The Kashmiri Militant groups, Pakistan's ISI, and Al Qaeda Triangle

I caught a report from Asia Times where you can often find out the kinds of things a lot of US press keeps under wraps and was astonished at the amount of coordination between India oriented militant groups and the Pakistani ISI, but it shows clearly that these groups were tied to, not inspired by as much of the press seems to think al Qaeda.  Even though the writer of the ATimes report was their Pakistani bureau chief, and after reading the article over a few times I had worked out some of the lost in translation business, I wanted some other confirmation  and found it in a McClatchy-Tribune report at Trading Markets.com 

It appears that the ISI has broken with the Qaedaphile groups, but past training and support may still have helped, and by working together with the help of al Qaeda one of the groups was able to work up  the plan that created the terror in Mumbai.

The ATimes report " Al-Qaeda 'hijack' led to Mumbai attack " left me feeling there might still be a connection between the ISI and militant groups, but the McClatchy report "Intelligence Warnings Ignored" seems to indicate otherwise.   I recommend reading both of them.

 Now for an easter egg alert.  (An 'Easter Egg' is something you notice in a report that is important enough to make a major point about.)

In the McClatchy Tribune report we read:

The Coast Guard that has intercepted a fishing trawler, Kuber from Porbandar in Gujarat coast, five nautical miles away from the Mumbai shore, is a key to the terror attack investigations. The trawler had gone missing since November 13 on the high seas. A GPS map of South Mumbai has been found along with few satellite phones on the ship. 

Remember the earlier report of an Indian Naval Vessel that had destroyed a pirate ship off the African horn?  Here's  a report from November 20, 2008 "Indian warship destroys suspected pirate vessel" showing that the incident happened on the Tuesday before that or November 16 th.  A few days later it came out  (See AP report at Yahoo News "Official: Sunken 'pirate' ship was Thai boat") that the pirate ship was actually a hijacked Thai  fishing trawler on its way to delivering equipment.  

The Indian Navy ship was completely out of it's league and did not have the equipment or inclination to keep in touch with the Maritime Bureau with tracks pirate hijackings and such.  Being unequipped for the job it wanted to do, it seems that the ship should have stayed close to India and maybe could have helped stop the Mumbai attack, but I guess it's just another example of the incompetency in Indian government.  

Now, I know I'm being pretty harsh on the Indian government and don't have much respect for the Pakistani government, but still those countries can be compared to a nation that invaded Iraq because we got hit in New York by a crew of mostly Saudis and no Iraqis on 911.  And then we re-elected the leaders that got us into that mess in 2004.  So we Americans, even if we never voted for Bush, don't have much to gloat about.

tags: mumbai terror attacks  pakistani isi  kashmir  al qaeda  indian navy ship tabar  

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