26/11 Attack Intended To Provoke India-Pakistan War: U.S. Expert


Washington: The 26/11 Mumbai terror attack was intended to change dramatically the future of South Asia, perhaps even by provoking a war between rising nuclear powers India and Pakistan, according to a top counter-terrorism expert.

Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, who has advised four U.S. presidents on South Asian issues, says he had pointed this out to then President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team at the time in several briefings. Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taeba group (LeT) had carefully chosen the targets and meticulously researched them over several years, he wrote in The Daily Beast, an American news reporting and opinion website

"They received considerable assistance in doing so from two sources-the Pakistani intelligence service, called the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate or ISI, and Al Qaeda."

"Each had its own agenda for the operation. But the targets were the same - Indians, Americans, and Jews - the targets of the global jihad started by Al Qaeda in the late 1990s," Riedel wrote.

Describing the November 2008 attack as "the most important terror attack since 9/11" he pointed out that the "10 terrorists' tactics have been copied by others since - for example, just weeks ago in Nairobi."

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Source: IANS