By Arun Kumar
Washington, Sep 11 (IANS): Another Mumbai type terrorist attack on an Indian city may provoke a full blown India-Pakistan war, a panel of top US counter experts has warned on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.
"One of the more predictable foreign policy challenges of the next years is a 'Mumbai II', a large-scale attack on a major Indian city by a Pakistani militant group that kills hundreds," said a 42-page analysis report produced by the non-partisan National Security Preparedness Group,
Headed by former Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton, and former Repiblican New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, who also headed the 9/11 commission, the panel noted that the Indian government showed considerable restraint in its reaction to the provocation of the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
"Another such attack, however, would likely produce considerable political pressure on the Indian government to 'do something,"' the panel warned.
"That something would likely involve incursions over the border to eliminate the training camps of Pakistani militant groups with histories of attacking India," it said. "That could lead in turn to a full-blown war for the fourth time since 1947 between India and Pakistan."
"Such a war involves the possibility of a nuclear exchange and the certainty that Pakistan would move substantial resources to its eastern border and away from fighting the Taliban on its western border, so relieving pressure on all the militant groups based there, including Al Qaeda," the panel said.
The reconnaissance efforts of Pakistani-American David Headley, who had changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani, "on behalf of Lashkar-e-Taiba were pivotal to the attacks in Mumbai," the panel noted.
"Last year he also planned an operation to kill those responsible for the 2005 publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, which many Muslims had deemed to be offensive," it recalled.
"The Mumbai attacks of 2008 showed that Al Qaeda's ideas about attacking Western and Jewish targets had also spread to Pakistani militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had previously focused only on Indian targets," it said.
Over a three-day period in late November 2008, LeT carried out multiple attacks in Mumbai targeting five-star hotels housing Westerners, as well as a Jewish-American community centre, it noted.