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Pakistan is “in a state of war”, its Interior Minister declared yesterday as the Government reeled from the fallout of the brazen gun assault on the Sri Lankan cricket convoy in Lahore.

As thousands of police combed the city for the gunmen, security officials grappled with evidence that the attackers may have planned a Mumbai-style siege on a more spectacular scale.

The attack is likely to strike fear into the hearts of counter-terrorist officials that other groups might try to copy the tactics. After Mumbai, cities around the world rushed to draw up measures to deal with such an assault in addition to their well-rehearsed routines for suicide bombing.

Pakistani officials have already suggested that the attack bore the hall-marks of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group believed responsible for the siege of tourist hotels in Mumbai.

CCTV footage showed the gunmen, like the Mumbai attackers, working in pairs, armed with assault rifles and grenades in backpacks. But they also carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a weapon of choice in the Afghan and Pakistan tribal areas. Their escape, melting into the Pakistani city least hospitable to Islamist extremism, will raise fresh and disturbing questions about their links to the security and intelligence services.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of several militant groups created by Pakistan’s powerful Inter Services Intelligence to battle Indian rule in Kashmir.

The attacks on Mumbai and Lahore are classic “fedayin” assaults – suicidal rather suicide – taught in Lashkar’s training camps by ISI officers. What Pakistan experienced in Lahore was the backlash, deepening the sense of crisis confronting the flailing civilian Government.

That the target was a moving convoy of visiting sportsmen underlines how far Pakistan has veered towards becoming a failed state. After the devastating bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad last year, foreign business fled and blast barriers sprung up around hotels and embassies, leaving few significant targets for terrorists to strike.

Foreign diplomats are hunkered down in their fortified compounds, and travel by armoured car – as the gunmen who peppered a senior American diplomat’s vehicle in Peshawar found when she escaped unharmed.

Quite simply, there was nowhere left to bomb that would grab international headlines. In their minibus, relying on police escorts, the Sri Lankan cricket team was the softest target that could be found.

The gunmen clearly went in prepared to die but their ability to escape suggests more skill, control and official connivance than any suicide mission. The propaganda effect will be devastating and it is also an enormous blow to President Asif Ali Zardari’s view that appeasing militants such as the Taleban in the Swat Valley would lessen attacks on Pakistani soil.

The gunmen are undoubtedly the product of the kind of training camps that the United States-led coalition has sought to eradicate in Afghan-istan, but which have merely relocated to Pakistan’s tribal border areas.

By bowing to the demands for Sharia in the Swat Valley, the Government in Islamabad has merely shrunken its writ, rather than extending it to the Pashtun badlands. The Government’s task is evident if Pakistan is to be rescued – for its own sake and the safety of the world beyond its borders.

Security experts say the conditions for the attack are unlikely to be replicated in the developed world – sanctuaries to hoard weapons and train militants, poor surveillance of armed groups, a radical political agenda and easy access to weaponry. Unhappily for Pakistan’s leaders, their country has all these ingredients in abundance.

The danger of a copycat attack is greatest somewhere close to a failing state or other ungoverned space, where militants are free to engage in the kind of paramilitary training that the Lahore attackers had. Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago, where training camps have flourished, presents one potential danger; Somalia, another.

Lashkar-e-Taiba

— “The Army of the Righteous” began as a militant offshoot of Markaz Dawatul Irshad, an Islamic charity, in 1989. It fought against India in Kashmir

— It was founded by Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, an Islamic teacher at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. He is still at large

— The group wants to establish an Islamic state in South Asia, uniting all Muslim majority regions in countries surrounding Pakistan

— Last month Michael Hayden, the outgoing CIA director, described Lashkar as one of the top ten challenges the US will face in 2009

— The philosophy of the group is based on Wahhabism, the form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia Lashkar is believed widely to have been behind the attack on the Indian Parliament building in December 2001 and the attack on Mumbai last November

Source: Times database

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