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Pakistan asked to accept responsibility

* WP editorial says ‘Pakistan not acknowledging truth’, ‘excuses must come to an end’

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: The Washington Post on Monday urged Pakistani civilian leaders to face up to their country’s responsibility for the Mumbai attacks.

In a hard-hitting editorial, the newspaper pointed out that by now, “the evidence that the terrorist assault on Mumbai was planned and directed from Pakistan is overwhelming.” The lone surviving attacker, a Pakistani national, has signed a statement describing how he was recruited and trained by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba group. Intelligence officials say cell phone intercepts show that the attackers were communicating with Lashkar commanders in Pakistan during the attacks. During a visit to Islamabad, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke for the West when he openly blamed Lashkar-e-Tayyaba for the siege and added that “the time has come for action, and not words,” from Pakistan.

The Post said, “Stunningly, however, Pakistan’s civilian government is refusing to acknowledge the truth. In an interview with the BBC last week, President Asif Ali Zardari claimed that there is still no proof that the attackers came from his country.

Several days earlier, he told Lally Weymouth of Newsweek and The Post that ‘I don’t have any specific information’ showing that the terrorists were trained in Pakistan.

Under heavy pressure from the Bush administration, Mr Zardari’s government has placed the leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba under a loose ‘house arrest’ and rounded up several dozen of its militants, including the man India has identified as the chief planner of the attacks. This unconvincing sweep looks bad in the light of history: After a Lashkar-sponsored assault on India’s Parliament in 2002, the government arrested many of the same people and formally banned the group. Later the suspects were quietly released, and the organisation re-emerged under the name Jamaatud Dawa.”

The Post said apologists for President Zardari’s civilian and democratically elected government point out that his “bluster probably covers his lack of authority to crack down on Lashkar-e-Tayyaba or its allies in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” Since he replaced Pervez Musharraf, “a master of duplicitous dealings with Washington,” the army has stepped up attacks on Taliban militants in provinces bordering Afghanistan, the newspaper charged. “The sponsors of the Mumbai attack no doubt wanted to undermine that campaign as well as steps toward peace by Pakistan and India. Yet, if the war on terrorism is to be won, the excuses for Pakistan must end. The incoming administration should quickly act on President-elect Barack Obama’s promises to condition aid, especially to the Pakistani military, on fundamental reforms. Officers who support the Taliban or groups such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba as a check on India must be purged, once and for all. Mr. Zardari and other civilian leaders should receive strong US support only if they clearly ally themselves with this agenda. The first step is relatively simple: to stop denying the truth,” the editorial concluded.

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