Mumbai attack puts focus on Pakistan

On terrorism blacklist
India has accused Lashkar-e-Taiba of other attacks on Indian targets in recent years, including the 2001 attacks on parliament in New Delhi and train bombings that killed 180 in Mumbai in 2006.

The United States and Britain listed it as a terrorist group in 2001.

After Pakistan banned the group in 2002, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means the Army of the Pure, is believed to have resurfaced under a new name, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, according to the U.S. and intelligence experts.

Jamaat-ud-Dawa says it focuses on charity work and publicly insists it has no links to Lashkar, which it says operates only in Kashmir, where an Islamic separatist insurgency against Indian rule has left more than 60,000 people dead since 1989.

Militant groups such as Lashkar want a Kashmiri merger with Pakistan, as Islamabad is also demanding. Some separatist groups want independence from both countries.

Many of the early militants in Kashmir had roots in the 1980s war in neighboring Afghanistan, when the United States and Saudi Arabia trained tens of thousands of young jihadis to fight the Soviet occupation. After the Soviet pullout in 1989, many of the Pakistani militants were redirected to fight Indian soldiers in Kashmir.

In the 1990s, the United States threatened to declare Pakistan a terrorist state because of its military and intelligence links to jihadi groups in Kashmir, including Lashkar-e-Taiba.

'Jihad network'
Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed established training camps in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, and were closely aligned to al-Qaida operatives there. Several senior Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives were close to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Masood Azhar, the group's leader, was one of three prisoners released by India to put an end to the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

In the U.S., one of the largest terror prosecutions since 2001 involved a group of young Muslim men from the Washington, D.C., area who trained at Lashkar camps in Pakistan, and who used paintball games in the Virginia woods as a way of preparing for global holy war.

Most members of the so-called "Virginia jihad network" never intended to stay with Lashkar, but viewed training with the group as a gateway for joining the Taliban or fighting in Chechnya, Afghanistan and other hotspots.

David Laufman, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted some of the cases, said he remains wary of reports implicating Lashkar in the Mumbai attacks, saying it would "demonstrate a major improvement in their ability ... to plan and execute attacks on this scale."

Pattern of similarities
However, a U.S. counterterrorism official said Monday that the small arms and explosives tactics used in the Mumbai assault were typical of Lashkar militants. "This is not outside the pattern they've used in the past," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in discussing sensitive foreign intelligence.

He noted that Lashkar has a social services arm, which embeds it in communities and makes it harder to combat.

Jamaat-ud-Dawa is run by Hafiz Saeed, who used to head Lashkar. After the devastating earthquake in October 2005, the group set up camps throughout Pakistani Kashmir, the region hardest hit by the quake that killed 71,000 people. At the time, residents readily acknowledged that Janaat-ud-Dawad was the successor to Lashkar-e-Taiba.

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