TROUBLE IN MUMBAI

In late November, yet another heinous crime by terrorists shook the world. This time, they chose the Indian city of Mumbai - the country's business capital, known before 1995 as Bombay - as their target. Almost 200 dead and about 400 wounded fell victim to the tragedy which has again raised questions as to who is to blame for the ugly phenomenon of terrorism and what has to be done to uproot it from the lives of this and future generations.

Indian 9/11

The terrorists targeted luxury hotels, popular restaurants, the main railway station and the Jewish centre. Among the victims were 18 foreigners, including two Americans, three Germans, two French, an Israeli, an Australian, a Briton, a Canadian, an Italian, a Japanese and a Chinese. The terrorist act was perpetrated by 10 terrorists, of whom nine were killed in a three-day operation by the Indian special forces. The only surviving terrorist is a certain Azam Amir Qasab, a Pakistani citizen, who admitted during interrogation that the gunmen had planned an Indian "11 September." Indeed, just as with the explosion of the twin towers seven years ago, the terrorist attacks were carried out in a business centre in which large numbers of Israelis, Americans and Europeans were likely to be present.

Following the terrorist action, New Delhi demanded that Pakistan extradite 20 persons who are suspected of terrorist activities and are currently on the territory of India's neighbour. In reply, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari promised to take "urgent measures" if evidence is furnished of his compatriots' association with the attacks in Mumbai. In an interview with the Financial Times, Zardari blames "non-government agents" for the crime and refers to the fight his government is waging against the Taliban and Al-Qaida on the border with Afghanistan.

In the mean time, Islamabad's refusal to extradite the suspects to Indian law enforcers - Zardari has only agreed to try the suspects in a Pakistani court - has aggravated his relations with New Delhi. India is now considering strikes against terrorist camps in Pakistan and has begun to reinforce its troops on the border with Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan has put its ground troops and air force on high alert. The danger of military conflict between India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars in their history, has become a reality. The thaw in relations between New Delhi and Islamabad, which had been observed for the last year, seems to be over.

The United States decided to intervene at the critical moment. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice undertook emergency visits to India and Pakistan. Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen held talks with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad too. The United States made it clear that it expected a balanced reaction to the tragic events from India, and complete and open cooperation with India on the prevention of terrorist acts in the future from Pakistan. However, while the chief US diplomat voiced solidarity with India and urged Pakistan to take "quick and decisive action," she did not directly indicate where the blame for the tragedy lay. "We are not ready yet to say who is responsible for the attack, but the United States is already gathering information," Rice said, although she said later that the attack in Mumbai was Al-Qaida style. But the shuttle diplomacy of the US administration yielded one important result: the Indian leadership agreed not to deploy troops on the Pakistan border, but it expressed its resolve to mobilize the international community to pressure Islamabad into taking decisive measures against terrorists.

Pakistani motives

Deccan Mujahedeen, an organization which no one knew about before 26 November, claimed responsibility for the Mumbai attack. Many people do not believe this, saying that the Indian Mujahedeen, who have staged several major terrorist acts this year, are hiding behind the new name. In the mean time, the arrested Qasab said that he was trained by gunmen from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba (the Army of the Righteous). One of the leaders of the organization, Yusuf Muzammil, is on the list of terrorists which India sent to Pakistan. In addition, New Delhi accused the same Muzammil of organizing the terrorist attack in Mumbai.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba is a paramilitary wing of the fundamentalist Pakistani organization Markas ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad. It was created in 1980 but it operated in Afghanistan until 1993. The core of the group is formed by veterans of the war with the Soviet Union. By the late 1990s, Lashkar-e-Taiba had become an influential organization operating in Pakistan with the stated aim of bringing Kashmir under Islamabad's control. The group staged a number of terrorist actions in India and, in 2002, the then Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf, banned Lashkar-e-Taiba, under pressure from the United States.

The list of 20 men includes leaders not only of this organization, but also of the radical Jaish-e-Muhammed (the Army of Muhammad and Taleban. It also includes the most wanted criminal in India, Daud Ibrahim, a mafia bosses in Mumbai who is on the wanted list for masterminding a series of explosions which killed at least 250 people back in 1993.

But in the current situation, it is important to not only identify the suspects, which the Indian special services set out to do right way, but also to have a clear idea of the motives behind the horrible crime. Qasab was quite self-contradictory in this part of his testimony. Initially he said that the terrorist act had aimed to take revenge on the Indians for oppressing the country's Muslim population, then he started to talk about the Americans and Britons, of whom the gunmen wanted to kill as many as possible, and then said that it had all started simply to take revenge on Israel for Palestine. Indeed, the Jewish community centre Nariman House was among the terrorists' targets. Several Jews who were taken hostage there were brutally killed during the assault (the Daily Telegraph reported that the bodies had signs of torture). But it is obvious that the terrorist act pursued a much broader aim than "revenge on the Zionists," although this too was a motivational component for the terrorists. The attack on Mumbai first and foremost targeted the peaceful relations between India and Pakistan in order to provoke an armed conflict between the subcontinent's two nuclear powers. It is noteworthy that the attack in Mumbai started during a visit to India by Pakistani Foreign Minister Mahmood Qureshi; it was cut short because of the terrorist acts.

The masterminds behind the terrorist acts apparently expected that the clash of the two countries would destabilize the situation in Pakistan, paralyze the civilian government bodies in Islamabad, which have been losing control of the country day by day for more than a decade, and pave the way for radical groups to come to power, which could have resulted in disaster for the region and for mankind, given that Pakistan is a nuclear power. In addition, a new conflict would certainly lead to a weakening of Islamabad's counterterrorist operations against the Taliban by forcing it to move most of its troops from the border with Afghanistan to the border with India. And this is yet another possible motive of the forces associated with international terrorist networks which organized the massacre in Mumbai.

The "Gordian knot" and "conflict of civilization"

However, whatever the motives and objectives of the terrorist acts - and not only in Mumbai - might be, the need to defeat terrorism is most crucial for the international community because it is directly linked to the issue of survival and dignity. The deaths of people of different nationalities and faiths have again demonstrated that the kindling of religious hatred is still under way and that terrorism is the common enemy of all nations, religions and civilizations, which makes it vital to seek new ways and methods of dealing it a deadly blow. First and foremost, there is a need to root out the underlying causes - the political, social and economic causes of terrorism - and seize every opportunity to achieve internal accord in the countries which in recent years have become hotbeds of terrorist threat.

Hopefully, realization of this truth will outweigh the animosity which pushes two nuclear powers - India and Pakistan - towards an all-out conflict. The growing political tension, and reduction of all hopes for peaceful regulation of problems to a state verging on despair is yet another consequence of terrorist activities, especially as the escalation of tension is not in either Pakistan's or India's interests. Pakistan is going through a period of internal political problems which will decide the fate of the Pakistani democracy, which President Zardari promised to promote when he replaced Musharraf in power. Having forced the dictator into resignation, the new government announced that it intended to bring under control the Army and the all-powerful Pakistan secret service ISI, whose officers are accused of secretly supporting the extremists. However, the Pakistani government is obviously weak, as manifested, in particular, when General Ashfaq Kiani, chief commander of the Pakistan Armed Forces, effectively cancelled President Zardari's decision to send the chief of Pakistani intelligence to India to cooperate with the investigation into the Mumbai attacks. So, if India decides to go for conflict with the Zardari government after all, it will effectively help his enemies in Pakistan. And when President Zardari says that Pakistanis are themselves victims of the terrorist war, that "I personally am a victim myself," the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was killed last year in a terrorist act, is trying to persuade the Indians that he and the Pakistani people are their allies in the fight against terrorism.

India is not interested, either, in starting an armed conflict with Pakistan. New Delhi realizes that, despite their superiority over Pakistan both in the numerical strength of its armed forces and in the number of military hardware units, relations between the two countries largely hinge on the fact that they both have nuclear weapons. So any plans to take revenge for the blood shed by terrorists in Mumbai might have too great a cost and not only Indians and Pakistanis will pay the price. This, together with the sincere attempts by both sides to improve relations, which they demonstrated up until the moment of the Mumbai tragedy, gives rise to hope that New Delhi and Islamabad will find the inner strength to combine their efforts and punish the masterminds behind the terrorist action.

This would give the international antiterrorist coalition a chance to take its activities to a new level. The prospects of the coalition created after the 11 September attacks, were effectively dimmed by the United States' and its closest allies' campaign in Iraq. And now, perhaps, the nations of the world will be much more persistent and diligent in their efforts to uproot terrorism. But everyone should keep in mind that the source which kindles the fire of international terrorism is not in the subcontinent. The Arab-Israeli conflict - this is the "Gordian knot" which must be cut through to make it possible to stabilize the situation in the Near East. The marginalized, deprived people in that region become recruits for the detachments of suicide bombers and are just tools in the hands of those people to whom the "conflict of civilizations" - one of the fundamental ideological clauses of the present day geopolitical code, matters so much.  The perpetuation of this conflict serves the interests of powerful circles, both in the West and in the East, which are waging a merciless war for the right to win a better position in the global "bloody business".