From the New York Times….

Sharpshooters had neither protective gear, nor the high-powered telescopes that their counterparts in Western countries would most likely use in a standoff with terrorists. On Saturday afternoon, a sharpshooter who had spent over 60 hours perched outside the Taj Hotel said neither he nor his partner had fired a shot because they were not sure how to distinguish the gunmen from ordinary civilians trapped inside the hotel.

I realize that India is a poor country. But you would think that a nation that is buying an aircraft carrier for billions of dollars would be able to afford some few high powered telescopes for their commandos.

The more I read, the more I realize how difficult it was for the commandos due to their lack of equipment. Take this story from the Telegraph for example….

A group of exhausted commandos who had engaged the militants for two nights inside the cavernous hotel after their deployment, reclined exhausted in one corner of the hotel’s lobby.

They ate listlessly from lunchboxes. It was the first cooked food they had seen in three days, but they found it difficult to swallow as their nostrils were still assailed by the stench of charred flesh and choking cordite from thousands of rounds expended in battle.

Most of them had survived without food or water for nearly 60 hours, lying motionless by the side of putrefying bodies for hours waiting for the next burst of fire from the militants. “It was sickening. But there was no option,” a commando said, declining to be named.

One commando said that in the corridors above the ground floor there were corpses decaying in the city’s oppressive heat, the floors slippery with congealing blood.

On top of all their other problems, I don’t think the commandos had any good night vision equipment. I have read nothing that comes right out and says that. But in all the interviews the commandos complain about how hard it was for them to fight in the dark and in all the pictures you never see night vision equipment on the commandos.

If you think about the problems involved in hunting terrorists in the dark down hallways covered with dead bodies and at the same time not being sure how many hostages are all around you, you can understand why it took so long for them to clear the hotel.

But there is no excuse for Indian’s top commandos to be so poorly equipped. As I said before, this is a nation that is spending billions of dollars on crappy aircraft carrier that will do nothing to help India’s security (The Chinese will sink it in a heartbeat and they don’t need it to hunt pirates). To make matters worse, the Russians are making the Indians pay through the nose for the carrier.

I think it just goes to show how badly Indian’s defense budget is managed.

From the Washington Post……

Indian officials said Saturday that they had killed or captured 10 gunmen responsible for the three-day assault on India’s financial and cultural capital. Nearly 200 people died in the attacks that began Wednesday.

Everybody is saying that their were only 10 attackers in total. I can hardly believe it. Only 10 men to take down a city of 18 to 19 million people. It makes it hard to understand why the Indians took so long to get everything under control. I mean granted, they needed time to bring troops into the city. But 3 days to take care of 10 men?

Of course, some British officials are defending the Indian response. But in the process they invite the whole world to try the same thing in Great BritainFrom the Telegraph…..

“It was always the doomsday scenario which Peter Clarke and I both recognised as the most challenging. In the early stages of such an attack there would a lot of death and chaos. Our unarmed police would be able to do very little except report in. There would be many hours of chaos before the police, backed by the military counter-terrorist response teams were in a position to contain, let alone neutralise, the terrorist threats.”

The former officer added that British armed response teams are not as numerous, well trained or equipped as they should be to deal with a fast moving and violent a scenario as that which occurred in Mumbai.

I guess the bottom line is that a government that expects its police force to hand out flip flops and give out safe sex advice can not expect those same policemen to handle a real crisis.

From the Telegraph….

On Thursday night, officials had claimed the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel was safe but on Friday it became the centre of the conflict once again, with furious firefights between the terrorists and the military.

It is pretty bad when you say an area has been cleared and yet you turn around and have major gunfight 24 hours later. It leads credence to this grousing in from another Telegraph article….

A second British official said that, although the India’s Black Cat commandos have a fearsome reputation for efficient antiterrorist operations, their deployment was botched.

“They are supposed to set-up a command centre in complete control as their first priority,” the official said. “Instead they arrived and went in guns blazing.

“It was blind. They didn’t have maps of the hotels, yet there terrorists had done enough reconnaissance to use the service facilities to manoeuvre.”

There was also criticism of a midnight announcement on the first day of the crisis by a cabinet minister that 200 commandos were deployed in the area within two hours.

The British official said: “The terrorist were forewarned by the government itself.”

The whole article is riddled with tales of gross incompetence on the part of the Indian government. The Indian solders and police have demonstrated their bravery, but their leadership left a lot to be desired.

And on the subject of the terrorists being forewarned…..

A senior officer in the country’s elite Black Cat commando unit told the Telegraph, the gunmen were able to trawl the internet for information once they lost cable television feeds to the two luxury hotels and office block.

The men looked beyond the instant updates of the Indian media to find worldwide reaction to the events in Mumbai.

Their analysis of at least five BlackBerry mobile phones recovered suggested the terrorists had links to England.

“There was a lot of content from the English media, not just in London but the Urdu and Arabic sites that are very strong in the north of England,” the Commando leader said near the site of the city’s third siege at Nariman House. “We have some analysis started on this and we will pass it on to Scotland Yard, no doubt.”

The availability of news updates and live TV streams from Indian and foreign media is though to have given the hostage takers an advantage in the two day siege. By early yesterday army commanders had realised the extent of the problem.

Lieutenant-General Noble Thamburaj, head of India’s southern command, said: “I want to pay tribute to the brave army and Indian forces who have died but I will not put a figure on it because that will sustain the terrorists.”

As the above story seems to demonstrates, the killers seemed to have better command and control then the Indian government. According to Bill Roggio (h/t The Belmont Club) they had command and control rooms set up ahead of time. So that gave them an advantage that they exploited to the full.

Still, there does not seem to be any good excuse for the Indian’s sloppy command and control.

From the Times of Indian….

MUMBAI: Two NSG personnel, including an officer, were today martyred and six other commandos injured during operations against terrorists in Mumbai, the first casualties suffered by the elite force during the siege. ( Watch )

Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, 31, was martyred while engaging terrorists this morning at the Taj hotel, an NSG spokesperson said.

This is just the latest in a long string of high ranking Indian police and army personal dying on the front lines. I am sure this is a great credit to their bravery but it strikes me as kind of odd. Don’t the Indian’s have any good NCOs? It seems like a major is a rather high rank to be leading from the front in a close quarters combat situation.

Also what is up with this? This is not the way i am use to seeing elite unites handle a gun. But this is not an isolated incident. I saw similar tactics being used on a video clip of the assault on Nariman House. Unfortunately, I can’t find that clip now.

From the Times of India…

The shootout on Wednesday found around 100 cops of the Railway Police Force (RPF) as well as Government Railway Police (GRP) ill-equipped to tackle two AK-47-wielding terrorists. Only six of those cops were armed with either Self-Loading Rifles (SLRs) or automatic weapons. The rest had lathis.

J N Lal, divisional railway manager of Central Railway, said no one imagined such fidayeen attacks at CST. “We were buying gadgets to tackle bomb blasts. Now we will surely think of modern weapons for our security personnel,” said Lal.

Click here to read what a Lathis is. Basically, it is not much more than a stick.

Kim is widely thought to have be incapacitated by a stroke. The question is, what does this mean for the future of North Korea? One possiblity is a Chinese invasion of North Korea. From Spiegel…..

It is quite possible that this regime will collapse without Kim. To prevent a wave of starving refugees from crossing into China, Beijing has increased its troop levels along the border with North Korea. One of the scenarios now being discussed in Tokyo, Seoul and Washington is an invasion by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. If North Korea were to descend into anarchy, China, as a “stabilizing force,” could attempt to gain control over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. Russia is believed to have approved of this plan.

My question is why wait for the regime to collapse? North Korea has got to be one of few places on earth where having Chinese overlords would be an improvement for just about everyone except for a privileged few.

From Alice the (British) Architect…..

These days, thanks to a draconian law brought about by people with beards wearing tweeds and sandals, lobbying the government on a day the government just wanted something to do, disturbing a single bat is a crime worthy of hanging. Well, not quite that bad, you understand, but a severe fine and a criminal record is more than enough to make someone think twice about waking the little critters from their daily slumber.

I notified English Nature, as the law dictates, and they sent a ‘bat worker’ round to spend the evening monitoring. The builders continued to work elsewhere, away from the roof, as quietly as possible (digging a foundation, if you must know). Despite charming assurances from the Bat People on the telephone, I received a horrible letter saying that all work must cease at once, and could not start again until the bat season was over, and how dare we even consider repairing the roof when the bats needed it. (There was no mention of the people who also happened to live there, and for whom the building was actually constructed).

From later on in the post….

We got off lightly. There are some kinds of bats that are so rare, that some buildings are simply not allowed to be worked on at all (according to a colleague who this happened to) even if it is listed and in danger of falling down. There are some people with colonies of 300 bats in their roof, all peeing and pooing into the insulation. Despite what the nicey nicey literature on English Nature’s website says about bat poo being ambrosia from heaven, it actually stinks. Many churches have bats, and whilst in some parts of the building they do not cause much of a problem (the belfry!) bat droppings all over the ancient furnishings are not particularly desirable. English Nature’s advice? Put cloths over everything.

Unlike most people, I like bats. I never had the problems with them that most people seem to have. There is something cool about seeing bats flying around and I always figured that anything eating bugs was a friend of mine. But if they had laws like this in America I would be killing every bat I could find. There are ways of killing the buggers without being caught.

But it is no surprise that England has laws like this on the book. If they let pirates go because they are afraid of violating their human rights, they ought to treat the bats at least as well.

From the New York Times…

Michael Rubenstein, a photographer working with The New York Times reports from outside the Taj hotel in Mumbai that the top floor of the hotel is still on fire and that hotel guests are banging on the windows begging to be rescued.

I hope they don’t have to face the choice of jumping or burning alive.

From Rod Dreher….

Breaking now: mass terror attacks underway in Mumbai, at hotels and other locations. Government says 78 people dead now, hundreds injured. The attacks are apparently coordinated, and taking place simultaneously all over the city. One Indian terrorism analyst on CNN now saying: “The whole city is being held hostage.”

It does not seem be over yet. The death toll now stands at 80 dead with 900 injured. Updates here.

Edit: Watch this Clip for a good overview.

From The New York Times….

As if things weren’t chaotic enough in the Gulf of Aden: a suspected pirate ship that was sunk last week by the Indian Navy now appears to have actually been a Thai fishing trawler, according to CNN, which cites the ship’s owner.

Last week, the Indian Navy reported that one of its warships, the INS Tabar, which had been deployed to the region to repulse the growing pirate threat, encountered a flotilla of three pirate vessels some 320 miles south west of the Omani coast. The Tabar fought a battle at sea, sinking one suspect vessel — what it called the “mother ship” — and forcing the pirates to abandon a second as they fled.

The comments are skeptical. But I think this story may be true and India may not care. These are the comments of a retired Indian Admiral….

So eventually when pressure from the Indian navy finally prompted the MEA to allow Indian participation, INS Tabar, a Talwar class frigate was sent to join at the Eastern end of the corridor. Coordination was arranged through diplomatic channels. The big difference in the way INS Tabar operated was that it was given clear instructions on the Rules of Engagement or ROE at it is commonly referred to by Naval Headquarters.

The commanding officer was given wide latitude to use force, at his discretion. Clearly, such explicit ROEs don’t exist for ships of TF 150.

This is a ridiculous situation, as the ROE of the NATO ships worries more about the human rights of the pirates, than about stamping out piracy. Actually there is an 1838 convention that permits any warship to interfere anywhere on the ‘High Seas’ to intercept pirates and try them — without handing them over to the country of origin.

Today’s interpretation by human rights lawyers state that pirates cannot even be handed over to their own state if that state does not respect the human rights of the pirates. This is an absurd situation. The US is not going to amend its rules regarding Centcom and Pacom. The answer appears to lie in New Delhi, where the MEA needs to draw up its own coalition of Indian Ocean powers, under the Indian navy to stamp out the pirates, in their harbours, ruthlessly

Note the ruthless part.

Also, it should be noted that story could be true and the ship could still be a mother ship for the pirates. I doubt the pirates have the sea going skills to go as far as they have been going on their own. Moreover, as Thai fishing trawler who would suspect you?