Mumbai Suspects Nabbed

Late Sunday afternoon scores of Pakistani soldiers, backed by helicopter gunships circling overhead, moved on a militant encampment less than three miles outside Muzaffarabad, the small hillside capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. According to local villagers, there were exchanges of small-arms fire as the soldiers launched an assault on the rural camp that was run by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charitable, public face of the Lashkar-e-Taiba guerrilla outfit that India has blamed for planning, organizing and carrying out the Mumbai massacre late last month. While Pakistani officials are not commenting publicly, they confirmed privately that between three and eight Lashkar operatives were captured, including perhaps Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, whom Indian officials have fingered as a top controller of the 10 gunmen who staged the Mumbai attacks that killed at least 164 people.

If he has indeed been apprehended, Lakhvi, a founding member of the radical, Islamist Lashkar-e-Taiba, could be a significant catch indeed. His capture could help to ease the mounting tension between the two nuclear-armed traditional rivals, India and Pakistan. It would also show that Pakistan has taken an important first step in answering the demands of India and the United States. The Mumbai gunman, Ajmal Amir Qasab, whom Indian forces captured alive, has told his interrogators that Lakhvi had not only helped to organize his and his nine comrades' training at Lashkar guerrilla encampments in Pakistani Kashmir but that he had also talked to and maneuvered the men by satellite and cell-phone calls as they carried out their well-planned and very bloody operation against Mumbai's main railway station, a pub, two of the country's best hotels and a Jewish center.

The Muzaffarabad raid was Pakistan's first overt action in response to the tremendous, and ever increasing, pressure that India and the United States were exerting on Islamabad to urgently move against and arrest those individuals who are believed responsible for the Mumbai killings, and to crack down on and dismantle the militant groups to which the gunmen belonged. Pakistan at first denied there were any verifiable links between the gunmen and Pakistan. But as irrefutable evidence poured in from Qasab's interrogation and from U.S. intelligence, Pakistan could no longer remain in denial.

In the hours before the raid on the guerrilla camp, Pakistani police shut down Jamaat-ud-Dawa's main madrassa in the town of Muzaffarabad, Pakistani officials say. These officials also hint that the police may move on Jamaat's other suspicious installations, such as its main political complex at Muridke, just west of Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city, near the Indian border. The 150-acre complex, called Markaz-e-Taybah, or Center of the Pious, boasts a school with 3,000 students, largely drawn from the dirt-poor surrounding villages, a farm, a hospital and mosque. Jamaat invited journalist to tour the compound last week in an effort to show how benign and benevolent the operation is. The group's spokesman denied that any "martial training" or other jihadi activities are going on at the center. Even so, India insists that Jamaat's activities are simply a front for, and provide assistance to, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

New Delhi may have a point. Jamaat's leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed claims he severed links with the Lashkar group, of which he too is a founder, after it was banned in 2002. He then founded Jamaat, which has a strong following in many areas of Pakistan as both a charity and as an advocate for militant, especially anti-Indian, Islam. To be sure, Jamaat runs medical clinics, schools and housing projects, especially in Pakistani Kashmir, which was devastated by a monster earthquake in 2005, killing some 80,000 people, activities that have won it a widespread following. But it also preaches militancy, if not hate. Every Friday, Saeed, 62, a former university professor, gives firebrand speeches at Punjabi mosques, denouncing India for its "occupation" of disputed Kashmir, and the Pakistani government and military for its support of Washington's war on terrorism. India and the United States believe that at least some of Jamaat's charitable collections go to fund Lashkar-e-Taiba's violent agenda.

The Pakistani cabinet's defense committee met in Islamabad on Monday with Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani and other top brass, presumably to determine the government's next step. In their planning, they are most likely weighing the possibility of an Islamist backlash—and an even wider, public one—if the government does move to shut down other Jamaat-ud-Dawa facilities, such as its rather popular complex at Muridke. One reason the government may be reluctant to announce Lakhvi's arrest could be a fear of a hostile public reaction against his arrest and the impending crackdown.

Lakhvi, who is also known as Abdullah Azam among other aliases, is a big fish indeed. He has served as Lashkar's supreme operational commander in Kashmir, orchestrating attacks against Indian security forces across the Line of Control, the ceasefire line separating the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled sectors of the former Himalayan kingdom that both countries claim. He is a major jihadi operative who has also directed Lashkar operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and perhaps even Iraq. As a major Lashkar and Jamaat fundraiser, his name appears on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of those suspected of bankrolling terrorism.

Lakhvi, like many other Lashkar fighters including the captured Qasab, is from one of the many poor rural villages of Pakistan's Punjab province, which borders on India, where anti-Indian sentiment runs high, and guerrilla groups have a strong following. The Lashkar-e-Taiba and other largely Punjabi guerrilla groups that were nurtured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency in the late 1980s as a proxy force to fight India, are also fighting with the Taliban inside Afghanistan. A cross-fertilization of objectives and ideologies may be occurring among the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Taliban and Al Qaeda as these jihadi groups operate in close proximity to each other in havens along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

So far India remains skeptical of Islamabad's nascent crackdown on the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the arrest of Lakhvi. They remain unconvinced that Lakhvi is in custody and that the Pakistani offensive against Lashkar and other like-minded jihadi groups will be prolonged and serious. New Delhi will doubtless be disappointed when Islamabad announces that it will not turn Lakhvi over to Indian authorities, if he has been captured, but rather will try him in Pakistani courts.

The jury is still out on whether this is a one-time spectacular, or the beginning of a real purging of jihadi organizations in the country. Pakistan's history of easing the pressure after an initial crackdown on militant groups only invites such skepticism.