Lessons from Nairobi: Why India is not ready for the next 26/11

School Number 1 opens its doors on Bell Day, the traditional beginning of Russia’s school year, but only so parents can walk past the peeling walls, scarred by the graffiti generations of students inflicted on them, through the long corridor lined with the photographs of the children who were killed.

There’s no date called 9/1 imprinted on the world’s memory, but perhaps there should be. That morning of 1 September, 2004, heavily armed men from jihadist group Riyad ul-Saliheen–the Gardens of the Righteous–walked in through the door of Beslan’s school soon after the students and their parents did, and took 1,100 hostages. At the end of a murderous three-day siege, 334 people were dead, 186 of them children–some executed at point-blank range.

It isn’t possible to look into the minds of the men who carried out the world’s most lethal fidayeen terrorist attack, but if we could, perhaps we’d have found words like these: “The light of the sun and water”, the jihadist cleric Muhammad Masood Azhar wrote,“are essential for crops otherwise they go waste. In the same way, the life of nations depends on martyrs. The national fields can be irrigated only with the blood of the best hearts”.

Or, perhaps, we’d have found this, from a book written the Islamist tyrant General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s key ideologue Brigadier SK Malik: “terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself”.

Ever since the still-unfolding horror of the Westgate mall attack in Nairobi, Indians have been remembering 26/11–and asking if it could happen again. Beslan’s story holds out this important lesson: 26/11 wasn’t the beginning of a new kind of terror, and Nairobi won’t be the last we see of it.

Like bombs, fidayeen assault teams kill, but the carnage they inflict unfolds over time and in graphic detail—making the loss of skilled and committed cadre worth bearing for their commanders. For terrorists, killing is a macabre form of performance theatre, that brings both their cause and their willingness to kill for it home to their audience—us.

Hit by past fidayeen attacks executed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, and facing new threats from the Indian Mujahideen, the question before India’s security forces is when, not if.

From 26/11, India learned just how badly prepared it was.

Mumbai’s police control system collapsed in the face of a deluge of panicked, inaccurate information. Key officers failed to administer its emergency-response system, and ill-trained men on the ground proved ineffectual. Even the élite National Security Guard turned out to lack equipment like ballistic shields, hydraulic door-openers, and hands-free wireless communication equipment. Faced with innovative terrorist tactics, like the use of plain, old-fashioned fire to create a distance between them and police, commanders flailed.

In the year since then, police forces have made substantial investments in addressing those problems. Maharashtra’s Force1, after a poor beginning, is now rated among the best in the country, ranking alongside the National Security Guard and crack military units in competitive commando exercises. Hyderabad has the 250-strong OCTOPUS force, drawing on the experience of the state’s feared counter-Maoist Greyhounds. Delhi set up a similar special weapons and tactics units in 2009, initially trained by military experts from India and abroad. The National Security Guard has re-equipped, retrained and set up new centres— though there’s some criticism its massive expansion has engendered a hierarchical, bureaucratic culture that will make it ineffectual in combat.

The bad news is this: it’s not enough.

For one, there’s no police magic-bullet to stop well-equipped attackers willing to kill civilians in crowded public places. Mumbai counter-terrorism drills have shown that while Force1 can be deployed in 20 minutes or less, it can take up to an hour and half for them to reach locations in the city’s southern and north-western commercial hubs.

Elsewhere in the world, police long ago realised that crack SWAT teams can only be part of the solution. In 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into their high school building, and opened fire at students inside. The Columbine school shootings sparked off a major rethinking on the best ways to deal with such attacks. Local police had, until Columbine, been taught to cordon-off and contain shooting attacks until SWAT units arrived. SWAT teams were in place outside the school within 40 minutes of the shooting being reported to police, but it proved too late.

From soon after the shootings, police tactics began to change. Instead of containing shooters and calling for specialist help, first responders were taught to immediately engage the attackers.

Experience has shown this doesn’t always work well. Earlier this month, former soldier Alexis Aaron opened fire at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Police responded rapidly, engaging Aaron in a gunbattle within minutes of the killing having begun-but 13 people were already dead. In the 2012 shootings in Aurora, police were at the site within 90 seconds of a crazed gunman opening fire–but even that was too late.

Yet, the fact that first responders arrived rapidly probably helped prevent far higher levels of fatalities.

It’s often forgotten how much ill-trained and unequipped police first-responders actually achieved on 26/11. From the interrogation of Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, it’s clear that railway police guards who returned fire using aging bolt-action rifles led his two-man assault team to drop its plans to take hostages, and instead head out to the Cama Hospital–leading to his eventual capture. Policemen holed up in the luxury apartments behind the National Centre for the Performing Arts pinned down the terrorists at the Oberoi and Trident Hotels. And inside the Taj itself, police put up a fight which, though relatively ineffectual, probably saved more than a few lives. This was done by officers and men who had never seen hostile fire in their lives.

“The government should be focusing on upgrading the skills of first-responders”, argues Ajai Sahni, the director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. “We just don’t have a national template for improving basic police training, and that’s a fatal flaw”.

It isn’t, of course, the only fatal flaw. Firstpost has earlier reported massive deficits in the Intelligence Bureau’s staffing and training, which constrains its capacity to pre-empt terror attacks. Police human resource shortages haven’t been plugged, despite promises made by the government in 2008.

Hotels and malls have posted guards, but few have worthwhile training or equipment. In all major cities, cars entering public spaces are checked for explosives using a metal detector, or a cursory glance, both pointless exercises. Just days after the recent bombing of the Bodh Gaya temple, Firstpost’s sister television network, CNN-IBN, succeeded in infiltrating mock pressure cooker bombs past security at threatened places of worship.

Nairobi ought to be a wake up call–but there’s no reason to believe it’s going to wake up a government with a demonstrated ability to ignore fire-alarms going off by its head.