The Pakistan Connection

To escape any of the government's anti-extremist dragnets, Lashkar cleverly morphed into Jamaat ud Dawah, a so-called Islamic charitable group, after Musharraf banned it following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Today Jamaat ud Dawah openly solicits funds and recruits adherents in Pakistan, particularly in mosques, and has undertaken high-profile relief work in the aftermath of the deadly 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the more recent destructive tremor in Baluchistan, earning it an increased following. The group's radical founder, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, is free and still openly preaches his sermons of hate despite occasional, and brief, stints in jail. Earlier this month, Saeed openly preached to a gathering of tens of thousands of faithful in Pakistan's Punjab province. He called on Pakistan to halt the truck convoys supplying U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan, accused the Pakistani army of fighting the Pakistani people, called on U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to embrace Islam, declared that only by invading India would Pakistan get river waters that he claimed were being criminally diverted by India, and promised the jihad would continue until Kashmir was free from Indian rule.

Meanwhile, Jaish-e-Muhammad, like Lashkar, has established insurgent training camps in the tribal areas. And its leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, is said to be working closely with Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Indeed, a spate of reports over the past year or so indicated that Kashmir-oriented Pakistani jihadi groups like Lashkar and Jaish had moved most of their camps and operational centers from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, where they were born, to the safer environs of the tribal area where the Taliban and Al Qaeda hold sway. For the past few years the Pakistan Army and ISI had put these jihadi groups on a very short leash, not allowing them to infiltrate across the heavily mined and guarded Line of Control that separates the Pakistani- and Indian-controlled sectors of Kashmir. As a result, the bulk of the groups are thought to have shifted their main operational bases to the tribal area.

Lashkar, Jaish and other Kashmiri jihadi groups are believed to be involved in cross-border operations into Afghanistan to attack U.S. and coalition troops operating there. But from their new tribal-areas bases, they also get an opportunity to work closely with Al Qaeda planners operating in the region. Indeed these tribal havens are perfect places for Lashkar and other like-minded, anti-Indian groups to safely plan attacks and then communicate operational ideas to loosely affiliated jihadist groups in India, most probably via the Internet. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Taliban sources tell Newsweek, has never hidden his goal of sabotaging the Indo-Pakistani peace process, even though negotiations between the two countries aimed at establishing normal cross border traffic and trade and finding a solution to the Kashmir conflict are moving at a snail's pace. Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's No. 2 man, is on the record saying he would like to promote an all-out conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbors. Ironically, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan had just completed a round of successful talks in Islamabad on countering terrorism and drug trafficking, among other things, the day before the Mumbai attacks occurred.

Unfortunately, Pakistan does not seem to realize the full danger that these jihadist groups it once sponsored still pose to regional stability. The Pakistan military still seems to view the huge Indian army as an existential threat along its eastern border, perhaps a greater menace than the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and the Kashmiri extremist groups. "(India) is a living threat," says a senior Pakistan official. "You decide what is a threat by looking at the other person's capability: what he can do in terms of troop formations and where those formations are deployed. The intention to go and attack somebody can change in an instant, so Pakistan is focused on India. While it is fighting the war on terror, (Pakistan) has not shut its eyes to the conventional threat."

In view of India's and Pakistan's rather ineffective responses to terrorism at home, strikes by Islamic militants in India are unlikely to disappear. The fact that the Mumbai terrorists were trying to single out British and American citizens, and attacked a building housing some Jewish families, clearly points to an international dimension to this attack. It may not only be a twisted way to get revenge against the alleged maltreatment of Indian Muslims at home, but also to send a message to western powers like U.S. and the U.K., which are New Delhi's close allies, to keep their hands off of India. The attacks further rattled India's already shaky economy by scaring foreigners away from Mumbai, the country's financial capital, and creating uncertainty in this formerly relaxed commercial hub.

The Mumbai attack, however, should make it clear to Pakistan and Indian--indeed to Washington and the region--that is essential for the two countries to work together ever more closely to combat this extremist threat before it derails the fledgling peace process and throws both countries back into the dangerous game in which they view each other as mortal enemies. That would be suicidal. Officials in both countries most probably realize the serious threat that a new round of mutual recriminations would pose to regional security. "It's terrible, it's tragic," says the senior Pakistani official. "I hope we can work together to end this menace which affects us both. Nothing will be served by accusations or finger pointing," he says. "That would only serve the terrorists who want to sabotage Pakistani-Indian relations." That could very well have been the terrorists' ultimate goal.

With Zahid Hussain in Islamabad

© 2008