Kandahar Vs Mumbai

Now that the ruling party at the center is trying to use the Kandahar incident of the 2000 to counter the weak anti-terrorism front of the attack against them, I was thinking of the similarities or the differences between the two.

The similarities that i could think of between the two are that both of them were attacks on the nation, by trained Islamic fundamentalists. Both involved hostage situation. There were some people who paid with their lives in both the incidents.

Now lets come to the differences. In the Kandahar incident, the terrorists boarded the Indian Airlines flight in Nepal and then hijacked it. In Mumbai attacks the terrorists came over into India and attacked landmarks inside the country. With Kandahar, the hijacked flight was flown to Kandahar (of course), which is a different country and which was ruled by the Islamic fundamentalist group Taliban. We all very well remember the scene where the Taliban militia surrounded the plane as soon as it landed. Now it is very well a guess as to on whose side they could be on. With the Mumbai attack, the terrorists took over the buildings and started fighting from inside them.

I am aghast to see the statements from the many educated, elite and the youth icons of the country who try to compare the Kandahar and the Mumbai attack and give out statements that while in Kandahar, the previous govt sent a minister to escort the terrorist and get the release of the hostages, with Mumbai our govt sent commandos and fought against the terrorists.

Can you please clear a couple of my doubts "Mr Youth Icon", "Mr. Future PM". Suppose it was your govt which was in power when Kandahar happened what would you have done? Send commandos to Afghanistan and get the hostages released?If so, would you have sent an army over to Afghanistan along with the commandos to first take on the Taliban militia who were surrounding the plane? Do you really believe that you would have succeeded in this?

Also if you really want to compare the two, wouldn't Mumbai attack show that you are poor at handling terror. There were people from outside country who attacked our country and took hostages. First of all, you let them enter the country, then you let them take hostages, take 4 days to kill them and free hostages and paid with the lives of nearly 200 odd people.

I am not praising the previous NDA govt, but just questioning the audacity of the present govt in saying that they were better in handling terror. I am sorry, but you are not... If you were, you would not have let them get into the country and kill so many of the innocent people of our country