The US, the UK, and Israel are actively collaborating with India to unravel the nature of the conspiracy and identify the perpetrators.
NEW DELHI: Even as India took a tough line with Pakistan on Friday, asking Pakistan to send ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha and army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani here to “assist in inquiries”, it is becoming clear that the Mumbai terrorist attack is fast becoming a global issue.
The US, the UK, and Israel are actively collaborating with India to unravel the nature of the conspiracy and identify the perpetrators. These countries are all sending experts to lend a helping hand in the investigation.
The past two days have seen a flurry of activity with intelligence sleuths and forensic experts from the CIA, FBI, and other agencies flying in from different parts of the world. On Monday, a team of Afghanistan-based CIA operatives, foreign ministry officials from Israel, and intelligence officers from the UK were in Mumbai for what will probably go down as the first collaborative effort with India on this scale in the war on terror. An FBI team is also on its way to Mumbai to join the investigation.
But the icing on the cake for India is Pakistan’s agreement to send the chiefs of the Inter-Services Intelligence and the army. The move comes in response to a request from prime minister Manmohan Singh to his counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani, on Friday.
But, according to a well-placed official source, it was only after the US leaned on the Pakistan government that the latter acquiesced to what will be a historic first in Indo-Pak engagement.
Predictably, Pakistan has not announced dates for the visit and those familiar with the way Indo-Pak relations work do not expect the duo to come in a hurry. But international pressure is mounting on Pakistan to join in this global effort to hunt down the conspirators, virtually putting the Mumbai attack on the same plane as the horrific 911 strikes in New York.
The United Nations Security Council issued a resolution on Friday urging the international community to “cooperate actively” with Indian authorities. It is believed that the resolution was pushed by the US, which is playing an unusually pro-active role to get to the bottom of the conspiracy.
The targeting of American and British citizens by the terrorists and the attack on the Jewish-owned Chabad House, where a number of Israelis were staying, have fuelled suspicions of an al-Qaeda-inspired global conspiracy with international dimensions that extend well beyond the borders of South Asia.
One of the angles being investigated is whether the attack was meant to send a warning to the incoming Barack Obama administration, which has put the war in Afghanistan at the top of its foreign policy agenda.
The concern in the US is evident from the fact that not only is president George Bush monitoring events in Mumbai, president-elect Barack Obama is equally focused on the incident. He has already spoken to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice twice for inputs, received detailed briefings from US intelligence agencies, and talked to India’s ambassador in Washington Ronen Sen for an update.
Interestingly, a report in The Times, London, the morning after the terrorists struck quoted Western intelligence sources as saying that they were expecting an “al-Qaeda spectacular” before Obama takes office. The report said India was probably chosen as the theatre for this “spectacular” because this is where al-Qaeda has sufficient resources to carry out an attack on a giant scale.
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