WASHINGTON, March 8: The next major attack on the US soil may come from militants associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and not Al Qaeda, say American terrorism experts.

Juan Zarate, the deputy national security adviser for counter-terrorism in the Bush administration, told the Chicago Tribune that even before the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November, the FBI and other US intelligence agencies were focussing on LeT as the next big threat to US security.

“We are and should be concerned about the threat LeT poses, given its global network,” Mr Zarate said in an interview published on Sunday. “It doesn’t just reside in South Asia. It is an organisation that has potential reach all over the world, including the US.”

The report claimed that the LeT threat had become one of the most crucial national security and diplomatic challenges for the Obama administration and Congress.

Bruce Riedel, chairman of the Obama administration’s Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy review team, said he believed such a “global jihadist syndicate” of disaffected young Pakistanis was the most likely mechanism for launching an attack on US soil. Mr Riedel said Mumbai was only the latest of several attacks by such militants on soft targets frequented by Americans, including hotels in Kabul and Islamabad.

FBI Director Robert Mueller also highlighted the concern in a recent speech, saying US authorities fear a Mumbai-style commando attack on the mainland and such militants from “less well-known terrorist groups ... are merely an e-ticket away from the United States”.

FBI intelligence chief Donald Van Duyn recently told Congress that the bureau was investigating “a limited number” of people in the US with suspected links to the Lashkar but that there was no evidence the group had an organised US presence.

The Tribune reported that Washington wanted Pakistan not only to dismantle LeT but also other similar groups founded during the Afghan war or later to fight India in Kashmir.

Quoting US and allied intelligence sources, the report claimed that potentially tens of thousands of Pakistanis had been trained in Lashkar’s guerrilla camps in Pakistan, many of whom had gone on to work with Al Qaeda. That includes a small number of US residents, some of whom are believed to have returned to the United States. Nearly a dozen Americans, including many members of the so-called Virginia jihad network, have been convicted in US courts of training at Lashkar camps and conspiring to provide material support to the group.

Yet, America’s main concern is the thousands of disaffected Westerners and Pakistanis in Britain and other countries in Europe who travel frequently to Pakistan, the report added.

Citizens of these countries do not need a visa for coming to the United States.

The report claimed that an unknown number of those have trained in Lashkar camps, and after getting “indoctrinated in its hatred of the West and returning home, they were free to travel to the United States with virtually no background check”.

The report quoted US authorities as saying that the Lashkar was in many ways a bigger threat than Al Qaeda, whose leadership was on the run from numerous CIA air strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas.

Mr Riedel and other experts told the Tribune that the Pakistani government’s extreme reluctance to cooperate in the investigation against the Lashkar, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other militant groups further exacerbated the situation.

Also on Sunday, several US newspapers reported that the FBI helped India determine that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai on Nov 26 were from the Lashkar.

India had sent the US agency evidence collected from five GPS phones used for coordinating the attack, requesting the FBI to analyse the data.

The information FBI sent back to India established that the attack was mounted from the sea by LeT operatives, the report said.

The militants steered their boat using GPS equipment and used Blackberries, satellite phones and GPS navigators to co-ordinate their attacks.
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