Editorial: Bombay Nightmare
Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2006

New York had its September 11 and Madrid its March 11: Now Bombay reels from July 11. A series of seven explosions yesterday evening in the Indian financial capital brought the city to a halt, killing 146 and injuring 400. The explosions, coordinated with remarkable efficiency, came within minutes of each other, at the rush hour, in the commuter rail system.

No group has yet claimed responsibility, but this attack has the al Qaeda stamp. The Madrid bombings of 2004 and the London bombings of 2005 targeted public transportation in multiple attacks. News agencies in India have duly reported the involvement of extremist factions such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Students Islamic Movement of India.

The Bombay blasts are another reminder of the global scope of the war on terror. India has been fighting Islamic terrorism in the Kashmir region since 1987. Past outrages include the attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in December 2001 and multiple explosions in Bombay in August 2003 and New Delhi in October 2005.

Inevitably, someone is going to interpret this latest attack as a protest against New Delhi's recent cozying up to the Bush Administration, just as the bombings in Madrid and London were seen as "retaliation" for Spanish and British support for the liberation of Iraq. Yet Osama bin Laden has long considered democratic, secular India as his biggest enemy after the U.S. and Israel. Small wonder: The three countries form the hard core in the front-line battles against the jihadists. It is also no accident that, for all of his negative approval ratings abroad, President Bush is popular with the Indian public.

In the last decade especially, the U.S. and India have come to see themselves as natural allies: the world's oldest democracy and the world's largest, as the saying has it. Yesterday's murders remind us that natural allies have common enemies, and deserve each other's support in fighting them.