Published: December 01, 2008 03:39 pm      

Fighting terror – darned if you do, darned if you don’t

As the world continues to reel from carnage at the hands of terrorists in Mumbai, India, an object lesson for Americans appears evident. To be sure there is a drastic difference between America and India’s susceptibility to being attacked. The United States has great oceans between it and its foreign terrorist enemies, while India shares a border with Pakistan, a country well known for breeding and harboring murderous extremists.

Currently, most finger pointing by Indians is directed toward Pakistan, widely thought to be the host country for this latest attack which saw at least 195 killed in India’s financial capital – equivalent in many ways to America’s Wall Street.

Most, but not all, fingers, that is. Many Indians are also pointing at their own government, not because of any suspected complicity or some bizarre conspiracy, but because of its ineptitude in preventing these kinds of attacks from occurring.

Where was the surveillance? How could no one have known something, anything was about to happen?

MSNBC website’s sub-headline for the story – “Militants aimed to kill 5,000 people in attack to rival Sept. 11” may have said it all. The story quotes a captured militant as telling interrogators they “wanted to go down in history for an ‘Indian 9/11.’”

Here is the object lesson: Pundits have lined up like jets on a commercial airport runway to declare George Bush a lame duck president whose two terms in office were punctuated with abject failure.

Perhaps this isn’t too surprising because the presidency is almost always subject to “Darned if you do and darned if you don’t” style criticism.

The fact is, since Sept. 11, 2001, there has not been an attack on U.S. soil similar to what India has just experienced, a feat no one would have thought possible seven years ago. This is not an accident, and this has led to the “Darned if you do” criticism Bush has received for his surveillance methods that to some have seemed much too Orwellian.

But neither would these same critics appreciate living in India. There they would be joining the “Darned if you don’t” finger pointers now criticizing the Indian government for gross negligence and ineptitude in fighting terror.