As new details emerge about the terrorist gang that attacked Mumbai last month, it is clear that it is highly skilled, armed with modern weapons and communications, and hates America as well as India.
You can add its name, Lashkar-e-Taiba, to al-Qaida as a new suicidal radical Islamic threat to peace and security in another facet of self-styled holy war. Its links with Pakistan and that country’s top-level Inter-Services Intelligence agency pose an unexpected complication in the shaky U.S. alliance with Pakistan to unseat the Taliban and destroy al-Qaida. At the same time, tension mounts between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
Indian police, who suggested Pakistani complicity from the start, now say that the attackers got four months of commando training by Inter-Service Intelligence, or ISI, the spy agency of the Pakistani Army, the most powerful force in the nation’s unstable political system.
Pakistani authorities say they have arrested about 20 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, but Jane Perlez, reporting for The New York Times from the capital, Islamabad, raised doubts. She quoted an American official who has dealt with Pakistani officials for several years as saying: “In the past when they’ve promised to move against these guys, they’d pick them up and then several months later, they’d release them.”
The terrorist group has functioned as an arm of Pakistan’s military for two decades, according to Ms. Perlez. It is based in Kashmir, a territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. They fought three wars over it from 1947 to 1972. Pakistan’s army helped establish the group to harass Indian forces in the area. In the past seven years, Lashkar has conducted several attacks in India, including a 2006 raid on an Indian train at Mumbai in which about 200 Indians were killed.
Pakistan banned Lashkar in 2002 under U.S. pressure after its attack on the Indian Parliament, but the Pakistani Army has protected it and kept it in operation. It is supported by a charity, which has hundreds of thousands of members and operates 100 Islamic schools without interference by the government. Some authorities say that last month’s three-day attack against Mumbai meant that Lashkar had gone out of control. But the government is so weak that “control” has lost most of its meaning.
British and American diplomats tried in 2002 to get Pakistan to demobilize Lashkar and related groups. The government rounded up thousands of members and then is said to have quietly released them.
The new threat presents President-elect Barack Obama and his choice as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, with a challenge. Pressure on the weak Pakistani government to suppress the terrorist groups might help.
A more fundamental step would be a diplomatic push on both nations to settle the Kashmir dispute once and for all. That may seem hopeless, but so did the impasses in Ireland and South Africa until they were settled peacefully.