MANIPAL, India, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Since the
terror attacks on Mumbai five days ago, Indian security sources have promoted
evidence that the attackers were trained by elements of the Pakistani military.
While the field training took place at a
camp run by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency near Muzaffarabad in
Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, fluency in the handling of ordnance was taught at
another ISI safe house on the outskirts of Karachi.
Pakistan has done little to create
deniability about these connections or earlier links discovered by U.S.
intelligence agencies between the ISI and the July 7 bombing of the Indian
Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Many analysts see the top priority of
Pakistani intelligence as reversing India's path toward social stability and
economic growth. Still, why were so many telltale clues left behind in these
attacks that enraged the Indian public and made the world aware that India is
among the softest terrorist targets of the major democracies?
The hope of those who planned last week's
attack was that India would respond to the attacks the way it did to the attack
on its Parliament in 2001 -- by mobilizing troops on the Pakistan border and
creating an expectation that a full-scale, conventional India-Pakistan war was
imminent. At that time Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's unwise decision to
"bluff" the Pakistanis into cooperating with India by the threat of
war boomeranged on New Delhi. Foreign missions evacuated their nationals in a
panic and business confidence plunged.
