By Patricia Lee Sharpe
The murderous attack on Mumbai engendered reactions that came close to horrified admiration. The attack from the sea was audacious. It was extremely well planned. It was brilliantly executed.
But who masterminded the massacre and why? And why was it brought off now, which is to say about two weeks ago? I had a hunch about the latter, but I couldn't post it because my out-of-the-classified-information-loop civilian imagination had to leap too wide a gap. The stepping stone I needed only came to light (for me) on Sunday.
Lashkar in the Cross Hairs
Meanwhile the who, organizationally speaking, was quickly identified by India and—India should be very grateful for this—by the U.S., which threatened to step in if Pakistan failed to follow up against Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the Islamist proxies created some years ago by Pakistan’s military. LET’s founding purpose? To make India’s portion of Kashmir too hot for India to hang on to. Although it was politically necessary for Pakistan’s less than inspiring President Zardari to play hard to convince, the evidence was compelling enough, and it was made sufficiently public, to force Islamabad to raid a militant training camp outside of Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. During those days of hesitation, Zardari was probably also haunted by the violent reaction to his predecessor’s bloody raid on the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad a few years ago.
But the raid on the LET camp, eventually, was on. Among those carted away was one Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakvi, who was directing the Mumbai operation from a supposedly safe distance. Cell phones are two-edged swords when it comes to orchestrating complex operations, however. The operatives may get the message, but so do the investigators. India has even found and arrested the guys who supplied the phones the attackers carried. They turned up in Kolkata, of all places. Other electronic communications methods, it seems, can also lead to perps, though the difficulty is greater.
Proxies Aren’t Perfect
As the U.S. discovered when its own Islamist proxies in the first Afghan War turned out to be less than grateful for the America weapons and money they used to run the Soviets out of Afghanistan, Islamabad is, perhaps, learning that the violent men it recruited to wreak havoc in Indian Kashmir have their own blowback potential. Well, that’s what Pakistan is asking us to believe, anyway. The LET is “a private organization.” It is “not the Pakistani state,”according to Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S. This said, Pakistan was obliged to take some dramatic open action against the rogues, especially since India, which reacted with incredible restraint to previous death-dealing attacks attributed to Pakistan-backed agents, is less inclined to be philosophical this time. The Mumbai attack was too big and too embarrassing, and an election is coming up, so New Delhi wants blood or bodies to prosecute. The possibility that India might be in the mood for some sort of attack across the border is not being laughed off by anyone.
Still, Pakistan is probably hoping to have the last laugh here, again. It’s an old game. You round up the little guys, and let the big guys get away. In the case of the LET, long identified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and officially “illegal” in Pakistan itself, the sleight of hand is achieved by a cute little subterfuge. There’s an Islamist charity which serves as LET’s unbanned cover organization. That’s the oh-so-saintly Jamaat-ul Dawa, which operates schools, etc., and its oh-so-pious top leaders are considered inviolate because, it has been reported, if they were “grilled, it would be tantamount to civil war in Pakistan.” (Actually I think this is putting it a little too dramatically, but some violence could be expected.) What’s more, continues this writer, “militancy cannot be easily stamped out—it has a habit of reinventing itself.” The last time the U.S. pressured Pakistan to shut down LET military training camps, hundreds of its militants simply joined forces with Al Qaeda. That could happen again, Syed Saleem Shazad warns.
The Same Old Same Old?
Possibly. But that was in 2004. I’m not so sure that India, let alone the U.S., will be so easily placated on the eve of 2009, especially now that the fallen attackers, as well as the one who probably regrets that he was captured alive, have been identified as, beyond all doubt, Pakistani. If people credibly connected to the Mumbai operation, people like Zaki and others still unnamed, are neither extradited to India nor put on trial in Pakistan, India is not going to be satisfied. Furthermore, a fact that should be more widely appreciated, Islam doesn’t stand still either. Those who don’t think that Islam should be propagated by violent coercion are gradually finding the courage to speak out and say so.
The Real Reason Why?
Ambassador Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. gave three possible reasons for the attack last week: (1) to create mayhem in India; (2) to bring down the Zardari government; (3) sabotage India-Pakistan relations. All these are believable goals for fundamentalist militants of the sort who would like to see the sub-continent under the domination of Islam even more completely than the vast domain inherited by the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb back in the 17th century. (Interesting historical factoid: Aurangzeb, too, was a religious fanatic and the empire was smaller at his death.)
But I am not alone in thinking that there’s a fourth, more proximate possibility for the attacks on Mumbai: to take pressure off the Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgents in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. By this fall Pakistan had done the unthinkable, which is to say, the brass had pulled troops away from the border with India. Suddenly the government was winning battles in the tribal areas where its forces had for years been mauled and humiliated. What a shock to the insurgents! Not only were they losing men, they were losing the all important aura of invincibility. On Oct 13th, some 27 militants were killed. On Nov. 17th, another 16 were reported killed. And so on. Assuming these reports are a true reflection of trends on the border, the militants had reason to be worried. They could be caught in a pincer between the Pak army in the south and NATO in the north. But to get those too effective troops pulled out of the mountains, the insurgents (and their shadowy backers in the military) needed a crisis. So why not manufacture one?
Provoking India, Again
Only one kind of crisis could be expected to unify nationalist sentiments in Pakistan, promoting as a by-product sympathy and support for the militants. If bogey man India could be provoked into issuing threats or maybe into conducting cross-border raids, the all too effective troops would have to be redeployed, to face the traditional enemy, thus taking pressure off an insurgency which had begun to threaten even the lowland settled areas of Pakistan.
If this were the answer to the question of why, I still had a time line problem. The Mumbai attack itself was one more demonstration of how sophisticated and ingenious al Qaeda and its allies can be when it comes to planning and carrying out terrorist operations. 9/11 was a very long time in the making. The coordination was extraordinary. The Madrid train station and the London Underground attacks were pretty professional, too. Between the tide turning battles in the tribal areas and the attack on Mumbai there wasn’t enough time for even a strategic genius to mount the plan we saw in action de novo. A mere four to six weeks to conceive, map out and accomplish out a ten-or-more man, multi-object terrorist attack by sea? No way! Especially when the recruiting and training of the martyrs to carry out the mission has to be factored in, too.
The Time Line Problem Solved
But what if there were plans for all occasions waiting on the shelf, so to speak. Plans ready to be activated when the time was ripe. With such a plan in waiting, the right young men could be trained to carry it out fairly quickly. And hey! the brains of the operation could keep them on the right track electronically!
Well, this was a logical solution, but I didn’t feel comfortable about proposing it without a little supporting data. My problem was solved on Sunday:
Police investigators say that an Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, in jail in Uttar Pradesh, India, may also be linked to the militants who attacked Mumbai. Mr. Ansari, who was detained in February [ ! ], has told the authorities that he scouted targets in Mumbai for another Lashkar-e-Taiba plot. That plot was foiled when he and five co-conspirators were captured [in connection with another plot].
Of course, we don’t (or I don’t) know to what extent the “foiled plot” was elaborated or what its other components were, but prudence and wisdom might deduce that there could be plenty of ideas for wreaking havoc all ready for action. Every so often, in fact, hints to that effect surface. The Bush administration ignored intimations of what became 9/11, and evidently the U.S. warned India that something nasty was likely to creep out of the sea into Mumbai.
As a result, India’s leaders have, perhaps rightly, been excoriated for leaving Mumbai so undefended. In many ways, India did indeed drop the security ball, and yet it's impossible to protect every potential target all day everyday year after year. Reasonable preparedness will never be perfect protection.
No Apocalypse, Yet
Americans behaved like scared rabbits after 9/11, which allowed a government with authoritarian predispositions to trash the U.S. Constitution and herd us into a tragic, foolish war in Iraq. India’s reaction, so far, has been gratifyingly rational, which is a relief, since both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers. Meanwhile, miraculously, India’s Hindu supremacist, hyper-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party hasn’t stirred up anti-Muslim sentiment. Indian Muslims generally have condemned terrorism, and Muslim leaders in Mumbai have even refused to bury the dead attackers in Muslim cemeteries. “Given what the attackers did, they can’t really be Muslims” goes the reasoning. If the object of the Mumbai massacre was to destabilize India or to provoke the Indian government into attacking Pakistan so that Pakistani troops could be withdrawn from battling insurgents in the mountainous areas, it seems to have failed. According to the Pakistani daily Dawn, Islamabad "would be forced to withdraw its troops from the Afghan border if India deployed additional troops on the eastern border. However, as of a few days ago tensions between the two countries had not reached that level.
If, on the other hand, the objective was to halt the peace and trade talks between the Zardari government and the Congress government in New Delhi, it has certainly succeeded, at least for the foreseeable future. This may be good for the Islamist project, but it is not good for most people in either country.