A meticulous account exposing the role of Pakistani agencies, US in 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks

The 26/11 attacks in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, were a pivotal moment in the country’s troubled history of terrorism, and while much has been written about the attacks themselves, the documentation of the complex organizational structure and dynamics that underpinned these attacks has, at best, been fragmentary. Terrorism, moreover, has most often been examined in the context of the intent and activities of particular terrorist formations, often ignoring the reality that modern terrorist groups, with rare exception, are creatures, not of radical anti-state actors, but of states themselves. “Perfect Storm – The History and Anatomy of 26/11” authored by Prabhakar Aloka and Nikhil Ravi – addresses both these lacunae, at once providing a meticulous account of the largely concealed complex that lies behind the violent manifestation of terrorism, and the extraordinary degree of state collusion, exposing the role not only of Pakistani agencies, but of the mother of most movements of contemporary terrorism, the US itself.

The book explores the traumas of Partition, of repeated defeats, Pakistan’s loss of its eastern wing, and the rising paranoia of the country’s leadership that “crystallize into an almost theological conviction that India represented an existential threat that must be countered by any means necessary.” The result was a steady, systematic ‘weaponization’ of historical memory and faith, as Pakistan set about, over the decades since it engineered the US-backed Afghan jihad, to create “a network of training camps, financial pipelines, ideological indoctrination centres and political fronts designed to sustain a long-term insurgency without leaving Pakistan’s fingerprints.”

It also examines the systemic failures in India that made 26/11 possible, as warnings of “imminent danger… entered the byzantine machine of India’s security apparatus, joining countless others in the daily tide of intelligence that washes over government agencies.”

Perfect Storm details the elaborate structures engineered by Pakistan’s ISI and its Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) proxy, for terrorist recruitment, training and funding, including the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which “maintained lucrative side businesses in arms dealing, drug transportation and precious metals smuggling;” institutionalized drug trafficking that won Lt. Gen. Fazle Haq, the Chief Martial Law Administrator of the North West Frontier Province, the sobriquet of “Pakistan’s Noriega”; innovative cyber theft networks that transferred millions into the terrorist pipeline; and LeT’s “almost corporate approach to creating militants.”

The book also profiles some of the most prominent architects of the structure and enterprise of terrorism in Pakistan, as well as, specifically, the 26/11 attacks. These include the story of a young Lieutenant Akhtar Abdur Rahman, who barely escapes execution at the hands of Hindu soldiers in the communal chaos of Partition, and who, decades later, as Director General ISI, transformed Afghanistan into “a laboratory for perfecting the art of proxy warfare”; as well as a detailed and compelling portrait of Daood Gilani aka David Headley, whose “mismatched eyes – one blue, one brown – present an almost perfect metaphor for his fractured identity, a physical manifestation of the duplicity that defined his existence.”

An author must not be faulted on what he chooses to write about, or what he omits, but rather, on how well he treats his chosen subject. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that “the book deliberately steers away from a blow by blow account of the 26/11 attacks themselves, as those sixty hours of horror have been meticulously chronicled in several excellent accounts.” The authors neglect the pathological shortness of Indian memory, and the fact that a new generation that knows little of these events is now in place. A retelling of these events would have been interesting reading even for those who are reasonably familiar with the happenings of those fateful days.

Moreover, if public familiarity is grounds for excluding material from the book, then Perfect Storm’s ‘Postscript’ is more than redundant. The authors bring nothing new to the discourse, and the ‘Postscript’ has the feel of a sketchy afterthought, lacking the detail, depth and rigor that mark the rest of the book.

But these are minor irritants in a book that brings enormous clarity, both to the systematic and systemic build-up of terrorism, as well as the structures, events and personalities that eventually fashioned the Mumbai attacks.

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