The US has dismissed the new threat out-of-hand, with Caitlin Hayden, spokesperson of the National Security Council at the White House, claiming that the US has “seriously degraded al-Qaeda in the region” and that it does not “regard the announcement as an indication of new capabilities by al-Qaeda.”
The Indian reaction has been more sensible, with Home Minister Rajnath Singh going into a huddle with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and other intelligence agencies, and Narendra Modi getting a briefing on the potential threat. A nation-wide alert has been sounded.
The US can afford to dismiss the threat as over-rated because it is getting out of Afghanistan later this year, leaving the field free for al-Qaeda to make a comeback, but for India the threat just got worse. It is one thing to slot the al-Qaeda move as a response to ISIS's grisly attractions, quite another to presume this is some kind of internal rivalry within the jihadi fold and thus not an immediate threat to India. It could also be argued that since al-Qaeda has not been too successful in recruiting Indians to it cause, it is unlikely to be any more successful.
The argument would be wrong, for it does not require a lot of local talent to launch terror in India. In Kashmir, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) gets its work done with Pakistan-based fidayeens. The 26/11 Mumbai terror attack was perpetrated with practically no Indian participation – except, maybe, at some logistical level. I believe that the jihadi threat has multiplied several-fold after the al-Qaeda announcement for a simple reason: it is precisely when rival terrorist organisations are in a game of oneupmanship that they tend to get more aggressive and active on their terrorism.
With both ISIS and al-Qaeda now out to prove who is stronger, the world can expect them to plot new - and more spectacular - outrages. India, a perennial soft target, is the place where terrorism is easiest to execute: given population densities, poor intelligence, a corrupt and inefficient police force, and a weak state, killing hundreds of people in one bold attack is easiest to pull off here.
So India should be ready for another 26/11 kind of attack in the next 12-24 months.
It is worth recalling that even the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai - where the Taj and Oberoi hotels, the CST suburban terminus, the Jewish Chabad House and the Leopold restaurant were targeted - was the direct result of a conflicted Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) trying to keep its organisation together in the face of more radical calls for participation in global jihad.
While the ISI-supported LeT’s primary focus is jihadi attacks in Kashmir, in the immediate years before it launched 26/11 it was facing an internal crisis, with some radical members of the Lashkar wanting to focus on al-Qaeda’s priorities. This meant joining the global jihad by targeting the Americans in Afghanistan and getting them out of the area so that the Taliban could run their own caliphate.
The Musharraf regime’s targeting of some radical Islamist mosques – in particular the attack on Lal Masjid in Islamabad – under pressure from the US made many radical jihadis anti-ISI and anti-Pakistani army. The Pakistani army came under attack from waves of suicide bombers. In this scenario, many of the Lashkar jihadis were considering deserting the official ISI-sponsored jihadi groups and joining al-Qaeda.
The Lashkar, which was nurtured and encouraged by the ISI to target India, was thus in danger of splitting between its pro-al-Qaeda and pro-ISI factions, and it needed a spectacular terror extravaganza to keep its flock together.
In their 26/11 book, The Siege, authors Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark point out that though the LeT always wanted to target India outside Kashmir too, the scope of the 26/11 plot was widened in order to keep the organisation together.
The authors write that David Coleman Headley, the US-ISI double-agent who helped plot the Taj attacks by sending the Lashkar detailed drawings of the insides of the hotel, was suddenly called by Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the Lashkar’s amir and military boss, to fast-forward the Mumbai operation and expand its scope. The book quotes a Major Iqbal (an as yet unidentified ISI contact of the LeT) as saying that the ISI “was under tremendous pressure to stop the Lashkar falling apart. The outfit needed to pull something out of the hat, an operation that would bind everyone together.”
“Chacha Zaki”, as the Lashkar commander was referred to, thus wanted to expand the scope of the Mumbai operation to target not just Indians, but Americans, Israelis and Europeans in the city, so that all factions could note that the Lashkar was committed to global jihad, and not just focused on Kashmir.
The rest, we know, is history. But the takeout for the recent al-Qaeda threat is this: if 26/11 was scaled up to align the global jihadists with Kashmiri jihadists, it is more than likely that al-Qaeda will be trying to do the same this time too – to align global jihad with a murderous Indian programme.
It is more than likely that al-Qaeda will be in alliance with the ISI-backed Lashkar to cause murder and mayhem in India. The other possibility is that ISI and LeT have taken on the India franchise from al-Qaeda and are planning the next 26/11. Only, the next 26/11 will not just be a carbon copy of the previous one. It will be different, and not where it is expected. Our intelligence sleuths must thus imagine new kinds of possible threats to be prepared. They can't just fight yesterday's threats, which are unlikely to be repeated.
We need to be on our guard – and not just for a few days.
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