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The key question: Who benefits if Pakistan is blamed for Mumbai?

 
The National (VAE)
November 30 2008
Tony Karon
 
Like a football defender who holds up his arms to show the ref that he had nothing to do with the opposing striker crashing to the turf, Pakistan's government plaintively urged India to refrain from blaming it for the Mumbai massacre. Of course, the defender is often innocent – as Pakistan's political leaders almost certainly are – but they know that when terror strikes in India, the knee-jerk reaction is to blame Pakistan.
 
And not without good reason. Terrorism has long been part of the Pakistani military establishment's strategy of proxy warfare against India over Kashmir, and more recently, even, over Afghanistan. Kashmiri jihadist outfits – some of them suspects in last week's Mumbai attacks – have long been based in Pakistan and backed by its Inter Services Intelligence agency. When suicide bombers struck India's embassy in Kabul in July, the CIA produced clear evidence of involvement by ISI operatives.
 
So, with Indians seething after the Mumbai attack, it's hardly surprising that Delhi is looking for a target for its ire. Of course, in what V.S. Naipaul dubbed “the land of a million mutinies”, any number of separatist groups could hypothetically have been responsible. And given the militant talk and terror attacks recently emanating from the nationalist Hindu community, conspiracy theorists might even suggest that their anti-Muslim agenda would benefit from the discord sowed by the outrage in Mumbai.
 
There are also plenty of poisonous grievances among India's own 140 million Muslims, many of whom form an impoverished and disadvantaged underclass periodically subjected to horrific pogroms. But while there's plenty of material there for any terrorist recruiter to work with, the grounds for suspecting outside help are overwhelming.
 
As the former CIA man Robert Baer noted, the men who carried out the attack were well trained and almost certainly combat experienced. “You do not sustain a military assault for three days, taking only combat naps, unless you know what you are doing,” Baer wrote. “You have to have been shot at before. You cannot be intimidated by flash-bang grenades, or commandos fast-roping down the side of a building.”
 
The scale of the attack, which involved a large number of trained fighters moving through terrain that had clearly been well reconnoitred, suggests a high degree of professionalism in its planning.
 
Police work typically begins with the question of motive, and this is plain: a ratcheting up of Indo-Pakistani tensions, possibly even threatening confrontation along traditional fault lines in Kashmir and elsewhere. The beneficiaries of an escalation of tension would be all those whose interests are threatened by Indo-Pak rapprochement – al Qa'eda and the Pakistani Taliban elements coming under sustained attack by Pakistani and US forces along the Afghan border; and hard-core elements of the military and intelligence community whose political DNA is orientated towards confrontation with India.
 
Not only would the Islamist militants want to reorient the Pakistani military away from counterinsurgency and towards confrontation with India – their common enemy – but so would elements in the military and intelligence services, who are hostile to deploying the army against the Taliban and who see the jihadi proxies as a key element of a continuing strategic rivalry with India.
 
Provoking India would not only realign the interests of the Pakistani military and the Islamists, it would threaten US efforts to reorient the Pakistani military towards domestic counterinsurgency, and to broker a deeper rapprochement with India – a development US analysts believe is key to resolving the conflict in Afghanistan.
 
Still, the Pakistani politicians are quite right to throw up their arms and warn that blaming them would be wrong and counterproductive – for if there were assistance from inside Pakistan for the attacks, it came from elements looking to derail the government's own agenda. The military and, in particular, the ISI, do not in any serious way hold themselves answerable to elected politicians. When President Asif Ali Zardari sought earlier this year to place the ISI under the control of the Ministry of
the Interior, he was quickly warned off by the military –and complied.
 
Zardari, opportunist though he may be, takes a position strongly at odds with the jihadi proxy war favoured by the military. He angered the military establishment earlier this year by using the term “terrorists” to describe the Kashmiri militant groups. He has also alarmed the brass by offering to adopt a no-first-strike nuclear policy towards India.
 
So, the Pakistan government is not exactly in control of its intelligence service, and even if the Mumbai murderers received help from within the ISI, it could have come from rogue elements more committed than the leadership to the jihadi proxy war.
Islamabad is already teetering under the pressure generated by the US
counterinsurgency effort on the Afghan border, and by a financial crisis that has forced it to seek a bailout from the IMF. Plunging the country back into a state of conflict with India may hasten the demise of the current interlude of civilian rule and restore the military to power. That, of course, may not be cause for dismay among the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre. But a bloodied India may not have the patience for propping up the Pakistani government if it is deemed unable to prevent terror attacks emanating from its own soil.
 
Tony Karon is a New York-based editor and analyst who blogs at rootlesscosmopolitan.com
 
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