March 4 (Bloomberg) -- Yesterday’s deadly ambush of Sri Lanka’s cricket team in Lahore, Pakistan, further undermined President Asif Ali Zardari’s grip on his nation as guerrillas showed they are increasingly able to hit even officially protected targets.
“This was not simply an attack on Sri Lankans,” said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a security and political analyst in Lahore who formerly taught political science at Punjab University there. “It was most importantly an attack on the Pakistani government, to show its lack of control.”
Zardari’s inability to stabilize his country is complicating President Barack Obama’s effort to refocus U.S. counterterrorism efforts on the Pakistan-Afghanistan region. The White House plans to unveil a strategy for that campaign this month, U.S. officials say.
The assault yesterday, which killed six policemen and injured six Sri Lankan cricketers, came less than three weeks after the Pakistani government accepted a truce that gave control of the Swat Valley, north of Islamabad, the capital, to the opposition Taliban.
Meanwhile, the government is still trying to recover a senior American United Nations official kidnapped last month in the southwest. And Zardari is facing the prospect of public demonstrations over a court ruling that barred his chief rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, from public office.
Succeeding Bhutto
Sharif, who is backing a call for nationwide anti-government protests beginning March 12, accuses Zardari of being behind the court ruling against him. Zardari, 52, was elected last year following the December 2007 assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
While Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said in a statement in Islamabad that “we suspect a foreign hand behind this incident,” Salman Taseer, the provincial governor of Punjab, of which Lahore is the capital, noted parallels between yesterday’s attack and November’s terrorist assault in Mumbai, India, in which 164 people died.
Pakistan last month announced it would prosecute at least two members of the banned Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba guerrilla group among those it accuses of plotting the Mumbai violence.
As in the raid on India’s financial center, the guerrillas in Lahore were wearing sneakers and carrying backpacks, automatic rifles and grenades in a coordinated ambush, video footage indicated. Police said all 12 gunmen escaped.
‘The Same Pattern’
“It’s the same pattern, the same terrorists who attacked Mumbai,” Taseer told reporters in Lahore. The way they attacked showed that “they were obviously trained,” he said.
“Lashkar-e-Taiba is under pressure and its supporters are very upset at the government’s plan to put them on trial,” said Rizvi. Yesterday’s attack may be a warning by Islamic militants against the government not to proceed, he said.
While Zardari has vowed to act against militant groups, he likely will be “seriously constrained” by Pakistan’s powerful military from any broad crackdown, said a Jan. 19 report by the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, California.
During the 1990s, the army supported Lashkar and other guerrillas as proxy forces in Pakistan’s dispute with India over the Kashmir region, according to scholars such as Husain Haqqani, the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.
The terrorist violence has hampered efforts by Zardari to halt an economic slump that slowed growth from an annual average of 6.8 percent over five years to a forecast of 3.5 percent in the 12 months ending in June. Last year, as attacks in Pakistan killed more than 2,000 people, overseas investment tumbled 38 percent, according to the government.
Undermining Democracy
“The democracy of the country has been undermined, and foreigners are repeatedly attacked to harm the country’s image,” Malik said in a statement in Islamabad.
Pakistan borrowed $7.6 billion from the International Monetary Fund in November and will seek a further $4.5 billion because “the war on terror has caused serious economic problems,” government financial adviser Shaukat Tarin said Feb 16. Pakistan’s benchmark stock index, the Karachi Stock Exchange 100, dropped 1.5 percent yesterday.
Sri Lanka agreed to play cricket in Pakistan after India pulled out of a planned series following the Mumbai attack. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa called the Lahore ambush a “cowardly” act against athletes visiting as goodwill ambassadors.
Advance Information
Former Lahore deputy police chief Parvez Rathore, who left that post on Feb. 25 when the court ruling forced Sharif’s party out of office, said in an interview that police had advance information of a possible attack on the Sri Lankan team. He couldn’t say whether the new police administration had implemented extra security steps as a result.
Sri Lanka was given “no hint of a significant security threat,” its foreign secretary, Palitha Kohona, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
India’s former national counter-terrorism chief, B. Raman, said a role by Sri Lanka’s main guerrilla group should be investigated. Sri Lanka’s army has made military advances in the past month against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
While the Tamils are predominantly Hindu, the Tigers cooperated in arms smuggling with Pakistani Islamic militants in the 1990s, Raman said in an e-mail.
‘Dramatic Changes’
Yesterday’s attack calls into question Pakistan’s chances of hosting matches for the 2011 Cricket World Cup in South Asia. The World Cup will include no games in Pakistan without “dramatic changes” in security, International Cricket Council Chief Executive Officer Haroon Lorgat told the BBC.
The assault on a visiting national team in South Asia’s most popular sport “will be a terrible blow to all Pakistanis,” Shaukat Qadir, a retired army brigadier general and political analyst, said by telephone from Islamabad.
Zardari’s office issued a statement expressing shock over the attack and saying that “it was reassuring that our policemen rose to the occasion and laid down their live to protect our Sri Lankan guests.” It promised grants to the families of those killed, saying, “the sun will shine gloriously on the tombs of these heroes.”
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