The Lakhvi Outrage

(Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)

The news of the release on bail of 26/11 plotter Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi by a Pakistani Anti-Terrorism Court today - at a time when the horror of the terror attack in Peshawar has barely sunk in - has shattered our faith in Pakistan's will to fight terrorism.

India has always seen progress in the investigations and trial of seven Pakistanis accused of involvement in the Mumbai terror attack case as an important marker of Pakistan's commitment to combat terrorism emanating from its soil. But the case has moved at a glacial pace. The trial has been subject to repeated adjournments, non-appearances of lawyers, vacation of judges and frequent changes of prosecution lawyers, at least one of whom has mysteriously died. No judge has shown the slightest interest in moving the Lakhvi case towards a conviction.

Meanwhile, Lakhvi, the principal accused, has been enjoying a comfortable life in prison, equipped with numerous cell phones from which he commands his followers. He has even fathered a child during his incarceration (though there are officially no conjugal rights for prisoners in Pakistan). Now he has been given bail, in what can only be interpreted as a decision by Islamabad that to fight the Tehrik-i-Taliban, they need the support of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Between Mullah Fazlullah and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, it seems, the Pakistanis have decided that Lakhvi, who only kills Indians, is better than Fazlullah, who relishes claiming the lives of Pakistanis, especially those in uniform. (So much for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's dismissal yesterday, in the wake of Peshawar, of the idea that there can be "good Taliban and bad Taliban".) There may well be no good Taliban, but for Islamabad, clearly, there are still good terrorists and bad terrorists. The Taliban are the bad ones, while Lakhvi is an asset, and with their backs to the wall, the ISI wants him on their side, not languishing comfortably in a jail for having killed 166 Indians.

This sadly fits a pattern we have seen for too long. The principal conspirator of 26/11, Hafiz Saeed, roams freely around the country, making incendiary, hate-filled speeches against India, while the Government of Pakistan bleats that he has no case to answer. Worse, the banned organization he heads, Jamat-ud-Dawa, a "humanitarian" front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, receives support, funding and patronage from the governments of both Pakistani Punjab (run by the Prime Minister's brother) and the Federal Centre.

Just last week, Hafiz Saeed assembled five lakh fanatic followers in Muridke and exhorted them to pursue jihad against India. The Pakistan government actually laid on special trains so this rabid preacher of hatred could bring his bloodthirsty followers to his event. There is supposed to be a $10 million US bounty on information leading to his arrest, but though everyone in Pakistan knows where he is - his rallies are advertised in advance like those of any politician - no one has stepped forward to claim it. (And given the billions of dollars the US pays Pakistan to shore up its national security institutions - which in turn protect and encourage Hafiz Saeed - the 10 million wouldn't go very far anyway.)

Lakhvi has been in jail for nearly six years because of Indian and American efforts in the aftermath of 26/11. By showing restraint after 26/11, ignoring the calls of hotheads for airstrikes and missile launches, and by pressuring the US to work on its near-bankrupt clients in Islamabad -- who have received some $11 billion in military assistance since 9/11, ostensibly to fight Islamist terror but much of it spent on those who have fomented such terror -- India briefly achieved real results.

Under US pressure, the Pakistani leadership arrested some 20 militants, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the reputed operational mastermind of the Mumbai horror, and in February 2009 released a report finally admitting that five of the attackers were Pakistani. This was an important first step, but it did not go far enough: there are still too many evasions and denials in Islamabad, including the suggestion that the attacks were masterminded elsewhere than Pakistan. With today's bail news, even that limited success has collapsed.

Even those house arrests and nominal bannings are not enough for Indians: we have seen this movie before. The Lashkar was banned in 2001 -- by General Musharraf under duress after 9/11 -- only to re-emerge as the ostensibly humanitarian group, the Jamaat-e-Dawa, and in that guise is even more powerful than before. Its head, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, remained free to preach vitriolic hatred against India in his Friday sermons and to serve, at the very least, as a catalyst for murder and mayhem in our country.

New Delhi has been rightly insisting that Islamabad crack down completely on these militant groups, dismantle their training camps, freeze their bank accounts (not, as Musharraf did, with enough notice for them to be emptied and transferred to other accounts operated by the same people) and arrest and prosecute their leaders.

Though there is little appetite in Pakistan for such action, the UN Sanctions Committee under Resolution 1267 did proscribe the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and impose travel bans and asset freezes on specific named individuals, including Saeed. China, which had opposed such a move when the US and the UK had proposed it in 2006, supported it in 2008 - a clear indication that in the wake of the Mumbai horrors, it judged that such pro-Pakistani obstruction would no longer be compatible with its role as a responsible leader of the international system. The sanctions had remained in place till today.

What is essential is to sustain the pressure: the granting of bail makes that impossible now. I had hoped that one positive thing might come out of the unspeakable tragedy in Peshawar - that it might give the semi-secular moderates in Pakistan the opportunity to crack down upon the extremists and murderers in their midst, in their own interest. Then, I thought, the suffering of a few hundred families in India on 26/11 might not be replicated in the lives of other Indians at the hands of these evil men in the years to come. Sadly, the regime in Islamabad has gone the other way - for them, India's enemies are their friends, against their "real" enemies on the Afghan border.

Continued terrorism from Pakistan and areas under its control remains a core concern for India. It is critical for India and also for the security of the region that Pakistan shows determined action to dismantle all terrorist networks, organisations and infrastructure within its own territory. Releasing one set of terrorists on bail while going after another suggests that for Pakistan some terrorists are still an "asset".

What the Lakhvi release means, sadly, is that for India, the time has not yet come to let down our guard with Pakistan.

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