To Bangalore, with hate, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

To Bangalore, with hate

By Praveen Swami

Police hunting for the perpetrators of last week's attacks on the Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore are revisiting the 2008 serial bombings in the city.

“HAPPY Vishu, Malayalees and Pravasees,” reads the cheerful red banner running across the web page set up by an enthusiastic resident of Pallikera in Kerala. Photos offer a glimpse of the small town's charms: men with gym-honed biceps, the Bekal fort, and, improbably, photos of two western tourists hugging the billboard of a local celebrity.

Fifteen years ago, a young man named Sarfaraz Nawaz left Pallikera on a journey that would lead, step by step, to the serial bombings in Bangalore in June, 2008. From his story, and that of his associates in south India's Islamist networks, investigators have pieced together a fascinating account of how multiple jihadist cells formed across the region; linked to each other only loosely through leaders, who in turn were connected to Islamist groups in the Gulf and the Lashkar-e-Taiba's commanders in Pakistan.

But the story also demonstrates disturbing gaps in intelligence; gaps that allowed jihadists to mobilise and recruit members, and prepare for attacks. Following last week's bombings at the M. Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore, the police in Karnataka have renewed the search for over a dozen individuals linked to Nawaz's networks who eluded arrest after the June 2008 serial bombings in India's information-technology capital.

Born in 1977, the quiet, scholarly Nawaz joined the Students Islamic Movement of India in 1995. In 1996, he left home to study at the famous Dar-ul-Uloom Nadwat-ul-Ullema seminary in Lucknow. But he found its clerical austerity stifling, and returned to Kochi to study at Accel Computers. Fluent in Malayalam, English, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic, Nawaz began writing regularly in the SIMI-linked Kerala magazine Nerariv and the pro-National Development Front newspaper Thejus.

http://newageislam.com/to-bangalore,-with-hate/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/2741

Maharashtra fugitive emerges as 26/11 suspect, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad,

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

Maharashtra fugitive emerges as 26/11 suspect

By Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI: Mumbai police investigators say they may have succeeded in putting a face to an until now unidentified Indian Lashkar-e-Taiba operative who played a key role in guiding the operations of the team that attacked Mumbai in November 2008.

Based on information provided by India’s intelligence services, as well as interviews with arrested jihadists, police believe the Indian national in the Lashkar’s control room could be Syed Zabiuddin Syed Zakiuddin Ansari, a Lashkar-linked Maharashtra resident, who has been a fugitive since 2005.

The unidentified Indian operative was one of several Lashkar personnel who used Voice-Over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) links to provide orders to the assault team. Last month, The Hindu broke the news that one of the operatives in the control station spoke Mumbai-inflected Hindi, in stark contrast to the Punjabi used by the others.

Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab, the Lashkar terrorist arrested in the course of the assault, said his team had been trained by an Indian national identified as Abu Jindal — the alias also used by the unidentified controller, and a nom de guerre known to have been adopted by Ansari in the past. Police say Ansari played a key role in a plot to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, an operation meant to avenge the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. Ansari is alleged to have been the key leader of an Aurangabad-based Lashkar cell, which received assault rifles and military-grade explosives from Pakistan to stage an attack which would have closely resembled the Mumbai operation.

http://newageislam.com/maharashtra-fugitive-emerges-as-26/11-suspect/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/2440

The Alphabet Soup Of Internal Security, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

The Alphabet Soup Of Internal Security

By Praveen Swami

Ever since the savage Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on Mumbai in November 2008, Indians have been demanding that the government add muscle to the country’s counter-terrorism defences. Speaking at a lecture organised by the Intelligence Bureau on December 23, 2009, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram laid out the government’s response, outlining his vision for the “broad architecture of a new security system that will serve the country today and in the foreseeable future.”

India’s counter-terrorism response, Mr. Chidambaram said, will soon be led by a single agency with control over intelligence, operations and investigation — the National Counter-Terrorism Centre. The NCTC will have access to counter-terrorism intelligence generated by India’s covert services, as well as authority over the National Security Guard and the National Intelligence Agency. Newly-created electronic databases will make up the NCTC backbone, providing it with vast access to real-time information. India’s new intelligence czar, the Director-General of the NCTC, will report to a Minister with just one responsibility — ensuring India’s internal security.

Will the new organisation bring about a radical improvement in India’s anaemic internal security infrastructure? Or will it, as critics contend, prove to be just one more ingredient in the rich alphabet soup of semi-functional organisations kept warm by India’s bourgeoning security budget?

http://newageislam.com/the-alphabet-soup-of-internal-security/war-on-terror/d/2361

Pakistan Willing To Overlook Ties That Bind: Lashkar And The Global Jihad, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

Pakistan Willing To Overlook Ties That Bind: Lashkar And The Global Jihad

BY Praveen Swami

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, it is asserted, is a product of the India-Pakistan contestation in Jammu and Kashmir and has little interest in targeting the West. Both claims are ill-founded.

“Umm al-Qura Maintenance Company, LLC,” read the sign outside the door. Inside the sparse office, named for the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s main training base in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the jihadist group’s top military commander was having an increasingly heated argument.

Muzammil Bhat, who investigators say supervised the training and execution of the November 2008 terror strikes in Mumbai, had arrived in Dubai to meet with a long-standing asset he hoped would facilitate operations inside India. But the former Nizambad commerce student, Abdul Razzak Masood, flatly refused to cooperate, saying India wasn’t the enemy. He demanded that the Lashkar, instead, focus its resources on targeting the United States, principal adversary of the Islamist movement.

Ever since the arrest of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley — charged with carrying out the reconnaissance that enabled the carnage in Mumbai — intelligence services across the world have been revisiting the Masood case. Headley’s case has made clear that the Lashkar possesses transcontinental networks of global reach and lethality. Masood’s story helps to understand the complex ties that bind the Lashkar and the global jihadist movement.

http://newageislam.com/pakistan-willing-to-overlook-ties-that-bind--lashkar-and-the-global-jihad/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/2232

In Kashmir, the price of peace isn’t right, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

In Kashmir, the price of peace isn’t right

By Praveen Swami

Nov 06, 2009

More than three years ago, Kashmiri secessionist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq made a dramatic admission of failure. “Our fight on the political, diplomatic and military fronts […has] not achieved anything other than creating more graveyards,” the Srinagar cleric said during a speech at a January 20, 2006 dinner hosted by the former Pakistan-administered Kashmir Prime Minister, Sardar Attique Khan.

Late last month, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram told journalists that he was committed to breaking the deadlock that has led to so many graves being dug since that historic speech. “We will consult every shade of political opinion,” he promised, “but it will be done quietly, far away from the glare of the media.”

Off-screen, as it were, the dialogue process is progressing. In September, highly-placed Jammu and Kashmir government sources have told The Hindu, the Minister met Mirwaiz Farooq face to face in New Delhi before the cleric left for an Organisation of the Islamic Conference meeting in New York. Neither Mr. Chidambaram nor Mirwaiz Farooq will confirm that he met the other, but authoritative sources said the two men discussed the prospects of the Hurriyat Conference bringing to the table a clear manifesto for talks. Mr. Chidambaram’s quiet diplomacy is not, as many media accounts have suggested, a radical departure from the past.

In November 2005, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Mohammad Yasin Malik was escorted by Intelligence Bureau personnel to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — part of a process of high-level contact that paved the way for talks between the Hurriyat and the Centre the following year. Later, in January 2006, National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan met Farooq Kathwari, a United States-based ethnic Kashmiri magnate with high-level links in Pakistan. Mirwaiz Farooq also arranged a meeting in December 2006 with N.N. Vohra, New Delhi’s former interlocutor on Jammu and Kashmir and now Governor.

http://newageislam.com/in-kashmir,-the-price-of-peace-isn%E2%80%99t-right/current-affairs/d/2059

Are we humans really God's best Creation: A Message from George Carlin, Spiritual Meditations, NewAgeIslam.com

Spiritual Meditations

Are we humans really God's best Creation: A Message from George Carlin

By Praveen Swami

Nov 06, 2009

More than three years ago, Kashmiri secessionist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq made a dramatic admission of failure. “Our fight on the political, diplomatic and military fronts […has] not achieved anything other than creating more graveyards,” the Srinagar cleric said during a speech at a January 20, 2006 dinner hosted by the former Pakistan-administered Kashmir Prime Minister, Sardar Attique Khan.

Late last month, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram told journalists that he was committed to breaking the deadlock that has led to so many graves being dug since that historic speech. “We will consult every shade of political opinion,” he promised, “but it will be done quietly, far away from the glare of the media.”

Off-screen, as it were, the dialogue process is progressing. In September, highly-placed Jammu and Kashmir government sources have told The Hindu, the Minister met Mirwaiz Farooq face to face in New Delhi before the cleric left for an Organisation of the Islamic Conference meeting in New York. Neither Mr. Chidambaram nor Mirwaiz Farooq will confirm that he met the other, but authoritative sources said the two men discussed the prospects of the Hurriyat Conference bringing to the table a clear manifesto for talks. Mr. Chidambaram’s quiet diplomacy is not, as many media accounts have suggested, a radical departure from the past.

http://newageislam.com/are-we-humans-really-god-s-best-creation--a-message-from-george-carlin/spiritual-meditations/d/2100

Double standards in Pakistan’s anti-terror campaign exposed, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Double standards in Pakistan’s anti-terror campaign exposed

By Praveen Swami

5 Aug 2009

Like Maulana Mohammad, Saeed often unleashed stinging attacks on the state of Pakistan. Pakistan’s rulers, he said in a March 2007 speech, “to reassure America and to prove that they are enlightened and moderate, continue to take weird and reckless measures in utter contempt of the safety, security, and well being of their people.”

In several speeches reported on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa website during that year, Saeed expressed support for the Taliban. Pakistan’s rulers were, during one sermon delivered at the Jamia al-Qudsia, urged to “stop fighting the war of the enemies of Islam and Muslims in Waziristan and other places.” He demanded that Pakistan stop “trying to please the Christians and the Jews.”

In another veiled attack on the former President, Pervez Musharraf, Saeed asserted that “Muslim rulers have disappointed the Ummah [worldwide Muslim community]. It is time to wage jihad against them. They are not Muslims. They are the agents of Jews.”

His lieutenant, Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, launched an even more acidic attack on retired General Musharraf at the Madrasa Ayesha, near Rawalpindi. Pakistan, he asserted, “is ruled by Ahmads” a reference to a heterodox sect officially proscribed in Pakistan, and long subject to persecution by Islamists. “Most of the top Generals and bureaucrats,” he continued, “are Ahmadi.”

In order to counter this pernicious influence, Makki called for “jihad and martyrdom to be made part of the curriculum. They should be taught in textbooks at school, college and university levels.”

http://newageislam.com/double-standards-in-pakistan%E2%80%99s-anti-terror-campaign-exposed/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1606

Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Obama’s world and Pakistan’s war on terror

By Praveen Swami

Even as the Second World War raged on, the General Officer-Commanding of Imperial Britain’s Indian Army Eastern Command had begun work on the making of a new nation. Hindu-majority India, Sir Francis Tucker had come to believe, was dangerously mired in “superstition and formalism;” ripe to be seized by “a material philosophy such as Communism.” For this calamity to be averted, he argued, it was “very necessary to place Islam between Russ ian Communism and Hindustan.”

By 1944, Tucker was advocating the need for “a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.” “If such a power could be produced,” he wrote in his memoirs, India’s Partition and Human Debasement, “and if we could orient the Muslim strip from North Africa through Islamia Deserta [sic.], Persia and Afghanistan to the Himalayas, upon such a Muslim power in northern India, then it had some chance of halting the filtration of Russia towards the Persian Gulf.”

Pakistan lived up to Tucker’s hopes, allying itself with the anti-Communist powers during the Cold War and offering its services to the United States of America’s war-by-proxy against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Now, the enemy flies the stark, black-and-white banners of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban but Tucker’s vision of Pakistan continues to influence the geo-strategic imagination of the U.S. policy establishment.

http://newageislam.com/obama%E2%80%99s-world-and-pakistan%E2%80%99s-war-on-terror--/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1450

The making of Indian Mujahideen: A Bomb cult born over tea and biscuits, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

The making of Indian Mujahideen: A Bomb cult born over tea and biscuits

By Praveen Swami

May 6, 2009

The Mujahideen and the Mullah

From 2003, two years after it was proscribed, SIMI began to rebuild its networks. Leaders of its two key groups were to make their way to Islahi’s home for his endorsement.

Expelled from the Jamaat-e-Islami after calling for militant action in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Islahi was seen by many hardliners as the authentic voice of the organisation’s jihadist legacy. His books — among them, a 1991 tract on the Babri Masjid issue which was translated into several languages — provided the foundations for SIMI’s world view.

Islahi doesn’t deny these contacts. “We shared ideas on how Muslims could best be defended in these dark times,” he says, “but some of them had trouble understanding that violence wasn’t the only option.”

Shahid Badr Falahi’s faction first consulted Islahi on their political options in 2006, after they expelled the jihadists at a secret meeting held at Aluva that January. Later, the jihadists also lobbied for his support. In response to Falahi’s action, Safdar Nagori’s pro-terrorism faction had held a meeting in April 2007, where plans for setting up a mujahideen group were firmed up. Nagori, accompanied by Hussain and Qureshi, then travelled to Hyderabad to seek Islahi’s support.

http://newageislam.com/the-making-of-indian-mujahideen--a-bomb-cult-born-over-tea-and-biscuits---/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1386

Will 2009 BE KASHMIR’S YEAR OF DELIVERANCE?, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

Will 2009 BE KASHMIR’S YEAR OF DELIVERANCE?

Politics at the crossroads of past and present

Praveen Swami

Both the Congress and National Conference fought the 1983 elections on communal lines. In alliance with Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq — father of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference chairman, Umar Farooq — Dr. Abdullah gave his campaign an expressly Islamic colour. In one pamphlet, the National Conference equated the Congress with Maharaja Hari Singh, who had “enslaved the Kashmiris.” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used identical tactics to push forward the Congress’ pursuit of power. She campaigned against the Resettlement Act, which would have allowed Muslim Partition refugees to return to Jammu and Kashmir and reclaim their properties. As the author and journalist Tavleen Singh has noted, Mrs. Gandhi sought to persuade Jammu voters that they “were really a part of Hindu India and had, therefore, been neglected by Muslim Kashmir.”

Inflammatory tactics paid off: the National Conference won 46 seats, all in Muslim-majority constituencies, while the Congress picked up 23. However, the Congress continued on with a campaign designed to annihilate Abdullah. His alliance with Mirwaiz Farooq — who was, ironically enough, to die at the hands of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen assassin —was characterised as anti-national. Sikh religious camps held in Jammu and Kashmir were described as state-sponsored training centres for Khalistan terrorists. Much of the propaganda was deceitful — the Congress itself, after all, had sought an alliance with the Mirwaiz — but it prepared the ground for the dismissal of the Abdullah government in July 1984, months after he sponsored a national opposition conclave in Srinagar.

http://newageislam.com/will-2009-be-kashmir%E2%80%99s-year-of-deliverance?--/current-affairs/d/1089

The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s army in India, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s army in India

By Praveen Swami

But the most pressing threat to India comes from Lashkar operatives who will not have to cross the oceans or scale the mountains across the Line of Control. Key leaders of Indian Mujahideen — the terrorist network responsible for a string of urban bombings since 2005 — escaped a nationwide police hunt which led to the arrest of over 80 of its operatives in six states.

If the Indian Mujahideen is indeed planning further strikes, two men are most likely central to its plans: Riyaz Bhatkal, who organised the quasi-industrial production of the ready-to-assemble ammonium nitrate-based ‘u’-shaped bombs used in its bombing campaign, and the man tasked by the Lashkar’s central commanders to link these units together, Mumbai-based SIMI operative Abdul Subhan Usman Qureshi.

Bhatkal—the son of the owner of a leather-tanning factory in Mumbai’s Kurla area — was part of the circle of student Islamists who joined the Students Islamic Movement of India around 1998. Like others in SIMI, Bhatkal believed that the problems confronting India’s Muslims were the consequence of secular modernity — and that the answer lay in fighting to create an Islamic state. Along with his elder brother Iqbal Bhatkal, a qualified cleric who also practised Unani medicine, Bhatkal became a key figure at SIMI’s Mumbai office.

http://newageislam.com/the-lashkar-e-taiba%E2%80%99s-army-in-india--/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/1126

Understanding Pakistan’s response to Mumbai, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Understanding Pakistan’s response to Mumbai

By Praveen Swami

Pakistan’s establishment didn’t listen then — and does not seem to be listening now. Ever since the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s attack on Mumbai, commentators have been struggling to explain just why Pakistan appears so reluctant to act decisively against the perpetrators. Some have focussed on the Lashkar’s patronage by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate; others on the Pakistani military’s hopes of weakening President Asif Ali Zardari. All these explanations have merit but miss a critical element: the slow transformation of the Pakistani state itself into an instrument of the jihadist agenda.

Last month, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalated, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, Sahibzada Noor-ul-Haq Qadri, called a clerical convention to discuss the issue. In their fatwa, the clerics dismissed the charge that the Mumbai attacks were authored in Pakistan, and instead called on their government “to unveil Indian conspiracies against Pakistan.” The fatwa, issued on behalf of the Tahaffuz-e-Namoos-e-Risalat Mahaz — the Front for the Protection of the Prophet’s Honour — made it obligatory on all Pakistani citizens to wage jihad against India should war break out.

Earlier, ISI Directorate chief Lieutenant-General Shuja Pasha hailed jihadist leaders Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah, whose depredations have claimed the lives of thousands of Pakistanis, as “true patriots” for offering to fight India.

http://newageislam.com/understanding-pakistan%E2%80%99s-response-to-mumbai---/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1152

Mapping the Indian Mujahideen, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

Mapping the Indian Mujahideen

By Praveen Swami

Ahmad and Ismail were killed at Balakote in May 1831, while waging an unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire. The two men had set out with 600 followers from Rae Bareilly five years earlier to defend Islam at a time when the Mughal power had, for all practical purposes, given way to British rule.

Like his heroes, Amin found the martyrdom he worshipped: his death was the latest success in a string of nationwide intelligence-led operations targeting the IM. But the arrests of a bewildering succession of its operatives — each proclaimed by police to be “leader”, “top commander” and “mastermind” — have done little to further the understanding of just what the group is about or the threat it still poses.

Mapping the IM isn’t easy: it is more a social network than structured organisation; a label used by a loose coalition of jihadists bound together by ideological affiliation and personal linkages. In this, it is not unlike the al-Qaeda, whose operatives are drawn from the multiple transnational terror groups allied under the banner of the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

http://newageislam.com/mapping-the-indian-mujahideen/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/847

Behind the Batla House shootout: charges that the Jamia Nagar encounter was fake belong in the Wonderland, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

Behind the Batla House shootout: charges that the Jamia Nagar encounter was fake belong in the Wonderland

By Praveen Swami

When inspector Mohan Chand Sharma walked through the door of the flat where he was to die, all he knew was that he was looking for a man with two missing front teeth. Soon after the Gujarat bombings, a Bharuch resident contacted the police to report that the vehicles used as car bombs in Ahmedabad had been parked by his tenant. Gujarat Crime Branch Deputy Commissioner Abhay Chudasma had little to go on, bar one small clue: the mobile phone used by the tenant to communicate with the landlord. It turned out that the phone went silent after the Ahmedabad bombings.

Based on the interrogation of suspects, Gujarat police investigators determined that the cell phone was one of the five used by the perpetrators between July 7 and 26 — the day of the serial bombings. They learned that the perpetrators had observed rigorous communication security procedures, calling these numbers only from public telephones. Between July 16 and July 22, the investigators learned, another of the five Gujarat phones had been used in the Jamia Nagar area. This phone had received just five calls, all from public phones at Jamia Nagar. Then, on July 24, the phone became active again in Ahmedabad.

http://newageislam.com/behind-the-batla-house-shootout--charges-that-the-jamia-nagar-encounter-was-fake-belong-in-the-wonderland--/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/868

Pakistan’s ISI: Between survival and disintegration, Islam and Politics, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Politics

Pakistan’s ISI: Between survival and disintegration

By Praveen Swami

Lt. Gen. Pasha’s predecessor, Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj — a distant relative of the former President Pervez Musharraf — became a focal point of global ire during the year he served as Pakistan’s spymaster. In the U.S., he was seen as the architect of a policy of continued Pakistani support for Islamist terror groups operating in Afghanistan. The U.S. troops responded by initiating cross-border raids into Pakistan, raising the spectre of a full-blown confrontation.

Lt. Gen. Taj’s tenure in the ISI also saw renewed skirmishes along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, where an India-Pakistan ceasefire had held since 2002. Afghanistan and India held the ISI responsible for sponsoring the July 7 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an operation investigators believe Pakistan’s covert service had sub-contracted to the Lashkar-e-Taiba. China, too, is believed to have grown increasingly restive following the ISI’s failure to act against the Taliban after two of its nationals were kidnapped in August.

By appointing Lt. Gen. Pasha, Gen. Kayani has signalled that he intends to rein in the Islamist hardliners in the ISI. But can he bring about a change in the institution’s strategic vision — and does he, in fact, want to do so?

http://newageislam.com/pakistan%E2%80%99s-isi--between-survival-and-disintegration/islam-and-politics/d/897

Making the water boil in Afghanistan, War on Terror, NewAgeIslam.com

War on Terror

Making the water boil in Afghanistan

By Praveen Swami

Islamabad, for its part, backed not a few plots of its own. Its covert services cultivated Islamists exiled by the Daud government, using religion to combat Pashtun nationalism. In July 1975, the ISI financed an attempted coup led by the future mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Even the 1992 mujahideen capture of Kabul did not fundamentally alter India’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan. Internal fighting between Hekmatyar and other mujahideen groups soon led to a situation where New Delhi was backing one or the other faction which found itself in opposition to Pakistan.

It was only with the rise of the Taliban that India, for the first time in the history of Afghanistan, found itself supporting an opposition group — the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud. In 1996-1997, RAW initiated negotiations for the use of the Farkhor military airbase, 130 kilometres south-east of Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe. India operated a small military hospital at Farkhor but also used the base to ship high-altitude warfare supplies to the Northern Alliance, service the group’s Soviet Union-built MI-17 and MI-38 helicopters, and execute electronic intelligence-gathering operations.

http://newageislam.com/making-the-water-boil-in-afghanistan-/war-on-terror/d/184

Deepening divide in Jammu and Kashmir, Islam and Pluralism, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Pluralism

Deepening divide in Jammu and Kashmir

By Praveen Swami

Kot Dhara is perhaps the most inappropriate stage conceivable for an acting-out of the ugly communal war that enveloped Jammu and Kashmir in the wake of the Amarnath shrine board riots. Its residents have long been united by the shared pain of communal fascism. In August 2000, a woman and two small children were among six Hindu civilians butchered by Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists in one of the waves of communal massacres that followed the Kargil war. Less than three years later, terrorists entered the village again, searching for a Muslim who they alleged was an informer. He was away: but the four women and two children at home were beheaded.

The Kot Dhara-type incidents show that the communal fires set off by the shrine board riots are still burning across J&K. Early in July, charges of wilful sacrilege provoked violence north of the Pir Panjal too. Mobs attacked the police in Srinagar after an accidental fire at Jenab Sahib in Soura damaged the shrine’s ceiling. At least one newspaper quoted local residents who claimed to have broken the police guards’ rifles to pieces after finding cards and liquor in the guard room — inflammatory claims the newspaper made no effort to substantiate.

http://newageislam.com/deepening-divide-in-jammu-and-kashmir/islam-and-pluralism/d/248

Babri Masjid Ghosts Emerge from Tale of Bolton Terror Suspect to be Extradited to India, Radical Islamism and Jihad, NewAgeIslam.com

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Babri Masjid Ghosts Emerge from Tale of Bolton Terror Suspect to be Extradited to India

by Praveen Swami

In the wake of the 1992-1993 carnage, ganglords like Mr. Latif came under pressure from communities torn apart by communal violence — and turned to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate for help. In February 1993, Karachi-based ganglord Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar ordered networks to stage reprisal attacks. From a confessional statement made by Dawood Ibrahim's lieutenant Usman Gani Merchant, we have some idea of what was discussed at the meeting, where the decision for ‘revenge' was taken.

Mr. Kaskar's operatives set off 13 improvised explosive devices in Mumbai on March 12, 1993, killing more than 250 people — the largest terrorist attack in India's history, known popularly as the Black Friday bombings. The explosives, grenades and assault rifles used in the course of the revenge operation were provided by the ISI, which hoped to set off a communal war in India.

http://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-and-jihad/praveen-swami/babri-masjid-ghosts-emerge-from-tale-of-bolton-terror-suspect-to-be-extradited-to-india/d/7232

Is Iran On The Nuclear Edge?, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

Is Iran On The Nuclear Edge?

by Praveen Swami

None of this is reason enough to be sanguine. Iran has developed missiles that can deliver a one-tonne warhead, the typical weight of a nuclear weapon, up to 1,000 kilometres — evidence that the idea of possessing one figures in its military imagination. Bruno Tertrais, an eminent French scholar, has also pointed out that just two countries that acquired the capabilities to make nuclear weapons didn't eventually succumb to the temptation of building one.

But will they use one? “Iranians,” Israeli expert Avner Cohen has aruged, “are aware of the catastrophic consequences of such an act.” The Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the Israeli nuclear arsenal, at more than 200 boosted and fusion weapons, is enough to annihilate Iran.

Irrational actors?

In Israel and the U.S., some experts argue that Iran's theocratic leadership simply can't be counted on to be deterred by nuclear weapons — and thus, even the smallest risk that it could acquire one must be eliminated. In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered an apocalyptic speech, arguing that the “establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world.” “The outcomes of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land,” he continued. “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

http://newageislam.com/current-affairs/praveen-swami/is-iran-on-the-nuclear-edge?/d/7263

India's god laws fail the test of reason, Current affairs ,NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

India's god laws fail the test of reason

by Praveen Swami

Like dozens of other intellectuals and artists, Mr. Edamaraku is a victim of India's god laws — colonial-era legislation obliging the state to punish those who offend the faith of others. Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code criminalises the actions of “whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons”. Its sibling, Section 295A, outlaws “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class”. Section 153B goes further, proscribing “any act which is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between different religious, racial, language or regional groups or castes or communities”. Alarmingly, given the sweeping generalities in which these laws are written, truth is not an admissible defence.

http://www.newageislam.com/current-affairs/praveen-swami/india-s-god-laws-fail-the-test-of-reason/d/7254