"We are going to see a bloodbath."

    According to Pakistani journalist and Taliban specialist Ahmed Rashid,[1] Islamists linked to al-Qaeda and to Kashmir's jihadi movements are the ones who organized and executed the Bombay operation.

    Le Nouvel Observateur: Who is responsible for the Bombay attacks?

    Ahmed Rashid: This attack was coordinated and conceived by al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban with the help of Kashmir jihadi movements, with the objective of creating a resurgence of tension between Pakistan and India. The Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda are under fire from the Pakistani army in the Bajaur and tribal regions and they hope this Bombay attack will force the Pakistani Army to redeploy its troops along the Indian border. India today is a victim of global jihad.

Also see below:     
Pakistan's Spies Aided Group Tied to Mumbai Siege    â€¢

    Have the tiny groups of Indian Muslims had a part in this attack?

    Indian Muslim groups do, in fact, exist; their mobilization is growing and their very artisanal attacks have caused thousands of death in India. But those groups would not have been capable of this degree of sophistication and coordination. No, the attack was executed by Punjabi jihadists who are fighting in Kashmir. After the 2004 cease-fire, the Pakistani secret services stopped authorizing militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Virtuous) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (the Army of Mohammed) from going to Kashmir. But they didn't plow them back into civilian life. Those groups then fragmented into a multitude of entities. Some demobilized. Some joined al-Qaeda, others joined the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal regions. Still others waited for the right time to go back into action. They are educated and live in cities. They are responsible for several of the attacks that have recently bloodied Pakistan.

    Why didn't the Pakistani government encourage and control their demobilization?

    Because the Pakistani secret services wanted to keep them within their orbit, just in case.... At the time of the October 2005 earthquake, they helped those who had continued to train in camps recover some respectability. They pretended to have transformed themselves into NGOs and so siphoned off the majority of the funds and the assistance intended for victims.

Ahmed Rashid has just published "Descent into Chaos," in which, most notably, he shows how Pakistan allowed the Taliban to reconquer part of Afghanistan." (Photo: Forum Barcelona 2004).

    Does the Pakistani government share responsibility for these attacks?

    The Pakistani government is not responsible for the Bombay attacks. No one has an interest, neither the Army nor the secret services, in seeing a rise in tension between India and Pakistan while Pakistan is bankrupt, can't pay its soldiers' salaries and terrorism is destabilizing the whole country. It's possible that certain former secret services leaders who controlled those organizations (Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba) during the war in Kashmir participated in the attacks. But not the Pakistani government.

    What will the consequences for Indo-Pakistani relations be? Could one envisage the two countries joining forces to fight against what has become a common enemy?

    They so distrust each other! Especially their secret services, the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence and the Indian Intelligence Bureau. Of course, the CIA could try to bring them together, as it has the Pakistani and Afghan secret services. For that to happen, Pakistan will have to be transparent about the aid its secret services have provided those groups and communicate all the intelligence it has available. But if there's the slightest suspicion that India is mobilizing, Pakistan will mass its troops along the border, as in 2001. Remember, after the battle of Tora Bora, the Americans asked Islamabad to deploy troops to the Afghan border to prevent al-Qaeda members from escaping. That's when a commando terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament by a group of Pakistanis provoked a resurgence in tension that led Pakistan to concentrate its troops along the Indian border: for four years, there had been no soldiers in the tribal regions! That's what allowed al-Qaeda and the Taliban to grow stronger at their leisure. In fact, it was after the battle of Tora Bora, in the course of which bin Laden escaped, that the connections between Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Qaeda were forged: Lashkar escorted al-Qaeda fighters to Karachi, where they supplied them with false passports so they could return to their home countries ...

    How do you think the situation is going to develop in the region? Are you worried?

    In the coming months, we are going to see a bloodbath, a massive al-Qaeda attack in Afghanistan and in Pakistan to demoralize Westerners and Barack Obama before they send troop reinforcements. The jihadists are ready to do anything to maintain their fief in the tribal regions and southern Afghanistan, to open new fronts and distract the enemy ... and the Bombay attacks are the first round of this diversionary strategy.

    [1] From the June 2008 New York Review of Books: Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and writer. He is the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia and Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia," which is published this month. He is a BBC contributor and writes for the Daily Telegraph and the International Herald Tribune.

    --------

    Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.

Pakistan's Spies Aided Group Tied to Mumbai Siege

Sunday 07 December 2008

»

by: Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez, The New York Times

    Washington - Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan's main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.

    American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks.

    As a result of the assault on Mumbai, India's financial hub, American counterterrorism and military officials say they are reassessing their view of Lashkar and believe it to be more capable and a greater threat than they had previously recognized.

    "People are having to go back and relook at all the connections," said one American counterterrorism official, who was among several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still progressing.

    Pakistani officials have denied any government connection to the siege on Nov. 26-29, in which nine gunmen and 163 other people were killed. A Pakistani official confirmed on Sunday that security forces had initiated an operation against at least one Lashkar camp.

    The Associated Press, citing militants and an unidentified senior official, reported Monday from Islamabad, Pakistan, that Pakistani troops had seized a former Lashkar camp, in the Pakistani part of Kashmir, that is now used by the group's charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa. "More than 12 people" were arrested, The Associated Press said.

    The official who spoke to The New York Times gave no details about the operation he confirmed, Pakistan's first known response against the group implicated in Mumbai. "The government of Pakistan has always said it would act on any evidence that is presented to us," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details about security operations. "We will make sure that nobody uses Pakistani territory to carry out militant activity."

    While Al Qaeda has provided financing and other support to Lashkar in the past, their links today remain murky. Senior Qaeda figures have used Lashkar safe houses as hide-outs, but Lashkar has not merged its operations with Al Qaeda or adopted the Qaeda brand, as did an Algerian terrorist group that changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, American officials said.

    Unlike Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, who have been forced to retreat to mountain redoubts in western Pakistan's tribal areas, Lashkar commanders have been able to operate more or less in the open, behind the public face of a popular charity, with the implicit support of official Pakistani patrons, American officials said.

    American and Indian officials believe that one senior Lashkar commander in particular, Zarrar Shah, is one of the group's primary liaisons to the ISI. Investigators in India are also examining whether Mr. Shah, a communications specialist, helped plan and carry out the attacks in Mumbai. "He's a central character in this plot," an American official said.

    For years, American intelligence analysts have described Lashkar as a group with deadly, yet limited, ambitions in South Asia. But terrorism experts said it clearly had been inspired by the success of Al Qaeda in rallying supporters for a global jihad.

    "This is a group that years ago evolved from having a local and parochial agenda and bought into Al Qaeda's vision," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor and terrorism expert at Georgetown University who has followed Lashkar closely for several years.

    Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means "army of the pure," was founded more than 20 years ago with the help of Pakistani intelligence officers as a proxy force to challenge Indian control of Muslim-dominated Kashmir.

    Indian officials have publicly implicated Lashkar operatives in a July 2006 attack on commuter trains in Mumbai and in a December 2001 attack against the Indian Parliament. But in recent years, Lashkar fighters have turned up in Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting and killing Americans, senior American military officials have said.

    As American, European and Middle Eastern governments crack down on Al Qaeda's finances, Lashkar still has a flourishing fund-raising organization in South Asia and the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, counterterrorism officials say. The group primarily uses Jamaat-ud-Dawa to raise money, ostensibly for causes in Pakistan.

    The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group's evolving emphasis and determination to elevate its profile in the global jihadist constellation.

    Lashkar also has a history of using local extremist groups for knowledge and tactics in its operations. Investigators in Mumbai are following leads suggesting that Lashkar used the Students' Islamic Movement of India, a fundamentalist group that advocates establishing an Islamic state in India, for early reconnaissance and logistical help.

    An Indian man arrested in connection with the attacks, Fahim Ahmad Ansari, had been described beforehand by Indian newspaper reports as a former member of the Students' Islamic Movement who met with Lashkar operatives in Dubai in 2003.

    American officials said investigators were looking closely at the likelihood that the attackers had local support in Mumbai.

    Mr. Hoffman said that Lashkar had developed particularly sophisticated Internet operations, and that intelligence officials believed the group had forged ties with regional terrorist organizations like Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia by assisting them with their own Internet strategies.

    Although Pakistan's government officially banned Lashkar in 2002, American officials said that the group had maintained close ties since then to the Pakistani intelligence service. American spy agencies have documented regular meetings between the ISI and Lashkar operatives, in which the two organizations have shared intelligence about Indian operations in Kashmir.

    "It goes beyond information sharing to include some funding and training," said an American official who follows the group closely. "And these are not rogue ISI elements. What's going on is done in a fairly disciplined way."

    Still, officials in Washington said they had yet to unearth any direct link between the Pakistan spy agency and the Mumbai attacks. "I don't think that there is compelling evidence of involvement of Pakistani officials," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer" on Sunday. "But I do think that Pakistan has a responsibility to act."

    She said evidence showed "that the terrorists did use territory in Pakistan."

    An American counterterrorism official said: "It's one thing to say the ISI is tied to Lashkar and quite another to say the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks. The evidence at this point doesn't get you there."

    Moreover, some terrorism analysts said that Lashkar's dependence on its original sponsors had lessened in recent years. With wealthy donors in no short supply, an established recruiting pipeline and a series of training camps, Lashkar "has outgrown ISI's support," said Urmila Venugopalan, a South Asia analyst for Jane's Information Group.

    The protection that Lashkar operatives enjoy inside Pakistan has allowed the group to thrive at the same time that Al Qaeda's leaders have been forced to hide in caves and occasionally transmit messages to one another using donkey couriers.

    In a public statement in May, Stuart Levey, the under secretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, called Lashkar a "dangerous Al Qaeda affiliate that has demonstrated its willingness to murder innocent civilians."

    But other terrorism analysts offer a more nuanced view of the group's Qaeda ties.

    On the one hand, Al Qaeda and Lashkar share many positions: a belief in a strict interpretation of the Koran, a desire to establish a government based on strict Islamic laws and a priority to evict United States troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Lashkar has helped Qaeda fighters move in and out of Afghanistan. In March 2002, a Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in a Lashkar safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, according to a State Department terrorism report. Eleven detainees currently at the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are suspected of having some kind of connections to Lashkar.

    But Lashkar and Al Qaeda do not always see eye to eye, terrorism analysts said. While Lashkar strives for the creation of a pan-Islamic state across South Asia, Al Qaeda aims to create an even larger entity. Al Qaeda is wary of Lashkar's relationship with the ISI, an American official said. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar's charity wing, denied last week that the group or its founder, Haffiz Muhammad Saeed, had any connection to the Mumbai attacks. The surviving gunman in Mumbai has claimed to have met Mr. Saeed at a training camp in Pakistan.

    On Friday, Mr. Saeed gave his regular sermon at his mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, where thousands listened to him denounce Hinduism, praise Islam and criticize Ms. Rice for visiting the region. Surrounded by security guards, Mr. Saeed, 63, a stocky man with a huge, untrimmed beard, spoke for 50 minutes to a rapt congregation that sat on the wide lawns of the Qadisiyyah Center in central Lahore.

    "Now Condoleezza Rice has rushed to India and Pakistan because infidels are united," he said. "If infidels do not stop their anti-Muslim activities, the Muslims are second to none in taking revenge."

    Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan. Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Lahore, Pakistan, and Margot Williams from New York.

    This article was reported by Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez and written by Mr. Schmitt.