Bombay's confused First and Third-World status has unfortunately got reflected in the unprecedented, sixty-hour-long terrorist attack on India's financial capital which has claimed 195 lives, among them fifteen foreigners. The fact that the terrorists from Pakistan attacked Bombay, that a majority of their victims were Indians, and that they struck iconic symbols like the Taj and Trident hotels reflects the hate-India ideology of Pakistani terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and its military Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI. The fact also that the terrorists hunted for Americans and Britons in their temporarily-captured hotels and spread mayhem in an Israeli Jewish centre at Nariman House points too to involvement or influence of Arab terrorist groups, principally the Al-Qaeda. 

But if you go beyond the proforma pronouncements of anti-terrorism scholars that the two-and-a-half day-long attack gave oceans of publicity to the terrorists, you encounter problems with the deeper motivations for the attack. The experience with LeT terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir is an absent history of surrenders. But in Bombay, a few terrorists were captured. While their interrogation can clear aspects of the Pakistani terrorist-Al-Qaeda link to the Bombay attack, then it may not. Or the attack motivations may not have been shared with the "foot soldiers" that attacked Bombay. This makes the tasks ahead for Indian investigators none too easy, even though, on the surface, the broad contours of the attack motivations appear deceptively simple.
 
The deeper motivations and mastermind identities must have to be known, because it is not at all clear to more perceptive intelligence officers if the Bombay attack, despite the confounding nature of its terrorism, is not in fact an experiment to something bigger – and "spectacular". Spectacular after 9/ 11, going by the bar that the Al-Qaeda raises higher and higher, or did, once, would have to be a nuclear or near-nuclear (dirty bomb) attack, and it is not at all certain after the Bombay terrorism that Indian civilian and military reactors near the sea are safe. And yet, the chilling analysis of bigger things to come in Bombay does not travel farther than this (at least for now), both because of the seemingly confused objectives and motivations of the attackers, and, as said at the very beginning of this piece, the confused status of Bombay. Whatever Bombay's greatness, it won't be mistaken by the Al-Qaeda for the source of American and Western "satanic" power that Washington, New York or London represent.
 
Indeed, the Bombay terrorist attack reveals of the conflicting objectives and motivations of the Al-Qaeda/ Arab inspirers on the one hand, and on the other, those of the Pakistani terrorist masterminds and "foot soldiers", very likely from the LeT. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), another anti-India Pakistani terrorist group, is presently ruled out in the Bombay attack, because it would not get Pakistani military or ISI support for such a scale of operations as readily as the LeT, because the JeM tried to assassinate the former Pakistani military president, Parvez Musharraf, at least once. But the JeM was close to Al-Qaeda in the Musharraf attack and the LeT to the Pakistani military establishment generally and historically. At Bombay, perhaps the joint purpose of terrorism has brought together the strangest bedfellows, which is the ISI, the LeT and the Al-Qaeda or its derivative.

That is why there are several loose ends in the Bombay attack that investigators must puzzle over but have to resolve. Considerable quantities of RDX were recovered from various terrorist attack sites, especially the Taj Hotel, suggesting that the terrorists failed in their binary mission of triggering off "spectacular" explosions. This is an exact reverse of the 1993 Bombay serial blasts masterminded by the underworld kingpin, Dawood Ibrahim, and Tiger Memon, where the planned long stand-off with personal weapons and grenades, as now, did not happen, although they were brought ashore from Pakistan, as now. This suggests a Dawood Ibrahim footprint in the recent terrorism, especially also because his vast criminal network has the capacity to host and sustain such a large, meticulously planned attack. As a Union minister, Kapil Sibal, admitted, the attack was planned over "months".

But overlaying all this India-directed terrorism is the targeting of foreign guests at hotels, especially Americans and Britons, and not least the Israelis at Nariman House. Although US missile attacks on the Al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders hiding in Pakistan's FATA has enraged Pakistani militants, the LeT has not gone out of the way to target American interests in Pakistan. Here, in Bombay, to be in bed with the Al-Qaeda or a group with similar anti-US terrorist sentiments is to court trouble with the US government, which must point to new compulsions on the part of the LeT, which is in India's interest to investigate and discover, and not just via the captured terrorists.

In other words, not just the unprecedented duration of the terrorising of Bombay should alarm and spur India to overhaul and rebuild its anti-terror institutions and mechanisms. But the many unreconciled aspects of sixty hours of Bombay terrorism reveal terrifying glimpses of the dramatic reorientation of Pakistani terrorist ideologies, motivations and objectives against India, strengthened with new alliances with the Al-Qaeda or its spin-offs. While the US and the West should be concerned with these new terrorist regroupings, India in the end can and should only put trust in its own national will and resources to overcome this attack on its nationhood.