US believes Pakistan group responsible for Mumbai attacks

NY Times:

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for the deadly attacks in Mumbai.

The American officials cautioned that they had reached no hard conclusions about who was responsible for the operation, nor on how it had been planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered over the past two days has pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba, or possibly another Pakistani group focused on Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad.

The American officials insisted on anonymity in describing their current thinking and declined to discuss the intelligence information that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants.

Lashkar-e-Taiba on Thursday denied any responsibility for the terrorist strikes. The group is thought by American intelligence agencies to have received some training and logistical support in the past from Pakistan’s powerful spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, but American officials said Friday that there was no evidence that the Pakistani government had any role in the Mumbai attacks.

American and Indian officials for years have blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a campaign of violence against high-profile targets throughout India, including the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi and an August 2007 strike at an amusement park in Hyderabad.

At times, Indian officials have also said that Jaish-e-Muhammad was responsible for the 2001 attack on the Parliament building.

A State Department report issued this year called Lashkar-e-Taiba “one of the largest and most proficient of the Kashmiri-focused militant groups.” The report said that the group drew funding in part from Pakistani expatriate communities in the Middle East, despite the freezing of its assets by the United States and Pakistan in 2002, after the attack on the Indian Parliament.

The report said that the actual size of the group was unknown, but estimated its strength at “several thousand” members.

Pakistani officials announced Friday that the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, would travel to India to assist the Indian government with its investigation of the attacks. If it occurred, the visit would mark a first for an ISI chief.

But by Friday evening, Pakistani officials were suggesting that a lower-level representative of the ISI would make the trop.

An FBI team has also been dispatched to Mumbai to assist with the forensic investigation of the attacks.

Lashkar-e-Taiba has, for the most part, not targeted Westerners in past attacks, as some reports said the attackers in Mumbai did....

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I think the India government has evidence of the involvement of Pakistan groups including some confessions from captured terrorist. They seem to be going out of their way not to make direct attacks against the Pakistan government. I suspect that one reason for their restraint is a belief that the terrorist were trying to provoke a war between Pakistan and India. The Pakistan government needs to make clear to the world whose side they are on in this fight. This means they need to aggressively go after the support groups for those responsible for the attacks.