For those of us who were in Mumbai during the 2008 terrorist attacks there, the bulletins from Paris on Friday night evoked queasy déjà vu. With each shocking addition to the story—drive-by shootings at one crowded restaurant and then another, explosions reported at the other end of town, casualty estimates rising sharply, and then the first social media hints at hostages being calmly slaughtered—the feeling intensified.

The parallels between the two outrages are striking, and not just in the terrorists’ methodology of using small teams to attack simultaneously multiple “soft” civilian targets in carefully chosen, symbolically significant locations.