“The radical Moslems in Pakistan are being decimated by the Pakistan government. The radical Moslems control less and less territory. They have fewer, smaller, more vulnerable safe havens. These bombings of tourist hotels are the last gasps of the radical Moselm movement in Pakistan.”

Seems to me this is a pretty potent last gasp. But if they have to recruit bodies from Britain, maybe you’re right that their ranks have been decimated.

Couple of things bother me: what did the terrorists expect to achieve? Demanding the release of their little terrorist buddies seems like an after-thought.

I don’t believe there were only ten of them, but why would the Indian government lie?

The captured kid acted initially like he thought he would survive, live to fight another day. Maybe it was *not* set up as a suicide run, that they were told they’d be in and out, or a James Bondian helicopter would swoop in and rescue them, or some dumb damned thing. In which case, I wonder how many billion dollars they were promised each to do it.

We’re surprised that the Indian cops froze. But why should we be? We’re Americans and we lead the world in everything including training, responsiveness and leadership. We can see from the hero’s in cummerbunds who led hotel guests to safety that individual Indians are brave, too, but they were leading AWAY from the gunmen, not toward them. We forget that other countries, no matter how sophisticated they may be technologically, simply aren’t as good as we are at ANYthing (including Russia, Mike).