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Mumbai Attack Is Test for Pakistan on Curbing Militants
Anjum Naveed/Associated Press
A Pakistani in Islamabad on Wednesday shouted slogans against the United States and India.


By JANE PERLEZ and SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: December 3, 2008
LAHORE, Pakistan — Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan’s new government, raising questions whether it can — or wants to — rein in militancy here.

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Map and Photographs of the Attack Sites
Related
U.S. Tries to Ease India-Pakistan Tensions (December 4, 2008)
Lack of Preparedness Comes Brutally to Light (December 4, 2008)
Times Topics: Terrorism in India
Times Topics: Lashkar-e-Taiba


Sebastian D’souza/Mumbai Mirror, via Associated Press
Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, a surviving siege gunman, at Mumbai’s main train station on Nov. 26.
President Asif Ali Zardari says his government has no concrete evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks, and American officials have not established a direct link to the government. But as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Thursday morning, pressure was building on the government to confront the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian and American officials say carried out the Mumbai attacks.

Though officially banned, the group has hidden in plain sight for years. It has had a long history of ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. The evidence of its hand in the Mumbai attacks is accumulating from around the globe:

¶A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.

¶According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told his interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Mohammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.

¶And according to a Western official familiar with the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil, whom the surviving gunman named as the plot’s organizer, fielded phone calls in Lahore from the attackers.

Many of the charges against Lashkar originate from investigators in India, which has a long history of hostility with Pakistan. The United States shares an interest with India in shutting down Pakistani militant groups that pose threats to its soldiers in Afghanistan.

Today, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose name means “army of the pure,” operates openly in Lahore. Its militant wing, Western officials say, has used camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and Pakistan’s tribal areas to change from a group once focused primarily on Kashmir into one now determined to join the ranks of a global jihad. The Mumbai attacks, which included foreigners among its targets, seemed to fit the group’s evolving emphasis.

The 63-year-old Mr. Saeed lives in a large compound that includes a cream-colored mosque that faces on to a bustling commercial street. A sign outside says Center of Qadsisiyah, a triumphant reference to the place where the Arabs defeated the Persians in the seventh century.

A spokesman for Mr. Saeed, Muhammad Yahya Mujahid, denied in an interview on Wednesday that Mr. Saeed was involved in the Mumbai attacks, and described the Indian demand that he be turned over along with 19 others as “propaganda.”

“India wants him because he exposes India on Kashmir and on water closure,” Mr. Mujahid said, referring to Pakistani complaints about India cutting off water sources to Pakistan.

The group’s public face, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, runs Islamic schools and charity works and maintains a 75-acre campus about 15 miles north of Lahore, at Muridke, he said. Since 9/11, he added, “The scene has changed and the relationship is not so good with the establishment.”

According to Western intelligence officials, Lashkar was formed in 1989 with the assistance of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, with Mr. Saeed as its head collaborator.

How far that relationship extends today remains a topic of intense debate, Western officials said. Critics in Pakistan of the ISI maintain that the intelligence agency still protects Lashkar.

Though established as a proxy force to fight India in Kashmir, Lashkar has since turned itself into a transnational group, officials say. Today it has cells in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s tribal areas, and a few of its fighters have even turned up in Iraq, officials said.

Whether the group has come under the influence of Al Qaeda is uncertain.

“We’re not saying there’s a direct hand in it but you have to think there’s some learning going on, emulation going on, there are influences or contacts of some kind,” a senior American official said.

India security officials say that while Lashkar remains active in Indian-administered Kashmir, violent militant activities there have fallen significantly in recent years.

Accounts from the captured gunman in Mumbai as well as those from a former Lashkar fighter who spoke with The New York Times provided glimpses of its recruitment methods and how the Mumbai attacks were planned.

According to Rakesh Maria, the chief of the crime branch of the Mumbai police, the surviving gunman, Mr. Kasab, came from a village called Faridkot, in Punjab. The son of a laborer, he dropped out of school after fourth grade and moved to Lahore to join an older brother and make a living as a day laborer.

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Multimedia
Interactive Map
Map and Photographs of the Attack Sites
Related
U.S. Tries to Ease India-Pakistan Tensions (December 4, 2008)
Lack of Preparedness Comes Brutally to Light (December 4, 2008)
Times Topics: Terrorism in India
Times Topics: Lashkar-e-Taiba
There, he told investigators, he was recruited into Lashkar.

One of the camps he attended was in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, where Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Lashkar affiliate, did relief work after a big earthquake in 2005.

There were roughly 25 people, sometimes more, in each camp, said Deven Bharti, a police commissioner in Mumbai. Whether some of them were being prepared for other attacks on other targets, in India or elsewhere, is not known. “We can’t rule it out,” Mr. Bharti said.

Mr. Kasab received training in handling arms, navigating the sea and survival techniques. He was shown Google Earth maps and video images of his targets. At one of the sessions, he told interrogators, Mr. Saeed, the Lashkar leader, gave a motivational speech, covering a host of pan-Islamic grievances from Palestinian territory to Iraq to Kashmir.

A GPS navigational device was found on the boat that the gunmen used to get close to Mumbai, before killing its captain and abandoning it in the Arabian Sea. The GPS device showed that they left Karachi on Nov. 23.

He knew only limited information about his conspirators, Mr. Bharti said. He did not know whether there were plans to attack other targets. “He was only a foot soldier,” Mr. Bharti said.

He was given an AK-47, a pistol, grenades and 5,400 rupees, about $110. The police said they were still looking into whether they had collaborators who helped them plot the attack beforehand, or during the day of the siege. The police dismissed earlier reports that they had rented rooms earlier and positioned weapons.

Mr. Bharti said that the information Mr. Kasab had provided so far had checked out, including his most recent tip: that he and a partner, Ismail Khan, had abandoned a bag with a 17-pound bomb at Victoria Terminus, also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the railway station where they began their killing spree. The police recovered the bag on Wednesday.

But much remains unclear or unknown about him. A strict practice among the trainers of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the former Lashkar fighter told The Times, was a system of changing the names of the members every few months, so that everyone had layers of names that were discarded over time.

That system was intended to make it very difficult to identify members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and is a likely explanation why Pakistani investigators have had little luck in finding Mr. Kasab’s family in Faridkot.

The former fighter, who comes from the tribal areas of Pakistan, said he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2000, stayed for eight months, then switched to another group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, for “ideological reasons.”

He said that retired Pakistani Army officers impressed with Lashkar’s ideology joined its ranks as volunteers. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified to his former associates.

According to the former fighter, some members of Lashkar moved to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, particularly the Mohmand region, close to the city of Peshawar.

The group focused on waging war against India, he said, but was also committed to wider goals, among them the creation of an Islamic state in south and central Asia.

At its start in 1989, Osama bin Laden was widely reported to have been a financial supporter. Since 2002, Lashkar trainers have worked closely with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to Seth Jones, an expert on militant groups at the RAND Corporation who has spent time in Afghanistan.

Their presence has increased in Afghanistan in the last year, Mr. Jones said. “They have had small numbers of fighters embed with local Afghan units on the ground such as the Taliban to gain combat experience and improve their tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said.

Lashkar was banned under strong American pressure in 2002. Since then, Mr. Saeed disassociated himself from Lashkar, said his spokesman, Mr. Mujahid. Lashkar was now an “operational wing” to fight in Kashmir — its fighters no longer under Mr. Saeed’s control.

Asked if he knew the operational commander of Lashkar, Mr. Mujahid waved his hand dismissively, and said he was in Kashmir.

He also denied even knowing the name of Mr. Muzammil, the man identified by the Indian authorities as the person in charge of the Mumbai operation.

“Everyone who was interested in Kashmir, went to Kashmir,” he said. “They are doing there what they have to do.”

Now my article(this is all i have due to unfortunate circumstances its not two pages):

Christopher Columbus is credited for being the first person ever to explore the Americas. His travel encouraged others to travel to the Americas which later help shape today’s culture and society. However, just because he is praised for his contributions to society does not mean it has always been like that, especially during his time. In fact, it shows that he was underappreciated and not honored for his discoveries that helped open new industries or business for the European countries. His tarnished reputation came about when his settlers were killed by the Taino Natives, which led to some political arrests. By reading his letters, anyone would know exactly how he feels about his number one accusers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

In his letter, the tone and diction is much more intense and aggressive than his friendly letter he wrote to his friend, who supported his voyages. He states, “The other most important matter, which calls aloud for redress” (par.1, pg.3, Christopher Columbus). The phrase, “calls aloud for redress not only him calling for the Crowns’ attention he is also displaying his anger toward them for not treating him honorably and respectable. He feels as though are embarrassing him in front of the whole country and more importantly, his family. All he wanted to from Spain was to get the respect and recognition for serving his country and leading them to prosperity.

He also uses pathos to make his audience (the King and Queen) feel the grief he feels at an old age. He has been accused and put on trial in serving his country even though they are his accusers. He states, “I came to serve at the age of twenty-eight years and now I have not a single hair on my body that is not gray, and my body is infirm, and whatever remained to me from those years of service has been and taken away from me and sold, and from the my brothers, down to my very coat, without my being heard or seen, to my great dishonor (pg.3). He makes you feel sorry for all the pain and suffering he had to endure to help Spain. He told them how he and his brothers were captured by the natives and was mistreated by them. For him it makes him believe that they had took him for granted and do not care for everything he has done to benefit their future. Who could blame Columbus for asking the king to grant him permission to move to Rome?

In conclusion, if the Spanish thrown would have gave Columbus much more credit and honor than what he has received, imagine how much of a powerful nation they would have become with all the new crops and land they would have received. He would have been credited for help build their society and cultures.


The Professional The Student
1. Total # of words 1485 475
2. Total # of sentences 65 19
3. Longest sentence 64 72
4. Shortest sentence 53 12
5. Average sentence length 23 25
6. # of sent. with more than 10 words over the avg. length 23 2
7. % of sent. with more than ten words over the avg. length 5
8. # of sent. with more than 5 words below the avg. length 8
9. % of sent. with more than five words below the avg. length 40
10. Paragraph length
• longest paragraph 3 6
• shortest paragraph 1 2
• average paragraph 2 5