Mystery phone call put Pakistan and India on the brink of war

Mystery phone call put Pakistan and India on the brink of war
By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers
12/8/08

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan_A mysterious night-time telephone call last week brought nuclear-armed India and Pakistan close to the brink of war at the height of the crisis over the Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistani officials said Sunday.

They said the "threatening" call was made, ostensibly by Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to Pakistani President Asif Zardari, on Friday, November 28, two days into the Mumbai attacks, in which some 170 people died. India by then had declared that the militants who'd stormed Mumbai were all from Pakistan. The heated conversation left Zardari thinking that India was about to attack and led him to put Pakistan's armed forces on "high alert," according to Wajid Hasan, Pakistan's ambassador to London and a close associate of Zardari.

While Pakistan's attention remains focused on its eastern frontier with India, as many as 200 armed assailants Sunday overran a depot in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province, that houses military supplies for U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The assailants, believed to be Pakistani Taliban, set the depot on fire and destroyed around 100 trucks carrying equipment, food and other supplies. Some 70 Humvees were turned into smoldering hulks of metal.

About 70 percent of the supplies to the international forces in land-locked Afghanistan are trucked through Pakistan, and Pakistani militants have mounted a campaign to choke off the vital supply line.

The combination of militant attacks along Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan and rising tensions with India to the east are a threat to the U.S.-led war against al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and western Pakistan, to the Pakistani civilian government's on-again, off-again campaign against Islamic militants and to the Bush administration's efforts to improve relations with India and to prevent the hostility between India and Pakistan from escalating into war.

The telephone hoax could have triggered a nuclear war. Given Pakistan's inferiority in conventional forces, it might not have been able to respond to an Indian attack except with nuclear weapons, analysts said. India, however, didn't put its forces on alert.

Zardari quickly mobilized Western leaders in an attempt to avert war, telephoning Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, among others, who in turn frantically called India, Hasan said. Pakistani reporters who were briefed by the Indian Embassy in Islamabad said they were told that Rice telephoned Mukherjee in the middle of the night and demanded: "Why have you threatened war?"

According to those same sources, Mukherjee told Rice that he'd made no such call or threat. Nevertheless Rice, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and defense secretary Robert Gates all rushed to the region.

It's unclear who made the call.

Indian officials, who didn't want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, theorized that Pakistan's own Inter Services Intelligence agency made the call by using technology to make it look as if it came from a number from India's foreign ministry. That suggests that ISI, which is part of the military, was trying to break relations between the two countries, already strained by the Mumbai attack, in order to put Pakistan's military back in charge of the country. It was "worrying that a neighboring state might even consider acting on the basis of such a hoax call," Mukherjee said in a statement.

"I can only ascribe this series of events (following the call) to those in Pakistan who wish to divert attention from the fact that a terrorist group, operating from the Pakistani territory, planned and launched a ghastly attack on Mumbai," he added.

The news of the tension created by the mysterious "Indian" telephone call emerged as the Bush administration, in the face of growing pressure from India, put Islamabad on notice that it must clamp down on Islamic militant groups accused of targeting India.

"I did say to the Pakistanis that the argument that these are non-state actors is not acceptable," Rice said Sunday on ABC's This Week program. "Non-state actors in your territory are still your responsibility."

In a separate appearance on Fox News, Rice added: "The United States expects the full and complete cooperation of Pakistan, and Pakistani action. And that yes, it is a matter for our relationship."

As if on cue, Pakistani security forces Sunday raided a camp used by members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), on the outskirts of Muzaffarabad, the provincial capital of the Pakistani-controlled part of the disputed northern territory of Kashmir. India has charged that the group carried on the attack on Mumbai, and though it's only one of dozens of jihadist organizations in Pakistan, a McClatchy reporter last week traced one of the attackers to a Pakistani village where residents said LeT has recruited young men.

Pakistan's government insisted that the threatening phone call came from a number in Indian's Ministry of External Affairs. Pakistan's ambassador in London said that a caller ID system in the presidency identified the origin of the call.

"They did it (made the call). It was not a hoax call, but an instrument of psychological warfare. They were trying to scare Pakistan, test the waters for our reaction," Hasan said in an interview.

Hasan added that he'd received information that India was "about to launch a very drastic action" on that Friday, and that only intervention from Western leaders averted it.

According to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who flew to Pakistan after a visit to New Delhi, Indian officials are threatening to use force if Pakistan doesn't move swiftly to act against those responsible for the Mumbai assaults.

McCain, who met in New Delhi with Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, told Pakistani journalists that India is ready to order air strikes. The Republican presidential candidate said that Indian officials told him that they have evidence of the involvement of former ISI officers in the planning and execution of the Mumbai assault, according to reporters who met him.

"The democratic government of India is under pressure, and it will be a matter of days after they have given the evidence to Pakistan to use the option of force if Islamabad fails to act against the terrorists," McCain told the journalists, according to an account by a reporter present that was published Sunday in Pakistan's Daily Times.

(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent)