None So Blind...

There are, it is often remarked, none so blind as those who will not see.

As Indian patience finally reached its limits after the serial attacks onMumbai's rail system, which killed at least 182 people in near-simultaneousexplosions at seven different locations on July 11, 2006, scheduledsecretary-level talks between Islamabad and Delhi were indefinitely deferred.India also issued a strong call to Pakistan to fulfil its oft-repeated promiseof dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism on its soil. India's PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh, travelling to the G-8 Summit at St. Petersburg,declared, "The international community must isolate and condemn terroristswherever they attack, whatever their cause and whichever country or groupprovides them sustenance and support", and called for "an approach ofzero-tolerance for terrorism".

The 'international community' responded with suitable rhetoric in the G-8'sDeclaration on Counter-Terrorism, but, while Indian diplomats celebrated itsniceties, it offered little hope of concrete action against the state sponsors ofterrorism, including those who were in clear and demonstrable violation of UNResolutions on the subject, specifically including Resolution 1373 which imposesspecific duties on member states, inter alia, to end support, "active orpassive", to terrorist entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, denysafe haven to terrorists, their financiers and planners, and prevent themovement of terrorists across their borders. The UN Resolution 1267, moreover,set up a Committee to identify individuals and entities belonging to orassociated with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and required member-states to imposespecific sanctions against these. It is significant that at least three groupsoperating from Pakistan against India, specifically, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT),the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahiddeen (HuM), are on the 1267Committee's consolidated listing.

Immediate and shrill denials of Pakistani culpability in the Mumbai blasts,and in other acts of terrorism in India, came from two expected sources:Islamabad and Washington. General Musharraf advised India not to "startthis blame game" and "give unsubstantiated comments". He alsoadvised India to look within and address its own failings instead of blamingothers. These positions were echoed by demands for evidence and immediaterestoration of the 'peace process' from Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, foreignminister Khurshid Mahmoud Kasuri, and a host of other ministers and officials.

India responded to the calls for 'hard evidence' by demanding the renditionof Syed Salahuddin, the 'chairman' of the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen (HM),headquartered at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), and terroristand ganglord, Dawood Ibrahim, located at Karachi, against whom overwhelmingevidence existed, including open source evidence of their continuous presence inand operation from areas within Pakistan or under Pakistani control. 'Immediateaction' on this count, the ministry of external affairs argued, would help"convince the people of India that we (India and Pakistan) are workingtogether… against terrorism".

It was at this stage that Washington interceded on Pakistan's behalf, asAssistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher gratuitously advised India to"find the evidence", adding further that "some of the groups thatare suspected in these bombings are actually outlawed in Pakistan." Warmingup to the theme, he observed further, "no country has done more thanPakistan in the ongoing fight against terrorism.... And no country has lost morepeople than Pakistan." Boucher's support immediately encouraged Islamabadto summarily reject Delhi's demands for Salahuddin's and Ibrahim's extraditionor rendition.

Boucher's observations, however, omitted a great deal of the 'evidence' ofterrorist activity emanating from Pakistani soil that is manifestly available toWashington, and which must underlie the State Department's annual reports onterrorism. It is significant that the most recent Country Reports on Terrorism,2005, issued by the US Secretary of State, identify the LeT, the JeM, the HuM,the HM, the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), and the Al Badr Mujahideen as'foreign terrorist organisations'. [The LeT, JeM and the HuM, as already noted,also find mention on the UN 1269 Committee's listing of organisations linkedwith the Taliban and Al Qaeda, presumably on the basis of evidence available tothe 'international community' and to the US].

The Report records, further, that the "Jaish-e-Mohammed continues tooperate openly in parts of Pakistan despite President Musharraf's 2002 ban onits activities. The group is well-funded, and is said to have tens of thousandsof followers who support attacks against Indian targets…"

With regard to the LeT, the Report observes that "some members (of theLeT) were facilitating the movement of al-Qaida members in Pakistan", andalso records that the organization functions under a number of identitiesincluding 'Jamaat ud-Dawa' and Al Monsoorian', and that it is "Based inMuridke (near Lahore) and Muzaffarabad" (in PoK).

We are also informed, again on the authority of the US Secretary of State,that "HUJI operatives have received training at Pakistan's Inter-ServicesIntelligence Directorate (ISID)-sponsored camps in Pakistan."

The report is somewhat coy about the location of HM, but we learn that its"location/area of operation" is "Jammu, Kashmir, andPakistan". The veil is rather thin, and the report goes on to note that thegroup "has not engaged in terrorist acts outside India"; ergo, it islocated in Pakistan, but only engages in terrorist acts in India. It isconfirmed, further, that "HM claimed responsibility for numerous attackswithin Kashmir", and that "The group is the militant wing ofPakistan's largest Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami". TheReport also notes, quite unambiguously, that the HM is "led by SyedSalahuddin". Of course, Salahuddin's specific location is omitted, but thisis information that the State Department can immediately procure from any cubreporter in Pakistan, if it does, indeed, lack such intelligence.

Dawood Ibrahim's location can also be identified from comparable sources, andBoucher would be advised to note that this ganglord has been on the USTreasury's list of designated 'terrorist supporters' since October 2003.

Boucher would also be advised to note that the US has held, and continues tohold, hundreds of 'terrorist suspects' without a shred of evidence, without dueprocess, without trial and without even minimum rights guaranteed by theprotocols of war at Guantanamo Bay; and that the US has secretly sought andsecured the 'extraordinary rendition' of hundreds of others who have disappearedinto secret locations, again without any semblance of due process or legalrepresentation, for what is euphemistically referred to as 'interrogation' by'allies' who have a reputation for inventive brutality. A large proportions ofsuch renditions originate in Pakistan.

The fact is, the US has had sufficient and continuously mounting evidencesince the early 1990s, to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, but ithas balked against taking this step on considerations purely of strategic andtactical expediency. The Clinton Administration did, of course, put Pakistan ona list of 'suspected' State-sponsors of terrorism, but all that is now in thepast. With no capacities of its own to pursue and neutralize Osama bin Laden andthe Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Washington has unequivocally 'rehabilitated' Islamabadas its principal ally in its selective 'global war on terrorism' in the SouthAsian region.

Pakistan, consequently, operates under an implicit US sanction to pursue itslimitless ambitions in South Asia and beyond, simultaneously through the twininstrumentalities of diplomacy and terrorism, except where such terrorismtargets US interests. It is the impunity conferred by the double standards,guaranteed support and advocacy emanating from Washington, which have allowedPakistan to continue its campaigns of terror in India.

There is overwhelming evidence of these campaigns, with hundreds of terroristmodules identified and neutralized across India, volumes of interceptedcommunications, gigantic stores of seized weaponry and explosives. Washington isaware of this evidence, and can seek greater access to it if it needs furtherreaffirmation. Washington has, moreover, enormous and independent confirmatoryflows of such intelligence and evidence from its own assets in the region. It isnot 'hard evidence', which Boucher coaxes India to provide, that is lacking; itis, quite simply, the willingness to look at and act on it.

Pakistan's irredeemable leadership will not give up its enterprise ofterrorism unless it is left without a choice. In abandoning terrorism, it wouldneed to give up all vestiges of its current and over-extended strategicprojections, for it has no other instrumentalities or natural capacities fortheir attainment. The country is hostage to a dictatorship, an army, a polityand an elite that have demonstrated no commitment to civilized governance ornorms of acceptable international conduct since the creation of this ill-fatednation. Unless this stranglehold is forcibly broken, the ISI will continue to'manage and deploy' its various 'assets', including the supposedly 'banned'terrorist groups, in its covert war against India and Afghanistan.

The US may find this situation tactically acceptable. But 9/11 has powerfullessons (as have the succession of terrorist arrests on US soil and across theworld, thereafter) that are being ignored here. Terrorism does not respectinternational borders, and the Islamist terrorism that is the principal tool ofmobilization in Pakistan's covert war against India, is a universal ideologythat recognizes America as one of its foremost enemies. If Islamist terrorismsucceeds anywhere in the world, it will repeat itself everywhere. FortressAmerica has been breached once. Unless the enemy is destroyed in lands currentlyfar from the American imagination and vision, it will be breached again.

The footprint of almost every act of international terrorism since 9/11 (andbefore) passes inexorably through Pakistan. This is where the enterprise ofIslamist terrorism thrives. This is where, now or, at infinitely greater costs,eventually, the threat will have to be neutralized.

Ajai Sahni is Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management.Courtesy, the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia TerrorismPortal