Dawood Is A Terrorist, Has "Strategic Alliance" With ISI, Says U.S.

Dawood is a terrorist, has 'strategic alliance' with ISI, says US

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/i...ow/5418149.cms

Chidanand Rajghatta, TNN, 7 January 2010, 02:06am

WASHINGTON: Nearly 17 years after Dawood Ibrahim’s infamous D-company fled to Karachi after devastating Mumbai with serial bomb attacks that killed

258 people, the United States has highlighted Pakistan’s patronage of the underworld don and said the "criminal-terrorism fusion model" he represents is "a credible threat to US interests in South Asia."

A US Congressional report released Tuesday identified the D-company as a "5,000-member criminal syndicate operating mostly in Pakistan, India, and the United Arab Emirates," which has a "strategic alliance" with ISI and has "forged relationships with Islamists, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Qaida."

The report, prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the research wing of Congress, is aimed at priming US lawmakers on various issues, and has no immediate policy implications. The US Department of Treasury has already designated Ibrahim as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) in 2006 and President Bush designated him, as well as his D-Company organization, as a Significant Foreign Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.

Neither action has persuaded US "ally" Pakistan, which shelters Ibrahim but denies he is in the country, to prosecute him or extradite him to India or US Aside from periodic hand-wringing, Washington too has made little effort to force Pakistan to give up Ibrahim or other terrorists such as Omar Sheikh Saeed, an accused in the Daniel Pearl beheading case who is also suspected of wiring $ 100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta.

In fact, the same day as the CRS report on criminal-terrorism nexus was released, Washington was also forced to focus on the nexus between Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India and its fall-out in Afghanistan, following reports that the massacre of seven CIA agents at a Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan was masterminded by Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani commando-turned-jihadi.

Kashmiri’s initial terrorist forays into India were largely ignored by Washington, the same way it overlooked the jihadi activities of Masood Azhar, Hafeez Saeed and other terrorist leaders under the pretense that it did not affect US interests.

The latest CRS has a different tone altogether. It makes no secret of Pakistan’s sponsorship of the criminal-terrorist Ibrahim, saying his "D-Company is believed to have both deepened its strategic alliance with the ISI and developed links to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which was designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in 2001."

During this time period, some say D-Company began to finance LeT’sactivities, use its companies to lure recruits to LeT training camps, and give LeT operatives use of its smuggling routes and contacts, the report says. It also notes that some press accounts have reported that Ibrahim’s network might have provided a boat to the 10 terrorists who killed 173 people in Mumbai on 26/11 and records that the "US government contends that D-Company has found common cause with Al Qaeda and shares its smuggling routes with that terrorist group."

Tracing Ibrahim’s background, the report says he began as a "criminal specialist" in Bombay, first as a low-level smuggler in the 1970s and later as the leader of a poly-crime syndicate. He formed a thriving criminal enterprise throughout the 1980s and became radicalized in the 1990s, forging relationships with Islamists, including LeT and Al Qaeda. D-Company’s evolution into a true criminal-terrorist group began in response to the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the subsequent riots that killed hundreds of Muslims, it recalls.

"Outraged by the attacks on fellow Muslims and believing the Indian government acted indifferently to their plight, Ibrahim decided to retaliate. Reportedly with assistance ISI, D-Company launched a series of bombing attacks on March 12, 1993, killing 257 people. Following the attacks, Ibrahim moved his organization’s headquarters to Karachi, Pakistan," the report says, mincing no words about the terrorist don’s Pakistani location and patronage.

While US analysts and researchers periodically wake up to the continued Pakistani protection of terrorists such as Ibrahim, Omar Sheikh Saeed, Masood Azhar and others, there is no sign that Washington is making any effort to persuade Islamabad to act against them. A furious President Obama railed about intelligence failure and the inability to connect the dots on the same day the CRS report was released, but US intelligence history is dotted with monumental flubs – including sleeping over A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation (and not holding him or Pakistan accountable to this day) and a shocking lapse in tracing the origins of the $ 100,000 wired to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta which would go towards significantly unraveling the 9/11 plot.