Mumbai’s 26/11 and later revelations
November 28th, 2010
On November 26, 2008, ten terrorists rampaged across a well-known section of India’s commercial city, Mumbai, for three days and killed over 100 people before nine of them were gunned down. The one terrorist not killed was captured and has been talking to the Indians about his background. More revelations to prove Pakistani involvement in the attack have since come to light and now stand in the way of a dialogue of normalisation between India and Pakistan.
That is what Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was talking about when he said in Multan on November 26 that Pakistan had “strongly condemned” the Mumbai attacks and now hoped that the stalled dialogue with India over Kashmir, Siachen, Sir Creek and river waters would resume soon.
The Mumbai attack is yet another case in which Pakistan finds itself alone. The surviving terrorist was Ajmal Kasab, a trainee of Lashkar-e-Taiba (later Jamaatud Dawa), and a resident of a town in south Punjab. Lashkar-e-Taiba was banned by the UN Security Council. It then changed its name to Jamaatud Dawa, only to be banned again under that name by the same committee of the security council. Pakistan has been forced to run a trial against the military commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba and his cohorts but the process is taking long in the midst of a back-and-forth of the usual India-Pakistan inquiries for ‘more information’.
Meanwhile, more damning evidence has been provided by another individual, an American of Pakistani origin, David Headley, who was used by the plotters as an advance reconnaissance agent. He has spilled more beans, denied by Pakistan, but more or less believed by the entire world. Credibility leans the way it leans because of an earlier 1993 attack in Mumbai mounted from Pakistan with the help of a Mumbai don, Dawood Ibrahim, who is supposed to be currently living in Karachi. Here too, Pakistan’s response in the shape of a denial has been laughed away by the world.
We know Ajmal Kasab, but who is David Headley? People who knew him as he grew up in Pakistan have written that he is the son of a former director-general of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation and his American wife. Daud Gilani (the surname of his Pakistani father), or David as he is called now, was a perfect US-Pakistan physical and mental hybrid. He was caught while planning an al Qaeda attack in Denmark along with another Pakistani, Tahawar Hussain Rana.
Rana was born in Chichawatni in Punjab. According to one report, he was educated at Cadet College Hasan Abdal before becoming a citizen of Canada. It was in Hasan Abdal that he developed a friendship with his class fellow Daud Gilani and got to know other boys who were to rise within the military hierarchy of Pakistan and were allegedly a link in the chain that bound Pakistan to the Mumbai attack. Headley, now ‘singing’ to American intelligence officials, has named two retired army majors whom he claimed helped him in planning his reconnaissance work. He also alleged that these two officers, when in service, had worked in intelligence. No wonder, then, that the families of the Americans killed in the Mumbai attacks have asked the court in the US to summon the ISI. What is new and what actually puts Pakistan in deeper hot water is the revelation that it was al Qaeda — and Osama bin Laden personally — who thought up the Mumbai attack.
According to details revealed in a report, “Osama himself named the fedayeen team chosen for the terror strikes on Mumbai”. Headley has also said: “Lashkar commander Abdur Rehman, alias Pasha, is directly in touch with the top brass of al Qaeda, including Ilyas Kashmiri who is now number three in the al Qaeda hierarchy in Pakistan. Abdur Rehman has met Osama a number of times.”
Pakistan has not properly banned Jamaatud Dawa. Its leader Hafiz Saeed faced a trial at the Lahore High Court and was able to prove that he was improperly indicted and, after being freed, is now once again throwing challenges to India. He was allowed to hold a ‘mammoth’ rally in Lahore earlier this year to warn India against cheating Pakistan out of its waters — a false allegation — and was later allowed to hold another mammoth rally in Islamabad-Rawalpindi for the cause of Kashmir in the wake of the declaration of India-centrism at the highest military level in Pakistan.
The latest from Washington on the subject is the following statement: “Assistant Secretary US Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Robert O Black Jr, in an interview with Times Now, (a TV channel in India launched as joint venture by the Times of India and Reuters), has said that the US has been serious about the Lashkar-e-Taiba since 2001 when it was involved in the parliament attack in India. US experts have identified the outfit as the single most serious threat to the United States after al Qaeda.”
Pakistanis were greatly put off when the British prime minister said something about Pakistan being involved on the wrong side of the war against terrorism. On the other hand, our Interior Minister Rehman Malik — if one can correlate his various statements made while trouble-shooting in Karachi — thinks that attacks inside Pakistan too are planned and executed under one authority.
The concept of the ‘good’ Taliban who will get us the status of kingmakers in Kabul is completely wrong and misleading. By not taking action against declared terrorist organisations, Pakistan is actually signalling where it stands in this war. Once again we are in a war we can never win, although most of us accuse the world of waging an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. The 42 states fighting terror in Afghanistan will survive but Pakistan will have a tough time prospering under its current policy.