debkafile: The Mumbai police chief’s bombshell charges against Pakistani intelligence expected to derail India-Pakistan dialogue, including Kashmir

Police chief A.N.Roy bluntly accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of using Lashkar e-Taiba, al Qaeda’s known operational arm in Kashmir, India and Pakistan, to carry out the seven July 11 train blasts in Mumbai which killed 208 and injured 600 people.
His news conference took place Saturday, Sept 30, shortly after a deadly suicide bombing outside the Afghan interior ministry in Kabul killed a dozen people. Afghanistan is increasingly prey to suicide attacks on a scale that is beginning to resemble the dire situation in Iraq. debkafile‘s counter terror sources report that one of the problems uncovered in exchanges of intelligence in recent months is that Pakistani intelligence involvement in al Qaeda and Taliban is climbing to the level it stood at before 9/11.
The Mumbai police chief’s charge comes days after President George W. Bush welcomed President Pervez Musharraf in Washington as “a strong defender of freedom and the people of Pakistan” and praised his important role in fighting against terrorism. He also led a three-way encounter which included Musharraf and Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has repeatedly charged that without SIS support, al Qaeda and Taliban would never have been able to escalate their terrorist attacks and their assaults on NATO troops. The White House summit ended with a decision to increase cooperation for the battle against terrorists.
Buoyed up by his warm White House welcome, Musharraf went on to boast in a BBC interview on Sept 30: The West “would be brought to its knees” without Pakistan’s cooperation in the war against terror. “Let that be clear. And if ISI is not with you, you will fail.”
At the same time, British Department of Defense officials leaked documents to the local media which closely follow the Indian and Afghan accusation of SIS collaboration and support for al Qaeda.
With an eye on Arab and Muslim support, the Pakistani president during his American visit never missed a chance of stressing that the core issue spurring Islamic terror is the… unsolved Palestinian-Israeli dispute. His leaked statement that he only joined the war on terror because the US threatened to bomb his country “back into the stone age” was equally aimed at showing al Qaeda that his so-called collaboration in the war on terror was not to be taken seriously.
With an “ally” like Musharraf, it is hard to see how the United States and Britain expect to win the war on terror – not only in southern Asia, but in Iraq, Lebanon and Israel as well.