Robert Fisk’s World: Whenever I'm in Tajikistan, my mobile phone says I'm in Dubai

I guess we ordinary folk are going to go on sipping at the same creepy narrative under Obama's regime. Take the easy way we have already accepted the story of the "highly disciplined", "professional" and "military" way in which Mumbai's T-shirted butchers slaughtered their way through hotels and railway station last week. Were they from Pakistan's Kashmir or trained in the camps of Afghanistan? Well, I wonder. I recall how, when Algeria's obscene civil war began between Pouvoir and "Islamists" in the early 1980, we were regaled by the authorities with stories of "terrorists wearing police uniforms" cutting the throats of civilians. This went on for months before Dumbo Fisk realised – and later confirmed by interviewing members of the Algerian security forces – that the men in police uniforms were policemen. Ergo Baghdad where journalists regaled the world with stories of attacks on civilians and foreigners by men "wearing police uniforms". Since there were no ready-to-wear police uniforms in Bakuba warehouses, they were policemen working for the insurgents.

And I rather suspect that the "highly disciplined" and "professional" killers of Mumbai come from the same stable. The Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence? Quite possibly. The Pakistani army – many of whose men have been mysteriously captured and equally mysteriously vanished in the tribal territories? Maybe. Or the Indian security services, whose inter-religious makeup is never discussed, but against whom there is substantial evidence of massacres in Kashmir? These days, all such acts of cruelty should be referred to by what the police used to call an '"open mind".