Researching a backgrounder on the Mumbai attacks, I exchanged emails with Wilson John, a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based thinktank.
Although I’m what they used to call “an old India hand”, I haven’t paid much attention to the Subcontinent for quite some time, and a lot of what John told me came as news. Excerpts:
On the radicalisation of Indian muslims:
”There is evidence of a section of the Indian Muslims getting radicalised enough to take up arms against the State but they are neither trained nor capable of carrying out terrorist attacks without outside help. In the past, all of them were trained in Pakistan or Bangladesh or in Kashmir where militant camps have been operating for quite some time. Weapons and explosives have often been procured from outside sources, helped in large measure by the criminal underworld in Mumbai and other cities. I must say that there are people, mostly young, in the Muslim community who are more influenced by the al Qaida ideology than by Pakistan. Many of the doctors and software professionals caught in the recent past point to such a possibility.”
On the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Kashmir connection:
“Pakistan has kept jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammad operational despite severe restrictions on such groups imposed by the US and other nations since September 2001. These groups have been sustained both as tactical and strategic tools in achieving certain foreign policy objectives, viz. India and Afghanistan. LeT men, for instance, were sent as first line of intruders in Kargil in 1999. JeM was created after the 1999 Kandahar hijacking to launch a series of suicide missions against the army in Jammu and Kashmir. Today, key terrorist leaders — LeT chief Hafiz Saeed, JeM chief Maulana Masood Azhar, HuJI chief Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Harkat ul Mujahideen chief Fazlur Rehman Khalil — are free. LeT hand in the July 2008 suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul and the attack on the US troops in Kunar province proves the group’s strength and operational capability.”
I also spoke with Professor Martti Koskenniemi, a leading Finnish expert on international law, who showed no mercy to my attempts at drawing an analogy between Mumbai and the U.S. military response to 9/11. He pointed out that unless the Pakistani government refuses to co-operate (so far it hasn’t), there is no legal basis for an Indian retaliation.
I asked him whether Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 was thus illegal, as clearly the Lebanese government was not responsible for the attacks that led to the war. He promptly replied: “Absolutely it was illegal, there was never any doubt about it.”
Pakistan has always had a “Nod & Wink” policy when it comes to providing help or training for terrorist act in India – the only reason this has gotten so much attention and the rest of the world involved is because these were not poor masses being terrorized or dying but foreigners and the well-heeled crowd. I am sure most who died were still the working class – poor Indian have been dying for a long time. US has never paid attention – it just kept on giving Pakistani Junta more and more aid to grow the madrasas – we cultivate and create monster and then wonder why they do bad stuff…. because it’s in their DNA.
I know many Muslims and alot of these nice people in private they say how terrible this is but openly you will rarely see they critcize it. Not all Muslims are terrorist but have you noticed lately all terrorist are Muslims. Why can’t regular decent Muslims denounce these people not just act openly – and get onboard with the rest of the world – Do they still think they will still go to heaven if they stay quite and do nothing.
I had an opportunity to discuss the very same issue, the Israeli response to Hezbollah’s attacks in 2006, with Israeli MFA senior international law advisor Daniel Taub when he came to town earlier this year in a private meeting.
He said that Israel had every right to respond in the way it did under international law. For one, Hezbollah was/still is a part of the Lebanese government, which has allowed the Hezbollah to maintain a state within a state.
Regardless of the reasons of why the Lebanese government has allowed such a situation to continue, nevertheless, it’s responsible for what what takes place on and from its own soil. Period. Only Koskenniemi knows for sure what he was thinking when he offered that opinion to you, but it was badly flawed.
Also, when judging what is proportionate use of military power, which no doubt Koskenniemi wrongly deems Israel’s use of it to have been ‘disproportionate’, one has to not only weigh/consider the force already used by the enemy, but also the overall threat it poses at the time.
So Koskenniemi errs in his reading international law, who, for the most part, parses/reduces international law from the most robust reading and interpretation into the smallest defintion possible, which means skipping over the parts he just happens to disagree with. Otherwise he would be forced to recognize the fact that Israel was well within its rights to act the way it did.
Koskenniemi would not stand a chance in a legal debate with Mr.Daniel Taub over the issue, that I am certain of.