Mumbai

It will be some time, no doubt, before the full number of those who have died in the Ummah's latest franchise operation becomes clear. Reports at the moment suggest that at least 195 people have died in coordinated attacks on hotels, hospitals, railway stations and areas associated with Jewish people. Mumbai, of course, when it was Bombay, was one of the great centres of Judaism. Its Jewish community was founded before the diaspora, by shipwrecked oil-pressers from Galilee, whose liquids could conceivably have touched the lips of Christ. Today, Mumbai has been racked by bombs, multiple sieges, and the assaults of young men weaponed with small arms.

The raid has already given rise to much speculation. I make no pretence to know, from a military standpoint, what went on. What has happened suggests four things, of varying importance.

The first is that, despite legitimate global concern about weapons of mass destruction, any weapon is a weapon; and the world is at the moment awash in bullets and machine guns, which can of course do immense damage. The Wall Street bomb plotters of 1920 killed 30, and injured 100; with very little expenditure, relatively speaking, the Mumbai plotters of 2008 seem to have increased those figures by a factor of six at least.

Small arms are recognised as a global problem. You can look at the International anti small arms network here. They point out that the Mumbai gunmen were using Kalashnikovs, which are probably decades old. In 2006, the Control Arms campaign pointed out that there were between sixty and seventy million of the things spread around the world, and that the weapons were produced in at least 14 countries. The bullets were similarly constructed across the world. These are the horrors of our time, and though I doubt it, the UN suggests that they are not ungovernable.

There has been a lot of talk in recent days of a Tobin tax on international transactions. I wonder if a punitive global tax on bullets and rifles would not be a better idea. No bullet tax, no WTO membership; no signature of the small arms convention, no trade. It would at least be a positive step, though slightly deranged if anyone expected it to achieve anything quickly.

My second observation is that the presence of young men from Britain in this conflict, as in Afghanistan, suggests a return to a slightly older pattern. In the matter of Ireland, in the nineteenth century, it was not unusual to find fevered commentary on vast Fenian conspiracies. These were indeed largely funded from one country.

American money sponsored assaults on others, often with foot soldiers and generals educated in Mexican Wars or Canadian or American armies. Like the filibusters, these young men ranged around the world, between politics and paramilitaries, from Australia through New York, Montreal, London and Liverpool, to Dublin. They used existing trade routes, and had an uneasy relationship with their global religion, sometimes developing their own rituals around its practices. They maintained their networks with the use of self-published pages in a 'dynamite press' that was fast changing, global, and of a piece with the new international communications system, the telegraph. One does not have to squint too hard to see the Mumbai plotters in this picture.

But history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. The cry of Ireland was for a liberated national homeland, which has mostly but not wholly been achieved through politics. It was not for a global warrior pope to take command, as per the demand for a new caliphate which the al-qaeda franchises tend to include in their corporate mission statement. It would be wrong to carry the analogy too far.

My third observation is that there is far too much bloviation going on about the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. The title of 'world's favourite mysterious agency' seems to have switched from the CIA after its humiliation and consumption by the Homeland Security system to the Pakistani outfit. Yet every indication is that the leaders of the ISI are being either removed or tamed, and that Pakistan's government is now in control.

If, the thinking goes, the ISI wanted to stop the Pakistan war that has spread from Afghanistan by taking the heat off of its progeny, the Taliban, and putting it onto Mumbai, the wish must have fathered this action. That's sloppy, fallacious logic, and also, it would mean that not only was one required to believe the ISI mad, evil, unpredictable and super-organised, but, also that they were stupid. I have never, ever, seen any indication of that. In fact, one of the first things Pakistan did in this crisis was to send the head of the ISI to New Delhi in response to Indian requests with all the information he had about the individuals involved. The KGB didn't even do that with the Kennedy Assassination.

Seriously--a traceable attack with small arms on a neighbouring superpower armed with nuclear weapons targeted on your teeming cities and a Navy itching to take on pirates, terror routes, and an expanded Indian Ocean role? I'd need a truck full of evidence and signed statements before I accepted that one. People should decide whether they think the ISI is a coherent, disciplined, serious organisation or a bag of screaming loony cats and stick with their observation; both are incompatible, and both are incompatible with the facts of what has gone on.

My fourth and final observation is just how sad this is. Anti-semitism has reared its head in a country that has never had anything, officially or semi-officially, to do with it. I despise that disease. More importantly, many young men have given their souls to hatred. Worlds have been ended, because that is what happens when a life is taken. And the men of terror have discovered, in what I hope to God is not a dry-run, a new and highly effective way to expiate their rage. This rage subsists within a world on fire along what I have in the past termed its arcs of instability.

Al-Qaeda (for want of a better word) activity in the past has had very great mimetic components. In these attacks, it has reformed its business model. Early reports suggest British franchises, co-ordinated by someone else, and in alliance with a separate regional group established for different purposes, a little as in the Indonesian attacks of a few years ago. I note also the ongoing influence of ties developed in the old Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. This is a global and resourceful enemy, and it will not go away easily or at all.

I hope someone of importance has worked out that North Africa and the Indian Ocean rim are heaving with discontented young men, poverty, and what is now tidally retreating investment as the seas of global finance dry. Gas pipes in North Africa, the new global slum-cities, and the Indian Ocean; are these the new theatres of our rolling twenty first century crisis?