After the Meet

After the Meet

In the wake of the assurance given to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh by US President Barack Obama during their recent meeting in Washington that India will get access to Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operative David Coleman Headley, who has revealed to the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) the LeT’s Mumbai 26/11 plot, India should now prepare a very comprehensive road map to extract information from the US-based jihadi terrorist. According to reports, the US is working out the legal route to let Headley be questioned by India, and the details of access will be worked out between the national security advisors of the two countries — Shiv Shankar Menon and Gen Jim Jones. Those who would travel to the US to interrogate Headley must keep in mind the fact that he is a prized repository of jihad blueprints pertaining not just to the Mumbai savagery but also to the so-called Karachi Project involving serving and retired Pakistan Army officers with the sole intent to bleed India in as many ways as possible, and that a highly professional questioning of him can go a long way in comprehending the Pakistan-generated jihad story in totality. India must know that story, especially the infrastructure behind the Karachi Project that has come to light following Headley’s startling revelations to the FBI. The Karachi Project is purely India-specific, and going by our experience of the Pakistan-packaged terror brand all these years, there is every reason to believe that the project is a joint venture of the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and ‘good’ jihad fronts like LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) for a protracted assault on India, especially to bleed its economy. And the grand project might as well entail cyber-terrorism — of course with help from China’s ‘‘vibrant hacker community that has been tied to targeted attacks in the past and has been linked through informal channels to elements of the Chinese state’’ as a University of Toronto research has enlightened us with. Therefore, the imperative and importance of interrogating Headley cannot be overemphasized.