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Saeed’s release raises fears of fresh terror wave

Praveen Swami

Pakistan’s military establishment sees the Lashkar as a partner and strategic asset, not a threat that must be crushed

Despite Lashkar’s proscription by the U.N., Pakistan did little to act against the organisation
Saeed’s public speeches and writings characterised by invective against Hindus

NEW DELHI: Even as the Lashkar-e-Taiba assault team that attacked Mumbai in November was waiting for its final orders at a Karachi safehouse, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed had issued a declaration of war.

The only language India understands is that of force, a press release issued by the Jamaat-ud-Dawa recorded his telling the organisation’s leaders on October 12, 2008, and that is the language it must be talked to in.

Now, a Lahore court has released Saeed from house arrest: the consequence of so-far unexplained procedural failures by Pakistani authorities in its enforcement of the public order regulations under which he was detained. Pakistani prosecutors have not initiated criminal proceedings against the Lashkar chief, leaving him free to now rebuild the terror networks he commands.

Given the Lashkar’s intimate relationship with the Pakistani state, Saeed’s release is no surprise. Pakistan’s military establishment sees the Lashkar as a partner and strategic asset, not a threat that must be crushed. Even as Pakistan fights hostile jihadist elements that threaten it in the west, it continues to patronise groups such as the Lashkar; groups which, like the Pakistan Army itself, see themselves as guardians of the ideological frontiers of the state.

State patronage

Despite the Lashkar’s proscription by the United Nations Security Council in December, Pakistan did little to act against the organisation. Its offices in its southern Punjab heartlands continued to function, as did the military infrastructure that funnelled cadre across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

Last month, a Jamaat-ud-Dawa front organisation was found to be organising relief for civilians displaced by the fighting in Pakistan’s north-west. Flying the black-and-white flag of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation volunteers ran food kitchens and ambulances catering to tens of thousands of refugees.

Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation chief Hafiz Abdur Rauf had earlier headed the Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s charitable wing, the Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq.

Earlier, in February this year, thousands of Lashkar cadre marched through Lahore holding the organisation’s black-and-white flag but under the name of a new organisation, the Tanzeem-e-Azadi-e-Kashmir [Organisation for the Liberation of Kashmir]. Pakistani newspapers reported that its activists had collected donations from bystanders, handing out receipts bearing the name of the Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation

The Lashkar story

In 1987, the lives of a Pakistani theologian and a Palestine-born jihadist who had been Osama bin-Laden’s ideological mentor intersected in Islamabad. Hafiz Mohammad Saeed and Abdullah Azzam together set up the Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad, the Centre for the Propagation of the Faith. In his seminal work, Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism, the scholar Hassan Abbas has recorded that the institution was part of Azzam’s effort to revive the lost art and science of jihad.

Azzam was assassinated in 1989, but Saeed succeeded in turning the MDI, now called the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, into the largest Islamist institution in the world. Despite its proscription by the Security Council after the November, 2008, massacre in Mumbai, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa continues to operate a web of educational and charitable institutions out of its sprawling campus in Muridke, near Lahore.

Saeed’s efforts were backed by the Pakistani state. First appointed to Pakistan’s powerful state-run Council on Islamic Ideology by the military regime of General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, Saeed was later given a position at Lahore’s University of Engineering and Technology.

By 1990, Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Taiba was participating in the Pakistan-sponsored covert war in Jammu and Kashmir. Hussain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, candidly admitted in a 2005 article that the Lashkar had been backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.

The Lashkar project was driven by a visceral hatred of Hindus. Born on June 5, 1950 to Kamaluddin Saeed, in the Punjab town of Sargodha, the Lashkar chief grew up hearing of Partition atrocities. In his 2007 book Frontline Pakistan, Zahid Husain reported that the horrors of the partition in 1947, which uprooted his family from their home in Shimla, left a huge imprint on Hafiz Saeed’s personality. Thirty-six members of his family were killed while migrating to Pakistan.

Saeed’s public speeches and writings have been characterised by invective against Hindus. In a 1999 article, he said that the Hindu was a mean enemy and the proper way to deal with him was the one adopted by our forefathers, who crushed them by force.

On December 13, 2001, terrorists stormed India’s Parliament.

Pakistan’s former President, General Pervez Musharraf, under pressure, proscribed the Lashkar. But the MDI renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and resumed operation. Moreover, the Lashkar continued to operate freely out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where the proscription order did not apply. Pakistan also arrested Saeed in 2002, as part of a counter-terrorism action intended to ward off the risk of war with India. But he was later acquitted of sedition charges by a Lahore court.

Even as Pakistan scaled back infiltration in Kashmir, violence has fallen year-on-year; since 2002 the Lashkar’s all-India offensive escalated. After the Mumbai bombings of 2006, General Musharraf again promised to end terrorism directed at India, but once again failed to act against the Lashkar. Now, many in India’s security services fear Saeed’s release could herald a fresh wave of terror.

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