India faces more 26/11-like threats: Former US envoy

Former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill today said India faced the threat of more 26/11-like terror attacks and one of the reasons would be the lacklustre response by its government towards such crises.

Blackwill, who has co-authored the report titled “Terrorism against India — Lessons from Mumbai”, was delivering a lecture on the report at a meeting organised here by industry body CII. He said apart from intelligence failure, inadequate coastal security, failure of the government to respond swiftly to such incidents, inability to form a single command centre for operation against terrorists and ill-equipped police force were some of the areas of concern for India.

Speaking about the findings of his report, Blackwill said the only way to stop such attacks was swift and coordinated response and prevent terrorists from achieving their objective — which in the case of Mumbai was to grab maximum international attention.

Stressing that India would need to find its own solution to the problem of Jihadi terrorism, Blackwill admitted some US policies on this front had failed, yet military offensive was no solution for this as it might escalate into a full-fledged war between the two countries.

Later, replying to a question, Blackwill said there was definitely a possibility of local support but it was difficult to comment on the extent of it.