The Kashmir terror attack that drove India and Pakistan almost to war echoes the 2008 Mumbai carnage – Chris Hughes explains why powerful India can’t underestimate Pakistan
The terror attack killing 26 tourists, mostly Indians, in the India controlled part of Kashmir last month has chilling echoes of the 2008 Mumbai atrocity. Coordinated and aimed at totally discrediting Indian security the scale of Mumbai was vastly higher but there are similarities. In 2008 ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani based militant group, launched 12 shooting and bombing attacks over four days in Mumbai.
A total of 175 people died, including nine of the attackers, with more than 300 injured and it took a long time to stop it. A film about the attack was made, focusing on the attackers slaughtering wealthy guests at the famous Taj Hotel. All aimed at ruining, destroying India’s reputation as a holiday destination, a place of business, striking terror at its very heart and sparking a violent reaction.
In both they have got what they wanted. Before his execution the surviving Mumbai attacker Ajmal Kasab said he and his fellow terrorists were controlled by Pakistan. Subsequent informers claimed rogue Pakistani Army personnel and members of the shadowy Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence agency – the ISI – had involvement. We may never know for sure but once again Pakistan finds itself accused of backing a terror attack or at the very least knowing about it.
Another terror attack that has goaded India into coming close to war. This is exactly what jihadists want. It is what they are. And it is the same group Lashkar-e-Taiba that is in the spotlight as suspect number one. India is adamant their aggressive reaction was justified and we are now awaiting Pakistan’s reaction, despite its claims of downing five Indian jets.
The giant-sized elephant in the room is that both nations are nuclear armed, roughly having about 170 nuclear warheads each. But India’s military is more than three times the size of Pakistan’s – with more than 1.5 million troops, because it borders another bitter enemy, China and needs a bigger force.
So India would appear to be the superior country and the military most would back to win an all-out war between the two nations. Yet it would be foolhardy for Delhi and the west to under-estimate Islamabad which has for years controlled, coerced and done shadowy, secret, deals with Pakistani and Afghani terror groups.
Its ISI agency has links to a gangster-jihadi network called the Haqqanis – dubbed the “Sopranos of Afghanistan.” This powerful network of Islamists, in turn, has control over what happens with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And it has familial links to al- Qaeda, which as I revealed exclusively last September in the Daily Mirror, is secretly being run by Hamza bin Laden, Osama’s supposedly dead son. The reason this is being kept quiet by the US is that Donald Trump announced during his first term that his troops had killed him.
This was not and is not true. He escaped and is running al-Qaeda and the intelligence world knows it. I am told the Pakistani ISI may still be in touch with their old contacts, whether they backed the Kashmir attack or not, and could well have the ability to mobilise huge numbers of jihadis via their contacts in the militant networks of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
India would want to fight a conventional war on the air, at sea and on the ground. But Pakistan’s very able special forces, along with an awful lot of their militant friends, could cause “hybrid warfare” mayhem for India. That means lots of terror attacks and covert operations.
It may not be true that the ISI backed the attacks that sparked this near-war. But if the war happens jihadist will soon become involved. Osama bin Laden wanted global jihad, rallying what he believed to be oppressed Muslim nations against non-Muslim nations.
He’s been dead for 14 years and yet the jihad he planted and grew and emboldened is still sparking major wars and tensions globally.