THE DAY OF THE TIGER-
Mumbai jihadists' prime target was Jewish center"When asked during interrogation why Nariman House was specifically targetted, Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue. Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans" -- Qur'an 5:82"Nariman House, not Taj, was the prime target on 26/11," by Somendra Sharma for DNAIndia, January 5 (thanks to Pamela):Think 26/11, and images of the carnage at the Taj come to mind. But the terrorists themselves were in no doubt that Nariman House was the prime focus. For this was the place which housed a Jewish centre, and the fanatics from Pakistan were clear that they wanted to send a message to the world from there. The Mumbai crime branch, which is investigating the terror attacks, has found that the terrorists’ handlers in Pakistan were clear this operation should not fail under any circumstances. The rest of the operations — at the Taj, Oberoi and Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus — were intended to amplify the effect.A senior police official, told DNA on condition of anonymity, that the interrogation of Mohammed Amir Iman Ajmal (aka Kasab) revealed as much. Just before entering the city, the terrorists’ team leader, Ismail Khan, briefed them once again about their targets. “But Khan briefed Imran Babar, alias Abu Akasha, and Nasir, alias Abu Umer, intensely on what to do at Nariman House,” the officer said.When asked during interrogation why Nariman House was specifically targetted, Ajmal reportedly told the police they wanted to sent a message to Jews across the world by attacking the ultra orthodox synagogue.According to the statement by Ajmal, Khan told Babar and Nasir that even if the others failed in their operation, they both could not afford to.
“The Nariman House operation has to be a success,” the officer said, quoting from Ajmal’s statement.“Khan also said that as far as Nariman House was concerned, there should not be even a minimal glitch in finding it and capturing it,” the officer quoted Ajmal as saying.After the dinghy carrying the 10 terrorists reached Mumbai at the Macchimar colony opposite Badhwar Park in Cuffe Parade, it was decided that no bombs would be planted in the taxi to be used to reach Nariman House.“The idea,” according to the police officer, “was that if Babar and Nasir got delayed in locating and entering Nariman House, the bomb in the taxi may explode even before they entered their target.”...“Ansari told us that he did not divulge this information earlier because it would have jeopardised the most important operation of the LeT. He had also been warned by the LeT that Nariman House was their most secret operation and must not be compromised at any cost,” the officer said.
Lashkar-e-Tayiba commander Zarar Shah captured in the crackdown on militants earlier this month in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, has confessed the group's involvement in the terror attacks in Mumbai, a media report saidon Wednesday.Shah has also implicated other LeT members, and had broadly confirmed the confession made by the sole capturedmilitant Ajmal Kasab to Indian investigators--that the 10 assailants trained in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and then went by boat from Karachi to Mumbai ], the Wall Street Journal reported quoting a senior Pakistani security official.The paper said Pakistan's own investigationof terror attacks in Mumbai had begun to show substantive links between the LeT and 10 gunmen who took part in the Mumbai mission.Pakistani security officials were quoted as saying that a top Lashkar commander, Zarar Shah, has admitted a rolein the Mumbai attack during interrogation. The paper quoted a person familiar with investigation as saying that Shah also admitted that the attackers spent at least a few weeks in Karachi, training in urban combat to hone skills they would use in their assault.The disclosure, it said, could add new international pressure on Pakistan to accept that the attacks, which left 183 dead in India, originated within its borders and to prosecute or extradite the suspects.That raises difficult and potentially destabilising issues for the country's new civilian government, its militaryand the spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence--which is conducting interrogations of militants it once cultivated aspartners, the Journal said."He is singing," the security official said of Shah.
The admission, the official told the paper, is backed up by US intercepts of a phone call between Shah and one ofthe attackers at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, the site of a 60-hour confrontation with Indian security forces.A second person familiar with the investigation was quoted by the Journal as saying that Shah told Pakistaniinterrogators that he was one of the key planners of the operation, and that he spoke with the attackers during therampage to give them advice and keep them focused.Shah, the paper said, was picked up along with fellow Lashkar commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi during the military camp raids in PoK.The probe, the Journal said, also is stress-testing an uncomfortable shift under way at Pakistan's spy agency -- andthe government -- since the election of civilian leadership replacing the military-led regime earlier this year. Military and intelligence officials, it says, acknowledge they have long seen India as their primary enemy and Islamist extremists such as Lashkar as allies.But now the ISI is in the midst of being revamped, and its ranks purged of those seen as too soft on Islamic militants.That revamp and the Mumbai attacks are in turn putting pressure on the civilian leadership, which risks a backlashamong the population -- and among elements of ISI and the military -- if it is too accommodating to India." "Don't fight the ISI. It can make or break any regime in Pakistan," retired General Mirza Aslam Beg, a former army chief, was quoted as saying.The delicate politics of the Mumbai investigation, the Journal said, have given the spy agency renewed sway just when the government was trying to limit its influence. A Western diplomat told the paper that the question now is what Pakistan will do with the evidence it is developing.The big fear in the West and India is a repeat of what happened after a 2001 attack on India's parliament, which ledto the ban on Lashkar. Top militant leaders were arrested only to be released months later, the Journal noted. Lashkar and other groupscontinued to operate openly, even though formal ISI links were scaled back or closed, the diplomat was quoted as saying."They've got the guys. They have the confessions. What do they do now?" the diplomat said. "We need to see that this is more than a show. We want to see the entire infrastructure of terror dismantled. There needs to be real prosecutions this time."
A spokesman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari , Farhatullah Babar, was quoted as saying on Tuesday that hewasn't aware of the Pakistani investigation yet producing any links between Lashkar militants and the Mumbai attacks."The Interior Ministry has already stated that the government of Pakistan has not been furnished with any evidence," he said.The Pakistani security official, it said, cautioned that the investigation is still in early stages and a "more full picture" could emerge once India decides to share more information.Pakistani authorities didn't have evidence that LeT was involved in the attacks before the militants' arrest inPoK, the security official claimed. They were captured based only on initial guidance from US and British authorities.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/...ai-attacks.htmTOP ARTICLE The Clock Is Ticking 14 Jan 2009, 0010 hrs IST, K Subrahmanyam The ‘New York Times' carried an article on Sunday titled 'Obama's Worst Pakistan Nightmare'. The timing of the article by David Sanger,nine days before the Obama inauguration, is highly significant. The national security adviser of the outgoing administration, Stephen Hadley, in an earlier interview said that Pakistan was the biggest foreign policy challenge to the incoming Barack Obama administration. At the end of George Bush's term, his aides are reported to have handed over to Obama's transition team a lengthy review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, concluding that the US has far more at stake in preventing Pakistan's collapse than it does in stabilising Afghanistan or Iraq.
According to Sanger, the author of the transition report has recorded that "only one of those countries has a hundred nuclear weapons. For al-Qaeda and other Islamists this is the home game... For anyone trying to keep a nuclear weapon going off in the United States, it is our home game too". Sanger has written about Pakistan's command and control over its nuclear weapons after a detailed session with General (Retd) Khalid Kidwai, head of the Strategic Plans Division. Kidwai has been doing this job since 2002, interacting extensively with the American media, think tanks, the Pentagon and State Department to persuade them that Pakistani nuclear weapons were quite safe and there were no risks of them falling into the hands of jehadis. But the Americans are not convinced. Sanger narrates how Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told President Bush during a meeting in Washington about the crackdown on a major madrassa even as American intelligence had the transcripts of the Pakistani army giving advance warning to the madrassa about impending raids.
In these circumstances, American officials have doubts about two kinds of vulnerabilities of Pakistani nuclear weapons. The first, according to one of the most senior officials in the Bush administration, is what happens when the Pakistanis move their weapons. The US fears that some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport nuclear weapons closer to the frontlines where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. When the 26/11 attacks occurred in Mumbai, officials told Sanger that one of the attackers' motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events. The second, according to the officials, are the steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to infiltrate the nuclear labs and put sleepers in there. This American fear can be traced back to A Q Khan's proliferation record and the uncovering of links between Bashiruddin Mahmood, a pioneering Pakistani nuclear scientist, and al-Qaeda.
The article discloses that US spent $100 million in aiding Pakistan to improve the safety and security of its weapons. But the Pakistanis are extremely suspicious of the Americans and have refused to accept direct technological help because of the fear that any electronic locking mechanisms from the US could have devices to disable their weapons. The Pakistanis are also unwilling to allow US special forces to operate against jehadis in their territory because of suspicion that Americans may develop capability to use special forces to seize their weapons. The American worries are mostly about the jehadis. In the last year of the Bush administration, the directors of National Intelligence and CIA undertook several trips to Pakistan to convince Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani that the militants in the tribal areas were now aiming to bring down the government in Islamabad. Sanger says, "The message was simple and direct. The Pakistani leadership needed to forget about India and focus on the threat from within". President-elect Obama echoed similar sentiments in interviews. The NYT report clearly conveys the concerns of Washington about Pakistan as the Obama administration is about to assume office. There will be sceptics in India who will insist that in this situation the US is likely to succumb to Pakistani blackmail and sacrifice India's security interests at the altar of trying to maintain Pakistan's stability, as they have been doing in the last eight years. On the other hand, there can be views that Americans are no longer likely to accept the degree of risk vis-a-vis Pakistan conveyed in this article and continue to be taken for a ride. It is obvious that Obama is taking this challenge seriously. Vice-president-elect Joe Biden visited Pakistan just days before the inauguration.
Following the Mumbai attack, diplomatic interaction between India and the US has intensified. What is needed today is a strategic understanding at the highest leadership levels between India and US on the international threat arising out of Pakistan. The US Congressional Bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism in its report last month concluded, "Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan." The US is concerned about Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and becoming a threat to them. Pakistanis assert that their nukes are India-specific. Therefore, there is a mutuality of strategic interest between the two countries on the developments in Pakistan.
MOSCOW MOMENTS AND IMPRESSIONS – NOVEMBER 2007 – 
