Crossposted from Flopping Aces

The only member of the jihadi assault team captured during the Mumbai attacks has fingered several Pakistani organizations as providing support to the group, according to reports in the Indian press.

Kasab has implicated the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network based in Karachi for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, police sources told India Today.

Indian intelligence has identified additional links to Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. An “intercepted conversation between Muzammil, Muzaffarabad chief of LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) operations, and a certain Yahya in Bangladesh,” showed a direct link in the Mumbai attacks, The Times of India reported. “Yahya arranged SIM cards, fake ID-cards primarily from western countries like Mauritius, UK, US, Australia.”

Phone numbers on the satellite phone found the hijacked Indian fishing boat show calls were made to Zakir Ur Rehman, a Lashkar-e-Taiba training chief based in Karachi.

Indian intelligence officials also told The Times of India that 25 terrorists were “training in the Pakistan village of Durbari Mitho, and that an ISI agent was also involved in the training.” It is unclear if these were members of the Mumbai assault team.

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…and Pres-elect Obama has already made it very clear that if India wants to conduct airstrikes on America’s ally, Pakistan, it’s perfectly acceptable. [QUESTION: is there a VIDEO PROFESSOR CD on diplomacy that we can send to Pres-elect Obama before January?]

also:

Taliban are ‘patriots,’ says Pakistani Army official

Just to get everyone back up to speed (since the msm seems to prefer distracting us with more Natalie Holloway stories or political smears about an irrelevant Palin)…

-Pakistan is America’s ally. Without them, the US could not wage war in Afghanistan, hunt Osama Bin Laden, and devastate Al Queda’s leadership core. Most of the Al Queda who have been killed/captured since the 911 attacks have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and in Pakistan. Love em or hate em….the Saudis and Pakistanis do run up a respectable tally & deserve thanks for that.

-Pakistan has problems. They’ve got nuclear weapons, an itchy trigger finger for launching against India (lest we forget that they’ve been on the brink of nuclear war several times), the country has hundreds of thousands of people willing to be terrorists, and they’ve got those tribal areas where sovereignty exists only on a map.

-The Taliban who took over Afghanistan when the Soviets and Americans abandoned it were backed by Pakistani intelligence as well as Al Queda. Even today, there are innumerable love connections between our ally’s intelligence services and our enemies (the Al Queda network of terrorist groups).

OK, now take those three things and add in the timeline of recent events.

-The US has been pre-emptively, unilaterally, bombing Al Queda leaders in the allegedly-sovereign tribal areas of Pakistan (a sovereign area is one where the government’s rule of law exists, but there is no Pakistani control over these areas=no real sovereignty beyond a line on a map.)

-NEXT, add in these highly publicized terror attacks from an Al Queda group backed directly and in several ways (confirmed by multiple sources in India, US, UK, etc) by the Pakistani Army, Navy, intelligence services and more.

-Now toss in President-elect Obama’s blank check, public permission slip for nuclear-armed India to attack nuclear-armed Pakistan at a time when both nations have their armed forces at a wartime alert level.

I invite you all to draw your own conclusions as we draw closer and closer to a regional nuclear war (again), and to the Inauguration Day for a man with zero foreign policy experience, a national security team without unity of direction, purpose, or the ability to tell their boss he needs to shut up. Me, I think India would be smart to let their very capable intelligence services deal with the Pakistani ISI in terms of retaliation. However, it’s unlikely that such an action would satisfy the angry population of India, and any action that will do so is bound to have equal effect towards enraging the population of Pakistan. Only the hope that cooler heads will prevail can change the direction of this growing crisis sparked by 10 guys with rifles. Sadly, as that need for cooler heads grows, we get a President-elect who can’t help but babble on with hot air that fans the flames rather than cools them.