Shot in the dark

Today, in Foreign Policy:

I’m not a Pakistan expert by any means, so I could be wrong, but I thought this was an excellent piece and I recommend you check it out. Very critical of Pakistan’s many political and economic failures, particularly its inability or outright lack of desire to do something about the many jihadi groups that stage their strikes on Afghanistan and India from Pakistani soil. But with that point in mind, I think we can actually simplify the implicit question in that headline quite a bit:

Yep, that’ll do. That’s a story from The Guardian today. Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who is allegedly the military head of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, was let out of jail because prosecutors can’t put together a case against him. Now normally it’s a good thing when prisoners are released if there’s not enough evidence to try them, especially when they’ve been imprisoned without charges since 2008, but in this case Pakistani prosecutors aren’t suffering from a “lack of evidence” so much as they’re suffering from a “lack of evidence that won’t also prove that Lashkar-e-Taiba is essentially a creation of the Pakistani intelligence services.” So when I say they “can’t” put together a case against Lakhvi, it’s really more like they “don’t want to” put together that case, because it would reveal way too much nasty stuff:

Despite phone-tap and witness evidence, including the confession of the sole surviving attacker, critics say a prosecution is unthinkable given the close relationship Pakistan’s military has had with LeT, a jihadi group established in the early 1990s as an off-the-books force to help Pakistan prise the contested region of Kashmir away from India.

Any prosecution, let alone extradition to India, could risk revealing any ongoing ties between Pakistan’s intelligence establishment and LeT.

Luckily, Lakhvi doesn’t seem to have suffered for his 6+ year stint in the cooler. His jailers made sure he’d be OK:

Lakhvi is said to have had a relatively comfortable stay behind bars, enjoying perks including a television and access to a mobile phone, as well as being able to father a child.

So maybe this, in a microcosm, explains why Obama won’t visit Pakistan.