Mumbai: With Musharraf Gone, America Remembers The ISI

By Cernig

What is remarkable to me about current reporting and speculation on the Mumbai attacks is that, in sharp contrast to the 2006 bombings which claimed even more lives, Western media reporting - and particularly conservative pundits - have so quickly moved to talk about the possible complicity of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency should the active involvement of one of it's several terrorist proxy groups be confirmed. In 2006 those well-known ties between the ISI and various jihadist groups went almost entirely unmentioned in the U.S., and conservative pundits went to great lengths to argue that Pakistan would never have jeopardized its relationship with the Bush administration by backing attacks inside India. What a difference no longer having a favored dictator to prop up makes to conservative memories and to mainstream stenography.

Yet this time it seems that the ISI's involvement, and that of its proxies, might be minimal despite India's insistence on finger pointing.

Comments

[JOHN]

not all of them.

[Victor Tremblay]

Interesting. Although Zardari seems to be very US friendly, maybe he has not been around long enough to "prove" it to the US right, and the temptation to put the blame on the evil Pakistani is too great. This Pakistani's perfidy further supports the right's claim that they failed in Afghanistan and to catch Bin Laden because of Pakistan. Whereas in 2006, they still thought Afghanistan was going great so Pakistan involvement was downplayed.

The problem might not be Musharaf per se but more the perception (among the right in the US) that the US was winning in the Afghanistan back then so that problems with Pakistan had to be downplayed whereas now the perception is that the US is losing so Pakistan has to be painted in a way where they can be easily scapegoated for all the troubles in the region. Just thinking aloud here, I'm not sure of my hypothesis