Mumbai: Exporting Pakistan’s Resources →
Gary Brecher’s (The War Nerd) brief overview of the Mumbai terrorist attacks has an interesting take on the Mumbai terrorist attacks from an economic perspective:
The reason this was such a good plan is that it maximized the Islamists’ local assets. These guys aren’t smooth enough to get through normal hotel security to plant a bomb, but they didn’t have to be. They just stormed in through the front door, firing at full automatic.
That’s why this talk about whether security at the hotels was adequate is ridiculous. Hotel security is aimed at stopping sneak attacks, bomb-planters. To stop the sort of heavily-armed suicide squads that hit these hotels, you’d need a full platoon of infantry.
So what you see here is something economists would understand as well or better than traditional military analysts. I hate to sound cold-blooded, putting it this way, but what happened is that Pakistan’s islamists had a surplus of raw labor, and thought of a way to get it to a place where it maximized its global value in terms of pure blood and destruction.
John Robb of Global Guerillas also has a perceptive overview in his post ‘Urban Takedown: Mumbai’:
The late November commando attack on Mumbai India is a great demonstration of the state of the art in “urban takedowns.” Essentially, an urban takedown is an attempt by a small group of attackers to overwhelm a city and force it into a prolonged shutdown (see the site, Naxalite Rage for an excellent exploration of the incident).
