John Reid: Remember Mumbai
[John Reid, a former British secretary of defense and home secretary, is chairman of the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London.]
The first anniversary this week of the Mumbai atrocities serves as a timely reminder of the real and present threat from terrorism and its global nature.
Over the three days of attacks from Nov. 26 to 29 last year, it is estimated that more than 170 civilians and security personnel were murdered, including some 28 foreign nationals from 10 countries.
Mumbai thus joined the Bali attacks in 2002, the Istanbul bombings in 2003, the Beslan and Madrid attacks in 2004 and the London bombings in 2005 in the growing list of major terrorist atrocities since 9/11, 2001.
Twelve months after Mumbai, it is clear that the terrorist threat will remain extremely serious globally for years to come. This is not, as some critics of Britain’s foreign and defense policies assert, primarily because of the “excesses” of Western policy since 9/11, especially in Iraq. This critique is a major misjudgment.
Indeed, according to the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center, approximately three quarters of the almost 11,800 terrorist incidents that took place across the world in 2008 (the latest full year for which data is available) took place outside the Iraqi theater.
Attacks in Africa, for instance, particularly in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rose markedly last year, accounting for some 2,200 fatalities. These are countries and areas where little or no connection to Iraq can be rationally claimed.
Similarly, in terms of chronology, the terrorism threat was serious well before 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — one only has to recall the attempted 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Islamic militants.
Read entire article at NYT
The first anniversary this week of the Mumbai atrocities serves as a timely reminder of the real and present threat from terrorism and its global nature.
Over the three days of attacks from Nov. 26 to 29 last year, it is estimated that more than 170 civilians and security personnel were murdered, including some 28 foreign nationals from 10 countries.
Mumbai thus joined the Bali attacks in 2002, the Istanbul bombings in 2003, the Beslan and Madrid attacks in 2004 and the London bombings in 2005 in the growing list of major terrorist atrocities since 9/11, 2001.
Twelve months after Mumbai, it is clear that the terrorist threat will remain extremely serious globally for years to come. This is not, as some critics of Britain’s foreign and defense policies assert, primarily because of the “excesses” of Western policy since 9/11, especially in Iraq. This critique is a major misjudgment.
Indeed, according to the U.S. government’s Counterterrorism Center, approximately three quarters of the almost 11,800 terrorist incidents that took place across the world in 2008 (the latest full year for which data is available) took place outside the Iraqi theater.
Attacks in Africa, for instance, particularly in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rose markedly last year, accounting for some 2,200 fatalities. These are countries and areas where little or no connection to Iraq can be rationally claimed.
Similarly, in terms of chronology, the terrorism threat was serious well before 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — one only has to recall the attempted 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Islamic militants.