I'll take a stab at this. There is of course the fact, proved beyond doubt, that the attackers(members of Lashkar-e-Taiba) were Pakistani, came from Pakistan, and were in constant contact with a 'control room' in Pakistan for the duration of the attack. Reconnaissance for the attacks was carried out by a Pakistani American David Headley(originally Daood Gilani) who was apparently a DEA double agent, was arrested by American authorities and who
implicated the ISI in no uncertain terms.
Quote:
David Coleman Headley’s long-awaited testimony at the start of a trial with international repercussions resolved one question at the outset: Federal prosecutors did not hesitate to connect Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) to the attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans.
...
Headley testified that Lashkar “operated under the umbrella of the ISI” even after the group was banned in Pakistan in 2001. The ISI and Lashkar “coordinated with each other,” Headley testified. “And ISI provided assistance to Lashkar: financial, military and moral support.”
...
After he trained three years with Lashkar, Headley said, a “Major Ali” of the ISI recruited him when he was briefly detained near the Afghanistan border in 2006. Ali referred him to an officer known as Major Iqbal, who became Headley’s handler and worked separately but in coordination with Lashkar chiefs, directing Headley’s reconnaissance in India and providing $25,000 to fund his mission
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He's apparently not the most reliable of witnesses, but then again, it's not like he's making particularly unbelievable accusations. There has recently been some corroboration for his account -
The latest news is that an Indian named Abu Jundal(alias Sayed Ansari) was arrested by Saudi authorities, and handed over to India. He was in Saudi Arabia on a Pakistani passport(which are apparently machine readable and biometric and hence ought to be difficult to fake), and carried Pakistani nationality cards. It's been widely reported that he was handed over to India over Paksitani protests because a) the US insisted on it and (b) Indian investigators recovered DNA from his family in India and it matched. He was apparently the guy who went to Pakistan and helped train the attackers in Hindi. He was present in the control room in Pakistan and in constant communication with the attackers over the phone while the attacks took place. The people he names match the ones earlier fingered by David Headley. From the
Chicago tribune -
Quote:
Indian officials who analyzed the phone conversations with the gunmen had long suspected that one of the handlers was an Indian because he used words only a fluent Hindi speaker would use, while the others spoke the mix of Punjabi and Urdu common to large parts of Pakistan.
Ansari, investigators say, has provided the names of four other people in the Karachi control room, which New Delhi maintains could not have operated without some state support.
Two of them he named as Sajid Mir, also known as Sajid Majid, and Sameer Ali.
A Pakistani-American, David Headley, who was convicted of scouting targets in Mumbai ahead of the attacks, gave the same two names to a Chicago court last year as helping mount the operation.
Headley identified Sameer Ali as a major in the ISI who had recruited him when he was briefly detained near the Pakistan-Afghan border in 2006 and Sajid Mir as a man handling foreign recruits for the LeT.
Mir was also believed to be the handler of a Frenchman accused of plotting an attack in Australia soon after the September 11 attacks. French judge Jean-Louis Brugiere who investigated the case said he believed Mir was an officer of the Pakistani military.
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So. Is there hard, incontrovertible, smoking gun level proof that Pakistani intelligence were involved? I'm not sure. There is enough proof however that nobody in India doubts that there was some level of involvement. Of course, India's experiences with Pakistani involvement in terrorist activity go far back enough that most Indians don't really need proof. I don't think I come under that category, but I too think there's enough proof here to believe that the Pakistani state, or, given its schizophrenic nature, at least some elements of the Pakistani state, were involved in the attack.
More importantly, given Pakistan's reputation in these matters, I don't think most of the world really doubts they were involved either. Sort of like OBL. What really concerns me though is not so much that they were involved in the past, but that there are no serious indications that they are attempting to, able to, or even
want to reign in this kind of activity in the future.
07-19-2012, 12:13 AM
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