Monday, December 06, 2010
Diplomats withheld criticism of Indian intelligence failures
From The Hindu
In the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, European and other diplomatic missions in New Delhi deliberately chose to offer India a sympathetic message “rather than pound on the government for its massive intelligence failure,” according to a cable of the United States State Department released recently by the WikiLeaks.
In the cable, which was dated December 2, 2008 and written by the U.S. embassy in New Delhi to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. officials reported that the Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand High Commissions had conveyed their intent to adopt this “controlled approach” in their reactions to the attacks.
However, they were equally clear that any offers of assistance ought to be made with care, so as to avoid being interpreted by India as politically motivated or attempts to monitor its actions, and there was a need to take extra care not to get “sucked into the blame game Pakistan and India are currently playing.”
Regarding the investigations into the attacks, the U.S. embassy termed a “Million Dollar Question” the issue whether the ISI was behind 26/11.
On this, the British High Commission officials said that while there were clear links between the perpetrators and the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and also links between the LeT and the ISI, there was “no clear evidence yet to suggest that the ISI directed or facilitated the attacks.”
A contact within the British High Commission in New Delhi also informed the American diplomats that India's move to place high-profile criminal figures, such as Dawood Ibrahim and Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Azhar, on the Most-Wanted List submitted to Islamabad “took away from the focus on LeT members implicated in the Mumbai attacks.”
In the same cable, the U.S. officials also recorded that a Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi informed them that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan had to “backpedal on [his] initial offer, made before the Mumbai attacks, to send [the] ISI Chief to India,” after misrepresentations of the move in the Indian press fuelled the “deterioration in the Indo-Pak relationship.”
In the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, European and other diplomatic missions in New Delhi deliberately chose to offer India a sympathetic message “rather than pound on the government for its massive intelligence failure,” according to a cable of the United States State Department released recently by the WikiLeaks.
In the cable, which was dated December 2, 2008 and written by the U.S. embassy in New Delhi to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. officials reported that the Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand High Commissions had conveyed their intent to adopt this “controlled approach” in their reactions to the attacks.
However, they were equally clear that any offers of assistance ought to be made with care, so as to avoid being interpreted by India as politically motivated or attempts to monitor its actions, and there was a need to take extra care not to get “sucked into the blame game Pakistan and India are currently playing.”
Regarding the investigations into the attacks, the U.S. embassy termed a “Million Dollar Question” the issue whether the ISI was behind 26/11.
On this, the British High Commission officials said that while there were clear links between the perpetrators and the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and also links between the LeT and the ISI, there was “no clear evidence yet to suggest that the ISI directed or facilitated the attacks.”
A contact within the British High Commission in New Delhi also informed the American diplomats that India's move to place high-profile criminal figures, such as Dawood Ibrahim and Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Azhar, on the Most-Wanted List submitted to Islamabad “took away from the focus on LeT members implicated in the Mumbai attacks.”
In the same cable, the U.S. officials also recorded that a Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi informed them that President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan had to “backpedal on [his] initial offer, made before the Mumbai attacks, to send [the] ISI Chief to India,” after misrepresentations of the move in the Indian press fuelled the “deterioration in the Indo-Pak relationship.”
Labels: cablegate, mumbai terror, U.S. Embassy cables, Wikileaks
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 5:17 AM 
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