Quamar Rasheed
1. The nation of Pakistan gets no benefit from this. However there are likely to be some people who hope to benefit from the troubles caused by these attacks. For example, someone in Pakistan may be hoping to prevent the President from signing a peace deal with India permanently dividing Kashmir and renouncing Pakistani claims to the Indian portion. There may be some group that is hoping that by causing tensions with India, the Pakistani army will have to stop going after al Qaeda and Taliban in the NWFP. There may be someone hoping to precipitate a crisis that will cause the government of Pakistan to fall so that a different faction can take over. It may be some people in the ISI who are targeted to be purged from that organization in a recent announcement by the President of Pakistan. It may be some group who are hoping to destroy Pakistan so that they can steal Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in the chaos that follows.
2. I have read that there were something like 30 attackers, but they were able to hold out as long as they did because the Indian police and army were trying to spare the lives of the hostages. If the Indian police and army were not worried about killing innocent civilians, they would have killed all the attackers within a few hours on the first day.
3. The people who planned this attack may be trying to embarrass the government of Pakistan for reasons that I described in (1) or they may have other reasons for leaving a trail that points back so obviously to Pakistan.
4. There may, of course, be other explanations. It seems to me very unlikely that the President and the elected government had anything to do with this attack. It also seems unlikely that the government of India attacked its own people. The most likely explanation is that somebody hopes to benefit from trouble between Pakistan and India.
5. This attack was obviously planned long in advance by an organization with plenty of resources and experience at surveillance. People in ISI fit that description. So does al Qaeda, for that matter. This was not just a bunch of crazy young men who decided on their own to kill some people.
6. and 7. Obviously this operation had plenty of support and planning. Ammunition could have been brought in over weeks or months and kept in rented apartments or warehouses until a day before the attacks when it could have been brought into the hotels in suitcases, by conspirators working in the hotels or by persons disguised as workmen doing repairs at the hotel. Put your mind to it and you can probably think of a half dozen ways to smuggle ammunition from somewhere else in Mumbai into a hotel room. If somebody puts out a “Do Not Disturb” sign on their door, do the maids come in anyway?
8. How much security is there? Do they search everybody’s suitcase when they check in to the hotel? Do they check the tool box of every carpenter and plumber? Do they search all the food and laundry that is brought into the hotel?
9. In an open society like India, there is a lot of activity that is not watched by the intelligence services. Are you suggesting that every Muslim in India should be fitted with a GPS transmitter so that the intelligence services can keep track of them every minute of the day? I don’t think that is going to happen.
I would like to hear more about what groups in India you think might benefit from these attacks. Is there any party that you think will do better in an election as a result of these killings? As I have said, I think that the most likely suspects are Pakistanis who are hoping to damage the government of Pakistan for reasons related to Pakistani politics. The Indians and others who were killed are just bit players in what is essentially a Pakistani political drama. However, as new facts come to light I might have to change my opinion.
