Pakistan: Tired of being blamed for terrorism

Why does the world assume that Pakistan was behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks? asked Hamid Alvi in the Islamabad Nation. Only one of the 10 gunmen who killed 173 people in India’s financial capital last month survived, and we can hardly expect to believe anything he says. Yet based on his supposed confession, the “Indian media concocted,” and the Indian government endorsed, “flimsy tales” about Pakistani militants who ostensibly sailed from Karachi to Mumbai for two days, undetected by the Indian navy. Such a story is ridiculous. “India has about the largest navy in the region, and it is armed to the teeth” with nuclear-powered submarines and the most modern ships. “Not even a sparrow flying on the Karachi-Mumbai sea lane could pass unchecked.” And can anyone explain how Pakistanis from Karachi would know how to get around Mumbai so quickly, moving directly from one target to the next? “One does not have to be an FBI superstar to discover that knowledge of targets and their surroundings has got to be the work of well-informed Mumbai city boys.”

It’s obvious that India is capitalizing on the Mumbai carnage to stick it to Pakistan, said the Peshawar Frontier Post in an editorial. India keeps repeating its mantra that Pakistan has become the epicenter of “global terrorism,” and now the U.S. and much of the rest of the world believe it. The goal, of course, is to get everyone to believe that the Pakistani state, not just Pakistani nationals, was involved in the crime. Already, India has demanded that Pakistan hand over 40 people that it accuses of involvement in the attacks or of affiliation with terrorist groups. If, as is likely, Pakistan refuses, India will parade that as evidence that the country has something to hide. India has all but convinced the world that the perpetrators were Pakistanis egged on by rogue elements in Pakistani intelligence.

Yet there are other, equally plausible theories, said Kaiser Bengali in the Karachi Dawn. One holds that Indian intelligence was behind the attacks and is blaming Pakistani militants in Kashmir in order to have an excuse for an Indian attack on the disputed province. Another view is that the Mumbai operation “was part of an Indo-Israeli-U.S. conspiracy with the larger objective of denuclearizing Pakistan,” by demonstrating that Pakistan is too unstable to be trusted with nukes. Any of these theories could be true, but that doesn’t mean Pakistan is blameless. The sad truth is, any group could have hired Pakistani militants to carry out the attacks, because for far too long, Pakistan has tolerated radical elements in its midst.

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“As a nation, it is time for us to do some soul searching,” said Kamal Siddiqi in the Islamabad News. We have not faced the fact that the Mumbai terrorists did have links with our homegrown terror group, Lashkar-e-Taiba.“ As Pakistanis we continue to fund and protect these militant organizations. There are many among us who justify their existence.” Yet when such a group gives all Pakistanis a bad name by committing an atrocity, we say it’s all a Western conspiracy. This time, the stakes are too high to retreat into our usual denial. “When will we ever get out of the tendency of blaming everyone else but ourselves?”