Pakistan link to Mumbai attacks evident: Obama's adviser

A prominent adviser to US president-elect Barack Obama said the Mumbai attack was an act by global jihad, and targeted what Osama bin
Laden called the "Crusader-Zionist-Hindu" alliance.

Terrorism expert Bruce Riedel said at Brookings Institution, a prominent think tank in Washington DC, that the Mumbai attack was a "seminal event in the history of international terrorism, and particularly in the history of global jihad".

"Ayman Al Zawahiri, the ideological leader of Al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden have spoken many, many times to their followers about the danger posed to Islam by what they call the Crusader-Zionist-Hindu alliance, and that is precisely the target set that we saw here," he said.

"We've seen a phenomenon in Al Qaeda's operational activities in the last several years, which I would call the Pakistan-ization... more and more of its activities outside of the South Asian arena, and particularly in western Europe, used Pakistanis, principally members of the diaspora in UK, Denmark, Germany, and Spain," Riedel, an expert on Al Qaeda, said.

Meanwhile, a new report said ISI had a plan to deploy sea-borne terrorists for an operation in Kashmir last year. That plan was hijacked by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (and maybe, Al Qaeda) to launch a terrorist attack in Mumbai. The ISI plan, the report in Asia Times said, was crafted by Ashfaque Kiyani, who was then the head of ISI. After he became army chief, Kiyani moved the Muzaffarabad training camps to Karachi. The report said the ISI plan was shelved a few months ago but Zakiur Rahman, an LeT commander, went ahead with it, and even improved on it.

That the LeT was behind the Mumbai attack is now virtually beyond doubt. Just this week, US director of national intelligence Mike McConnell blamed LeT for the attack, the first time a US official publicly blamed the group. "The same group that we believe is responsible for Mumbai had carried out a similar attack in 2006 on a train and killed a similar number of people," said McConnell, speaking at Harvard University. "Go back to 2001 and it was an attack on the Parliament," he added.

Echoing him, Riedel said, "This is a group that was founded in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the assistance of the ISI and with the assistance of Osama bin Laden, who was an important early fundraiser for the group. Osama's then spiritual mentor, a Palestinian named Abdullah Azam, was one of the charter members in the creation of the LeT. It was formally announced as an organization in Afghanistan's Kunar province, long a stronghold of Al Qaeda."

He added, "This was an extraordinary radical movement to begin with, and, over the last decade, it has become increasingly radical. It does not seek simply the end of the Indian occupation of Kashmir or to create an Islamic state in Muslim majority parts of South Asia, rather it seeks the creation of a caliphate to dominate all of South Asia well into Central Asia, something akin in its mind to a recreation of the Mughal Empire."

Riedel also focused attention on the fact that the LeT's greatest strength comes from the Pakistani diaspora, particularly in the UK and the UAE. "This group has extremely close links and is very active in the Pakistani diaspora in the UK. Some 800,000 strong. And, in the Persian Gulf, almost 2 million strong, where it raises much of its funding," Riedel said.

Coutesy:TimesofIndia.