Pakistan has raided a terrorist training camp on its territory and one reports says it arrested Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the purported mastermind behind the bloody Mumbai attacks in India.
The Moderate Voice’s India-based co-blogger, veteran journalist Swaraaj Chahaun, believes the timing of this may not be happenstance. In an email he writes: “To me it seems that the US administration’s arms twisting has worked with the Pak military and ISI [Pakistani intelligence.} Chauhan believes the Pakistan government “knew all along where Lashkar camps are and where they have been training militants for more than two decades for creating trouble across the border. At last the US administration has woken up to the danger inherent in turning a blind eye to the “old pal’s” dangerous/myopic games.”
And in this age of terrorist acts that often don’t have consequences for the terrorists, the news is dramatic — but it still may be not the kind of long term fix and terrorist eradication that New Delhi and Washington demand. Times Online reports:
Pakistani security forces have raided a training camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the militant group blamed for last month’s attack on Mumbai, and arrested at least 12 of the group’s activists, government officials said today.
One Pakistani official told The Times that among those arrested was Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, LeT’s operations chief, whom Indian officials have accused of masterminding the Mumbai attack.
The raid last night near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, was Pakistan’s first attempt to respond to mounting pressure from India and the United States to take action against LeT after the Mumbai strike.
It is unlikely to satisfy either Delhi or Washington unless Islamabad follows up by prosecuting those arrested and taking further action against other militant groups linked to attacks on Indian soil.
“We’ve seen before how Pakistan will arrest some militants, keep them for a couple of months and then release them when the world’s not paying attention,” said B. Raman, a former head of the Pakistan desk at the Research and Analysis Wing (India’s MI6).
“It must not be allowed to do that this time. They have to prosecute these people and dismantle the whole terrorist infrastructure,” he told The Times.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.