MUMBAI ATTACKS: The media looks at who's to blame

[See SAJAforum's full coverage of the Mumbai attacks]

With the Mumbai attacks, the US media is giving an unprecedented level of coverage to a developing news story in India. The Western media clearly appreciates the import (and not just the spectacle) of what's happening, given the geopolitical implications. But it's also extremely slippery terrain, because for most Western media outlets, it's a matter of playing catchup with decades of India-Pakistan resentments.

Case in point, the still-evolving issue of who's to blame: Was it an indigenous Indian militant group (Deccan Mujahideen) or in fact a Pakistani group, as Indian officials are alleging/hinting (but which Pakistan denies)? Some experts suspect that the sophistication of the attack, and of the weaponry, points to a possible alignment with al-Qaeda. This morning, Munir Akram, the former Pakistan ambassador to the UN, spoke on the Takeaway, a nationally-broadcast public radio program produced by my station, WNYC. He pushed back hard against the Indian establishment, and claimed the attacks resulted from socio-economic disparities within India:

"It's almost a Pavlovian reaction from India. Every time something goes wrong in India, Pakistan is blamed... It's obviously an indigenous group - and there are so many indigenous problems in India, so many divisions. Muslims are at the bottom of the socio-economic class. Huge resentments. There are oppressions. There are acts of pogroms that have happened against them. And anger, obviously is now turning to resistance, and some sort of organized resistance. So it's very difficult straightaway to make connections with external forces."

That notion was rejected by another guest, MJ Gohel of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, who spoke from London:

"This idea that there is some group called the Deccan Mujahideen is ridiculous. The fact is that no such group even exists... The name means absolutely nothing. What matters is the modus operandi. The modus operandi here is of an al-Qaeda linked Islamist group which wanted to perpetrate terror on a mass scale... These are the fingerprints of a global jihadi group. As far as the Pakistani connection is concerned, unfortunately there is a long history of this. One can go back in time to 1989, when cross-border terrorism started in Pakistan, and the militants were coming across the border. It's an established fact."

On NPR, the reported assessment is still very cautious. NPR's Jackie Northam said the picture is still very unclear" and that Indian officials are not sharing information. She also noted homegrown resentments that could be at the root of the problem. At the end of the segment however, the host, Steve Inskeep says that an Indian official has identified one of the militants as a Pakistani national.

On this CNN segment, there was skepticism about the existence of a "Deccan Mujahideen," with analyst Will Geddes referring to them as having "come out of nowhere."

The NYT's Mark Mazzetti cites analysts who find "mounting evidence" of the role of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba:

The American officials cautioned that they have reached no hard conclusions about who was responsible for the operation, as well as how it was planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered over the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba, or possibly another Pakistani group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad.

The American officials insisted on anonymity in describing their current thinking declined to discuss the intelligence information that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants.

Similar thoughts in the Washington Post:

Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

Same article, further down:

"This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad," said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book "The Search for Al Qaeda." "No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India's economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis."

Several analysts and officials said the attacks bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, two networks of Muslim extremists from Pakistan that have targeted India before. Jaish-i-Muhammad was blamed for an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.

According to Counterterrorism blog, a spokesman for the Jamat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of Lashkar, has been unusually staunch in rejecting responsibility:

Earlier this evening, I spoke via telephone with the official representative of JUD, Abdullah Muntazir, to discuss the situation in Mumbai and mounting allegations of involvement by LET and/or Pakistani Islamists. Muntazir strongly denied these charges, referring to the attacks as an "internal problem" for India. He repeatedly insisted to me, "we have nothing to do with it", and blamed Indian "propaganda" for "divert[ing] the attention of the public media" --- which he described as "their usual practice." Interestingly, during our conversation, Muntazir went even further and actually condemned the events that have taken place in Mumbai as needless "carnage": "Islam does not permit killing civilian people." He added, "I don't think that this is a legitimate tactic."

Please help us out by leaving updates in the comments section, with links to credible reports.