Dangers Ahead
Incredible that a mere handful of young men - ten in number, although it's bruited about that another five, unapprehended, are still on the loose and capable of launching other attacks - were able to hold a city of 14 million people ransom while they engaged in an organized murder spree on a grand scale. Their modern communication gadgetry and AK-47s in stark contrast to the old Lee Enfields and plastic vests worn by a disorganized and ill-trained Indian police force.The terror group had been carefully briefed by an earlier group whose purpose was to scope out the details of the ground to be covered, the landmarks to be targeted, the better to impact on the sensibilities of the city, the nation, in the success of their organized bloody rampage. And a government that had been forewarned by another nation's secret agency with all the necessary details of an impending attack, shrugged off the possibility, leaving its population unshielded and undefended.
In the reality of the bloody aftermath and the certain knowledge that the jihadis were trained in terror-training camps in Pakistan, India is gathering the wrath of its indignation into a fireball of accusatory denunciations. The slow but steady high-level discussions between the Indian and Pakistani governments toward a peace accord, shattered by the intentional interference of rogue elements in the Pakistani military, its spy agency, and allied paramilitaries, otherwise known as terrorists.
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, alarmed at the breakdown of talks, has promised co-operation in the Mumbai attack investigations, only to be brought back to reality by the jerking of his cord attached to the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Agency and the country's army chief, neither of whom has any intention of co-operating with India. This nuclear-armed country has a president that is a figurehead diplomat, subservient to the armed whims of its military.
The military and the ISI infiltrated by the very same Islamists who cultivate the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Knowing that, in a military confrontation with India over Kashmir or the Punjab, the Taliban, murderously preying for the present on communities within Pakistan as well as those in Afghanistan, will take up their arms in a common cause to battle India, should the worst case scenario evolve.
But it should not, and as long as cool heads prevail, will not. It is in no one's interests that two nuclear-armed neighbours with a long history of intermingled Hindu, Sikh and Muslim populations succumb to permitting an ill-conceived military confrontation to take place. India demands of Pakistan that it arrest and surrender key elements of the Lashkar-e-Taibat, responsible for training and dispatching the Mumbai ten to wreak atrocities in that city.
Easier said than done. Yet if India takes the initiative and enters the borders of Pakistan to itself rout the training camps and take its principles into confinement it risks the very real wrath of a country whose territorial integrity has been breached yet again. While Pakistan would not assume to confront the United States militarily, it would presume to do just that with its neighbour.
The final question is, what will Islamabad do to appease New Delhi, if it will not and can not defang the jihadists in its midst?
Labels: Terrorism, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, December 03, 2008
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