Another Mumbai type attack on the cards: US official

Lalit K Jha

Washington, May 10 (PTI) A top Obama aide has warned of
another "Mumbai-style" terror attack on India by the jihadist
"Frankenstein monster," which wants the Pakistan Army to
remain focussed on its western border and foil attempts to
re-deploy it in the restive tribal areas.

Bruce Riedel, an administration aide and retired CIA
expert, who helped formulate Obama's Af-Pak policy, believes
there is "serious risk" of another Mumbai-type terrorist
attack so as to ratchet up tension between India and Pakistan
and give Islamabad's Army an excuse to maintain its forces on
the western border.

In an interview to the Council on Foreign Relations,
Riedel said the jihadist in Pakistan, whom he termed as the
"Frankenstein monster" wants the situation on the India-Pak
front constantly boiling to divert the Pakistani army away
from them and allow Islamic militants to grow and fester.

"There is a serious risk of another Mumbai-style attack,
which would ratchet up tensions and make the Pakistani army
even more determined to keep 80 per cent of its manpower
focused on India rather than on the threat posed by the
internal jihadist problem," Riedel told CFR in an interview.

Observing that India has shown remarkable restraint over
the years, partly because they cannot figure out a viable
military response that doesn't risk escalation to full-scale
war, Riedel said: "How longer that restraint will last before
we have another attack remains to be seen".

Riedel was the co-chairman of the Obama Administration's
inter-agency committee to develop the Af-Pak policy, which was
announced by President Barack Obama on March 27.

The interview published May 6, in the online edition of
the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, was taken
before Obama met his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari at
a tri-lateral summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in
Washington.

"Pakistan is a base of operations for repeated attacks
on India going back to the hijacking of an Indian aircraft in
1999 to the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, and then
of course the Mumbai attack of last year," he said.

"Indians feel that they have put out the olive branch on
more than one occasion and instead of a reciprocal response,
they've gotten more terror," he said.

"How much longer that restraint will last before we have
another major attack remains to be seen... There has to be
some point at which India's tolerance is pushed too far. Of
course that's exactly what the jihadists want," he said.

Riedel said there is clearly recognition that to change
Pakistan's overall behaviour, India will have to be a part of
that equation.

"The Indians have made it very clear that they don't
want to be put in the same grouping. But at the same time, we
should understand that you can't change Pakistan's behaviour
without understanding it's obsession with the Indian
equation," he argued. PTI LK