By Jon Kraushar
Communications Consultant

As details emerge about how commandos ended the brutal attack on Mumbai, India it will offer the incoming Obama administration — and the world — lessons about the most effective ways to quickly end a terrorist strike on a city and may also suggest longer-term strategies to discourage future terrorist traumas.

President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign declarations on everything from national security to economic security are undergoing severe reality checks day by day.

Under what conditions is it effective to negotiate with terrorists? What anti-terror strategies result in at least limited havoc and horror?

Are more lives and destruction ultimately spared when the agonizing decision is made to risk the loss of some innocent lives with a well-planned and relentless counter-offensive that kills or captures merciless terrorists?

What is a civilized society willing to do to defeat uncivilized enemies? What are the consequences of either employing or not employing various anti-terror strategies, including surveillance, torture, imprisonment and the use of certain weapons and technologies?

How do we gauge how much a given anti-terror strategy or response has either discouraged or encouraged future heinous aggression against us by terrorists?

Terror will never be completely defeated but it can be subdued. How? Winston Churchill warned us that, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”  Clearly, we should not feed the crocodile.

We will starve the crocodile by getting better at three “I’s” that lead to a fourth: intelligence, interrogation and incarceration, which will result in more interruption of terrorist activities. 

It is from the ashes and heartbreaking casualties of Mumbai in 2008, Manhattan, Washington, and Stoneycreek Township Pennsylvania in 2001, and other past and future terrorist killing grounds that we learn how to tackle terror—with resolve. 

Communications consultant Jon Kraushar is at www.jonkraushar.net.