Check out, "Peshawar: As India mourns with Pakistan, Musharraf blames New Delhi, Kabul" Dawn, December 18, 2014.
Also, check out, "Pakistan's Urdu Media Blames India For Peshawar Attack" Open The Magazine, December 22, 2014.
An excerpt from, "After Peshawar, Expect Business As Usual In Pakistan" by C. Christine Fair, War on The Rocks, December 22, 2014:
LeT is an important ally of the Pakistani deep state. Unlike other militant groups that fractured and gave way to the TTP, LeT has never attacked within Pakistan. It has remained a loyal proxy, restricting its operations to Afghanistan—where its operatives kill Americans, Indians, and Afghans, among others—and to India, in and beyond Kashmir. LeT remains loath to upset Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency, the ISI. After all, with their support, LeT enjoys unfettered latitude to recruit, fund raise, train, and plan operations from the safety of Pakistan.
LeT’s very existence in Pakistan and the unfettered active support it enjoys across the Pakistani state belies Pakistan’s assertion that it will not distinguish between good and bad terrorists. How can Pakistan expect the world to believe that it is no longer distinguishing between those useful killers who murder at the behest of the Pakistani state, like those of the LeT, and those it seeks to eliminate because they kill Pakistanis?
If Pakistan were seriously committed to extirpating Islamist militancy from its soil, it would have to not only eliminate the Pakistani Taliban, it would also have to dismantle and disable the LeT; the Afghan Taliban whose leadership resides in Pakistan’s Balochistan province and beyond and which enjoys extensive active state support; other so-called Kashmiri groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammad, which it has nurtured to kill Indians; as well as the Ahl-e-Sunnat-wal-Jamaat (ASWJ known formerly as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan) which had killed thousands of religious minorities in Pakistan.
It is true that Pakistanis are in mourning for this tragic and senseless loss in Peshawar. However, outrage does not mean that Pakistanis blame the culpable parties. LeT’s leader, Hafiz Saeed, spoke to crowds massed in Lahore in his Punjabi-influenced Urdu to denounce the assailants: India. He was not alone in fingering India as the culprits. Former President Musharraf weighed in during a television interview:
Do you know who is Maulana Fazlullah? He is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan commander. He is in Afghanistan. And I am reasonably sure that he was supported by former Karzai government and RAW [India’s external intelligence agency] to carry out terror attacks in Pakistan.
Similarly, during a popular television program, “infotainment celebrity,” Dr. Amir Liaquat explained to his rapt audience that the abominable crime was an Indian plot staged within Afghan territory. Unfortunately, such buffoonery is all too common. Indeed, many Pakistanis tend to believe that India—or sometimes even Israel or the United States—is behind the various terror attacks and even floods in Pakistan.
How can Pakistan’s leaders credibly assert to their citizens and to the world that they take this menace seriously when they fail to take responsibility for the existence of terrorists and when they assiduously seek to externalize blame for their woes? Why would anyone believe that Pakistan’s military is discontinuing a long-held policy of distinguishing between “good militants” who operate on its behalf in Afghanistan and India and those “bad militants” who kill Pakistanis? The world should believe Pakistan has turned over a new leaf only if and when Pakistan forthrightly acknowledges that these incidents are due to blowback rather than some mysterious foreign hand, and when it first stops actively supporting the murderous menagerie it has nurtured and then works to permanently dismantle them.
