Whatever its larger aims, in other words, the terrorism that revealed itself in Mumbai represents Al-Qaeda’s displacement from the cutting edge of militancy. Indeed the world’s most celebrated terror network appears to have been swallowed whole and fully digested by the Pakistani outfits that protect its leaders, which is the same thing as saying that the global has disappeared into the local to animate it from within. Having fitted itself into a long history of militancy in the region, these attacks were quickly bogged down in purely local concerns, however global their aims may have been. And indeed if it is the Lashkar-e Taiba that was behind the terrorism in Mumbai, then this entrapment by history is even more pronounced, since what the group says it wants is neither any military or political advantage for Pakistan, nor a global Islamic caliphate, but rather some version of the British Raj-given that its ideologues imagine a South Asia pockmarked with “Hindu” and “Muslim” countries that largely coincide with the princely states of colonial times. Bizarrely pluralistic in conception, and much like some British plans for the subcontinent, this vision of India’s future represents a profound failure of the militant imagination, one that in fact possesses no future of its own.