India absorbs most terror blows, sponge protecting US:Tellis

Washington, Jan 29 (PTI) India has become the "sponge"
that was protecting the US and the West from the terror
campaign of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and is absorbing "most of
the blows" unleashed by terrorist groups in Pakistan, the US
Senate was told.

LeT, which has been blamed for the Mumbai attacks,
remains a terrorist organization of genuinely global reach and
represents a threat to regional and global security second
only to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, according to strategic
expert and an influential policy advisor Ashley J Tellis.

Tellis, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, made these remarks while testifying
before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs yesterday on the November 26 terrorist
attacks in Mumbai and their consequences for the US.

"India has unfortunately become the 'sponge' that
protects us all. India’s very proximity to Pakistan, which has
developed into the epicenter of global terrorism during the
last thirty years, has resulted in New Delhi absorbing most of
the blows unleashed by those terrorist groups that treat it as
a common enemy along with Israel, the United States, and the
West more generally," he said.

Tellis said the Obama administration should keep
Pakistan’s "feet to the fire" and ensure that Islamabad makes
good on its promises to take on terrorist groups.

Washington should also demand more of Islamabad precisely
because LeT threatens to become a significant global terrorist
threat, he said, adding, the US should insist that Islamabad
roll up and eliminate the entire LeT infrastructure of
terrorism that currently exists inside of Pakistan.

Tellis also termed India's response to the Mumbai attack
as "inadequate" and suggested that New Delhi set up a body on
the lines of America's National Counter-terrorism Center and
take US help.

Tellis said since the launch of the global war on terror
post 9/11, ISI assistance to LeT has become more recessed but
it has by no means ended, even though the organization was
formally banned by Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf on
January 12, 2002.

Throwing light on LeT's links with the ISI, Tellis
said the terror group has received strong financial, material,
and operational support from Pakistan's powerful spy agency
—-including from itsfield stations in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and
Bangladesh—-because of the growing conviction within the
Pakistani military that the war against India could never be
won if the hostilities were to be confined only to J and K.

While India has occupied the lion’s share of LeT
attention in recent years, he said the organization has not by
any means restricted itself to keeping only India in its
sights.

LeT was from the very beginning a "preferred ward" of
the ISI, enjoying all the protection offered by the Pakistani
state, he added.

Even when Pakistan, under considerable U.S. pressure,
formally banned LeT as a terrorist organization in 2002, the
LeT leadership remained impregnable and impervious to all
international political pressure, Tellis said.

Tellis said it would be a "gross error" to treat the
terrorism facing India—-including the terrible recent
atrocities—as simply a problem for New Delhi alone.

In a very real sense, the outrage in Bombay was
fundamentally a species of global terrorism not merely because
the assailants happened to believe in an obscurantist brand of
Islam but, more importantly, because killing Indians turned
out to be simply interchangeable with killing citizens of some
fifteen different nationalities for no apparent reason
whatsoever. PTI LKJ
RKM
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