On January 22, 2009, the Punjab CID officially warned the IGP that “RAW (Indian Intelligence Agency) has assigned its agents the task to target (the) Sri Lankan Cricket Team … especially while traveling between the hotel and stadium … to show Pakistan as a security risk state for sports events…Extreme vigilance and high security arrangements are indicated.” As if on cue, minutes after the attack, a clutch of the usual suspect Pakistani analysts, TV anchors, politicians and one former DG-ISI pointed the finger at a “foreign hand” from across the border. This was a tit-for-tat replay of Mumbai, they argued, because the terrorists escaped intact and didn’t commit suicide, a hallmark of the local Islamic jihadi groups. The RAW conspiracy theory was completed after statements from the Indian Foreign Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, and the Home Minister, P Chidambaram, noting the depth of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan. “Unless infrastructure and facilities available to the terrorist organizations within Pakistan or territory under its control are completely dismantled, repetition of these incidents will take place”, said Mr Mukherjee. Both were quick to crow about India’s decision not to send its cricket team to Pakistan, followed by a chorus of professional voices from sports-playing countries across the globe seeking a long term ban on playing in Pakistan.
But there are some snags in this scenario. A former high ranking intelligence official who relinquished charge of a senior police post in the Punjab government three days ago told TFT confidentially that this was “the handiwork of a former jihadi group now linked to Al Qaeda”. He said that last year the security agencies had nabbed a terrorist from the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), a sectarian organization once involved in the Kashmir jihad but now working closely with the Al-Qaeda-Taliban network led by Baitullah Masud in South Waziristan, FATA. This terrorist, he explained, was still in police custody. He had confessed that he was trained to carry out a suicide mission last year during the proposed Champions Cricket Trophy, whose venue was later shifted out of Pakistan.
The Punjab Governor, Salmaan Taseer, and the IGP, Khalid Farooq, say that the attack was carried out “by the same people who did Mumbai”. Significantly, however, on the day of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore, most newspapers carried news that Al Qaeda had owned up to the Marriott Hotel Islamabad blast of September 2008 in a message sent to the Saudi embassy in Islamabad. On December 22, 2008, it may be recalled, the Interior Adviser, Mr Rehman Malik, had told the National Assembly that the Marriott blast was carried out by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Al Qaeda has already claimed responsibility for the attack on the Danish embassy in Islamabad.
Before her death, Ms Benazir Bhutto had revealed that the attack on her procession in Karachi in October 2007 was carried out by the gang of “Abdul Rehman Sindhi, an Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) militant from the Dadu district of Sindh”. After her assassination in December 2008, an Al Qaeda spokesman claimed responsibility for killing “an American asset”. The LeJ was created in 1996 and trained by Al Qaeda in its camps in Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, the Taliban government, backed by Al Qaeda, steadily refused Pakistan’s demand to hand over LeJ terrorists. There are other signs that the LeJ is an ally of Al Qaeda. In May 2002, a New Zealand cricket team abandoned its tour of Pakistan after a LeJ suicide bomber attacked them in front of their hotel in Karachi. There is also evidence of the LeJ’s involvement in the attack on the Karachi Corps commander in 2002 and on General Pervez Musharraf in 2003.
The LeJ was closely aligned with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the master-planner of the 9/11 attacks in the United States who was later nabbed and handed over to the US by the Musharraf regime. When the British national Omar Sheikh, sprung from an Indian jail by Jaish-e-Muhammad after the hijack of an Indian airliner in 1999, led the American journalist Daniel Pearl into a trap in Karachi in January 2002, the trap was actually set by a group of terrorists of LeJ which finally facilitated Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in personally slaughtering Pearl in a safe house belonging to a charity trust linked to a madrassah in Karachi and active in Afghanistan, and banned as a terrorist organisation.
But there is a serious problem in Pakistan about such terrorist attacks. Despite many occasions when Al Qaeda has owned up to its attacks in Pakistan few Pakistanis believe that Al Qaeda actually exists, let alone that it is dangerous for Pakistan. This state of mass denial owes to the religious-nationalist ideological leanings of many “youthful” TV anchors who were blighted by the Zia ul Haq years in which the national education system was explicitly religious-nationalist. It lies behind the lack of consensus in Pakistan about the origins of “Islamic” terrorism and how to tackle it. It is strengthened by “fearful” reporting from places where journalists like Musa Khankhel have been killed in Swat for expressing views that arouse the wrath of the Taliban. And it is strengthened by the regular acquittal of LeJ terrorists from courts where judges are not protected by the state.