Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks The Untold Story (Audible Audio Edition) Sebastian Rotella Gary Dikeos Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks The Untold Story (Audible Audio Edition) Sebastian Rotella Gary Dikeos Audible Studios Books
The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai offer a rare picture of the ties between Pakistan's intelligence service and the militant group Lashkar-i-Taiba. The trail of two key figures, an accused Pakistani mastermind and his American operative, traces the rise of a complex, international threat.
Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks The Untold Story (Audible Audio Edition) Sebastian Rotella Gary Dikeos Audible Studios Books
I had a chance to watch Mr. Rotella's documentary, The Perfect Terrorist, directed by Tom Jennings, funded by ProPublica and aired on Frontline (gotta give credit to them all), and I was blown away at how amazingly networked this entire event was. I then looked online for other sources and found this and it amazed me how incredibly great Mr. Rotella is at what he does. His work (namely, this Single) speaks volumes for his value of investigative journalism.The best part is, unlike most popular and overly sensationalistic investigative journalism, Mr. Rotella's work (both the book and the documentary) has none of the hype, special effects, millions of dollars in media budget, or a ten day foreplay on the channel sponsoring the event to build up hype on a program that could've been summarized in two minutes. No, Mr. Rotella's work is the entire opposite. It's independent, donor-funded and directed towards public interest. It requires all the resources the former has, but the latter outdoes the former in terms of quality, importance and with the intent of informing everyone.
While this book reads like a sewn together set of stories that were written independently, for $0.99, it's a great price for the entire collection of his work on the subject. Also, as another reviewer here mentioned, it doesn't fully go into the background of all the players involved, it does give you just the right amount of information needed to understand how these things started, developed and manifested into what they ultimately became. Nonetheless, it's a great book. I loved every minute of reading it.
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Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks The Untold Story (Audible Audio Edition) Sebastian Rotella Gary Dikeos Audible Studios Books Reviews
The intrigue within this story is truly fascinating. Buy it and read it. But one question that I wouldn't mind having quantified relates to this According to the ("untold") story here, on several occassions various people intimately close to Headley voice their concerns about his actions to various law enforcement types who, for whatever reason, choose not to act on them. First, then, is this because there are simply way too many first-person accounts from people trying to implicate others in shady activity, with a resulting volume of tips too vast to try to run down every possible lead? And/or, second, is it in any way due to the fact that the people coming in from the cold to implicate Headley are females, while the people receiving the intel are males (presumably) who may have simply discounted the value of the information being presented to them because of other, perhaps intrinsic, bias? Its curious.
For a short report this does pack a lot of punch and understandably this sticks to facts and very little in terms of either any significant historical backdrop as well as any inferences. The report retraces the planning and execution of the audacious Mumbai attacks on 26/11/2008 by a Lashkar e Tayyiba unit. Thanks to the arrest of David Headley who was a part of the planning team as well as the capture of an attacker, a lot of characters step out of the shadows. The kingpin behind all of this was Sajid Mir who planned and executed the entire mission with dollops of help from the Pakistani Intelligence. Ten gunmen attacked and held hostage the city of Mumbai for 3 days with the world attention riveted on a shocked Indian governments response. The attack largely put paid to years of rapprochement between the Indian and Pakistani government. The report covers the duplicity that the ISI engages in while dealing with the US government, modalities of training that the gunmen used and sketches of the personalities that were key to the planning. Its a sobering tale of an ideology shaped by hate that has the potential of triggering a nuclear war in the near future
I feel like I got most of what I wanted to get out of this long article some basic understanding of the Mumbai attacks beyond the superficial reports and horror stories from the mainstream media, which are pretty much designed to entertain instead of inform. Overall, it presents a chronological account of the attacks, and points to the deficiencies in various US and other intelligence agencies.
However, I feel that the piece is lacking in both its demonstration of reputability and the depth in which it covers certain topics.
[reputability]
With an article of this length, I'd expect to at least see some footnote references certainly, not all of the source information could be classified.
While the claim that the ISI was involved in the attacks sounds reasonable, it seems like the report didn't make the most disinterested attempt to establish this appearance. The writer more exposits instances where ISI individuals aided Lashkar, than analyzing how widespread the assistance is. It feels like a list of incitements -- and surely it's helpful that the author put it in chronological order for better reading -- but doesn't try to answer bigger questions. Of course it would be in Lashkar's interest to place agents inside the ISI. What I'm ultimately unconvinced of is that the entire organization is guilty of conspiracy I'm not at all closed to that being a possibility, but this story hasn't provided the necessary analysis to lessen the skepticism I try to read with.
The general style also feels somewhat non-academic. With any situation of high secrecy like this, there are bound to be multiple versions of events, not just conflicting opinions like "the ISI instrumented the attacks" versus "the ISI was uninvolved and unaware". At the end, the author mentions that there are quite a number of high-up terrorist leaders that remain unknown [from the public's point of view]. While a story is nice to read, I have the feeling that the possibilities are more vague than the cast of characters including Mir, Headley, etc.
[depth of writing]
While it's perhaps beyond the scope of the article, I don't feel that there is proper context for the Jihadis they are presented as extremists, without proper exposition on how those extremist tendencies grew out of their environment. What elements, like poverty, social conservatism, and culture of young males contributed to their actions? Religion is not enough to explain religious fanaticism. Having recently finished Thomas Goltz' Chechnya Diary, I can imagine how reading an account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis could lead to significant misunderstandings of a people.
Similarly, while clearly the US intelligence agencies missed many warning signals, the article doesn't explore why these signify a broken system. I imagine there's a lot of signal-to-noise, and a million things to coordinate in distributing intelligence effectively. Questions like, "Did Headley's former DEA informant or American citizen status cause signals to be ignored?", or "Was Headley's wife taken less seriously than she should have been, because she was a woman?" are not explored.
I had a chance to watch Mr. Rotella's documentary, The Perfect Terrorist, directed by Tom Jennings, funded by ProPublica and aired on Frontline (gotta give credit to them all), and I was blown away at how amazingly networked this entire event was. I then looked online for other sources and found this and it amazed me how incredibly great Mr. Rotella is at what he does. His work (namely, this Single) speaks volumes for his value of investigative journalism.
The best part is, unlike most popular and overly sensationalistic investigative journalism, Mr. Rotella's work (both the book and the documentary) has none of the hype, special effects, millions of dollars in media budget, or a ten day foreplay on the channel sponsoring the event to build up hype on a program that could've been summarized in two minutes. No, Mr. Rotella's work is the entire opposite. It's independent, donor-funded and directed towards public interest. It requires all the resources the former has, but the latter outdoes the former in terms of quality, importance and with the intent of informing everyone.
While this book reads like a sewn together set of stories that were written independently, for $0.99, it's a great price for the entire collection of his work on the subject. Also, as another reviewer here mentioned, it doesn't fully go into the background of all the players involved, it does give you just the right amount of information needed to understand how these things started, developed and manifested into what they ultimately became. Nonetheless, it's a great book. I loved every minute of reading it.
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