Pakistan on FATF Watch List - The Hindu (28.02.18)

(Guidelines for Reader: Latest Op-Ed First; Verbatim Compilation of The Hindu Op-Ed; Best to read in the order of oldest to latest article to get a comprehensive understanding; Consider repetition to be revision)

(We are drowning in information and starving for wisdom. READ and develop a PERSPECTIVE!!)

Going grey: on Pakistan and the FATF watch list (28.02.18)

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) that monitors countries on action taken against terror-financing and money-laundering has decided to place Pakistan back on its watch list, or “greylist”, from June. The decision is both appropriate and overdue, given Pakistan’s blatant violation of its obligations to crack down on groups banned by the Security Council 1267 sanctions committee that monitors groups affiliated to the Taliban (which originally included al-Qaeda affiliated groups), such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Haqqani network. Their leaders like Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar continue to hold public rallies and freely garner support and donations. In the process, both the LeT and JeM, which continue to praise and claim credit for terror attacks in India, have grown their bases in Pakistan, with fortress-like headquarters in Muridke and Bahawalpur that the authorities turn a blind eye to. By doing this, successive Pakistani governments have jeopardised ties with India, and shown disregard for the outcry against terrorism worldwide. One violation was a Pakistani court’s bail to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, LeT operational commander and a key planner of the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Under the 1267 sanctions ruling, banned entities can get no funds, yet Lakhvi received the bail amount, and the authorities have since lost track of him.

It is surprising, then, that the first round of talks of the International Cooperation Review Group that makes its recommendations to the FATF plenary failed to reach the consensus needed to list Pakistan, despite a formidable team of the U.S., U.K., France and Germany proposing the resolution against it. That the initial support for Pakistan came from China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries is cause for concern in New Delhi, given the recent diplomatic outreach by India. Equally significant, however, is China’s turnaround in the plenary session two days later, when it dropped objections to the resolution, indicating that its support for Pakistan is negotiable and not set in stone. The FATF listing will not miraculously change Pakistan’s behaviour, and this is not the first time it has been listed as a country with “strategic deficiencies” in countering terror-financing and money-laundering. However, if the greylisting comes as part of a concerted campaign to hold Pakistan accountable, and pressure is ratcheted up with financial strictures on its banks and businesses and targeted sanctions imposed against specific law enforcement and intelligence officials, it may yet bear fruit. The hope is that such sanctions will persuade Pakistan to stop state support for these terror groups and become a responsible player on the global stage and a responsive neighbour.

XXX

The fight Pakistan must wage within (18.02.17)

The suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwanis not the first terrorist attack on a place of worship in Pakistan, and is unlikely to be the last. Imbued with their extremist ideology, jihadis have targeted several Sufi shrines all over Pakistan for several years. As the shrine is a major attraction for devotees, the Sehwan attack resulted in a very high number of fatalities, just like the attacks on the popular shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore in 2010 and that of Hazrat Shah Noorani in Balochistan last November. Unfortunately, Pakistan’s ruling elite still sees terrorism through a geo-strategic lens, not as the consequence of its appeasement and sponsorship of Islamist extremism.

Jihadi justification

The jihadis justify their violence against Sufi shrines as attacks against ‘impure’ manifestations of the Islamic faith. Killing ‘unbelievers,’ ‘heretics’ and ‘deviants’ is an integral part of their plan to create a purer Islamic state. The same justification has been used in the past to attack Shias and Ahmadis as well as Pakistan’s Christians and Hindus. Although jihadi groups were originally nurtured by Pakistan for proxy wars in Afghanistan and against India, at least some jihadi groups consider Pakistanis as legitimate targets. To them Pakistan is as much their religious battlefield as Afghanistan or India. Pakistan would have to delegitimate the jihadi ideology in its entirety to ensure that more extreme offshoots of its protégés do not kill its people.

Despite periodic noises about making no distinctions among good and bad jihadis, Pakistan’s leaders have shown no interest in defining all jihadis as a threat to Pakistan. The country’s military still sees terrorism in the context of its geo-strategic vision. The jihadis responsible for attacks within Pakistan are deemed ‘agents’ of Indian intelligence or the Afghanistan National Directorate of Security (NDS).

For Pakistan’s military, Pakistan has only one enemy and all acts of violence against Pakistanis must be attributed only to that enemy. At a recent event in Washington DC, I was confronted by a fellow Pakistani who argued that terrorism in South Asia would end if the Kashmir issue was resolved in accordance with Pakistan’s wishes. He had no answer to my question how resolution of any international dispute would diminish the fanaticism of those who kill Shias and Sufis as part of an effort to purify Muslim society.

In all four provinces

Over the last week, jihadi offshoots claiming links to the Islamic State (IS) have demonstrated their capacity to strike in each one of Pakistan’s four provinces. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Taliban, publicly claimed responsibility for some of the attacks and threatened to attack further Shia, Ahmadi and Pakistan military targets as part of its ‘Operation Ghazi’. Simple research on Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and other similar groups reveals that their members are homegrown Punjabi jihadis ideologically convinced of their narrow sectarian worldview.

But Pakistan’s reaction to the Sehwan attack was to blame groups ‘based in Afghanistan’. Some were silly enough to suggest that the latest wave of attacks was aimed at preventing the Pakistan Super League (which plays its cricket in Dubai due to poor security in Pakistan) from having its final in Pakistan. There was no attempt to answer the question how Afghanistan-based terrorists could travel vast distances within Pakistan without being intercepted by Pakistan’s security services. After all, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which prides itself at being the ‘world’s best intelligence’ service, shows a high degree of efficiency in dealing with secular critics, ranging from little known bloggers to political activists, but is remarkably incompetent at interdicting suicide bombers.

The only reasonable explanation for why Pakistan is unable to intercept jihadi terrorists targeting its own people is that the state apparatus does not consider jihadis as the enemy in the same manner as they pursue secular Baloch and Muhajir political activists or other critics of Pakistan’s policies.

For decades Pakistan has seen jihadi groups as levers of its foreign and security policy and periodic assertions that the policy has changed have proved wrong. Every step against jihadis is followed by one in the opposite direction. Thus, the much publicised ‘Operation Zarb-e-Azb’ targeted out-of-control Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan but spared groups based in Punjab and Karachi. Hafiz Saeed’s recent detention was accompanied by blocking action against him and Masood Azhar at the U.N. with Chinese support. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is continuously telling jihadis, “Those of you who do not attack inside Pakistan will not get hurt.”

More about image

For Pakistan’s civil and military elite, the priority is Pakistan’s international image and its external relations, not the elimination of terrorism or confronting extremist ideology. Pakistan’s publicly stated view of its terrorist problem is that it is the victim of blowback from its involvement in the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad during the 1980s. Former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, described Hafiz Saeed as Pakistan’s hero in a well-known interview on Pakistan’s Dunya TV in October 2015 and argued that Pakistan had “brought Mujahideen from around the world” and “trained the Taliban” at a time when Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and Osama bin Laden were heroes for both the CIA and the Pakistanis.

In this version of history, there is little acknowledgement of Pakistan’s role in allowing the ideology of jihad to flourish and grow for two decades after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the Americans started telling Pakistan to shut down the jihadi enterprise. Pakistanis spend more energy defending themselves against U.S. and Indian criticism over safe havens for the Afghan Taliban than they do on figuring out how to rid Pakistan of the cancer of jihadi terrorism.

Twenty-five years have elapsed since then Secretary of State James Baker threatened Pakistan in 1992 that its support of jihadi groups could result in the U.S. declaring Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Over a quarter century, Pakistan has offered excuses and explanations as well as made promises that have not been kept. It has itself faced terrorism, lost lives and fought certain terrorist groups. But its essential policy of using jihadi groups for strategic advantage in the region— in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir and against India — has not drastically changed.

For ‘strategic advantage’

In the process of securing strategic advantage, Pakistan has unleashed ideologically motivated groups on its soil that have morphed and mutated over time. While groups such as Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaat-ud-Dawa speak of Pakistan’s national interest, other groups such as Jamaat-ul-Ahrar have an ideological perspective that is not limited by the concept of modern nation states. For them, Pakistan is as dispensable as other states for the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and they have a God-given right to kill those they consider un-Islamic.

In a recent report co-authored by Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation and myself, we pointed out that Pakistan must focus on reversing the extremist trends in Pakistani society. Pakistani authorities — specifically the country’s military leaders, who control its foreign and security policies — need to take a comprehensive approach to shutting down all Islamist militant groups that operate from Pakistani territory, not just those that attack the Pakistani state.

As attacks like the recent one in Sehwan demonstrate, Pakistan’s tolerance for terror groups undermines the country. It corrodes stability and civilian governance, damages the investment climate, and inflicts death and injury on thousands of innocent Pakistani citizens.

Husain Haqqani, Director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC, was Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2011

XXX

Seeing through a glass darkly: on combating terrorism (20.12.17)

Yet another anniversary of the November 26, 2008 terror attacks on multiple targets in Mumbai has come and gone. Much has changed since then and terror has evolved into an even more dangerous phenomenon. Recent variants represent a paradigmatic change in the practice of violence.

A different genre

It is difficult to recognise the new generation of terrorists as a mere extension of the earlier lot of radical Islamist terrorists who were influenced by the teachings of the Egyptian thinker, Sayyid Qutb, and the Palestinian Islamist preacher, Abdullah Azzam, and adopted the practical theology of the Afghan warlord, Jalaluddin Haqqani. There is less theology today and the new age terrorist seems to belong to an altogether different genre of terrorism.

This is not to say that the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai were not different in the methodology and the tactics used in the September 11, 2001 attack in New York City. Nevertheless, the spate of recent attacks in Europe and parts of Asia, from 2015 to 2017 — beginning with the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January 2015, the major incidents at Brussels and Istanbul Ataturk airports as well as the Bastille Day attack in Nice, France, all in 2016, to the string of attacks in London, Stockholm, Barcelona and New York, in 2017 — are very different in structure and the morphology from attacks of an earlier period.

Standing out from the crowd

A large number of terror attacks in the past three years have been attributed to the handiwork of the Islamic State (IS), and reveal its leaning towards the “nihilism” of Sayyid Qutb. It is this which distinguishes the IS from many of the other radical Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The IS’s recruitment techniques, especially its ability to proselytise over the Internet, including “direct to home jihad” as also its more sanguinary brand of violence, set it apart from earlier variants of radical Islamist terror.

Even while the IS has gained a great deal of prominence due to its brand of violence, other terror networks have continued to be no less active. For example, al-Qaeda and its affiliates. The Boko Haram in Africa has been responsible for more killings than most people would realise. Closer home, the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network have carried out several spectacular attacks inside Afghanistan. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi have carried out several attacks inside Pakistan. Pakistan provides the wherewithal and the support to terror outfits such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad to launch well-planned attacks on Indian targets.

Most of these outfits continue to adopt earlier methodologies. These have proved no less effective than those followed by the IS. The terror attack on a mosque in North Sinai, Egypt in November this year, which killed over 230 persons, is one such example. In December, the TTP was responsible for a terror attack on an agricultural training institute in Peshawar, Pakistan. Differences among terror outfits, do not, however, preclude a complicated pattern of relationships when it comes to operational aspects.

Incorrect perception

Understanding the constantly altering trajectory of terror is important before charges of intelligence failure are levelled. It has become axiomatic to attack agencies of intelligence failure whenever a major terror attack takes place. This need not be the case in every instance. The usual charge levelled is of the failure of intelligence agencies “to connect the dots”. Most often, this is not true. There are many other reasons for adequate intelligence not being available to prevent a terror attack. The danger is that a wrong diagnosis could prevent further improvements in intelligence collection and analysis.

One common fallacy is that intelligence agencies have remained static, are rooted in the past, and that their personnel are inadequately trained to handle current day intelligence tasks. While there is room for improvement, it is a mistake to presume that intelligence agencies have not made rapid progress and kept up with the times. Intelligence agencies today are well-versed in the latest techniques of intelligence gathering and analysis. Agencies obtain vast amounts of information from both human and technical intelligence, not excluding signal intelligence and electronic intelligence, intelligence from satellites and photo reconnaissance, etc. This is apart from open source intelligence.

Agencies employ data mining techniques and are familiar with pattern recognition software. Today, noise and signals constitute valuable meta-data. Analysing meta-data has produced more precise information and intelligence than is possibly envisaged, and agencies well recognise the value and utility of this.

In addition, intelligence agencies have become highly adept in monitoring and exploiting open source material. Mapping and analysis of social networks is today a critical aspect of their work. This is especially useful when it comes to unearthing covert terror networks. Many intelligence agencies today have an extensive database of several thousands of terrorists and potential terrorists.

Admittedly, intelligence agencies, like many other organisations, are risk-prone. They do make mistakes. Intelligence analysts, like analysts in other fields, are particularly vulnerable. Problems also arise from inadequate sharing of intelligence across institutions and countries. All these, however, are a far cry from the charge of an inability or failure “to connect the dots”.

The real problem is that when dealing with terrorism and terror networks, no two situations in the actual world are identical. The nature of threats is such that they continue to evolve all the time. Both the 2001 terror attack in New York and the November 2008 attack in Mumbai were one of a kind with few parallels at the time. Anticipating an attack of this nature remains in the area of an “intelligence gap” rather than an “intelligence failure”. Most experts explain an intelligence gap as one denoting an absence of intelligence output while an intelligence failure is one where, based on available evidence, no warning was issued.

Newer challenges

One of the major challenges that all intelligence agencies face is a qualitative understanding of the newer, and many post-modern threats. These newer generation threats, including those by terror groups and outfits, often lie “below the radar” or beyond the horizon. Anticipating such threats and their nature requires intelligence agencies to be constantly ahead of the curve. Anticipating newer threats is only partly facilitated by today’s technical advances such as new computing and communication technologies. However, these alone are not often enough to meet today’s intelligence needs.

As problems become more complicated, and as terror networks become even more sophisticated, there has to be recognition that the situation demands better understanding of factors that are at work. Levelling mere charges or accusations against intelligence agencies of a failure to anticipate an attack by not “connecting the dots” could be misleading, if not downright dangerous. All professional analysts in whichever field they operate face the same problem as intelligence agencies, and vividly outlined by David Omand, a former U.K. Intelligence and Security Coordinator as “seeing through a glass darkly when the information available to them is incomplete or partially hidden”.

Alongside this, and to fill the gap, there is a case for far greater sharing of intelligence and information among intelligence agencies worldwide than it exists at present. This is important to prevent another terror attack on the lines of the Mumbai 2008 attack. It now transpires that certain foreign intelligence agencies had additional information about the possible attack which was not shared in time, and which led to an intelligence gap. This could have been avoided.

More important, such a situation should never arise in the future. Terror and terrorism is a universal phenomenon. Every nation is bound to share the intelligence available with it to prevent a possible major terror attack.

M.K. Narayanan is a former National Security Adviser and a former Governor of West Bengal

XXX

Pakistan and the Lashkar’s jihad in India (09.12.2008)

Praveen Swami

Were the terrorists who stormed Mumbai non-state actors?

“Whoever they are,” Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari said last week of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai, “they are stateless actors who are holding hostage the whole world.” “I very much doubt,” he continued, asked about the arrested terrorist Mohammad Ajmal Amir, “that he’s a Pakistani.”

President Zardari’s claims have disintegrated with media reports from Pakistan confirming that Amir is indeed a Pakistani national linked to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan, under intense pressure, has since begun a crackdown on Lashkar offices in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, although its seriousness of purpose is still far from clear. How events develop from here will settle the question of whether the Lashkar is, in fact, a non-state actor—or a covert instrument of the Pakistani state. In 1987, Osama bin-Laden’s ideological mentor and a professor of religious studies together founded the Markaz Dawat-ul-Irshad — the Centre for the Propagation of the Faith and its Teachings. It was to grow into an empire. Today, the Pakistan-based Jamaat-ud-Dawa runs a web of educational, medical charitable — and military — institutions on a sprawling campus at Muridke near Lahore.

Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian national who had taught Islamic studies in Amman and Riyadh, came to Pakistan in 1979 to set up the Maktab al-Khidmat (Office of Service), which helped funnel Arab jihadists arriving in Pakistan to mujahideen groups. Pakistani scholar Hassan Abbas has recorded in his seminal work Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism that Azzam wished to revive the “lost art and science of the jihad.”

Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, born in a conservative, Punjabi family which lost 36 of its members during its Partition journey from Shimla to Lahore, was Azzam’s partner in the founding of the MDI. Like Azzam, he followed the Salafist tradition of Islam. Saeed was appointed by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq to the state-run Council on Islamic Ideology, and was later given a position at Lahore’s University of Engineering and Technology. In 1989, Azzam was assassinated in a bombing attributed to Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Saeed turned his attention to the emerging jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, and founded the Lashkar in 1990. Hussain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, candidly admitted in a 2005 article that the Lashkar had been “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.”

From the outset, the Lashkar made clear that it was not confined to Jammu and Kashmir. In an undated pamphlet likely issued around 1999, Hum Jihad Kyon Kar Rahe Hein (Why we are fighting a jihad), it argued: “Muslims ruled Andalusia for 800 years but they were finished to the last man. Christians now rule [Spain] and we must wrest it back from them. All of India, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Assam, Nepal, Burma, Bihar and Junagarh were part of the Muslim empire that was lost because Muslims gave up jihad. Palestine is occupied by the Jews. The Holy Qibla-e-Awwal in Jerusalem is under Jewish control. Several countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Cyprus, Sicily, Ethiopia, Russian Turkistan and Chinese Turkistan were Muslim lands and it is our duty to get these back from unbelievers.”

Late in 1992, as communal tension began to rise across India, Saeed assigned to a trusted lieutenant the task of opening a second front — this time against India as a whole. Mohammad Azam Cheema — ‘Baba’ to his recruits, and like Saeed the son of middle class Punjabi family — first came into contact with Saeed while both men were teaching at the engineering university in Lahore.

Hindu chauvinists handed Cheema a gift in December 1992, in the form of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Lashkar operatives now reached out to Indian Islamist organisations. Indian nationals Abdul Kareem ‘Tunda,’ Mohammad Azam Ghauri and Jalees Ansari executed the first Lashkar-led operation in India on the first anniversary of the demolition, bombing several trains. Later, Indian recruits like Amir Hashim — who used the code-name Kamran — executed attacks in New Delhi, Jalandhar and Rohtak. By 1996, Cheema is believed to have been running over a dozen Pakistani agents across India, operating under fictions — the term intelligence professionals use for cover-identities. Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan’s Jhelum district, was, for example, dispatched to Hyderabad to build Lashkar cells in the region.

On December 13, 2001, terrorists stormed India’s Parliament. The former Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, under pressure, proscribed the Lashkar. He also promised an end to cross-border infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir. But the MDI and Lashkar leaders who were arrested were soon released. The MDI renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and resumed public fundraising, recruitment and propaganda operations. Moreover, the Lashkar continued to operate freely out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where the proscription order did not apply.

Even as Pakistan scaled back infiltration in Kashmir — violence has fallen year-on-year since 2002 — the Lashkar’s all-India offensive escalated. Between 2004 and 2006, Lashkar-linked cells, sometimes operating in affiliation with elements of the Bangladesh-based Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami, attacked several Indian cities, a project that reached its climax with the Mumbai train bombings in 2006.

India’s intelligence services have long said the post-2002 offensive was commanded by a battle-hardened Kashmir jihad veteran so far known only by code-names, ‘Muzammil,’ ‘Yusuf’ and ‘Abu Hurrera.’ Muzammil specialised in using the Lashkar’s fidayeen assets in Kashmir to attack targets elsewhere in India. In September 2002, for example, he ordered the south Kashmir-based Lashkar commander, Manzoor Zahid Chaudhuri, to despatch two fidayeen to storm the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar. Later, he put together a June 2004 plot to use fidayeen to assassinate the then Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani.

After the Mumbai bombings of 2006, Gen. Musharraf once again promised to end terrorism directed at India — but once again failed to act against the Lashkar. No clear answer just what this was has ever emerged: some analysts believe that the General wished to appease the anti-U.S. elements in the ISI by allowing jihad against Pakistan’s eastern adversary to continue, while others insist that the LeT was in a position to initiate a civil war with 20,000-odd men estimated to have passed through its military camps.

Muzammil — if that is indeed the name of the six-foot tall, long-haired and full-bearded Punjabi-speaking terror commander who operates out of Muzaffarabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi — worked hard to put a firewall between the Lashkar in Pakistan and its affiliates in India. The Indian Mujahideen, which executed a string of bombings across India in 2007-2008, was one product of his efforts. Most of the IM’s key operational figures, mainly drawn from the ranks of the Students Islamic Movement of India, had trained at Lashkar camps in Pakistan. However, the Lashkar had no direct role in the IM’s bombing campaign, nor did it commit Pakistani nationals to the attacks.

Even as the Lashkar focussed on its anti-India campaign, though, Pakistan began to descend into chaos. As jihadists battled Pakistani troops along the northwest frontier and Islamabad found itself compelled by the U.S. to take on the terror groups it had long patronised, the language used by the Al-Qaeda and the Lashkar increasingly converged. In April 2006, Osama bin-Laden issued a proclamation that denounced a “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu war against Muslims.”

Saeed’s public speeches began to draw on the same ideas. Just this May, for example, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief asserted “the Crusaders, the Jews, and the Hindus — all have united against the Muslims, and launched the ‘war on terror’ which is in fact a pretext to impose a horrible war to further the nefarious goals of the enemies of Islam.” Less than a month later, on June 12, he called on Islamabad to disassociate “itself from the war on terror and join the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir.”

By targeting western nationals in Mumbai, the Lashkar has initiated the third phase of its campaign, which first focussed on Kashmir and then all of India. The Al-Qaeda, the language of bin-Laden and Saeed suggests, had an ideological and tactical influence on the decision to open this fresh front.

Did the ISI or elements in the military also play a role? No hard evidence exists to support this claim but Pakistan’s long-standing failure to crack down on the terror group has led more than one analyst to make the obvious inference that the terror group has powerful friends. Although Pakistan continues to insist that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a charitable group, the U.S. State department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2007 insist that it is in fact a “front organisation” for the Lashkar.

It is likely that some in the ISI see the Lashkar as an ally in their campaign against India — a campaign that sustains the hostility which informs the foundation of the Pakistan Army’s political primacy in Pakistan. In August, The New York Times reported that the U.S. had intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and the terrorists who bombed the Indian Embassy in Kabul. And many commentators have argued that the Mumbai operation could have been backed by pro-Islamist ISI elements who wished to provoke an India-Pakistan clash that would compel the eastward diversion of troops now committed to fighting the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda.

Now, President Zardari has the option of speaking the truth and acting against the Lashkar — or giving weight to charges that the banned terror group is an instrument of the state he governs.

Corrections and Clarifications

The tenth paragraph in an article "Pakistan and the Lashkar's jihad inIndia" (Editorial page, December 9, 2008) said that he [Kashmir jihadveteran so far known only by code-names, 'Muzammil,' 'Yusuf' and 'AbuHurrera'] put together a June 2004 plot to use fidayeen to assassinate thethen Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani. The UPA Government was formed on May22, 2004, so Mr. Advani was only the Leader of the Opposition.

(All of the above articles have been taken straight from The Hindu. We owe it all to them. This is just an effort to consolidate opinions expressed in The Hindu in a subject-wise manner.)