Mumbai mayhem : Obama aide says al Qaeda, I.S.I. spawned 'Army of Pure'

By Ahmar Mustikhan, Freelance Journalist

A senior advisor to President-elect Barack Obama has clearly spelled Pakistan-based terrorists, with links to bin Laden, are responsible for the attack on Mumbai last week that left nearly 200 dead.

“The most dangerous terrorist menace comes from groups with intimate connections to the global jihadist network centered around Usama bin Laden and al Qaeda and its allies in the Pakistani jihadist culture,” Bruce Reidel Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution said in a report that was published Sunday by the DC-based progressive think-tank.

Formerly of the C.I.A., press reports list Riedel as one of the three people who have President Barack Obama's ears on South Asia—the other two are Jonah Blank, who is an aide to Vice President-elect Joe Biden, and Karl Inderfuth, professor at George Washington University.

For decades Islamists in Pakistan have accused Christians, Jews and Hindus of conspiring against the world's second largest Muslim nation. One of the first victims was wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who fit that description-- he was a national of “Christian” USA, was Jewish and had been bureau chief of the WSJ in Mumbai.

Pearl was brutally executed in spring of 2002 and his slaying was videotaped.

Riedel said India has been a target for al Qaeda and the global jihadist movement for over a decade, adding India has often been listed by bin Laden and his accomplice Ayman Zawahiri as a part of the ‘Crusader-Zionist-Hindu’ conspiracy against the Islamic world.

Interestingly, Pakistan coup leader-turned-presdent Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was forced out of office in disgrace and replaced by Asif Ali Zardari-- with strings being pulled viceroy style by Zalmay Khalilzad, outgoing US. Ambassador the United Nations-- had enlisted Al Qaeda's support in the Kargil misadventure way back in 1999.

“The targets of the killers in Mumbai—Americans, Brits, Israelis and Indians--fit exactly into the profile al Qaeda and its partners vilify and plot against. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri have spoken about the “U.S-Jewish-Indian alliance against Muslims.”

India had the second largest number of casualties from terrorism in 2007-- just behind Iraq--, Riedel said, elabrating many different groups use terror as a tool in India.

“But the most dangerous terror menace comes from Kashmiri groups based in Pakistan with long and intimate connections to al Qaeda and bin Laden,” he said.
Riedel writes: The group which has been linked by initial Indian assessments of the Mumbai attack, Lashkar-e Tayiba (literally the army of the pure or righteous), was founded in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s by a group of Kashmiri activists with the assistance of the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate or ISI," the Obama aide said.

"Usama bin Laden was an early supporter of the group and provided some of the initial funding for its start. The ISI was an enthusiastic supporter of the Kashmiri insurgency and wanted to use asymmetric warfare, i.e. terrorism to undermine Indian control of Kashmir," Riedel wrote.

Riedel adds: LeT was banned in Pakistan in 2002 but continues to operate there under a number of cover names including Jamaat ud Dawah. Its self professed goal is to create an Islamic state in all of south and central Asia, not just Kashmir. Its operatives have worked closely with al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and there are reports of LeT volunteers fighting in Iraq. Like al Qaeda it has raised funds in the Gulf states.

“The extent of its continuing relationship with the ISI is much debated. The Pakistani authorities claim none exists but the fact is that the organization has been tolerated in Pakistan despite the 2002 ban. It still has is leadership there and trains its fighters in both Pakistani Kashmir and the badlands along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,” Riedel said.

According to Riedel, since 9/11 several key al Qaeda operatives arrested in Pakistan have been found in safe houses run by LeT. The first major al Qaeda lieutenant caught after 9/11, Abu Zubayda, was apprehended in an LeT safe house in Faisalabad.

Riedel cited a report by Gary Schroen, who served as a CIA chief of station in Pakistan and led the first CIA team into Afghanistan after 9/11, that “since 2002 whenever a raid has been conducted in Pakistan against al Qaeda, al Qaeda members are found being hosted by militant Pakistanis, primarily from the LeT group, supporters of the Kashmir insurgency.”

Selig S. Harrison, Asia Director at Washington-based Centre for International Policy, was quoted in the Congressional Quarterly more than five years ago: "I was told by a top source in the state department that the Lashkar was serving (as) a secret police function for the Taliban."

Just last month, Harrison wrote an article headlined “India's Terrorist Problem” in NEWSWEEK,

“Now, the latest evidence indicates that Islamist extremists have broadened their offensive to include India—and Pakistan's own intelligence agencies are complicit. Unless Washington broadens its counterterrorism strategy and forces Islamabad to crack down, the Islamists could end up wreaking havoc not only in Pakistan but also in India—eight times larger, a rising global power with growing ties to the United States and a huge and restive Muslim minority," Harrison wrote.

Riedel recalled in December 1999 Kashmiri militants hijacked an Indian commercial airliner, IA 814, from Kathmandu, Nepal, and flew it to Kandahar, Afghanistan, then the de facto capital of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

“The hijackers were allegedly assisted by the ISI station in Nepal, they were received as heroes by the Taliban in Kandahar and the plot was reportedly planned by bin Laden. Usama hosted the victory dinner when India reluctantly gave in to the hijackers’ demands to save the 155 hostages,” he said.

Former Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, who flew to Kandahar to arrange the hostage release and negotiated with the Taliban, has labeled the IA 814 operation the “dress rehearsal” for 9/11 because it involved so many of the same characters behind 9/11.

Riedel said many accounts of the Mumbai mayhem say the terrorists arrived by sea from the Pakistani megacity port of Karachi. "Karachi has long been a favorite hide out of the global jihad syndicate.”

Reidel commended Zardari's efforts of rapprochment with India, but doubted his ability to rein in the I.S.I.

Many Pakistanis agree. “Zardari is like an old grand mother trying to prevail upon young muscular grandsons not to sow terror in the neighborhhod,” said Razzaq Baloch, who now lives in Miami, Fla. “Both Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani were scolded by army chief Pervez Kayani when they offered to send the I.S.I. chief to join the terror probe in India.”

Other Baluchs have hailed the B.J.P. decision not allow the I.S.I. to set foot on Mumbai soil. “The cruel joke is the I.S.I. officers did it themselves and are now offering help in the investigations. They are some of the biggest thugs, trying to blackmail the world,” adds Rashid Baloch from Dallas, Texas.

Harrison praised U.S. administration officials for openly blaming high-level ISI officers for helping to stage the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed at least 41 people. “But despite the appointment of a new ISI director Sept. 30, no heads have rolled, and more important, Washington has failed to use its enormous aid leverage to get the new civilian government of Pakistan to curb the ISI's Islamist ties,” he said in his NEWSWEEK article.