The second knock-out blow was delivered in the December 2001 attack on Indian Parliament by the so-called 'non-state' elements of mixed identity, including Indian agents or collaborators. The third knock-out came last month with the attack on Mumbai's top hotels and landmarks by 'non-state' elements from Pakistan, completing a hat-trick of major terrorist strikes. The origin and instigation or inspiration of the perpetrators this time, as in earlier instances, has been vehemently doubted and dismissed, after a series of flip-flop hints of admission and denials, by Pakistan's new civilian government under heavy military pressure.

By a quirk of history and circumstance, Nawaz Sharif has come back to have his sweet revenge on the Pakistani civil and military establishment. Now, as opposition leader in the national assembly or parliament, he is the lone voice in the country to expose the establishment's cover-up of the identity of the perpetrators of Mumbai carnage. He has specifically questioned why Mumbai's lone surviving attacker Ajmal Amir Kasab's home village in Pakistan near Dipalpur in Okara district had been cordoned off and journalists and others prevented from meeting the villagers and Kasab's parents. Kasab's identity, first confirmed by London's Observer newspaper and reconfirmed by Pakistan's own Geo television channel and Dawn newspaper, is still being denied by the Islamabad establishment. Kasab's identification will open the floodgates to the identity of the other attackers whose bodies Pakistan doesn't wish to claim even for burial in their home surroundings. The identities of the attackers will also lead to the identities of their handlers and hideouts in Pakistan as Kasab's evidence has already indicated. The United States, European Union and others have unambiguously asked the Pakistani establishment to come clean on the issue and dismantle the terrorist structure on its soil. The questions everybody is asking are: how long can the truth be suppressed and how much more can India's patience be tested? 

The enormity of the carnage perpetrated in Mumbai is too grave to be fobbed off by denials, subterfuge or soft assurances. The frequent bleeding of India through low-level localised proxy attacks cannot go on any longer. This year alone, as the Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee said at a joint press conference with the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently in New Delhi, six Indian cities have been attacked with various skills and kills extinguishing 350 lives.

Mukherjee and Rice continue to remind Pakistan in unambiguous words that the issue cannot be brushed under the carpet and Pakistan' shifty and shifting tactics won't do. India's disenchantment with Pakistan is total and all options are open (implying the military one) if Pakistan fails to dismantle its terror network on its soil. Indian Congress president Sonia Gandhi's warning that India is capable of giving 'a befitting reply' further underlines India's resolve.

The latest dressing down Pakistan's National Security Adviser Mehmud Ali Durrani has received from Rice and Pentagon top brass in the U.S. should leave Islamabad in no doubt that this time the militarist regime in Pakistan is truly isolated in the international arena barring some Arab and other fringe backers.

There have been excesses in India too. But unlike Pakistan, India has not been in denial. The 1992 demolition of the 16th century Babri mosque complex where a Hindu temple also co-existed, (whose recent anniversary passed off peacefully), the 2002 Gujarat pogrom by Hindutva zealots, and the more recent Malegaon events have been widely condemned in India as kalanks or black marks.

But the Pakistani establishment sticks to its 'pure' denials or white lies as if it can't do any wrong or can't see anything wrong being hatched under its very nose. Blaming India for media scares, knee-jerk reactions and lack of evidence has become its pet ploy. The dramatic assaults like the attack on the Indian Parliament, Indian Embassy in Kabul and the Mumbai carnage seen vividly on world television screens are evidence enough for anyone willing to see the naked horror. Asking for yet more proof in the face of such open evidence seems beyond all comprehension. It's like saying the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis never took place!

In Pakistan the key to any peace with neighbours, meaningful war against jihadis in Afghanistan or elsewhere, or even maintaining law and order at home lies in the hands of the army. Unfortunately things have come to such a pass that at this juncture even the army is not able to stop the rapid slide of Pakistan into a failing state. In a veiled attack on the army, the real rulers of the country, Nawaz Sharif has blamed the PPP government led by President Asif Ali Zardari for making Pakistan look like a 'failed state.' Pakistan, he said, 'presents the picture of a failed and ungovernable state due to the absence of the government's writ; the country needs a new road map to pull it out of the problems it is facing.' It was up to the nation to decide whether to make Pakistan a failed state or a successful state, he reminded his countrymen.

The army has had too much money and weaponry showered on it by the Bush administration over the last eight years in the name of Afghanistan war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Quite a lot of that American largesse has been deployed against India in the low-intensity 'proxy war' in Kashmir and several Indian cities.

The U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, who has already said that it's no use throwing money on the table (of Pakistan's rulers), has to devise a new strategy to save Pakistan from the Taliban, Al Qaeda and bankruptcy. Powerful elements within the army still see the mullahs and the Taliban as spiritual allies. Not for nothing ex-president General Musharraf was known for his Military Mullah Alliance (MMA)! Musharraf may have gone, but the MMA spirit is still alive, even after the September bombing of Marriott hotel in Islamabad and the carnage in Mumbai.

Pakistan needs to be helped with money and much more. But only a limited portion of that money should be given to the army, while the rest should be seen to be used for actual social and economic development — a large chunk for the conversion of over 22,000 venom spewing Islamist madrassas or seminaries into modern schools. Saudi Arabia, the main source of cash for madrassas, needs to be told by its American and other well-wishers that these madrassas are also the schools for Al Qaeda's new recruits who revile the Saudi rulers as much as they hate the Americans. For them Afghanistan, India and Pakistan itself are all fair targets.

top