Whenever New Delhi points a finger at Pakistan in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in India, a weary world seems to say, "Here we go again!" The old enmity between the two countries can tire spectators who often quickly dismiss Indian accusations of Pakistani malfeasance are little other than political recriminations. Yet, the latest terrorist assault in Bombay-- involving 10 coordinated strikes that killed close to 200 and the capture of a Pakistani terrorist,Mohammad Ajmal Amir (aka Qasab), from Faridkot -- leaves no doubt about the authenticity of the Indian charge. Whether or not the carnage in Bombay is India’s 9/11, the information now available abundantly confirms that it was not the act of domestic malcontents-- another "Oklahoma City."
The West would do well to take notice that this bloodbath was not the work of homegrown militants aggrieved by India’s failure to integrate its Muslim minority but of the most dangerous Pakistani terrorist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), whose wider goals threaten not only secular India but also the West and even Pakistan itself.
The early conclusion that the attack in Bombay was the work of disaffected domestic protesters was arguably consoling because, if true, the threat to the international community would indeed be minimal. Moreover, the contention that New Delhi’s terrorism problem is largely domestic marginalizes the extent of foreign-- primarily Pakistani -- involvement in India’s "million mutinies" and accentuates the centrality of the unsettled dispute over Kashmir.
These inferences are false. As is now clear, the atrocity in Bombay was not masterminded by internal subversives-- even if there were individual Indian participants. The meticulous planning, the enormous resources committed to a complex mission across great distances and long periods of time, and the burdens of a difficult sea-land operation, rule out virtually every indigenous terrorist group in India, Muslim or otherwise. The attacks involved months of training in Pakistan and extensive reconnaissance of targets in Bombay; after these were complete, the terrorists appear to have left Karachi by as yet unknown means, hijacked a fishing trawler on the high seas and, upon reaching India’s territorial waters, transferred to inflatable speedboats which landed at two different locations on the city shores from whence the assaults began. No domestic terrorist group has previously demonstrated the capacity to undertake anything as complicated and it would indeed be shocking if any did acquire such capacity unbeknownst to Indian or Western intelligence.
All evidence points to LeT as the perpetrators of the killings in Bombay conducted under the nom de guerre "Deccan Mujahideen" and reflecting its classic modus operandi: suicidal attacks, but not suicide, involving small squads of highly-armed individuals, intent on inflicting the largest numbers of casualties at symbolic sites. Such violence is emphatically not directed at remedying the grievances of India’s Muslims or resolving the dispute over Kashmir. Although LeT has long operated in the disputed state of Kashmir, it’s not a Kashmiri organization. Rather, it consists primarily of Pakistani Punjabis financed, trained, armed and abetted by the Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI) -- a product of the latter’s war against the Indian state dating back to the late 1980s.