Rice on Indian Mission to Steady Nerves

By M H Ahssan

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the Indian capital on Wednesday to try and soothe nerves frayed by last week's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, but is likely to face an uphill task in defusing mounting suspicion and tension between India and Pakistan.

Rice is due to meet Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other top officials, and arrives as media reports surface claiming US and India's own intelligence agencies had months before warned the government of possible waterborne terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

Rice will use the visit to pressure the two US allies - who have fought three wars since their 1947 independence from British rule - to cooperate in wiping out terrorism, a senior US State Department official was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse.

"I want to consult with the Indian government on what we can do to help," Rice said in Brussels, Belgium, before leaving for India. "Pakistan needs to cooperate fully and transparently ... I am pleased to see the statements from Pakistan that they intend to do so."

Many Indian policymakers have adopted a hardened stance against Pakistan in the belief its state agencies, such as the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), were behind the attacks, which killed 171 people, including 28 foreign nationals.

Conservative commentators have unleashed what is fast becoming a media campaign to demand India take serious punitive action against Pakistan for the attacks - to the point of asking for strikes on terrorist training camps Indian spy agencies claim exist across the border.

Liberals, who prefer a diplomatic rather than military approach, have been sharply critical of the conservatives. But it is not clear that they can persuade the Indian government to take a reasoned and sober approach.

''Nobody is talking of military action against Pakistan ... what will be done, time will show,'' India's Foreign Minister Pranab Mukerjee said on Tuesday, while speaking at an India-Arab forum.
"If the already fragile India-Pakistan process breaks down, diplomatic and trade relations are frozen, and a conflict breaks out, the consequences will be grim," said Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor in the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"Any conflict that breaks out today between India and Pakistan has the potential, the deadly potential, to escalate to the nuclear level and cause unspeakable destruction."

Under pressure to take a tough stand against Pakistan, New Delhi has summoned Pakistan's ambassador and issued a formal protest. He was told the attacks were carried out by "elements from Pakistan" and "the government expects that strong action would be taken against those elements".

According to the official spokesperson of India's Ministry of External Affairs, the diplomat was told that "Pakistan's actions need to match the sentiments expressed by its leadership, that it wishes to have a qualitatively new relationship with India''.

Many of the hawks who advocate a hardline approach are livid at the attacks, which they see as an insult to, or a slighting of, India. They describe it as India's own "September 11", referring to the terror attacks on the United States in 2001.

They are particularly incensed that gunmen carrying sophisticated arms and explosives could land boats in Mumbai unhindered and proceed to strike at nine or more sites, including a crowded railway station and two luxury hotels.

Like protesters in Mumbai, who blame India's political leaders for their incompetence and indifference to security issues, the hardliners too want the armed forces and security agencies to have a prominent role in deciding how to respond to acts of terrorism.

Some of them focus on the alleged involvement of the jihadi Pakistani extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET), and by implication, Pakistani state agencies, in the attacks.

India has bluntly told Pakistan that it must hand over to it 20 "most wanted fugitives". The list includes Hafiz Mohammed Said, the founder of the LET, and Yusuf Muzammil, a senior LET operative who reportedly masterminded the attacks.

India's police agencies, which are investigating the attacks and following leads emerging from the interrogation of arrested terrorist Mohammed Ajmal Amir Iman (alias Qasab) in Mumbai, claim to have discovered a conspiracy - at the center of which is LET.

Indian authorities said Tuesday that ex-Pakistani army officers trained the gunmen behind the attacks - some for up to 18 months - and the group set out by boat from the Pakistani port of Karachi, reported the Associated Press.

Qasab told police his group trained for about six months in LET camps in Pakistan, learning close-combat techniques, hostage-taking, handling of explosives and satellite navigation, according to AP.

A satellite phone reportedly found aboard a ship that brought the attackers to Mumbai's shores was used to communicate several times with senior LET members, reported the Los Angeles Times. The phone records reportedly lead back to Yusuf Muzammil.

The United State's National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, while not mentioning the LET by name, clearly indicated US suspicions on Tuesday by saying the Mumbai attacks were carried out by the same group that bombed trains in the Indian capital in 2006, an attack the Indian government has attributed to the LET.

But Pakistani leaders say no one has offered them any specific evidence of the groups involvement, and that solid, hard, incontrovertible evidence, which can withstand critical scrutiny and on the basis of which the attackers and their co-conspirators can be convicted, is in short supply.

The leads pointing to LET's involvement must be fully established if the international community is to be convinced and Pakistan's cooperation is to be secured. Although in Qasab the Indian authorities have for the first time caught an attacker red-handed who can provide invaluable information, evidence and clues for further investigation.

LET was created and trained by Pakistan's ISI, yet is banned in many countries, including the US. The armed wing of the extremist Pakistan-based religious organization Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal-irshad, LET is alleged to have conducted numerous operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Jammu and Kashmir since 1993.

It was blamed by New Delhi for a terrorist attack on India's parliament house in December 2001, which led to a 10 month-long eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between the two countries, with a million troops amassed at the border.

"Many of the hawks' premises are mistaken," argued political scientist Zoya Hasan. "For instance, it is simply wrong to use the 9/11 analogy for the Mumbai attacks. The two are different in context, scale and impact."

Adds Hasan said that the Twin Towers casualties were 16 times higher than in Mumbai and for the first time in 60 years exposed the vulnerability of the American homeland, where as Indians have long recognized their vulnerability. "India has suffered scores of attacks in the last two decades and 9/11 changed the way the US looks at the world, including Islam. Mumbai probably won't alter India's outlook."

Similarly, the assumption that LET's involvement necessarily implicates the ISI or the Pakistan army, or proves the complicity of the civilian government, headed by President Asif Ali Zardari, is questioned by many former intelligence officials in India.

One of them told Inter Press Service on the condition of anonymity that "it would be wrong to assume that LET enjoys no autonomy and the ISI still fully controls it. Making a direct equation between LET, the ISI, the Pakistan army and the elected civilian government, and accusing them of having colluded to engineer the attacks, would be way off the mark''.

This official's assessment is that Zardari's government would not want to undermine the peace process with India and risk a costly conflict at a time when Pakistan is in dire economic strife and volatile situation due to a growing collapse of governance and rising ethnic strife. Struggles seen in the current Mohajir-Pashtun clashes in Karachi, and the creeping Taliban takeover of the North-Western Frontier Province.

The conspiracy theory also contrasts with Zardari's recent pledge to not use nuclear weapons first against India. He has also often said Pakistan can ill-afford to unleash the very forces of extremism on India which have caused such havoc on its own territory.

After all, Pakistan is also a victim of extremists, who claimed his wife Benazir Bhutto's life, carried out the September 20 attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, and earlier made two major attempts on former president General Pervez Musharraf's life.

On Tuesday, Zardari told the Financial Times that provocation by extremist "non-state actors" posed the danger of a return to war between India and Pakistan, and rhetorically asked: "Even if the militants are linked to LET, who do you think we are fighting?"

"Many will question his claim that Pakistan is seriously fighting LET or its parent organization, Harkat-ul-Dawa (HUD)," said Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations and global politics at Delhi University. "Pakistan imposed a formal ban on the group, but it reappeared under a different name. Its leader, Hafiz Mohammed Said, is a free man. And HUD holds public meetings, according to many credible reports."

Nevertheless, Vanaik added, "India should take Pakistan's offer to help investigate the attacks. Although it has reneged on its earlier offer to send the ISI director-general to India, it has still promised to send a senior agency official. India should respond positively to this and try to build alliances with the saner elements in Pakistan who recognize the dangers of fomenting jihadi terrorism."

The alternative would be to drift towards conflict, insecurity and war. If India insists on its demand about turning in fugitives living in Pakistan, there is a danger that Pakistan will not comply.

"This seriously risks an armed conflict," said Vanaik. "Neither side can win, and is fraught with grave nuclear danger. The only side to gain from an India-Pakistan conflict will be extremists and terrorists - besides the US through a heightened mediatory role. This would only confirm the view that the attacks are a gift from the most criminalized orders of the 'global right' to its most powerful echelons."

However, there is an honorable and peaceful way out. This is to take the Mumbai case to the United Nations Security Council under Resolution 1373, which requires all states to "refrain from providing any form of support to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts", give "early warning to other states" and "deny safe haven to those who finance, plan, support, or commit terrorist acts ..." all on pain of punitive measures.

This multilateral approach, analysts say, would obviate overbearing US influence and must be explored. But it is not clear that Indian leaders can muster the will to take it.