Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a Canadian citizen and immigration consultant living in Chicago, is at the centre of terrorism investigations in India and the United States that link him to plots in Europe and America—and to the massacre in Mumbai one year ago that killed more than 160 people. Rana, who co-owns a house in Ottawa where he frequently visits, is currently charged in Chicago for allegedly planning an attack against the Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But according to Indian reports citing government sources, he is also suspected of playing a role in the Mumbai attacks, perhaps even scouting targets in the days before the massacre.
It is widely believed that the assault on Mumbai was carried out by the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Rana’s co-accused, a Pakistani-American who changed his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley in 2006, told American police he trained with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan, where he allegedly met with al-Qaeda affiliate Ilyas Kashmiri to plan foreign operations. Court papers allege that Rana, who attended military school with Headley in Pakistan, also used email to discuss with an LeT operative how the group might smuggle members of the group into the United States.
These allegations, if proven true, are significant for what they tell as about the LeT’s growing international reach, and its current strength. The group that once confined its terrorist aspirations to South Asia appears to be branching out to Europe and even North America. Lashkar-e-Taiba can afford to stretch its horizons. Only one year after bringing so much death and destruction to Mumbai, the group is thriving. Its base in Pakistan is secure. And the Pakistani government, which knows all about Lashkar’s power and its evolving ambitions, is unwilling—or unable—to do anything about it.
The organization was created in the late 1980s by Pakistan’s largest spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). According to Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who, earlier this year, chaired an inter-agency review of American policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan for the White House, this was done with co-operation and funding from Osama bin Laden, who then had a base in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
Although in its early days the group sent fighters to join the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Lashkar’s main mission was to fight Indian rule in Kashmir, a disputed region split between China, India, and Pakistan, but with the latter two both contesting the area held by the other. Its members soon targeted India directly. Last November’s massacre in Mumbai was only the most recent of several attacks on Indian soil over the past decade.
Pakistani officials say they cut off contact with the LeT after Sept. 11, 2001. But clearly ties still exist between Lashkar and the ISI. Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, describes the LeT as an “ISI alumni association,” meaning that links between the terrorist group and Pakistan’s intelligence agency are maintained by officially retired spies. Christine Fair, assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University, says Lashkar is a “surrogate” of the ISI. “It’s a non-state actor only in the sense that they are not issued government of Pakistan paycheques,” she says. “But they are tools of the state.”
Although the LeT’s main goal remains driving India out of Kashmir, its links to other transnational jihadist groups, and its activities beyond South Asia, suggest it is developing a broader agenda. It sent fighters to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and then to Iraq, where several Lashkar operatives were captured by British forces in 2004. David Hicks, the Australian former Guantánamo Bay detainee, was introduced to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan by the LeT. Al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured in a Lashkar safe house in Pakistan. According to Gary Schroen, the CIA’s former station chief in Islamabad, “Since 2002, whenever a raid has been conducted in Pakistan against al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda members are found being hosted by militant Pakistanis, primarily from the LeT group.”
Now there are allegations that American and Canadian Lashkar members plotted to murder a Danish cartoonist and infiltrate their fellow jihadists into the United States. In short, the group appears to be evolving into what Bruce Hoffman, a professor of counterterrorism at Georgetown University, has described to Maclean’s as “al-Qaeda’s stalking horse. They have global ambitions, and they play very directly into the global jihad. They are much more than a Kashmiri separatist group.”
