Menon links terror to Pak agencies
Without naming Pakistan, national security adviser Shivshankar Menon on Tuesday said the terrorist groups’ links to “the official establishment and with existing intelligence agencies” was getting stronger.
Opening a conference jointly hosted here by an Indian and an American think tank, Mr Menon said the interrogation of David Coleman Headley, an American of Pakistani descent who has confessed to scouting targets for the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, had provided a “much clearer picture” of the “ecosystem that supports terrorism”.
“It is really the links with the official establishment and with existing intelligence agencies, it is that nexus which makes it a much harder phenomenon for us to deal with. Unfortunately what we know what we’ve seen is that these links, this nexus will not in fact be broken soon, if anything it’s getting stronger,” Mr Menon said.
It was the second time in one week that a senior Indian official has spoken about terrorist groups’ links to the Pakistani establishment. Last week, on the eve of external affairs minister S.M. Krishna’s talks with his Pakistan counterpart in Islamabad, home secretary GK Pillai had told a section of the Indian media that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), had controlled and coordinated the Mumbai attacks “from the beginning till the end”.
In his remarks, Mr Menon also said that today, it was even less possible to be optimistic about the success of existing counter-terrorism strategies in Pakistan or in Afghanistan not because there is little understanding of the problem or the strategies were intrinsically flawed, but because of the terrorist-establishment nexus.
“For us, it has been brought home most recently by what we learnt from Headley which confirmed many of the things we knew before,” Mr Menon added.
The Pakistan foreign ministry was quick to dismiss Mr Menon’s remarks as “baseless accusations”. Its foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said in a statement that they “were yet another manifestation of the Indian establishment’s propagandistic stance toward Pakistan.”
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