by Bruce Riedel
There is also evidence of LeT support for al Qaeda terrorist operations in the West. Shahzad Tanweer, the leader of the al Qaeda cell that carried out multiple suicide bombings on the London underground on July 7, 2005, had been to an LeT camp in Pakistan before the attacks. A second bomber in that attack, Mohammad Sidique Khan, may also have trained in an LeT camp. Both appeared in martyrdom videos aired by al Qaeda after the attack. LeT also provided some of the funding for the al Qaeda cell that planned to blow up ten jumbo jets over the Atlantic en route from the United Kingdom to Canada and the United States in the summer of 2006.36
Immediately after American commandoes killed bin Laden in 2011, Hafiz Saeed proclaimed the fallen al Qaeda leader a hero of Islam. At Friday prayers that week, Saeed acknowledged LeT’s debt to bin Laden and promised that LeT would avenge his death. Documents found in bin Laden’s hideout show that the two were in close contact right up to bin Laden’s death. Given the two groups’ close connections and shared ideological viewpoints, it is odd indeed that al Qaeda’s leadership said very little about the Mumbai operation in the months following the attack. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri each issued several statements afterward on numerous issues, including developments in Pakistan, but none made any mention of the Mumbai attacks.37 Why?
Al Qaeda’s unusual silence about the Mumbai attack may be an attempt to protect its ally Lashkar-e-Tayyiba from more international scrutiny. Once an organization is openly affiliated with al Qaeda, it gets more attention from the security services of the world, including the CIA, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and others. It joins, in effect, the A team of international terrorists and therefore gets more attention in counterterrorism operations. Al Qaeda probably also wanted to cover its own hand in the Mumbai operation to avoid bringing more pressure on Pakistan to break the ISI’s ties to LeT and to make a more serious effort to combat al Qaeda itself. Bin Laden was not hiding from the ISI in 2008; he was hiding in its midst.
REACTIONS TO THE MUMBAI MASSACRE AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
Pakistan initially denied any involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attack, even trying to suggest that the bombers were not Pakistanis and the attack was not staged from Karachi. There was considerable confusion in the early Pakistani response. President Zardari said at first that he would send the head of ISI to India to help with the investigation. The army and ISI quickly made it clear that they did not think that that was a good idea, and Zardari dropped it. Only in January 2009 did Sherry Rehman, then the Pakistani information minister, acknowledge publicly that the terrorists were Pakistanis. Under enormous international pressure, Islamabad banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa and put Saeed under house arrest. He was released in June 2009. Several other LeT officials have been arrested and are awaiting trial. Pakistan rejected India’s request that Saeed and others be extradited to India to stand trial. The Pakistani government has consistently denied that it or the ISI had any connection to the bombers and the attack. While some Pakistani officials quietly have admitted that the ISI had links to LeT in the past, they deny that it had any foreknowledge of or role in the Mumbai operation itself.
There has been no systematic crackdown on LeT’s infrastructure and apparatus in Pakistan. Many Pakistanis are in denial about their country’s relationship to the tragedy in Mumbai. Despite India providing Pakistan with dossiers of evidence linking the attack to Pakistan, many Pakistanis believe that it was plotted and conducted by someone else. Some blame the Indian intelligence service, claiming that the Indians wanted to divert attention from Hindu extremists involved in anti-Muslim pogroms in India. Others have argued that Israel was the real perpetrator, hoping to provoke a war between India and Pakistan in order to destroy Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. One Pakistani think tank has argued India and Israel did it together.38 India, of course, blamed Pakistan for the attack from the start, and it suspended all diplomatic engagement with Pakistan immediately after the massacre. India has presented detailed dossiers that lay out the evidence of a Pakistani hand in the attacks, including transcripts of the chilling calls from the terrorists to their handlers in Pakistan, the weapons and other material found in Mumbai at the crime scenes, and the results of the interrogations of Qasab and Headley.
It is important to note what India did not do after 26/11 as well as what it did. Although the alert levels in the Indian and Pakistani air forces increased during and immediately after the attacks, there was no general mobilization of the Indian army as occurred after the December 2001 attack on the parliament or any military strikes on LeT targets in Pakistan. Pakistan, apparently fearing an Indian air strike or some other military attack, put its air force and advance ground units on alert. However, as the Indian air force commander later said, “We exercised restraint and did not give Pakistan any excuse for a misadventure.”39 India’s restraint is especially significant in light of an intense effort by the Indian military after the attack on Parliament in 2001 to develop the capability to strike Pakistan quickly after any new terrorist incident, avoiding a lengthy national military mobilization. Announced in 2004, the new doctrine for rapid response to a provocation is called the Cold Start approach. Indian forces have trained and conducted exercises to carry out a limited military attack on Pakistan since 2004.40 The Cold Start doctrine and plans were designed specifically to give New Delhi a military option for retaliation against attacks like the Mumbai massacre.
Instead Singh, Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi, and the rest of the ruling Congress Party leadership chose a political response, despite intense pressure for a stronger response from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People’s Party, amid the run-up to the national elections in May 2009. During the campaign BJP leaders repeatedly suggested that Singh’s response had been too pacific and would only encourage further terrorism. The argument did not resonate with Indian voters, who returned the Congress Party to office with a larger mandate that it had won previously. Nonetheless, it is clear that another mass casualty attack on the level of the Mumbai attack would lead to intense political pressure on New Delhi for a more forceful response, possibly including military action. In a brave and prudent political move, Singh agreed to restart diplomatic engagement with Pakistan despite the failure of Islamabad to take on LeT or to extradite its leadership. In July 2009 at the Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Egypt, Singh agreed to reopen the diplomatic process with Pakistan. The BJP again attacked him as naïve and weak for doing so, but Singh understood the dangers of escalation for India.
Led by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, the international community was quick to condemn the attacks in a statement by the UN Security Council in the days just after the attack. In June 2009, the United Nations added four officials from LeT to the consolidated list of individuals associated with bin Laden and al Qaeda created under UN Security Council Resolution 1267 (passed in May 2005), which obligates all UN members to freeze their funds and assets. The U.S. Department of the Treasury followed suit, freezing the assets of the four in July 2009.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other states appealed to India to show restraint and to Pakistan to cooperate with the investigation into the attacks. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke directly with both Zardari and Singh to try to caution them to avoid letting the situation get out of hand. As noted in the introduction to this volume, President-elect Barack Obama also called Singh to express his condolences and urge restraint. Such calls to India’s leaders for restraint and a cool response have now become an all-too-familiar reaction to acts of terrorism in India. In 1999 President Clinton urged restraint during the Kargil war; President Bush did the same after the attack on the parliament in 2001, after the Mumbai metro attacks in 2006, and after the Mumbai massacre in 2008.
The 2008 attack on Mumbai came only days after Obama was elected president of the United States. His new team was confronted with an enormous international crisis as they were
still celebrating their victory and starting to prepare to run the country. Obama was careful throughout the crisis to make clear that Bush was still president and that he was not yet in charge, but the events in Mumbai shaped his thinking about the world and the rise of India and Pakistan. Mumbai showed graphically that America’s deadliest enemy, al Qaeda, was deeply entrenched in a larger terrorism syndicate in Pakistan that threatens America, India, and even Pakistan itself. Six Americans were directly murdered by the terrorists in Mumbai, symbolizing the stakes for America. Others, like my friend and occasional coauthor Gary Samore, the president-elect’s soon-to-be arms control czar, were staying at the Taj and could have been killed.
The complex web of ties between al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, and the Pakistani army are a direct threat to American strategic interests beyond Mumbai itself. Pakistan has become a hothouse of terrorism, creating a global menace. The crisis would have been much worse, of course, if al Qaeda and its friends had gotten all that they wanted. If Singh and Gandhi had responded with force, not restraint as both Bush and Obama urged, this gang of terrorists could have created the war that they hoped for. A war between India and Pakistan, even if conducted on a limited basis with conventional weapons, would have been devastating to U.S. interests. Obama and his aides understood that completely. We knew that his call to Singh was immensely important, and we waited anxiously to hear how Singh had portrayed his options for action. Thankfully, he chose well. A war would have been devastating in many ways to many more countries than India and Pakistan. In the fall of 2008 the world economy was in free fall. Banks were failing, jobs were fading, and a deep recession loomed ahead. War in South Asia would have accelerated all the downward trends in the global economy. Not only would India’s rising economy be threatened, the global economy itself would be threatened.
The longest war in American history, the battle to free Afghanistan of al Qaeda and terrorism, would have been vastly complicated. In 2008 more than 80 percent of NATO supplies for the war came through Pakistan, the bulk through Karachi, the port that the terrorists departed from on their journey to Mumbai. If India and Pakistan had gone to war, that supply line would have been instantly put in jeopardy. Al Qaeda and LeT understood that completely. If the war had escalated to a nuclear exchange, the implications would have been even more disastrous for America and the world. India and Pakistan have the capability to destroy each other’s cities. The destruction of just Mumbai and Karachi would mean the deaths of millions. The economic, political, and climate implications are self-evident.
The Mumbai crisis highlighted the vital interests that the United States has in the rise of India and Pakistan, and determining how to cope with their emergence as major world powers is among its most urgent priorities. The next chapter turns to understanding America’s relationship with them and how it has evolved.
CHAPTER TWO
AMERICA, THE RAJ, AND PARTITION
India is the richest and most splendid country in the world.
—Marco Polo
THE CABINET DINING room at Number 10 Downing Street is a historic, impressive place to meet. I was a guest of Prime Minister David Cameron, who had invited me to participate as an outside expert in a meeting of the United Kingdom’s National Security Council in December 2011 to take stock of British policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. More British soldiers are deployed to Afghanistan than to any other conflict zone in the world, and many have paid the ultimate price in service to their country. The key decision-makers of the United Kingdom—the prime minister, deputy prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary, minister of defense, chief of staff, and the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6)—were seated around the table to review the state of war in South Asia. John Sawers, or M, the head of SIS, was an old friend. As an American, I considered it a singular honor to be asked to address this group.1
For centuries, that particular room had seen generations of British leaders discuss and review policy toward India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. No analysis of the rise of India and Pakistan can begin without a proper understanding of their modern origins in the British Raj. In many ways, the British were the godfather of Pakistan; it was on the banks of the River Cam, not far from London, that the idea of Pakistan developed in the 1930s. At the end of the Raj, the idea of partition became reality and India and Pakistan became the states that they are now.
To understand America and the rise of India and Pakistan today, then, one must begin with the British Empire. America, India, and Pakistan are all products of that empire, and their political systems are derived from their common British heritage, to which they also owe a common language. But their experiences with the United Kingdom also differed in important ways. In addition to the Native Americans already living in the New World, who were soon outnumbered, America was populated primarily by immigrants from Europe and by African slaves. Most of the European immigrants, at least, came willingly. India is populated by the descendants of its original inhabitants, not those of colonial settlers. There were never more than 100,000 Europeans in the Indian Empire. While for Americans the memory of the British Empire is fairly benign, the memory of the Raj is bittersweet for Indians and Pakistanis. Many appreciate the benefits that it provided and still enjoy some of its legacy, but it also led to partition, pain, and the enduring conflict over Kashmir. The legacy of the Raj also deeply affected the future foreign policy strategies of India and Pakistan. It left India with an abiding distaste for great power politics and a fierce determination to maintain full independence in making decisions on national security. India does not want to be a partner, especially not a junior partner, in constraining alliances against communism, China, or anything else. The legacy of the Raj left Pakistan the weaker and more vulnerable state, always at war with its bigger neighbor. It needs a partner—or better, multiple partners—to stand up to India. These legacies are as alive today as they were in 1947.
America and British South Asia also have had very different timelines. The United States fought for and gained its independence from Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, just as India was losing its independence to the British East India Company at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. America would fight a terrible civil war in the middle of the nineteenth century; at about the same time, India would fight a terrible war to gain independence, lose the war, and formally become a part of the British Empire. By the end of World War I, in 1918, America would be a global power; India would be just beginning its successful battle to achieve independence.
ORIGINS
Europeans “found” America and India at the same time, when Portuguese and Spanish explorers were looking for a new way to access the wealth of India and Asia. Their direct path through the Middle East had been blocked by the growing power of the Ottoman Empire, so they sought new paths. One was around the African continent, the other across the Atlantic and Pacific. The lure was spices, especially the spices and peppers of India. Vasco da Gama won the race on May 20, 1498, when he and his fleet arrived in India after sailing around Africa. Christopher Columbus, of course, had found America six years earlier, although he was in denial for a time, still believing that he was dealing with the Indians of the subcontinent.
Da Gama made three voyages to India before dying in Kochi in 1524. The Portuguese king made him admiral of the Indian seas and viceroy of Portuguese India. For a time, Portugal dominated the ocean highway to India, building trading stations and forts and fighting naval battles with the Ottomans to protect its access. Portugal grew fabulously wealthy from its monopoly of trade with India. Portugal’s key base in India was at Goa, which the Portuguese occupied in 1510 and kept until 1961, but they also had possessions on both the east and west coasts of India. In 1535 Portugal acquired part of what would become Bombay, where it built the city’s first church.
The India that Portugal discovered was richer than any state in Europe and
probably better governed and administered. The Mughal Empire was in its ascendency in the sixteenth century. The empire was founded in 1525 by Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, when his army invaded the subcontinent from Afghanistan equipped with Turkish cannon and match-lock muskets that gave him a technological advantage over the Indian armies that he encountered and defeated. His son Humayun expanded the empire, and Humayun’s son, Akbar the Great, took it to its apogee. From 1556 to 1605, Akbar ruled over an empire that stretched for more than 1,200 miles, from Kabul and Kandahar in the northwest to the Bay of Bengal in the southeast. Most of today’s Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh were under Akbar’s reign; only the far south of the Indian peninsula was beyond his reach.
Akbar’s Islamic empire, which was administered by officials of his Persian-speaking royal court, had some 100 million subjects in 1600. The majority were Hindus, but Akbar was careful not to antagonize them with an overzealous approach to Islam. He celebrated Hindu festivals, took Hindu wives, and tolerated diversity. His son, Jahangir—or “conqueror of the world”—would rule from 1605 to 1627, succeeded by Jahangir’s son, the famous Shah Jahan, who would build the Taj Mahal during his thirty years on the throne.
The Portuguese never tried to conquer the Mughal Empire; they knew that it was vastly more powerful than any army and fleet that they could possibly muster. Instead, they traded with it. Other European states fought Portugal for part of the action, and the Dutch, Danes, and French also took possession of forts and trading stations around the Indian Ocean. The British arrived on the stage in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to 218 merchants who formed The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, which would later become the East India Company. Its first trading station was set up in 1608 in Surat. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Portugal was fading as a great power and needed English help to defend its realm. On May 11, 1661, King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal, and acquired Bombay as her dowry. The king leased the Bombay settlement to the East India Company, firmly establishing England’s presence in India. The settlement grew quickly from a population of 10,000 people in 1661 to some 60,000 fifteen years later.2