The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Jihadi groups: alive and killing

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Sunday, Aug 29, 2004

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Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Jihadi groups: alive and killing

Indian authorities have pointed to a renewed offensive of cross-border infiltration and argued that this would not be possible without official Pakistani patronage.

"PAKISTAN IS in fact a country for the Muslims of the subcontinent. Therefore, it is incomplete without Kashmir. Pakistan is also incomplete without Hyderabad, Junagarh and Munabao because these states had announced accession with Pakistan but the Hindus subjugated them. That is why it is our duty to free these states from the Hindus' subjugation and assure their Muslim population that they will become part of Pakistan. This is our agenda of Pakistan's completion. We will continue to propagate it in India through speech and writing and take these states back through Jihad." — Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed in the magazine, Nida-e-Millat, August 18, 2004.

Last month, 17-year-old Muhammad Sohail was produced before reporters by Afghan authorities in Kabul to tell his extraordinary story. Captured while fighting side-by-side with the Al Qaeda forces, Mr. Sohail's account blew open official Pakistani claims of being serious about combating terror — and made clear that as long as jihad is used as an instrument of state policy in Jammu and Kashmir, it will feed violence elsewhere in the world as well.

Mr. Sohail had trained not in some remote Afghan mountain bad-land, but in a camp at Mansehra, not far from Pakistan's capital city, Islamabad. He took orders not from Osama bin Laden, but from a Pakistani cleric who moved around that country freely. And he fought not for the Al Qaeda but for the Jamaat-ul-Ansar, a re-branded version of the Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin (HuM). Although HuM was proscribed by the United States in October 1997 and officially banned by Pakistan in January 2002, Mr. Sohail's account made clear it was still alive — and killing.

Renewed hate-polemic

Why is Mr. Sohail's story of significance to India? If renewed hate-polemic directed at India by figures like Mr. Sayeed is the theory of the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir, camps like those he trained at are the practice. Indian authorities, notably the Chief of the Army Staff, Nirmal C. Vij, have pointed in recent weeks to a renewed offensive of cross-border infiltration, and argued that this would not be possible without official Pakistani patronage. Mr. Sohail's account suggests that Indian charges that Pakistan continues to arm and train jihadi cadre to fight in Jammu and Kashmir are true. Writing in The New York Times early this month, journalist Carlotta Gall noted that "it is in an open secret in Pakistan" that jihadi groups fighting in Jammu and Kashmir "have continued to train men and infiltrate them" across the Line of Control.

Close links

A study of Pakistan's recent crackdown on terror also illustrates another disturbing development — the close links between Islamists fighting in Afghanistan and West Asia, groups Pakistan opposes, and those operating in Jammu and Kashmir, which Pakistan not-so-secretly endorses. Weeks after Mr. Sohail's story of arrest, Pakistani authorities detained two key figures in Pakistan's jihad apparatus, HuM's Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil and Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the head of its sister organisation, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI). Both organisations were founded with cash and guns paid for by the U.S., in the course of the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Soon after the end of that campaign, HuJI and HuM merged to form the Harkat-ul-Ansar, which for a while became among the most dreaded organisations in Jammu and Kashmir.

In 1997, the al-Faran, a Harkat-ul-Ansar front organisation, kidnapped and killed five U.S. and European nationals in Jammu and Kashmir. The international outrage over the killing, and feuds over cash and influence, led Mr. Khalil and Mr. Akhtar to split again. An abortive reconciliation attempt was made by Maulana Masood Azhar, the ultra-right cleric and terrorist, eventually released from an Indian jail in the course of the Indian Airlines flight IC-814 hostages-for-prisoners swap.

Mr. Khalil's HuM, meanwhile, became a founding member of the International Islamic Front in February 1998. That year, a HuM training camp in Afghanistan was bombed by the U.S. in an effort to target Osama bin Laden for his alleged role in the bombings of that country's embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.

Despite this action, no real pressure seems to have been mounted on Pakistan to do something about Mr. Khalil himself. Some experts attribute this to the proximity of groups like HuM and HuJI to the military establishment in Pakistan. In 1995, General Abdul Waheed Kakkar, Pakistan's then Army Chief, discovered that several officers were planning a coup against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, intending to declare an Islamic Caliphate. Major-General Zahir-ul-Islam Abbasi, who served as an intelligence official at Pakistan's High Commission in New Delhi in the late 1980s, and several mid-ranking officers were court-martialled. Although Mr. Akhtar was held for his links with the plot, he was released. Soon after seizing power in October 1999, Pervez Musharraf released General Abbasi.

The wheel turned after HuM forces directly engaged the U.S. military in Afghanistan from October 2001. Mr. Akhtar fled to Saudi Arabia and then on to Dubai. HuJI, however, escaped the ban imposed by General Musharraf after the India-Pakistan near-war of 2001-2002. It was only after the twin assassination attempts on the Pakistan President last year — the consequence of General Musharraf's pro-U.S. position — that the relationship soured. HuM fared just as well as HuJI until this time. Although the organisation was banned, Mr. Sohail's testimony shows its renamed version operated with considerable impunity. Much the same, of course, was true of other organisations banned in the wake of the 2001-2002 military crisis, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

Unfortunately, nothing seems to have been learned from this experience in either Islamabad or Washington. Efforts have been made, for example, to shield the Jammu and Kashmir part of HuJI operations from the ongoing crackdown on the organisation. Pakistani authorities are believed to have released its Muzaffarabad-based operational commander, Mohammad Illyas Kashmiri, who was detained some time ago on terrorism-related charges. HuM, for its part, also remains a credible force. On October 12, for example, HuM cadre executed a well-known Congress worker, Liaqat Ali Khan, near the Gandoh area of Doda district, on the border between Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. Khan had been kidnapped a month earlier after he refused to allow a local HuM commander marry Rashida Bano, daughter of a relative.

Two-track handling

What makes Western policy on Pakistan's two-track handling of jihadi groups all the more inexplicable is that the link between organisations such as the LeT and the Al Qaeda are well documented. The Al Qaeda operational chief, Abu Zubeidah, for example, was arrested from a LeT safe house in Faislabad in March 2002. Such linkages, the recently-released report of the official U.S. commission on 9/11 noted, may have been key to the outrage. Noting that the alleged architect of the outrage, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, operated from Karachi, the report observes that "almost all the 9/11 attackers travelled the north-south nexus of Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi."

A large volume of Pakistani and Western media reports also affirm that camps run for state-approved terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir are being used to train forces fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan as well. Writing in The Observer earlier this month, journalists Jason Burke, Paul Harris and Martin Bright reported on the "increasing cooperation between different militant groups". "Until recently," they noted, "Pakistani militants fighting in Kashmir rarely cooperated with Arab militants dedicated to a `global jihad'. Increasingly, the same phenomenon has been noticed elsewhere." Muhammad Khan, an alleged Al Qaeda operative who was persuaded to work as a double agent by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, is believed to have had contacts in the U.S., Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh — and India.

The bottom line seems to be this: faced with an election, the administration of George W. Bush will not jeopardise what counter-terror cooperation it does get from Pakistan by pushing a more principled line. In Pakistan on official business last month, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, admitted that not all training camps run for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir had been closed down. He also urged Pakistan to terminate the use of its territory for Taliban and Al Qaeda attacks into Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. has been unwilling to pressure Pakistan to crack down on all jihadi groups. Mr. Sayeed's case is particularly instructive. Despite members of his organisation being discovered in Iraq, and his making express threats to raise cadre to fight there, the LeT head remains free to recruit personnel and raise funds.

Terrorism consists of two simple things: the intention to carry out an act of terror, and the ability to do so. U.S. intervention has focussed on using the Pakistani military establishment to turn the gun away from its own head — but not on actually taking the gun away. Yet Mr. Sohail's story has shown once again that as long as someone has a gun, he ultimately chooses where to point it.

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