https://icct.nl/publication/a-decade-on-from-the-2008-mumbai-attack-reviewing-the-question-of-state-sponsorship/
On the night of 26 November 2008, ten Kalashnikov-wielding terrorists attacked Mumbai. They stuck simultaneously at five locations, shooting dead 140 Indians and 25 foreign tourists. American and British passport-holders were executed in two luxury hotel complexes.[1] At a Jewish cultural centre, Israeli nationals were tortured before being killed. A fourth location, a café frequented by Western backpackers, was enfiladed with automatic fire. Only at the city’s main railway station, the site of the largest number of deaths, were all the victims Indian. The gunmen seemed at war not just with India, but with the world.[2]
A decade later, the findings of several international police investigations and dozens of analytical studies triggered by the attack have been largely forgotten.[3] This paper seeks to help break this silence by presenting a detailed interpretation of what transpired, with particular focus on an inconvenient reality: the potential role played by state-sponsorship of terrorism. Throughout the discussion that follows, this paper switches between three different analytical views of the Mumbai attack. One perspective, which is most strongly-held in India, holds that it was a state-sponsored covert operation by a Pakistani intelligence agency. A second opinion, more frequently encountered among American and European analysts, takes the more limited view that ‘rogue’ elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service ISI were involved in the attack. Finally, there is the interpretation favoured by Pakistani officials, which holds that the Mumbai attack involved no state-based actors whatsoever.
As is so often the case with matters relating to intelligence agencies, ascertaining exactly what happened and why is a difficult enterprise in which few facts are undisputed. This paper is an extensively-researched interpretation of the Mumbai attacks ten years after their occurrence. It acknowledges that differing perspectives will yield different outlooks on what transpired. With that in mind, its aim is not to provide a ‘definite’ answer on the role and extent of state-sponsorship of the attack. Instead, it seeks to disprove point three and show that state actors did indeed have a hand in the attack.
Following the Mumbai attack, suspicion swiftly focused on Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a vast jihadist group based in Pakistan. Although notionally banned by the Pakistani government since 2002, LeT held ostentatious fund-raising rallies and operated urban recruitment centres without any official interference. It had pioneered the concept of suicidal mass-casualty assaults in South Asia, reportedly upon the advice of a former Pakistani Army SWAT operator.[4] But, unlike previous LeT assaults on India, those of 26 November 2008 (or ‘26/11’) were different in two respects.
First, the 26/11 attack targeted Western nationals, as well as Indian civilians. This ensured there would be much greater global interest in ascertaining the perpetrators’ true identities than with previous attacks that ‘only’ targeted Indian citizens. Second, during previous raids, LeT gunmen had stormed a single location and fought to the death. Without anyone left to interrogate, the attackers’ country of origin would be difficult to verify. In Mumbai, the gunmen attacked multiple sites simultaneously and sought to manoeuvre in the densely crowded city. However, unfamiliar with the topography, one of the attackers was unable to barricade himself in in time. Local policemen swarmed him while he was on the move, losing one of their colleagues in the process.[5] The arrest of this gunman, whose name was Ajmal Kasab, was a game-changer. For the first time, India captured a participant in a suicidal attack with high interrogation value.
Kasab was immediately questioned by Prashant Marde, an officer of the Mumbai police.[6] The gunman confirmed that there were nine other shooters in the city, and stated that all were Pakistani nationals. Aware of the international ramifications of these revelations, the Indian government permitted the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to interrogate Kasab directly. A team of FBI officials flew in from New York to learn what they could about the attack.[7] Kasab independently confirmed to the FBI what he had told the Indian police: he was a Pakistani citizen and a member of LeT, and the attack was being directed in real-time from the Pakistani port city of Karachi via mobile and internet telephony. This digital trail connecting the gunmen in Mumbai with controllers in Karachi proved crucial.
Simultaneously, Western intelligence officials in Islamabad met with the head of analysis at Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). According to Steve Coll, a double Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who closely examined Pakistani links with terrorism in his book Directorate S, the ISI official was confronted with intercepts of serving agency operatives directing the gunmen in Mumbai.[8] The official Pakistani response in the following days was a bundle of contradictions. At the diplomatic level, Islamabad promised to cooperate in the post-attack investigation while insisting that any link to Pakistani territory was unproven. However, at the local level, attempts were being made to erase the evidentiary trail leading to Pakistan generally and LeT specifically.[9] Even at the time, this response drew criticism from former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.[10] Nearly ten years later, Sharif observed that Pakistan’s failure to deliver justice for the Mumbai victims had eroded its credibility globally.[11]
This feature-length op-ed is divided into two parts. The first focuses on what Pakistani, American, and Indian investigations into the Mumbai attack discovered about LeT and ISI involvement in the attack. The two levels of involvement – that of LeT as a jihadist group and that of the ISI as an arm of the Pakistani government – are treated separately. The Pakistani investigation focused only on the former, the American focused on both aspects while highlighting the LeT angle, while the Indian investigation concentrated primarily on Pakistani state culpability. Importantly, all three concurred that LeT had carried out the Mumbai attack. The second part of the paper will examine what the Indian and American governments have done since 2008 to secure Pakistani cooperation in shutting down this group. By contrasting Indian and American efforts to cooperate, with the lack of such cooperation from Islamabad, this paper concludes that this is in part due to the US’ ambivalence to pursue LeT.
Data used in this paper has been compiled from American court documents, Western scholarship, and Pakistani and Indian English-language journalism. The Pakistani and Indian sources reflect respective national biases, but they converge on the basic reporting of facts – it is on matters of interpretation that they differ. Pakistani journalists have provided the bulk of information about Islamabad’s historically close ties with Lashkar-e-Taiba. A recent increase in media censorship has limited public discussion on this issue, but Western analysts based outside of the country have continued to pursue this topic.[12] The efforts of the ISI and Pakistani army to shield LeT from international sanctions have been periodically reported on. There has also been focused reporting by American journalists on ISI involvement with terrorism.[13]
In June 2001, the Pakistani current affairs magazine Newsline carried a report in which a wing of the ISI, known as the Security or ‘S’ Wing, was accused of instigating domestic terrorism. The report suggested that during the democratic interlude of 1988-99, when civilian prime ministers ruled the country, the army-officered ISI had used Islamist proxies to discredit them.[14] There has long been suspicion that elements within the agency had engineered a massacre by Sindhi extremists in the city of Hyderabad on 30 September 1988.[15] Around 250 people were gunned down in just 15 minutes, mostly from the minority Muhajir community (descendants of refugees who emigrated from India in 1947).[16] The next day, Muhajirs in Karachi retaliated against innocent Sindhis, fracturing the efforts of civilian politicians to form a united front against the military regime then in power. Throughout the following decade, rumours persisted that the ISI supported breakaway factions within mainstream political parties, providing them with firearms to target each other.[17] These rumours were sometimes endorsed by officials from other security agencies within Pakistan.[18]
There is a similarity between the 1988 Hyderabad massacre in Pakistan, and the attack which took place in Mumbai two decades later. In both cases, roving teams of shooters mowed down civilians in public spaces. In both cases, the perpetrators escaped conviction. The suspected mastermind of the Hyderabad massacre, a Sindhi politician named Qadir Magsi, was acquitted in 2017.[19] The main suspect in the Mumbai case, LeT military chief Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi, was bailed in 2014 after a court case in which prosecutors and at least one judge received death threats.[20]
After 9/11, some international scrutiny had come to be focused on ISI’s alleged support for militant groups.[21] In 2006, aware of mounting suspicion, the agency created a counter-terrorism cell to liaise with Western counterparts. American scholar Stephen Tankel suggests that ‘S’ Wing operated at cross-purposes with this new cell called ISI-CT:
ISI-CT was technically the directorate responsible for counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan. Because it was formed at the behest of the United States and funded with CIA money, however, ICI-CT was perceived within the Pakistani security establishment as an externally sponsored orphan […] In reality, ISI-CT has a limited mandate that clashes with the service’s more powerful External Security Wing (ISI-S), which is responsible for directing intelligence and security operations outside Pakistan, and, in this capacity, manages the militant portfolio. As a result, since its inception, ISI-CT has been constrained and repeatedly undercut by ISI-S.[22]
Some Western analysts have explicitly identified ‘S’ Wing as a sponsor of transnational terrorism. However, due to the fact that the ISI is an intelligence monolith, it also has an internal function, rendering the agency simultaneously responsible for both foreign and domestic operations.[23] This means that it is uniquely positioned to calibrate home-grown militancy within Pakistan, and divert surplus violence towards foreign targets when necessary. Such ‘extraversion’ has been Islamabad’s main policy instrument for preserving domestic security since the early 1990s, as acknowledged by the late Pakistani interior minister, Naseerullah Babar.[24]