February 22, 2009:
Pakistan has agreed to allow U.S. CIA interrogators to talk to Pakistani terrorists arrested for planning the last November's terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. The CIA lost two of their operatives during the Mumbai attack. These two (a 57 year old man and a 45 year old woman) were apparently examining the Taj hotel, which was attacked and badly damaged, as a potential target for just the kind of terrorist attack they found themselves the victims of. Naturally, the CIA was very interested in talking to the people who planned this attack, and promptly got to work with Indian and Pakistan intelligence officials to try and get Pakistan to arrest the local terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attack.
Normally, Pakistan denies any connection with Islamic terrorists devoted to attacking India. Meanwhile, Britain and India have long been demanding that Pakistan shut down Islamic terrorist groups that are tolerated because they devote most of their resources to fighting in the disputed (between Pakistan and India) province of Kashmir. Britain is angry because over 70 percent of the terrorist plots it discovers in Britain have some connection to Pakistan based terrorists. Many of these Pakistani connections are the same terrorist groups that launch attacks inside India.
After a few months of this pressure, Pakistan shut down an Islamic charity connected with the Mumbai terrorists, arrested 70 suspects and put another hundred under house arrest or surveillance. But Pakistan had done this sort of thing before, and after the media noise died down, released those arrested and allowed the terrorist operations to resume. India wants the guilty people extradited to India for trial. Pakistan refuses to do this.
Located in northwestern India, the state of Kashmir has been the source of several wars, and constant violence, between India and Pakistan, over the last sixty years. In the late 1980s, Pakistan began supporting Islamic terrorists, believing that a terrorism campaign in Kashmir would drive the Indians, and non-Moslems out. It didnt. And now Pakistan is trying to shut down all Islamic terrorism within its borders, but is having a difficult time doing so. This is because, through those two decades of supporting Islamic terrorism, many Pakistanis got involved, and don't want to stop. Moreover, the terror campaign in Kashmir has a lot of popular support in Pakistan, because most Pakistanis agree that Kashmir should be theirs.
By allowing the CIA to interrogate the Mumbai Islamic terrorist planners, Pakistan hopes to get more help in dealing with these Pakistani terrorists. The Pakistani government can't trust many of the people in its own intelligence agencies. The CIA knows this, and has been trying to get a better idea of who all the pro-terrorist Pakistani intel operatives are. So does the Pakistani government.