The sickness coming from Islam in Pakistan

Ralph Peters:

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As Indians rebound from the shock of last week's carnage, Western media analysis remains self-absorbed, naive and breathless. Once again, commentators insist the story is really about us. It's not.

We're not the only targets of Islamist fanaticism - and we're on the far margins of this one.

Islamist extremists hate India as deeply as they hate the United States. Those terrorists didn't strike Mumbai because they couldn't reach New York (although many others would like to), but because they wanted to harm and humiliate India.

Let's examine who the terrorists were, who probably backed them, and why they committed this horrendous crime.

Who did it? The terrorists claimed to be members of the "Deccan Mujahedeen." Embarrassed that they'd never heard of such a group, "experts" dismissed what the perps themselves announced. I believe the terrorists.

The terror underworld is far more fluid than Western organizations. Our analysts want tidiness, but Islamist groups overlap and identities evolve. Alliances of convenience come together, then disintegrate. Rogue actors further complicate the mix.

The title "Deccan Mujahedeen" is just the equivalent of a US Army task-force name, assigned for a specific operation. The terrorists' deeper affiliation could lie with any number of Pakistan-sanctioned Islamist groups - or with India's homegrown Muslim terrorists, who have their own indirect connections with Pakistan.

Preliminary statements issued by the Indian government claim that most, if not all, of the terrorists were Pakistani nationals. Yet, even if proven, this does not mean that the current government in Islamabad knew of the attackers' plan. It didn't.

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Now the current Pakistani government can't control the demons the policies of its predecessors unleashed. Islamabad does not seek a confrontation with India, but this nuclear-armed power can't control its own territory or its personnel.

So the issue isn't whether Pakistan bears any guilt, but how direct the guilt may be. And how can India respond to a nuke-armed neighbor that doesn't know what its own operatives are up to? Pakistan's barely a country - it's chaos with a parliament.

In the realms of terror, guilt is rarely clear and retaliation is infernally hard.

What causes do these ter rorists represent? Their name, Deccan Mujahedeen, captures their vision: an India once again under Muslim rule.

To us, this seems an absurd, impossible goal, as mad as al Qaeda's dream of a global caliphate. We're dealing with sometimes brilliant operators, but we're also facing dreamers whose visions are irrational by our standards.

Madness and genius are not mutually exclusive. And rational goals don't attract suicide commandos.

For centuries, the Deccan plateau was a Muslim stronghold in central India, ruled by tyrants from mighty fortresses. The subcontinent's Islamist extremists believe that Muslims are entitled to rule India again. They view the Deccan as Islam's dagger in India's Hindu heart.

For all its 900 million Hindus, India is also the world's third-largest Muslim country - just behind Indonesia and Pakistan. More than 130 million Muslims are governed from New Delhi.

Carving the new Muslim state of Pakistan from British India proved disastrous for regional Islam. Pakistan could never compete with its giant neighbor, while the Muslims who remained in India saw their political power fatefully diluted.

And neither Muslim nor Hindu activists have forgotten that 2 million of their co-religionists were slaughtered in the partition violence. Since then, sporadic outbreaks of interfaith bloodshed have plagued India, with confrontations increasing as Hindu fundamentalists take a page from Muslim extremists. (Hindu fanatics attack Christian converts, too.)

Every party has grievances, none of which can be satisfied.

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The terrorists had several goals: First, they just wanted to hurt India. Second, they wanted to embarrass the Indian government. Third, they wanted to damage India's strengthening economy.

The attacks on the hotels weren't just to scare away tourists. The underlying purpose was to frighten off foreign businessmen and investors - to make India seem unstable and incapable of protecting itself.

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Apart from being the world's largest (if raucous) democracy, India shares a trait with the United States that infuriates Islamists shamed by the abysmal failures of their own societies: India is a success story. And Allah had nothing to do with it.

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There is a recognition that Islamic countries can not really compete in economic terms with non Islamic democracies. What the terrorist hope to do is destroy the economies of countries like India in the US in hopes that they can then destroy them militarily with superior numbers. While this is a foolish dream, they start with the correct premise that they can never beat us when we are economically strong. The fact is they cannot defeat us when we are not economically strong, because we are smarter fighters with a better warrior culture.