Military Mutiny in Pakistan?

Pakistani military is a disciplined force. Its soldiers have a long history of acting in strict accordance with the orders of senior military commanders through various crises, coups, insurgencies, national emergencies, natural disasters and external hostilities the nation has seen since 1947. However, the cohesion and discipline of Pakistan's armed forces is being tested like never before, as the fears of a mutiny within the ranks are rising in the aftermath of America's Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad and PNS Mehran terrorist attacks in Karachi.

Public comments highly critical of the current military leaders by retired Pakistani military officers are just one indicator of the depth of discontent among serving officers. Among others, press reports quote retired Gen. Talat Masood as saying “It’s never good for a military of that size to have a feeling of resentment". The discovery of bin Laden, he added, “has stung them as much as it has stung the whole world.” “This is a security failure,” Shehzad Chaudhry, a retired air vice marshal, said on GeoTV. The need of the hour is to focus on the security forces and their capability, instead of on the question of who could be behind the Taliban who are attacking the Pakistani military, he said. “There is a need to develop national counterterrorism policy and bring our own house in order first.”

A recent Washington Post report talks of "seething anger in barracks across the country". The Post report mentions Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani's "town-hall-style meetings at five garrisons, where he faced barbed questions from officers about the U.S. raid".

The latest terrorist attack on PNS Mehran, a naval air base in Karachi, has only increased the fears of a massive mutiny within the military. The breach of a heavily guarded military installation and the resultant loss of life and property have yet again humiliated the military and security agencies like the ISI, and exposed them to unprecedented criticism of incompetence.

Deflecting mounting criticism by blaming America or India will no longer do. Pakistan's military and intelligence leaders must accept responsibility for their massive failures, and clean house if they wish to regain the public confidence and the support of their rank and file which they are rapidly losing.

The US must play a constructive role by encouraging reform and strengthening Pakistani military rather than contributing to its humiliation and destruction as it appears to have done recently. This is necessary to prevent the nightmare scenario of disaffected junior officers joining with the radicals to gain access to Pakistan's rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal to threaten those who oppose terror in Pakistan, Asia and the world.

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Life Goes On in Pakistan

The world media are focusing on scores of deadly terrorist attacks in the last four weeks claiming over 300 innocent lives in Pakistani cities, and tracking the military's counterinsurgency campaign unfolding in South Waziristan. However, the Pakistani blogosphere is buzzing with the news and pictures of the Fashion Week in Karachi.

A series of fashion shows ended Saturday in which 30 Pakistani designers presented their creations. Karachi's Marriott hotel was the scene of the glamorous event.


And there is a lot more that is happening in Pakistan.

In October, a painstakingly detailed production of Chekov's "The Seagull" had a successful run in Karachi.

Karachi's local actors put on a female version of The Odd Couple and the Abba musical Mamma Mia drew large crowds.

An art exhibit opened recently in Islamabad to portray the effects of recent events on Pakistani psyche. Using the snake skin as a symbol of ongoing terror in the country, artist Haleem Khan has used the metaphor of a venomous snake to portray the violence that confronts people.

There were dozens of other events across the country, such as the 25th anniversary of a street theater group, a film festival for children, scores of music concerts, thousands of weddings and endless games of street cricket.

Clearly, many Pakistanis are defying the campaign of intimidation unleashed by the Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan. Despite the failed political leadership and extremely poor governance, the country’s saving grace is arguably its people. As the consequences sink in among Pakistan’s secular elite of the rising Taliban, there are signs that the country’s educated middle class – in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, cities rocked recently by continuing terrorist attacks – is losing its patience with radicalism. The urban middle class has more clout than many analysts think. It constitutes the backbone of the army, the business and professional classes and the opinion makers in the media. And the middle class is getting serious about its responsibility. They have now compelled the government into taking more decisive action. There appears to be visible light at the end of the tunnel. Let's hope it's not an oncoming train.

Here are two video clips of Karachi Fashion Week 2009:





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Pakistan's Intelligence Failures Amidst Daily Carnage

The best way to stop the increasing carnage on the streets of Pakistan, at least in the short term, is to stop the terrorist attacks well before they occur. Unfortunately, however, the intelligence agencies which are supposed to frustrate the blood-thirsty attackers appear totally ineffective, even paralyzed. The agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Intelligence Bureau (IB), are caught in a continuing power struggle between the civilian political elite and the military brass for control, even as terror strikes on a daily basis, claiming dozens of innocent lives.

While the battle for the control of ISI is making headlines with the well-publicized conditions attached to the recent US aid bill at the urging of Pakistan's Ambassador Haqqani, what is less well known is the disgraceful attempt by President Zardari to pack the IB and the Interior ministry with his cronies.

Let's look at the story of Shoaib Suddle, who is known to be very close to Zardari. Suddle was the Karachi Police Chief in September, 1996, when Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir, who was challenging the role of Zardari in the PPP, was allegedly killed by the police in an apparently planned ambush. Suddle is one of the accused in the murder case filed in this connection. Suddle was appointed by Zardari in June, 2008, to head the IB, in spite of strong opposition from Prime Minister Gilani and against the advice of the military. He was given an extension of two years after he reached retirement age. In April this year, a Pakistan Supreme Court judge set aside the extension given to him and other police officers facing trial in connection with the murder of Murtaza Bhutto. In spite of this rebuff by the apex court, he was taken to the US and Europe by Zardari along with the Director General of the ISI. Shortly after his return from the trip with Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani had Suddle replaced by Javed Noor as the DGIB in deference to the Supreme Court judgment.

Pakistan's top law enforcement officer and Zardari's man responsible for internal security is Interior Minister Rehman Malik. Malik was the person responsible for the personal security of Benazir Bhutto when she returned to Pakistan under a deal with former President Musharraf brokered by the US in 2007. After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, there were accusations of lax security against Rehman Malik, and serious questions were raised about his absence from the scene of the deadly attack in Rawalpindi. In his current role as Interior Minister, Malik's effectiveness is hampered by the fact that he has had a rocky relationship with the ISI since the 1990s, when he was the deputy chief of the FIA.

Even as the Pakistani Army prepares a counterinsurgency campaign in FATA, it is extremely important to have serious intelligence professionals working together to gain the necessary knowledge to disrupt and disable the terrorist networks, which appear to be spreading to the heartland of Pakistan's Punjab province.

As the nation bleeds like never before, it is the prime need of the hour for both the military and political leaders in Pakistan to start seriously cooperating on matters of coordinated intelligence gathering and concerted counter-terror strategy, organization, plans and actions.

There is also a sense of urgency to initiate longer term actions to address the underlying causes of terror by offering alternatives to the young people who are recruited as suicide bombers, wreaking havoc on innocent lives on almost daily basis.

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Pakistan's Probe Finds Bangla Link in Mumbai

A Pakistani official familiar with the country's Mumbai terror investigation said Thursday that Pakistani authorities had no evidence to indicate the attack was planned or carried out from Pakistan, though they did find involvement by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based group India blames for the attack. The same official also believes Pakistani investigators have found a Bangladeshi group, Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami (HuJI), and possibly al Qaeda were involved in the attack along with Lashkar. The unnamed official didn't say where investigators believe the attack was planned, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and Pakistan's Dawn newspaper.

The Pakistani investigators were also trying to ascertain "if at least one of the Mumbai attackers was of Bangladeshi origin", the newspaper said. Diplomatic and other sources told PTI that the Pakistani security establishment and the senior-most American diplomats here had been referring to a possible Bangladeshi connection to the Mumbai attacks in the past few days. Both Pakistani security officials and US diplomats have also been making a case for "larger regional cooperation", the sources said.

Besides the Bangladeshi connection, there were "clear indications that some of the planning for the attacks was done in Dubai and there is also an element of local Indian support", the Dawn reported. "Investigators believe it would have been almost impossible to plan and execute an attack of this proportion and sophistication without the local Indian support, a fact India is shying away from," it reported.

In a related development, the FBI is reported to have sought access from the Indian authorities to two militants, Fahim Arshad Ansari and Sabbauddin, who were arrested by Uttar Pradesh police some time between February and March last year for having made reconnaissance of several sensitive places and were later questioned for the Mumbai attacks.

Last week, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said the attack was planned outside Pakistan and suggested it was part of a transnational plot.

The leaks show that Pakistani investigators sharply disagree with their Indian and the U.S. counterparts who have consistently claimed that the plot began in Pakistan. Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon this week alleged that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency maintains ties to Lashkar. Reacting to the Indian statement, Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit said India should not jump the gun by making statements at a time when Pakistan was sincerely carrying out investigations into the Mumbai attacks. The spokesman said that instead of leveling baseless allegations against Pakistani institutions, India should help in investigating the attacks.

While the leaks from Islamabad so far indicate that Pakistani investigation may not be conclusive, it definitely appears to create significant doubts and raise many new questions about the validity of Indian and American claims pinning the blame for Mumbai attacks entirely on Pakistan-based LeT or JuD.

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Chilling Mumbai Cell Phone Transcripts

"We have three foreigners, including women," the gunman said into the phone. The response was brutally simple: "Kill them." Gunshots then rang out inside the Mumbai hotel, followed by cheering that could be heard over the phone.

The ruthless exchange comes from a transcript of phone calls the Indian officials claim they intercepted during the November Mumbai attacks. They were part of a dossier of evidence New Delhi handed Pakistan this week that it claims definitively proves that the siege was launched from across the border. The New York Times reports that the dossier was also shared this week with diplomats from friendly nations; one described it as “comprehensive,” another as “convincing.”

The Mumbai transcripts, which were obtained by an Indian newspaper The Hindu, show that the 10 gunmen who carried out the attacks were in close contact with their handlers throughout the siege. India says the handlers directing the attacks that left 164 dead were senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group.

"There are three ministers and one secretary of the cabinet in your hotel. We don't know in which room," the handler told a gunman inside the Taj Mahal hotel at 3:10 am on the first night of the attack.

"Oh! That is good news. It is the icing on the cake!" the gunman said.

The handlers told another team of gunmen who had seized a Jewish center to shoot hostages if necessary.

"If you are still threatened, then don't saddle yourself with the burden of the hostages. Immediately kill them," he said.

He then added, "If the hostages are killed, it will spoil relations between India and Israel."

"So be it, God willing," the gunman replied.

Six Jewish foreigners, including a rabbi and his wife, were killed inside the Jewish center.

Later in the night, nearly 24 hours after the attacks began, the handlers urged the gunmen to "be strong in the name of Allah"

"Brother, you have to fight. This is a matter of prestige of Islam," the handler said. "You may feel tired or sleepy, but the commandos of Islam have left everything behind, their mothers, their fathers."

The gunmen were told several times not to kill any Muslim hostages.

The attackers used several different mobile phones, including those belonging to the hostages. Shortly after the siege began, Indian authorities say they began intercepting calls from inside the hotel. They were also able to pick up calls carried over the Internet (VOIP calls), which the handlers used to route some calls, according to the the Indian government dossier.

The siege lasted nearly three days, far longer than security experts said it should have, and, apparently, far longer than the terrorists expected as well. The handlers told the gunmen on Nov. 27 that "the operation has to be concluded tomorrow morning." But it was 36 more hours before it finished.

Much of the dialogue has a teacher-student dynamic, and indeed, the surviving gunman has said he and the rest of the group were trained by Lashkar in Pakistani Kashmir.

"We made a big mistake," one of the gunman says into the phone in the early hours of the siege.

"What big mistake?"

"When we were getting into the boat ... another boat came. Everyone jumped quickly. In this confusion, the satellite phone of Ismail got left behind." The investigation shows the gunmen entered Mumbai, which sits on the Arabian sea, by a rubber dinghy.

The attacks against iconic Mumbai targets were covered nonstop by news channels around the world, which the handlers used TV reports to guide the gunmen, the dossier says. The handlers warned when commandos roped down to the Jewish center from helicopters.

The dossier included photographs of dozens of items recovered in the attacks, including GPS units, mobile phones, guns, and explosives, as well as data gleaned from satellite phones, and details from the interrogation of the lone surviving gunman.

It also had pictures of more mundane items India calls incriminating because they were made in Pakistan, including pickles, detergent, a match box, tissue paper, a Mountain Dew bottle, shaving cream and a towel.

But the strongest — and most chilling — evidence that the gunmen were not acting alone came from the phone transcripts.

"Keep your phone switched on," a handler said in the midst of the siege, "so that we can hear the gunfire."

It's not clear who the handlers were or where they were located.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Tuesday that he did not believe the gunmen were acting alone, and Pakistani state agencies must have had a hand in the attacks, without offering any evidence.

The dossier made no mention of any Pakistani officials or agencies.

Pakistani authorities are reviewing the evidence, but have dismissed Singh's claims as "a propaganda offensive" designed "to whip up tensions" in the region.

Indian leaders have made clear they do not want a military conflict with Pakistan, and Pakistan's intelligence chief said there will be no war over the Mumbai attacks. New York Times correspondent Somini Sengupta said in an interview on NPR radio today that many Indians realize that there will be "swift retaliation" by Pakistan if India launched air strike on targets in Pakistan.

These transcripts and accounts of Mumbai suggest that the cold-blooded gunmen were essentially human drones directed, manipulated and controlled by their remote masters. Without suggesting any moral equivalence, the methods of Mumbai attackers can be compared to the high-tech warfare by American predator drones that wreak havoc on the ground in Afghanistan and FATA, thousands of miles away from their pilots sitting in front of video screens with joy sticks in Nevada, USA.

It should be recalled that India deployed a large number of its troops on Pakistani border for almost a year in an exercise of "coercive diplomacy" after attacks on Indian parliament in 2001. Pakistan responded by mobilizing its troops. In the end, the Indian strategy did not work. After Mumbai, India is relying on a diplomatic offensive to bring international pressure on Pakistani government to achieve its objective of stopping further attacks from its neighbor's soil. Missing from this strategy, however, is a political track aimed at resolving the key dispute on the status of Kashmir that has caused continuing hostilities and recurring tensions between the two neighbors since their independence in 1947.

Here's a video clip of the live coverage of Mumbai attacks:

Early Eyewitness Accounts from Mumbai

On the 20th floor (of Hotel Oberoi), the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell. They lined up the 13 men and three women and lifted their weapons. "Why are you doing this to us?" a man called out. "We haven't done anything to you."

"Remember Babri Masjid?" one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India's first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.

"Remember Godhra?" the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.

"We are Turkish. We are Muslim," someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.

Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.


The preceding excerpts are part of the eyewitness accounts of Mumbai pieced together by YAROSLAV TROFIMOV, GEETA ANAND, PETER WONACOTT and MATTHEW ROSENBERG of the Wall Street Journal. These excerpts illustrate how radicals on both sides of the divide draw strength from each other to justify their unjustifiable acts of murder and mayhem of innocent people. Here is the full story:

MUMBAI -- As waiters started setting dinner buffets in Mumbai's luxurious hotels, the killings that would ravage this Indian metropolis began out of sight, in the muddy waters of the Arabian Sea.

In the dusk hours of Wednesday, fisherman Chandrakant Tare was sailing his boat about 100 yards from a fishing trawler when he spotted young men killing a sailor on board. He says he saw them toss the body into the engine room. Assuming he had stumbled upon pirates, Mr. Tare says, he sped away.

Hours later, at least 10 terrorists, having arrived by small craft on the shores of Mumbai, began to sow death and destruction at will across India's financial capital.

Pieced together from interviews with dozens of witnesses and officials, this account of the three days of the battle for Mumbai shows just how a small but ruthless group of skilled militants, attacking multiple targets in quick succession, managed to bring one of the world's largest cities to its knees. The human toll -- currently at 174 fatalities, including nine terrorists -- was exacerbated by the Indian authorities' lack of preparedness for such a major attack. But the chain of events also points to just how vulnerable any major city can be to this type of urban warfare.

Authorities are still questioning the one captured terrorist, a 21-year-old Pakistani named Ajmal Qasab, who they say has confessed to training with outlawed Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The investigation remains in its very early stages, and the identities of the killed militants remain unclear.

Around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, one dinghy with half a dozen young men landed at a trash-strewn fishing harbor near the southern tip of the Mumbai peninsula, witnesses say; a second arrived nearby shortly after. Mostly in their early- to mid-20s, the men came ashore wearing dark clothes and hauling heavy bags and backpacks, according to fisherman Ajay Mestry, who saw one of the landings. The group he saw split up and raced toward the shimmering city.

Arriving by boat, a small team of terrorists spread out across Mumbai, instilling terror in India's largest city for three days.

When one young man with a bulging bag jogged up from the beach, Anita Rajendra Udayaar, the keeper of a roadside stall full of recycled plastic bottles, asked where he was heading. "Mind your own business!" he shouted back, she recalls.

Mumbai's attention that night was focused on one of the country's favorite sports: cricket. India was playing against England, and beating its old colonial master. In the open-air Cafe Leopold, a popular people-watching spot near the landing site, customers -- many of them foreign backpackers -- were watching the match.

At about 9:30 p.m., two gunmen with assault rifles appeared on the sidewalk, witnesses said. One stood at the entrance, the second to his left. Then they started firing.

Minutes later, they walked away, leaving more than a dozen casualties behind amid upturned, bloodied tables.

At about the same time, two other gunmen arrived at a Bharat Petroleum gas station at the corner of a small alley that leads to Chabad House, also known as Nariman House, the local headquarters of the Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement.

With its small, faded sign, the five-story Chabad House -- which served as a guesthouse and source of kosher food for the many Israeli backpackers who travel through India -- is so hard to find that most visitors ask for directions at the gas station. But the militants knew their way, a station attendant says: Without stopping, they threw a hand grenade into the gas station, and walked into the alley.

Alarmed by the explosion, Chabad House's rabbi, Gavriel Holtzberg, called the Israeli consulate. The two gunmen burst into his building, taking a number of Israelis, a young Mexican Jewish woman, and the rabbi and his family hostage. It appears that they quickly shot dead one of the guests, an Israeli kosher ritual inspector, whose body would be found badly decomposed at the end of the siege.

The explosion and gunfire attracted the attention of neighbors. Some young men started throwing stones toward the building. Manush Goheil, a 25-year-old tailor, stepped outside the family's shop to get a better view. His brother Harish watched from the shop as a gunman shot him dead with a well-aimed bullet fired from the Chabad House's top floor.

Around the same time about one mile north at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai's monumental colonial-era train station, two gunmen in dark T-shirts and hauling heavy backpacks walked down Platform 13, which opens into a large hall fringed by Re-Fresh Food Plaza, a fast-food outlet.

Throwing a hand grenade into the crowd of travelers, they unloaded volleys of gunfire. Bullets flew through the window where the station's manager, D.P. Chaudhari, observed the hall; he ducked down and survived. A colleague, S.K. Sharma, was cut down as he crossed the concourse. One bullet lodged in the stomach of Re-Fresh Plaza manager Mukesh Aggarwal. The gunmen peppered a bookstand at the back of the hall with bullets, shattering the glass next to a copy of "Complete Wellbeing" magazine, according to vendor Sarman Lal, who quivered on the floor saying his last prayers.

The two gunmen moved along two separate paths toward the station's main entrance, firing as they walked. They met virtually no resistance, even though several dozen police officers are usually deployed at the station. "They were killing the public, and the police just ran away," says Ram Vir, a coffee vendor whose stand is near Platform 8.

B.S. Sidhu, head of the Railway Protection Force for the Mumbai region, says that while some officers tried to fight back, there was little his force could do. Most police officers at the station -- as they are throughout India -- were unarmed or carried only bamboo sticks known as lathis. More than 40 people, including three police officers, were killed in just a few minutes, authorities said. The wounded survivors screamed for help amid acrid smoke, piles of slumped, bloodied bodies and spilling suitcases.

By then, shooting had begun in two other spots: Mumbai's most luxurious hotels, symbols of the city's prosperity that were packed with tourists, visiting executives, and the local elite out for dinner. The historic Taj Mahal Palace & Tower and a complex housing both the Oberoi and Trident hotels rise high above the sea on opposite sides of the southern tip of Mumbai.
Video

In the aftermath of bloody attacks, Mumbai residents raised questions about how they could have occurred and how a handful of terrorists could hold off waves of Indian commandos.

At about 9:45 p.m., two gunmen, slender and in their mid-20s, ran up the circular driveway at the entrance to the Trident. They shot the security guard and two bellhops. The hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government, according to the hotel company's chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi. The gunmen raced through the marble-floored lobby, past the grand piano into the adjoining Verandah restaurant, firing at the guests and shattering the windows.

At the end of the lobby, they burst into a bar called the Opium Den, shooting dead a hotel staff member. Then they ran after a group of guests who tried to escape through a rear service area. They killed them, too.

The gunmen returned to the Verandah, climbed a staircase, dashed down a corridor lined with jewelry and clothes shops, and stopped in front of the glass doors of Tiffin Restaurant, a swanky restaurant with a sushi bar in the Oberoi hotel.

They killed four of six friends who live in south Mumbai and had just settled down at a table near the front door. One member of the group, a mother of two, threw herself to the ground and shut her eyes, pretending to be dead. The men circled the restaurant, firing at point blank range into anyone who moved before rushing upstairs to an Indian restaurant called Kandahar.

Restaurant workers there ushered guests closest to the kitchen inside. The assailants jumped in front of another group that tried to run out the door. "Stop," they shouted in Hindi. They corralled 16 diners and led them up to the 20th floor. One man in the group dialed his wife in London and told her he'd been taken hostage but was OK. "Everybody drop your phones," one of the assailants shouted, apparently overhearing. Phones clattered to the floor as the three women and 13 men dug through their purses and pockets and obeyed.

On the 20th floor, the gunmen shoved the group out of the stairwell. They lined up the 13 men and three women and lifted their weapons. "Why are you doing this to us?" a man called out. "We haven't done anything to you."

"Remember Babri Masjid?" one of the gunmen shouted, referring to a 16th-century mosque built by India's first Mughal Muslim emperor and destroyed by Hindu radicals in 1992.

"Remember Godhra?" the second attacker asked, a reference to the town in the Indian state of Gujarat where religious rioting that evolved into an anti-Muslim pogrom began in 2002.

"We are Turkish. We are Muslim," someone in the group screamed. One of the gunmen motioned for two Turks in the group to step aside.

Then they pointed their weapons at the rest and squeezed the triggers.

A few minutes later they walked upstairs to the terrace. Unbeknownst to the terrorists, four of the men were still alive; one of the survivors later provided the account of the shooting to The Wall Street Journal.

At the vaunted Taj hotel across the peninsula, two terrorists arrived from their attack on Cafe Leopold by about 9:45 p.m., broke down a side door and entered the building, according to a police officer investigating the attacks.

Two others entered the hotel's modern lobby, opened fire and threw grenades. As guests dashed for cover, the two pairs united. They would keep Indian police and commandos at bay for another 60 hours as they rampaged through the building.

Uptown, the two gunmen who had attacked the train station -- recorded by the station's surveillance cameras -- reached the nearby Cama Hospital for women and children, authorities said, shooting dead two unarmed guards at the entrance and racing up the stairs. By then, news of the attacks had spread in the neighborhood. A number of policemen ran into the hospital as nurses herded expectant mothers into one room and locked themselves inside, a duty doctor says.

On the top floor, the terrorists and the police traded fire near a poster that reads "Mother's Milk is Best for Babies." The policemen were badly outgunned. The gunmen killed one officer and escaped down the stairs, into a narrow alley that separates Cama Hospital from another hospital called GT.

In the alley, the state of Maharashtra's antiterrorism chief, Hemant Karkare, sat in a police SUV packed with fellow officers, trying to coordinate a response to the mayhem engulfing the city. Creeping up, the two militants sprayed the vehicle with gunfire.

The officers appear to have died before any of them had a chance to fire back. The wall and metal blinds behind the van's spot are riddled with bullets. Not a single bullet mark could be seen by a reporter in the area from which the terrorists fired.

Dumping three of the officers' bodies on the ground and taking the others with them, the two militants jumped into the SUV and sped towards the Metro Big Cinemas multiplex. As they passed a crowd of journalists and onlookers, the SUV slowed down, a gun barrel emerged from the window, and bullets started to fly. Then, the vehicle sped on, with another police vehicle in hot pursuit. At one point, the gunmen ditched the SUV and hijacked a Skoda, police said, cruising through southern Mumbai -- possibly looking for an escape route. Two hours later, they ran into a large police roadblock erected on a key road leading out of south Mumbai, at Chowpatty Beach.

Skidding to a halt 30 feet away from the roadblock, the Skoda's driver blinded the police with high beams and, flipping wipers, began spraying fluid on the windshield so that officers couldn't see into the car, said sub-inspector Bhaskar Kadam, one of the officers manning the roadblock.

The three policemen armed with guns drew them. The nine others waved their bamboo sticks. Revving the engine, the car tried to U-turn but got stuck on the median. The man in the passenger seat rolled out and started shooting, killing one officer and wounding another. The surviving baton-wielding officers jumped on him, knocking him unconscious. Policemen with guns shot the driver dead.

This pair's killing spree was over. Police later identified the gunman taken alive as Mr. Qasab, from the Punjab region of Pakistan, who they say is providing details of the plot.

Back at the Taj Mahal Palace, staff members had been calling room after room, advising hundreds of guests to lock the doors, switch off all the lights, and hide, guests and staff said.

At about 11 p.m., K.R. Ramamoorthy, the 69-year-old nonexecutive chairman of ING Visya Bank, heard men in the corridor knock on his sixth-floor room, he says. "Room service," one of them called out in English.

Silence.

"Shoe polish," the same voice called out.

Mr. Ramamoorthy moved to the bathroom, accidentally banging the door. The two gunmen blasted the room door's lock open and entered. They tied Mr. Ramamoorthy's hands and feet, he says, using his long Indian top known as a kurta, and his pajama bottoms. Then they ordered him to kneel on the ground. "I'm 69 years old. I have high-blood pressure. Please let me go," he recalls begging.

"We'll leave you, we'll let you go," one of the men replied, he says. They turned him over so he lay face down on the floor.

Over the next hour or two, the two men spoke on their mobile phones in his room, seeming relaxed and happy, Mr. Ramamoorthy says. He couldn't tell much of what they said but made out the word "grenade" several times, he says. They ate some snacks from the minibar. Then, two more gunmen showed up in the room, dragging four other hostages -- all uniformed hotel staff.

"What are your names and occupations?" the men asked the five hostages.

"I am Ramamoorthy from Bangalore," Mr. Ramamoorthy says he replied.

"What is your work?" one of the assailants asked in Hindi.

"I am a teacher," he replied.

"No way can a teacher afford to stay here," shouted the gunman, he recalls. "You better tell us the truth."

"I work for a bank," Mr. Ramamoorthy admitted.

The assailants were distracted by calls on their mobile phones. Minutes later, pushing the five hostages in front of them, the gunmen descended the staircase to a fifth-floor room. They shoved the hostages inside, laid them face down on the floor, and left.

Mr. Ramamoorthy says he managed to free his hands and untied the others. By now, a fire possibly started by a grenade explosion was spreading through the sixth floor of the Taj hotel. As the choking smoke from the blazing fire enveloped the room, one of the four hotel staffers ripped off curtains and bedsheets, creating an improvised rope. The staffers used the rope to shimmy down the balcony outside to the third-floor ledge.

Certain he didn't have the physical strength to follow suit, Mr. Ramamoorthy backtracked and descended via the smoke-filled staircase to the third floor. Some time later, he noticed the glare of searchlights. He opened the window and waved and shouted. Firefighters saw him and lifted a ladder to the window. "You are safe," he says they told him. He looked at his watch. It was 6 a.m. Thursday.

As the fires set by the militants burned through the hotel during the night, the general manager, Karimbir Kang, was busy shepherding hotel residents like Mr. Ramamoorthy to safety. Mr. Kang didn't manage to rescue his own wife, Neeti, and two young children: They died in the blaze.

In the other hotel complex taken over by the militants, the Oberoi-Trident, gunmen returned to the 20th floor at around 6 a.m. Thursday. They pulled out their mobile phones and filmed the sprawled bodies of executed diners. The four injured men who survived the firing line there -- one squashed under two bodies -- were still playing dead, trying not to move.

"We'll booby-trap the bodies with bombs," one of the gunmen said into the phone. As soon as the two terrorists left, the four injured men crept out to a terrace and hid behind a cooling tower, says one of the men. For more than 24 hours, they didn't move from their hiding place, drinking small amounts of red liquid inside the cooling system to soothe their thirst, the man says.

Authorities had asked the Mumbai-based Marine Commandos to help at the Taj in the first hours after the takeover of the hotels. But the so-called MarCos struggled to figure out the entrances and exits in the hotel and found it hard to match the gunmen who moved with ease through the building and seemed to know the structure inside out. The gunmen also were accustomed to operating in darkness, a commander on the force said.

At 6.30 a.m. Thursday, commandos from India's National Security Guard finally arrived -- after they first waited for hours while authorities located a plane to pick them up at New Delhi, then waited for transportation from Mumbai's airport to the hotels under attack. The NSG commandos had proper equipment and training. They surrounded both the Taj and the Oberoi complex and a prolonged siege began.

The terrorists moved frequently through both buildings to confuse their pursuers and create the impression of greater numbers. Still, two of them found time on Thursday to call a local TV station to rant about India's mistreatment of Muslims.

As the fighting went on, new fires broke out at both the Taj and the Oberoi in the evening, sending plumes of smoke into the sky. "Every time the terrorists were in a corner and under stress...they set fire to the curtains," said J.K. Dutt, director general of the NSG.

By Friday morning, the NSG began to achieve real progress. At roughly 9 a.m. that day, Bill Bakshi heard a knock on his 19th-floor room in the annex section of the Taj. A diabetic who was running low on insulin, he peeked through the eyehole in hope of rescue and saw three uniformed men with assault rifles, he says. "They wouldn't say who they were," says Mr. Bakshi, a 63-year-old who owns a textile company. "They were scared, too -- they didn't know who was inside, either."

Mr. Bakshi opened the door. The next thing he knew, he says, he had three gun barrels thrust in his face. It took a couple minutes to convince the NSG men that he was not a terrorist, he says.

By late Friday morning, the NSG cleared out the annex section of the Taj, freeing hostages there. It also succeeded in storming the Oberoi, killing one gunman in a corridor and another in a bedroom. As they combed the hotel room by room, bringing out to safety the four injured men hiding behind the cooling system, the commandos found 32 other bodies inside.

At the Taj and the besieged Chabad House, the fighting continued. Two militants holed up inside the Jewish center had blown off the doors of the elevator on every floor, and used the shaft to hide whenever NSG commandos fired back.

It appears that they executed their hostages one by one as the commandos closed in. Two young women guests, their wrists tied with white plastic rope, lay on the same bed, bullet holes in their heads, according to a photograph taken later at the scene. The terrorists shot Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife, who fell next to each other. As darkness fell, NSG commandos blasted a wall with explosives and finally penetrated the building. They killed the gunmen.

At the Taj, the battle raged into Friday night, with one of the gunmen opening fire from a window and shooting at the hundreds of journalists who gathered to cover the siege on the plaza outside. None were hit.

By Saturday morning, however, the commandos had taken over most of the building. They set a fire to smoke out three surviving terrorists, cornered in a restaurant called Wasabi, up a spiral staircase from the lobby. Two of the gunmen were shot dead. The third was hit with bullets as he tumbled backwards out of a window and onto the plaza outside. "After that," said Mr. Dutt, the NSG chief, "There was no more shooting."
—Niraj Sheth in Mumbai and Krishna Pokharel in New Delhi contributed to this article.

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The Nightmare Scenario for Pakistan

As the seventh anniversary of the 911 attacks approaches and the Americans prepare to vote in November, a major terrorist attack from Pakistan's tribal areas on the US soil is the nightmare scenario that may unfold in 2008. Such an attack would immediately trigger massive bombing and invasion of Pakistan by the US and NATO, with or without the approval of Pakistani authorities. It could also result in the removal of the democratically elected government and installation of a new military regime in Pakistan. Not only would this scenario set Pakistan as well as South and Central Asian regions back by decades, it would unleash terrible consequences for Pakistani diaspora around the world. In addition to unparalleled death and destruction, such a scenario could turn Pakistan into a failed state with widespread unrest, homelessness, poverty, hunger and disease. With the potential take-over of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal by the US, it would render Pakistan unable to deter its neighbors from adventures into Pakistan. Within the United States, it would mean the election of John McCain as the new president continuing the current policies of George W. Bush.

This nightmare scenario is not far-fetched. It is almost certainly on the minds of US military planners planning contingencies. At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings recently, General David H. Petraeus, the newly-nominated head of the US Central Command, answered in the affirmative to a question by Sen Jack Reed if he agreed with the intelligence community and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen's assessment that the next terrorist attack on the United States would most likely come from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. The US intelligence Community, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and future CENTCOM commander all agree that Pakistan poses the greatest danger as the potential source of a major terrorist attack on the US.

There is a rising chorus of international criticism of Pakistan as the newly elected government in Islamabad attempts to change its policy on dealing with the terrorist threat along Pakistan-Afghan border. It seems that the Pakistani military is showing signs of weariness in its fight against the Taleban who have local roots in the tribal belt on both sides of the highly porous Durand line. The NWFP provincial government and Islamabad are eager to try negotiating peace with the militants to improve security within Pakistan. However, the US, NATO, and Afghan governments are concerned with rise in attacks on their forces from the militants who are alleged to be operating from Pakistani side of the border. With the rising death toll on the Afghan side, there are warnings coming from US General Dan McNeill and President Hamid Karzai to Pakistan to stop the cross-border attacks.

As the Pakistani leadership currently focuses on restoration of judges, peace deals with the Taleban in tribal areas, and calls for UN inquiry into Bhutto assassination, this rising chorus of criticism has the potential to blind-side the newly elected government with sudden escalation along the border with Afghanistan. It is time for the new Pakistani leaders to start to pay attention to Pakistan's vital relations with the West and prevent any precipitous action by US and NATO along the Pak-Afghan border. Pakistan must persuade and involve US in any peace deals with the Taleban to avoid creating suspicions. The Taleban must be told not to provide sanctuaries to foreign terrorists and extremists and to stop cross-border attacks as a condition for any peace deals. Pakistan and US must focus on isolating and marginalizing the extreme elements within the Taleban and offer incentives to those who agree to cooperate in ending the hostilities threatening the entire region.

On the US side, there is some hope that a precipitous and a major and purely military action along the western border can be avoided. The new CENTCOM commander General Petraeus believes in the use of diplomacy along with the military force. “In most of the issues we'll address, a purely military approach is unlikely to succeed,” he noted, “and our strategy must recognize that.”

General Petraeus said he’d seek to deal with the underlying causes of challenges in the region. Thoughtful joint planning and coordination with the US and NATO as well as internal strategizing by Pakistan's diplomatic and security analysts can help Pakistan avoid the nightmare scenario to assure Pakistan's democracy and economic progress. It is important that Pakistan's leaders recognize the far-reaching significance of their actions regarding the war on terror and feel the urgency and full weight of responsibility while making political and security decisions.