Editor’s note: Two weeks after the attacks in Mumbai—in which fewer than a dozen militants held at bay some 800 police for 60 hours—PoliceOne presented a special report consisting of articles from P1 SWAT Columnists Lt. Dan Marcou and Sgt. Glenn French, as well as analysis and opinion from Stratfor and P1 members. On Friday, February 20th, 2009, we’re introducing a three part series from Dick Fairburn on the subject (part one is called “Countering terrorist teams: A different threat requires a different response”). Be sure to watch for that at the end of the week.
By John Arquilla
The New York Times
With three Afghan government ministries in Kabul hit by simultaneous suicide attacks this week, by a total of just eight terrorists, it seems that a new “Mumbai model” of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging.
The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.
While it’s true that the assaults in Kabul seem to be echoes of Mumbai, the fact is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using these sorts of swarm tactics for several years. Jemaah Islamiyah — the group responsible for the Bali nightclub attack that killed 202 people in 2002 — mounted simultaneous attacks on 16 Christian churches in Indonesia on Christmas Eve in 2000, befuddling security forces.