Lashkar-e-Taiba

 THE QUESTION of Kashmir is one of the longest-running tragedies of our time—a South Asian Palestine. Three wars between India and Pakistan, several insurgencies, counterinsurgencies and a countless series of negotiations have failed to settle the political future of this beautiful, disputed Himalayan region since the creation of the states of India and Pakistan in 1947. For sixty years, these two countries have claimed all of Kashmir as their own. Blood has been spilled, thousands have died and still the people are in crisis.

The intractability of India’s and Pakistan’s competing policies was evident once again this fall, as foreign ministers parroted inflexible national positions on Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly session. After several years of quietude, Pakistan renewed its call for a UN-mandated plebiscite, which would give Kashmiris the option of choosing between India and Pakistan as their home nation. “The Jammu and Kashmir dispute is about the exercise of the right to self-determination by the Kashmiri people through a free, fair and impartial plebiscite under UN auspices. Pakistan views the prevailing situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir with grave concern,” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in his recent address. India responded by calling off any potential meeting between Indian Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart, with Krishna retorting:

The State Department has issued a travel warning for U.S. citizens visiting Europe. The alert comes after U.S. and European officials said there was a credible threat of commando style terror attacks against Britain, France, and Germany, similar to the attack in Mumbai almost two years ago.

In Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, a senior FBI official responsible for thwarting similar attacks in the United States said that for U.S. intelligence, “Mumbai changed everything”:

The ease of the planning and execution, the low cost, and the alarming sophistication of the communications system that LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba] had used were all troubling. The attacks relied on an easily obtainable global positioning system device, Google Earth maps, and commercially available encryption devices and remote control triggers.

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The FBI was horrified by the low-cost, high-tech operation that had paralyzed Mumbai. American cities were just as vulnerable.

In recent years, a heated debate has raged both inside and outside government over whether the most consequential terrorist threats today are “top down” or “bottom up.”

That is, whether they are organizationally driven by existing identifiable groups and their leaders or instead emanate from spontaneous collections of unaffiliated individuals (e.g., “bunches of guys”).

A prominent feature of this debate has been the argument that al Qaeda has ceased to exist as either an organizational or operational entity and that its founder and preeminent leader, Osama bin Laden, is no longer of any operational importance.

What became known as the leaderless-jihad theory instead claimed that our main security problem came from these self-recruited and mostly self-trained wannabes with a limited capacity for violence.

Still more consequentially, this canard suggested that formal terrorist organizations had become as immaterial as they were superfluous. As such, it dismissed more traditional conceptions of terrorism as a process involving existing organizations that guide recruitment, direct information operations, and actively plan, plot, and implement attacks.

A diverse and more complex terrorist threat is the conclusion of a new report published by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Preparedness Group (NSPG) titled, Assessing The Terrorist Threat.

The NSPG is co-chaired by Governor Thomas Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton, who had also co-chaired the famed 9/11 Commission. The NSPG seeks to carry forward the work of the 9/11 Commission by ensuring that the United States is adequately prepared to counter current and future terrorist threats.

The report was written by Peter Bergen and myself, with the assistance of fellow NSPG member Dr. Stephen Flynn and Ms. Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation.

It concludes that al-Qaeda and allied groups continue to pose a threat to the United States. Although it is less severe than the catastrophic proportions of a 9/11-like attack, the threat today is more complex and more diverse than at any time over the past nine years.

Al-Qaeda or its allies, we argue, continue to have the capacity to kill dozens, or even hundreds, of Americans in a single attack. A key shift, though, in the past couple of years is the increasingly prominent role in planning and operations that U.S. citizens and residents have played in the leadership of al-Qaeda and aligned groups, and the higher numbers of Americans attaching themselves to these groups.

The most important questions concerning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai are also obvious ones, yet are not asked nearly often enough by Western analysts. They are: What goals did the terrorists hope to achieve by these attacks? And how to what degree did they achieve them? Regrettably, the terrorists so far seem to have achieved at least a qualified success.

The first terrorist objective was clearly the direct human and physical damage caused, and the direct impact of this damage on India. From this point of view, most unfortunately, the terrorists have pulled off the greatest success in a single operation since 9/11, though less due to their own strength than the weakness of the Indian state. India has suffered a severe economic blow at a most inopportune moment, and the shortcomings of its security system have been cruelly revealed. In fact, its entire claim to be an aspiring great power has been called into question. It still seems extraordinary that a mere ten terrorists can have achieved so much.

WE LIVE in a world where the greatest terrorist threats to the United States can hardly even be given a label. The actors are neither traditional terrorist groups nor the classic state sponsors. In the murkiest of undergrounds, weaknesses within states and their governments' desires to bolster their security often result in an inability to rein in societies' darkest undercurrents. In this netherworld, Saudi Arabia funded the kind of networking that ultimately led to 9/11. Pakistan becomes in part responsible for the Talibanization of its own country as sectarian strife explodes and members of its intelligence service abet radicals. Even Iran, a classic state sponsor, finds itself hedging its bets, funding all kinds of radical groups in Iraq, even ones that are fighting its favored proxies. These states create serious problems for the United States, deadly problems for their regions and at times catastrophic problems for themselves.

For all the talk of "nonstate actors" or "networked organizations," states remain at the core of the war on terror. Some are willing to fight al-Qaeda and become invaluable allies; others ignore the danger or even tacitly support it. Yet these states' motivations and activities are far different than the types of sponsorship seen during the cold war. Then, terrorists were funded to act as deniable proxies for states; now, many terrorist groups are as much "playing" their sponsors as vice versa. Indeed, states are often more anxious to support terrorism not to cause trouble for others but to keep it out of their own backyards.