Pakistan's Ex-NSA spills the beans

Finally, the cat is out of the bag as Pakistan would not have any cover to hide behind over the 26/11 Mumbai Terror attack killing 166 innocent people. Pakistan's former National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani's in an address to a Seminar admitted that the 26/11 Mumbai attacks by terrorists in 2008 that claimed the lives of 166 people were carried out by a terror group based in Pakistan and was a classic trans-border terrorist event, has shaken the establishment in that country because it acknowledges a truth that Pakistan has been denying right since the event. That the establishment in Islamabad would have been acutely embarrassed by this admission is undeniable. It is not as though there was any credibility attached to Islamabad's claim that the Mumbai terror attacks were not the handiwork of Pakistani agents. But there was the fiction that was being maintained for the consumption of the world at large. Now, with a key official of that time accepting that it was the work of a terror group based in Pakistan, the Pakistanis' denial would have no legs to stand on. Typically, there would be statements from the Pakistan side to suggest that what Durrani is saying is not true, but the cat is out of the bag and cannot be convincingly put back.

The Indian government has maintained all along that the Lashkar-e-Taiba was the group involved in the attacks and has said that the operation received covert support from Pakistan's intelligence agency – the ISI. Durrani, however, said at a seminar in New Delhi that the government of Pakistan and ISI were not involved ‘directly' in the entire affair. But this is a typical case of cover-up to save his own skin. Recalling the episode, during which he had revealed about terrorist Ajmal Kasab after which he was sacked, Durrani said, “I made a statement on television in Pakistan which the government did not like and for which I got sacked.” In January 2009, then Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had issued a statement and was quoted by Geo News channel as saying that he had sacked Durrani for commenting on the issue of the nationality of Ajmal Kasab. It is indeed the time the Trump administration in US and the world community took Pakistan to task. The manner in which the trial of the Mumbai terror perpetrators has been turned into a farce is for all to see.