Who's Responsible for Mumbai

There's a long and very complete description of the Mumbai assault at Long War Journal. You should read it, because it's very useful and I'm about to draw heavily on that account.

The link to Pakistan is obvious. Some of the fighters belong to Lakshar e-Taiba that has camps in Lahore; the ship is linked to a port in Karachi, and a sat-phone on board the ship documents a recent call to the city. However, given the nature of transnational terrorist groups, this link is incidental. It doesn't really matter much because it doesn't tell us anything new about Pakistan or terrorist activity. Moreover, it's not really clear just where else they would have come from - it's the only plausible base country within striking distance by sea or land. Sri Lankan terrorists would have better things to do, and everyone else is too far away and not sufficiently Islamic.

The attackers are very clearly your average, run-of-the-mill islamists. They want their fellow Mujahideen released from Indian prisons, they make statements about the suffering and abuse of the Muslim people in India and Kashmir, and they are generally opposed to Hindu control over Muslim lands. There's an important distinction here, because to them, it's not about Pakistan and India and national territory - it's close, but not really the same. It's about Islam, and reclaiming Muslim lands from the infidels, whether they're Hindu infidels or Christian infidels or, sometimes, Muslim Innovators.

So the real question, is how likely and useful would it be for Pakistan to exploit this close-but-not-quite shared interest and help with the attack?

I think that it's very unlikely. People may point to the level of training as evidence of government involvement, but terrorist camps are surprisingly well organized and disciplined. Lots of us labor under the assumption that the terrorist camps are shoddily organized and the trainees can't fight well, but that's not really true. With strong economic support, these camps trained the Afghanis who pushed out the Soviets, so that's worth bearing in mind.

The relative calm over Kashmir has been helpful to both countries, especially to Pakistan who has the US in it's face about their contributions to Afghanistan. It wouldn't pay to foment instability with two nations at once. And while that doesn't mean they're not doing it, it wouldn't help their chances in Kashmir and I'm assuming that the ISI is a rational actor in all this.

But Islamist networks are rational actors too. When they choose targets and methods, they do have a political goal in mind aside from outright murder, even though they are far more likely to resort to outright murder in pursuit of those goals. The Islamists in Mumbai had an agenda, but I seriously doubt that their attack was sponsored by the ISI over Kashmir. They didn't send enough messages about Kashmir specifically, and they spent too much time just being violent Islamists with no message other than their own.

Had they been exceptionally vocal about Kashmir (or even just on-message about it), I'd believe the ISI was in on it somehow. Since they weren't, I'm almost positive that the ISI wasn't involved.

In the end, it looks a lot like the 1994 hijacking of an Air France jet by Islamic militants. Well organized, manifestly political, but it was just terrorists doing what they do, and that's conspiracy enough without dragging government motives into it, even if there are plenty.