President Musharraf tried to use his autobiography to reinvent himself -- but the past was too close behind, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad Nearly three months after train blasts left 182 people dead in Mumbai, Indian police are sure they have found the culprits. "The conspiracy was hatched in Pakistan," police chief, AN Roy, told a press conference in Mumbai on 30 September. "The terror plot was Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) sponsored and executed by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) operatives with help from the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). " The SIMI is an indigenous Islamist movement, banned by the Indian authorities in 2001 for publicly supporting Al-Qaeda attacks on America. The LT is a Pakistani Jihadist militia fighting Indian rule in Indian-controlled Kashmir. And the ISI is Pakistan's premier intelligence agency drawn, mostly, from the ranks of its army. Pakistan dismissed the charges as baseless. "India always chooses this path of pointing fingers at Pakistan without evidence," said Information Minister, Tariq Azim Khan, on 30 September. "If they have any evidence, they should provide us with it and we will carry out our investigations". This is precisely what India intends to do, say Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon. "This is something we will certainly take up with the government of Pakistan and we will judge them not by immediate reactions or verbal statements, but by what they actually do about terrorism. It seems to me logical that the mechanism has to deal with this kind of evidence," he added. Menon was referring to the "India-Pakistan anti- terrorism institutional mechanism" agreed last month between President-General Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the Non-Aligned Summit in Havana. The Indian party to the mechanism is its chief intelligence service, RAW. Its Pakistani counterpart is the ISI. It will be interesting to see how readily the ISI undertakes to investigate its own role in the Mumbai bombings. The Indian charges came in a thick of others, thrown while Musharraf has been on a diplomatic tour of Europe, Cuba, the US and Britain, ostensibly to forge closer alliances but also to promote his autobiography "In the line of fire". At the UN General Assembly in New York Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned his "partner" that "you cannot train a snake only to bite others", implying that a recent deal between the Pakistan army and pro-Taliban tribesmen in the border areas was to spare army casualties at the expense of the insurgency in Afghanistan. In London, Musharraf was confronted with a leaked Ministry of Defence research paper which alleged that the ISI was "indirectly supporting" Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, Iraq and Britain via a tacit alliance with the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), a parliamentary coalition of Pakistan's main Islamist parties. Musharraf denied the charges "200 per cent", although he acknowledged that veteran and retired ISI commanders from the anti-Soviet Afghan "jihad" era could still be "assisting" the Taliban. Britain too was adamant the leaked report "in no way represents the view of the government". On the contrary, it praised the ISI's role in uncovering the alleged "transatlantic plot" this summer at Heathrow airport. Under the squeeze from George Bush, Karzai was persuaded to keep his teeth firmly on his tongue. How powerful are the charges? While the LT has denied involvement in the Mumbai carnage, few analysts here doubt its capability. It is one of the most brutal of the Pakistani outfits fighting in Kashmir, with a track record of attacking civilians, including an assault on the Indian parliament in Delhi in December 2001 that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. It is also a pan-Islamic, trans-national organisation whose ultimate goal is not "the liberation of Kashmir alone, but also of the 200 million Muslims in India," according to its emir, Hafiz Said. He was arrested in August, ostensibly for "threats to public order", but also perhaps, says sources, under American pressure for LT's alleged involvement in Mumbai. He remains under house detention. Nor, given history, are the charges against the ISI wholly off beam. It nurtured the Taliban as Pakistan's proxy in Afghanistan and, throughout the 1990s, armed, funded and harboured an array of Pakistani outfits fighting in Indian Kashmir, though it had less of a patron relationship with the LT than others. But there is also the acknowledgement that the ISI is not the "right-wing ideologically fired intelligence agency" it once was, and that Musharraf has moved to replace its more zealous cadres with those more in tune with his own authoritarian, pragmatic strain. The clearest evidence of this is the grouse by Islamist groups that the ISI has in recent years prevented cross-border infiltration from Pakistan to Indian-controlled Kashmir and, tellingly, slowed the flow of official funds. The measures are corroborated by Delhi. According to Indian government statistics, 3,500 militants crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 2001. In 2005 the numbers were 237. Still, the whiff of collusion remains. Following the earthquake in Pakistan last year, it was the Jihadists who were among the first shovelling out the survivors, with LT's parent organisation, Jamaat-ud- Dawa, leading the pack. This alone contradicted Musharraf's oft-repeated claim that he had dismantled militant camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The best spin on the welfare work was that the ISI was "crafting a new role for the Islamist fighters", weaning them away from what has long been a useless armed struggle in Kashmir. The worst is that the ISI are holding the Jihadists in reserve, ready to be un-leased if and when the Indian-Pakistan "peace process" collapses. Even so, few analysts believe the ISI was behind the Mumbai attacks other than in the form of a rogue or "retired" officer. But it is the ambivalence that tarnishes the ISI and its boss, says a former General, who refused to be attributed. It will continue to do so, he says, until Musharraf decides, by deed as well as word, that the era of foreign policy by jihad is over.
