Plans of Attack
By Richard A. Clarke
WashPost
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Ten young men land a small boat at a quay in a city of 18 million people. Within minutes of setting ashore, they are throwing grenades and raking crowds with automatic weapons fire. Days later, almost 200 people are dead, more are wounded, the financial capital of a nation of a billion people has ground to a halt, and the world is riveted.
To most of the world, the Mumbai massacre seems inexplicable and random, like the periodic devastation caused by typhoons or tornadoes, or simply pointless, just killing for killing's sake. But the attack was neither random nor pointless. The carnage in Mumbai was goal-oriented, an attempt to advance an overall strategy that is being ruthlessly pursued by the Islamist radical network.
That network of groups is approaching 2009 with a specific agenda. So, too, is the incoming leadership of the network's chief enemy, the United States. To understand how the two sides think, imagine two hypothetical meetings in which each side plots its terrorism agenda for 2009.
* * *
Rawalpindi is a military city, home to Pakistan's senior officers and retired military men. That would seem to make it an unlikely place for the world's most wanted terrorists, the people whom U.S. officials call "high-value targets," to meet. But Rawalpindi is where the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, hid, precisely because no one would think of looking for him there. Perhaps the leaders of al-Qaeda, the Taliban movement that is again on the march in Afghanistan and some Pakistani terrorist groups obsessed with Kashmir would also come together there -- say, in a safe house owned by a sympathetic retired Pakistani leader of the country's powerful and shadowy military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).
(More here.)
WashPost
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Ten young men land a small boat at a quay in a city of 18 million people. Within minutes of setting ashore, they are throwing grenades and raking crowds with automatic weapons fire. Days later, almost 200 people are dead, more are wounded, the financial capital of a nation of a billion people has ground to a halt, and the world is riveted.
To most of the world, the Mumbai massacre seems inexplicable and random, like the periodic devastation caused by typhoons or tornadoes, or simply pointless, just killing for killing's sake. But the attack was neither random nor pointless. The carnage in Mumbai was goal-oriented, an attempt to advance an overall strategy that is being ruthlessly pursued by the Islamist radical network.
That network of groups is approaching 2009 with a specific agenda. So, too, is the incoming leadership of the network's chief enemy, the United States. To understand how the two sides think, imagine two hypothetical meetings in which each side plots its terrorism agenda for 2009.
* * *
Rawalpindi is a military city, home to Pakistan's senior officers and retired military men. That would seem to make it an unlikely place for the world's most wanted terrorists, the people whom U.S. officials call "high-value targets," to meet. But Rawalpindi is where the ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, hid, precisely because no one would think of looking for him there. Perhaps the leaders of al-Qaeda, the Taliban movement that is again on the march in Afghanistan and some Pakistani terrorist groups obsessed with Kashmir would also come together there -- say, in a safe house owned by a sympathetic retired Pakistani leader of the country's powerful and shadowy military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).
(More here.)
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