[Reader-list] Lethal lapse by Praveen Swami

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

* Lethal lapse *

 PRAVEEN SWAMI

* Had India's strategic establishment heeded the warning signs, the Mumbai
attack could, perhaps, have been averted.

*

IN October, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's supreme religious and political head,
Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, in a signal speech to top functionaries of the
organisation, said: "The only language India understands is that of force,
and that is the language it must be talked to in."

If India's strategic establishment had been listening, all those people who
made the mistake of being in the wrong places in Mumbai on November 26 would
still be alive. If more carnage is to be prevented, it is imperative to
correct the culture of strategic deafness that facilitated the murderous
attacks.

>From the testimony of the arrested *fidayeen,* Ajmal Amin Kasab, Maharashtra
Police investigators have garnered their first insights into the role of the
Lahore- and Karachi-based Lashkar commanders in organising the attacks. Both
the State Police and the Indian intelligence services appear to be confident
that they will succeed in demonstrating that the trigger of the Mumbai
terror squad's guns were pulled by their commanders in Pakistan.

But even as India debates what the authorship of the attacks will mean for
India-Pakistan relations, commentators are scrambling to contrast India's
responses to terror to those of the United States. Whereas the U.S. has
succeeded in blocking successive attempts to execute attacks on its soil
since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the argument goes, India's
failure has been dismal.

Politicians have been quick to blame the intelligence services for failing
to predict the Mumbai attack. However, available evidence suggests that
despite credible intelligence that terrorists were planning attacks in
Mumbai and elsewhere, India's political leadership failed to act.

Back in 2002, Indian intelligence informants first began reporting that
Lashkar operatives were being trained in marine commando techniques along
the Mangla dam, which straddles the border between Pakistan-occupied Kashmir
(POK) and the province of Punjab. It soon became clear that the Lashkar,
which found it increasingly difficult to penetrate India's Line of Control
defences, was hoping to open new routes across the Indian Ocean, routes that
would give it easy access to key cities such as Mumbai.

In 2006, Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil was disturbed when the covert
services told him to make specific mention of the need to step up
counter-terrorism defences. Among the intelligence that Patil based his
speech on was the evolving story of Faisal Haroun, a top Lashkar operative
who commanded the terror group's India-focussed operations out of
Bangladesh. In September 2006, Haroun was briefly held by the Bangladeshi
authorities before being deported, quietly. But a West European covert
service obtained transcripts of his questioning by Bangladesh's
Directorate-General of Field Intelligence, evidence that shook even the Home
Minister.

Haroun, it turned out, had been using a complex shipping network, with
merchant ships and small fishing boats, to move explosives to Lashkar units
operating in India. Among the end-users of these supplies was Ghulam
Yazdani, a Hyderabad resident who commanded a series of attacks, including
the assassination of the Godhra pogrom-complicit former Gujarat Home
Minister, Haren Pandya, and the June 2005 bombing of the Delhi-Patna
Shramjeevi Express. Investigators probing the Haroun story determined his
network had helped land a massive consignment of explosives and assault
rifles on the Maharashtra coast for an abortive 2006 Lashkar-led attempt to
bomb Gujarat.
 INDIAN OCEAN BASE

 India's intelligence services determined that Haroun had been attempting to
set up an Indian Ocean base for the Lashkar. Along with a Male-based
Maldives resident, Ali Assham, Haroun had studied the prospect of using a
deserted Indian Ocean island to build a Lashkar storehouse from where
weapons and explosives could be moved to Kerala and then on to the rest of
India. In 2007, when evidence emerged of heightened Islamist activity in the
Maldives, including the bombing of tourists in Male's Sultan Park and the
setting up of a Sharia-run mini-state on the Island of Himandhoo, the
seriousness of the threat to India's western seaboard became even more
evident.

Last year, the Lashkar's maritime capabilities were underlined once again,
when a group of eight *fidayeen* landed off Mumbai's coast. On that
occasion, a superbly crafted intelligence operation allowed the landing to
be tracked by Coast Guard ships. The police in Maharashtra and Jammu and
Kashmir, acting on information provided by the Intelligence Bureau (I.B.),
were able to arrest the *fidayeen*. However, it was clear the networks
Haroun was able to build were up and running.

On the basis of these warnings, New Delhi moved to step up coastal
counter-infiltration measures. In its Annual Report for 2007-08, the Home
Ministry detailed the measures put in place for "strengthening coastal
security arrangements, to check infiltration". In liaison with the nine
coastal States and Union Territories, it said, funds had been earmarked to
set up "73 coastal police stations which will be equipped with 204 boats,
153 jeeps and 312 motorcycles for mobility on coast and in close coastal
waters. The coastal police stations will also have a marine police with
personnel trained in maritime activities".

Precise figures are unavailable, but officials in three States told this
correspondent that progress in realising the scheme had been painfully slow.
Maharashtra and Gujarat both inaugurated over a dozen coastal police
stations over the last year, but neither State set up a trained marine
police. Fewer than a dozen new boats were made available to the two police
forces; without sophisticated surveillance equipment fitted on board, their
use for counter-infiltration work was at best rudimentary. And while the
I.B. received sanction for hiring small numbers of personnel to man new
coastal surveillance stations last year, it got neither boats nor
observation equipment.

Early this year, more intelligence became available that the Lashkar had
Mumbai in its sights. Investigators probing a New Year's Eve attack on a
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) camp in Rampur found that the Lashkar
unit responsible for the attack also had plans to hit the Bombay Stock
Exchange (BSE) , the Gateway of India and the Oberoi hotel. Uttar Pradesh
resident Fahim Ahmed Ansari was arrested in February along with two
specially trained Pakistani nationals, Imran Shehzad from Bhimber in POK and
Mohammad Farooq Bhatti from Gujranwala in Punjab.

Ansari's interrogation records, which were accessed by *Frontline*, show he
was recruited by the Lashkar when on a visit to Dubai in 2003. The owner of
a small paper envelope manufacturing business and a one time activist of the
Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), Ansair met top Lashkar commanders
in Pakistan in 2007. He returned to India through Kathmandu late that year.
Back in Mumbai, Ansari stayed at Sunlight Guest House from November 28 to
December 10 before renting a room off Falkland Road. He then secured a
driving licence under the alias Samir Sheikh and enrolled himself as a
student at a computer institute near the BSE.

All three BSE assault-team volunteers held Pakistani passports, which they
presumably hoped would enable them to escape by catching flights through
Nepal. Shehzad carried passport number EK5149331, issued on March 14, 2007,
while Bhatti used passport number AW3177021, issued a day earlier. Ansari's
Pakistani passport, BM 6809341, issued on November 1, 2007, bears the
pseudonym Hammad Hassan.
 LAST-MINUTE ALERTS

 On the eve of the Mumbai attacks, warnings continued to flow in. In late
September, I.B. informants issued warnings that the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower
hotel was on the list of a small set of high-profile targets selected by the
Lashkar for a suicide-squad attack. The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW),
too, on the basis of communications intelligence, learned that the Lashkar
had carried out reconnaissance on targets in Mumbai's Wasanji Road,
including the Leela Kempinski hotel.

Finally, on November 18, the RAW intercepted a satellite phone conversation
originating in the Indian Ocean from a ship bound for India's western coast.
In the conversation, a still-unidentified Punjabi-speaking individual
notified a contact in Lahore that his "cargo" would soon land in Mumbai. RAW
communications experts determined that the Pakistani landline number was one
sometimes used by a top Lashkar commander for operations directed against
India, who is so far known only by the aliases "Muzammil" and "Abu Hurrera".
Indian Coast Guard ships were scrambled towards the location of the ship.

Luck favoured the Lashkar. Even as the *fidayeen* squad bound for Mumbai
panicked at the heightened Indian naval presence in the area, an opportunity
presented itself. On November 15, a Porbandar-registered fishing boat,
Kuber, was blown off course by bad weather. From the account of Ajmal Amin
Kasab, investigators have determined that the boat was hijacked on the night
of November 18. Later, the 10 *fidayeen* on the Kuber are thought to have
shot dead four of the five crew members. After finally landing in Mumbai,
the *fidayeen* broke up into five groups and headed towards targets they had
previously trained to locate on high-resolution satellite maps.

Despite the mass of credible intelligence that was available, no system was
put in place to guard against the attacks: Mumbai simply did not have the
resources to do so. Less than a week before the attacks, additional security
stationed in south Mumbai was withdrawn. Maharashtra – with at just 147
policemen for every 100,000 population or, expressed in another way, 49.9
policemen to guard every 100 square kilometres, falls well short of global
norms – simply did not have the resources to keep men tied up guarding every
potential target.

Hotels and businesses, for their part, failed to enhance their own internal
security systems. Neither the Trident hotel nor the Taj, for example, had
access control systems or a system to deal with a terrorist attack or
bombing. For weeks before the attacks, police sources told *Frontline*,
Maharashtra Police officials met with top corporate security heads in an
attempt to convince them of the need to invest in defending their
facilities. Nothing was done.

Even if police personnel had been stationed near the terrorist targets, it
is improbable that they could have intervened effectively. Mumbai, unlike
any Western city of scale, has neither a specially trained emergency
response team nor a crisis-management centre with an established drill to
deal with a terrorist assault. In this, it is not exceptional: no Indian
city has any crisis-management protocols in place. "People contrast the
post-9/11 successes of the U.S. with our failures," notes one Maharashtra
Police officer, "but they should also be contrasting the billions spent by
that country with the peanuts we have invested in our own security."

"The whole system is premised on the assumption that our intelligence
services will get a hundred per cent heads-up on the precise timing of a
terrorist attack," one intelligence official says, "but nowhere in the world
does this happen. Intelligence is only an aid to on-ground policing, not a
substitute."

India's strategic responses were no better. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
and his foreign policy advisers failed to read the signs that jehadist
groups in Pakistan were sharpening their swords.
 EXISTENTIAL THREAT

 In a speech delivered on October 19 before an audience of key Lashkar
leaders such as Maulana Amir Hamza, Qari Muhammad Yaqoob Sheikh and Muhammad
Yahya Mujahid at the organisation's headquarters in Lahore, the Lashkar
chief made it clear that he saw India as an existential threat. India, he
claimed, was building dams in Jammu and Kashmir to choke Pakistan's water
supplies and cripple its agriculture.

Earlier, in a speech on October 6, Saeed claimed India had "made a deal with
the United States to send 150,000 Indian troops to Afghanistan". He claimed
India had agreed to support the U.S. in an existential war against Islam.
Finally, in a sermon to a religious congregation at the Jamia Masjid
al-Qudsia in Lahore at the end of October, Saeed proclaimed that there was
an "ongoing war in the world between Islam and its enemies". He said that
"crusaders of the East and West have united in a cohesive onslaught against
Muslims".

India has learned that not all terrorism stems from Pakistan: the country
has faced attacks from Indian Islamists, Hindutva groups and
ethnic-chauvinist organisations in the north-eastern States. Each form of
hate has fed and legitimised the other. But this circle of hate has been
driven, too, by organisations based in Pakistan, jehadist groups that have
demonstrated that they, while being friends of Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate, are enemies of the people of Pakistan.

In his recent address to the nation, Manmohan Singh warned that he intended
to "raise the costs" for those waging a war against India. He could start by
demanding that Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari act against such groups
and then consider what can be done, if need be, to compel him to do so.

Link - http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20081219252501800.htm


-- 
Aditya Raj Kaul

Freelance Correspondent, The Times of India
Cell - +91-9873297834

Campaign Blog: http://kashmiris-in-exile.blogspot.com/
Personal Blog: http://activistsdiary.blogspot.com/