Islamist terrorists conducted coordinated attacks against pre-selected targets in Mombai last week. This kind of attack requires a network consisting of well-developed recruiting, training, intelligence, operations, and command & control cells. While India has enough aggrieved Islamists to fill the ranks for such an attack, the Islamist networks operating out of Pakistan have a competitive advantage for this kind of wickedness due to the combination of un-governed spaces, large pockets of supportive host populations, and all the institutional and cultural consequences of years of state-support for Islamist insurgencies.
Thus it is no surprise that Indian investigators told Reuters that interrogations of a captured terrorist revealed that “the militants who attacked Mumbai underwent months of commando training in Pakistan.” Nor is it surprising that this training was organized by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group. LeT was one of the tools the Pakistan government used as a proxy to further its ambitions in Kashmir and it was the LeT’s attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war in 2001-2002 (and, incidentally, led Pakistan to takes its “eye off the ball” in the tribal areas along its border with Afghanistan).
Many people assume that Pakistani intelligence (i.e. the ISI) maintains ties with LeT, leading some to assume the complicity of the Pakistani government or factions within it (e.g. in the Army of the ISI) in the Mumbai attacks. This goes too far, at least based on the available evidence. The weakest link in the chain is the one that links the ISI (mush less the PK government) with LeT. This goes in the face of contradictory data which has LeT and related groups targeting the Pakistani government for abandoning them when Musharraf pledged Pakistan toward the U.S. “War on Terrorism”. Have we already forgotten the many assassination attacks on top politicians, military targets, and even the ISI itself? I dare say that if the ISI does have direct contact with the ISI, it is more along the traditional lines of collection and counter-intelligence than it is the old command-and-control relationship it enjoyed in the 90’s. It is far more likely that the ISI has lost control of its Kashmiri creation just as it has its erstwhile proxies in the Pakistani Taliban.
Our brains are wired for causality: they will connect dots regardless of the underlying pattern actually described by the data. To make matters worse, we act as if we had slept through elementary probability, forgetting that several “probable” events in a chain combine to create a decidedly improbable conclusion; and that one dubious link weakens the entire chain of causation. Armchair analysts point to the convenience of the attack for those conservatives in the Army who oppose peace with India; but this kind of backwards logic is best left for bar-rooms and barber shops. It certainly has no place among responsible journalists or policy-makers.
The most likely explanation regarding the Pakistan government’s complicity in the bombing is that former ISI officers were part of the network that facilitated the act. The ISI probably maintains contact with these retired officers, but is neither involved in or even privy to the operational details of their work. I personally hope that the outrage over the Mumbai attacks leads the PK to prosecute this “shadow network” of retired officers and to build support for continued intelligence reform. But I also hope that we avoid condemning the Pakistan government for an event that may have been outside its control and knowledge. After all, it cannot even keep the militant Islamists from committing atrocities within its own borders; why should anyone assume it could have stopped the attacks in Mumbai (or Afghanistan)? Pakistan is in bad shape – as an ally we can help them do the right thing better. But this requires analytical objectivity, if not outright charity.
