Foolish Question: Mumbai’s Trauma: How Quickly Will Recovery Come?

Today’s news brings a foolishly short-sighted question: Mumbai’s Trauma: How Quickly Will Recovery Come?

How quickly? The blood of hundreds of dead and wounded hasn’t even been cleaned up yet!

What kind of “recovery” can Mumbai possibly have while the butchers who planned this vile attack remain free to launch additional attacks on innocent civilians at will?

Granted, the buses must roll, telephones must ring, and most of Mumbai will return to work. Yet there is no possible hope for any “recovery” until those behind these terror attacks have been hunted down and killed or brought to justice.

The cancer of Islamic terrorism has already metastasized to almost every country on earth. Killing the tiny band of individuals who carried out the Mumbai attacks was necessary, but was not a ‘win.” it gave the attackers the martrydom they presumably sought. Retaking control of buildings does not begin to address the deeper underlying problem. To kill the immediate perpetrators is merely to hit the pause button. It is not the end game.

This wasn’t the first attack on Mumbai and it won’t be the last. If India wants to “recover,” it will take a sustained military, law enforcement, and intelligence effort in cooperation with other nations of goodwill. It will take a long-term effort akin to the all-out domestic and international effort George W. Bush has led on America’s behalf for the past seven years, thus far successfully.

Quick recovery from terror attacks is an illusion. To begin to ask about recovery within days of a terror attack is to imply that the attack was an isolated incident rather than one battle in a much larger and more frightening war. That is the same sort of narrowly-focused thinking that preceded the September 11th attack on America. During Bill Clinton’s term, there was one terror attack after another on America and its interests. Because America didn’t take the individual attacks seriously enough, they escalated.

It’s more alarming to think about the big picture than to put the most recent tragedy into the past and try to move on. But to ignore the pattern is to invite the recurring nightmare. How many more Mumbais and Beslans and Tel Avivs and Lockerbies and 9/11s will the world have to endure, before enough nations of decency and goodwill rise up and fight this cancer to its death?

I underscore the point because America and much of the world is already weary of fighting the jihad. We want to move on. We want hope. We want change. We want to blink and see the jihad gone. All of this we want, and may even deserve, but it’s a fantasy we indulge at our peril.

This is an expansion on a post at GINA COBB

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