Lahore 3/3. Comments by Najam Sethi

If the event on 3/3 at Lahore was not so tragic with so many innocents dead and wounded, with the perpetrators of the atrocity coolly walking off, the comments by Pak visual media on the efficiency of RAW to plot, the super efficiency of Pak intelligence to discover the same and issue warnings  would have been a matter of great humour.

Najam Sethi is as good a patriotic Pakistani as any Pakistani  can be. Sometimes what he writes may not be palatable to all Indians or Westerners. Sometimes his views may not be palatable to some from Pakistan or the US.

However what he says is clearly based on in-depth analysis of events backed by a prodigious memory and facts.

Will those in power read and understand?

Ed:

(Article from Mail Today)

LAHORE 3/3 WHO DUNNIT

by Najam Sethi

ON JANUARY 22, 2009, the Crime Investigation Department ( CID) of the provincial government of Punjab officially warned the Inspector General of Police as follows:

“ It has reliably been learnt that RAW ( Indian Intelligence Agency) has assigned its agents the task to target Sri Lankan Cricket Team during its current visit to Lahore, especially while traveling between the hotel and stadium or at hotel during its stay. It is evident that RAW intends to show Pakistan as a security risk state for sports events particularly when European and Indian teams have already postponed their proposed visits considering it a high security risk to visit Pakistan. Extreme vigilance and high security arrangements are indicated.”

As if on cue, minutes after the attack, Pakistani analysts, TV anchors, politicians and one former DG- ISI, General ( retd) Hameed Gul, pointed the finger at a “ foreign hand” from across the border.

This was a tit- for- tat replay of Mumbai, they argued, there were ten or twelve terrorists, they were decked out in the same sporty manner as the Mumbai terrorists, they carried the same sort of arms and rucksacks, and seemed to have all the time in the world to carry out their plans.

The clincher was the point that they were not ready to commit suicide, the hallmark of the local Islamic jihadi groups; indeed, that if they had been part of any local jihadi suicidebombing squad, the bus carrying the Sri Lankans would not have escaped total destruction.

INSTEAD, it was argued, the assassins escaped injury and capture according to a rehearsed plan of exit and disappearance.

The RAW conspiracy theory was completed after statements from the Indian Foreign Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and the Home Minister, P Chidambaram, noting the depth of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan.

“ Unless infrastructure and facilities available to the terrorist organizations within Pakistan or territory under its control are completely dismantled, repetition of these incidents will take place”, said Mr Mukherjee.

“ Security was hopelessly inadequate”, said Mr Chidambaram, “ the Pakistanis have not done enough to combat terrorism”. In light of the event, both were quick to crow about India’s decision not to send its cricket team to Pakistan, followed by a chorus of official and professional voices from sports- playing countries across the globe seeking a long- term ban on playing in Pakistan.

But there are some snags in this scenario.

A former high- ranking intelligence official who relinquished charge of a senior police post in the Punjab government three days ago told me confidentially that this was “ the handiwork of some jihadi group or the other”. He said that last year the security agencies had nabbed a terrorist from the Lashkar- e Jhangvi, a sectarian organization once involved in the Kashmir jihad, but now working closely with the Al- Qaeda- Taliban network led by Baitullah Masud in South Waziristan, FATA. This terrorist, he explained, was still in police custody.

He had confessed that he was trained to carry out a suicide mission last year during the proposed Champions Cricket Trophy, whose venue was later shifted out of Pakistan.

While Pakistan’s official position is still pending investigations, the Punjab Governor, Salmaan Taseer, and the IGP, Khalid Farooq, said that the attack was carried out “ by the same people who did Mumbai”. That attack was traced to members of the jihadi group Lashkar- e Tayyeba or Jamaat- ud Dawa, some of whose planners are being investigated. Interestingly, on the day of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, most newspapers carried news that Al- Qaeda had owned up the Marriott Hotel Islamabad blast of September 2008 in a message sent to the Saudi embassy in Islamabad.

On December 22, 2008, it may be recalled, Minister on Interior, Mr Rehman Malik, had told the National Assembly that the Marriott blast was carried out by Lashkar- e Jhangvi.

In interviews before she was assassinated, Ms Benazir Bhutto had revealed that the attack on her procession in Karachi in October 2007 was carried out by the gang of “ Abdul Rehman Sindhi, an Al- Qaeda- linked Lashkar- e Jhangvi ( LeJ) militant from the Dadu district of Sindh”. After her assassination in December 2008, an Al- Qaeda spokesman claimed it had killed “ an American asset”. The LeJ is a sectarian outfit, created in 1996, and trained by- Al Qaeda in its camps in Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, whenever the government of Pakistan demanded the handover of LeJ killers, the Taliban government, backed by Al- Qaeda, steadily refused the demand.

There are other signs that the LeJ is an ally of Al- Qaeda. In May 2002, a New Zealand cricket team abandoned its tour of Pakistan after an LeJ suicide- bomber attacked them in front of their hotel in Karachi.

THE LeJ was closely aligned with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the master- planner of the 9/ 11 attacks in the United States. When the British national Omar Sheikh sprung from an Indian jail by Jaish- e Muhammad after the hijack of an Indian airliner in 1999, led the American journalist Daniel Pearl into a trap in Karachi in January 2002, the trap was actually set by a group of terrorists of LeJ. These people facilitated Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in personally slaughtering Pearl in a safe house belonging to a charity trust linked to a madrassa in Karachi and active in Afghanistan, and banned as a terrorist organisation.

But there is a serious problem in Pakistan about such terrorist attacks.

Despite many occasions when Al- Qaeda has owned up its attacks in Pakistan — one was when an Al- Qaeda spokesman declared that the Danish embassy in Islamabad was attacked by an Al- Qaeda suicide- bomber — few Pakistanis believe that Al- Qaeda actually exists, let alone that it is dangerous for Pakistan.

This state of mass denial lies behind the lack of consensus in Pakistan about the origins of terrorism and how to tackle it.

It is strengthened by “ careful and fearful” reporting from places in FATA where journalist Musa Khankhel of Swat was recently killed for making an observation on the Taliban warlord Fazlullah.

It is also strengthened by the regular acquittal of LeJ terrorists fromcourts where judges are not protected by the state.

The writer is editor, The Friday Times