Pakistanis have Won

EDITORIAL
Posted on 2009-01-07
IT would be too unrealistic to believe that Pakistan will act in the right earnest once India has given them the evidence on the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack. Ever since the attack happened, Pakistan has been speaking as though it were the purest and most pacific country where such perpetrators as those of the Mumbai attack could not find any breeding grounds. As a matter of fact, they have still not accepted that Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani national. Remember the first days of the Mumbai attack? They began saying that the kind of language the attackers spoke was not spoken by anyone in Pakistan. They have stuck to that.
They have not allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take any DNA test on Ajmal’s father so that his parentage could be established with the matching with his DNA. They have thrown a security cordon around the village and are not allowing Pakistani or international media to meet Ajmal’s parents. All this goes to give us a good idea about the intention of the Pakistani authorities, which is to deny, no matter what evidence is produced, that the conspiracy to attack Mumbai was hatched on Pakistani soil and the attackers were recruited, trained and funded, as well as ‘handled’ during the operations by ‘commanders’ in Pakistan.
The consistent denial in spite of Ajmal’s confession and the pile of evidence is Pakistan’s way of avoiding being dubbed (by self-revelation!) a terrorist breeding ground. Denial at least keeps some people guessing: admission will mean a universal condemnation.
The reality, if you want to look at it, is that Pakistani civilian and military authorities must have known by now what happened, who did it and how they did it. As a matter of fact, it is already clear that the kind of meticulous planning, intelligence, training and knowledge that the Mumbai attackers showed could not have been possible for them without the support of institutions of the Pakistani State. In a way, it can be said that Pakistan is just feigning asking for evidence on Mumbai attackers, because in actual fact they already had the evidence—perhaps much more ‘evidence’ than Indian or American investigators could ever hope to unearth.
So, it is very likely that Pakistan will go on playacting indefinitely, until everybody forgets what happened. It only needs some other big event to take place somewhere on the globe. Already, Israeli thrust in Gaza is drawing global attention. Pakistan would be praying for something big to happen, so the eyes of the world move away from Pakistan and it would be happy to have taught India a lesson and got away scot free!
There are only three ways Pakistan could stop playacting. One, the civilian leaders of the country have no truck with terrorists. This can be nothing but a pipedream, as right when Pakistan is overtly supporting US to fight the Taliban it is covertly supporting the Taliban against the US. Terrorist groups are a very important ally in Pakistan’s strategies both for Afghanistan and India. The second way could be India launching a war against Pakistan, which is also ruled out. The third way is to economically throttle Pakistan, which also does not seem likely, as the US needs its civilian and military support and will prevail over any vote for economic sanctions against Pakistan in international forums. To conclude, sad to say, but Pakistanis have won the Mumbai round!