Pakistan’s Munich: The Enemy’s Fingerprints
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad , Pakistan
You can’t ignore the symbolism: Commando-style trained young men with backpacks, carrying automatic machine guns and armed with grenades and rocket launchers, bearing a shocking resemblance to the video footage released by the Indian government of the Mumbai attackers in November.
The Indian connection, even if indirect and unintentional, cannot be ignored:
1. Lahore is the same city where Pakistani antiterrorism police arrested several Indian citizens and their Pakistani accomplices in the past few weeks and paraded them in public with evidence linking them to India’s spy agency Research & Analysis Wing, or RAW. Lahore lies a few kilometers away from the Indian border and has bore the brunt of India’s covert operations in the 1970s and 1980s, mostly randomly planted bombs in public places designed to spread terror.
2. Pakistani security officials had received a report that at least ten Indian operatives have crossed the border into Lahore 48 hours before the attacks.
3. India spearheaded a campaign to convince several countries to sever sports relations with Pakistan and put tremendous pressure on Sri Lanka not to send its cricket team to play here.
4. India has a history of supporting the terrorist LTTE group and arming it with sophisticated weapons to fight the Sri Lankan government and army. Pakistan, on the other hand, has been supporting Sri Lanka against this terrorism. India has long been disturbed by the close relationship between Colombo and Islamabad. In this connection, Sri Lanka’s foreign minister’s statement is important. He said he won’t point fingers but said, “Terrorism has no borders,” an implied suggestion that the Sri Lankans believe the perpetrators came from outside Pakistan.
5. The timing of the attack shows the professional planning. Lahore administration was in a flux after the change of provincial government. Lahore was also the last Pakistani city that has not yet been affected by the fallout from the war in Afghanistan. This incident effectively brings chaos to Lahore as well. The rest of Pakistan is already being destabilized by foreign intelligence operatives working from the Afghan soil, inserting professional saboteurs and flushing the country with money to recruit criminals and activating them under the guise of religious extremists.
An important point to note here is that whoever planned this attack made sure that the terrorists look similar to Mumbai attackers. This can be an attempt to spark more conflict between Pakistan and India. In this case, if evidence is found, it might be interesting to probe the possibility of a third party trying to push both countries to war. And it’s not just religious elements in Pakistan that want this. There is an organized terrorist infrastructure inside India, manned by Hindu terrorist groups with recruits from Indian military intelligence. The same Indian elements are also active in Kabul and other Afghan cities, using the Afghan soil to export terrorism inside Pakistan. American reports have also linked these Indian elements to attacks on US and NATO soldiers and blame them on Pakistan.
There is enough circumstantial and physical evidence that involves India’s intelligence agencies in terrorism inside Pakistan.
The Pakistani military must realize that this is an organized and not a guerrilla war that is being waged against Pakistan. This terrorism is deceptively hiding itself behind the label of religious extremism, and has links with those countries that are actively destabilizing Pakistan from the inside.
It is time now that patriotic Pakistanis and the Pakistani military sit up and take notice of the apologetic statements of the government in Islamabad which, like the Indians, wasted no time in linking the Lahore attack to the Mumbai attacks, which means linking it to Pakistanis (which is not proven except in the minds of India, their American backers and their backers in Pakistan, i.e. President Zardari, Rehman Malik, Sherry Rehman, and the former advisor Mehmud Durrani.) In this case, if the Zardari government is accusing ‘Mumbai attackers’ of this latest attack, then this government is indirectly accusing the Pakistani military and our intelligence of attacking the Sri Lankans in Lahore. This is in continuation of the covert efforts by elements in this government to cause a confrontation between the Pakistani military and the world at large.
Pakistan ’s response must be methodical. This is the time to expose Indian terrorism. There is stunning evidence available with Pakistani authorities about Indian activities in Afghanistan, inside Pakistan’s tribal and border areas and inside the rest of Pakistan. The Zardari government will not bring this evidence forward. It is the responsibility of the Pakistani military and its spy agencies to force this government to unmask the Indian activities. Enough of this apologetic attitude toward India. We urge Pakistan to publicly demand that Indian’s sponsorship of terrorism be curbed.
The Indians should also brace for retaliation. If Indian military and security forces are using terrorism against Pakistan in multiple places, then Indians from these organizations should be a fair game for retaliation.
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