Following up on earlier posts here and here about Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), I’ve been looking closely at the arrest in Chicago on anti-terrorism charges of two men linked to LeT and accused of plotting attacks in Denmark.

Analysts say the Chicago case demonstrates the global reach of the militant group and its ability to plot attacks in India and around the world. The court documents submitted by U.S. authorities also allege that Lashkar-e-Taiba had suggested that attacks on India be given priority over the planned attack in Denmark, highlighting the threat still posed by the group one year after Mumbai.

As discussed in this factbox, analysts cite several reasons for Pakistan’s reluctance to dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba. These include its role in Kashmir and in India-Pakistan rivalry, and popular support for the humanitarian work of its Jamaat ud-Dawa sister organisation. They also cite an unwillingness to create a new enemy right now when Pakistan is already fighting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan and facing a wave of reprisal attacks in its cities. Lashkar-e-Taiba is the only Pakistani militant group which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan itself.

None of that makes the group any less dangerous. But while researching the subject, I also found myself asking questions about the nature of the group and the kind of support it has – beyond its alleged state backing. This is not to condone violence. But by failing to look at this support, particularly for Jamaat ud-Dawa’s  humanitarian work, are we perhaps missing at least part of the point?

The religious ideology of the Markaz ud-Dawa wal Irshad which gave birth to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat ud-Dawa is Ahl-e-Hadith, a Salafist school of thought which seeks a return to what it sees as the ”purer” practices of the early Muslims. This ideology originally sprang from a rejection of the corruption of religion by political power and of the syncretism which had thrived in South Asia through a blending of Hinduism and Islam, and which also underpinned the popularity of the Sufi tradition.

Whatever you think of this ideology, it does bear a remarkable resemblance to the thinking behind the Protestant Reformation in Europe which rejected the power and the myths of the Catholic Church and sought what it saw as a return to the original views of the followers of Jesus, best exemplified by its then heretical efforts to translate the Bible from Latin into languages that ordinary people could understand.

The Protestant Reformation led to centuries of wars, pogroms and cruelty from which Europe only properly emerged after World War Two. It also contributed to a philosophy of clean living, hard work and individualism which some argue laid the foundations for capitalism and with it, the rising power and wealth of the west.

So my first question is whether we understand properly these similarities between such reformist traditions in Islam and Christianity, both in their time seen as hardline, fundamentalist and dangerous?  And are we drawing the right lessons from this?

Secondly, one of the reasons for the popular support for Jamaat ud-Dawa is its extensive humanitarian work in education, healthcare and disaster relief.  This is not unique to Pakistan or Islam - before the development of universal free education in many countries, most people were educated in schools originally set up by charities and religious organisations.

Providing help to the poor is common to most if not all religious organisations.  In disaster relief, the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was amongst the first on the spot following the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India, just as Jamaat ud-Dawa cadres rushed to help the victims of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir

Again, are we paying enough attention to the similarities between the ways in which different religious organisations help the poor and drawing the right lessons? There are inherent dangers in this help – as seen in the activities of some Christian missionaries in the British empire, in the global network of support for Jamaat ud-Dawa that counter-terrorism experts fear can be exploited by Lashkar-e-Taiba, and in the popular backing for the RSS after the Gujarat earthquake in 2001 that may have strengthened it in its alleged role in the communal violence in the state a year later.

There are no obvious answers to these questions. But if those posting comments here could set aside the many bitter feuds which divide nations and indeed the exploitation of religion for political gain that has been a feature of every continent, how would you start addressing them?

Please try to restrict your comments to those you would be willing to make if everyone was physically present in the same room, rather than in an internet forum.

(Photos: Mumbai skyline; earthquake-hit road near Muzzafarabad in Pakistani Kashmir; a girl rescued from the Gujarat earthquake)

Given the debate about whether the United States should refocus its strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan more narrowly on hunting down al Qaeda, it’s worth looking at what happened immediately after 9/11 when it did precisely that.

Reluctant to destabilise Pakistan, then under former president Pervez Musharraf, the United States turned a blind eye to the training camps and poured money into the country. In return, Pakistan hunted down al Qaeda leaders — among them alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003. ”For the Bush administration, the priority was al Qaeda,” writes Bruguiere. ”The Pakistan Army and the ISI would focus on this - external - objective, which would not destabilise the fragile political balance in Pakistan.”

But for Bruguiere, one of the major lessons was that Islamist militants can’t be separated into “good guys and bad guys”, since they were all inter-linked. 

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures. ”After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way,” he said. “All the groups are scattered, very polymorphous and even mutant.”

Gone were the political objectives which drove terrorism before, he writes, to be replaced with a nihilistic aim of spreading chaos in order to create the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. For the hijackers on the Algiers-Paris flight, their demands seemed almost incidental. “We realised we faced the language of hatred and a total determination to see it through.”

Many have argued against this view of international terrorism as a new and nebulous Islamist network without obvious political objectives, which found its most powerful expression in al Qaeda. Just as Lashkar-e-Taiba grew out of rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the GIA sprang from anger about the annulment of elections in Algeria that an Islamist group was poised to win. Its attacks on Paris in the mid 1990s were seen as a reprisal for France’s role in supporting the government in its former colony. Many of those who support al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are driven by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other perceived injustices across the Middle East. 

Yet if he is right that the United States and its allies are facing a loose international network of Islamists with no clear pyramid structure, then it would suggest that no amount of drone bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership of the kind promoted by counter-terrorism supporters would work. Nor would it be enough, alone, to address political grievances at a national level without taking account of a network which operates globally and does not recognise the validity of the nation state. Rather, you would need a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy which went far beyond the kind of focused counter-terrorism first used by the Bush administration.

Browsing through the New Yorker profile on U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, I noticed the same argument was raised there:

“A pure counter-terror approach had, in fact, been the Bush Administration’s policy for years: kill or capture terrorist leaders, with minimal support for political institutions in Kabul and Islamabad,” it said. “It had created the mess that (President Barack) Obama inherited, with two countries under threat from insurgents and Al Qaeda’s strength increasing.

“‘Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” it quoted former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who led Obama’s first review of strategy, as saying.  “They’re part of a syndicate of terrorist groups. Selective counterterrorism won’t get you anywhere, because the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes.”

(Photos: Jean-Louis Bruguiere; Pervez Musharraf, the Taj in Mumbai, the Marriot in Islamabad)

The Jihadica website has just posted an item about an apparent rift between al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban in the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar.

“Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments ‘the beginning of the end of relations’ between the two movements,” it says.

“Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the ‘nationalist’ character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the ‘national’ model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.”

Reports of rifts between different militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan have surfaced before, particularly between Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), over the latter’s insistence on targetting Pakistan. Mullah Omar, according to media reports earlier this year, wanted the TTP - which is believed to be close to al Qaeda - to focus instead on fighting western troops in Afghanistan.

Such reports of rifts are impossible to verify and may be deliberately designed to confuse - the talk of a break between Mullah Omar and al Qaeda comes as the United States has talked of stepping up pressure on the ”Quetta shura”, named after the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where Washington says the Afghan Taliban are based. Islamabad says Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan.

But history would suggest that the Islamist militants do not always form a cohesive whole or even follow a common ideology. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahideen who had driven them out became fragmented, leading to a bloody civil war.  In Kashmir too, where a separatist revolt began in 1989, different militant groups rivalled and sometimes fought each other.

The general picture is of many different Islamist militant groups which often make common cause, and sometimes co-operate opportunistically when this suits their many different objectives. 

According to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal the three main insurgent groups in Afghanistan co-ordinate their efforts but have different command structures and work under separate strategic plans. These are the Quetta shura Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.

Within Pakistan, security forces appear to be fighting against a coalition of militant groups which include the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the sectarian anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both of which have been suspected of involvement in gun and bomb attacks in Punjab province in recent weeks. The banned LeJ was originally based in Punjab, but has been operating increasingly out of the tribal areas.

The Pakistan Army has launched an offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the TTP. It says around 1,000 foreign fighters, mainly Uzbeks, are also holed up there.

Punjab is also the base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Lashkar differs from many other militant groups in that it is not believed to have launched attacks within Pakistan itself, focusing instead on Kashmir and India. Nor does it share the Deobandi religious ideology of many of Pakistan’s militant groups and of the Afghan Taliban, instead following a tradition more akin to al Qaeda’s Salafist views.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, another Punjab-based group which like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) originally focused mainly on Kashmir, is seen as much closer to al Qaeda than the LeT.  It is one of many militant groups which is believed to have splintered in Pakistan as a result of various crackdowns following 9/11, creating many dangerous offshoots.

In Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, rebels have long been waging a separatist insurgency which Pakistan says is backed by India - a charge Delhi denies. But these rebels are quite separate from the Jundollah Sunni militant group blamed for last Sunday’s suicide bomb attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in neighbouring Iran.  Analysts argue that Jundollah, whose religious ideology is Deobandi, is increasingly following a sectarian anti-Shi’ite agenda, under the influence of Pakistan’s own Deobandi groups.

But according to French historian Stephane Dudoignon, quoted in this Reuters interview, the group does not share the Islamic internationalism of al Qaeda. Instead, its leader Abdolmalik Rigi had always stressed that he was a Baluch and Iranian patriot. And the rise of Jundollah, he says, coincided with an explosion of drug smuggling on the eastern fringes of Iran, from which it drew much of its funding.

Meanwhile on the subject of drug smuggling and to return to the original subject of the jihadica post, it’s worth noting that the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar appear to be considerably better funded than al Qaeda nowadays. That would suggest that if there is indeed a rift between a nationalist and internationalist agenda, the Afghan Taliban may have the upper hand.

(Photos: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; the TTP, opium field)
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A crucial part of gunman Mohammad Ajmal Kasab's confession at the Mumbai attack trial has been censored by the judge on the grounds that it could inflame religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. After stunning the court on Monday by admitting guilt in the the three-day rampage that killed 166 people, Kasab gave further testimony on Tuesday that included details about his training by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based militant group on U.S. and Indian terrorist lists.

The front-page report in today's The Hindu, which noted the judge's gag order in its sub-header, put it this way:

Ajmal made some crucial statements on Tuesday as part of his confession. They pertained to the purpose of the attack as indicated by the perpetrators and masterminds and the message they wanted to send to the government of India. Ajmal also wanted to convey a message to his handlers. However, this part of his confession faces a court ban on publication.

In view of the communally sensitive nature of Ajmal’s statements, judge M.L. Tahaliyani passed an order banning the publication and broadcast of Ajmal’s statement recorded on Tuesday by any media or person, except the part which pertains to the CST. Mr. Tahaliyani remarked that the trial was at “a delicate stage.”

Given the complex mix of religion and politics in India, it's not unusual to see the media playing down the communal aspect of tension and violence. In the recent general election, the party that usually plays up these differences, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), hardly used the "religion card" in its losing campaign. But that doesn't mean things are getting better. According to the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, the "unfortunate year of 2008 ... proved to be worse than 2007." See their two-part report on 2008 here and here.

But Kasab's testimony could shed important light on what role religion plays in Islamist militancy. How could a young man who wanted to become a dacoit (bandit) be convinced by Islamist militants to try to become a shahid (martyr) instead? Was he actually convinced, or did he do it for other reasons?

(Photo: Taj Mahal hotel burns, 27 Nov 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

Kasab told the court on Monday that he originally approached the militants to get weapons and training and won (surprisingly easy) admission to their office by saying he wanted to wage jihad. He was taken in and given extensive training in preparation for the Mumbai attack last November. All of this is detailed in published accounts of his statement in court on Monday. In earlier statements, police say, he showed little understanding of Islam or jihad, saying the latter was "about killing and getting killed and becoming famous."

What role did Islamist ideology play in this, and what part the confused ambitions of a poor and impressionable young man? In a publication entitled Why Are We Waging Jihad?, Lashkar-e-Taiba listed its goals as:

1) to eliminate evil and facilitate conversion to and practice of Islam;

2) to ensure the ascendancy of Islam;

3) to force non-Muslims to pay jizya (poll tax, paid by non-Muslims for protection from a Muslim ruler);

4) to assist the weak and powerless;

5) to avenge the blood of Muslims killed by unbelievers;

6) to punish enemies for breaking promises and treaties;

7) to defend a Muslim state; and

8 ) to liberate Muslim territories under non-Muslim occupation.

Did his handlers stress all this to Kasab? Did he want to do any of the above? What did his Islamist handlers say about Hindus? If they fed him a diet of anti-Hindu hatred, might it be better to publicise the details so they can be debated and discredited? Some of the most interesting contributions to such a debate could come from Indian Muslims, who live in the kind of secular democracy the LeT rejects.

(Photo: Kasab in detention, 3 Feb 2009/video grab from CNN IBN)

I'd be especially interested to hear the reaction from the famous Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, which is a traditionalist Sunni school but has urged Muslims to reject terrorism and vote in elections against extremists.

Right now may not be the best time to publish Kasab's censored confession. But revealing it at a later date, for example after the verdict, might do more good than the harm Judge Tahaliyani fears. What do you think?

Having asked last month whether Pakistan was in a position to take on the Laskhar-e-Taiba, an obvious follow-up question was to try to assess how much of a threat the militant group blamed for last year’s attacks on Mumbai represents to the West and to India.

According to analysts who track the LeT closely, the Pakistan-based militant group is not the new al Qaeda. It is still very much focused on Kashmir and India, while its single-issue agenda along with the humanitarian work carried out by its Jamaat-ud-Dawa charitable wing mean it is more comparable to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas than to al Qaeda.

That said, it has a formidable infrastructure and global network of sympathisers and fund-raisers that could be used by other groups which do want to target the west, and that in itself makes it a threat.  What also comes across in talking to people about the LeT are concerns about the group going rogue, either because it slips out of the control of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or because splinter groups break away from the leadership of its founder, Hafez Saeed, and become a danger not just to India and the West, but also to Pakistan itself. (As discussed in this earlier post, deepening instability in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, where the LeT is based, would dwarf anything seen until now in the tribal areas.)

In the meantime, Praveen Swami, associate editor at The Hindu, has written an analysis of the Indian Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Taiba for the June edition of the CTC Sentinel (pdf document). It is a must-read for its wealth of detail about the LeT’s connections in the Gulf, as well as its description of how the LeT nurtured the Indian Mujahideen within India itself.

“From its origins in Pakistan’s Punjab province, the LeT has grown into a transnational organisation,” he writes. “This development is of concern to authorities across the region for three reasons. First, the evolutionary trajectory of the LeT will make it increasingly resistant to counter-terrorism action in any one country or decapitation attempts targeting its leadership. Second, the LeT’s ability to recruit from a pool of well-educated, affluent sympathisers in multiple countries gives it dramatically enhanced reach and lethality. Third, the LeT could spawn and sustain the growth of quasi-independent jihadist movements outside of Pakistan.”

Do also check out Swami’s rather prescient article in the Hindu which he wrote in 2007warning about the risks of LeT militants reaching India by sea – just as they did in last November’s Mumbai attacks — rather than following the traditional route of crossing the Line of Control dividing Kashmir.  “So far, Pakistan appears to have moved to restrain the Lashkar from acting on its publicly declared desire to execute major terrorist strikes in India — but done little to dismantle its capability to do so,” he wrote in 2007. “As the detente process proceeds, India needs to ensure that Pakistan is urged to take this next, necessary step.”

Finally, for an insight into how the U.S. administration views the Laskhar-e-Taiba, it is interesting to see Tim Roemer, President Barack Obama’s choice for ambassador to India, bracketing the LeT along with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

According to this report in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, asked what India could do to improve its relationship with Pakistan, Roemer said: ”There’s more we can do to share information about our common threats in that area, which are al Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and try to prevent the next attack from taking place, or deflect that next attack.”

Much to talk about when the foreign secretaries and then prime ministers of India and Pakistan meet next weekon the sidelines of a Non-Aligned summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

(Reuters file photos: Mumbai skyline; LeT commander Lakhvi and U.S. ambassador-designate Tim Roemer)

The suicide bomb attack on the Pakistan Army in Pakistani Kashmir on Friday was not only unprecedented; it also raised questions about the state of militancy in Pakistan.

At its simplest level, the first suicide bombing in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir was seen as a reaction by the Pakistani Taliban to Pakistan’s military campaign against them in South Waziristan. “The militants are hurting and they are reacting. And this is a reaction to the successful operations we’ve had in Waziristan and we’ve had in the Malakand division,” Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told Reuters.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, while a government official described the bomber as a Taliban militant from Waziristan.

What is puzzling, however, is the decision to target Pakistani Kashmir. While there are historical links between Pakistan’s frontier tribesmen and Kashmir dating back to partition, as discussed by Indian strategic analyst B. Raman in this article, the region has until now been the preserve of Punjab-based militant groups focused on fighting India in Indian Kashmir. The biggest of these, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), has avoided staging attacks on Pakistani targets, and of all the militant groups operating in Pakistan, it would be expected to be critical of attacks on the military.

Why, therefore, would the Pakistani Taliban attack the Pakistan Army on the LeTs home turf? And why would Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud risk alienating the LeT — blamed for last November’s attacks on Mumbai — by sending one of his men to launch the first suicide bombing in Pakistani Kashmir and then openly claiming credit for it? An accident of the mayhem spreading in Pakistan, a sign of greater cooperation between the two groups, or a deliberate message from him to the LeT?

There has been speculation in the past among security analysts about how far the Pakistan Army and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have been using contacts in the LeT — which the ISI once nurtured to fight Indian rule in Kashmir — to seek information to use against the Pakistani Taliban and its al Qaeda allies.  That speculation dates back to the arrest of  senior al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in an LeT safe house in Faisalbad in 2002.

But in the murky world of Pakistani militancy, nobody has ever been able to work out exactly how the different groups fit together, and in particular on the extent to which they shift between cooperation on a shared agenda and competition between their many different objectives - from Afghanistan to Kashmir to global jihad to targetting the Pakistani state itself.

The attack in Muzaffarabad probably provides an important clue. What is much harder, however, is to work out how to decipher that clue.

President Barack Obama chose his words carefully when asked in an interview with Dawn earlier this week why the United States has been silent on Kashmir in recent months:

“I don’t think that we’ve been silent on the fact that India is a great friend of the United States and Pakistan is a great friend of the United States, and it always grieves us to see friends fighting. And we can’t dictate to Pakistan or India how they should resolve their differences, but we know that both countries would prosper if those differences are resolved,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

“And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest,” he said. ”And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on.”

During his election campaign, Obama said the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan could focus on tackling militants on its western border with Afghanistan. “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” he said in an interview with MSNBC in October 2008, shortly before the presidential election.

The U.S. public position changed after the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.  Under pressure from India, which argued that any talk of resolving the Kashmir dispute would be rewarding terrorism, the Obama administration quietly dropped any reference to Kashmir.

But has the U.S. position on India, Pakistan and Kashmir really changed, or just gone underground?

It’s hard to believe that the U.S. position has changed dramatically. As I discussed in this analysis, the Lashkar-e-Taiba – once nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to fight India in Kashmir – is increasingly being seen as a potential threat to the West comparable to al Qaeda (scroll down on this pdf document from CTC Sentinel to see a detailed background report on the LeT and its Jamat ud-Dawa charitable wing).

Neither the United States nor Britain can afford to turn a blind eye to the Lashkar-e-Taiba when its training camps can be used by disaffected Pakistanis from the diaspora. And that suggests that the old “hands-off” approach in which the West tended to view the Kashmir dispute as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan no longer works. It needs to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its sights on the LeT while also nudging India to resume a peace process that might — over the long term — help reduce tensions over Kashmir.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met at a regional conference in Yekaterinburg in Russia this month. But they remain a long way off from resuming a formal peace process broken off by India after the Mumbai attacks. While the Pakistan government has said it wants to resume the peace process — a position supported in detail in Pakistani op-eds, including by former Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and by retired Lieutenant-General Talat Masood – India wants Pakistan to take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba first before it will resume formal talks.

In the meantime, the Pakistan Army is engaged in what looks as though it will be a very protracted and difficult battle against the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. So even if it were determined to target the Lashkar-e-Taiba, it would be unlikely to do so until it has defeated the Pakistani Taliban. Yet without a reduction in tensions with India, it is also unlikely to move significant numbers of troops from the eastern border with India to use against the Pakistani Taliban on the western border with Afghanistan.

So how does the United States break the logjam?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits India in July, and while she is likely to choose her words in public as carefully as Obama, privately she is expected to try to enlist Indian support for U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan — including by moving forward on peace talks. In advance of her trip, she has promised to “create a new era” in the relationship between the United States and India.  Given India’s reluctance to respond — or be seen to respond — to American pressure on talks with Pakistan, that’s probably the kind of language New Delhi needs to hear if it is to be won over.

The challenge for Clinton, and U.S. administration as a whole, will be in winning over India without offending Pakistan, where people are intensely wary of a U.S.-India relationship that would squeeze the country from both sides, from Afghanistan and from India.

Some people in India are calling upon the new coalition government to make a series of bold moves towards Pakistan that will compel the neighbour to put its money where  the mouth is.

If Pakistan keeps saying that it cannot fully and single-mindedly go after militants on its northwest frontier and indeed increasingly within the heartland because of the threat it faces from India, then New Delhi must call its bluff, argued authors Nitin Pai and Sushant K. Singh in a recent piece for India’s Mint newspaper.

How about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, back for a second term, giving a categorical public declaration that Pakistan need not fear an Indian military attack so long as the Pakistan army is engaged in fighting with Taliban militants?  While a verbal commitment may not convince the military brass in Rawalpindi, it will likely play well in Washington as it rathchets up pressure on the Pakistan army to take the battle to the militants.

Second and to back up its assurance, India could move some of the army strike formations from the international border with Pakistan in Punjab and Rajasthan. “Such a bold, strategic move will not only make India’s verbal assurances credible, but it will also immediately result in irresistible pressure on the Pakistani army to commit more of its troops to the western border,” the authors wrote in the Mint piece.

Clearly, the aim of such a peace gamble is to expose the contradiction within the Pakistani position, force them to either go full throttle after militant groups, some of whom are suspected to be tied to its intelligence agencies, or  face America’s wrath.

Moving Indian troops back will compel the Pakistan army to act against the Taliban, and because it is incapable of doing so, will cause the United States to realise that there is no alternative to dismantling the military-jihadi complex, Pai and Singh argue.

Taking out Pakistan’s military-jihadi establishment is really what the battle in Pakistan is all about - that is the refrain you hear incessantly in the strategic establishment in New Delhi  as I did during a visit over the past few weeks, and one you can be sure it will be telling U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expected to visit sometime in July.

But in the immediate future, is such a bold gamble as troop pullback really going to work?
Two issues. One, what about Kashmir ? No pullback is proposed on Kashmir where tens of thousands of troops are massed on both sides of the Line of Control, and according to some Pakistani experts this really is where is there should be a re-deployment of forces.

Ejaz Haider in a piece for Pakistan’s Daily Times, says the bulk of India’s military deployment  iscentred on Pakistan, with 7 of the army’s 13 corps “specific to Pakistan.”  In any case, given that the Pakistan army’s numerical strength is half that of India, the deployment of the Pakistan army along the eastern frontier is much thinner than India’s.

And if Pakistan does not face the threat of a hot war from India as everyone keeps telling it, Haider says, then India too does not face that prospect.

“If Pakistan is asked by the US and other western capitals on the basis of this argument to pull out troops from the eastern border and deploy them to the west, then perhaps India should also be called upon to thin its much-heavier Pakistan-specific deployment along the international border, the Line of Control, the working boundary and the actual ground position line,” he says.

But can the Indian army really thin out of Kashmir? At this point when the threat of infiltration of militants from Pakistan is again being talked about?

And finally does Singh, even with a stronger parliamentary support after a general election, really have the people’s endorsement of cutting back troops from the Pakistan frontier. The wounds from the 26/11 attack on Mumbai for which the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba has been held responsible, remain fresh for a large number of Indians.  They are not in a mood to forgive or forget.

[Photos of Indian and Pakistani troops at a border checkpoint and the site of a car bombing in Lahore on May 27)

Conspiracy theories have filled a void in Pakistan that opened up as soon as the dozen gunmen who attacked the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team made a leisurely getaway  without any apparent casualties after a 25 minute gun battle.

Since the attack on Tuesday, Pakistani authorities have yet to reveal where the investigation was going,  despite Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi saying “important  leads” had been established.

There has been finger pointing in the Pakistani media in various directions, but the sympathies of the indiviual reporter or media group have to be examined in every case. Only the conspiracy theorists have answers to who could have done it and why.
 
    WHO ARE THE SUSPECTS?
    Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani jihadi group blamed for the slaughter of nearly 170 people in Mumbai last November. There were some similiarities, but LeT hasn’t got any history of attacking inside Pakistan.

Maybe LeT fears the Pakistan government, having already arrested a handful of LeT members named in the Mumbai case, seriously aims to put it out of
business and wanted to send a warning, destabilise a Pakistani government it thinks is soft on India and Kashmir. Maybe it is worried the old  friends in Pakistani intelligence are abandoning them.

But the rationale for targetting Sri Lankan cricketers, in Lahore, a city where the LeT has moved easily in the past, is hard to see.

 Another Sunni militant group with far stronger ties to al Qaeda is Lashkar-e-Janghvi. Like LeT, LeJ is a Punjabi group.

But LeJ has provided footsoldiers for al Qaeda operations, and has been involved in spectacular attacks, most recently the  suicide truck boming of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad last September, which killed 55 people.

As the Daily Times notes, the involvement of LeJ, or another group in al Qaeda’s thrall makes sense on some levels. But the question of why the Sri  Lankans were targeted is hard to square unless the answer is that it could have been anybody. The attack has certainly achieved an  al Qaeda objective in terms of ruining Pakistan’s international image and undermining faith in the government.

 The Pakistani Taliban also have ties to al Qaeda and have been blamed for the assassination of former prime minister  Benazir Bhutto, though there’s a surfeit of conspiracy theories around her slaying too.

(more…)

An Indian military presence in Afghanistan to put further pressure on Pakistan? That would be the red  rag for Pakistan, and the end of its long struggle to seek strategic depth  in Afghanistan against its much larger eastern neighbour.

Indian newspapers have reported army chief General Deepak Kapoor as saying at a news conference that such a move would squeeze Pakistan, although he seemed to be at considerable pains to stress this  was a decision that India’s politicians had to take.

Kapoor said New Delhi’s efforts in Afghanistan, which themselves have aroused suspicion in Islamabad, were confined to reconstruction so far. It was up to the Indian government to decide whether the option to “strategically squeeze” Pakistan from both sides by placing a division or so of Indian soldiers in Afghanistan should be considered.

“We are only assisting Afghanistan in its reconstruction efforts at present. The political leadership will have to take a decision if something more is required,” the general said, according to the Times of  India.

The Hindustan Times quoted him thus: “Changing our strategic policy towards Kabul in terms of raising military stakes is one of the factors that is to be determined politically.” 

Kapoor’s remarks, however carefully phrased, are unlikely to go unnoticed in the strategic establishments. Is it feasible or is this a part of a tense psychological battle that New Delhi has mounted against Pakistan following the Mumbai attacks?

You could argue several reasons why an Indian military presence in Afghanistan is most unlikely beginning from the fact this further complicates a messy battlefield where America is doing all it can to get everyone, but especially the Pakistanis, to focus on the hunt for al Qaeda and the Taliban. Then, how do you justify sending troops to another country, even if it is Afghanistan? Would they be part of the U.S.-led coalition or would they operate independently? Is it even feasible from a military point of view?

Perhaps the idea is to force Pakistan to blink by threatening to squeeze it militarily, on top of a diplomatic encirclement as pointed out in a previous post on this blog.

On Thursday, Pakistan said security forces had closed five training camps run by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed for the Mumbai attack, and arrested 124 of its leaders and those of a related charity. So it doesn’t look like the heat is off, even if there is considerably less talk of conflict

[Reuters pictures of the Taj hotel, Mumbai and an Afghan woman with her son on a Kabul street]