Recently, the ‘Times’ said, some of the group's operations have shifted from Kashmir to Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas and even to Afghanistan to attack US troops.

American officials and terrorism experts were quoted as saying that the group had not sent large numbers of operatives into Afghanistan, but had embedded small teams with Taliban units to gain fighting experience.

"Afghanistan is an operating war zone, so they can get active training as the Kashmir front has slowed down a bit," the ‘Times’ quoted Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, as saying.

The group is believed by experts to have at least a loose affiliation with al-Qaeda, the paper said, adding that in March 2002, a Qaeda lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in an LeT safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Lashkar-e-Toiba is not known to have singled out Westerners in past terrorist attacks, as the gunmen in Mumbai seem to have done. But one counter-terrorism official told the paper that the group ‘has not pursued an exclusively Kashmiri agenda’ and that it might certainly go after Westerners to advance broader goals.

Meanwhile, a leading US think tank has said that blaming the Mumbai terrorist attacks on Pakistan could plunge New Delhi and Islamabad into worst crisis since 2002.

In 2002, it notes, that after a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, a near nuclear confrontation took place between the two countries in which the US brokered a stand down.

The shape of the current crisis will consist of demands that the Pakistanis take immediate steps to suppress Islamist radicals across the board, but particularly in Kashmir, it says, adding that New Delhi will need to demand that this action be immediate and public.

... contd.