Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [116]
All the groups and individuals within this net hate the US, Israel, India and indeed Russia alike, though they have different targets at different times. Despite LeT’s strategic decision to concentrate on India, there is no ideological barrier to its members taking part in actions against the West. The jihadi world could even be called a kind of cloud of interplanetary gas in which individuals join some clump for one operation and then part again to form new ad hoc groups for other attacks. This also makes it extremely hard for the ISI to keep tabs on the individuals concerned, even when it wants to.
By far the biggest terrorist attack carried out by LeT itself was that in Mumbai in November 2008. The great majority of the Pakistani experts and retired officers whom I know do not think that the Pakistani high command, either of the ISI or the army, was involved in ordering Lashkar-e-Taiba’s terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008. They point out in particular that, while deliberately targeting Westerners greatly boosted LeT’s prestige among international militants, it would have been an unprecedented, reckless and pointless strategy for the Pakistani high command, ensuring a furious reaction from the international community.
Equally, there is an overwhelming consensus that this operation could not have been planned without ISI officers having been involved at some stage, and without the ISI knowing that some sort of operation was being planned. Whether the operation then continued as it were on autopilot, was helped only by retired officers, or whether the junior officers concerned deliberately decided to pursue it without telling their superiors, is impossible to say at this stage. The American LeT volunteer David Headley, who was involved in the preparations for the Mumbai attacks, has testified under interrogation that ISI officers were involved in the planning, but could not say whether they were acting independently or under orders from above.
Certainly the ISI and the military as a whole made strenuous attempts – in the face of incontrovertible evidence – to deny that LeT had carried out the attacks. While the Pakistani authorities could do a great deal more to restrict and detain LeT activists and leaders, it is extremely difficult to put them on public trial – for the obvious reason that they would then reveal everything about the ISI’s previous backing for their organization.
THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR DETERRENT
The question of military links to Islamist terrorists raises particular fears in the West because of Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons. The horrendous consequences if such a weapon did fall into terrorist hands makes this a natural fear, but one which has led to a considerable degree of exaggeration and even hysteria in the Western media as far as Pakistan is concerned.
Given Pakistan’s lack of economic development, the Pakistani nuclear deterrent is the most remarkable achievement of the Pakistani state. It may also in certain circumstances lead to that state’s downfall. This is obviously because of the risk of a nuclear exchange with India and the destruction of both countries; and perhaps even more importantly because of the fears that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have raised in the US. These fears are in part based on mistaken information and analysis, but they are nonetheless real.
For a long time, the US turned a partially blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. The reasons for this were that every Pakistani administration since the early 1960s – military and civilian alike – was involved in this programme, and several of those administrations were, at different times and for different reasons, key US allies. Moreover, until the 1990s at least, India, and not Pakistan,