Out of the Mountains (12 page)

Infesting the Megacity

What do the Mumbai attacks tell us about the future spectrum of threats in coastal cities? Many excellent studies have analyzed the counterterrorism lessons of the raid, but for our purposes it's worth focusing on aspects that relate to the urbanized, networked, littoral environment, where, as we've seen, most people will live in the future, and where most conflict will occur.

The first and clearest observation is that the raiders consciously exploited the urbanized coastal environment of Mumbai and Karachi. Karachi, a chaotic and unruly megacity of
21
million, is Pakistan's largest city and its busiest transportation hub. The city has experienced extremely rapid urbanization since Partition in
1947
, when it grew rapidly with the influx of millions of Muslims from newly independent India, and again in the
1980
s, when millions of refugees from Afghanistan and from Pakistan's tribal areas settled in periurban slums.
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The port of Karachi handles
26
million tons of freight per annum, or
60
percent of the country's total shipping and cargo movement, giving the harbor and its approaches some of the heaviest coastal shipping traffic in the world.
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The LeT raiders slipped out of Karachi under cover of this dense maritime traffic, infiltrated Indian territory in a fishing vessel among thousands of others, made their way into Mumbai by landing at a busy jetty in a coastal slum, and exploited the crowded, dense environment of the Mumbai waterfront to move without detection on foot and in public transport. Mumbai, a megacity of just over
20
million, is India's second-largest city, after Delhi, and is one of the most densely populated urban centers on the planet, with almost thirty thousand people per square kilometer.
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Its urbanization has been largely organic and unplanned, resulting in a complex mix of different types of buildings—slums butting up against high-rise hotels, alleyways next to industrial facilities, and so on. The attackers skillfully exploited the complexity of this urban environment, using slums and alleys to cover their movement between targets.

The second major feature of the attack was that the attackers exploited networks of connectivity within and between the two coastal megacities of Karachi and Mumbai. As I mentioned earlier, it's possible that Captain Solanki of the
Kuber
didn't resist the terrorists because he thought they were smugglers, part of a broader network of contraband trading, drug smuggling, and human trafficking in the sea space around Mumbai, an illicit enterprise in which Solanki himself may have engaged in the past, and which—even if he wasn't personally involved—would have appeared to him as just part of the normal background environment. The locals who saw the team land might also have believed the terrorists were smugglers or illegal immigrants, while the manager on duty at the Leopold Café initially mistook them for backpackers, part of a busy traffic of low-budget tourists that flows through the area.
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It's worth noting once again that dark networks—flows of people, money, goods, and information that lie outside the view of law enforcement and government authorities—are, in themselves, neither good nor bad, and their existence creates a venue for a wide range of beneficial, neutral, or (in this case) harmful activities. In this sense, any negative externalities of dark networks are effects of the
activities
of people in the network, not characteristics of the network itself.

Once they landed in Mumbai, the terrorists also exploited the connected, networked nature of the urban environment. They used Skype, cellphones, and satellite phones to connect with their handlers in Pakistan, who in turn monitored Twitter, news blogs, international and local satellite news, and cable television in real time, which allowed them to control the attacks and react as the Indian response developed.

The importance of the Karachi control node is obvious if we look at the role of Abu Dera Ismail Khan, the team leader, who died early in the operation, in a diversionary attack a long way from the main targets. If Khan had been running the operation in a classical military command-and-control manner, it would have made no sense for him to lead a secondary attack of this kind. His place would have been with the main team at the main objective: he would have given the job of leading the secondary attack to a trusted subordinate. That he was assigned to a diversionary objective—albeit one requiring considerable on-the-fly decision making—underlines the continuous and intimate control that the Karachi operations room exercised over the teams at the main objectives. Meanwhile, the assault pairs themselves seem to have operated autonomously, in a “flat” structure with no hierarchy among teams, each directly responsive to the command node in Karachi. The Mumbai attack was thus, in effect, directed by remote control, making the connectivity between the assault teams and the remote command center a critical element in the operation.

Likewise, the attack team's focus on foreigners seems to have been calculated by LeT controllers to maximize international attention, creating an extremely high level of news coverage—and resulting in an unusually large number of foreigners (including citizens of twenty-two countries) being killed.
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This may have been, in part, the classic terrorist tactic of maximizing publicity, but it may also have been an operational requirement: since the raiders' command-and-control methodology relied on the Karachi operations room monitoring Twitter and Internet feeds in order to control the assault teams, the raiders needed to do something in order to create large-scale Twitter and Internet traffic, so as to generate a sufficient online signature to close the feedback loop with their command node.

The raiders mostly didn't target specific individuals—the killing of Commissioner Karkare, the Mumbai counterterrorist chief, seems to have been a pure accident, while the importance of each target group seems to have been determined either (in the case of the diversionary attacks) by its disruptive effect on the city or (in the case of the main attacks) by its media value. The attackers seem to have deliberately drawn out the operation over as many days as possible, hardening and consolidating their positions as soon as they entered the main target sites, and preparing for a lengthy siege. Their goal seems to have been to maximize the raid's disruptive impact and increase the effect of terror and urban dislocation by shutting Mumbai down for as long as possible. The attacks on transportation and public health infrastructure (the taxis, railway station, and hospital) also seem calculated to maximize disruption within the urban flow of Mumbai and slow the Indian response.

This response was affected by problems in coordination among the city authorities of Mumbai (including local police, fire brigade, ambulance, and hospital services), the government of Maharashtra State, and the Indian central government in New Delhi. In order to use national-level assets such as the MARCO and NSG teams, the state government had to approve their deployment and agree to cede control over the incident sites to central government organizations, a process that took almost six hours to negotiate, delaying the national response; in the meantime, the local police were severely outgunned, while the Mumbai antiterrorism squad was reeling from the loss of its commander early in the raid.

The attacks didn't involve weapons of mass destruction or particularly high-tech equipment. As in most irregular conflicts, the raiders used small arms (rifles and pistols), improvised explosive devices, and grenades; they didn't even use rocket-propelled grenades. Small arms, however, because they involve intimate contact between attackers and victims, because their use implies the presence of an enemy on the spot, and because gun battles tend to last longer than bombings, can have a greater terror effect than a bombing or hostage situation. In an urban environment, where firefights tend to be fleeting and to occur at short ranges among small numbers of combatants, the terrorists' ability to operate in a distributed swarm of autonomous small teams, with low signature and high mobility (due to their light weapons and combat loads), was a key tactical advantage.

Likewise, the raiders used no unusually sophisticated or specialized communications devices: they employed commercially available phones and off-the-shelf GPS devices, and pulled much of their reconnaissance data from open-source, online tools such as Google Earth. They did, however, display an excellent standard of preparation and reconnaissance, and extremely good skills in sea movement, coastal infiltration, and small-boat handling, techniques that are obviously optimized for littoral environments. They clearly understood the urban-littoral dynamics of Mumbai—the systems logic of the way the city worked—and used this knowledge to their advantage. In this respect, assistance from state sponsors (or perhaps, nonstate sponsors who somehow managed to gain excellent access to military-grade equipment, training, intelligence, facilities, and weapons) was a key factor in the raid's success.

What does all this say about the future environment? First, I should make it clear that Mumbai represents only one kind of threat that will exist in the urban, networked littoral of the future; we'll take a detailed look at others later in this chapter. That said, Mumbai exemplifies the higher end of the threat spectrum, that of state proxies using irregular (sometimes called “asymmetric”) methods to temporarily disrupt an urban target, rather than to control an urban population over a long period of time. Crime researchers John P. Sullivan and Adam Elkus describe this as an evolved twenty-first-century form of “urban siege”:

There are several methods that terrorists and criminal insurgents use to besiege cities from within—pure terror and systems disruption, although the two are often combined together. Both methods are sustained means of besieging a city with a campaign of protracted urban violence. Pure terror is a form of social systems disruption. It is a spasm of violence intended to demonstrate to the public that the authorities cannot help them, and that they are helpless against the power of the gun. . . . While the success of the Mumbai terrorists came in large part from the tactical and operational inadequacy of Indian law enforcement response, it is easy to imagine a small group of terrorists creating multiple centers of disorder at the same time within a major American city in same manner. An equally terrifying scenario is a Beslan-type siege in school centers with multiple active shooters. Paramilitary terrorists of this kind would aim for maximum violence, target hardening, and area denial—capabilities that many SWAT units would be hard-pressed to counter.
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To my mind, Mumbai represents the current state of the art in urban littoral terrorism. The attack has served as the model for at least two planned copycat raids on major coastal cities in Southeast Asia and Europe, and its level of technical difficulty alone was enough to raise LeT's stature as a regional terrorist organization.
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In this context it's worth noting that guerrillas and terrorists can gain strategic advantage just by demonstrating skill, daring, and tactical competence: the “style points” they acquire, and the shock value of showing they're a force to be reckoned with, can outweigh tactical failures.

But Mumbai was far from a tactical failure: on the contrary, the attack showed that a nonstate armed group can carry out an appallingly effective seaborne raid on a major coastal city, over a three-day period, in several dispersed locations—the type of operation traditionally associated with high-tier special operations forces such as the U.S. Navy SEALs or the Royal Marines' Special Boat Service. Indeed, Mumbai was a further demonstration of a long-standing trend, sometimes called the
democratization of technology
, in which nonstate armed groups are fielding highly lethal capabilities that were once the sole preserve of nation-states. As a combat-experienced officer with an understanding of urban riverine operations in Iraq said to me, the Mumbai terrorists' callous disregard for human life was deeply horrifying, but “any maritime special operator in the world would be proud to pull off such a complex operation.”
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This was far from the first major seaborne terrorist attack—it wasn't even the first such attack in India. But the Mumbai raiders showed an extraordinary ability to exploit transnational littoral networks and both legitimate and illicit traffic patterns, inserting themselves into a coastal fishing fleet to cover their approach to the target. Their actions blurred the distinction between crime and war: both the Indian ship captain and local inhabitants initially mistook them for smugglers, and their opponents for much of the raid were police, not soldiers. They exploited Mumbai's complex patterns of coastal urbanization by landing from the sea close to the urban core but choosing landing places in slum settlements with limited government presence. Obviously enough, this approach wouldn't have worked without significant help from active or retired members of the Pakistani military, so Mumbai is rightly seen as a hybrid state/nonstate attack. Equally obviously, though, the attack could only have occurred in a highly networked, urban, littoral environment—precisely the environment that's becoming the global norm.

II. Mogadishu: Things Fall Apart

Along with terrorism and proxy warfare, the urban, coastal, connected environment of the future will harbor more diffuse threats—what we might call “threats without enemies,” which, by definition, aren't amenable to military or law enforcement responses.
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These may arise not from the presence of armed groups per se but from complex interactions among criminal and military actors, domestic and international networks, city populations and governments, and the urban organism and its external environment.