Posts Tagged ‘Mumbai attacks’
Indian engineer is an Al Qaeda member
The first Indian Muslim to be associated with global terror network al Qaeda, who was arrested in France two weeks ago, is a mechanical engineer from south India, Indian Home Minister P Chidambaram announced on Monday.
Mohammad Niaz was arrested in France for links with al Qaeda’s Algerian arm.
Mohammad Niaz, who hails from Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, had been “radicalised” very early in life and had been in touch with the proscribed Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi), Chidambaram told reporters in New Delhi. “He joined Simi based in Tamil Nadu at the age of 21 and had been on the scanner of Indian intelligence agencies before he was arrested (in France),” he said. Simi is also allegedly allied with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which the Indian government believes is responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Niaz was arrested at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on May 10 upon arrival from Algeria, where he had developed links with an al Qaeda franchise. “It is reported that Niaz has been arrested for links with the terror group that is recruiting people for jihad in the Pakistan and Afghanistan region,” Chidambaram said. “The inputs that the government has on him indicate that he is a trained activist with a militant bent of mind,” he said.
Niaz is among seven suspected terrorists held by French authorities earlier this month. But the French government has not linked them to any specific plan to carry out attacks in that country. French Interior Minister Claude Gueant described Niaz as a man with a high level of technical training.
The Mohali Maelstorm
By: Rohit Kumar
ZoneAsia-Pk
–‘The Times of India reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to reach out to Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, which “could open up new possibilities of deepening Indo-Pak engagement” (ToI). India’s and Pakistan’s home secretaries, the top civil servants in charge of security issues, have begun talks in New Delhi ahead of this week’s semifinal match-up between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup, their first formal peace talks since the 2008 Mumbai attacks (Dawn, AFP/Reuters). Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the match with him, and also invited Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari (Dawn).’—
Read Complete Article: http://www.zoneasia-pk.com/ZoneAsia-Pk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4039:the-mohali-maelstorm&catid=70:free-talk&Itemid=84
The Mohali Maelstorm
By: Rohit Kumar
ZoneAsia-Pk
–‘The Times of India reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to reach out to Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, which “could open up new possibilities of deepening Indo-Pak engagement” (ToI). India’s and Pakistan’s home secretaries, the top civil servants in charge of security issues, have begun talks in New Delhi ahead of this week’s semifinal match-up between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup, their first formal peace talks since the 2008 Mumbai attacks (Dawn, AFP/Reuters). Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the match with him, and also invited Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari (Dawn).’—
Read Complete Article: http://www.zoneasia-pk.com/ZoneAsia-Pk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4039:the-mohali-maelstorm&catid=70:free-talk&Itemid=84
Preserving the slender thread in Pakistan
Kaustav Chakrabarti
The arrest of Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square Bomber, resulted in a flurry of public warnings from senior US officials. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton warmed Pakistan of ‘severe consequences’ should another terror act be traced back to Pakistan’s tribal areas, while urging Pakistan to target militants in North Waziristan. Broadening the aperture of counterinsurgency is a legitimate expectation of the west and Pakistan’s neighbours. However, issuing public warnings and accusations (Clinton also made a veiled reference to Pakistan not sharing full information about Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar) is counterproductive and will only serve to snap the slender thread of consensus forged against terrorism among the people and the soldiers of Pakistan. Repeated ‘orders from Washington’ runs the serious risk of undoing arguably the most decisive driver behind successes in Swat and South Waziristan – Pakistani ownership of its war against extremism.
The Slender thread – Pakistani ownership of its struggle
Last year’s much-celebrated offensives in Swat Valley and South Waziristan, the nerve centre of the Pakistan Taliban, were not a result of pressures from United States. In fact, they were the outcome of internal dynamics. Operation Rah-e-Rast in Swat began after the local Taliban refused to abide by a peace deal, even after their popular demand of Shariah was met. It was Taliban excursions into abutting districts, and not a sophisticated information campaign, that cost them local support; a death blow to any insurgent. On the other hand, Operation Rah-e-Nijat in South Waziristan commenced after militants linked with the Taliban attacked the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi.
Since then, officers and soldiers killed fighting the Taliban have been afforded the status of shaheed (martyr), an honour that till recently, was exclusively reserved only for those who died fighting rival India. Large number of people gathered to pay homage to the Brigadier who laid down his life defending GHQ, and the young officers who were executed by militants in Swat. When the Taliban attacked a military mosque in Rawalpindi, the entire nation shared the grief of soldiers who lost family members. Surveys prove that more Pakistanis approve of fighting terrorism; what they can’t quantify is the trauma that they’ve gone through before collectively agreeing for the need to slay demons of the past. The silver lining, if there ever is a silver lining to suicide bombing, is this very internalised consensus – a home-grown response to a home-grown problem.
Change in public opinion
Things were not always like this. Just a few years ago, the army’s assault on Lal Masjid in Islamabad, after the mosque had become a haven for militants, hardly generated the public approval that has become the norm since 2009. Deaths of students, most of who belonged to the tribal areas, angered large sections of the Pashtun community and brought them even closer to the Taliban. Not surprisingly, the aftermath of the raid witnessed an unprecedented hike in suicide bombings across Pakistan. The fact that major operations in those years took place at the same time as General Pervez Musharraf happened to be visiting Washington did not help matters either. To put things in perspective, compare 2007 Pakistan with the American experience in Vietnam or, the Indian experience in Sri Lanka – a nation that refused to agree with the war its army was fighting.
Why exercising patience is a wise option
Exercising restraint in the face of Times Square-like incidents might seem counterintuitive. However, the United States should remain patient, especially in such trying times.
The US can achieve greater success with Pakistan by simply lowering its visibility, or rather its noise level. No country likes to take orders from outsiders, least of all the proverbial ‘epicentre of terrorism’ that does not take favorably to American foreign policy in a post-invasion of Iraq world. Coercive public diplomacy with Pakistan has outlived its utility. Rather, by consciously negating the perception that the government of Asif Ali Zardari is a surrogate of the United States – and accentuating Pakistan’s sovereignty over matters internal to it – the coming convergence of militant groups in Pakistan will by itself cause Pakistan to expand its counter insurgency aperture.
Greater numbers of militants have begun to identify the United States as their main enemy. While earlier, Jaish-e-Mohammad confined its attention to Kashmir, and Lashkar-e-Janghvi exclusively targeted the Shiite community, significant elements within these groups have now coalesced to target the Pakistani State, who they all agree is run by ‘remote control from Washington’. The attack on the Marriott in September 2008 was neither against those suggesting a political, non-Jihadist solution to Kashmir nor was it against Shiite traders; it was a challenge to the very state of Pakistan. The growing collaboration of the previously independent militant groups in Pakistan has no doubt increased their collective lethality. However, a game-changing byproduct of increased networking between Pashtun, Punjabi, sectarian, pro-Taliban and pro-Kashmir groups, all aided by al-Qaeda, is that it will compel Pakistan to expand its counter terrorism/insurgency strategy, and that too under the weight of its own security imperatives. By extrapolating these trends, it is not hard to imagine a greater congruence of the counter-terrorism objectives of Pakistan, its neighbours and its western allies in the near future.
Unintended consequences of browbeating Pakistan
By issuing public threats to Pakistan, the United States will inadvertently endanger Pakistan’s brittle consensus, already under attack by elements that continue to blame the United States for all of Pakistan’s problems and insist on halting military operations. Clinton’s remarks will only serve the purpose of those who continue to seek distinctions between good and bad armed Jihadis.
Tactical reasons too call for prudence. Armies the world over have little trouble in smashing rebel camps, tasks that are not dissimilar to conventional warfare. The real challenge lies in what follows – giving a sense of security to the population, preventing a resurgence of militancy, and carrying out fast-track development; tasks that are all manpower intensive. Insurgents, therefore, take it as matter of doctrine to wait till the counter-insurgent shifts his attention to other ‘terrorist hotbeds’, and strike when supply lines thin. There is plenty to learn from Mao -‘…extend guerrilla warfare…, make a front out of the enemy’s rear, and force him to fight ceaselessly throughout the territory he occupies’. Antagonizing more militants will require Pakistan to deploy more troops to control the ‘liberated’ population, who will subsequently demand the army to provide it with security and logistics and, very likely, shift its allegiance if those demands are not met.
The extra troops can come from only one place – Pakistan’s border with India, where tensions have flared since the Mumbai attacks. Here, the best the United States could do is to maintain a safe distance. Lacking legitimacy as an interlocutor in both New Delhi and Islamabad, even well-intentioned efforts by Washington will be viewed as ‘taking sides’, complicating matters further. Confidence building measures between India and Pakistan have a high gestation period. Accepting this fact and showing perseverance will yield better results and reduce trust deficits between the three countries.
India Reversing the Militant Card On Pakistan
STRATFOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
Summary
India’s foreign secretary said India and Pakistan should not let Islamist militants sabotage efforts to improve bilateral relations after a meeting with her Pakistani counterpart June 24. This statement marks a noteworthy shift in New Delhi’s attitude, which since the 2008 Mumbai attacks had been adamant that it would not hold any substantive talks with Islamabad unless the latter prevented militants from attacking India. The shift in India’s position is informed by its desire to exploit the Islamist militancy within Pakistan to its advantage, as well as by the U.S.-Pakistani alignment on Afghanistan. But the Indo-Pakistani rapprochement is very new, and could well still founder.
Analysis
During a joint press conference in Islamabad on June 24 with her Pakistani counterpart, Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao called on the two South Asian nuclear powers to deny terrorists the opportunity to derail improving Indo-Pakistani relations. This latest bilateral meeting follows an April 30 meeting between the prime ministers of both countries, which ended with a call on the two countries’ foreign ministers to meet as soon as possible to discuss ways to resume the normalization process, which was undermined by the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.
After the meeting between the two prime ministers, STRATFOR pointed out that the rationale behind the softening of the Indian stance had to do with the U.S.-Pakistani alignment on Afghanistan. Washington needs to cooperate with Pakistan to achieve its goals in Afghanistan, a need that has resulted in improved U.S.-Pakistani relations and that raised serious concerns in India that Islamabad was no longer under pressure to act against Islamist militants targeting India. U.S. and Indian interests had aligned after Sept. 11, resulting in pressure on Islamabad that New Delhi saw as a means of containing Pakistan from using Islamist militant proxies to counter the growing gap between Indian and Pakistani military capabilities.
This dual pressure sparked a domestic jihadist insurgency in Pakistan, with Islamabad losing control over its complex Islamist militant landscape. The need to align with Washington in the war against jihadism and avoid war with India forced Pakistan to rein in Taliban and Kashmiri Islamist militant entities – a process that saw the rise of a Pakistani Taliban phenomenon and saw many former Punjabi and Kashmiri militants waging war against the Pakistani state.
The domestic insurgency became so powerful that it forced a shift in Pakistani thinking regarding the use of Islamist militants as a means of projecting power across its eastern and western borders. At a time when there is a major fire raging at home fueled by Islamist extremism and the country’s military-intelligence establishment is having a hard time extinguishing it, Pakistan does not appear to be in a position to use Islamist militant non-state actors – especially against India, which carries the risk of war. Moreover, backing Islamist militancy against India – to the extent that it is even possible – would only aggravate the war at home.
And herein lies an opportunity for India to exploit to its advantage. Pakistan’s domestic insurgency, which has claimed some 20,000 lives in recent years, has seen public and government opinion turn against the Islamist militants. From India’s point of view, this new dynamic needs to be encouraged, as it is the only effective way of containing Pakistan-based Islamist militancy directed against India.
Previously, New Delhi has had no effective means of getting Pakistan to give up its militant card against India. Years of intense pressure from both India and the United States on Islamabad failed to prevent the worst terrorist incident in Indian history when Pakistan-based militants struck in Mumbai in November 2008. Responding with war with Pakistan was not an option, as such a conflict could quickly go nuclear. But now that Pakistan is suffering from the same forces that it historically deployed against India, the Indians see a possible opportunity to try and encourage the growing movement against extremism and terrorism.
The only way India can take advantage of this opportunity is to engage Pakistan in meaningful dialogue, which explains the change in New Delhi’s behavior. It is not clear if India will be able to succeed in its strategy, as the dynamic in Pakistan remains in its nascent stage. Everything depends upon how the situation shapes within Pakistan in terms of the outcome of Islamabad’s war against Islamist extremism and whether Pakistan can prevent jihadists from sabotaging the peace process with India by launching another attack. Even if Pakistan regains control over Islamist militants, it might well return to its old policy of using militants as instruments of foreign policy, especially given that it has no other way of containing growing Indian military power.