Pakistanis Move Troops From Anti-Terror Operations Towards India

The terrorists who carried out the Mumbai attacks can only smile at the good fortune of their deadly work. The Pakistani government is considering the Indian government a bigger threat than the very Islamists who operate inside the country and who carried out the deadly Mumbai attacks and who support and carry out terrorist attacks not only inside Pakistan, but against Afghanistan as well. For more than a month, the Pakistanis have threatened to take troops off the line in the frontier provinces and send them towards the Indian border. Today, we get some word that they're actually carrying through on that threat.

The Pakistani government is busy directing one of its armies to redeploy away from the Afghan border where it was being used in counterterrorism operations, towards the Indian border, which is a serious misallocation of resources in the war on the terrorists.

Two intelligence officials said the army's 14th Division was being redeployed to Kasur and Sialkot, close to the Indian border. They said some 20,000 troops were on the move. Earlier Friday, a security official said that all troop leave had been canceled.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Indian officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

An Associated Press reporter in Dera Ismail Khan, a district that borders the Afghan-frontier province of South Waziristan, said he saw around 40 trucks loaded with soldiers heading away from the Afghan border.

India is blaming Pakistan-based militants for last month's attacks on Mumbai. Islamabad has said it will cooperate in any probe, but says it has seen no evidence backing up India's claims.

Both countries have said they hope to avoid military conflict, but Pakistan has promised to respond aggressively if India uses force, an option the Indian government has not ruled out.

Pakistan has deployed more than 100,000 soldiers in Waziristan and other northwestern regions to fight Islamic militants blamed for surging violence against Western troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan is sending the troops towards the Line of Control, which has been site of multiple skirmishes and three wars. India has every right to demand that the Pakistanis hand over the terrorists and all those responsible for the attacks, which were plotted and carried out from Pakistani territory.

Pakistan is playing a real dangerous game with India, figuring that it can appease the Islamists and nationalists all while trying to maintain a veneer that they're operating counterterrorism operations against the same Islamists. Complicating matters is the fact that the Pakistani intel services, the ISI, is thoroughly penetrated by the Islamists and it is all too likely that the ISI assisted the terrorists in their deadly attacks.

At the same time, the Pakistani government can't maintain security for the NATO supply lines that run from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and that threatens the ongoing NATO and US military operations there. It's a situation that cannot persist without seriously compromising the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which is yet another reason why the terrorists must be smiling. They're attacking the US war effort's soft underbelly - reliance on the Pakistani government to transit materials into Afghanistan. Cut the supply lines, and the war effort in Afghanistan grows immeasurably more difficult as air resupply is far more expensive and time consuming.

For their part, the Pakistanis claim that it was a homegrown Indian terrorist group responsible for the Mumbai attacks. Indian authorities have given Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations proof that the Pakistanis were involved in the attacks. That's at the same time that Indian authorities claimed to have disrupted another terror plot involving Pakistani ISI against India.