Pakistan refusal to act against 26/11 perpetrators shows its ‘insincere approach’: Ex-Pentagon official

Pakistan’s refusal to act against perpetrators of 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, which claimed the lives of over 160 people including six Americans is a testimony to the lack of seriousness from Islamabad in combating terrorism emanating from its soil, said former Pentagon official Michael Rubin.

In an opinion piece in Washington Examiner, Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes citizens of dozens of nations have fallen victim to Pakistan-sponsored terror and the Mumbai attacks alone claimed victims from not only the US and India but also from Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, the Netherlands, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore and Mauritius.

While only six Americans died in Mumbai, the number of American victims of Pakistani terror support in orders of magnitude is higher when Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Taliban is considered.

If Pakistan is serious about counterterrorism, it will recognise that there are no factors that justify the Mumbai attacks, asserts Rubin.

The Mumbai terror attacks lasted for four days from November 26, 2008, killing 166 people and injuring over 300. In these gruesome attacks, nine terrorists were killed and the lone survivor, Ajmal Amir Kasab, was caught and was sentenced to death at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune in 2012. On November 11, 2012, Kasab was hanged in Yerawada Jail in Pune.

Pakistani authorities continue to deny culpability. A trial underway in a Pakistani anti-terrorism court against seven suspects has made little headway in more than a decade, as Pakistani officials serially question the sufficiency and legitimacy of evidence against them.

“What happened in India’s largest city and commercial capital was a crime against humanity, which no military or diplomatic dispute excuses. The refusal to arrest and try Lashkar-e-Taiba co-founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and the group’s leader, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, simply highlights the reality that the late Osama bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan was no outlier but was rather evidence of a pattern in which Pakistani authorities protect master terrorists. Pakistan’s insincere approach to countering terror financing, as documented by the Financial Action Task Force, simply reinforces the point,” he writes.