Some Dead Are Worth More Than Others

Israel used white phosphorus munitions, in violation of United Nations protocol which prohibits their use in civilian areas.

United Nations compounds in Gaza were hit with such munitions, according to the BBC, but the IDF says all attacks were in accordance with international law, and an internal investigation is being started.

In the meantime, (yet unsubstantiated) claims are coming from a mother describing how her children "melted" in front of their eyes when hit with such munitions. Unexploded white phosphorus bombs leak the corrosive substance into the streets and buildings of the Gaza Strip.

It seems not enough that their children are being decapitated in front of their eyes by conventional weapons.

It is evident that some dead are worth more than others.

The End of the Bush Era: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This is the third in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.

The Israeli-Palestinian problem is the world's longest-running high profile conflict.

It was in 2000, under the stewardship of Bill Clinton that Yasser Arafat and the then Prime Minister Ehud Barak were on the verge of a political agreement. Clinton, ever the diplomat, hashed out some good solutions on Jerusalem, control of religious sites, and Israeli settlements, that were workable on the ground. As is typical in politics, "painful concessions" were on the table, but the reality is that 2000 was a turning point for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where they simply failed to turn.

Yasser Arafat eventually backed down saying the solution was untenable with the Palestinians, the talks broke down, the Second Intifada began, and George W. Bush stepped into the Whitehouse in 2001.

The Second Intifada started just a few months before he stepped into office in September 2000, so he was, in all fairness, inheriting a very difficult problem.

His 8 subsequent years in office saw the bloodiest attacks by Israel on the Palestinian territories during 9/11, then subsequently upon Lebanon, and then more recently the Gaza Strip.

Granted, Israel was consistently provoked during this time, but these completely disproportional "outbreaks of violence" are representative of the blank cheque handed to Israel by the US government to basically do as it pleased.

As they bombed Lebanon with extreme prejudice, the cries around the world for moderation were nearly unanimous, barring the US. When they bombed the Gaza Strip, the cries again were nearly unanimous, barring the US who eventually relented by abstaining from the UN Security Council vote.

Let's be fair, though: Israel had legitimate enemies and targets in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Iran has been fuelling both these fires and has a big hand in destabilizing the region and continuously provoking Israel.

That being said, 1,300 civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, of which a third are children, and the 1,200 civilian casualties in Lebanon, is simply unacceptable.

Consider for a moment Israel's casualties: 44 civilians in the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War, and 3 in the 2008-2009 Gaza Strip Attacks.

When asked about the disproportionality of the numbers, we're told not to play the "numbers game." But really, we would see who would play the numbers game if, let's say 1,300 Israelis were killed, a third of which were Jewish children.

And all this happened while Israel's special partner, the United States, stood idly by. And that really was the hallmark of the Bush presidency when it came to Israel and Palestine. A policy of muted disengagement, but stalwart support, while actually doing nothing on the ground to help either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

When you think of the Middle East conflict during the Clinton years, you remember the historic meeting of Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton during the Oslo Accords in 1993. You remember the 2000 Camp David Summit with Ehud Barak. It's a history of engagement.

Bush, however, undertook no such personal diplomatic drives during his term. Instead, he insisted the Palestinians have elections out of no better reason than blind ideology ("spreading freedom"), and voters overwhelmingly voted for Hamas and sidelined the secular, moderate, yet corrupt, America-backed Fatah, sowing the seeds of the recent Gaza Attacks.

Is Israel better off today than it was in 2000 when Clinton handed over the reins to Bush? Arguably, no.

Palestinians are more numerous today than they were in 2000, and the conflict has made no steps forward, and has rather made negative progress. Israel underwent two wars, one of which it lost to the Lebanon, and has lost a lot of face to the international community for its heavy-handed tactics. There were protests in London and New York against the recent Gaza Strip bombings, and people are tired of hearing about the Middle East. Public sentiments are slowly turning against Israel as reports of their bombing schools and hospitals spread. Just a few years ago, criticisms of Israel were silenced with accusations of anti-Semitism.

It's nice to finally see the world acquire a more nuanced worldview.

Arguably, the best thing that happened to Israel in the era of Bush was Ariel Sharon's unilateralism.

The Palestinian response is and always has been impotent, as is evident from Israeli casualty numbers. Oh no, I do play the numbers game, as do most rational people. A lower overall casualty rate means lower risks, which means a lower threat level. The numbers don't lie: if you're a Palestinian, you're far more likely to die than if you were an Israeli.

These wars weren't cheap for Israel, and in the face of massive balance of trade deficits, the Israeli economy is kept alive on the life support of American aid. This is as sustainable as the Gulf-Arab countries' economies are dependent on oil. Today it's there, tomorrow it isn't. Granted, the US will support Israel with its dying breath, but that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of such an arrangement or the confidence the world now has in America's capacity to handle such expensive "special arrangements" with two wars and a recession on its plate.

In all fairness, the failure of the Bush administration isn't a direct failure. Nobody disputes how much of a colossal mess the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, how sticky a problem it is, and how difficult and painful the resolution will be for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Their tack on the Middle East was almost a perverse extension of their laissez-faire, market-driven economics: letting the "market forces" of massive American military and economic subsidy for Israel fight it out with the Irani-backed Palestinian and Lebanese militants, with innocent Israelis, and a lot more innocent Palestinians stuck, and dead, in the middle.

An indirect failure, and a failure he shares with his predecessor, and will in all likelihood share with his successor, but a failure nonetheless.

But hope, as they say, springs eternal.

An Appeal for Empathy for Israel and Palestine

Very few problems are as complex as that of Israel and Palestine. Even assuming that the politicians on either side are actually sincere in achieving peace (something that is strongly suspect), it combines elements of politics, history, religion, economics, demographics, and the most prized possession of mortal man, land. So it isn't straightforward at all.

But we must learn to separate the problem from the people.

The only thing that stops the Palestinians from "disappearing" and "solving" this problem (for the Israelis) is that history has taught us that you cannot wipe a people off the face of the map due to the sheer physical challenge of such a task. They're hanging on by a thread not dissimilar to the one the Native Americans, Jews, and Australian aboriginees held on to, in history.

There was a comic strip regarding this in the newspaper last week: a lone Israeli and a lone Palestinian burying their dead in their respective graveyards, "The Last Israeli/Palestinian" written on their shirts. When they're done, they look at each other for a moment, and then charge at each other with their shovels.

Not exactly very comic. But this is indicative of the fatigue the world feels when it comes to the Middle East. "Oh no, not the Middle East again!"

We should be empathetic to the plights of common people in the region. Consider for a moment what it's like to be a Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip, or an Israeli under rocket fire.

And I say this regardless of what opinions these people may hold and whoever may have the upper hand, Israel or Palestine. Most Israelis supported the offensive against Gaza, and most Palestinians voted for Hamas.

But pain is pain, and an Israeli getting killed on her way back from the gym from Hamas rockets is as tragic as the Palestinian child dying from an Israeli bomb while taking out the garbage, no matter what they think, or who they voted for. To me, both of these are incalculable losses. They are both, to me, inextricably family.

We should seggregate our emotions. Let us reserve our consternation for the politicians and experts, upon whom we depend to solve the most critical of our problems, and who have so thoroughly and consistently let us all down.

And let us reserve our empathy, good will and prayers for the common people on the ground.

All they really want to do is get on with their lives, just like us.

The End of the Bush Era: Iraq

This is the second in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.

The reasons for why the Bush-Blair coalition went into Iraq for Gulf War 2 is going to remain one of the great mysteries of our generation.

A lot of answers are on offer, but they are at best only a piece of the puzzle, and at worst, dismissive of exactly how convinced these gentlemen were (and remain to this day) that we needed to bomb Iraq.

Oil is not a good enough a reason. Iraq was a net importer of oil for years after the invasion in 2003, and it couldn't have been expected to be any different. Oil is a capital-intensive venture, and most of the infrastructure was crumbling in Iraq, after more than 12 years of sanctions. Today, after 5 years, Iraq's contribution to global oil production is still nothing to write home about.

It may be a combination of oil and one-upping his father, who very prudently went in with certain objectives, achieved them, then moved out, but then subsequently lost his re-election in 1991.

It could have been the Cookie Monster, I don't know. The truth is, nobody does. Despite the numerous books that have come out on the Bush presidency, the real inner core of interactions are covered in a fog of war, and subject to conjecture. Everyone's got a guess, and an opinion, but nobody really knows.

If you ask Bush and Blair about it, they go into moral platitudes about how they "believed" it was right, as if you're asking them if they believed in Jesus or Buddha, and then fall back to the ridiculous argument that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.

Well, it would be a better place without Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and my annoying university roommate in 2006. Invade them too, why don't you, and make the world a "better place"? It's a cop-out.

It is a decision perplexing in its stupidity and awe-inspiring in the scale of disaster it has rained down upon Iraq and the world.

I still remember watching "Operation Shock and Awe" on CNN from Abu Dhabi in March 2003. It indeed was both shocking and awful.

The skyline of Baghdad was glowing orange in the night time as it rained fire. The domes and palm trees, such a familiar site for me, (having lived and grown up in the Middle East myself) silhouetted against the flames. To see it burn like that, it touched me really deeply. People shouldn't be allowed to do things like that without due cause.

Everyone outside of the Western intelligentsia informally knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq was under weapons inspections, stricter sanctions or bombings for the past 12 years at that point, and this combination of UN-administered soft and hard diplomacy was doing a pretty decent job of containing the Iraqi threat. Al Qaeda loathed Iraq and wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Hans Blix, the UN Weapons Inspector, a diplomat and academic, made the most logical observation: we don't have enough information to draw a conclusion safely, and more inspections are required. The US and the UK ran an unsuccessful smear campaign to completely destroy the man's reputation in a bid to overturn his opinions so they could start bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age.

I interviewed a certain Dr. Joseph Nye (a Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Public Policy in Harvard) while I was in NUS in 2004 for my university publication, after it had become obvious that there were no weapons. In true academic humility, the man admitted in all honesty he was very surprised Saddam Hussein didn't have any weapons, because, and I remember his exact words, "we knew he had them."

This has to be one of the world's biggest "Oops!" Billions of dollars wasted, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, thousands of coalition casualties, a resurgence of localized Al Qaeda (where previously there was none), and an eruption of brutal, horrific sectarian violence resulted.

They underestimated so completely how difficult it would be to tackle a country so diverse and violently communal, that it genuinely baffles the mind as to what exactly they were expecting. "To be greeted as liberators" is part of the refrain they had stuck to, another indicator of how blinded by ideology and an over-simplistic worldview the Bush administration had to be.

Mr. Blair, in the meantime, had nought say in the failing strategies being implemented by the Bush administration. Iraq is a blemish on Tony Blair's record; he has arguably been one of Britain's most successful Prime Ministers since Winston Churchill, but how can one not give him the unfortunate moniker of "a poodle" after so submissively allowing George Bush to first spear-head a campaign against Iraq on such flimsy evidence, and then completely botch up the ground operations?

The post-invasion failures are summed up by the one very stupid thing they did: they went on and completely disbanded Iraq's security forces.

So they released men trained in handling arms and the arts of war to fend for themselves in their ethnic enclaves in a deeply schismatic region of the world that had suffered many years of painful dictatorship, and liberated only after war and bombings. Were they expecting grace and sensibility?

But the world collectively drank the kool-aid. The press was so sparing in their criticism and scepticism of their campaign against Iraq, one wondered if they were complicit. Honestly, where were the "analysts" and "experts" when the drums of war were being beaten for no apparent reason?

Most of the American senate voted for the war in Iraq, Democrats and Republicans alike. Most of the Americans supported the war, even after it was found to be under false pretence, much to the world's dismay when they re-elected George Bush for a second term in 2004, vindicating him that he was on the right path.

It was only in the last 2 years of Bush's presidency that people started losing complete faith in the man.

So it only took 6 years for them to catch on that this man had no clue what he was doing. It is remarkable how enduringly short-sighted and over-simplistic the American people are when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Instead of looking inward after the attacks of 9/11, they looked outward for something to bomb. And one country wasn't enough, they had to find a second one to empty their ordinances in.

The troop surge in 2007 eventually worked, something Bushites claim is a great victory, because he did it when everyone was against the idea, and it actually worked (much to everyone's surprise).

But even then, this success cannot be credit to him. It's like saying, I'm sorry I axed your fingers clean off your hand, but look, I managed to sew a couple of them back on again. I'm great, aren't I?

The thought that went into the troop surge and its associated policies under David Petraeus should have been the name of the game from the get-go. In fact, what game? There shouldn't have even been a war!

I don't see why he should claim the credit for ameliorating a planetesimal problem that he created. Iraq today has only "tolerable" levels of violence, where "only" 20 or so people die in bombings everyday, where previously it was 10 times as much. He set the bar of expectation so low that a success like this looks like a defining moment in his presidency.

Iraq is an epic, unprecedented failure that George W. Bush and his complicit allies are entirely responsible for. It outsizes all of his other failures, of which there are many, by at least an order of magnitude.

Despite what minor successes he may have had in his time, the scale of human and capital loss the world has incurred under this man's leadership, it would be small justice for Iraq to define his presidency, and for him to be remembered as one of the worst American presidents in recent history.

The End of the Bush Era: Afghanistan

This is the first in a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.

Afghanistan

It surprises me how much the war in Afghanistan is still supported by Americans.

I understand it was UN-approved, but the US lobbied very hard for it, and nobody wanted to question them at the time. They had many allies in its totally preposterous war in Iraq, so I can see why many naysayers may have bended the American way in 2001, after being shocked by 9/11 and then shivering in fear at what the sleeping giant would do now that it awoke. Other countries, perhaps legitimately, also saw the scale of the attacks and didn't want to fall prey to anything similar.

For my part, though, I still think the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong, both morally and strategically.

What has come of it? Tens of thousands of civilian lives have been lost. What little infrastructure Afghanistan had was pommeled. A country in need of rehabilitation after generations of warfare is seeing yet another war. Drug production has increased many-fold and the black market for opium is flooded with Afghan produce. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are still blogging from their mountain hills, and the Hamid Karzai government has no implementation capacity to distribute and spend the billions of dollars it is receiving in foreign aid.

The Taleban are now back, and the government is now considering negotiating with them.

Why could they not have negotiated with the Taleban back then? Before the lives were lost, before you emptied billions of dollars of missiles and ammunition onto a poor patch of mountainous dirt that's seen enough violence already? Before the Taleban was radicalized any further, like they weren't already radical enough?

The Taleban offered to try Osama bin Laden in their own courts in 2001. The religious council actually politely asked Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan before the invasion, because as much as Osama bin Laden was their guest, they didn't want to get bombed for him.

Don't tell me there was no room for negotiation with those people. They may not have been the paragon of progressive thinking, but violence was not a foregone conclusion.

There were senior, aged members of the Taleban who would see some inkling of reason back then. Most of them are now dead or sidelined by the new hardline extremists who don't have a moral problem in selling drugs to make money like the pre-invasion Taleban did. They will be much harder to negotiate with, if they want to negotiate at all.

Yes, these are the same people that blew up Buddhas out of spite, and wouldn't let girls go to school, but they are also the same people who offered their own forces in support of the operations to free Air India hostages that landed in a hijacked plane in Kandahar in 1999.

They are the same people that destroyed 95% of Afghanistan's poppy culture, on nothing more than the principle of the thing (a fatwa was issued that said taking drugs was forbidden in Islam.)

Consider, for a moment, that the illegal drug trade in Afghanistan was one of their only sources of income. It brought in billions of dollars in informal revenue to an otherwise impoverished country under chronic and crippling sanctions for many years. The worldwide supply of Afghan-made drugs was destroyed almost literally overnight.

The hatred for the Taleban in progressive circles is very strong, the term "Talebanization" is a cuss, representing prudishness on an astronomical scale and the curtailment of individual freedoms. Rightly so. And I must say this: I'm not defending the Taleban. I'm defending empathy, the sanctity of human life, the willingness to negotiate even with someone you have deep differences with, and the use of force only as a last resort.

When the Taleban removed the Northern Alliance from control over Afghanistan, many Afghans breathed a sigh of relief. They didn't like the Taleban any, but they sure were a whole lot better than the warlords of the Northern Alliance. The men were forced to wear beards, and women were barred from many public engagements, but they were still better than the random injustice of the warlords. There was a semblance of order in the country.

Afghanistan has no precedent for an organized government in its recent history (something Iraq has, and so is cause for very cautious optimism there). It is still living in the Dark Ages socially, with feudal lords roaming the countryside, and unaccompanied women in public at genuine risk of grievous harm. Building any kind of civil institution in a region like Afghanistan is going to be difficult.

I wish it the very best. I still remember CNN's Nic Robertson reporting from Afghanistan in 2001 before the invasion, taking great pains to point out that the Afghans have a rich tradition of chivalry, to a fault, in seeing Osama bin Laden as their guest in remembering the aid he rendered them during the Soviet invasion.

Looking forward, though, from my vantage point, all the data points toward one very likely eventuality: the continuation of hostilities. I do very much want to be proven wrong, though.

America was looking for something to bomb after 9/11, and that's a stupid reason to go to war. But this is emblematic of the Bush presidency: twisted, belligerent, and arrogant ideology, mixed with a complete divorce from reality.

The End of the Bush Era

This is a series of essays, "The End of the Bush Era." It is a list of what I believe are the most prominent successes and failures of this prolific politician who, for better or ill, is going to become an indelible part of history.

I still remember when George W. Bush got elected president in 2000. There was a big hullabaloo around the Florida recount that I didn't pay much attention to (I was only 16!), but we were just waiting for when he would win. This is no big secret: Bush got the Muslim backing in 2000.

Al Gore was drab, uncharismatic, indistinguishable from Bush, and represented the status quo, and his pick of Joe Lieberman for Vice President didn't sit well with Muslims, who, for better or ill, saw in Mr. Lieberman someone who may not bode well for Middle East peace, being a Jew.

"Our candidate" won in 2000, so we got our way. Christian conservatism has a lot in common with Muslim conservatism, so socially, we swing generally the same way. The backing for John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 by the Muslims is largely because we've decided gay marriage is a far less significant issue than say, prisoner abuse, or illegal invasion.

Bush very quickly lost Muslim and (for slightly different reasons) other Americans' backing, and I remember in 2004, there was a campaign out called "ABB." Anybody But Bush. Not really a clear endorsement of John Kerry who was on the Democratic ticket, but representative of how quickly and deeply his support evaporated.

I was in university at the time, in Singapore, and I watched the elections very closely. I was working for the school paper at the time, so me and a friend of mine arranged for a non-scientific poll: we approached people at the bus stops in NUS and asked them questions about the election. Most people didn't really care about the elections, thinking they're untouched by them.

How wrong they were. Bush got the popular vote that year, and set the world on a course to further disaster.

The American elections affects everyone. They are the world's largest economy by far, and they are truly a superpower. This is both hard power (military) and soft power (economic and diplomatic). They are also a source of innovation and (despite what may have happened these past 8 years), I still believe, generally a source of good in the world.

Most of the game-changing innovations come from the United States, and they still take the majority of Nobel Prizes in the sciences. As recently as last year, they dominated the Nobel Prizes, bagging the awards for Economics, Chemistry and Physics.

It's American companies like Microsoft, Apple and IBM that fuelled the IT revolution which has created millions of jobs and incomes worldwide, and it's an American company that has made the first fully viable electric car. We use American ingenuity and know-how in every facet of our lives today.

Let's be fair: the world rides on America's innovative coat tails.

If the Nazis won in World War 2, or Soviet Russia during the Cold War, we'd be in a very different world, and, I think, not a better one.

The fact that I even have to consider what the world would be like had the Nazis or the Soviets won is indicative of how badly the past 8 years under George W. Bush has been. The world is left reeling from failure after failure after failure of the Bush administration, and we're soul-searching. What just happened? How did it come to this?

How can one man be so brazenly incompetent, yet so enduringly popular among his people, and manage to remain in power so long, and do so much damage?

Far better politicians have failed for far fewer and graver faults.

What follows is a series of posts on all the things I believe Bush did right, and all the things I believe he did wrong. One of these lists, I get the feeling, is going to be longer than the other.

Other articles in this series:

The End of the Bush Era: Afghanistan

The End of the Bush Era: Iraq
The End of the Bush Era: Conflict
The End of the Bush Era: Free Trade

Apportioning Blame in the Mumbai Attacks

The dust has settled. The dead are being put to rest, and collectively, we mourn. As people start to move on, we can name our heroes, our villains, and everything in between.

The Heroes.

1. The victims.

They did no wrong, didn't ask to be heroes, and given the choice, I think they'd choose to continue with their dinners. Yet here we are. These innocent souls now join the many hundreds of thousands of victims throughout India and the world, now, and in history, who were guilty only of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And though the victims may have found peace in their eternal slumber, the emptiness they leave behind with their loved ones must be unimaginable.

I am truly sorry for their enormous loss.

2. The policemen.

They were ill-equipped, and under-trained. The gunmen had night-vision goggles, and they didn't. The gunmen had better guns, and had actually trained with their weapons, but the police didn't. They were late in getting to the scene, and they wasted the critical moments when lives could have been saved. They didn't know what to do, they didn't know the layout of the hotel, and nobody bothered to teach them or tell them.

But they went in anyway. When they were needed the most, they were there. And many of them died.

"When they lay us down to rest,
Tell our moms we done our best."

That they didn't know what to do wasn't their fault. They are, unequivocally, heroes.

3. The commandos.

The famed Indian Black Cats. They were trained, and equipped, but they were all the way in New Delhi and couldn't catch a plane because there wasn't any, and couldn't catch the ones that were available because the bureaucracy didn't account for that. But they eventually got the job done, after 60-something hours. Could it have been done sooner? Perhaps. But Indian commandos cleaned up an Indian mess, and that's something to be proud of. The Israelis, apparently, offered help, but India said they had it covered.

Arguably, they didn't have it covered. But it's good to take responsibility.

4. The people of Mumbai. They have suffered many wrongs, and yet they prod on. Like the people of Islamabad, Baghdad, Kabul, and Grozny. What else can one do. You pick up the pieces, and you move on. Common folk are incredibly resilient.

The Villains

In most cases, the hero-villain dichotomy is a false one. But these crimes were so horrific, that the perpetrators of this crime really are villains.

But what devilry is this? Suicide bombing, though I do not condone, I understand. It is the terrorist equivalent of blind rage. A lack of control in your life can lead to suicidal tendencies; it is one of the things you actually can control.

But what is it that these people have suffered that would push them to this controlled burst of terror? The gut reaction is to dismiss them as evil, and perhaps to a certain extent that's true. But most of the deeply messed up things in the world make sense to a level. This doesn't make much sense yet.

No statement was made as to what they wanted, a no-name organization was put forward, the Deccan Mujahideen, and goodness knows why they targeted Americans, Britons and Israelis if they were indeed homegrown terrorists, which the consensus is starting to suggest. What was their goal?

There's more thinking and soul-searching to be done. Questions. Questions that need answers.
___________________________

These are the only two categories that (approximately) fall into the category of white and black. Right and wrong. Good and evil.

Now come the shades of grey.

India

India is no stranger to terrorism. They've been wrangling with it since independence, arguably before. If the Indian civil service traces its roots to the British civil service, that represents a long line of bureaucrats, administrators, and politicians that have dealt with criminal malcontents, rebels, terrorists, anarchists and freedom fighters (from an administrator's perspective, these all fall into the same basket).

And yet look at the pitiable excuse for a response. Their policemen were carrying obsolete weaponry they had previously never used before. Mumbai, a city of 13 million people, doesn't have its own commandos or national guard on stand-by. This, after a truck filled with almost a tonne of explosives laced with aluminium, blew up in the front yard of their neighbour's capital in Islamabad. You think they would have gotten the hint?

The helicopter dropping the commandos off in Nariman House circled overhead three times before dropping them off. So much for the element of surprise! It was almost a perverse comedy, like a Bollywood movie, where the hero takes down a dozen chicken-legged policemen in shorts.

Such a long history of terrorism and insurgency movements, and India still doesn't have a central terrorism database. They don't have a singular authority that handles these kinds of issues, a country with more than a billion people, and numerous separatist and insurgent movements.

In all fairness, India alone doesn't suffer from this. All the sub-continent countries display this level of incompetence. When will they realize that their laziness costs lives?

But to give India's democracy some credit, there is a tradition of taking responsibility for gross negligence. The Home Minister resigned in the face of these attacks, and I remember a few years back, a terrible railway accident sparked the resignation of the Railway Minister.

Though these resignations, strictly speaking, don't serve an immediate purpose in improving the situation, the culture of taking responsibility, at least, is there. I say at least, because it is, literally, the least, that could be done.

The terrorists hijacked a boat, took a dinghy to the shore, verbally abused fishermen on the way who asked what they were doing, walked into Mumbai, spraying bullets in the train station along the way, entered the hotels, took the time to ask people their nationalities, searched the hotel, and then kept the authorities at bay for over 60 hours. If that isn't a systemic failure at every level of the intelligence and civil defence administration, I don't know what is.

In short: the government botched this one up really bad.

Pakistan

Pakistan is now getting blamed for it. The Indian foreign minister, before any of the dust even settled, pointed his finger to "elements" in Pakistan. Summary: meaningless.

It's like a night guard asleep at his post hears an explosion which wakes him up, and the first thing he does upon waking is accuse the guy next to him.

People died on their watch, and they're looking for scapegoats, so obviously the last thing on their minds is their sworn responsibility as civil servants.

That being said, is Pakistan blameless? Fareed Zakaria (I'm a fan) said it in a piece soon after the bombings: Pakistan needs to stop choosing between "good terrorists" and "bad terrorists." Terrorists that destabilize India and Afghanistan are the good kind, and those that destabilize Pakistan are the bad kind.

That there are sympathetic elements within the Pakistani ISI is without a doubt. The evidence continues to mount that the attacks were staged from Pakistan. If that is the case, then the Pakistani government shoulders a sizeable burden, comparable to that of the Indian government: why weren't the terrorists on their soil stopped? The Pakistani authorities are, at best, incompetent, and at worst, complicit.

An attack of this scale does not serve any Pakistani agenda. Undermining local interests that stay out of the news media are the kind that would serve a hostile Pakistan's agenda. As the saying goes "Do not attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity."

The terrorism problem within South Asia is localized and indigenous, and the South Asian countries need to combine forces on this.

I, however, remain sceptical the Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians can work together on anything.

Islam

No doubt this will push those that hate Islam and Muslims to hate them even more.

I am not a subscriber to the thought that "you cannot judge a religion by the actions of its followers." No, you can, you should, and everyone does.

But Muslims died in these attacks. Muslims have died in almost every major terorrist attack by Muslim extremists, and pretty much all of the minor ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the major perpetrators of terrorism (the Buddhists are a distant second in the religious extremism rankings), Muslims account for most of its victims by number. Mind you, this includes the "collateral damage" suffered by Muslims during coalition air raids.

If you count the casualties in the "War on Terror" (which for all intents and purposes basically means Afghanistan and Iraq), Muslim civilian and combatant casualties outnumber any other casualties in these conflicts, be they civilian, Indian, Israeli, American, or coalition forces. Be they casualties in the numerous suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, New York, Mumbai, or Madrid.

So we suffer as much if not more than anyone else does, it's just that when an Afghan or Iraqi civilian dies, or a Pakistani or an Arab, their government usually lacks the organization, infrastructure, news agencies, public relations apparatus, or diplomatic and political will to make an issue out of it.

In every one of the BBC articles on the Mumbai attacks, they've listed the dead. And at the very end, they take by name the single Briton that died. It's an honourable thing to do, to look out for your own.

Since most Muslim countries are poor and under-developed, our dead don't have a public voice. We bury our numerous, uncounted, innocent dead in Chechnya, the Gaza Strip, and Somalia privately, and the Earth is soaked in our tears. And neither our own governments, nor other governments look to see our pain.

Why don't people realize that our suffering and our grievances is the world's suffering too? It's only when people get pushed to the very brink, when they lose their humanity and like a child, break the vase to get some attention, does the world look at us. With a frown of irritation on its face. Like it would be so much easier if we all just... disappeared.

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Wait A Minute...

Muslims are not a single, monolithic entity. Muslims in America are different from Muslims in the UK, who are different from Muslims in India. That there may be some elements shared within common extremist ideologies does not mean that Muslims in general are a problem case.

The Muslim faith's enduring egalitarianism allows for a Muslim in the Philippines to feel for his brother in Palestine, but that does not mean we speak with one voice.

With the exception of a few high-profile cases, the United States is largely immune from the scourge of indigenous Muslim extremism. The Muslim diaspora in the United States (and North America) is among the most well-settled, integrated, and successful of all the Muslim diaspora in the world.

Muslims in Europe have their own grievances by way of Europe's collective social backwardness in integrating immigrant populations into the common fold. That has nothing to do with Islam, but the root problems are socio-economic.

Europe for all its progressiveness has never had an indigenous, enduring Muslim population from pre-modern times. All Muslims in Europe today are modern immigrants. In the Middle East, there are still native Jews and Christians, descendants from the time of the Prophets of yore. This is an indicator of Europe's history of integration.

In Palestine, large swathes of Muslims have been living in refugee camps for generations now, internally displaced, without an identity, continuously intimidated by the Israelis, neglected by the Arabs and the Palestinian Authority, and unwanted everywhere.

Everyone has their problems. Yes, religion may be a catalyst in the process of radicalizing people, once you've hammered into their brains that the gardens of paradise are worth whatever political agenda you may be preaching. But I'm a Muslim, and technically, I'm looking forward to the same gardens as many of the suicide bombers. But I'm not rushing to do anything untoward.

These people are hopeless, and uneducated, and many have lost their families, their dignity, and have nothing to live for. Hate the sin, not the sinner. We have to pull these people out of that rut. If for nothing else, than to save our own skins.

Every region which finds terrorism as an intractable problem is riddled with poverty, corruption, instability, lack of education, and general hopelessness. Palestine. Afghanistan. Sudan.

And let me be clear: As a Muslim, I have nothing to apologize for because the perpetrators were Muslim. I condemn their attacks along with the rest of the world. By saying "Muslims need to speak out more" that's indirectly casting some of the blame of these terrorists on me. I share none of the blame of any of these terrorists, and I never will be. I am not of them, and they are not of me.

But to have a clear conscience and to actually try to identify how to solve the problem, I have to note that the root problem of a lot of terrorism lies within political solutions to non-fictional grievances in Kashmir, Palestine, and Africa. I'm not condoning violence by highlighting the shades of grey, but I'm looking at the root cause as well as the symptoms. Shouldn't everyone be doing that?

By using a faith as a scapegoat, we're not addressing the problem. It is dismissive, and a disservice to the issue. The problem lies within people, and within people lies the solution.

To the Muslims: there's an African saying, "A fool at forty, is a fool for ever." Most post-colonial Muslim countries are nearing 40, it's about time they started to show some progress, because very soon, blaming the thieving white people of half a century ago just isn't going to cut it.

Good governance, education, healthcare, a good economy, free speech. And terrorism will become a much more manageable problem.

Ask a bum in New York (someone who is arguably good-for-nothing and reasonably hopeless) to blow himself up. You think he'll do it? No, because he knows he's not just a bum, but he's a bum in New York, man. He shares in that pride. Don't underestimate the poor and the hopeless. They're very aware of their surroundings.

The Mumbai Blasts

The time to soul-search and apportion blame will come. Now, we must stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in India, for they have suffered a deep and grievous wrong.

First, we must wash our dead, and lay them to rest.