Thoughts on Mumbai

Of all the holidays we in the U.S. celebrate, can any of them compare to Thanksgiving for pure hedonism? The historical significance of the occasion notwithstanding, for most people, Thanksgiving is a great excuse to have a long weekend, eat and drink to extreme excess, and then hit the malls for the frenzied start of the Christmas shopping season.

This year, Thanksgiving was no different, except for a jarring reminder from the other side of the world that life is not necessarily as comfortable and safe as the holidays usually make us feel. While a few hundred million Americans blissfully overate and then retired to their sofas to watch some mediocre football, a handful of armed militants -- all of them likely Muslims from Pakistan -- went on a killing spree in Mumbai and murdered almost 200 civilians before police finally killed or captured them.

While disturbing, the sad truth is that events such as this one aren't totally unsurprising. But that's all the more reason to reflect at some length on the Mumbai killings; they were not the first, and they will not be the last. And I see no reason why the next bloodbath can't take place in New York, or Omaha, or Richmond.

Probably the most obvious, visceral question to ask when an atrocity like this happens is: Why? Why would 10 young men infiltrate a foreign city and proceed to murder scores of innocent people they never met before? For that matter, why did two dozen young men hijack airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers? The latter is the question shocked Americans asked after 9/11, and except for the specific numbers, locations and means of assault, it's the same question many more people are asking now.

Unfortunately, the answer isn't obvious, at least to me. If it was pure homicidal mania, I could understand, to the extent that insanity can be understood at all. But I'm fairly certain these young Pakistani guys who shot tourists for being American, or Jewish, or just shot people for the sake of shooting them weren't insane in the clinical sense. Neither were the 9/11 hijackers. The stock answer that I think most Americans would give, then, boils down to "They just hate us." No doubt they do, but it takes more than pure hate to motivate a normal human being to commit mass murder.

So the conclusion I have to draw is that there was some sort of point to this carnage, that these terrorists were trying to accomplish something beyond the bloodshed they wrought. What that might be, I don't profess to know. Inflame tensions between India and Pakistan -- both technically American allies -- to force the U.S. to come down on Pakistan and wreck the ongoing campaign against the Taliban in that country? Force India to consider negotiating the status of the predominantly Muslim state of Kashmir? Something entirely different? I don't know.

The "why" matters, but it's elusive. Equally important though is the more pragmatic question: How do we respond to such barbarism? I won't claim to know that either, but I do know how not to react. To figure this out, all I had to do was read The New York Times' editorial on the killings, which demonstrated just how dangerous the road to political correctness can be. The Times does not ask why the Mumbai attackers did what they did, but rather, The Times asks why the Indian government allowed them to do it:

"How can their government have ignored the warning signs? A 2007 report to Parliament warned that the country’s shores were poorly protected — and some or all of the attackers arrived by boat. Why weren’t the police and the army better prepared to respond?"

Implicit in these questions is the attitude that, like hurricanes and earthquakes, terrorist attacks just happen. And because they happen, governments -- including the Indian government -- have a responsibility to respond to them as effectively as possible. The culpability of the terrorists for their actions is completely absent, as if they're just as mindless as Hurricane Katrina.

Do we really live in such a debased age that a major newspaper like The New York Times can't muster some genuine horror, and anger, that armed savages took advantage of a free, open society to commit murder? To put it bluntly, where's the outrage?

Mumbai symbolizes much that modern liberalism claims to value: multiculturalism, freedom of religion, democracy, commerce, tolerance, and on a basic level, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. All of this was exploited and attacked by a small group of people who prefer an unfree, intolerant, bigoted society, but liberal bastions like The Times can't bring themselves to acknowledge this clash, because doing so comes dangerously close to passing judgment on a culture. So in the name of cultural sensitivity, fanatical Islamism must be treated as a sort of natural disaster, with no blame to assign, except for the negligent governments that don't get out of the path of the storm.

Seven years ago, when the 9/11 attacks finally woke Americans up to the fact that Al Qaeda had been at war with their country for years, the outrage wasn't lacking. Almost to a man, the country was shocked and justly furious that someone could commit that sort of wanton violence. Have we really changed so much since then? When only 170 people are killed instead of 3,000, do we take it in stride, especially when it happened in a different hemisphere?

The issue of how to respond to this and future attacks is indeed complicated, with no clear course of action in sight. But the immediate, gut-level reaction is, or ought to be, very simple. Reality dictates that cities in India, America and elsewhere develop strategies for responding to terror, but the fact that they have to should never stop appalling us.