Pakistan doesn’t appear to be serious of proceeding against the guilty of 26/11 or of dismantling the entire terror infrastructure built at the cost of American infrastructure, as former CIA officials who did duty in Afghanistan and Pakistan have testified before Congressional committees.
Out of the six names provided by India to Pakistan in connection with 26/11 probe, only two have been charged. One of these two is Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, military Chief of Lashkar-e-Toiba. The arrest has not come in the way of Lakhvi. Lodged comfortably in a Rawalpindi prison, he is still directing the LeT operations. As the ProPublica investigations show, he loves his cellular phone in his cell, and the mighty US could not compel the powerful Pakistan army chief Gen Kayani to withdraw the ‘facility’. He simply turned down the American request to take away Lakhvi phone.
There is hard evidence to show that far from any improvement, the terror situation has in fact deteriorated since the three-day carnage LeT indulged in Mumbai in November 2008. A number of major facilities have come up in Pakistan for training in fidayeen activities. These are in addition to the ones at Muridke and Bahawalpur. Infiltration of trained militants into Jammu and Kashmir is continuing unabated.
Pakistan government has lifted the ban on Hafiz Sayeed’s JuD which has been publicly spewing venom against India and the US. It has taken on the image of a charity to indulge in its core activities unchecked. The government’s failure to lend a helping hand to the people hit by floods in 2010 has come as godsend opportunity to Hafiz to pump prime fundamentalist culture and Islamist spirit.
Hafiz Sayeed himself leaves no one in doubt about his mission as he wings across Pakistan holding rallies and delivering religious discourse laced with political rhetoric. He not only opposes India publicly but issues threats to his own government if it does anything that can normalise relations between the two countries.
No wonder, Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has publicly rolled back his own cabinet decision to fall in-line with the global trade norms by according the most favoured nation status to India. The Army was supposed to be on board the cabinet decision since a key army functionary was part of the trade delegation that had held talks with New Delhi in the run up to the MFN decision. Put differently, either Hafez effect demoralised the army brass to the extent of retreating from the MFN frontline or Prime Minister Gilani simply led India into believing that he was very much in command of the situation.
Indian police have busted as many as 57 terror modules of different sizes and shapes, since 26/11, which means that attempts by Pakistani terrorists and their patron saints in Rawalpindi have not given up their India fixation. Though Rehman Malik has said he was sending a judicial commission to hear the lone surviving 26/11 terrorist, Kasab lodged in a Mumbai jail, he and his officers are yet to comply with the Indian request to provide voice samples of the masterminds of the attack to take the probe to the next level. Islamabad has been dithering on letting Indian security agencies and forensic experts question the masterminds in Pakistan. The country has been suffering from ‘more evidence’ syndrome even though enough evidence is available in the dossiers India had provided to enable it to proceed against the culprits. Will, not political will but Army/ISI will is in short supply.
The civilian government in Pakistan is too weak to stand-up to the military establishment and its intelligence wing. This has been proved time and again, the most recent being the Memo Gate – disclosure by the Pakistani-American Mansoor Aijaz that President Zardari approached the US military leadership to rein in his own military top brass. The Memo-gate has claimed the scalp of Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani since the allegation was that he had drafted the memo addressed to the then US military Chief Mike Mullen. Haqqani has denied having to do anything with the note, but Mullen has confirmed the existence of the note. It spoke of President Zardari’s readiness to hand over the 26/11 masterminds to India if only Washington could intervene to prevent a military takeover in Islamabad, which looked real after the US smoked out Osama bin Laden from his Abbotabad hole.
American investigations post 9/11 and Indian experience that predates 26/11 and go back to the time of Kargil war substantiate what Memo Gate says as a sub-text that for Pakistan, the terrorists are a bargaining chip to achieve its political, strategic and territorial objectives and that Islamabad continues to rely on terrorism as its life-line. The Army directly and through its eyes and ears – the ISI- controls the reins of the civilian government. As long as this continues, there is little chance of Islamabad achieving any breakthrough against terrorism.
Rehman Malik may have grandly stated on the sidelines of SAARC summit in Maldives that terrorist Kasab should be hanged, but the world knows that the statement lacks conviction.
