What is, exactly, Pakistan’s role in the Islamist harassment of India ?
On November 26, 2008, an Islamist commando group in Mumbai, India, terrorized 165 people, including 26 foreign tourists, for 3 days, wounding 304.
For details of the attack see: https://www.sdbrnews.com/sdbr-news-blog-fr/un-massacre-islamiste-que-loccident-veut-ignorer
After the attack on Mumbai, suspicion quickly focused on “Lashkar-e-Taiba” (LeT), a large jihadist group based in Pakistan:
https://www.sdbrnews.com/sdbr-news-blog-fr/que-sest-il-rellement-pass-le-26-novembre-2008-bombay-
We must now ask the question that confronts Western chancelleries: what role has Pakistan played for more than 30 years in the Islamist harassment of India?
"Lashkar-e-Taiba" - LeT
“The Lashkar-e-Taiba group responsible for the Mumbai attack has become more dangerous than Al-Qaeda!” a headline by Bruce Riedel in “Brookings” dated July 1, 2012, read.
And he added:
lashkar e taiba
“The arrest of Sayeed Zabiuddin Ansari, alias Abu Jindal, at New Delhi airport late last month is a major step forward in the investigation of the world’s deadliest terrorist attack since September 11. Abu Jindal was one of the masterminds behind the November 2008 attack on the city of Mumbai. He has already confessed his role and directly involved Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) in controlling the subsequent attack.
The November 2008 attack by ten terrorists in Lashkar e Tayyiba (LeT) was the largest and most innovative terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. It marked the maturation of the LeT from a Punjab-based Pakistani terrorist group targeting India exclusively to a member of the global Islamic jihad targeting Al Qaeda’s enemies: the Crusading West, Zionist Israel, and Hindu India. LeT used mobile phones and GPS technology to terrorize an entire city and attract global attention for three days. The masterminds of LeT conducted the operation in real time from their headquarters in Pakistan, even handing down death sentences to innocent people.”
This direct indictment of the Pakistan Service was echoed by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll in his February 2018 book Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which cited, among other things, the recording of ISI agents remotely leading the commando during the 2008 attack on Mumbai, which the ISI official could not ignore...
In another article published by the International Center of Counter Terrorism (ICCT) on 27 June 2019, Prem Mahadevan explains what LeT is and what the branch of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) called the “S” wing is. In June 2001, the Pakistani news magazine Newsline published an article in which this famous “S” wing was accused of inciting domestic terrorism. He suggested that during the democratic interlude of 1988-99, when civilian prime ministers were running the country, the ISI used Islamist proxies to discredit these ministers by perpetrating massacres:
massacre perpetrated by Sindhi extremists in the city of Hyderabad on 30 September 1988. About 250 people were shot dead in just 15 minutes, mainly from the minority community of Muhajir (descendants of refugees who emigrated from India in 1947).
The next day, Karachi’s Muhajirs retaliated against innocent Sindhis, splitting efforts among civilian politicians to form a united front against the then-military regime.
“Throughout the following decade, rumors persisted that the ISI was supporting separatist factions within mainstream political parties, providing them with firearms to target each other... (read Newsline)
There is a similarity between the 1988 Hyderabad massacre in Pakistan and the attack in Mumbai two decades later. In both cases, traveling teams of gunmen shot civilians dead in public places. In both cases, the perpetrators escaped conviction. The alleged mastermind of the Hyderabad massacre, a Sindhi politician named Qadir Magsi, was acquitted in 2017. The main suspect in the Mumbai case, “LeT” military chief Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi, was released on bail in 2014 after a court case in which prosecutors and at least one judge received death threats.”...
ISI sponsor or accomplice of Islamist terrorists?
At the diplomatic level, Islamabad had promised to cooperate with the investigation into the November 26, 2008 attack, but insisted that any link to Pakistani territory was unproven. In Pakistan, everything seems to have been done to clear the trail of assassins leading to Pakistan in general and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) in particular.
But Western researchers, who had been reluctant to suspect Pakistan in 2008 and subsequent years, have endorsed Indian claims that, for 15 years, the ISI was at least perfectly aware of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba’s preparations and actions if not complicit.
As early as 2018, a decade later, Pakistan’s failure to deliver justice for Mumbai’s victims had eroded its global credibility.
Mumbai’s Mobile Brains
During the post-attack investigations, a Pakistani-American jihadist named David Headley (not his real name, Daood Gilani) was arrested in October 2009 for planning a Mumbai-style terrorist attack in Denmark. While in US custody, he claimed to have been an informant with the US Drug Enforcement Agency, tasked with infiltrating the underworld in Pakistan.
Headley told a US court that he had been trained by the ISI in intelligence gathering techniques. His interrogations showed the involvement of a LeT agent named Sajid Majeed (often called “Sajid Mir” in the international media). Majeed was the deputy director of the external operations department at LeT, dealing with jihadists around the world.
Headley said the Mumbai operation was coordinated by Majeed. He also claimed that the ten gunmen who attacked Mumbai were trained by former members of the Pakistani army special forces...
Headley’s testimony confirmed that the ISI had three objectives in the Mumbai attacks:
controlling divisions in Kashmir-based elements of "LeT",
give them a sense of success and force respect from the jihadist community,
shift the theater of domestic violence to India and minimize it in Pakistan.
Since the massacre would take place on Indian territory, there would be no obvious link to Pakistan as long as the attackers fought to the death and were not taken alive. So controlling the terrorists over the phone may have been intended to cheer them up in that suicide bombing mission. There have been numerous such guided attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir in the past, with no serious diplomatic consequences for Pakistan.
The unexpected capture of Ajmal Kasab by the Mumbai police on the night of 26 November 2008 deprived the plan of its main asset: the ability to deny it.
A timid investigation on the Pakistani side
Part of the problem is structural. A 2010 study found that a majority of Pakistanis do not believe that jihadist groups based in Pakistan and operating in Indian Kashmir are engaged in terrorism. These views may be more widespread in Pakistani society than Islamabad would like foreign audiences to know. There is also the problem of insufficient information. As Joshua White, an American counterterrorism analyst, has pointed out, many Pakistanis view LeT as a charity, in contrast to foreign observers, who are more aware of its violent side.
Possible links between LeT and Al-Qaeda
According to British investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, Usama bin Laden’s hiding place in Abbottabad may have been built on land purchased by Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In 2008, according to two former assistants of Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed, Usama Bin Laden had traveled to Manshera to attend an extraordinary meeting for the Mumbai operation on November 26, 2008 (which had become the 26/11). It had been facilitated by Lashkar, overseen by the ISI S-Wing and sponsored by al-Qaeda.
isi
In addition, documents seized during the US commando raid that killed bin Laden revealed that Hafiz Saeed corresponded with the Al Qaeda leader until the latter's death. Usama himself had shown a keen interest in the arrest and trial of David Headley by US authorities in 2009-2010. It was these findings that led the US to declare a reward for the information that led to Saeed’s arrest and conviction.
The Indian View After the Mumbai Massacre
India’s policy response has been focused overwhelmingly on proving at the diplomatic level that Pakistan was connected to the Mumbai attack, even excluding military retaliation.
If India had attacked Pakistan following the Mumbai terrorist attack, Pakistan’s involvement would have been blacked out by the international community and the attack would have become just another India-Pakistan conflict in the eyes of the world...
Good souls would have called for peace and would have decreed 50/50 responsibility in the name of fairness or impartiality. That was exactly what the Pakistani military wanted.
Does this not remind you of the pogrom of 7 October 2023 in Israel, which became a victim of Hamas in the eyes of the world ?
Despite India’s restraint, Pakistan has not responded with cooperation, but has instead taken the side of doing as little, if anything, to LeT as possible.
But if another large-scale attack were to occur, such as in Mumbai in 2006 and 2008, India would not hold back militarily.
Indian diplomacy showed the US that America would not budge until its own vested interests were at stake, and the CIA always looked the other way. The proof goes to Pakistan as much as it does to Turkey, which for years has pursued an anti-Western and anti-European policy in full view of the US, which has made it a privileged ally!
Alain Establier
Sources:
Damien McElroy and Rahul Bedi, “Bombay Attacks: Britons and Americans Targeted,” Telegraph, 27 November 2008, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3529123/Bombay-attacks-Britons-and-Americans-targeted.html
Wilson John, The Caliphate’s Soldiers: The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s Long War (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011) and Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011)
https://icct.nl/publication/decade-2008-mumbai-attack-reviewing-question-state-sponsorship#_edn1
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/avoidingarmageddon_chapter.pdf
https://www.britannica.com/event/Mumbai-terrorist-attacks-of-2008
Photos credits: Associated Press, Encyclopedia Britannica