Mumbai Update 1

Via the Instanpundit, there is this from The Hindu, which claims to be India's National Newspaper. It also tells us that it has been around for over 100 years and has a readership of over 4 million. That isn't peanuts.

At any rate, a Praveen Swami* has an opinion piece in the 29 November 2008 edition of The Hindu. Titled India’s strategic deafness & the massacre in Mumbai, it contains some harsh criticism of the Indian Government. This is to be expected.

However, the author makes comparisons with the United States:

But even as India debates what the authorship of the attacks will mean to Pakistan-India relations, commentators have been scrambling to contrast India’s responses to terror with that of the United States. While the U.S. has succeeded in blocking successive attempts to execute attacks on its soil since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the argument goes, India’s failure has been dismal.

This raises questions as to if the US approach, which has been decried in some quarters (e.g., charges of wire tapping phone calls where one party is not in the US, immunity for telephone companies too quick to cooperate with NSA and detentions in GITMO), is not a suitable course. This is a question that the incoming Administration will have to ask itself.

And we will have to ask ourselves the same question and then respond by sending letters to our two Senators and our Representative and by writing letters to our local newspapers. This is an issue too important to not make one's voice heard--but also too important to not think through. While none of us want a Mumbai like experience in our near future, it is also true that we don't want the Federal, State or Local Governments dealing with our data, and our communications, the way some in which the Ohio bureaucracy dealt with Joe the Plummer (leafing through the data on hand to satisfy personal or political interest). Remember H L Menken's quip: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong**." (Apparently it first appeared in the essay "The Divine Afflatus," originally published in 1917. It appears the word "Divine" is redundant.)

Regards -- Cliff

* Mr Swami holds a BA in history from King's College, Cambridge and was a Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace, under the Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program. He was In Residence from October 2004–July 2005.

** My underlining.