A war without frontiers: India-Pakistan officials to discuss the long string of bombings

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

21 Sep 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

A war without frontiers: India-Pakistan officials to discuss the long string of bombings

By Praveen Swami 21 September 2008   The Islamist terror groups Pakistan set up to fight India are turning on the state which gave birth to them.   "Every infidel fears us," wrote Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Maulana Masood Azhar in a commentary published last week: "They fear the power and terror of jihad, which they know will eliminate them from the world."   On Monday, when the India-Pakistan joint counter-terrorism mechanism meets in New Delhi, officials from both countries will discuss the long string of bombings that have taken place across India since last summer.   Set up in the wake of the Lashkar-e-Taiba-authored serial bombing of Mumbai in 2006, the joint counter-terrorism mechanism has so far yielded little. But Indian policy makers have been asking themselves whether Thursday's murderous attack on the former Pakistan Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, will mark the moment when the Pakistani establishment finally turned on the monsters it helped give birth to.   Will it? At the heart of the debate lies Pakistan's feared covert service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, and its changing relationship with the terror groups it has sponsored for decades. Crackdown   Ever since the United States went to war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been compelled to come down hard on Islamist terror groups operating against the West. Although critics of President Pervez Musharraf have characterised his counter-terrorism efforts as half-hearted, the fact is that Pakistan has committed tens of thousands of troops to operations against Islamists in its north-west.   Pakistan's actions against India-focussed groups, however, have been far more nuanced. While direct ISI funding of groups such as the Jaish and the Lashkar has been terminated, and their training bases shut down or relocated, Pakistan has avoided dismantling their infrastructure. ISI strategists have focussed, instead, on the construction of firewalls between Islamist groups operating against India, like the Lashkar, and those like Al-Qaeda — a bid to ensure resources meant for fighting Pakistan's enemy to the east are not used to target either friends in the west, or at home.   As a result, Pakistan continues to be a safe haven for terrorists operating against India. Mohammad Abdul Shahid, the head of the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami cell that executed this year's terror strikes in Hyderabad and Ajmer, is known to operate out of Karachi. Khalistan terror commanders such as Wadhawa Singh Babbar, too, are based in Lahore. India's failure to persuade Pakistan to hand over these figures is not, of course, surprising. While the Central Intelligence Agency possesses a welter of credible evidence showing that Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar is sheltered by the ISI in Quetta, the U.S. has failed to secure his arrest — or elimination.   But there are growing signs that the enterprise is crumbling. Islamist terror groups meant to focus their energies on India are increasingly directing their anger at General Musharraf's regime — and its sponsors in the West.   On its cover, this month's issue of the Lashkar house-journal Majallat al-Dawa displays three missiles targeting Pakistan's iman ki imaarat, its structure of religious belief: shirk, or polytheism; fahashi, or obscenity, and corruption — this last evil transliterated from English instead of the Urdu bad-amli, presumably to identify it as Western in origin.   Last month's Zarb-e-Taiba, another Lashkar-affiliated magazine, spelt out the consequences of these evils. "Amriki ghulami aur dushmanon ke jaal ka shikaar Pakistan," the magazine screamed on its cover, over images of the country's tanks and missiles caught in a net, with Indian, Israeli, and American flags planted atop them: 'Pakistan is the victim of American slavery and the snares of its enemies.' Pakistan's surrender of its power in 2007 is juxtaposed with images of a combat jet firing missiles at the heart of a burning Indian flag.   Islamists in Pakistan, it appears, have scented blood: once the U.S. is compelled to withdraw from Afghanistan, they believe, General Musharraf's order will crumble, the road to state power will be clear.   Speaking at an Eid-ul-Fitr congregation at Lahore's Qaddafi stadium on October 14, the Lashkar's Hafiz Muhammad Saeed outlined his understanding of the global strategic situation. It had become impossible, he argued, for "the enemies of Islam and Muslims to maintain their occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan any longer." Eventually, he appeared to suggest, the U.S. would tire of these wars, and withdraw.   In a September 28 discourse before a congregation in Lahore's Nishatabad area, Saeed had provided historical context to these ideas. "Muslims," he argued, "had successfully repelled the Russians when they tried to take over Muslim lands. Now, they are going to be successful again in repelling those who invade Muslim lands and try to colonise them. Talk of pulling out their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan is proof of their defeat and Muslims will again be victorious."   Addressing an October 9 rally at the Shamsi Hall, in Karachi's Wireless Gate area, Lashkar second-in-command Abdul Rahman Makki fleshed out these ideas. Urging his audience to learn from the experience of the battle of Badr, where the Prophet Mohammad's numerically inferior forces defeated the armies of the tribe of Quraish, he asked them to "wage jihad against the infidel West."   While the U.S. was a superpower, Makki said, in both Iraq and Afghanistan the "mujahideen are killing the American soldiers like pigs and dogs. Afghanistan and Iraq are becoming the biggest graveyard for the U.S. soldiers. Now, the U.S. is thinking of withdrawing troops from both Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. spends $5 million every minute in Iraq to keep its forces. This proves that to end the monopoly of the West, jihad is indispensable. We will have to impose another Badr on them."   Last week, in his regular column in the magazine al-Qalam, Masood Azhar — one of the three terrorists released from Indian prisons in return for the lives of the passengers on board Indian Airlines flight 814 — pronounced General Musharraf's decision to shed his uniform "great news for mujahideen." Writing under the pseudonym Saadi, Masood Azhar promised that "the mujahideen will continue to wear the uniform of jihad that has been given to them by Allah. They will continue to wear the uniform of jihad till the last day of the universe."   Masood Azhar concluded: "So, my brothers you have only one way to earn respect and dignity and restore your lost glory, which is jihad. Wake up, wake up my brothers, mothers, daughters and sisters. Wage jihad against the infidel U.S. Wage jihad against the infidel Britain. Wage jihad against the infidel Israel. Wage jihad against the infidel India. Wage jihad against the infidel Europe. Wage jihad against every force that is against Islam. If you do not wage jihad then they will eliminate you."   Put simply, the jihad against India is, to the leadership of the Islamist terror groups operating against it, just an agent of a far larger enemy: the infidel world, as Masood Azhar described it. While the Lashkar has conducted no terror strikes within Pakistan, its restraint has come at a price: operatives from the organisation have been discovered to be active in at least half a dozen countries outside South Asia, including Iraq, Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.   But this begs another question: just why has the Pakistani state proved reluctant to act against those who are preparing to usurp it? Between hammer and anvil   Since 2002, when the Jaish-e-Mohammad's near-successful attack on Parliament House in New Delhi led Pakistan to the edge of war with India, some within its establishment have understood the perils of the tempered jihad strategy.   Soon after the 2002 military crisis, the former ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Javed Ashraf Qazi, lashed out at the terror groups he had helped construct. "We must not be afraid," he said, "of admitting that the Jaish was involved in the deaths of thousands of innocent Kashmiris, bombing the Indian Parliament, [the journalist] Daniel Pearl's murder and even attempts on President Musharraf's life."   Still, the Pakistani state proved unable — and unwilling — to take on the groups which now threaten to become its nemesis. Just why that is, we do not know. Some accounts have claimed that powerful elements within the ISI are opposed to General Musharraf's war against Islamists. In a recent interview, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan excoriated Pakistan for its failure to "rein in the ISI" but added that "very often such agencies develop their own momentum and are difficult to control."   Not everyone, though, is convinced that the ISI is out of sync with Pakistan's military-dominated establishment. Earlier this month, The Los Angeles Times reported that a former ISI officer reporting to the covert service's Chitral office was involved in organising Taliban operations.   People's Party of Pakistan politicians contend that attacks like the one on Ms Bhutto, in fact, serve the military's opponents, by terrorising democratic opponents. Scholar Hassan Abbas, for his part, has described General Musharraf as a "master of half measure," doing just enough to avoid international opprobrium without alienating the military's traditional allies among Islamists.   Others have a more prosaic explanation: with his troops engaged in a morale-sapping war with the Taliban, General Musharraf does not have the resources for a confrontation with the tens of thousands of cadre organisations such as the Lashkar have trained in Punjab.   As with most things, the truth probably contains elements of all these three conflicting propositions. Either way, one thing is clear: Pakistan's establishment is caught between the Islamist anvil and the hammer of U.S. pressure.   How well it weathers the blow will decide the fate of thousands of lives in Pakistan, India, and the West.   Source: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2007/10/20/stories/2007102056381200.htm