DAILY ALERT

In-Depth Issues:

Lashkar-e-Taiba Said Behind Mumbai Terror Attacks - Brenda Gazzar (Jerusalem Post)
    Suspicions in the devastating Mumbai terror attacks are centering on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani-based jihadi terror organization whose objectives include destroying India and Israel, and establishing an Islamic caliphate.
    On Sunday, Indian Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria said the only gunman captured by police admitted the group was behind the attacks and had intended to hit even more targets.
    Lashkar-e-Taiba - or Army of the Pure or Righteous - is the armed wing of a Pakistani-based religious organization founded in 1989. The organization is banned in India and Pakistan.
    During the 1990s, the group received instruction and funding from Pakistan's intelligence agency in exchange for a pledge to target Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir and to train Muslim extremists on Indian soil, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations.
    The group is suspected of being involved in the December 2001 attack on New Delhi's Parliament and the 2006 Mumbai train bombings.

    See also Pakistan-Based Group Accused in India Carnage Thriving Despite Ban - Candace Rondeaux and Craig Whitlock (Washington Post)
    Since 2002 when the government of Pakistan banned Lashkar-i-Taiba, the group has expanded its membership, its operational reach and its influence among radical Islamist networks seeking to spark a revolution in South Asia.
    Inside Pakistan, Lashkar still operates training camps for militants and runs a large charitable and social-services organization that has been embraced by Pakistani officials.
    Some of its fighters have traveled to Iraq and East Africa, and it has nurtured a mutually advantageous alliance with al-Qaeda.
    One of the British suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, London transit attacks spent time at a Lashkar-affiliated religious school in Pakistan.

    See also Lashkar-e-Taiba "Backed by Saudi Money" - William Kristol (New York Times)
    According to the respected journalist and diplomat Husain Haqqani, who is now Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Lashkar-e-Taiba is a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, "backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services."
    See also The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups - Husain Haqqani (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)

U.S., UK, Israel Ramp Up Intelligence Aid to India - Chidanand Rajghatta (Times of India)
    Investigators, forensic analysts, counter-terrorism experts, and spymasters from India, the U.S., UK, and Israel are converging in New Delhi and Mumbai to crack the method and motive behind the Mumbai terrorist massacre, now widely blamed on Islamist radicals who appeared to have all four countries on their hit list when they arrived on the shores of India.

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Observations:

Lives of Noble Purpose Cut Short in a War the Free World Must Not Lose - David Horovitz (Jerusalem Post)

• The premeditated assault on Habad House and Mumbai's other soft targets is only the latest bloody declaration of war by the death-cult Islamists, seeking now to destabilize India, but ultimately threatening all of our freedoms.
• To its abiding moral and practical detriment, much of the international community nonetheless shies from this reality, clinging to the notion that there are specific, legitimate grievances motivating the murder, and that these grievances can be sated and normal service resumed.
• In truth, of course, it's us or them. And the appalling "success" of this most recent, sophisticated assault on another free society, this latest benighted exercise in a campaign of global destabilization, exposes the incompetence of our defense.
• The free world must first acknowledge the scale of the challenge, and then set in place the cooperative security, intelligence and legal frameworks to meet it.

  The writer is editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post.