Author: Ramesh Thakur
Publication: Globe and Mail
Date: December 10, 2008
URL: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081210.wcoindia11/BNStory/specialComment/home
India reflexively blames Pakistan for nearly
all terrorist incidents; Islamabad habitually denies any involvement or links.
After last month's attacks in Mumbai, however, the proper response to Pakistani
denials is the double positive of "yeah, right." For all of India's
mistakes, abuses and atrocities in Kashmir, the worst outcome would be for
outsiders to impose a moral equivalence between democratic India and Pakistan.
According to U.S. officials quoted by The
New York Times, Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency has
shared intelligence with and provided protection to the banned Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Meanwhile, India has been second only to Iraq as the stage for terrorism,
averaging more than 1,000 killings annually for the past four years.
But even by these standards, the carnage in
Mumbai stands out for its savagery and audacity. The combination of training,
selection and advance reconnaissance of targets, diversionary tactics, discipline,
munitions, cryptographic communications and false identifications is typically
associated with special-forces units. Previous terrorist methods had involved
remote controlled or timed devices, but this was a three-stage amphibious
operation.
After Mumbai, even U.S. agencies are reassessing
their view of Lashkar-e-Taiba, concluding it is a more capable and greater
threat than previously believed. For the first time in India, luxury hotels,
a hospital and a Jewish centre were attacked and foreigners and Indians were
killed without discrimination. This is also the first major terrorist attack
in India that received saturation coverage by the world news media, bringing
home to Westerners that India is a front-line state against international
terrorism.
Many Indians are as angry and disgusted with
their own politicians as with Pakistan's perfidy. New Delhi's intelligence
failures and bumbling response, worthy of Inspector Clouseau, were amplified
by some politicians' tone-deaf comments, which reeked of insolence and imperiousness.
Most Indian officials have parsed their words
more carefully, however, pointing to "elements" inside Pakistan
- a recognition of rogue factions within Inter-Services Intelligence. Fareed
Zakaria, a Mumbai-born Muslim, has written of Pakistan's civilian government
being "an innocent bystander" as known terrorist groups operate
with brazen openness.
President Asif Ali Zardari's overtures of
friendship to New Delhi have been overshadowed by his ineffectualness against
the military-intelligence-terrorists complex. He agreed to an Indian request
for the head of the ISI to travel to India to help co-ordinate the investigation,
but reneged when the military and intelligence officers balked - the foreign-affairs
equivalent of a soccer "own goal." To the extent that terror networks
are regionalized across South Asia, so should counterterrorism networks be
regionally co-ordinated.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
American intelligence sources have made clear they share Indian assessments
of Pakistan's role in terrorism against India. The goal of pro-militant ISI
agents may be to provoke Indian troop movements and draw Pakistani units from
the Afghan border region to Kashmir, to show the civilian government that
the military still calls the shots and to restore the agency as custodian
of national interests rather than a stooge of the Americans. Sensitive to
these strategic calculations, India has demonstrated extraordinary forbearance
and restraint. This must be matched by credible, effective and visible action
by Pakistan to rein in the terrorists and those with financial, organizational
and personnel links to them.
Such action is not likely without sustained
and intense international pressure, because the Pakistani military-intelligence
community has never made the fundamental decision to turn its back on the
culture of jihad. Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to have been complicit in the
2001 attack on India's Parliament and the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. Every
time Pakistan comes under intense international pressure, a few terrorist
suspects are captured and jailed. Islamabad denied for years that LET had
morphed into the "charitable" Jamaat-ud-Dawa with its leader living
openly in Lahore, but - surprise, surprise - when Western pressure was ratcheted
up after Mumbai, camps were raided and some radicals were captured.
This should no longer be enough. The entire
structure of Pakistani terrorism must be verifiably destroyed to international
satisfaction, on pain of the country being labelled a terrorist state under
United Nations resolutions. Otherwise, the price will be paid increasingly
not just by Indian victims, but by Western ones. If Kashmir was the sole motivating
force of the Mumbai terrorists, they would have spared the foreign victims.
Indeed, they were equally cruel to Indian Muslims, rich guests and poor workers.
Their agenda stands exposed by their own choice of victims.
For the terrorists to be destroyed as a potent
force for evil, their links with Pakistan's military and intelligence must
be severed, completely and irreversibly. For this to happen, Pakistan's military
and intelligence elite must learn to construct their national interest differently.
To help or push them to do so, the international community and the world's
media must cease and desist from hyphenating India with Pakistan.
- Ramesh Thakur is director of the Balsillie
School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont.
