15 years of 26/11: 3 ways in which India’s strategy game has played out since Mumbai attacks

India had witnessed many terror attacks over the years but the one that rocked Mumbai in 2008 was a turning point, fundamentally transforming India’s strategy, and relationships in the world. Here are the three ways in which the strategic game has played out from India’s point of view over the last 15 years.

1. Pakistan as a perpetrator

While 9/11 had, for the first time, given the world the prism to view terrorism, for India, 26/11 was a major ‘I-told-you-so moment’. For more than two decades since the 1980s, India had suffered from scourge of terrorism — the Sikh militancy and the LTTE had claimed the lives of two Indian Prime Ministers as well as many other citizens, and the militancy in Jammu and Kashmir lifted the curtain on the harsh reality of Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism.

While Delhi’s concerns were always drowned out by Islamabad’s counter propaganda, 26/11 brought home to the world the threat of terrorism from the turbulent South Asian region. The fact that victims of those who were killed were from 16 nationalities, apart from India, and another seven countries’ whose citizens were injured, made 26/11 — the first truly global attack on Indian soil.

Importantly, this put the spotlight on Pakistan’s record on terrorism. India was now able to portray, with evidence, that Pakistan’s ISI and military was plotting and perpetrating terrorist attacks on India. And, that has been Delhi’s calling card after all the terror attacks — Uri, Pathankot and Pulwama in recent years.

2. US and the West on India’s side

Every G7 country had a victim, with six Americans killed, in the 26/11 attacks.  This was a major factor behind the sympathy India gained from the western world. Moreover, the attack occurred  while New Delhi and the Washington were in a strategic embrace — the Indo-US nuclear deal had just been signed a month ago, in October 2008.

The attack, thus, really got Delhi the leverage and the logic for a strategic alignment with the West to get a boost. While after the 9/11 attacks, the US was forced to undertake a dramatic shift in its policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, 26/11 brought it closer to India.

Historian Srinath Raghavan, in his book, The Most Dangerous Place: A history of US in South Asia (2018) wrote how coincidentally, ISI chief Lt General Mahmud Ahmed was in Washington DC when the 9/11 attacks had happened and Musharraf had sent him a couple of days earlier to persuade the Bush administration to engage with the Taliban.

On Sept 12, Mahmud was summoned to the US State department for a meeting with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. “Pakistan faces a stark choice… Either it is with us or it is not; this was a black-and-white choice with no grey” Armitage said sternly, adding that Pakistan had “no manoeuvring room,” Raghavan wrote.

While Musharraf yielded half-heartedly, as many have since pointed out, the Parliament attack in December 2001 showed that its ways had far from changed.

However, after 26/11 attacks by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani cantonment city of Abbottabad, “Pakistan could do little to protest that it was not a breeding ground for jihadi terrorism,” former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran wrote, in his book, How India sees the world: Kautilya to the 21st century (2017). “The current level of counter-terrorism cooperation between the US and India would have been unthinkable a decade ago,” he wrote.

“The Mumbai attacks lost Pakistan the Bush administration’s sympathy for good,” journalist-turned-diplomat Hussain Haqqani wrote in his book Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the US and an epic history of misunderstanding (2013). “US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told then Pakistan NSA Mahmud Durrani that there were continued contacts between LeT and ISI… [that] there is material support to LeT, and the LeT has just recently killed six Americans’,” Haqqani, then Pakistan’s envoy to the US, wrote.

“ISI chief Shuja Pasha visited the US for a meeting with CIA director Michael Hayden. He admitted that the planners of the Mumbai attacks included some “retired Pakistani Army officers”. According to Pasha, the attackers had ISI links, but this had not been an authorised ISI operation,” Haqqani, who was Pakistan envoy’s wrote.

This trust deficit only widened after the Abbottabad raid — a clear reminder that Pakistan was not playing straight with the Americans.

3. India’s strategic restraint and its dividends

In the immediate aftermath of the 26/11 attack, a familiar debate took place that had taken place after the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 recurred — what kind of action should be taken?

In his book, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (2016), former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon wrote on the India’ restrained response: “The simple answer to why India did not immediately attack Pakistan is that after examining the options at the highest levels of government, the decision makers concluded that more was to be gained from not attacking Pakistan than from attacking it.”

The real success, as he noted, was in organising the international community, in isolating Pakistan, and in making counter-terrorism cooperation against the LeT effective. “India began to get unprecedented cooperation from Saudi Arabia and Persian Gulf countries, and China too began to respond to requests for information on these groups,” Menon wrote.

This shift was notable after the Modi government came to power and has continued to reap dividends since then. The surgical strikes after the Uri attack in 2016, or the Balakot air strike in 2019 were possible without much international criticism, only because Delhi had shown strategic restraint in 2008.