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INDIA: Awaiting Pakistan’s Official Response to Mumbai Attacks

NEW DELHI, Feb 11 2009 (IPS) - Five weeks after India handed over a dossier to Islamabad containing detailed evidence on the Nov. 26-29 Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistan has finally promised an official response, based on investigations by its Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

However, the Indian government is disappointed at a statement issued on Feb. 9 by the Pakistan cabinet’s Defence Coordination Committee – including the armed services chiefs and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency – which says Pakistan needs more information.

The statement says Pakistan will register a case to bring the attacks’ perpetrators to justice under Pakistani law, but it contends that “without substantial evidence from India, it will be exceedingly difficult to complete the investigation and proceed with the case”. Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram has dismissed Pakistan’s contention as “rubbish”. The Indian External Affairs Ministry has told Pakistan: “We await a formal response. The picture is not clear.”

As New Delhi mulls its future options, a complex scenario is unfolding in the region amidst the visit to Pakistan of United States President Barack Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke.

In attack similar to the ones carried in Mumbai, a group of eight heavily armed fighters stormed three government buildings in Kabul, killing 20 people and inuring 57 others. All the eight attackers were killed, bringing the death toll to 28.

In Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, legislator Alam Zeb Khan of the secular Awami National Party was killed and seven others were injured when a remote-controlled bomb exploded close to his vehicle in Peshawar.

Meanwhile, a senior al-Qaeda leader, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, believed to be the network’s commander in Afghanistan, has warned India that it will pay a “heavy price if it attacks Pakistan. The Mujahideen will sunder your armies into the ground, like they did to the Russians in Afghanistan”.

This is the first time that al-Qaeda has specifically threatened India in such an overt fashion.

The Indian government is coming under pressure from within to explore various options to deal with what it considers to be Pakistan’s strategy of evasion and denial in respect of the Mumbai attacks and the role of jehadi militants in planning and executing them.

The FIA’s report has not been made public. But senior Pakistani officials have been quoted in the media as saying that the authorities have arrested at least five people from Karachi in connection with the attacks, and they will be put on trial with Amir Ajmal Kasab, the sole terrorist caught alive by police in Mumbai.

According to Pakistani media reports, the FIA inquiry report only blames individual suspects for the attacks and does not mention the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jamaat-ud-Dawa as the masterminds. There are suggestions too that the conspiracy to carry out the attacks was hatched in a European country and involved two South Asian states, but not Pakistan.

“This stretches credulity”, argues Karamat Ali, a Karachi-based political analyst and social activist. “Even if the plot was hatched outside Pakistan, some if not all of its executors were Pakistani. Naming Austria or Britain as the conspiracy site only suggests the existence of a supra-national jehadi network, it does not exonerate Pakistan.”

Many past terrorist attacks too had a Pakistan link. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during his December visit to South Asia said that 75 percent of the most serious terror plots being investigated by British authorities have links to Pakistan.

Analysts in the region believe that it is simply inconceivable that a handful of individuals could have conducted the Mumbai attacks without being guided by a highly inspired network with a broad political agenda, including promoting pro-Taliban interests and provoking rivalry between India and Pakistan.

The agenda may also be aimed at widening disaffection in India and promoting the communal divided between India’s Hindu majority and its sizeable Muslim minority.

Evidence collected by Indian police agencies suggests that the attackers were rigorously trained in armed combat, maritime navigation, and the use of sophisticated communications techniques including satellite phones and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).

The evidence provided in the Indian dossier on Mumbai (available at http://www.hindu.com/nic/dossier.htm) is certainly substantial and of exceptionally high quality. This assessment is reportedly corroborated by the U.S.’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which interrogated Kasab, the surviving attacker.

FBI interest in the case stems partly from the fact that among the 180 people who died in the bloody rampage, carried out by a group of ten heavily armed men, were six U.S. citizens.

Apart from Kasab’s confessions, the evidence includes the names and addresses of some of the attackers, and above all, a rich body of circumstantial evidence which, the Indian government says will stand scrutiny in a court of law in any civilised country.

The latter includes GPS records recovered from an Indian fishing trawler hijacked by the attackers; photographs of armaments used and personal effects such as garments, powdered milk cartons and toiletries, with Pakistani markings; and money trails linking Pakistan-based operators to the purchase of a Voice over Internet Protocol platform.

It also includes fingerprints on the rubber dinghies on which the attackers landed in Mumbai; and eight partial transcripts of intercepted conversations between the attackers and their LeT handlers, some of whom have been named – e.g. Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Abu Hamza and Yousuf alias Muzammil.

Says Delhi University-based political scientist Achin Vanaik: “It does not stand to reason that the FIA could not verify this information or investigate yet more leads within five weeks. The most charitable interpretation is that the Pakistan government is consciously practising outright denial. Making endless demands for more information, while ignoring the clinching evidence that has been presented, is fully compatible with this.”

According to Vanaik, a likelier hypothesis is that Pakistan’s civilian government has caved in to pressure from the army and the ISI to shield some key serving or former operatives involved in instigating and training the attackers, if not in planning the conspiracy in order to divert Pakistani troops from the Afghanistan border, where they are battling al-Qaeda-Taliban forces, to the eastern border with India.

In the process, says Karamat Ali, “Pakistan’s civilian government, already weakened by growing rivalry between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, and by steadily rising tensions between the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (N), has further eroded its authority and legitimacy. This too will play into the hands of extremist forces.”

How the Obama administration will deal with the unfolding situation remains unclear, although Holbrooke may provide some clues at the end of his visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and later, India.

But it is clear that Pakistan’s stonewalling tactics have strengthened the hands of Indian hardliners, who now advocate covert action in Pakistan, or coercive diplomacy targeting the shared waters of the Indus river system with a view to reducing their flows into Pakistan.

Matters are complicated domestically as India moves towards a general election, probably in April. “This will narrow the options available to the ruling United Progressive Alliance government,” says Vanaik. “One can only hope that sobriety will somehow prevail.”