New Delhi
20 July 2010
Without naming Pakistan, national security adviser Shivshankar Menon on
Tuesday said the terrorist groups' links to "the official establishment and with existing
intelligence agencies" was getting stronger.
Opening a conference jointly hosted here by an Indian and an American think tank, Mr
Menon said the interrogation of David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani
descent who has confessed to scouting targets for the November 2008 terrorist attacks
in Mumbai, had provided a "much clearer picture" of the "ecosystem that supports
terrorism".
"... it is really the links with the official establishment and with existing intelligence
agencies, it is that nexus which makes it a much harder phenomenon for us to deal with.
Unfortunately what we know what we've seen is that these links, this nexus will not in
fact be broken soon, if anything it's getting stronger," Mr Menon said.
It was the second time in one week that a senior Indian official has spoken about terrorist
groups' links to the Pakistani establishment. Last week, on the eve of external affairs
minister SM Krishna's talks with his Pakistan counterpart in Islamabad, home secretary
GK Pillai had told a section of the Indian media that Pakistan's intelligence agency, the
Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), had controlled and coordinated the Mumbai attacks "from
the beginning till the end".
In his remarks, Mr Menon also said that today, it was even less possible to be optimistic
about the success of existing counter-terrorism strategies in Pakistan or in Afghanistan
not because there is little understanding of the problem or the strategies were
intrinsically flawed, but because of the terrorist-establishment nexus.
"For us, it has been brought home most recently by what we learnt from Headley which
confirmed many of the things we knew before," Mr Menon added. He suggested that the
India-US counter-terrorism cooperation had attained critical mass and both sides can
look to expand it.
The Pakistan foreign ministry was quick to dismiss Mr Menon's remarks as "baseless
accusations". Its foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said in a statement in
Islamabad that they "were yet another manifestation of the Indian establishment's
propagandistic stance toward Pakistan." Basit said Mr Menon's assertions were
"entirely inconsistent with the understanding reached between the leadership of the two
countries" on the sidelines of the Saarc Summit in Bhutan in April "that terrorism was a
common threat which needed to be addressed in a cooperative manner."
Headley, who is in a Chicago jail, was interrogated by Indian investigators, including
sleuths from the National Investigation Agency (NIA), in June. He disclosed the
involvement of not just Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) operatives but the involvement of some
serving and retired officers of the Pakistan military and the ISI in the Mumbai carnage.
Headley also referred the Pakistani Navy training the 26/11 attackers.
No comments:
Post a Comment