Pakistani security forces have begun a crackdown on the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group that India has blamed for the outrage, arresting its commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhwi and 19 other fighters.

This is the post where I willingly eat some crow,which will no doubt please some critics of my earlier posts on the recent terror attacks in Mumbai.

Right from the first, India blamed the Lashkar e-Taiba, a primarily Kasmiri-separatist terror group, for Mumbai. I felt that they had insufficient evidence to do so, even based upon the testimony of one captured attacker who was almost certainly tortured into confessing what Indian interrogators would have been already pre-disposed to hear. The Mumbai attacks represented a change in tactics more reminiscent of purely internal Indian terror groups such as the Naxalites and there'd been no shortage of internal Muslem-Hindu tensions to justify an indigenous group being behind the attacks. But the LeT had certainly been behind earlier attacks in Mumbai in 2006 and, if the LeT were involved, then the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency had to accept a great deal of culpability as the LeT have been their creature all along. Still, I cautioned against leaping to premature conclusions and using the LeT as an excuse to gloss over internal Indian ethnic strife. However, new details, independently gained, are now surfacing which give Indian accusations fresh impetus and in the light of those details I have been forced to re-evaluate my thinking on the whole issue.

First, an excellent bit of investigative journalism from Saeed Shah, a freelancer who often writes about the region for McLatchy but on Sunday had a piece in the UK's Observer in which he recounts tracking down the family of the captured attacker and placing him firmly as a Pakistani from a tiny village, one of four hamlets all called Faridkot in Pakistan's Punjab province. He also confirms that the man, Mohammed Ajmal Amir, had been a member of the LeT and has obtained national identity numbers for the whole family. Shah also alleges that there's been a careful attempt at a cover-up, orchestrated in part by ISI agents who were supposedly feverishly looking for Amir's roots, which is why other journalists couldn't track Amir's home and family down.

While sometimes confirming that Amir did live in the village, and had a son called Ajmal, on other occasions locals claimed to know nothing.

Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: 'You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television.'

Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.

'Ajmal used to go to Lahore for work, as a labourer,' continued the villager who feared being named. 'He's been away for maybe four years. When he came back once a year, he would say things like, "We are going to free Kashmir."'

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I see that Pakistan has reneged on a public promise made only yesterday to send the head of its ISI intelligence agency to India.

With Pakistan offering to help identify and apprehend those responsible, Gilani's office said the head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency would go to India at the request of India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

However, Pakistani officials said on Saturday that the decision had been changed and that a lower-ranking intelligence official would travel instead.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari blamed the about-face on a "miscommunication" with India. He said Singh had asked only that a "director" of the agency — not the chief — go to India to share intelligence.

However, the revision followed sharp criticism from some Pakistani opposition politicians and a cool response from the army, which controls the agency.

This is the third promise involving civilian control of the ISI which has been turned back by the military in recent months. Indeed, the only promise we don't know for a fact to have been unfulfilled is one made just before the Mumbai attacks that the ISI's political department, the one analysts feel was most heavily involved in using terror groups as proxies, was being disbanded. It would be naive to think the military and the agency intend to keep that one either. In fact, it would be ravingly naive to think that support for using terror groups as proxies was confined to "rogue elements" within the ISI and military. That's the story American officials seem to want to stick to but I continue to believe that the Pakistani military are really in charge in that nation and using the civilian democratic government as a convenient front to deflect the West, which wouldn't have accepted another military dictator easily.

However, there are still good reasons to question the other story that they want to stick to as well, the one involving India's finger-pointing at Pakistan as the prime mover behind the Mumbai attacks.

Crossposted from Newshoggers.