Changing faces of Pakistani group linked to Mumbai attacks
Pakistan is in the grip of a bloody, intense fight against the militants in its midst – those who have threatened its capital, its economy and its broad existence as a state – that has displaced millions.
But in the coming weeks a trial in a high-security courtroom in Mumbai means that the world’s attention is, unhelpfully for Islamabad, bound to focus on the Pakistani security services enduring relationship with a group that was, a few years ago, seen as merely a group of Kashmiri separatists, Lashkar-e-Taiba.
You’ll remember Azam Amir Kasab as the young man with the blue-rucksack and the AK 47. His casual murderous stroll becoming the defining image of the Mumbai attacks in which 166 died.
His trial is ongoing, but his exploits and interrogation is superbly portrayed in a Dispatches to be broadcast this week.
Lashkar-e-Taiba is the group that his phone calls during the attacks, his training, and his recruitment, were all traced back to by both Indian and American investigators, it seems.
After Mumbai, American terror talking heads began to portray LeT as a sort of al-Qaida 2.0, while only a few months earlier they had enjoyed relative obscurity.
Founded in 1993 to throw India out of Kashmir, and accused of enduring links to the Pakistani security services, the ISI, LeT had begun life as dedicated to one, basic cause (Kashmir) but turned over the years into something quite different.
By 2008, some analysts saw them fitting similar definitions to al-Qaida: a radical militant group enjoying a safe haven in a highly-troubled state (Pakistan), that had splintered perhaps beyond recognition and now had spawned anti-Western, even anti-Semitic goals (Americans and Jews were targets of choice in Mumbai).
LeT were always intended to be the proxy militants who would take on the Indian army in the event of an all-out war for Kashmir. They weren’t meant to become an internal threat Islamabad would eventually be forced to tackle itself.
But in November the international pressure on Pakistan could no longer be ignored. Immediately after Mumbai, Pakistani troops arrested the group’s key leaders.
Back then, there was little else Islamabad could do, as talk of an Indian revenge “strike” and international pressure grew.
But since then, LeT’s continued, albeit fractious and changing, existence inside Pakistan has provided fuel for critics who say that the Pakistani security establishment is not that serious about ridding its country of militants.
Bruce Reidel, a former CIA officer who led a review of reviews of Pakistan and Afghanistan strategy for the Obama administration recently, believes the security establishment could shut down the LeT at any time, if they wanted to.
“The Pakistan Army could do it and the ISI could tell them where to find those guys in a heartbeat,” he told Reuters recently.
But as the crackdown has persisted, LeT has been changing shape and name constantly. First they became Jawat-ud-Dawa, who pursued mainly charitable work, they said.
The UN designated them a terrorist group, inciting a Pakistani government ban, so they changed their name again, this time to the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. (Thousands of FIFs workers are said to be distributing aid to people in the over-stretched camps for those who’ve fled the fighting in Swat).
After this long, shutting them down may not still be such a simple prospect as Reidel imagines.
Samina Yasmeen, an Australian professor writing a book on LeT, told Reuters recently the group has probably fractured, probably after 9/11, into a series of splinter groups perhaps free of the original leadership, and even their original ISI ties.
And then there are the enduring sympathies for parts of the group within Pakistani society.
This month, a Pakistani court released from house arrest the group’s founder, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, citing no evidence against him. The timing was not excellent. A couple of weeks later, only last Tuesday, India issued 22 arrest warrants for Pakistani nationals, accused of master-minding Mumbai.
Pakistan had previously said it would try these people in their courts, and this time a foreign ministry spokesman said it hadn’t got the Indian extradition requests.
No matter that their prime ministers had held a breakthrough meeting days earlier in Russia, which was meant to boost their cooperation against militants. It seems they had forgotten to bring this pretty simple thing up.
So goes the Delhi-Islamabad relationship. Each time Pakistan and India have to interact over militant extremism, something they both readily admit threatens their societies, they manage to ridiculously let their over-arching existential fear of each other get in the way of simple cooperation over what is basically a criminal case.
Both sides seem to believe giving any ground to the other brings them closer to some future form of final surrender. And through it all, the LeT continues to exist and morph into something that threatens both states.
Dispatches is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Tuesday 30 June