Peace with Pakistan was also a victim of Mumbai massacres - The National Newspaper
ISLAMABAD // Journalists who gathered recently at a hotel in Gilgit, a town in the disputed territory of Kashmir, asked Syed Khurshid Shah, a senior Pakistani cabinet minister, whether he expected his government to conclude a long-awaited peace deal with India by the end of its term in office in 2013.
We will be lucky if the Indians even agree to return to the negotiating table, the veteran politician said.
Mr Shahs tone of resignation was an honest admission of the nosedive in relations between the South Asian neighbours since suspected members of Lashkar-i-Taiba unleashed hell on the residents of Indias most iconic city.
Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars and two localised conflicts since independence from Britain in 1947, had come within touching distance of a comprehensive peace agreement in negotiations between 2004 and 2006 during the presidency of Pervez Musharraf.
Indeed, it is widely believed that had Mr Musharrafs regime survived the domestic political turbulence of 2007 and 2008, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning pact may well have been signed with the Congress-led government in New Delhi, particularly as it went on to win another term in Indias national elections in March.
Asif Ali Zardari, who succeeded Mr Musharraf as president in August 2008, had sought to restore diplomatic momentum just weeks before the Mumbai attacks, offering a no first nuclear strike during a televised address to a conference hosted in New Delhi by the Hindustan Times, a leading English language newspaper.
The offer was substantial, considering it represented a reversal of a defence doctrine introduced by Mr Musharraf, in which missile-based nuclear weapons were positioned as a counter-balance to Indias overwhelming conventional military superiority.
But, by then, the Lashkar-i-Taiba was on the verge of launching the Mumbai attacks, the stated aim of which was to end the détente in South Asia, something the militants had come to view through al Qaeda-coloured glasses after the Pakistani military had pulled the plug on their activities in disputed Kashmir in 2002, following intense diplomatic pressure from the United States, security officials and analysts said.
In fact, rumours had started to circulate within security analyst circles as early as March 2008 that the militants were planning something big in India.
In the months immediately after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, had admitted that they had kept track of the militants preparations, but had been given the slip at a critical moment.
Somewhere between the end of training and the launch of the operation, the militants disappeared. We have concluded that during that period, they were contacted by al Qaeda operatives and given a new mission, said an official, who was speaking without authorisation.
The result was that the original operational parameters, which had been confined to attacking the Taj [palace hotel], were expanded to the terrorisation of the Mumbai public and the targeting of the Jewish community centre.
The official implied that Lashkar-i-Taiba and other Pakistan-based militant groups that had previously targeted Indian security forces in disputed Kashmir, are, like their counterparts in the insurgent north-west tribal areas, no longer following the strategic objectives of the militarys Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.
That is apparently borne out by the events that followed an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 by the Jaish-i-Mohammed militant group, an act that escalated tensions almost to the point of war.
The group had catapulted to international notoriety in December 1999 when it hijacked an Indian airliner to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to secure the release from the Tihar Jail in New Delhi of Maulana Masood Azhar, its leader, and others, including Omar Saeed Sheikh, now jailed in Pakistan for the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
The subsequent diplomatic efforts in 2002 of the United States prompted the ISI to summon the leaders of the 17 militant groups active in Kashmir, known as the United Jihad Council, and instruct them to cease and desist, analysts said.
When the militants were told operational funding would no longer be available [from the militarys Inter Services Intelligence directorate], they approached sources in the Gulf with whom they shared the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, said Imtiaz Gul, chairman of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a liberal think tank in Islamabad.
At the time, militant leaders remarked to me that God had opened one door to continue their jihad after another had been shut, said Mr Gul, author of the recently published book, The al Qaeda Connection: the Taliban and Terror in Pakistans Tribal Areas.
The new policy from Islamabad did translate into action on the ground, with independent analysts estimating an 80 per cent reduction in militant traffic across the Line of Control, the de facto border, into Indian Kashmir.
By 2007, as bilateral bonhomie peaked, the Musharraf administration was pro-actively providing intelligence to India about Kashmiri militant groups, the analysts said.
Hezb-ul-Mujahideen, the largest of the 16 militant groups, was effectively put out of action as a direct consequence, losing 34 senior commanders and more than 300 militant fighters to raids by Indian security forces, according to Amir Mir, author of the 2008 book The Fluttering Flag of Jihad.
However, the Mumbai attacks, the subsequently damning testimony of Ajmal Kasab, the sole captured terrorist, and statements by generals that reasserted a defence doctrine based on a perceived threat of invasion by India, suggested to analysts that the Pakistani army might be slipping back into bad habits.
That perception was amplified by assertions of US officials that ISI personnel were maintaining contacts with the Afghan Taliban, as well as Pakistani militants, raising the question within western think tanks: What war is the Pakistan army fighting? Because its certainly not ours.
That prompted a group of Pakistani journalists, who met Gen Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief, in September, to ask him point-blank whether, as alleged by India, via Washington, the Lashkar-i-Taiba was still acting as a first line of defence against India.
We cannot outsource our national defence to private groups, Mr Kayani was reported to have responded. That is a thing of the past. We cannot afford it any more.
That point was underlined on October 10, when militant raiders penetrated the Pakistan army headquarters in Rawalpindi and took hostage nearly all the staff of the military intelligence directorate.
Army spokesmen have since confirmed the participation in the attack of members of the Jaish-i-Mohammed, who, like many of their ilk, had migrated to the militant strongholds in Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas after being excluded from Kashmir in 2002.
Analysts said that included among them were hundreds of former military mentors who, after being retired from service during a purge of militant sympathisers by Mr Musharraf, joined hands with their protégés, and Afghan Taliban and Arab al Qaeda leaders based in the tribal areas since being chased out of Afghanistan in 2001.
Therein lies the crux of the Pakistan armys dilemma, the analysts said. I feel the army is scared of itself, that the chief fears the soldier, said Khaled Ahmed, consulting editor of the Daily Times, an English newspaper.
Far too many army officers have crossed the line into the Islamist camp.
ISLAMABAD // Journalists who gathered recently at a hotel in Gilgit, a town in the disputed territory of Kashmir, asked Syed Khurshid Shah, a senior Pakistani cabinet minister, whether he expected his government to conclude a long-awaited peace deal with India by the end of its term in office in 2013.
We will be lucky if the Indians even agree to return to the negotiating table, the veteran politician said.
Mr Shahs tone of resignation was an honest admission of the nosedive in relations between the South Asian neighbours since suspected members of Lashkar-i-Taiba unleashed hell on the residents of Indias most iconic city.
Pakistan and India, which have fought three wars and two localised conflicts since independence from Britain in 1947, had come within touching distance of a comprehensive peace agreement in negotiations between 2004 and 2006 during the presidency of Pervez Musharraf.
Indeed, it is widely believed that had Mr Musharrafs regime survived the domestic political turbulence of 2007 and 2008, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning pact may well have been signed with the Congress-led government in New Delhi, particularly as it went on to win another term in Indias national elections in March.
Asif Ali Zardari, who succeeded Mr Musharraf as president in August 2008, had sought to restore diplomatic momentum just weeks before the Mumbai attacks, offering a no first nuclear strike during a televised address to a conference hosted in New Delhi by the Hindustan Times, a leading English language newspaper.
The offer was substantial, considering it represented a reversal of a defence doctrine introduced by Mr Musharraf, in which missile-based nuclear weapons were positioned as a counter-balance to Indias overwhelming conventional military superiority.
But, by then, the Lashkar-i-Taiba was on the verge of launching the Mumbai attacks, the stated aim of which was to end the détente in South Asia, something the militants had come to view through al Qaeda-coloured glasses after the Pakistani military had pulled the plug on their activities in disputed Kashmir in 2002, following intense diplomatic pressure from the United States, security officials and analysts said.
In fact, rumours had started to circulate within security analyst circles as early as March 2008 that the militants were planning something big in India.
In the months immediately after the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, had admitted that they had kept track of the militants preparations, but had been given the slip at a critical moment.
Somewhere between the end of training and the launch of the operation, the militants disappeared. We have concluded that during that period, they were contacted by al Qaeda operatives and given a new mission, said an official, who was speaking without authorisation.
The result was that the original operational parameters, which had been confined to attacking the Taj [palace hotel], were expanded to the terrorisation of the Mumbai public and the targeting of the Jewish community centre.
The official implied that Lashkar-i-Taiba and other Pakistan-based militant groups that had previously targeted Indian security forces in disputed Kashmir, are, like their counterparts in the insurgent north-west tribal areas, no longer following the strategic objectives of the militarys Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.
That is apparently borne out by the events that followed an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 by the Jaish-i-Mohammed militant group, an act that escalated tensions almost to the point of war.
The group had catapulted to international notoriety in December 1999 when it hijacked an Indian airliner to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to secure the release from the Tihar Jail in New Delhi of Maulana Masood Azhar, its leader, and others, including Omar Saeed Sheikh, now jailed in Pakistan for the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
The subsequent diplomatic efforts in 2002 of the United States prompted the ISI to summon the leaders of the 17 militant groups active in Kashmir, known as the United Jihad Council, and instruct them to cease and desist, analysts said.
When the militants were told operational funding would no longer be available [from the militarys Inter Services Intelligence directorate], they approached sources in the Gulf with whom they shared the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, said Imtiaz Gul, chairman of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a liberal think tank in Islamabad.
At the time, militant leaders remarked to me that God had opened one door to continue their jihad after another had been shut, said Mr Gul, author of the recently published book, The al Qaeda Connection: the Taliban and Terror in Pakistans Tribal Areas.
The new policy from Islamabad did translate into action on the ground, with independent analysts estimating an 80 per cent reduction in militant traffic across the Line of Control, the de facto border, into Indian Kashmir.
By 2007, as bilateral bonhomie peaked, the Musharraf administration was pro-actively providing intelligence to India about Kashmiri militant groups, the analysts said.
Hezb-ul-Mujahideen, the largest of the 16 militant groups, was effectively put out of action as a direct consequence, losing 34 senior commanders and more than 300 militant fighters to raids by Indian security forces, according to Amir Mir, author of the 2008 book The Fluttering Flag of Jihad.
However, the Mumbai attacks, the subsequently damning testimony of Ajmal Kasab, the sole captured terrorist, and statements by generals that reasserted a defence doctrine based on a perceived threat of invasion by India, suggested to analysts that the Pakistani army might be slipping back into bad habits.
That perception was amplified by assertions of US officials that ISI personnel were maintaining contacts with the Afghan Taliban, as well as Pakistani militants, raising the question within western think tanks: What war is the Pakistan army fighting? Because its certainly not ours.
That prompted a group of Pakistani journalists, who met Gen Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief, in September, to ask him point-blank whether, as alleged by India, via Washington, the Lashkar-i-Taiba was still acting as a first line of defence against India.
We cannot outsource our national defence to private groups, Mr Kayani was reported to have responded. That is a thing of the past. We cannot afford it any more.
That point was underlined on October 10, when militant raiders penetrated the Pakistan army headquarters in Rawalpindi and took hostage nearly all the staff of the military intelligence directorate.
Army spokesmen have since confirmed the participation in the attack of members of the Jaish-i-Mohammed, who, like many of their ilk, had migrated to the militant strongholds in Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas after being excluded from Kashmir in 2002.
Analysts said that included among them were hundreds of former military mentors who, after being retired from service during a purge of militant sympathisers by Mr Musharraf, joined hands with their protégés, and Afghan Taliban and Arab al Qaeda leaders based in the tribal areas since being chased out of Afghanistan in 2001.
Therein lies the crux of the Pakistan armys dilemma, the analysts said. I feel the army is scared of itself, that the chief fears the soldier, said Khaled Ahmed, consulting editor of the Daily Times, an English newspaper.
Far too many army officers have crossed the line into the Islamist camp.
