The trouble with this theory Mo, is that the leaders of al Q'aeda have not been indicted. No evidence has been shown, no grand jury held. In fact, evidentialy we are still pretty much at the point we were at before we invaded Afghanistan when we demanded that, in the absence of both extradition treaty and evidence, they hand over Osoma bin Laden - who is apparently wanted by the FBI for other attacks but not 9/11. Does the principle of innocent until proven guilty not apply here? If so, at what level does it stop applying? Worth remembering that the government of the day, which was vastly more representative, even if scarcely less thuggish than the current puppets, was quite happy to hand him over to Germany (with whom they did have an extradition treaty) in exchange for evidence suggesting that a trial in an unbiased court might result in a conviction of a crime recognized in Afghanistan.
As we have elected to spend untold billions shuttling soldiers all over Afghanistan killing thousands of Afghans since then, and the supposed evidence still has not surfaced, perhaps they had a valid point.
While some have been tied to al Q'aeda, however distantly, others have not yet been and may never be. Look at the ages of the hijackers. One was 33 the rest were in their 20s. So unless they were fighting in the mujahidin in their pre- and early- teens, they were not part of the anti-Soviet actions or the referenced "database". Now I know that the Afghan girls marry early, but was it really an army of children defeated Moscow? Is one part or another of the morality fable related in Wikipedia wrong?
[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses ... This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
appears to have been achieved in spades. With a little help from Our Dear Misleader and his cronies. Some bunch of thugs acted on 9/11, but was al Q'aeda really the motivating force behind it? I'd say that this remains one of the wide open questions to which we may never have a totally satisfactory answer due to Our Dear Misleader's criminal incompetence.
Yours Sceptically
Hermit
PS Always check the talk page on Wikipedia before citing it. It can be very helpful to recognizing PoV issues. This is almost certainly such a time.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
The trouble with this theory Mo, is that the leaders of al Q'aeda have not been indicted. No evidence has been shown, no grand jury held. In fact, evidentialy we are still pretty much at the point we were at before we invaded Afghanistan when we demanded that, in the absence of both extradition treaty and evidence, they hand over Osoma bin Laden - who is apparently wanted by the FBI for other attacks but not 9/11. Does the principle of innocent until proven guilty not apply here? If so, at what level does it stop applying? Worth remembering that the government of the day, which was vastly more representative, even if scarcely less thuggish than the current puppets, was quite happy to hand him over to Germany (with whom they did have an extradition treaty) in exchange for evidence suggesting that a trial in an unbiased court might result in a conviction of a crime recognized in Afghanistan.
As we have elected to spend untold billions shuttling soldiers all over Afghanistan killing thousands of Afghans since then, and the supposed evidence still has not surfaced, perhaps they had a valid point.
While some have been tied to al Q'aeda, however distantly, others have not yet been and may never be. Look at the ages of the hijackers. One was 33 the rest were in their 20s. So unless they were fighting in the mujahidin in their pre- and early- teens, they were not part of the anti-Soviet actions or the referenced "database". Now I know that the Afghan girls marry early, but was it really an army of children defeated Moscow? Is one part or another of the morality fable related in Wikipedia wrong?
[It is] easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there and cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses ... This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
appears to have been achieved in spades. With a little help from Our Dear Misleader and his cronies. Some bunch of thugs acted on 9/11, but was al Q'aeda really the motivating force behind it? I'd say that this remains one of the wide open questions to which we may never have a totally satisfactory answer due to Our Dear Misleader's criminal incompetence.
Yours Sceptically
Hermit
PS Always check the talk page on Wikipedia before citing it. It can be very helpful to recognizing PoV issues. This is almost certainly such a time.
Hermit,
Well, I'm certainly not holding this conversation to the level of proof necessary in a criminal court. Sure, if and when the wheels of justice start turning for the victims of 9/11 wherever in the world, I think a good "stand back" talk about skepticism and burdens of proof would be in order. Given the extaordinarily international nature of the 9/11 plot, historically significant body count, and unprecedented media exposure, I doubt we will ever have the pleasure of such a real conversation. However, unless and until such oportunity becomes real, I haven't heard any remotely credible alternative theories about 9/11. Yes I've read some of the 9/11 truther material . . . so far its just insulting to my intelligence. If you really have some recommended source I should be taking seriously, then by all means please share. Otherwise I'm more or less in general agreement with wikipedia, which I was only holding it out as relatively accurate reflection of my own understanding - the things I'm already reckoning on, not necessarily a current authority in and of itself, so please feel welcome to correct it for me. I'd take your word over the wiki talk page any way if it came down to this for me.
MUMBAI -- India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week's terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.
Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India's financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.
Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and Mumbai's main railway station, both prime targets of last week's attack, the police official said.
Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of locations in southern Mumbai that weren't attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week's attack, an official said.
U.S. officials agreed that Mr. Muzammil was a focus of their attention in the attacks, though they stopped short of calling him the mastermind. "That is a name that is definitely on the radar screen," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.
Information gathered in the probe also continues to point to a connection to Lashkar-e-Taiba, that official said. Along with a confession from the one gunman captured in the attacks, officials cited phone calls intercepted by satellite during the attacks that connected the assailants to members of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, and the recovered satellite phone from the boat.
It also emerged Tuesday that U.S. authorities had warned Indian officials of a pending attack by sea. Hasan Gafoor, Mumbai police commissioner, told reporters there was a general warning issued in September that hotels could be targeted as well, after the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad.
Two militants arrested in early 2007 also told police officials then that they were part of a band of eight Lashkar members who slipped into India by boat from Karachi, Pakistan, and made their way to Mumbai, an Indian police official in Kashmir said in an interview Tuesday. The group broke into pairs -- just as last week's attackers did -- and made their way north using safehouses provided by local sympathizers, the police official said.
The evidence cited by investigators is giving fresh ammunition to the Indian government, which has long tried to pressure Pakistan into cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba. India claims the group enjoys support from elements of the Pakistani intelligence agency. Pakistan denies that and outlawed the organization in 2002, but has done little to curtail its operations.
Mr. Muzammil's name is on a list of people -- numbering about 20 in all -- that India gave Pakistan earlier this week, demanding their immediate extradition, a senior Pakistani official told the Journal. The official said Pakistan was examining India's list of suspects and has assured New Delhi that action would be taken against them if there is evidence of involvement in the attacks.
Any move by the shaky civilian government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari against Lashkar-e-Taiba could create a huge backlash, however, particularly from Islamic groups, said a senior official in Pakistan. On Tuesday, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani convened a meeting of all of the country's political parties in the capital to develop a joint response to Indian demands for extradition.
"The government of Pakistan has offered a joint investigation mechanism and we are ready to compose such a team which will help the investigation," Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in a televised statement. Mr. Qureshi, however, declined to say whether Pakistan would hand over any of those sought by India.
The Mumbai attacks have ratcheted up tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who have been exchanging verbal fire for the past several days and sparking fears of a conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in India Wednesday, as is Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Indian authorities say evidence highlights how Lashkar has broadened its operations to include recruitment of both Indian and Pakistani Muslim extremists.
Lashkar-e-Taiba -- literally Army of the Good -- has been implicated by Indian officials in several recent terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The group initially focused on fighting the Indian army in the disputed state of Kashmir. Over the years, it has expanded its cause into the rest of India and aims to establish Islamic rule.
India has told Pakistan that the latest attacks in Mumbai were masterminded by Mr. Muzammil, aided by others in Lashkar's senior ranks including an operative named Asrar Shah, according to a senior Pakistani official. Mr. Muzammil, a Pakistani in his mid-30s, became head of Lashkar-e-Taiba's anti-Indian planning cell some three months ago, according to Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, an independent think tank in New Delhi. Indian authorities believe he is in Pakistan but officials there haven't acknowledged that.
India also claims the attacks were approved by Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the Pakistani official said. Mr. Saeed is the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organization of the Lashkar group. Mr. Saeed, who is free in Pakistan, denied the accusations. "India has always accused me without any evidence," he told Pakistan's GEO News television channel.
Indian investigators -- helped in part by the testimony of the one terrorist they captured alive, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab -- say they now possess solid proof. "We have made substantial progress in the investigation," said A.N. Roy, director general of the State Police of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located.
According to Mumbai police chief Hasan Gafoor, Mr. Kasab told interrogators that he and fellow gunmen spent between a year and 18 months in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp.
The 10 militants left Pakistan's port city of Karachi on Nov. 23 aboard a ship called the Al Husseini, which also carried a crew of seven, another senior police official said. Investigators believe that all the 10 gunmen were Pakistani because they spoke Punjabi or Punjabi-accented Urdu.
When they entered Indian waters, the terrorists hijacked a fishing trawler called the Kuber and took its five crew members prisoner. The terrorists transferred four of them to the Al Husseini and they were subsequently killed, police believe. The terrorists kept the Kuber's lead crewman alive and sailed close to Mumbai.
The terrorists abandoned the Kuber in haste, fearing detection by an approaching vessel, the senior police official said. In the process, they forgot their satellite phone on the Kuber. Investigators found in the call log the numbers of five people, including Mr. Muzammil, two of his deputies and his personal aide, the senior police official said. Indian officials had already intercepted phone conversations made while the terrorists were traveling to Mumbai.
Indian Muslim leaders are skeptical of Lashkar's reach into India. But police say Lashkar has increasingly sought contacts and recruits among Indian extremists. In October, for instance, five Muslims from the southern state of Kerala were recruited into Lashkar-e-Taiba and traveled to the Indian part of Kashmir, according to T.K. Vinod Kumar, Kerala's deputy inspector-general of police. They tried to cross the line of control that runs between India and Pakistan and reach training camps on the Pakistani side.
Four among the group were killed in a firefight with the Indian military during that attempt. The fifth, construction worker Abdul Jabbar, was arrested two weeks ago, Mr. Kumar says.
Unlike other Pakistani-based jihadist organizations, Lashkar draws its recruits across a broad social spectrum, from universities as well as among unemployed youths. The majority come from Punjab; Mr. Kasab used to live in the Punjabi village of Faridkot, according to Indian investigators.
In March 2007 when two militants were arrested in the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir, the pair told police that Lashkar was looking to start slipping people into India from the sea to avoid heavily guarded land borders. The sea also provided a winter route to Kashmir for Lashkar members, when high mountain passes crossing to India's part of the state are often blanketed by deep snow.
A Pakistani militant group apparently used an Indian operative as far back as 2007 to scout targets for the elaborate plot against India's financial capital, authorities said Thursday, a blow to Indian officials who have blamed the deadly attacks entirely on Pakistani extremists.
As investigators sought to unravel the attack on Mumbai, stepping up questioning of the lone captured gunman, airports across India were put on high alert amid fresh warnings that terrorists planned to hijack an aircraft.
Also Thursday, police said there were signs that some of the six victims of the attack on a Jewish center may have been tortured. "The victims were strangled," said Rakesh Maria, a senior Mumbai police official. "There were injuries noticed on the bodies that were not from firing."
Members of an Israeli rescue group which had a team in Mumbai said it was impossible to tell if the bodies had been abused, however, because no autopsies were conducted in accordance with Jewish tradition.
The surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab, 21, told interrogators he had been sent by the banned Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and identified two of the plot's masterminds, according to two Indian government officials familiar with the inquiry.
Kasab told police that one of them, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Lashkar's operations chief, recruited him for the attack, and the assailants called another senior leader, Yusuf Muzammil, on a satellite phone after hijacking an Indian vessel en route to Mumbai.
The information sent investigators back to another reputed Lashkar operative, Faheem Ansari, who they hope could be key in pulling together different strands of the investigation.
Ansari, an Indian national, was arrested in February in north India carrying hand-drawn sketches of hotels, the train terminal and other sites that were later attacked in Mumbai, said Amitabh Yash, director of the Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh police.
During his interrogation, Ansari also named Muzammil as his handler in Pakistan, adding that he trained in a Lashkar camp in Muzaffarabad — the same area where Kasab said he was trained, a senior police officer involved in the investigation said.
In Pakistan, Interior Ministry chief Rehman Malik told reporters he had no information on Lakhvi or Muzammil but that authorities would check.
Ansari "told us about a planned Lashkar attack on Bombay, on southern Bombay," said Yash, referring to Mumbai by its previous name. "He gave us eight or nine specific locations where the attack would be carried out," he said, adding that Ansari had detailed sketches of the places and escape routes from the sites.
Ansari said he carried out the reconnaissance in the fall of 2007, which also included the U.S. consulate, the Bombay stock exchange and other Mumbai sites that were not attacked.
Ansari is now in Indian custody, according to Yash. It was unclear if he was being questioned again, but Maria said they were working to determine if Ansari played a role in how the attackers "got such intricate knowledge of the sites."
Indian authorities have faced a torrent of criticism about missed warnings and botched intelligence, and revelations that Ansari disclosed details of the Mumbai plot 10 months ago will be added to the list. Linking an Indian national to the plot also undermines India's assertion that Pakistan is solely responsible.
Yash said during extensive interrogations Ansari confessed to scouting Mumbai, arranging a safe-house there for Lashkar militants and provided details on his involvement in the group. "We got everything out of him, whatever he knew," he said.
Ansari linked up with Lashkar while working at a printing press in Dubai. He was taken by sea to Pakistan to the Lashkar camp in Muzaffarabad and received a false Pakistani passport and citizenship papers, which police recovered when he was arrested.
In 2007, Ansari said, he traveled to Katmandu, Nepal, and then crossed back into India and settled in Mumbai, where he conducted reconnaissance for a future attack, Yash said.
He was arrested Feb. 10 in the northern city of Rampur after suspected Muslim militants attacked a police camp, killing eight constables. He said he was there to collect weapons to bring to Mumbai for a future attack.
Yash said Ansari's arrest did not derail Lashkar's plans for an attack. "When they found that their mole in Bombay had been caught...they carried out the operations in a different way," he said.
Meanwhile, police officers said they were trying to get as much detail as possible from Kasab.
"A terrorist of this sort is never cooperative. We have to extract information," said Deven Bharti, the head of the Mumbai crime branch.
Indian police are known to use interrogation methods that would be regarded as torture in the West, including questioning suspects drugged with "truth serum."
Bharti provided no details on interrogation techniques, but said "truth serum" would probably be used next week. He did not specify what drug would be used.
During questioning, details of Kasab's recruitment by Lashkar began to emerge, said police, describing him as fourth grade dropout from an impoverished village who was gravitating to a life of crime.
"Lashkar recruited him, preying on a combination of his religious sentiments and his poverty," said Maria.
The revelations came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with leaders in Islamabad after visiting India's capital — part of a U.S. effort to pressure Pakistan to share more intelligence and pursue terrorist cells believed to be rooted in the country.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari promised Rice his country would take "strong action" against any elements in Pakistan involved in the siege.
On Thursday, the U.S. Treasury Department designated as terrorists four individuals who hold leadership positions in Lashkar, including Lakhvi, and ordered any of their U.S. assets to be frozen. Also named were Muhammad Saeed, the group's leader; Haji Muhammad Ashraf, its chief of finance; and Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahaziq, a financier with the group.
Meanwhile, India put its airports on alert following threats of possible airborne attacks. Security forces swarmed New Delhi's international airport early Friday after the sound of gunfire was heard, police said, but no one was injured or killed. Police said it was not a terrorist incident.
The warning received by the airports "spoke of possibility of aircraft being hijacked by terrorists," India's air force chief, Fali Homi Major, told reporters Thursday.
The alert focused on three major airports — New Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai — but security was stepped up across India.
Several extra layers of security were set up and some passengers' bags were scanned for explosives.
"Passengers have been asked to pass through six-stage security checks," said Brij Lal, a senior police official organizing security at the airport in the northern city of Lucknow.
Nirmala Sharma, a passenger who flew from New Delhi to Lucknow, said her bags were checked a half dozen times and she went through a metal detector three times. "Sometimes it seemed tedious, but it seems to be the need of the hour," she said.
India will not respond to attacks in Mumbai by sending troops to the border with Pakistan, but will instead mobilize global pressure for its neighbor to act decisively against Islamist militants, analysts say.
The military strategy was tried in 2001 and 2002 after an attack on India's parliament, but achieved little.
The crucial difference this time is that India is dealing with a civilian, democratically elected government in Islamabad -- a reasonably friendly government which does not have full control over a much more hostile, hawkish military establishment.
Military confrontation, however tempting as Indian elections loom ever closer, would only empower the hawks across the border.
"It is simply not on the table," Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor of the Hindu newspaper said.
"If India were to take any of the military measures some armchair analysts want, that would almost certainly play into the hands of the military establishment in Pakistan."
It would also have played into the hands of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, by forcing Pakistan to withdraw troops from its tribal areas and western border.
It has even been suggested this was one possible motive behind the attacks. If so, that is not a trap India will fall into, analysts say.
Instead, the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi on Wednesday marks the first step in a more diplomatic and finessed response to the attacks.
It is likely to be a slow process, but the only real option.
"Pakistan needs to act with resolve and urgency and cooperate fully and transparently," Rice said on Wednesday. "That message has been delivered and will be delivered to Pakistan."
TRIED AND FAILED
India says it already has compelling and detailed evidence that the attacks in Mumbai were planned on Pakistani soil and carried out by Pakistani gunmen -- for once, one of the gunmen was actually captured and gave a detailed confession.
He said he was given months of commando-style training by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based Islamist militant group which was effectively established, analysts say, by the Pakistani military's spy agency, the ISI, to fight Indian rule in Kashmir.
Lashkar was also blamed for an attack on India's parliament in late 2001, an attack which brought the nuclear-armed neighbors close to war, with hundreds of thousands of troops eyeing each other nervously across the frontline.
But there is no point in India brandishing a gun unless it is prepared to use it.
The saber-rattling in 2002 yielded few results -- in the end the government moved the troops back -- and India is not seriously considering starting a fourth war with its neighbor.
"The military option has never been an option, because the military can't guarantee you an outcome," said Manoj Joshi, comment editor of the Mail Today. "We have been there, done it, and it doesn't work."
Indian security experts believe the attacks were staged in an attempt to undermine a burgeoning friendship between the civilian governments of the neighboring states, an attempt which could have had support from parts of the Pakistani military.
Confrontation would have also strengthened the hands of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group which the Pakistani military sees as a useful tool to infiltrate India in the event of war.
Instead, India has little choice but to try isolate hawks within Pakistani military and work with the civilian government, which has promised to cooperate with the attack investigation.
BALANCING ACT
But New Delhi has to play a delicate balancing act. Elections are due by May and the government is already under fire for failing to prevent this and a series of preceding bomb attacks on its cities. The opposition says it is "soft on terror."
That balancing act is already proving tough, and the government is in danger of overreaching itself, demanding more from Islamabad than it is likely to get.
Immediately after the attacks, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demanded the head of the ISI visit India to share information. Pakistan snubbed him by promising to send a lower-ranking official -- an embarrassment, proclaimed the media.
Again, New Delhi upped the stakes by demanding 20 of its most wanted men be sent back to India from their alleged hideouts in Pakistan.
The list is believed to include Dawood Ibrahim, a top Indian crime boss wanted for bomb attacks in Mumbai in 1993 that killed 250 people, and Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Pakistan is very unlikely to comply with that request. It has always insisted Pakistanis would be tried at home, if any evidence was given of their guilt, but that none had been given.
Yet Delhi's aim is to harness global outrage at the Mumbai attacks. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama must now realize, analysts say, that reining in Pakistani militant groups must be a top priority -- whether they are attacking India or Afghanistan.
"If you want a solution to Afghanistan, you have to lean on Pakistan to shut down all jihadist operations," Varadarajan said.
"You have to tackle the root cause, which is the attitude of the Pakistani military. That is the silver bullet."
On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?
After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.
So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.
First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered.
At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of Nov. 29 from Karachi: “ ‘I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,’ the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told I.P.S. ‘I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.’ ”
But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.
Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.
Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.”
Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can’t have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight — including some 40 other Muslims — in a suicide-murder operation, without even bothering to leave a note. Because the act was their note, and destroying just to destroy was their goal. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process.
“I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community.
We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.
Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”
Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution “practitioners.” “Practitioners” of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”
Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon? “I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for “going after the wrong people” and inflaming moderates, and “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.”
Really? The inflammation just “appears”? Like a bad pimple? The “fairer” we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.” Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife. Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.
The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity — and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving “militant” revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they’re any more important than the Indians, Britons, and Americans targeted in the attack on Bombay, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.
In a well-planned attack on iconic Bombay landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the “militants” nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city’s poor in a nondescript building. If they were just “teenage gunmen” or “militants” in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Bombay? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: “Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous.”
And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani “militants” in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Muslim” or “terrorist,” we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.
We are enjoined to be “understanding,” and we’re doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there’s a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what’s the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that’s not “too big to fail,” what is?
Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel “vulnerable.” Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They’re the world’s fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he’s feeling “vulnerable,” he’s doing a terrific job of covering it up.
We are told that the “vast majority” of the 1.6-1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra’s estimate) are “moderate.” Maybe so, but they’re also quiet. And, as the AIDs activists used to say, “Silence=Acceptance.” It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam — “Allahu Akbar.”
I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.
re the article in the earlier post, i have no doubt that a vast majority of muslims in india are moderate..still, i dont understand when deepak chopra because an expert on indian muslims. seriously..wtf? and who is his agent because he's doing a bloody good job getting deepak chopra 'out there'.
india would say thanks, but NO thanks..if it had an ounce of intelligence. israel has its 'own score to settle'? really? invade a country for six of its citizens? if 'revenge' is ok..i suppose israeli citizens are ok with their govt doing the same as the palestinian sucide bombers who have legit 'scores to settle'. is it right to 'settle scores' or do govts have more rights to 'settle scores' than refugees?
meanwhile...condy rice flew all the way to new delhi and pronounced that the attackers came from pakistan. very helpful.
'Israel to help India against Pakistan' Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:45:20 GMT
An Israeli website suggests that Tel Aviv might help India carry out covert operations inside Pakistan in retaliation for the Mumbai attacks.
India has asked for Israeli assistance in cross-border attacks against "Islamist terrorists" inside Pakistan, reported Debka which is believed to have ties with intelligence and military sources.
Israel, seeking revenge for the murder of six Jews in a Mumbai's Chabad center in November, has expressed willingness to help India in such operations, the website claimed.
According to the report New Delhi has sought Tel Aviv's help because of Israeli spies' experience in carrying out such operation without leaving any trace.
Tension is running high between India and Pakistan over a series of terrorist attacks in the Indian economic hub of Mumbai which left hundreds of people killed or injured.
Although New Delhi has accused Pakistani intelligence agencies of masterminding the attacks, Islamabad has denied any involvement in the carnage.
Earlier on Monday, however, Pakistan arrested Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operation chief, on charges of masterminding the Mumbai terror attacks.
This is while some Indian analysts blamed Israeli intelligence agencies of masterminding the plot, basing their theory on the fact that some of the victims of the attacks were anti-Zionist Jews.
SB/MMN
p.s. and oh..what is mccain doing there?? 'privately dissuade india'? mccain? really? wtf?
Is US Senator and defeated Presidential candidate John McCain warning Pakistan that “India may carry out surgical strikes against individuals or groups linked to the Mumbai terror attacks” or telling India that it ought to do so on the “irrefutable evidence” it has of the Pakistani hand? And, what does he mean by saying “Washington may not be able to do much about this” but that he will “privately try to dissuade India from doing so”? Are we going to remain putty in the US’ hands forever?
A week after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Indian officials on Friday stepped up their efforts to draw a connection between the violence and Pakistani government agencies.
In New Delhi, a high-level source in the Indian government, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said India has "clear and incontrovertible proof" that an Islamist militant group based in Pakistan, Lashkar-i-Taiba, planned the attacks and that the group's leaders were trained and supported by Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.
"We have the names of the handlers. And we know that there is a close relationship between the Lashkar and the ISI," the source said.
U.S. intelligence officials, however, were more cautious in their interpretation of the evidence. Although U.S. analysts acknowledged historical ties between Lashkar and ISI, as well as more recent contacts between militants and Pakistani intelligence officers, they said they were not convinced that Pakistan supported the attacks in any significant way.
"Even if there were contacts between ISI and Lashkar-i-Taiba, it's not the same as saying there was ISI support," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The official would not dismiss the possibility that further evidence would reveal active ISI involvement but said: "The evidence we've seen so far does not get you there."
Indian and U.S. investigators have identified Yusuf Muzammil, a Lashkar-i-Taiba leader, as the mastermind behind the attacks, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged Pakistan to hand him and other suspects over. Pakistan denies any involvement in the attacks and has called on India to divulge its evidence.
The attacks, which left more than 170 people dead and more than 230 wounded, came as India and Pakistan appeared to be making headway in peace talks. But relations between the two nuclear-armed countries have plummeted to their lowest point since 2001, when a bombing in India's Parliament -- also allegedly carried out by Lashkar-- brought the two countries to the brink of war.
Indian newspapers reported this week that ISI helped train the gunmen. But in comments to reporters Friday, newly appointed Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram did not specifically mention the agency or Pakistan. "There is ample evidence to show the source of the attacks were clearly linked to organizations which have in the past been identified as behind terrorist attacks in India," Chidambaram said.
Pakistan has agreed to a 48-hour timetable set by India and the United States to formulate a plan to take action against Lashkar and to arrest at least three Pakistanis who Indian authorities say are linked to the assaults, according to a high-ranking Pakistani official. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, said India has also asked Pakistan to arrest and hand over Lashkar commander Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhwi and former ISI director Hamid Gul in connection with the investigation.
Indian officials have said the sole surviving gunman in the attacks, who goes by the alias Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, mentioned Lakhwi during police questioning. Police had earlier identified the gunman as Ajmal Amir Kasab.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has expressed his country's solidarity with India, is expected to review plans by his nation's top military and intelligence officials and follow through on India's demands, the official said.
"The next 48 hours are critical," the official said.
At a news conference in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sought to deflect public anger at politicians for security lapses and the handling of the crisis. He also firmly rejected denials from Pakistani officials that the attacks originated in their country.
"The territory of a neighboring country has been used for perpetrating this crime," Singh said. "We expect the international community to wake up and recognize that terror anywhere and everywhere constitutes a threat to world peace and prosperity."
"The people of India feel a sense of hurt and anger as never before," he said.
Meanwhile, Joint Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria, said authorities were investigating the alleged role in the plot of Faheem Ansari, 35, who is in Indian custody. Maria said Ansari allegedly helped the attackers acquire "such intricate knowledge of the sites."
Ansari was arrested earlier this year in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for his alleged involvement in a New Year's Eve grenade attack on a police camp there.
In a confession to Uttar Pradesh police, Ansari admitted scouting several Mumbai locations for a man calling himself Kahafa, who was later found to be an operative for Lashkar, officials say.
"Kahafa also asked me specific questions about the Mumbai airport," Ansari was quoted as saying. "He asked me to find out about the height of the airport wall, the location of the nearest building that is at striking distance from the runway. I took photographs and shot videos of these places."
But he said that "the delivery of weapons could not materialize and the plan was postponed."
Maria countered reports in the Indian media that more attackers were at large. "It is very clear; 10 came, 10 were accounted for," he said.
Revealed: Home of Mumbai's Gunman in Pakistan Village Since the terrorist attacks in Mumbai 10 days ago, speculation has been rife about the birthplace of the lone surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab. India and Pakistan have clashed over reports that he came from the Punjab. Saeed Shah, after spending days travelling throughout the region, tracked down the killer's home - and his grandfather - and found conclusive proof of his identity. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/07/mumbai-terrorism-india-pakistan
The little house was certainly that of a poor family, with a courtyard to one side and a small cart propped up in one corner. The old man and middle-aged woman who answered the door were not the owners. No, they insisted, the owners were away.
'They've gone to a wedding,' said the old man, identifying himself as Sultan. He was, he said, Amir's father-in-law. So, that would make him Ajmal's grandfather? At last, it seemed, this was the right place.
It had taken days to get to Faridkot, a small, dirt-poor village in Pakistan's Punjab province. More than a week after the arrest of the only Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist taken alive during the terror strike on Mumbai, so little was still known about him. His name, for instance. Was he Mohammed Amin Kasab, Azam Amir Kasav? Or was he Mohammed Ajmal Amir? The name Kasai in fact means he would hail from a butcher community - that would be his caste. But it was recorded as Kasav, then later Kasab. The discrepancies reportedly stemmed from the fact that the Mumbai police officers who first questioned him were Marathi speakers and unable to communicate with the south Punjab resident in anything other than Hindi patois.
And where exactly was he from? Faridkot is what he told his interrogators, but this is a common village name. There were four candidates in the Punjab region.
Days of trying to establish which was the right one had led to a Faridkot near the Indian border, outside a town called Depalpur. The nearest city was Okara. It seemed to fit. And it was at this Faridkot that Ajmal's father was believed to live.
Initially villagers were unhelpful. No, said those approached, there was no one known here of that name. Even shown a photograph of Ajmal taken during the Mumbai siege, all swore they did not recognise him. The mayor was clear. 'There is a man who came to see me called Amir Kasab, who was worried,' said Ghulam Mustafa Wattoo. 'He told me that the Ajmal on the news was not his boy. That boy's gone away to work. There's no extremist network here.'
Was this another dead end?
As the villagers were questioned, the confusions appeared to multiply. Finally the name Mohammed Ajmal Amir, son of Mohammed Amir Iman, who ran a food stall, emerged.
At other Faridkots, including one near the town of Khanewal, villagers had been friendly and helpful, proffering tea as they shook their heads. 'No. Not from here,' they said. For a while, it appeared that this Faridkot would also prove a wasted journey. The mayor said there had been no local police investigation, suggesting that the authorities did not view this place with suspicion. But, over time, inconsistencies in the villagers' accounts heightened suspicion that this was the place. 'He [Amir] has lived here for a few years,' said one villager, Mohammad Taj. 'He has three sons and three daughters.'
Noor Ahmed, a local farmer, said: 'Amir had a stall he pushed around, sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere. He was a meek man, he wasn't particularly religious. He just made ends meet and didn't quarrel with anyone.'
Still the picture was confusing. While sometimes confirming that Amir did live in the village, and had a son called Ajmal, on other occasions locals claimed to know nothing.
Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: 'You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television.'
Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.
'Ajmal used to go to Lahore for work, as a labourer,' continued the villager who feared being named. 'He's been away for maybe four years. When he came back once a year, he would say things like, "We are going to free Kashmir."'
Wresting the whole of Kashmir from Indian rule is Lashkar-e-Taiba's aim. Ajmal had little education, according to locals. But it is still unclear whether he was radicalised in the village or once he had left to work elsewhere.
It is said that from the age of 13 he was shuttled between his parents' house and that of a brother in Lahore. If he did indeed speak fluent English, as claimed in Indian press reports, he would have had to have learnt that after he left the village.
But the villager who turned whistleblower said that local religious clerics were brainwashing youths in the area and that Lashkar-e-Taiba's founder, Hafiz Sayeed, had visited nearby Depalpur, where there were 'hundreds' of supporters. There was a Lashkar-e-Taiba office in Depalpur, but that had been hurriedly closed in the past few days. The Lashkar-e-Taiba newspaper is distributed in Depalpur and Faridkot. Depalpur lies in the south of Punjab province, an economically backward area long known for producing jihadists.
Shown a picture of Ajmal, the villager confirmed that he was the former Faridkot resident, who had last visited the village a couple of months ago at the last festival of Eid.
Some locals have claimed that this Faridkot, and another poor village nearby called Tara Singh, are a recruitment hotbed for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group accused of carrying out the Mumbai attack. On the side of a building, just outside Faridkot, is graffiti that says: 'Go for jihad. Go for jihad. Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad.' MDI is the parent organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Depalpur, a banner on the side of the main street asks people to devote goatskins to Jamaat ud Dawa, another MDI offshoot.
Tara Singh is home to a radical madrasa - Islamic school - and there is another hardline seminary in nearby Depalpur. The nazim (mayor) of Tara Singh, Rao Zaeem Haider, said: 'There is a religious trend here. Some go for jihad, but not too many.'
Some reports emerging in India suggest that Ajmal may have joined Lashkar -e-Taiba less because of his Islamist convictions but in the hope that the jihad training he would receive would help to further the life of crime upon which he had already embarked. But once inside Lashkar's base, his world-view began to change.
Here, films on India's purported atrocities in Kashmir and heated lectures by fiery preachers led him to believe in Lashkar's cause. It has also been said that, when he was chosen for the Lashkar basic combat training, he performed so well that he was among a group of 32 men selected to undergo advanced training at a camp near Manshera, a course the organisation calls the Duara Khaas.
And finally, it seems, he was among an even smaller group selected for specialised commando and navigation training given to the fedayeen unit selected to attack Mumbai.
The authorities may now attempt to deny that Ajmal's parents live in Faridkot, but, according to some locals, they have been there for some 20 years. But by the end of our visit, a crucial piece of evidence had been gained. The Observer has managed to obtain an electoral roll for Faridkot, which falls under union council number 5, tehsil (area) Depalpur, district Okara. The list of 478 registered voters shows a 'Mohammed Amir', married to Noor Elahi, living in Faridkot. Amir's national identity card number is given as 3530121767339, and Noor's is 3530157035058.
That appears to be the last piece of the jigsaw. A man called Amir and his wife, Noor, do live in Faridkot, official records show. They have a son called Ajmal.
Following our last visit to Faridkot, the mayor, Wattoo, announced via the loudspeaker at the mosque that no one was to speak to any outsiders. By yesterday, Pakistani intelligence officials had descended in force on Faridkot. Locals, speaking by telephone, said a Pakistani TV crew and an American journalist had been roughed up and run out of town. It appeared that the backlash had begun.
The key numbers
10 The number of people India says took part in the attack on Mumbai
1 Survivor from the militant group
2 Indians arrested on Friday in Calcutta suspected of handling phone cards used by the Mumbai attackers. Sources say later that one may be an undercover agent
163 Amended death toll after the massacre. At one point it was believed to have been as high as 195
204 Number of boats India will deploy to prevent future attacks
At a Pentagon meeting in 2002, a Muslim official from an Asian country observed that there were nearly as many Muslim citizens of India as of Pakistan, yet it was virtually unheard of that an Indian Muslim would join al Qaeda, while many Pakistanis had done so. Why? Because India is free and democratic, he asserted.
His point was not that democracy is a cure-all, but that the problem of terrorism cannot be solved by military or law-enforcement means alone. In other words, it is also crucial to confront the challenge at the level of ideas: to counter extremist teachings, and to promote democratic reforms with the aim of undermining the appeal of extremist Islamism.
The 9/11 attack intensified the Bush administration's interest in India. President Bush had come into office intent on transforming the U.S.-India relationship into a strategic partnership -- one that would acknowledge India's emergence as one of the world's most populous democratic countries, with an information-age economy, formidable military capabilities, and the ambition to increase its role in world affairs.
U.S.-Indian strategic cooperation received a boost early on when Jaswant Singh, then serving simultaneously as India's foreign and defense minister, visited Mr. Bush in the Oval Office in April 2001. Mr. Singh highlighted the countries' shared concerns about Asian security, particularly Indian-U.S. joint interests in missile defense.
The latter was a bold point on a controversial Bush administration initiative. Administration officials appreciated that Mr. Singh was signaling India's eagerness to establish common ground with the United States, even at the risk of protests from Russia, India's close friend during the Cold War.
The Pentagon played a leading role in building on the Bush-Singh dialogue. The U.S.-India Defense Policy Group (DPG), which I co-chaired with my Indian counterpart, forged extensive military-to-military links and opened channels for defense trade. The DPG became a forum for wide-ranging strategic talks beyond bilateral and regional issues.
I opened my first DPG meeting, in December 2001, with the observation that for too long Americans had viewed India chiefly as a problem country -- a nuclear proliferation problem and one half of the India-Pakistan problem. I said that the Bush administration saw India differently, as an opportunity, a rising power with which we could cooperate to shape the strategic environment of Asia to promote security, peace and prosperity.
The 9/11 attack had made it easier for Americans to appreciate India's struggle against terrorism. People readily discount someone else's security concerns when they don't share them. But after 9/11, many Americans inside and outside the government saw India and the United States as partners in the war against Islamist extremists.
The more we learned about jihadist ideology -- that of al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and others -- the less likely it appeared that India could free itself of terrorist attacks simply through territorial compromise with Pakistan over Kashmir. Jihadist leaders declare that the aim of their holy war is not to alter specific policies of their enemies, but rather to establish a universal Muslim state. Fighting and killing to implement this apocalyptic vision, they have a long list of grievances and hatreds, including against the rulers of most Muslim countries, who they deem apostates.
But the jihadists particularly despise democracy. They believe law-making and self-government by human beings is blasphemous, an affront to the sovereignty of God, who is the only proper source of legislation.
The Bush administration has bolstered U.S. homeland security and disrupted terrorist networks around the world through direct action against individual terrorists, the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein regimes, pressure on terrorist finances, law enforcement, and intelligence cooperation with numerous foreign partners. But there is no denying that the administration has fallen down on the job of countering ideological support for terrorism. The president's frequent talk of promoting democracy in the Muslim world is far short of a systematic, comprehensive effort to wage a battle of ideas against al Qaeda and the jihadist movement generally.
This is an area where President-elect Obama can make an important new contribution to national security. He can ask the State Department and intelligence community for formal strategies to counter radical Islamist ideology overtly and covertly and hold them to account for results.
The strategies could (1) identify, region by region, the key Muslim voices -- individuals and institutions -- for and against jihadist violence, (2) analyze their respective support networks and vulnerabilities, (3) develop U.S. and multilateral courses of action to amplify anti-terrorist voices and to undermine the extremists, and (4) establish measures of success and track progress. A key to success would be the quality of U.S. linkages with friendly foreign countries, like India, that share our interests and have relevant knowledge and capabilities.
The carnage in Mumbai will prove a setback for jihadist extremists if it motivates the Obama team to intensify strategic cooperation with India, and helps initiate a proper strategy to defeat our terrorist enemies ideologically.
Mr. Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of "War and Decision" (HarperCollins, 2008).
The Pakistani High Commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hassan, said he had learned from sources that India was about to launch a military strike to "teach Pakistan a lesson".
Speaking to Sky News, he said: "On the day of the Mumbai attacks, I got some information in London that India was going to act very drastically against Pakistan in retaliation to what happened."
The senior diplomat said had alerted the Pakistani government and President Asif Ali Zardari to the threat.
In turn, Mr Zardari urgently contacted high level British and American officials who intervened to calm the situation.
Mr Hassan said: "The president spoke to people in various places and the next day Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke to Mr Zardari and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice spoke to Shri Pranab Mukherjee, India's external minister," he said.
"It was probably because of that reason why the tension that was building up was eased a little.
"But ever since, we have been observing that there is a lot of talk of teaching Pakistan a lesson and exercising the so-called right of hot pursuit.
"However, we have not been provided with any evidence of elements of non-state players who were responsible for what happened in Mumbai."
There has been no response to the claims made by Mr Hassan from the Foreign Office.
A spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on security issues".
Following the attacks at the end of last month which left more than 170 dead, Indian politicians were quick to point the finger of blame at Pakistan.
The sole surviving gunman captured by the Indians, named as Ajmal Amir Kasab, is said to be a member of the militant Lashkar e Taiba group.
The group has links to the disputed region of Kashmir and has also been linked to the Pakistani ISI intelligence service.
The UK and US have appealed to both countries to work together to find out who was responsible for the attacks in an attempt to avoid a new row between the nuclear-armed neighbours.
Meanwhile new pictures have emerged from inside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel taken by CCTV cameras during the rampage by the terrorists.
Pakistani security forces on Sunday raided a camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), two sources said, in a strike against the militant group blamed by India for last month's deadly attacks on Mumbai.
Local man Nisar Ali told Reuters the operation began in the afternoon in Shawai on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani side of disputed Kashmir region.
"I don't know details as the entire area was sealed off, but I heard two loud blasts in the evening after a military helicopter landed there," Ali said.
An official with the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, which is linked to LeT, said security forces had taken over the camp.
India has demanded Pakistan take swift action over what it says is the latest anti-India militant attack emanating from Pakistani soil. No comment on the raid was immediately available from Indian officials.
At least 171 people were killed during the three-day assault last month across Mumbai, India's financial capital, which has imperilled the improving ties between the south Asian nuclear rivals.
Mumbai police have said the gunmen were controlled by the Pakistan-based LeT group blamed for earlier attacks including a 2001 assault on India's parliament that nearly sparked the two countries' fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947.
LeT was formed with the help of Pakistan's intelligence agencies to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, but analysts say it is now part of a global Islamist militant scene. They say it is sympathetic to, and may have direct ties with, al Qaeda.
HOAX CALL ROW
Pakistani territory was used to stage the attacks on Mumbai, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday, again urging Islamabad to help bring the perpetrators to justice.
"I think there's no doubt that Pakistani territory was used, by probably non-state actors," Rice told CNN's "Late Edition."
She has just returned from a trip to the region to urge cooperation between the old enemies India and Pakistan.
"I don't think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials," she added.
India's foreign minister had earlier accused Pakistan of trying to dodge blame over the Mumbai attacks' Pakistani origins by leaking a story about a hoax call to Pakistan's president that set off diplomatic panic.
Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported on Saturday that Pakistan had put its forces on high alert after a caller pretending to be Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee threatened President Asif Ali Zardari while the attacks were still going on.
Police in the Himalayan region of Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought for six decades, said on Sunday that one of two men arrested on Friday for helping get mobile phone cards to the gunmen had recently been hired as a constable.
"We are investigating whether he was on an undercover operation," a top Kashmir police officer said on condition of anonymity. The man, Mukhtar Ahmed, had worked for years as an informal anti-militant informant, the officer said.
An LeT-linked man suspected of reconnoitring Mumbai well before the attacks has been in custody since February in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police Special Task Force chief Brij Lal told Reuters.
The disclosure about Faim Ansari, a 26-year-old native of Mumbai, was the first evidence to emerge of Indian complicity in the attacks.
I don't sense any real right-to-left split amongst Americans on this topic. But since it happened in another country and only killed a few Americans, I'm sure there isn't such an urgency to get divisive about it. I've peeked at Salamantis's posts, and of course he's simply cut'n'pasting neo-cons, but they aren't too far off from my own specific understandings of the incident, although as usual I object to the pungent ideological odor that infests even the few truths they stumble-upon at odd moments. I'm personally not so keen to give Muslims long lectures about how to purify their ranks.
As a friend of heretics, Just as I do for Christianity, I certainly encourage pointing out issues where Islam is clearly out of touch and out of line with reality, but I just don't feel that extra push like the neo-cons Christians do to start telling them how to fix it. I don't do this to Christians I know either. Of course when honestly approached, I don't mind telling any curious Christian friend all the many and sundry ways I differ from their dogma. However, I've never seen it as my duty, or even a good idea, to tell Christians either how to be better Christians, or how to reform their insititutions. Somehow the neo-cons don't seem to see the same boundaries that I do.
[Fritz]A little somethng,something to keep the pot stirred.
Source: Debka Author: DEBKAfile Exclusive Report Date: December 6, 2008,
New Delhi has asked Jerusalem to assist in the operational and intelligence planning of Indian commando cross-border strikes against Islamist terrorist havens in Pakistan - including al Qaeda, Indian counter-terror sources report.
The Indian government's decision to embark on these in-and-out incursions in reprisal for the Mumbai outrage of Nov. 26-29 was first revealed in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 375 published Dec. 4 (Indian Retaliatory Raids inside Pakistan Impending).
DEBKAfile adds: Israel is willing to help the Indians carry out punitive forays into Pakistan because it has its own scores to settle for the brutal murder of six Israelis in Mumbai's Chabad Center by the Islamist terrorists and for the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency's hand in the atrocity.
Security sources in New Delhi disclosed Saturday, Dec. 6, that ISI officers actively trained the terrorists on military lines and selected their targets, including two big hotels and the Jewish-Israeli center.
Indian sources told DEBKAfile that Israel was asked for assistance because its special undercover forces were long seasoned in plotting and executing reprisals for terrorist attacks; above all, they were expert in getting away after covert operations without leaving a trail. New Delhi wants its commando operations in Pakistan to be stealthy and focused, and does not propose to admit responsibility.
Four Pakistani locations are targeted:
1. Pakistani Kashmir where scores if not hundreds of extremist Muslim training facilities are situated - many of them ISI-run and funded;
2. Punjab in eastern Pakistan on the border of northern India. DEBKAfile's counter terror sources report that Lahore and Multan have attracted a cluster of Islamist terrorist centers.
3. Pakistan's southern coast - from Karachi north to Gwadar close to the Iranian border. Indian intelligence (RAW) has evidence that this strip was where the terrorists who besieged Mumbai ten days ago were trained for their assault.
Our New Delhi sources disclose that Indian leaders showed the outline of this plan to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice when she visited last week. She commented guardedly that the United States was strongly opposed to a full-scale war between India and Pakistan but not averse to limited counter-terror operati
its idiotic. who just made israel the expert when it comes to dealing with terror. israel is a country that is dealing with terror everyday and is inflicting terror upon the palestinians everyday. let them fix their problems first before they go about doling services to others.
meanwhile..a little known fact..majority of the mumbai blast victims who died were muslims who were at the train station to board to their north indian villages for upcoming eid. the media just focuses on the jews at chabad house(6) and the taj hotel(the train station is more of a national heritage when it comes to architecture than the taj hotel). madness.
The terror attack in Mumbai should serve as a sign to decision-makers and strategic analysts in recognizing that the accepted approach to terrorism has become anachronistic and mistaken.
The world largely deals with terror attacks as sporadic, sensationalistic, and singular events. The tragedy and pain involved in these events elicits a response of anger, fury, and sadness, but the terror attacks are not viewed as undercutting the authority and power of the state in which the terror attack takes place.
During the period in which Palestinian terror focused on airline attacks, a leader of one of the Palestinian terror organizations was asked in an interview, "What advantage does your organization gain from a shocking incident that results in the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians?" His answer was, "I receive attention. In the two minutes in which the entire world is giving me their attention, I can send a message about the injustice being done to me."
Since this time, terrorism has gone through a series of changes. For a long period, terrorists attempted to harm the public, bringing attention to the message that they were trying to promote. The Vietnam War changed the terrorist organizations' conception, and brought to the forefront the notion that a terrorist army is not meant only to "sting" the enemy, but that in the end, it has the ability to be victorious.
During the meeting that took place at the end of the Vietnam War between representatives of the PLO and of the commander of the North Vietnamese army General Võ Nguyên Giáp, the PLO representatives congratulated the commander on the North Vietnamese victory over the American superpower. They asked General Giáp when he predicted terror organizations would be victorious over Israel. General Giáp answered in one word: Never! When asked the reason for this response, he stated, "You will never be victorious due to lack of determination."
There are those who believe that this meeting represented a turning point in the development of Islamic terrorism, which began to educate its society of the sanctity of suicide and initiated the era of suicide terrorism. The initial implementation defined determination as self-sacrifice, believing that the more people willing to prove their readiness to die for a cause, the greater the determination and the closer the victory. The heads of terror organizations quickly understood that suicide terrorism caused great demoralization, damage, and shock to the governing authority. For example, the subway terror attack in Madrid in March, 2004 brought about an immediate change of government in Spain.
Since the period of suicide terror, terror organizations have upgraded to include paramilitary fighting units, as opposed to singular acts of terror. Hizbllah, a full-fledged terror organization, is not constructed on the notion of individual terror attacks, but upon a complete military arsenal: Today it has amassed 42,000 rockets to enable continuous military terror, causing victims on a large scale, and thus presenting a serious threat to the state of Israel. Hamas has long ago abandoned the use of suicide terror exclusively, but has built a military capability comprised of rockets (that are being slowly upgraded) and fighting units that operate wholly differently than terror cells. Hamas's army of terror combines terror activities with military activities. This concept is also applied by the Iranian army, which, alongside fighting units includes the Revolutionary Guard, which cultivates a combination of paramilitary activities, terror activities, and propaganda campaigns, the secret weapon of fundamentalism's ability to gain power in the West.
Al-Qaida has also undergone the transformation from sporadic terror attacks to a prolonged war of terror. This organization's activities are more complex and integrated, exemplifying the future of terrorism that combines local attacks with broader strategies that include fighting units that operate in a completely different manner than the perpetrators of sporadic terror attacks, biological and chemical weapons, and a goal of achieving nuclear terror.
Mumbai, India does not constitute the ultimate battlefield, but serves as a site for broad strategic maneuvers, in which terror units have taken control of a major city through a war of terror. Unfortunately, this example will likely serve as a conceptual test case for future activities.
Without question, the approach towards fighting terrorism must undergo major rethinking. Times have changed since the main focus was the suicide bombers operating independently or in small groups, whose purpose was to injure the enemy and to draw attention to their cause.
Today, a new, different terror army, with several branches is being developed. This army includes all the elements of a military, but exploits the approach of the terrorist. The terror army enjoys the advantages of feeling exempt from any international law or convention, and of being exempt from international pressure or accountability. In addition, they handicap the power of their opponent through exploitation of the claims of internationally accepted values of human rights, correct treatment of prisoners of war, and prevention of harm to civilian populations - though none of these values apply to them, but only to their opponent.
Unfortunately, the world is slow to prepare for this growing threat. Every new terror attack illustrates that the danger to the stability of a range of governments and societies is much greater than we could have imagined.
The events taking place in Mumbai must act as a warning and turning point in the world's treatment of the local terror armies that base themselves in various parts of the world, and threaten the world's stability as a whole.
The writer is the Senior Vice President of Netanya Academic College and the Deputy Chair of the College's S. Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic Dialogue.
Victims caught in terrorist atrocities perpetrated for Islam typically experience fear, torture, horror and murder, with sirens screaming, snipers positioning and carnage in the streets. That was the case recently in Bombay (now called Mumbai), where some 195 people were murdered and 300 wounded. But for the real target of Islamist terror - the world at large - the experience has become numbed, with apologetics and justification muting repulsion and shock.
If terrorism ranks among the cruelest and most inhumane forms of warfare, excruciating in its small-bore viciousness and intentional pain, Islamist terrorism has also become well-rehearsed political theater. Actors fulfill their scripted roles, then shuffle, soon forgotten, off the stage.
Indeed, as one reflects on the most publicized episodes of Islamist terror against Westerners since 9/11 - the attack on Australians in Bali, on Spaniards in Madrid, on Russians in Beslan, on Britons in London - a twofold pattern emerges: Muslim exultation and Western denial. The same tragedy replays itself, with only names changed.
Muslim exaltation: The Mumbai assault inspired occasional condemnations, hushed official regrets and cornucopias of unofficial enthusiasm. As the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center notes, the Iranian and Syrian governments exploited the event "to assail the United States, Israel and the Zionist movement, and to represent them as responsible for terrorism in India and the world in general." Al-Jazeera's Web site overflowed with comments such as "Allah, grant victory to Muslims. Allah, grant victory to jihad" and "The killing of a Jewish rabbi and his wife in the Jewish center in Mumbai is heartwarming news."
SUCH SUPREMACISM and bigotry can no longer surprise, given the well-documented, world-wide acceptance of terror among many Muslims. For example, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted an attitudinal survey in spring 2006, "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other." Its polls of about 1,000 people in each of 10 Muslim populations found a perilously high proportion of Muslims who, on occasion, justify suicide bombing: 13 percent in Germany, 22% in Pakistan, 26% in Turkey and 69% in Nigeria.
A frightening portion also declared some degree of confidence in Osama bin Laden: 8% in Turkey, 48% in Pakistan, 68% in Egypt and 72% in Nigeria. As I concluded in a 2006 review of the Pew survey: "These appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come." Obvious conclusion, no?
Western denial: No. The fact that terrorist fish are swimming in a hospitable Muslim sea nearly disappears amid Western political, journalistic and academic bleatings. Call it political correctness, multiculturalism or self-loathing; whatever the name, this mentality produces delusion and dithering.
NOMENCLATURE LAYS bare this denial. When a sole jihadist strikes, politicians, law enforcement and media join forces to deny even the fact of terrorism; and when all must concede the terrorist nature of an attack, as in Mumbai, a pedantic establishment twists itself into knots to avoid blaming terrorists.
I documented this avoidance by listing the 20 (!) euphemisms the press unearthed to describe Islamists who attacked a school in Beslan in 2004: activists, assailants, attackers, bombers, captors, commandos, criminals, extremists, fighters, group, guerrillas, gunmen, hostage-takers, insurgents, kidnappers, militants, perpetrators, radicals, rebels and separatists - anything but terrorists.
And if "terrorist" is impolite, adjectives such as Islamist, Islamic and Muslim become unmentionable. My blog titled "Not Calling Islamism the Enemy" provides many many examples of this avoidance, along with its motives. In short, those who would replace "War on Terror" with "A Global Struggle for Security and Progress" imagine this linguistic gambit will win over Muslim hearts and minds.
Post-Mumbai, people such as Steven Emerson, Don Feder, Lela Gilbert, Caroline Glick, Tom Gross, William Kristol, Dorothy Rabinowitz and Mark Steyn again noted various aspects of this futile linguistic behavior, with Emerson bitterly concluding that "after more than seven years since 9/11, we can now issue a verdict: Islamic terrorists have won our hearts and minds."
What finally will rouse Westerners from their stupor, to name the enemy and fight the war to victory? Only one thing seems likely: massive deaths, say 100,000 casualties in a single WMD attack. Short of that, it appears, much of the West, contently deploying defensive measures against fancifully-described "activists," will gently slumber on.
The writer is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial center." Continuing to keep her brow heavily furrowed with the wrinkles of doubt and uncertainty, Santos went on to say that "[i]t is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
This same puzzled expression is currently being widely worn on the faces of all those who wonder if Pakistan is implicated in the "bloody coordinated" assault on the heart of Bombay. To get an additional if oblique perspective on this riddle that is an enigma wrapped inside a mystery, take a look at Joshua Hammer's excellent essay in the current Atlantic. The question in its title—"[Is Syria] Getting Away With Murder?"—is at least asked only at the beginning of the article and not at the end of it.
Here are the known facts: If you are a Lebanese politician or journalist or public figure, and you criticize the role played by the government of Syria in your country's internal affairs, your car will explode when you turn the ignition key, or you will be ambushed and shot or blown up by a bomb or land mine as you drive through the streets of Beirut or along the roads that lead to the mountains. The explosives and weapons used, and the skilled tactics employed, will often be reminiscent of the sort of resources available only to the secret police and army of a state machine. But I think in fairness I must stress that this is all that is known for sure. You criticize the Assad dictatorship, and either your vehicle detonates or your head is blown off. Over time, this has happened to a large and varied number of people, ranging from Sunni statesman Rafik Hariri to Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt to Communist spokesman George Hawi. One would not wish to be a "conspiracy theorist" and allege that there was any necessary connection between the criticisms in the first place and the deplorably terminal experiences in the second.
Hammer's article is good for a laugh in that it shows just how much trouble the international community will go to precisely in order not to implicate the Assad family in this string of unfortunate events. After all, does Damascus not hold the keys to peace in the region? Might not young Bashar Assad, who managed to become president after the peaceful death by natural causes of his father, become annoyed and petulant and even uncooperative if he were found to have been commissioning assassinations? Could the fabled "process" suffer if a finger of indictment were pointed at him? At the offices of the long-established and by now almost historic United Nations inquiry into the Hariri murder, feet are evidently being dragged because of considerations like these, and Hammer describes the resulting atmosphere very well.
In rather the same way, the international community is deciding to be, shall we say, nonjudgmental in the matter of Pakistani involvement in the Bombay unpleasantness. Everything from the cell phones to the training appears to be traceable to the aboveground surrogates of an ostensibly banned group known as Lashkar-i-Taiba, which practices what it preaches and preaches holy war against Hindus, as well as Jews, Christians, atheists, and other elements of the "impure." Lashkar is well-known to be a bastard child—and by no means a disowned one, either—of the Pakistani security services. But how inconvenient if this self-evident and obvious fact should have to be faced.
How inconvenient, for one thing, for the government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a new and untried politician who may not exactly be in charge of his own country or of its armed forces but who nonetheless knows how to jingle those same keys of peace. How inconvenient, too, for all those who assume that the Afghan war is the "good" war when they see Pakistani army units being withdrawn from the Afghan frontier and deployed against democratic India (which has always been Pakistan's "real" enemy).
The Syrian and Pakistani situations are a great deal more similar than most people have any interest in pointing out. In both cases, there is a state within the state that exerts the real parallel power and possesses the reserve strength. In both cases, official "secularism" is a mask (as it also was with the Iraqi Baathists) for the state sponsorship of theocratic and cross-border gangster groups like Lashkar and Hezbollah. In both cases, an unknown quantity of nuclear assets are at the disposal of the official and banana republic state and also very probably of elements within the unofficial and criminal and terrorist one. (It is of huge and unremarked significance that Syria did not take the recent Israeli bombing of its hidden reactor to the United Nations or make any other public complaint.) Given these grim and worsening states of affairs, perhaps it is only small wonder that we take consolation in our illusions and in comforting doubts—such as the childlike wonder about whether Jews are deliberately targeted or just unlucky with time and place. This would all be vaguely funny if it wasn't headed straight toward our own streets.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif.
The US government is seeking to add several former Pakistani intelligence officers to the United Nations’ list of international terrorists, The News reported. A senior US intelligence official familiar with the effort to rein in Pakistan’s intelligence service confirmed to The Long War Journal the US wants the United Nations Security Council to designate several senior former officers of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency as international terrorists.
Included on the list of former Pakistani intelligence officers being submitted to the UNSC are Hamid Gul, Javid Nasir, and Zahirul Islam Abbasi, as well as Aslam Beg, a senior Army officer, the intelligence official said.
The placement of the former Pakistani officers on the United Nations list would open their international accounts up to scrutiny and eventual seizure, the US official said. "We could do some major damage" to the officers' "slush funds" in international bank accounts. The US will also seek to place the officers on INTERPOL's wanted list.
News of the US move broke after Gul spoke to the Pakistani press about being added to the list. Gul "was informed of this by a highly responsible person, who had personally seen the written US request," The News reported.
The US intelligence official expressed concern that Gul still has access to such sensitive information. Gul's knowledge of the effort "is indicative that he still has friends in very high places."
According to The News, Gul said "the government should immediately move to protect the ISI from this indirect attack from Washington. He said the United States and some other Western nations were against him for the simple reason that he did not support their war on terror which, he said, was based on Washington’s greed for energy."
Gul's message is calculated to rally support within Pakistan's intelligence community, the US official said. "He is playing to a very particular crowd there, to convince people in the ISI that those against him are also against them."
Both the United States and India have accused the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based terror group backed by the ISI, of conducting last week's 62-hour assault on Mumbai that resulted in more than 180 Indians and foreigners killed and more than 300 wounded. Indian police captured a terrorist who admitted to training inside camps Pakistan and to being a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
While there have been no direct links between the Mumbai attackers and the Pakistani government, India has accused the Pakistani government of allowing numerous groups to operate on its soil. India has demanded the Pakistani government hand over about 20 wanted terror leaders and operatives, including Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Elements of the Pakistani state may have aided in the training of the Mumbai terrorists and the execution of the operation. The captured terrorist claimed members of the Pakistani Navy aided in his training, while Dawood Ibrahim, the ISI-backed mafia don, provided logistical support. Indian intelligence sources told PTI that the country has "proof that the Inter Services Intelligence was involved in planning the Mumbai terror attacks and training the terrorists." The unconfirmed report stated "the names of trainers and the places where meticulous training took place are also known to the government." US intelligence has additional information, according to the report.
Just this year, the ISI was directly implicated in the suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. Fifty-four people, including an Indian defense attaché, were killed in the July 7 bombing. The Indian embassy bombing was carried out by the Haqqani Network, with the direct backing of the ISI, The US confronted the Paksitani government with evidence of the ISI's involvement in August. Within two months after the US confrontation with Pakistan, Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj, the Director of the ISI, was relieved of his command.
Background on Gul, Nasir, Abbasi, and Beg
The four senior retired Pakistani officers put forth to be sanctioned by the United Nations have a long history of dealing with extremist groups, and particularly al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Kashmiri terror groups.
Lieutenant General (Retired) Hamid Gul served as the chief of the ISI from 1987 to 1989. Gul is known as the Godfather of the Taliban for his efforts to organize the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the helping to facilitate the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. Gul supports the terrorist insurgency in India-occupied Kashmir and opposes the US-led effort to defeat Islamic extremism.
"God will destroy the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever it will try to go from there," Gul said in August 2003. "The Muslim world must stand united to confront the U.S. in its so-called War on Terrorism, which is in reality a war against Muslims. Let's destroy America wherever its troops are trapped." Gul openly admits he maintains contacts with the Taliban and other extremist groups.
Lieutenant General (Retired) Javid Nasir commanded the ISI from 1992 to May 1993. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Nasir helped unite the warring mujahideen factions and establish a government. Nasir, and avowed Islamist, provided support to terrorist movements throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Nasir, along with Gul, kept in close contact with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.
Major General (Retired) Zahirul Islam Abbasi was a senior officer in the ISI during the Afghan war and served as a senior military commander. In 1995, he led a failed coup against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. He planned to kill the entire senior leadership of the Army command. Abbasi was implicated in the plot along with Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of the radical Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, an al Qaeda and Taliban-linked group. Akhtar later testified against Abbasi, who was then sentenced to seven years in prison. He was released by Pervez Musharraf after serving just four.
General (Retired) Mirza Aslam Beg served as Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army after the mysterious death of General Muhammad Zia ul Haq in 1998. Beg is known to profess sympathy for the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Kashmir terror groups. He has openly bragged that foreigners train in Afghanistan and fight in Kashmir. Beg, along with Gul, purportedly met with Osama bin Laden and more than 300 jihadi leaders at Darul Uloom Haqqania Islamic conference held in Peshawar in January 2001.
Pakistan has placed Masood Azhar, the founder and leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, under house arrest in the wake of mounting international pressure to act against terror groups involved with the Nov. 26 terror attacks in Mumbai, India.
Security forces have reportedly surrounded Azhar’s home in Bahawalpur and are preventing him from traveling. Azhar is one of an estimated 20 Pakistani terrorists wanted by India for their role in the Mumbai attacks.
Azhar is a long-time jihadi who trained at the same religious seminary as Afghanistan Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Azhar was released from an Indian jail in exchange for hostages held in an Indian Airlines flight hijacking in December 1999. Azhar’s brother, Mohammed Ibrahim Athar Alvi, took part in the hijacking.
Azhar established Jaish-e-Mohammed the next year as an offshoot of the Harkat-u-Ansar, one of many terror groups created with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency to fight the Indians in India-occupied Kashmir.
Jaish-e-Mohammed was implicated along with the Lashkar-e-Taiba as being behind the Dec. 13, 2001, attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi. In October 2001, the US added Jaish-e-Mohammed as a foreign terrorist organization. In 2002, Sheikh Ahmed Saeed Omar, a close associate of Azhar, was behind the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Azhar has been in Pakistani detention at least two times in the past decade. He was briefly detained after the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, but was cleared of charges by a court in Lahore. Pakistani police detained Azhar after the 2003 assassination attempts against then-President Pervez Musharraf, but freed him months later.
India has demanded Pakistan turn over senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, and Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami. These terror groups receive backing from elements within Pakistan's military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
But Pakistan’s foreign minister said the country will not turn over wanted terrorist leaders to India. Instead the men are to be tried in Pakistan if evidence of involvement in the Mumbai attacks is discovered.
"The arrests are being made for our own investigations. Even if allegations are proved against any suspect, he will not be handed over to India," Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said. "We will proceed against those arrested under Pakistani laws."
Pakistan’s foreign ministry also issued a demarche, or diplomatic rebuke, demanding the Indian government share information on the Mumbai investigation and requesting a joint investigation be conducted. “We require detailed information and evidence,” Qureshi said.
Yesterday, Pakistani forces targeted offices and camps in Muzaffarabad run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the main terror group behind the Mumbai terror siege. At least nine operatives, including Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, a senior Lashkar leader and one of the operational masterminds of the Mumbai attack, have been detained. According to one report, security forces clashed with Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters for over 90 minutes at the camp. An attack helicopter reportedly fired its guns during the battle.
Pakistani security officials said the operations against the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups would continue. “The operation is going on in Muzaffarabad and some other parts of the country and some arrests have been made, including a top man of Lashkar,” Inter-Services Public Relations Director General Major General Athar Abbas told Dawn. “We do not want to go into details of the operation because of certain reasons and sensitivity of the matter.” Raids have also been reported in the capital of Islamabad.
The operation is being led by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, Abbas said, “in which not only army but all civil security agencies are taking part.”
Just two days after the gunmen's siege in Mumbai ended, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari went on CNN's Larry King Live to plead his case. Even before the Indian authorities had brought the rampage to an end, they were laying blame on their neighbor to the north. And Zardari wanted the world to know they were wrong. "This is not the time to point fingers," Zardari protested. "The state of Pakistan is in no way responsible."
Instead, Zardari said, "I think these are stateless actors who have been operating all throughout the region. .  .  . The gunmen plus the planners, whoever they are, [are] stateless actors who have been holding hostage the whole world."
Zardari was partly right. In all likelihood, neither he nor his supporters had anything to do with the attacks. So, if you define the "state of Pakistan" as the president and his immediate cohorts, his words ring true. Of course, there is more to Pakistan's government, including its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the powerful military intelligence organization over which Zardari exerts little control. And there are good reasons to suspect that the ISI had a hand in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 180 people and wounded nearly 300.
The United States and India have named the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) terror organization as the main perpetrator of the attacks. Indian authorities captured the lone gunman to survive the assault, and he reportedly admitted being trained by the LET. India also claims to have intercepted phone conversations between the Mumbai attackers and one of the LET's leaders in Pakistan. The full investigation will take some time to unfold, so it is too early to name all of those responsible. It is, however, a safe bet that the LET was heavily involved.
Contrary to President Zardari's claims, the LET is no "stateless actor." In fact, the LET is and always was a creature of the ISI.
Throughout the war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United States, as well as other states, all sponsored the Afghan resistance fighters or mujahedeen. But Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were principally responsible for creating and sponsoring the most radical Islamic terrorist groups within the mujahedeen's ranks. This nexus is what first gave us Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and, later, Mullah Omar's Taliban.
The same nexus also gave us the LET. In fact, bin Laden and his spiritual mentor, Abdullah Azzam, reportedly played instrumental roles in the LET's founding. In the late 1980s, they met with members of the Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), an Islamist political party in Pakistan, and convinced its leaders to create a militant wing responsible for waging jihad in Kashmir. The result was the LET. And the struggle for control of Jammu and Kashmir, territory sandwiched between China, India, and Pakistan that had been disputed since the partition of 1947, would never be the same.
As the war in Afghanistan came to an end, the ISI began to reallocate its resources. The jihadists had proven their merit as guerrilla fighters, and the ISI found it convenient to use them elsewhere. Veterans of the Afghan conflict formed the LET's first cadres, and, using Saudi cash, the ISI quickly expanded the LET's operations. By the early 1990s, the LET emerged as one of the ISI's primary instruments for waging its proxy war against Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir.
The consequences of the ISI's decision are plain to see. The conflict over Kashmir was relatively terror-free in the late 1980s, but just a few years later Islamist terrorist groups were launching thousands of attacks. As Praveen Swami, a reporter for Frontline magazine in New Delhi, explains in his book India, Pakistan, and the Secret Jihad, there were only 7 terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir in 1988. In 1992, there were 3,920. The total number of civilians killed per year, including Muslims, increased from less than 30 in 1988 to more than 1,000 in 1993. Data on the number of attacks and total casualties vary by source. But according to Swami's estimates, which we find to be conservative, more than 41,000 people, including Indian forces, terrorists, and civilians, died between 1988 and 2005.
India has played its part in the violence in Jammu and Kashmir, but the prime mover has been the ISI and its jihadist proxies, including the LET. The ISI not only gives these groups safe haven and trains and supplies them, it also frequently coordinates their movements. Consider one telling example. In 1999, conventional Pakistani and Indian forces fought for control of Kargil, a mountainous district in northern Kashmir. During the coldest weeks of the conflict, the Indians ceded the highest ridges for warmer ground below. After the Indians left their positions, LET members moved in. The LET held this strategic battleground until their replacements--regulars in Pakistan's army--arrived. Such is the depth of cooperation between the LET and Pakistan's military establishment.
The ISI launched the full-scale jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, but it did not stop there. The LET and several sister organizations also backed by the ISI began attacking India proper long ago. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM), another ISI creation focused on Kashmir, has often been the LET's partner in crime. So has the Hizb-ul-Mujahedeen (HM), which was founded with the ISI's help in the late 1980s. And an Indian-based organization called the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which is sponsored by the ISI and deeply connected to its Pakistani brethren, has been instrumental in launching attacks inside India. These four organizations have killed hundreds. According to the website satp.org (South Asia Terrorist Portal), these groups, along with other smaller allied jihadist organizations, are responsible for dozens of attacks inside India between September 2001 and October 2008.
Until this latest attack, the most devastating assault perpetrated by these groups in recent years occurred on July 11, 2006. On that day, terrorists detonated seven bombs on Mumbai's commuter rails. According to Indian officials, the LET and SIMI were responsible. The attack left more than 200 dead and 700 or so wounded.
It is in this context that 10 or more gunmen laid siege to hotels and other locales in Mumbai in late November. Far from being the work of "stateless actors," the attack was perfectly consistent with the ISI's longstanding policy of waging jihad against India and its interests. In fact, Indian authorities have reportedly found direct evidence of cooperation between the ISI and the LET in the latest attack. The ISI allegedly trained the LET terrorists responsible and provided other logistical support for the operation. Thus, when President Zardari went on CNN to proclaim Pakistan's innocence, he avoided any substantive discussion of the ISI's role.
Even so, Zardari's comments are not altogether meaningless. They touch upon a central fault line in this war on terror. The president of Pakistan has essentially admitted what we should all know by now: There is currently no political force inside Pakistan capable of reining in the ISI and its many jihadist allies. Zardari had hoped for improved relations with India, but he was powerless to stop the Mumbai attacks. The jihadist forces have become entrenched within Pakistani society, which is home to dozens of extremist and terrorist organizations.
Indeed, the extent of the radicalization of Pakistani society is deeply troubling. It is the direct result of decisions made by Pakistani administrations decades ago.
Itinerant preachers had made their way back and forth from the Arabian peninsula for centuries, carrying with them a form of Wahhabism, the official state religion of Saudi Arabia. In time, a Pakistani variant evolved into its own strain of radical Islam called Deobandism. While this made some inroads among Pakistanis, it was not until the late 1970s that Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq made it the official policy of the Pakistani state to support the Deobandis, and radical Islam blossomed.
As Charles Allen notes in his masterly work God's Terrorists, there were only 200 madrassas, or religious schools, on Pakistani soil at the time of the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. By 1972, this figure had grown to 893. Of these Pakistani madrassas, 354 (40 percent) openly espoused Deobandism. After President ul-Haq threw the full support of his military behind the movement and turned on the spigot of Saudi petrodollars, radical Islam really took off. In 2002, Allen notes, Pakistan's minister of religious affairs "put the total number of madrassas in Pakistan at ten thousand, of which .  .  . no fewer than seven thousand" are Deobandi. It was the proliferation of Deobandi madrassas that led directly to the birth of the Taliban, which follows the Deobandi creed and continues to find new recruits among students of Islam. The most radical madrassas instruct more than 1 million students each year and provide a comfortable abode for terrorists planning attacks.
One result is that today the president himself is not safe. The jihadist hydra nearly killed Zardari on September 20, when a truck bomb leveled the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. Zardari had stopped off to chat with an old friend, narrowly avoiding death. The assassins were more successful with Zardari's wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was killed by jihadists in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on December 27, 2007.
All of this has important ramifications not only for India and Pakistan, but also for the United States and the rest of the free world. There is no question that Pakistan has played an instrumental role in the war on terror. President Musharraf's regime, including friendly elements within the ISI, killed or captured hundreds of al Qaeda operatives in the wake of September 11. But it is now clear that the ISI's long-term strategy for seizing power throughout South and Central Asia by sponsoring jihadist proxies remains undeterred.
Moreover, this strategy conflicts directly with American interests. Just as the ISI created the LET and its sister organizations, the ISI has also been the primary benefactor of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even as Pakistan gave the United States vital assistance in the war on terror, the ISI continued to sponsor America's enemies behind her back. There are numerous examples that can be cited.
Both NATO officers and Afghan officials have long maintained that the Taliban's Shura, or leadership council, is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta. In May 2006, Colonel Chris Vernon, then the chief of staff for Coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, told the Guardian that this was common knowledge. "The thinking piece of the Taliban is out of Quetta in Pakistan," Vernon said in an interview. "It's the major headquarters. They use it to run a series of networks in Afghanistan." Other anonymous U.S. and NATO officials backed up Vernon's statements.
Afghan president Hamid Karzai went so far as to say he knew the exact location of Taliban chieftain Mullah Omar and had passed on this information to the Pakistani government, only to have it ignored. "Mullah Omar is for sure in Quetta in Pakistan. And he knows that and I know that," Karzai told the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2006. "And we have given [President Musharraf] information. We have even given him the GPS numbers of his house, of Mullah Omar's house, and the telephone numbers."
Despite these warnings, the Taliban's leadership has remained free. The ISI has ensured their safety. But the ISI's complicity in the Taliban's and al Qaeda's terrorism goes far beyond the provision of safe haven.
Pakistani intelligence officers have been caught aiding America's foes inside Afghanistan. In December 2006, Afghan security forces captured Sayed Akbar, an ISI officer. Akbar had been tasked by Pakistani intelligence with serving as a conduit to al Qaeda, which was operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border in the Kunar region.
An aide to President Karzai told reporters that "evidence and documents [had] been seized with [Akbar] proving his destructive activities in Afghanistan." Afghan officials said Akbar confessed to conducting "illegal activities" in Afghanistan. According to Akbar, he had escorted Osama bin Laden as he traveled from Afghanistan's Nuristan province into the mountainous district of Chitral in northwestern Pakistan in 2005. While there have been numerous bin Laden sightings along the Afghan-Pakistani border, he was reported to have been sheltered in Chitral at this time. In fact, FBI agents visited Chitral in early 2006 to assess the reports.
Perhaps the most brazen example of the ISI's support for the Taliban and other terror groups operating in Afghanistan occurred in the mountainous Afghan border province of Nangarhar. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Nash, the commander of an embedded training team that advised Afghan border police, dropped a bombshell last September when his presentation on his time in Afghanistan from September 2006 to March 2007 made the rounds on the Internet.
A slide in the presentation claimed the ISI was supporting U.S. enemies fighting in Afghanistan. The slide read: "ISI involved in direct support to many enemy operations .  .  . classification prevents further discussion of this point." The support included "training, funding, [and] logistics."
Nash said multiple U.S. and Afghan intelligence reports indicated that the ISI "flew repeated helicopter missions into Afghanistan to resupply the Taliban during a fierce battle in June 2007," according to the Army Times. The ISI helicopters resupplied a "base camp" in the Tora Bora region in Nangarhar, where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda fought pitched battles with the U.S. military and Afghan militias before retreating into Pakistan.
The camp was run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami, an insurgent group long sponsored by the ISI, as well as the Taliban and al Qaeda. "A helo flew in the valley, went over to where we knew there was a base camp, landed, [and] 15 minutes later took off," Nash said. The helicopters made three separate flights to resupply the joint insurgent force. "From NDS [Afghan intelligence] sources that we had in the opposing camp, [we know] they were offloading supplies," Nash told the Army Times. Nash explained that the resupply efforts took place over the course of three months.
The most recent and damning allegation of ISI perfidy in Afghanistan was leveled by U.S. intelligence after a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into the outer wall of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Fifty-four people, including an Indian defense attaché, were killed in the July 7 bombing.
The Indian embassy bombing was carried out by the notorious Haqqani Network, run by former mujahedeen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Siraj. Both Jalaluddin and Siraj have close ties with al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden.
The Haqqanis have extensive links with al Qaeda and the Taliban, and their relationship with the ISI has allowed their network to survive and thrive in its fortress stronghold of North Waziristan. The Haqqanis control large swaths of the tribal area and run a parallel administration with courts, recruiting centers, tax offices, and security forces. They have established multiple training camps and safe houses used by al Qaeda leaders and operatives, as well as by Taliban foot soldiers preparing to fight in Afghanistan.
American intelligence agencies confronted the Pakistani government with evidence of direct ISI involvement in the bombing of the Indian embassy, the New York Times reported in August. "The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region."
The ISI officers involved in the Kabul bombings were not "renegades," the New York Times reported, and the intercepts indicated that "their actions might have been authorized by superiors." U.S. intelligence officials also said "elements of Pakistan's government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops" and were providing intelligence to Taliban and al Qaeda operatives on the U.S. covert air campaign targeting terror leaders in Pakistan's tribal areas. The Haqqani Network has been a prime target of these attacks; almost 60 percent of U.S. airstrikes this year have occurred in North Waziristan.
In the wake of the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, the ISI reshuffled its leadership. But the changes were most likely cosmetic. As the attacks in Mumbai illustrate, the ISI continues to sponsor terrorism. Indeed, the attacks in Mumbai were yet another wake-up call for the United States and the West.
Decades ago the ISI made a pact with the devil. There is no evidence that it can be redeemed any time soon. Given the ISI's deep roots within Pakistan's culture and its capacity to drive policy even against the wishes of the elected officials, curtailing the power of this rogue agency will be difficult at best. Indeed, the ISI is now one of the principal backers of radical Islam in the world.
The allure of Islamist extremism runs deep in Pakistan's officer corps. For many, this is an ideological war. Consider what "retired" ISI general Hamid Gul, who still exerts much influence in Pakistan, said in 2003:
God will destroy the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever it will try to go from there. The Muslim world must stand united to confront the United States in its so-called War on Terrorism, which is in reality a war against Muslims. Let's destroy America wherever its troops are trapped.
The same mentality compels the ISI and its surrogates to claim territory in the name of Islam. Pakistan's jihad in India and Kashmir is not just the product of a decades-old geopolitical rivalry. For the ISI, it is part of a Manichaean struggle between the forces of Islam and the rest of the world. As Praveen Swami notes in his book, the LET's leadership has openly talked of conquering large swaths of India on behalf of Muslims. After the Kargil war of 1999, LET chieftain Hafiz Muhammad Saeed threatened, "The real war will be inside [India]." He swore his forces would "unfurl the Islamic flag on the Red Fort." As Swami explains, the Red Fort in New Delhi "has been a long-standing motif in Islamist Discourse, as old as Partition itself." It is no wonder that in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, the Indians have demanded that the Pakistanis turn Saeed over. But it is doubtful that the Pakistani military will comply.
In the current crisis, the military shows signs of closing ranks with extremist elements as fears of a conflict with India increase. Just days after the Mumbai attacks, an army corps commander described Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud as a "patriot" and said the conflict with the Taliban in the northwest was merely due to "misunderstandings." In turn, the Taliban-dominated tribes pledged to send three million fighters to the Indian frontier in the event of a conflict.
Past efforts to purge the military of officers sympathetic to or openly supportive of the extremist cause have had only limited success. Former President Pervez Musharraf conducted multiple purges of the ISI after the September 11 attacks and attempts on his own life, but they had limited effect. Recently, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, a Bhutto loyalist, tried to bring the ISI under government control, but met resistance. Within 24 hours, the announcement that the ISI would be placed under the office of the prime minister had been rescinded.
The United States is now faced with an awful truth. Pakistan is both an ally and an enemy. The attacks in Mumbai are only the latest demonstration of the tactics the ISI is willing to sponsor in its quest for power in the subcontinent and beyond. We should be mindful that ISI-sponsored terrorism is a central component of our enemies' worldwide designs. It should not come as a surprise if someday we find ISI-backed terrorists laying siege to New York or Washington, just as they lately brought carnage to Mumbai.
[Fritz]A lone cry form the backwaters ... or a new front .... certainly an understandable concern given the image being portrayed, but I think not as lily white as is being protested.
The Iran - China marriage seems to be coming up again and again, in spite the nuclear 'taddle tales' and 'tiffs' last spring
After China, Iran Also Admonishes Pakistan About Terrorism
Something very very incompetent is going on the foreign front of Pakistan. Pakistan is fast becoming pariah and there is no sense of urgency in the leadership which is busy in bringing in Darbari governance in the country. India is fast weaving the net around the Pakistan and yet the rulers are unaware and oblivious of the threat.
Without giving any proofs for the involvement of Pakistani government and any elements from Pakistan, India managed to convince the members of security council to slap ban on the three charity outfits of Pakistan which were working in the Kashmir region and besides of that it succeeded in portraying a bad and scary image of Pakistan as an epicenter of terrorism and a persistent threat for the world. Diplomatic and foreign policy failure of Pakistan is clearly evident in this whole episode.
Now Iran’s deputy foreign minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhondzadeh is in New Delhi and “urging” Pakistan to “Do More” in the war against terror. “Our Pakistani friends, they should also take the lessons and they should also deal with the terrorists in a very strong manner,” Mohammad Mehdi Akhondzadeh told reporters in New Delhi.
Iran is our friend, but before falling pray to the Indian propaganda it must remember that it was the same India who supported US when US declared Iran a country a part of axis of evil. One hopes that Iranian government would come up with some sort of explanation in this regard.
But, whether that happens or not, we must have to set our own house in order. We need to fire all the foreign officials and lobbysits in UN, US and at other niche places and employ a team of people who are passionate, rigorous, aggressive, professional, visionary and loyal to their job and who eat, sleep, walk and live through doing their job properly. Otherwise, the whole world will turn against us for nothing, as it turned against Iraq upon the issue of weapons of mass destruction, where there was nothing in there, but as Iraq failed to convince the world about it and remained oblivious and belligerent, it has paid the price and still paying.
Found this interesting and have to wonder if this goes beyond financial interests of the US and UK and are there plans fermenting ?
Cheers
Fritz
U.S. OKs record $2.1 billion arms sale to India
Source: Reuters Author: Jim Wolf Date: Mon Mar 16, 2009 6:34pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration has cleared a $2.1 billion sale to India of eight Boeing Co P-8I maritime patrol aircraft, the largest U.S. arms transfer to India to date.
The State Department said in a March 12 notice to the U.S. Congress that it would license the direct commercial sale having factored in "political, military, economic, human rights and arms control considerations."
The Indian navy was the first international customer for the P-8, a long-range maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft.
Boeing says it can operate effectively over land or water while performing anti-submarine warfare; search and rescue; maritime interdiction; and long-range intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance.
India chose it over several rivals, including EADS Airbus A319, according to Flightglobal.com, an online aviation-trade publication.
Boeing has said it would deliver the first P-8I within 48 months of a contract signing, and the remaining seven by 2015. Derived from Boeing's commercial 737 airframe, its is similar to the P-8A Poseidon that Boeing is developing for the U.S. Navy.
In January 2008, Washington and New Delhi sealed India's previous largest U.S. arms purchase -- six Lockheed Martin Corp C-130J Super Hercules military transport planes valued at about $1 billion, including related gear, training and spares.
Boeing's P-8I contract is with the Indian Ministry of Defense. The sale includes associated support equipment, spares, training and logistical support through June 2019, the State Department said in its notice.
It said direct arms-trade "offsets" were expected to include engineering service, manufacturing and integrated logistics-support projects totaling $641.3 million.
Lockheed and Boeing, respectively the Pentagon's No. 1 and No. 2 suppliers by sales, are among warplane makers vying to sell India 126 new multi-role fighters in a deal that could be worth more than $10 billion.
Boeing is offering its F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet. Lockheed is pitching its F-16. They are competing with warplanes built in Russia, France, Sweden and by a European consortium.
One stumbling block for Boeing and Lockheed has been Indian qualms about standard "end-user" pacts designed to prevent leakage of sensitive U.S. technology to third countries. Such agreements are a routine part of U.S. government-to-government arms sale.
A similar form, known as DSP-83, had to be signed by Indian authorities for Boeing to have submitted its license request for the P-8I deal.
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