More than a month after the Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 170 people, India remains convinced that Pakistan’s official organs had involvement in the attacks. Yesterday, India’s Foreign Secretary accused Islamabad of having some knowledge of the attack beforehand after transmitting a large amoung of evidence uncovered by Indian investigators, including a confession from the surviving conspirator:
India confronted Pakistan on Monday with a detailed dossier that it said showed that “elements from Pakistan” were behind the November terrorist assault on Mumbai and said it was inconceivable that no one in the Pakistani government knew of the plans.
India’s moves added pressure to the already tense relationship between the nuclear-armed rivals over the assault, in which some 170 people died.
The evidence handed to Islamabad included the lengthy confession extracted during the interrogation of Ajmal Kasab, the only gunman caught during the attack. McClatchy reported Dec. 6 that Kasab had come from Faridkot, a village in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Also in the dossier were telephone intercepts between the assailants and their alleged handlers in Pakistan, data retrieved from recovered GPS and satellite phones and details of “recovered weapons and equipment,” India’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
India also briefed more than a dozen nations on the evidence supplied to Pakistan, probably as a means to ensure it doesn’t disappear. India had been slow to share its findings with Islamabad, fearing that sensitive information would get exploited by the same people they suspect of masterminding the Mumbai plot from within the Pakistani government. The Indian government couldn’t keep demanding action without providing some cooperation, however, but they apparently intended to hedge their bets as much as possible.
The tension remains thick between the two nations, and this won’t help calm the waters. The public accusation will push the Pakistanis further into the “corner”, as they put it. Pakistanis believe that the US and India have allied to dismember their country, and that the Mumbai attacks could get used as a cassus belli for both nations to act, since Americans got killed in Mumbai.
For our part, we’d actually prefer to see tensions decrease. We don’t want to dismember Pakistan, but we do want them fighting Islamist terrorists and not Indians. The higher the stakes get between New Delhi and Islamabad, the more Pakistan will send its troops eastward rather than westward, and the freer the hand of the terrorists will be to fight in Afghanistan. Not only does that make it more difficult for NATO to succeed in its mission, it interferes with NATO’s lines of communication in Pakistan.
Will they go to war? It’s slowly moving to that kind of conclusion, and it may become Barack Obama’s biggest foreign-policy crisis on Day One.
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