Dear All,

It’s been eight years since the Mumbai attacks. Eight years since an attack in which 10 armed gunmen attacked a train station, restaurant and Jewish centre, stormed the city’s Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, and created a climate of complete terror in the city. On the third day of the attack security forces cleared the Taj where some of the attackers had holed up. More than 160 people had been killed and scores injured. Nine of the attackers were killed but one was captured alive.

India accused Pakistan of being behind the attack, saying that their intercepts of the attackers’ calls revealed that they had been ‘directed’ by elements in Pakistan during the attacks. The Pakistani President at the time, Asif Zardari was so shocked by the attacks that he actually said that the ISI chief should go to India to talk to investigators. Naturally, this was vetoed by the powers that be… And the President pretty much had to eat his words but Pakistan promised to ‘cooperate in the investigation’, and this sort of cooperation has been pretty much ongoing for eight years. Ongoing, but actually going nowhere.

The Indians insisted that the attacks had been carried out by LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), and directed by ‘handlers’ in Pakistan, this was of course denied noisily by Pakistan. Some journalists tracked the family of the surviving gunman Ajmal Kasab to Faridkot village in Punjab’s Okara district and reporters were able to speak to Kasab’s father -- yet soon the authorities were insisting that Kasab actually had no connection to Pakistan. They briefed the villagers accordingly, and barred journalists from the area.

Pakistan has continued its denials, and the efforts of some agencies have been directed at erasing from history Ajmal Kasab’s Pakistani origins.

But what is more difficult to erase from history are the links of one man who is said to have been key in some of the reconnaissance work for the attack: that man was David Headley.

David Headley travelled to Mumbai several times on an American passport, posing as a businessman investor. He is now in a US jail, and there seem to be strict restrictions on who he is allowed to meet. But David Headley is actually Dawood Gilani, the son of a Pakistani father and an American mother, and who grew up in Pakistan.

Gilani’s father was a former head of Radio Pakistan (Saleem Gilani) and his half brother is a bureaucrat in Pakistan.

Dawood Gilani became estranged from his family when he got mixed up with drugs. But he seems to have made some sort of deal with the US anti-narcotics people -- the Drug Enforcement Agency, and once in the shady, deception-laden world of informants and intel, he became involved with various religious militant or jihadi groups. Headley was a Pakistani boy, a student of Cadet College Hasan Abdal.

The denial continues. When an extremely well respected retired police officer wrote (in a leading English paper) about the investigation that the police had done into the attack and the attackers, he was derided and condemned. Even though he had merely stated the facts of the investigation.

It’s been eight years since one of the most harrowing terrorist attacks of the subcontinent. But what have we all learnt from the matter? Will we remain in denial or will Pakistan’s new army chief be able to set a different direction for the country in terms of its eastern borders and its ‘assets’? Let’s hope that on this November day at least we look towards peace and away from violence.

Best wishes