The 9/11 Wars (69 page)

A SAVAGE INTENSITY

In late 2007, Mohammed Ajmal Amir, a former labourer with minimal education from a small town just north of Multan, approached a Lashkar-e-Toiba recruiter at a market stall in the city of Rawalpindi. His primary aim was far from religious. A petty criminal with ambitions to pursue a career as a robber, he wanted to learn how to use automatic and other weapons and thought the militant group would teach him the requisite skills.
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He then spent three weeks at Muridke, the headquarters of LeT’s ostensibly non-violent parent group Jamaat-ul-Dawa situated 30 miles south of Lahore, following a regime of four hours of religious instruction and two hours of sport each day. His original criminal career forgotten, Amir rapidly developed new interests. Seen as a promising recruit, he underwent three further weeks of mixed military and religious instruction in a LeT camp in a village near the town of Mansehra in the North West Frontier province before a series of courses of increasingly specialized instruction in smaller groups. Finally, he found himself back at Muridke with twelve others being taught how to swim. After nine months or more of training, the thirteen young men were briefed on their mission. They were not heading to Kashmir, as many of them had thought. They would be sent direct to Mumbai, India’s cosmopolitan, bustling commercial capital, to conduct a spectacular raid which would end in their deaths. After two attempts to cross the sea from Karachi in the late summer and autumn failed, finally the group succeeded in boarding an Indian fishing trawler. They forced the crew (who were later killed) to take them to their destination, which they reached in the evening of November 26. Once ashore, the militants fanned out across the city. Amir – who would be erroneously dubbed Kasab by Indian police and then the press – and one other gunman made their way to the seething Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, entered the toilets, took their weapons from their backpacks, headed out on the concourse and opened fire.
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The attack’s aim was to maximize publicity. Their target was civilians. Kasab and his partner killed fifty-three at the railway terminus, mainly evening commuters. Another seven, including a commando, were killed in the Nariman House, a centre for ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city, by another group of gunmen. Ten were killed at the Leopold Café, a hang-out for tourists and young locals, when it was randomly sprayed with bullets. One group of militants targeted the five-star Oberoi hotel, where they killed thirty. A second group attacked the famous Taj Palace hotel, yards from the sea and the monumental arch known as the Gateway to India, where they succeeded in holding out against security forces for nearly three days. Witnesses later told of the attackers marching through corridors, restaurants and ballrooms, demanding the identity of guests, holding some hostage, shooting others. Another thirty died there. In all more than 160 civilians were killed in the attack, and more than 300 injured. Kasab survived and was detained. All the other gunmen were shot dead. Two of them came from the town of Dera Ismail Khan in the North West Frontier Province. The rest came from the southern Punjab.
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In the aftermath of the attack, with Lashkar-e-Toiba clearly identified as the perpetrators, two urgent questions needed answering. The first was obvious: what was the involvement of the Pakistani security establishment? The second was equally pressing for security services around the world: did the Mumbai attacks, with their range of international targets, signal that Lashkar-e-Toiba, arguably the biggest violent Islamic extremist organization in the world other than Hamas or Hezbollah, had gone global? The answers to both would not become clear for some time and, when they did, would be, as ever, complex and nuanced.

Kasab was a junior figure, a footsoldier and a new recruit, who knew nothing of the background of the plot he had become involved in. Much of the background of the genesis of the attack, arguably the most spectacular of the 9/11 Wars other than the September 11 attacks themselves, was eventually revealed by David Headley, a Pakistani-American member of LeT who was arrested in the USA in 2009 and spoke to Indian investigators while in American custody as part of a plea bargain. Headley’s own life-story was the stuff of bad thrillers. Born Daood Gilani, the son of an American woman and a Pakistani civil servant, he had grown up in Pakistan but had spent much of his adult life in Philadelphia. When jailed for heroin trafficking in the late 1990s, Headley had agreed to work for US authorities as an agent, though the relationship had ended by 2000. He had joined LeT, aged forty-two, in 2002 after returning to his native land, seized with enthusiasm for radical Islam and a deep hatred of India.
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While in US custody, he explained to his Indian questioners how he had spent the first years of his association with LeT frustrated as, despite having successfully completed the various training courses necessary for aspirant combatants, he was never sent across the Line of Control into Indian Kashmir to fight.
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He was too old, and only a very low level of infiltration was being allowed by the ISI at the time. In late 2005, arrested near Peshawar, Headley mentioned his links to LeT to police, was interviewed by an ISI major and freed. Back at his home in Lahore, he was contacted again by the ISI, interviewed at length about his avowed ambitions to do harm to India or Indian interests by a lieutenant colonel and assigned a handler, a ‘Major Iqbal’, who sent him back to the USA in the spring of 2006 to change his name and get an Indian visa. On his return, the officer assigned a junior colleague to train Headley in clandestine techniques, and in the autumn of 2006, ‘Major Iqbal’ handed his new recruit $25,000 and sent him to Mumbai. His job was to survey dozens of different locations ranging from embassies to the offices of nuclear-related government organizations, filming and photographing everything he saw and bringing the material back to Pakistan.
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Headley’s association with the ISI complemented rather than replaced his activities with LeT. The two were interlinked. From 2006 to 2008, Headley undertook seven more visits to India, including several to Mumbai, on behalf of both the intelligence service and the militant group. After each, the former video store owner would meet both his ISI handler, who continued the training in clandestine techniques, and his LeT associates. On several occasions Headley went as far as to give both the same images and film copied on to two memory sticks. His contacts with ‘Major Iqbal’ continued up to and beyond the actual attacks in Mumbai, with Headley apprising his handler of last-minute changes in the planning of the operation, in particular of its targets. For Headley, the logic of the ISI in encouraging the attacks was clear. The service was worried that LeT, the Pakistani military’s most effective reserve of irregular forces and the one with which it had the closest relationship, might follow the example of other groups and pursue more aggressive agendas closer to the internationalist position of al-Qaeda. ‘The ISI was under tremendous pressure to stop any integration of Kashmir-based jihadi organizations with the Taliban-based outfits,’ he told his interrogators. Even worse was the prospect that significant elements of the LeT might begin to fuse with the Pakistani Taliban. ‘The ISI … had no ambiguity in understanding the necessity to strike India. It would serve three purposes: controlling further split in the Kashmir-based outfits, providing them with a sense of achievement and shifting the theatre of violence from the domestic soil of Pakistan to India,’ Headley explained.

Another driver for the project to strike India was the internal tension within LeT itself. It was in these dynamics that the answer to the second question posed by the Mumbai attacks – the potential globalization of LeT – was to be found. Like so many other radical groups over previous chapters, LeT had its own problems with indiscipline and ideological dissent. Headley told his questioners of the ongoing tension within LeT, which pitted leaders like founder Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and top military commander Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi against even more extreme elements within the organization. These latter had grown increasingly numerous as the 9/11 Wars had ground on. Many had split away to go and fight in Afghanistan. Others had stayed within LeT but argued forcibly that the group’s historic arrangements with the Pakistani security establishment were no longer justifiable, particularly as the ‘jihad’ in Kashmir appeared to have been abandoned and Pakistani state policy seemed to be to support Washington. Saeed and Lakhvi appear thus to have agreed to a Mumbai operation, which at its outset was supposed to be limited only to a
fedayeen
-style raid by two or three gunmen on a single hotel in the city, to head off internal dissent. The plot had then taken on a momentum of its own, building up a sufficient head of steam for the plan to largely escape efforts by the senior leadership of LeT to keep it to a scale that would be less politically contentious. Instead, the final weeks saw the number of gunmen increased, the list of targets lengthened and, rather than escape by train or bus to Kashmir and thence to Pakistan, it was decided that the militants were to hold out until they were killed.

The escalation of the plot also appears to have caught out the ISI. For if it is clear that low-level ISI officers knew much about the strike – Headley talks of ‘Iqbal’ approving the controversial last-minute addition of the Jewish centre to the target list – it is less certain that senior officers were aware of what was being planned in Mumbai. Headley implicated several majors and a colonel and said that the handler of Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi was a brigadier. But he also said that Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director general of the ISI, visited Lakhvi in prison after the attacks ‘to try to understand them’, implying that the broad assessment of MI6 and other agencies that the upper ranks of the ISI were unaware of the scale of the plan was probably correct.
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The nature of the relationship between the service and the militant group was such that the ISI had much less control over LeT than it liked to think – if probably more than it ever publicly admitted.
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The Mumbai attacks were thus, like so many terrorist operations over the previous years, the result of a range of structural and short-term factors among which the demands of a progressively more radicalized international jihadi movement and internal dynamics within a given group were key. The same had been true of the 9/11 attacks themselves. Lashkar-e-Toiba had not yet gone global – but were under significant internal and external pressure to do so.

The final weeks of 2008 thus saw – in a broad arc from the western coast of India to the Afghan–Iranian border – one of the most concentrated periods of violence in any theatre of the 9/11 Wars to date, rivalling even the worst times in Iraq in sheer savage intensity. There was the quotidian violence in Pakistan itself: a suicide bomb in the valley of Swat that killed nine; a second killed six in the Orakzai agency; a huge blast in the congested, narrow lanes of old Peshawar killed thirty-seven; a strike in Buner, even closer to the lowlands and Islamabad, killed even more. Through November, hundreds of radical militants loyal to mullahs close to the Pakistani Taliban – with Fazlullah, the former ski lift operator, among them – stormed through Swat, taking control of what had once been a favoured tourist destination for the Pakistani middle class. The security forces there seemed powerless to stop them, and the militants, calling for land reform,
sharia
law, an end to ‘moral corruption’ and American interference, surged on to the plains below the hills. They were now only 100 miles from the capital.

In Afghanistan too there was no let-up. Taliban leadership figures had made clear their intention to fight through the winter, and there were major Taliban attacks in Khost, in northern Parwan and in central Ghazni. There was a big ambush in Baghdis in the far north-west, an area hitherto largely free of violence. There was fighting near the Iranian border, a suicide bomb at the airport of Herat, continued heavy combat in Helmand and a series of low-level strikes, few reported, in and around Kabul.
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Kandahar and its environs saw dozens of incidents of intimidation and several assassinations.

The toll from the last five weeks of 2008 was staggering: the dead included more than 160 in Mumbai, 27 Western servicemen in Afghanistan, around 60 Pakistani and Afghan soldiers, about 50 Afghan policemen, around 100 or so Afghan non-combatants and at least two or three times that number of Pakistani civilians, some killed by drones, most by suicide bombings.
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Then there were the casualties among the Afghan Taliban or Pakistani insurgents, estimated to be in the hundreds, and even a few Western volunteers, dead somewhere high in the hills of the FATA or just over the border in Afghanistan. Overall more than 1,000 people had been killed and many more injured.

At the midpoint of this 1,500-mile-long arc of violence was the historic Khyber Pass, leading from Peshawar across the mountains to Afghanistan and eventually on to Jalalabad and the road to Kabul. Through December 2008, the various factions of the Pakistani Taliban launched nightly attacks on NATO convoys carrying supplies across the pass from Karachi to bases like Bagram. Eighty per cent of the supplies of the coalition fighting in Afghanistan were brought in via the Khyber, and the crossing point at Chaman near Quetta. The series of spectacular raids might have had only a minor impact in material terms – though nearly 250 vehicles were destroyed – but the footage of flaming trucks and stores brought home to millions watching in Europe and America just how tough the wars their nations were engaged in were and how ‘victory’, however defined, was unlikely to come soon. Militants even managed to get hold of a Humvee, which they paraded under a banner saying ‘The Caravan of Baitullah’, in honour of the Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud.
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Watching the scenes on CNN in his office at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, turned to an aide and said simply: ‘C’est foutu’, it’s fucked. Many of his counterparts elsewhere were expressing the same sentiments, though usually in slightly more diplomatic language.
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