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| India-Pakistan |
| An open letter to Kasuri |
| 2007-02-24 |
| Dear Mr Kasuri I read with interest the following agency report, dated February 22, 2007, on some observations made by you regarding the need for co-operation between the intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan: 'Intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan will have to work together if South Asia is to live in a civilised manner,' Pakistan said on Thursday, emphasising that such a cooperation is possible if governments push it. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, while talking to some TV channels in New Delhi, hoped India will share the outcome of the probe into the Samjhauta Express blast before the March 6 meeting of the Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism so that 'meaningful contribution' can be made to the fight against terror. Asked whether the intelligence agencies of the two countries could work together, he said, 'They will have to if South Asia is to live in a civilised manner.' He added that if both the governments 'put their weight behind' such an endeavour, it will work.' 'After all, both countries have suffered. It's your territory but majority of them are from Pakistan,' Kasuri said, and asked, 'Why shouldn't it work?' |
| Posted by:John Frum |
| #3 Pakistan is Sarajevo. I'm sure that is why we tread carefully. Time is on our (and India's) side. In 20 years, we'll have a whole new set of problems. If in the meantime we can avoid general general war with Islam we'll be all the better prepared for the next challenge. It may not have been as nice for the Eastern Europeans, it may have taken a long time, it may have been expensive, but I prefer the way we ended communism to the way we ended nazism, not that they were a hell of a lot different. I prefer the cold war route to destroying Islamism. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-02-24 08:32 |
| #2 Indian-US cooperation on terror has not been exactly smooth in the past. According to B. Raman... After the March 1993 Mumbai blasts, the Government of India sought the assistance of the counter-terrorism experts of Austria and the US for the examination of some hand-grenades of Austrian origin and a chemical timer of US origin recovered from the spot. The Austrian experts, who examined the grenades in New Delhi itself without taking them to Austria, gave a signed report that they had been manufactured in a Pakistan Ordnance Factory with technology and machine tools sold by an Austrian company to Pakistan's Defence Ministry. They also told New Delhi that it was free to use the experts' conclusions in its case against the ISI. The US experts expressed their inability to examine the timer on the spot in India and wanted to take it to the US for examination in one of their forensic science laboratories. The Government of India agreed to this. After some weeks, they sent to New Delhi an unsigned report stating that the timer was of US origin and was part of a consignment given by the US to the Pakistan Army during the Afghan war of the 1980s. They cautioned the Indian Government against using the report for any purpose. When it was pointed out to them that the timer produced the clinching evidence, which they had always wanted to declare Pakistan a State-sponsor of international terrorism, they disagreed. They contended that there was considerable leakage of arms and ammunition from Government stocks in Pakistan into the hands of smugglers and that the Mumbai terrorists might have got the timer from the smugglers without the ISI being aware of it. The then Clinton Administration did place Pakistan on a so-called watch list of suspected State-sponsors of international terrorism and removed it from the list after a few months on the ground that Islamabad had given them satisfaction on the question of co-operation in counter-terrorism. When Washington was asked to return the timer to India, they replied that their forensic science experts had by mistake destroyed it after examination. |
| Posted by: John Frum 2007-02-24 06:34 |
| #1 I think India has sufficient cause for distrust of the ISI in particular and Pakistan in general. I am also ashamed if the many reports I have read of the CIA mistreating India's intelligence community are true. It seems to me that we would want the world's most populous democracy on our side in the war, particularly since they are fighting it already on their own soil and are in more imminent danger than we ourselves. |
| Posted by: DanNY 2007-02-24 06:23 |