South Asia stands “in the eye of a storm of terror” – Indian home minister
Speaking in parliament Thursday, Dec. 11, Indian home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram announced measures to fix the intelligence lapses and “logistical weakness” which were exposed by the Islamist terrorist siege of Mumbai which cost 172 lives. He promised wide-reaching reforms of security laws and the national terror preventive infrastructure, including 20 new counter-insurgency schools for training commandoes.
“We cannot go back to business as usual,” said the minister. “The finger of suspicion points unmistakably to the territory of our neighbor Pakistan.” South Asia stood “in the eye of a storm of terror.”
The sole surviving terrorist of the bloody attack was remanded in custody Thursday and accused of making war on India.
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources point to preparations in New Delhi for a military response to the Mumbai attack, which is expected to come in the form of targeted cross-border raids on terrorist targets.
Indian officials have confirmed that that the ten terrorists accounted for, all from Pakistani Punjab, were only part of a 30-member team. Twenty are missing and India is therefore geared for more Islamist terrorist attacks. The counter-terror center in Jerusalem Thursday repeated its strong warning to Israelis to stay clear of Goa over the December-January holiday season, where Westerners, including Americans and Europeans, may be targeted for another Islamist assault, possibly by the missing terrorists.
Our New Delhi sources attach low credibility to Islamabad’s raids of Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist bases and arrests. For one thing, Islamabad refuses to turn over suspected ringleaders of the Mumbai outrage to India or allow Indian investigators to question him. For another, Western as well as Indian counter-terror sources hold that Lashkar e-Taiba was only one part of the Mumbai conspiracy. They point at a coalition led by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Taliban, elements of al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups.
Without ISI’s tactical and logistical organization, a terrorist attack on the Mumbai scale would have been inconceivable.