By AHMED QURAISHI
Tuesday, 7 July 2009.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—India has paid terrorist leader Baitullah Mehsud and his well armed and trained terrorist army around U.S. $ 25 million to mount a spectacular attack on a major Pakistani nuclear site. A special force of around 500 recruits has been assembled and trained to mount the operation that is supposed to shock the world. The purpose is to create an event that will create a global media scare and convince the world of the need for military intervention in Pakistan. Another objective is to neutralize voices of reason within the U.S. government that believe Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure.
The bulk of the terrorists in the special 500-strong force put together by Mehsud have been trained inside Afghanistan by trainers suspected of having links to the Indian intelligence. Although most of the recruits are expected to be Pakistanis from Mehsud’s tribe, an unknown number of Afghan and Indian elements with special operations training have been inserted in the Mehsud group in order to ensure the success of this high profile operation.
It is not clear when this plan was conceived and whether the 500-strong force divided into crack teams to carry out the attack(s) is ready. But Pakistani officials are taking no chances. The nation’s security setup is on high alert. As for the nuclear installations, the managers of Pakistan’s strategic arsenal maintain unrestricted universal operability to fulfill the arsenal’s role as a deterrent. For them, no day is a normal day.
But this latest disclosure of a plan to attack the nuclear sites has raised alarm bells, to say the least.
A rough sketch of the plan and how the attack(s) are expected to unfold goes as follows:
1. A team or several teams of terrorists attack one or more Pakistani nuclear sites and attempt to enter the facilities.
2. Within each crack team only a small core is supposed to be equipped with modern communications equipment, special operations gear, and modern weapons; highly trained to exact maximum damage.
3. Where possible, the terrorists plan to break in and hold the fort, a la Mumbai attacks, in order to generate maximum media coverage and embarrassment for the Pakistanis.
4. The international media, and especially the main American and British news outlets, turn this into a global crisis, comparable to the Bay of Pigs in 1962.
5. The event generates enough pressure to justify an ‘international demand’ to neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and force Pakistanis to accept ‘international’ supervision.
6. Depending on the aftermath, and after a few days or weeks, a small nuclear weapon is used somewhere, maybe against the US military or NATO bases in Afghanistan since it would be difficult to do it anywhere else, in order to confirm that the Afghan Taliban or generally the ‘Islamic extremists’ managed to steal a weapon from the earlier attack(s) on Pakistani sites.
This last point is critical. According to the available information, the mysterious disappearance of a senior Indian nuclear scientist and his subsequent death in May is linked to at least some parts of this plan. The scientist, Mr. Lokanathan Mahalingam, 47, had access to Indian’s sensitive nuclear information and worked at the prestigious Kaiga Atomic Power Station in the southern Indian state Karnataka, close to Project Seabird, a major Indian military base. His disappearance received limited coverage in the Indian media and there was almost a blackout on the circumstances surrounding how his dead body was found in a lake. The media in the U.S. and Britain also ignored the story. It is believed that Mr. Mahalingam was either involved in or had some knowledge about the planning for securing a small nuclear weapon that would leave no fingerprints, to put it this way, in order to execute the idea in paragraph 6 above.
The Indians have been working on this scenario for some time now.
On 16 May, the Israeli security website Debka under a story titled, ‘Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost,’ reported the following:
“India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are "already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists.”
The Times of India, reporting the story, complained about “Washington's misplaced confidence in, and [careless] approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets,” and grumbled that “Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.”
The Indian interest is obvious. But so is the Israeli interest. It is quite revealing that the story was broken by a news outlet known in international circles for its links to the Israeli government.
Official circles in Washington, including the White House, the State Department, Pentagon and CIA are cognizant of a history of cooperation between India and Israel in security issues. India’s security establishment is largely focused on Pakistan and on controlling Kashmir where the population is fighting the Indian military. At least in one incident, during the limited Pakistan-India war in 1999, the Israelis directly intervened to help the battered Indian army overturn a tactical victory by Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters.
As recently as two days ago, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and an Obama adviser known for his strong anti-Pakistan views, wrote an article published at the Brookings Institute website that demonstrates how far the anti-Pakistan lobby is willing to go to prove that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is not safe.
In Mr. Riedel’s case, he went as far as lying.
He used a recent terrorist attack on a bus carrying employees of KRL, a Pakistani nuclear facility, to say that Pakistani nuclear sites are already under attack. What he conveniently ignored is that the said bus was in fact traveling through a densely populated part of the city and not anywhere near any nuclear site. The bus most probably became a target of opportunity because it carried a plate indicating it was a government vehicle.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statement quoted by an Israeli source which was widely reported and never denied by the Indians, the Israelis or the Americans, was not the first to promote the alarmist and the unreal scenario of Pakistani nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands. Mr. Singh came on record during an interview with CNN in 2005 to say this:
“I am worried about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear assets should President Pervez Musharraf be replaced, since there is always the danger of Islamic militants seizing power and taking control of the country’s nuclear assets.”
There is little question that influential parts of the Indian government are involved in exporting terrorism into Pakistan from bases inside Afghanistan. Attempts to incite ethnic unrest in Pakistan’s southwest were traced by investigators to Indians in Afghanistan. Pakistani investigators reached the same conclusion with some of the evidence found in northwest Pakistan where terrorists are killing Pakistanis. And now there are reports of an impending attack on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities using Baitullah Mehsud.
The Indians and those who are supporting them should be under no illusions. Any attack on Pakistani nuclear facilities in the coming days will be construed as a declaration of war by India against Pakistan. Knowing of Mehsud’s previous contacts with Indians and with Karzai’s people, any miscalculated attempt by his terrorists will not be seen as anything less than a direct Indian attack. In this case, Pakistan will consider itself in a state of war, and retaliate accordingly. There should not be any confusion on this.
The Liberhan report is with the PM and will be tabled in Parliament soon. Till then, here is Prafull Goradia, very much an old Saffron warrior, writing in the Pioneer before the report was submitted to the PM:
Human hands could not have brought down the strong stone walls of the Babri edifice. To do that and clear the debris overnight required more than enraged kar sevaksSubsequently came the news, through the several police officers who were present, that a number of men were systematically attacking the edifice walls just below the domes with the help of crowbars. When some leaders questioned the police about their inaction, the reply was that they had instructions not to intervene without a threat to human life. Incidentally, no Minister of the Uttar Pradesh Government was available to contact.
Within the next hour came to the terrace two Press photographers who had been beaten, bruised and bleeding somewhat. Their cameras had been snatched away because the men with the crowbars did not want to be photographed. That is when I realised that those men were Government servants and not kar sevaks who would be proud to be photographed whereas Government servants would be afraid.
The town of Ayodhya was overcrowded with people, perhaps, two to three lakh in number. At 2:30 pm there was an audible sigh by the people which signalled that one of the domes had fallen. From where I was, I could not see it collapse. I did however witness the fall of the other two domes at 3:40 and 4:30 pm. There were tears of joy in the eyes of some of the VHP leaders. The Sangh leadership was neither jumping with joy nor sad with anxiety. By and large, the BJP veterans looked stunned as if blood had flowed out of their veins.
At 5:30 pm all of us came down from the terrace and began wending our way to where our cars were parked. The ten 30-feet walls were still standing as they were in the morning. All they had lost were their domes. Uncannily, not all these years since then have I ever seen a photograph of the Babri edifice without its domes. The earliest next picture was that of the Ram Lalla mandir in a tent hastily established by the Central Reserve Police. It was published in the dailies of December 9, 1992.
Clearly, the 10 enormous walls were demolished during the next 60 hours after 6:00 pm by when the Kalyan Singh Ministry had been dismissed and the President had taken over the Government of Uttar Pradesh. Which means that the walls were demolished by the representatives of the Central Government. Human hands could not have brought down the strong stone walls. To do the work and clear the debris fast mechanical devices, probably belonging to the CPWD, were used.
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