Mumbai attacks: The world can't ignore India's Islamist terrorists any longer

India has suffered a gathering wave of Islamist terror attacks over the last five years, but it wasn't until yesterday afternoon that the terrorists really made the outside world sit up and take notice.

Firemen tackle a fire at the Taj Mahal hotel
By targeting one of India's most iconic hotels, The Taj Mahal Palace on Mumbai's waterfront and holding hundreds of its wealthy foreign guests hostage, the Islamists have touched an international nerve at a delicate moment in the story of India's resurgence.
Despite the spate of attacks in recent years, including the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai that killed 180 people and bomb attacks this year in commercially sensitive locations of Bangalore and New Delhi, India has managed to retain its international image as a 'safe' place to visit and invest.
That all changed yesterday as the international news networks were filled with the voices of terrified Americans and Europeans, some of them on their mobile phones direct from the Taj Mahal Hotel, even as the bombs exploded nearby.
Such images will cause damage to India's status as an international investment destination at time when the economy is already suffering serious fallout from the global credit crunch.
Foreign capital, highly instrumental in India's economic resurgence, is fleeing India's economy at an alarming rate (more than £10bn this year), driving up the cost of borrowing and curbing the investment on which India's 'economic miracle' depends.
Mumbai attacks: More than 100 dead, including six foreigners Reaction from international leaders India bombings timeline, 2003-2008
Without China's trillion-dollar trade surpluses, India just doesn't have the spare cash to cut taxes and announce multi-billion dollar internal investment programs to prop up domestic demand.
It's an unquantifiable factor, but the fact that every serious investor and businessman to visit Mumbai will know the Taj Palace Hotel like a home from home, will only serve to increase the jitters caused by these attacks.
What will really terrify India's political leaders, however, is the certain knowledge that there is virtually nothing they can do to stop this type of low-tech attack from recurring again and again.
Since 2003, India's homegrown Islamist terrorist have struck with growing frequency - before yesterday's attacks they have bombed Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi this year alone - and without a single serious break-thorough by Indian police.
What began as a localized threat from Pakistan-backed mujahideen in Kashmir conflict has now spread across India, putting down indigenous roots in socially disenfranchised Muslim communities who have benefited less than most from the years of economic boom.
From a security perspective India is all but ungovernable: a vast landmass that shares porous borders with unstable Islamic states containing a shifting population of 1.1bn people, many of whom go through their entire lives without their names appearing in an official register of any kind.
With cash being the norm for living transactions and with many living in vast slums (45 per cent of all Mumbai's residents live in a slum, for example) it is perfectly possible for people to 'disappear', as the Indian police's failure to solve a single terror major attack in the last five years attests.
Add to this chaotic background the fact that sections of India's disgruntled 130m-strong Muslim minority have proved highly receptive to the extremists message and you are left with near perfect-storm conditions for an outbreak of terrorist activity.
India's political and security leaders have long privately acknowledged and feared this fact; unfortunately for India, yesterday was the day that the terrorists succeeded in bringing it to the attention of the entire world