Pakistan arrests suspected Mumbai plotter

[David]

AP


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Security forces overran a militant camp on the outskirts of Pakistani Kashmir's main city and seized an alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, two officials said Monday.

Backed by a helicopter, the troops grabbed Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi among at least 12 people taken Sunday in the raid on the riverbank camp run by the banned group Laskhar-e-Taiba in Pakistani Kashmir, the officials said. There was a brief gunfight in the camp near Muzaffarabad before the militants were subdued, the officials said.

The officials — one from the intelligence agencies and one from a government agency — spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Indian officials say the sole Mumbai attacker captured alive has told them that Lakhvi recruited him for the mission and that Lakhvi and another militant, Yusuf Muzammil, planned the operation, which left 171 people dead in India's commercial capital.

The capture of Lakhvi was likely to please India as well as U.S. officials, who allege he also directed Laskhar-e-Taiba operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Southeast Asia, training members to carry out suicide bombings and attack populated areas. In 2004, he allegedly sent operatives and funds to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

It was not immediately clear what Pakistan intended to do with Lakhvi.

Pakistan and India do not have an extradition treaty. Last week, President Asif Ali Zardari indicated anyone arrested in Pakistan in connection with the attacks would be tried in Pakistan.

[darrels joy]

The Pakistani Two Step



Pakistan has announced that it has carried out raids against Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in the country.

Pakistani security forces on Sunday raided a camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), two sources said, in a strike against the militant group blamed by India for last month's deadly attacks on Mumbai.

Local man Nisar Ali told Reuters the operation began in the afternoon in Shawai on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani side of disputed Kashmir region.

"I don't know details as the entire area was sealed off, but I heard two loud blasts in the evening after a military helicopter landed there," Ali said.

An official with the Jamaat-ud-Dawa charity, which is linked to LeT, said security forces had taken over the camp.

India has demanded Pakistan take swift action over what it says is the latest anti-India militant attack emanating from Pakistani soil. No comment on the raid was immediately available from Indian officials.

It's the Pakistani two-step. The Pakistanis have been doing this for years, and it follows a trend in other places like Saudi Arabia following terror attacks.

You make a few arrests.

You kill a few terrorists and say that you're cracking down. You do just enough to stay in power (in the case of Pervez Musharraf and now Asif Ali Zardari), and little more. You cycle between appeasement and crackdown, and the Islamists know this is coming just as surely as anyone who has been watching this for years.

The only way to break out of this mess is to take on the Islamists and destroy the Islamist terror infrastructure, but no one in Pakistan is willing to take it on; they've penetrated the ISI and the government can barely control the frontier provinces, let alone deal with the immediate threat of India's wrath following the terror attacks.

The US has been largely operating with tacit approval of the Pakistani government in taking out targets inside Waziristan and the NWFP. A major problem is that the terrorists aren't simply confined there - there are rat lines all through Pakistan, and going after them is tougher, although the US did take out an al Qaeda bigwig a few weeks back outside the frontier provinces. That's a much more delicate situation and one that threatens the overall US policy on airstrikes inside Pakistan.

The Pakistanis have chosen for far too long to enable and condone the Islamists and the jihad. They can't simply turn and burn them now without payback, and the Pakistani government is going to walk the tightrope, just as Musharraf did. They'll do only so much to reduce the pressure from the West and India, but no further because that would risk the Islamists rising up against the government.

In fact, Pakistan's ISI appears to have aided and abetted the terrorists in attacking Mumbai. This isn't the first time the ISI has been implicated in terrorism either.

More ominously, the former ISI chief is linked to al Qaeda's WMD advisory group.

Lieutenant General (Retired) Hamid Gul served on the board of the Umma Tameer-E-Nau, an organization founded by Pakistani nuclear scientists and industrialists, according to a secret dossier that the United States has put together to present to the United Nations Security Council, The News reported. Gul has also been implicated in supporting the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani Network, al Qaeda, and other extremist groups.

Gul served as the chief of the ISI from 1987 to 1989. Gul is known as the Godfather of the Taliban for his efforts to organize the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, and the helping to facilitate the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. Gul supports the terrorist insurgency in India-occupied Kashmir and opposes the US-led effort to defeat Islamic extremism.

The Umma Tameer-E-Nau "was founded by Pakistani nuclear scientists with close ties to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban," the US government stated in December 2001 after blocking the group's finances under Executive Order 13224. Three of the group's directors - two Pakistani nuclear scientists and an industrialist - were also proscribed under the executive order.

Note too that the NATO operations in Afghanistan are at tremendous risk because Pakistan simply cannot maintain operational security for the transportation terminals and convoys carrying the weapons and equipment into Afghanistan, and that threatens the IFOR. A major Taliban attack against one such terminal in Peshawar resulted in 160 vehicles destroyed, including dozens of humvees destined for Afghanistan. 70% of the equipment and vehicles destined for Afghanistan pass through Pakistan.

That's not a good situation to be in at all.

Cracking down against LeT and the Taliban in general is the absolute least the Pakistanis can do at this point. Appearing to crack down on LeT and the Taliban is the most they can do, precisely because of the risk of looking like the government is operating at the behest of the West or India.

UPDATE:
This certainly isn't good news. Pakistan has suspended the NATO supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

The decision came just hours after a logistics terminal in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, where dozens of trucks carrying Humvees and other military vehicles were parked, was attacked by insurgents on Sunday.

More than 300 Taliban militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles burned down the logistics [had to fix a typo in the original report] terminal.

That comes on the heels of still more attacks on NATO supply lines today, with 90 containers destroyed in an attack today. Pakistan claims that the terrorists involved are getting international assistance and that they can't handle the security of the NATO supply lines.

I guess the ISI now counts as international assistance?

http://lawhawk.blogspot.com/2008/12/...-two-step.html

[darrels joy]

Taliban raids Nato convoys for second night

Pakistani Taliban fighters attacked Nato supply routes for a second consecutive night, torching 50 containers needed to supply troops in Afghanistan during an audacious raid near Peshawar


The attack came barely 24 hours after 200 militants destroyed more than 100 lorries in a Nato base barely a mile away.

The trucks are needed to ferry vital equipment and supplies through the perilous Khyber Pass - the narrow mountain trail leading from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

"The militants came just past midnight, firing in the air, sprinkled petrol on containers and then set them on fire," said Mohammad Zaman, a security guard at the site quoted by Reuters.

"They told us they would not harm us, but they asked us not to work for the Americans."

The early Monday assault provided new evidence that the Taliban is resurrecting an age-old local strategy of hitting supply routes through the Hindu Kush mountain range.

Two Nato trucks travelling along the Peshawar ring road were also fired upon.

The attacks came as a prominent think tank said the Taliban had established a permanent presence in 72 per cent of Afghanistan - a figure debated by Nato.

"The Taliban now has a permanent presence in 72 per cent of the country," said the International Council, formerly known as the Senlis Council.

Its report defines a permanent presence as an average of one or more insurgent attacks per week over the entire year.
Early on Sunday morning, the gunmen overpowered and disarmed security guards, before setting fire to the vehicles, many of which were laden with Humvee armoured cars intended for Western forces.

About three quarters of all the ammunition, food, weapons and other supplies needed by Nato's troops in Afghanistan, including 8,000 British soldiers, pass through Pakistan.

Most supplies, including fuel, are unloaded in Karachi on the Arabian Sea and then carried along main roads through Pakistan and into Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass. The depot in Peshawar, the nearest city to the Pass which crosses the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, is a vital link in this chain.

The latest attack was a double victory for the Taliban. Earlier incidents had temporarily closed the Khyber Pass, causing a build up of lorries at the depot. A significant portion of this backlog has now been destroyed.

A senior police officer said the attack took place at 2.30am. "They fired rockets, hurled hand grenades and then set ablaze over one hundred trucks," he said.

One guard was killed and a fire swept through the parked vehicles. "They were shouting Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great) and Down With America. They broke into the terminals after snatching guns from us," said Mohammad Rafiullah, a security guard the the terminal.

Tariq Hayat Khan, the political agent in charge of Peshawar's neighbouring Khyber Tribal Area, said that attacks on Nato supplies were the work of a local leader from the Kooki Khel Afridi tribe, who has indirectly allied with Baitullah Mehsud, the head of Pakistan's wing of the Taliban. Mehsud has publicly vowed to stop Nato supplies from reaching Afghanistan.

Whenever Nato lorries pass through the Khyber, they must travel the 20 miles to the Afghan frontier between 7am and 1pm. Pakistan's security forces deploy sentries in the mountain heights overlooking the Pass. At sensitive points, "rapid reaction" units are on standby and Cobra gunship helicopters hover overhead.

Tribal leaders loyal to Pakistan's government deploy armed men on their section of the Pass. Nonetheless, the Khyber is often closed for days at a time. Last month, it was shut for a week when gunmen hijacked a dozen Nato lorries and made off with four Humvee armoured cars.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ond-night.html