Is Pak Listening?
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Coming out in the open about its findings on Mumbai terror probe, India has alleged that the attacks were a handiwork of the notorious spy agency, the ISI.
Foreign Secretary Shiv Shanjar Menon on Thursday said the attacks were planned and launched from Pakistan. “In each case the perpetrators planned, trained and launched their attacks from Pakistan, and the organisers were and remain clients and creations of the ISI,” he said while alluding to the bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul and the Mumbai mayhem.
India had all along pointed at ‘elements’ in Pakistan while the latter had maintained that ‘non-state’ actors were involved in the attacks that occurred in November last year.
Menon, for the first time, directly blamed Pakistan’s ISI for the attack. He said that the agency continues to support terror infrastructure in that country. Menon also appealed to the international community to stop selling any arms to Pakistan as all such purchases were to wage war against India.
The startling allegation comes on a day when Home Minister P Chidambaram cleared the air on Pakistan’s response to the dossier that India provided it. He said India had not got any response from Pakistan over Mumbai attacks probe.
His clarification was necessitated as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Advisor MK Narayanan were publicly holding divergent views on Pakistan’s response.
"There is no confusion. Both External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and I have said that we have not received any response to the dossier given to Pakistan as yet," Union Home Minister P Chidambaram told reporters.
“For India, a stable Pakistan at peace with itself is a desirable goal. We need a peaceful periphery in our own interest, and will work with all those in Pakistan and the international community who further that goal,” Menon told Institut Francais des Relations Internationales (IFRI), a leading French think tank, in Paris Wednesday.
“Given the fragile and unfinished nature of the polity beside us, there is much that the international community can do to help,” Menon said while underscoring that “the epicenter of international terrorism” lay in Pakistan.
“For instance, arms sales to Pakistan totally unrelated to the fight against terrorism or extremism are like whiskey to an alcoholic, a drug reinforcing an addiction, skewing the internal political balance, and making the consolidation of democracy more difficult,” he stressed.
He also reiterated that there was no response from Pakistan to 26/11 dossier presented by India a month ago, a point reinforced in New Delhi by Home Minister P. Chidamabaram Thursday.
“Two months after the Mumbai attacks, and one month after we presented a dossier of evidence linking the attacks t
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