Retelling the truth about 26/11 Mumbai terror attack

14 years ago, 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants, strolled into the Indian financial capital Mumbai and went on a killing spree that left 166 people dead and more than 300 injured. Armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades, the terrorists targeted civilians at the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, the popular Leopold Café and two hospitals, with the maximum publicity at places where the operation shifted to hostage-taking at a Jewish outreach Centre, the opulent Oberoi Trident, and the Taj Mahal Palace.

This was the worst terror attack in the city’s history which went on for four days before one of the terrorists, Ajmal Kasab, was caught alive. Kasab revealed in subsequent investigations how the LeT planned, organized and executed the deadly act. He further divulged that he was accompanied by 9 men who had arrived from Pakistan via sea, starting from Karachi and landing on a beach in Mumbai.

This attack was a clear demonstration that Pakistan desires only to bleed India by a thousand cuts. Pakistan has been using terror as an instrument to allow it to punch above its weight in terms of its conventional power vis-à-vis India. Part of the Pakistan’s strategic thinking is believing in the false idea that the only way to preserve its own security is by ensuring that India is weak, defeated or kept in a constant state of chaos. Pakistan believes it can achieve this imperative by supporting militant actors, thereby ensuring that the Pakistani State has plausible deniability when the militant group strikes.

Pakistan has been harboring the menagerie of terrorist groups for securing its vital objectives for two reasons: strategic and the economic. Strategically, they serve its key interests in both India and Afghanistan. Within India, the terrorist groups are employed to pin down hundreds of thousands of security forces in Kashmir, whereas, in Afghanistan, they are engaged to ensure that the country remains within Pakistan’s control and does not become a secure base for India. Using terrorist groups is significantly less expensive which enables Pakistan to achieve difficult objectives at minimal monetary cost. Not only that, Pakistan plans and executes terrorist attacks within India not only to cause fear and alarm but also to inspire terrorist constituencies and attract recruits. By succeeding in causing large-scale death and destruction, and garnering global media coverage for days, terrorists hope to attract both Pakistani and Indian recruits to their cause. All this is intended to keep the Indian security agencies engaged at the internal level and switch their attention away from Pakistan.

Christine Fair’s book, In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, exposes the deep nexus between the Pakistan’s military and its various terrorist organizations. According to Fair, LeT is especially favoured by the state’s security establishment because of four distinctive features. First, LeT is the only militant group that has never undertaken any violent attack within Pakistan making it a dutiful proxy of the ‘deep state’, which has the ability to orchestrate deadly terror attacks outside Pakistan. Second, LeT opposes Takfirism that involves proclaiming other Muslims as non-believers (kafirs). Third, by rejecting Takfirism, LeT also abstains from violent attacks against minorities and other religious groups residing in Pakistan. This is important for reducing both sectarian violence and social and political instability in Pakistan. Fourth, the LeT has not experienced any major splits at the organizational level, unlike all such other groups. The firm backing of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has a role to play in this organizational coherence of LeT. Fair proves the point that LeT is responsible for the majority of the terrorist attacks that take place in India.

After the dastardly 26/11 Mumbai Terror Attack, LeT, ironically banned in Pakistan since 2002, operates under different names and continues to find recruits, carry out cross-border terrorism from Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir, and expand its footprint in Pakistan without much hindrance. While Pakistan made half-hearted attempts to arrest members of the LeT, and cracked down on small militant training camps, their idea seems to have been to get by and escape both international censure and a full-blown military response from India. While India did not want to risk an open-ended war at the time, there was an understanding that should the LeT or any other Pakistan group conduct an attack at a similar scale on civilians, India’s cost-benefit calculus could change. Perhaps that is why, since 26/11, Pakistani backed terrorist groups have trained their weapons on the Indian military, attacking a number of army and air force bases in Kashmir and Punjab.

The policy of using terror as an instrument of foreign and security policy has backfired for Pakistan. In recent times, many former LeT operatives have joined other terrorist organizations like the ISIS, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi etc., and now consider Pakistan a target too and have carried out terror attacks on Pakistani soil. Pakistan’s policy makers must realize that by allowing such groups to continue operating in the country and thinking the country will remain safe from them is not the way forward. Pakistan should punish those involved in the Mumbai attacks and then also dismantle its terror infrastructure in the country. Friendly relationship with India and other neighbours will pay it better than terror.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Pakistani military wants to keep the Kashmir conflict militarized, so that the relevance and dominance of Pakistani Armed Forces continues to remain unchallenged in Pakistan. Conflict with a bigger, next-door neighbour, induces insecurity in the people and justifies the salience of the Pak army and the disproportionate defence budget that sustains its dominance. The Pakistan military has to realize that those who patronize terror are ultimately consumed by it.

(Writer is a Veteran of the Indian Navy. Views are his own.)