Another Mumbai type attack on the cards: US official

A top Obama aide has warned of another "Mumbai-style" terror attack on India by the jihadist "Frankenstein monster," which wants the Pakistan army to remain focussed on its western border and foil attempts to re-deploy it in the restive tribal areas.

Bruce Riedel, an administration aide and retired CIA expert, who helped formulate Obama's Af-Pak policy, believes there is "serious risk" of another Mumbai-type terrorist attack so as to ratchet up tension between India and Pakistan and give Islamabad's army an excuse to maintain its forces on the western border.

In an interview to the Council on Foreign Relations, Riedel said the jihadist in Pakistan, whom he termed as the "Frankenstein monster" wants the situation on the India-Pak front constantly boiling to divert the Pakistani army away from them and allow Islamic militants to grow and fester.

"There is a serious risk of another Mumbai-style attack, which would ratchet up tensions and make the Pakistani army even more determined to keep 80 per cent of its manpower focused on India rather than on the threat posed by the internal jihadist problem," Riedel told CFR in an interview.

Observing that India has shown remarkable restraint over the years, partly because they cannot figure out a viable military response that doesn't risk escalation to full-scale war, Riedel said: "How longer that restraint will last before we have another attack remains to be seen".

Riedel was the co-chairman of the Obama Administration's inter-agency committee to develop the Af-Pak policy, which was announced by president Barack Obama on March 27.

The interview published May 6, in the online edition of the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, was taken before Obama met his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari at a tri-lateral summit with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Washington.

"Pakistan is a base of operations for repeated attacks on India going back to the hijacking of an Indian aircraft in 1999 to the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, and then of course the Mumbai attack of last year," he said.

"Indians feel that they have put out the olive branch on more than one occasion and instead of a reciprocal response, they've gotten more terror," he said.

"How much longer that restraint will last before we have another major attack remains to be seen... There has to be some point at which India's tolerance is pushed too far. Of course that's exactly what the jihadists want," he said.

Riedel said there is clearly recognition that to change Pakistan's overall behaviour, India will have to be a part of that equation.

"The Indians have made it very clear that they don't want to be put in the same grouping. But at the same time, we should understand that you can't change Pakistan's behaviour without understanding it's obsession with the Indian equation," he argued.

Riedel said Pakistan faces a growing coalescence of jihadist militant groups, not just in the tribal areas, but in the Punjab and in the major cities including Karachi.

"This is threatening the very survival of the Pakistani state as we have known it. It is not inevitable and it is not imminent, but there is a real possibility of a jihadist state emerging in Pakistan sometime in the future.

"And that has to be one of the worst nightmares American foreign policy could have to deal with," he said.