This from the UK Guardian on the observations of some Mumbai residents just before the highly orchestrated, widespread, and well-planned attacks — which seem to be related, at least in part, to the Kashmir insurgency of long standing:

Indian TV news channels provided eyewitness accounts from people who saw the armed attackers land in Mumbai. “It was around 9.15 last night when I saw a speedboat with eight men on board come close to the shore,” a man told Times Now TV today. The man appeared to be a resident of the Colaba fishermen’s village, minutes away from the Taj Mahal, one of two luxury hotels in Mumbai taken over by the terrorists.

“Six young men with large bags came ashore, after which the two who remained in the boat started the outboard motor again and sped off,” he added. “They were fair, chikna (well-off) and looked around 20, 22, 25 years old. They said they were students. When we tried to find out what they were doing, they spoke very aggressively, and I got scared.”

Two boys and an older woman from the same neighbourhood spoke to CNN-IBN. “When we tried to talk to them, they rudely said, ‘What do you want? Do your own work’, and walked away,” the two boys said. “They were carrying large bags – one bag was orange coloured.”

This from a Reuters report about the apparent invasion of a Jewish center in Mumbai:

A militant holed up at the center phoned an Indian television channel to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars. “Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages,” the man, identified by the India TV channel as Imran, said, speaking in Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent. “Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims. Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?”

And some reporting and a little relevant history from the Economist:

The attacks started at around 10.30pm on Wednesday, when gunmen started shooting and throwing grenades at Mumbai’s main Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station. Television footage showed two men shooting at random as they drove through nearby streets in a stolen police jeep. Around the same time, a bomb was reported to have exploded in a taxi parked near the city’s main airport. More or less simultaneously, gunmen speaking Hindi and Urdu, the language of many north-Indian Muslims and of neighbouring Pakistan, stormed two hotels—the Taj Mahal and the Trident Oberoi…

There seemed little doubt that the attackers were Muslim militants of some description, but their exact provenance was unclear. Responsibility was claimed by a previously little-known group called the Deccan Mujahideen. Speaking to Indian television by telephone, a gunman holding hostages in the Trident Oberoi demanded that Muslim prisoners, including those captured in Kashmir, should be released from Indian jails. “Release all the mujahideens, and Muslims living in India should not be troubled,” he said.

In the past five months India has suffered from a spate of Islamist militancy, with bomb-blasts in half a dozen cities, including Delhi, Bangalore and Jaipur. A home-grown Muslim terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen, has been blamed for the spree, in which over 150 people were killed. In a chilling, 14-page admission of responsibility for the Delhi bombings in September, the Indian Mujahideen castigated the counter-terrorism efforts of Mumbai’s police, and promised Mumbaikars future “deadly attacks”.

As India’s first indigenous Muslim terrorist group—so they have often been described—the Indian Mujahideen are a worrying sign. They seem to have evolved from a decade-long campaign by Pakistan-based militants, including many fighting an insurgency in Kashmir, to incite India’s 140m Muslims to revolt. These groups have been held primarily responsible for half a dozen major terrorist attacks in Mumbai in recent years. In 1993 local Muslim gangsters backed by Pakistan-based militants set off 13 near-simultaneous bomb-blasts in the city, killing more than 250 people. In 2006 another co-ordinated bombing spree on Mumbai’s railway killed over 180 commuters. A Pakistan-based group, Lashkar-e-toiba, was blamed at the time.

Stratfor weighs in with some instant analysis and predictions:

the Indian government has two choices. First, it can simply say that the perpetrators are a domestic group. In that case, it will be held accountable for a failure of enormous proportions in security and law enforcement. It will be charged with being unable to protect the public. On the other hand, it can link the attack to an outside power: Pakistan. In that case it can hold a nation-state responsible for the attack, and can use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism. Politically this is a much preferable outcome for the Indian government, and so it is the most likely course of action. This is not to say that there are no outside powers involved — simply that, regardless of the ground truth, the Indian government will claim there were.

That, in turn, will plunge India and Pakistan into the worst crisis they have had since 2002. If the Pakistanis are understood to be responsible for the attack, then the Indians must hold them responsible, and that means they will have to take action in retaliation — otherwise, the Indian government’s domestic credibility will plunge. The shape of the crisis, then, will consist of demands that the Pakistanis take immediate steps to suppress Islamist radicals across the board, but particularly in Kashmir. New Delhi will demand that this action be immediate and public. This demand will come parallel to U.S. demands for the same actions, and threats by incoming U.S. President Barack Obama to force greater cooperation from Pakistan…

There is a precedent for this. In 2001 there was an attack on the Indian parliament in Mumbai by Islamist militants linked to Pakistan. A near-nuclear confrontation took place between India and Pakistan, in which the United States brokered a stand-down in return for intensified Pakistani pressure on the Islamists. The crisis helped redefine the Pakistani position on Islamist radicals in Pakistan.

In the current iteration, the demands will be even more intense. The Indians and Americans will have a joint interest in forcing the Pakistani government to act decisively and immediately. The Pakistani government has warned that such pressure could destabilize Pakistan. [e.g., it was announced just this week that the 8-month old civilian government, perhaps overreaching, had said that it had dismantled the political wing of the ISI, which appears at odds with reality to some observers, and could presage increased domestic unrest in Pakistan -- ed.]

None of this context is provided by the witless, uneducated and politically correct newsreaders at America’s so-called cable news networks, of course. (And it’s not just the American press that is inane for fear of saying something politically incorrect.) For an American angle, there’s this from the Christian Science Monitor: “Barack Obama says resolving the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir will be a goal of his presidency, ending eight years of silence on the issue.” Good luck with that — seriously.

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