As Indian patience finally reached its limits after the serial attacks on Mumbai's rail system, which killed at least 182 people in near-simultaneous explosions at seven different locations on July 11, 2006, scheduled secretary-level talks between Islamabad and Delhi were indefinitely deferred. India also issued a strong call to Pakistan to fulfil its oft-repeated promise of dismantling the infrastructure of terrorism on its soil. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, travelling to the G-8 Summit at St. Petersburg, declared, "The international community must isolate and condemn terrorists wherever they attack, whatever their cause and whichever country or group provides them sustenance and support", and called for "an approach of zero-tolerance for terrorism".

The 'international community' responded with suitable rhetoric in the G-8's Declaration on Counter-Terrorism, but, while Indian diplomats celebrated its niceties, offered little hope of concrete action against the state sponsors of terrorism, including those who were in clear and demonstrable violation of UN Resolutions on the subject, specifically including Resolution 1373 which imposes specific duties on member states, inter alia, to end support, "active or passive", to terrorist entities or persons involved in terrorist acts, deny safe haven to terrorists, their financiers and planners, and prevent the movement of terrorists across their borders. The UN Resolution 1267, moreover, set up a Committee to identify individuals and entities belonging to or associated with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and required member-states to impose specific sanctions against these. It is significant that at least three groups operating from Pakistan against India, specifically, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahiddeen (HuM), are on the 1267 Committee's consolidated listing.

Immediate and shrill denials of Pakistani culpability in the Mumbai blasts, and in other acts of terrorism in India, came from two expected sources: Islamabad and Washington. General Musharraf advised India not to "start this blame game" and "give unsubstantiated comments". He also advised India to look within and address its own failings instead of blaming others. These positions were echoed by demands for evidence and immediate restoration of the 'peace process' from Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmoud Kasuri, and a host of other ministers and officials.

India responded to the calls for 'hard evidence' by demanding the rendition of Syed Salahuddin, the 'chairman' of the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen (HM), headquartered at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), and terrorist and ganglord, Dawood Ibrahim, located at Karachi, against whom overwhelming evidence existed, including open source evidence of their continuous presence in and operation from areas within Pakistan or under Pakistani control. 'Immediate action' on this count, the Ministry of External Affairs argued, would help "convince the people of India that we (India and Pakistan) are working together� against terrorism".

It was at this stage that Washington interceded on Pakistan's behalf, as Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher gratuitously advised India to "find the evidence", adding further that "some of the groups that are suspected in these bombings are actually outlawed in Pakistan." Warming up to the theme, he observed further, "no country has done more than Pakistan in the ongoing fight against terrorism.... And no country has lost more people than Pakistan." Boucher's support immediately encouraged Islamabad to summarily reject Delhi's demands for Salahuddin's and Ibrahim's extradition or rendition.

Boucher's observations, however, omitted a great deal of the 'evidence' of terrorist activity emanating from Pakistani soil that is manifestly available to Washington, and which must underlie the State Department's annual reports on terrorism. It is significant that the most recent Country Reports on Terrorism, 2005, issued by the US Secretary of State, identify the LeT, the JeM, the HuM, the HM, the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), and the Al Badr Mujahideen as 'foreign terrorist organisations'. [The LeT, JeM and the HuM, as already noted, also find mention on the UN 1269 Committee's listing of organisations linked with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, presumably on the basis of evidence available to the 'international community' and to the US].

The Report records, further, that the "Jaish-e-Mohammed continues to operate openly in parts of Pakistan despite President Musharraf's 2002 ban on its activities. The group is well-funded, and is said to have tens of thousands of followers who support attacks against Indian targets�"

With regard to the LeT, the Report observes that "some members (of the LeT) were facilitating the movement of al-Qaida members in Pakistan", and also records that the organization functions under a number of identities including 'Jamaat ud-Dawa' and Al Monsoorian', and that it is "Based in Muridke (near Lahore) and Muzaffarabad" (in PoK).

We are also informed, again on the authority of the US Secretary of State, that "HUJI operatives have received training at Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID)-sponsored camps in Pakistan."

The report is somewhat coy about the location of HM, but we learn that its "location/area of operation" is "Jammu, Kashmir, and Pakistan". The veil is rather thin, and the report goes on to note that the group "has not engaged in terrorist acts outside India"; ergo, it is located in Pakistan, but only engages in terrorist acts in India. It is confirmed, further, that "HM claimed responsibility for numerous attacks within Kashmir", and that "The group is the militant wing of Pakistan's largest Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami". The Report also notes, quite unambiguously, that the HM is "led by Syed Salahuddin". Of course, Salahuddin's specific location is omitted, but this is information that the State Department can immediately procure from any cub reporter in Pakistan, if it does, indeed, lack such intelligence.

Dawood Ibrahim's location can also be identified from comparable sources, and Boucher would be advised to note that this ganglord has been on the US Treasury's list of designated 'terrorist supporters' since October 2003.

Boucher would also be advised to note that the US has held, and continues to hold, hundreds of 'terrorist suspects' without a shred of evidence, without due process, without trial and without even minimum rights guaranteed by the protocols of war at Guantanamo Bay; and that the US has secretly sought and secured the 'extraordinary rendition' of hundreds of others who have disappeared into secret locations, again without any semblance of due process or legal representation, for what is euphemistically referred to as 'interrogation' by 'allies' who have a reputation for inventive brutality. A large proportions of such renditions originate in Pakistan.

The fact is, the US has had sufficient and continuously mounting evidence since the early 1990s, to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, but it has balked against taking this step on considerations purely of strategic and tactical expediency. The Clinton Administration did, of course, put Pakistan on a list of 'suspected' State-sponsors of terrorism, but all that is now in the past. With no capacities of its own to pursue and neutralize Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda in Pakistan, Washington has unequivocally 'rehabilitated' Islamabad as its principal ally in its selective 'global war on terrorism' in the South Asian region.

Pakistan, consequently, operates under an implicit US sanction to pursue its limitless ambitions in South Asia and beyond, simultaneously through the twin instrumentalities of diplomacy and terrorism, except where such terrorism targets US interests. It is the impunity conferred by the double standards, guaranteed support and advocacy emanating from Washington, which have allowed Pakistan to continue its campaigns of terror in India.

There is overwhelming evidence of these campaigns, with hundreds of terrorist modules identified and neutralized across India, volumes of intercepted communications, gigantic stores of seized weaponry and explosives. Washington is aware of this evidence, and can seek greater access to it if it needs further reaffirmation. Washington has, moreover, enormous and independent confirmatory flows of such intelligence and evidence from its own assets in the region. It is not 'hard evidence', which Boucher coaxes India to provide, that is lacking; it is, quite simply, the willingness to look at and act on it.

Pakistan's irredeemable leadership will not give up its enterprise of terrorism unless it is left without a choice. In abandoning terrorism, it would need to give up all vestiges of its current and over-extended strategic projections, for it has no other instrumentalities or natural capacities for their attainment. The country is hostage to a dictatorship, an Army, a polity and an elite that have demonstrated no commitment to civilized governance or norms of acceptable international conduct since the creation of this ill-fated nation. Unless this stranglehold is forcibly broken, the ISI will continue to 'manage and deploy' its various 'assets', including the supposedly 'banned' terrorist groups, in its covert war against India and Afghanistan.

The US may find this situation tactically acceptable. But 9/11 has powerful lessons (as have the succession of terrorist arrests on US soil and across the world, thereafter) that are being ignored here. Terrorism does not respect international borders, and the Islamist terrorism that is the principal tool of mobilization in Pakistan's covert war against India, is a universal ideology that recognizes America as one of its foremost enemies. If Islamist terrorism succeeds anywhere in the world, it will repeat itself everywhere. Fortress America has been breached once. Unless the enemy is destroyed in lands currently far from the American imagination and vision, it will be breached again.

The footprint of almost every act of international terrorism since 9/11 (and before) passes inexorably through Pakistan. This is where the enterprise of Islamist terrorism thrives. This is where, now or, at infinitely greater costs, eventually, the threat will have to be neutralized.

The writer is the Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management

Courtesy : South Asia Terrorism Portal

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