B.RAMAN
The exasperation of Porter Goss, the Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with Pakistan's role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other remnants of the Al Qaeda, is evident from his remarks on bin Laden during an interview with the "Time" magazine which has been carried by it this week
2. The interview has come in the wake of the arrest of one Hamid Hayat, a US citizen of Pakistani origin, his father and some others by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) earlier this month. They belonged to a 2500-strong Pakistani community living at a place called Lodi near Sacramento in California. Hamid and his father have been charged by the FBI with covering up from the law enforcement agency the fact regarding his having attended a six-months jihadi training at a camp near Rawalpindi during a visit to Pakistan in 2003-04.
3. Hamid was reported to have told the FBI that the camp was being run by the Al Qaeda, but the indications are that it was actually being run by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM--which now calls itself the Jamiat-ul-Ansar), a virulently anti-US Pakistani jihadi terrorist organisation, which is a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People formed in 1998. Its then Amir, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, who was released by the Pakistani authorities after having been detained for some months last year without being prosecuted, was a co-signatory of bin Laden's first fatwa of 1998 against the US.
4.The Pakistani authorities have sought to ridicule the FBI's charge against Hamid by pointing out that it was inconceivable that a jihadi training camp attended by hundreds of trainees, as claimed by him, could be located in or near Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan Army's General Headquarters are located. Coincidentally, Yasin Malik, the head of the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), one of the jihadi terrorist organisations of India's J&K, during a recent visit to Pakistan, revealed that hundreds of members of his organisation had been trained in the late 1980s in a camp at the very same place, which was being run by Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a Kashmiri, who used to be a member of the Government of Nawaz Sharif and is now the Minister for Information in the Cabinet headed by Shaukat Aziz.
5. Amongst the members of the present Cabinet, he is considered as close to President Pervez Musharraf. He has had a long history of association with the HUM and Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and had obtained for the HUM a large plot of land near Rawalpindi for starting a jihadi training camp.
6. Embarrassed by the disclosure of Yasin Malik, Sheikh Rashid strongly denied running any such training camp and maintained that he was only running a humanitarian camp for the refugees from J&K. Yasin Malik also subsequently retracted from his statement and accused the media of misreporting him. He asserted that what he had said was that Rashid was looking after the refugees. He denied having said anything about jihadi training organised by Sheikh Rashid.
7. The loud-mouthed Sheikh Rashid, who has many enemies in Pakistan because of his proximity to Musharraf and his habit of frequently dropping the name of Musharraf, found himself contradicted not only by Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), during whose Government the jihadi training camp was started, but also by Gen. (retd) Mirza Aslam Beg, who was the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) at that time, Brig. (retd) Nasurullah Babar, who was the Interior Minister in Benazir Bhutto's Cabinet, a former officer of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Hashim Quereshi, a co-founder of the JKLF, who had hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft to Lahore in Pakistan in 1971.
8. While all of them asserted that it was correct that Sheikh Rashid was running a jihadi terrorist training camp, the PPP revealed that the ISI, without the clearance of Benazir, had got transferred hundreds of acres of land in the suburban areas of Islamabad for starting his training camp. Hashim Quereshi, who corroborated the allegations against Sheikh Rashid during a media interview, was asked whether any other member of the present Cabinet had been associated with jihadi terrorism. He replied: "It would be easier to answer who are the members of the present Cabinet who were not associated with terrorism?"
9. From a study of the various statements emanating from these persons, it is clear that the camp at which Hamid attended a jihadi training course was probably the same as the one run by Sheikh Rashid on behalf of the HUM in a large plot of land got transferred to him by the ISI. However, the name of the camp as given by Hamid in his statement to the FBI slightly differs from the name as given by the critics of Sheikh Rashid. According to the FBI, Hamid had given the name as Tamal, whereas the critics of Sheikh Rashid have given the name as Tarnol.
10. While the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon have been very generous in their praise of the co-operation received from Gen.Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment in the so-called war against terrorism, their positive perception of the Pakistani Army's role is not shared by their officers at the field level--- either by the American Army officers deployed in the Afghan territory across the Pakistani border or by the US diplomats in Kabul or by the US intelligence officers posted in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.
11. The American Army officers have been particularly outspoken in giving expression to their dissatisfaction over the effectiveness of the combing operations conducted by the Pakistani Security Forces in the Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Pakistan Army's claim that the Security Forces had fought vigorously against the foreign terrorists, who had taken shelter in this area, losing during their operations nearly 230 officers and men has not been satisfactorily corroborated. There are grounds to suspect the casualty figures given by the Pakistan Army.
12. During the last few months, the Pakistan Army has practically suspended its combing operations in the area, claiming that most of the foreign terrorists operating from this area have been killed or captured or driven into Afghanistan. This claim is not accepted by the US Army officers who have been demanding that the combing operations be resumed.
13. The Pakistan Army has also not taken any action to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Taliban, and other Taliban leaders who have been operating from the Pashtun areas of Balochistan. Since the end of winter, these remnants, with the help of the survivors of the Al Qaeda operating from the Waziristan area, have stepped up their acts of violence in Afghanistan. There have also been one or two acts of suicide terrorism, involving Arabs, suspected to be of the Al Qaeda.
14. The differences between the US officials in Afghanistan and their Pakistani counterparts came to a head last week when Geo TV, a private TV channel of Pakistan, interviewed a leader of the Taliban, who assured the viewers that both Mulla Omar and bin Laden were alive and well. In an interview to an Afghan TV station, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan who is under orders of transfer to Iraq, asserted that Mulla Omar and other Taliban leaders were operating from Pakistan. He asked: "If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country which has nuclear bombs and a lot of security and military forces not find them?" The Pakistan Foreign Office strongly protested against Khalilzad's TV interview and described his remarks as irresponsible.
15. It is against this background that one has to see the comments of Porter Goss, which apparently reflect the exasperation of his own officers in the field. India has always been saying that Musharraf has not taken any action to dismantle the training infrastructure of the pro-Al Qaeda Pakistani jihadi terrorist organisations in Pakistani territory. While this was not disputed by the US, it was at the same time not exercising adequate pressure on Musharraf to dismantle these camps because the US apparently felt that these were being used only to train jihadi terrorists to operate in J&K. The reported revelation by Hamid that these camps were also being used to train jihadis from the Pakistani community in the US for operating in US territory has come as a shock to the US agencies.
16.In his interview to the "Time", Goss made the following points: It was unlikely bin Laden would be brought to justice until "we strengthen all the links" in the chain in the US-led hunt for terror suspects. "In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links . When you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community." Asked if he had a good idea where bin Laden is, he said: "I have an excellent idea of where he is."
17. He did not mention Pakistan by name, but it was apparent that he was talking of Pakistan. On the Afghan side of the border, it is the 16,000-strong US troops, which have the responsibility for the hunt for bin Laden. If he was in Afghan territory, there was no reason why Goss should have talked of sanctuaries in sovereign states, weak links etc. If bin Laden was in Iranian territory, there was no reason why he should have refrained from naming Iran since the US relations with Iran are already at the rock-bottom.
18. His reference to the need for working in unconventional ways in a conventional world is intriguing. Is he talking of the need for the US Special Forces operating clandestinely on their own in Pakistani territory in order to kill or capture bin Laden, with or without the concurrence of Musharraf? Is the State Department refusing to agree to this? If he has such an excellent idea of where bin Laden is, why is the CIA not using the Predator aircraft to kill him?
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai.
Friday, April 10, 2009
MUSHARRAF & THE US: THE FATAL ATTRACTION ( 27-8-2005)
B.RAMAN
The London explosions of July 7,2005, have once again focussed the spotlight on Pakistan and its President Gen.Pervez Musharraf.
2. Even before July 7, American and European media was replete with reports voicing concern over the fact that Pakistan was continuing to be the main hub of jihadi terrorism in the world despite the seeming crack-downs against terrorist and extremist organisations ordered by Musharraf from time to time since 9/11.
3. Amongst the developments, which triggered off these media reports were the following:
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A report submitted by the security experts of the European Union (EU) to the European Parliament in October last year, which highlighted the large number of Pakistanis or persons of Pakistani origin detained for questioning by the law-enforcing agencies of different EU countries after the Madrid blasts of March,2004. The fact that none of them could be prosecuted for want of sufficient evidence of their involvement in acts of terrorism did not mean that the agencies’ suspicion against them was unwarranted.
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The arrest at Lodhi near Sacramento in California in June this year of a US resident of Pakistani origin (Hamid Hayat), who reportedly admitted during his interrogation that during a visit to Pakistan he had undergone jihadi training in a camp near Rawalpindi. The camp is suspected to have been run by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a founding-member of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Its then Amir, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, was also a co-signatory of a fatwa issued by the Al Qaeda and other members of the IIF in 1998 calling for attacks against US and Israeli nationals and interests.
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Three facts ascertained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shocked the American authorities and large sections of their public.
Firstly, Hamid Hayat reportedly stated during the interrogation that during the training the trainees practiced firing on a portrait of President Bush. Thus, a training camp in which the trainees were motivated to hate Bush to such an extent as to create in them an urge to kill him was being run right under the nose of the military-intelligence establishment.
Secondly, a Pakistani cleric, hailing from a well-known anti-US madrasa of Karachi, had managed to obtain a resident visa for working as a cleric in a Lodhi mosque. What shocked American observers most was that openly this cleric was condemning the Al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism and participating in inter-faith meetings against terrorism, but covertly he was supporting the activities of the HUM and the Al Qaeda and motivating young Muslims in the US to go to Pakistan for training.
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Thirdly, the report carried by the “Herald”, the prestigious monthly journal of Karachi published by the “Dawn” group of publications, giving details of the revival of jihadi terrorist training camps in the Manshera area of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). After the publication of this report, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) started harassing Mr.Amir Mir, the journalist who discovered the revival of the training camps and wrote on it. This brought to public memory two past instances of similar harassment of journalists in 2002. In the first instance, the then Editor of the “News” of Islamabad was harassed for carrying details of the interrogation of Omar Sheikh, the mastermind behind the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, in defiance of a directive from the ISI not to publish them. The Editor, who was sacked by the publishers under military pressure, went away to the US fearing a threat to his life from the ISI. In the second instance, a journalist of a periodical was illegally detained and allegedly tortured following the publication by his journal of an investigative report by him, which showed that, contrary to the denials of the Pakistani authorities, Dawood Ibrahim, the Indian trans-national mafia leader , wanted for his involvement in acts of terrorism and other offences in India, was living in Karachi under the protection of the Pakistani agencies. This report created considerable embarrassment for Musharraf, who has been consistently denying Dawood’s presence in Pakistan. The present harassment of the journalist of the “Herald’ for writing the report about the revival of training camps in Manshera has led to a number of journalists’ organisations of the West such as the Reporters Without Borders of France addressing communications to Musharraf, expressing their concern over the dangers of the ISI getting this journalist killed by criminal elements and then projecting his death as due to a traffic accident.
4. The suspicion that Musharraf has been double-dealing with the international community on the question of continued Pakistani support to the jihadi terrorists and the involvement of the Pakistani military establishment in the proliferation activities of Dr.A.Q.Khan, the nuclear scientist, has been further strengthened by some recent developments.
5. The first of these developments is the upsurge in attacks on US and Afghan troops in Afghan territory by Pakistan-based remnants of the Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Heckmatyar’s Hizbe Islami since the end of the last winter in March,2005. The stepped-up activities of these elements from Pakistani territory have already cost the lives of 45 US troops and nearly 700 members of the Afghan Army, Police and other Government supporters.
6. Since the US launched its military strikes against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban on October 7,2001, this is the highest casualty rate sustained by the US forces in Afghanistan. Suicide terrorism, which had practically disappeared from Afghan territory for nearly three years, has made its appearance once again. For the first time since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7,2001, Afghanistan witnessed violent anti-US riots instigated by the Pakistan-based Hizbut Tehrir in protest against the alleged desecration of the Holy Koran by the US guards at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Fifteen persons were killed in the riots.
7.Who is responsible for this disturbing upsurge in terrorism and other acts of political violence in Afghan territory? If they are from Pakistan as alleged by the Afghan authorities and even by the junior and middle level US officers fighting and bleeding in Afghanistan, who do not agree with the projection of Musharraf by Washington as a stalwart ally against terrorism, how are they able to move back and forth across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border despite Musharraf’s claims of having effectively sealed the border to make such infiltration difficult? How has there been an increase in their ranks since the beginning of this year? After 9/11, Musharraf effectively controlled acts of jihadi terrorism directed against the US from Pakistani territory, while taking no action against terrorism directed against India. Now, he is not controlling---or at least not able to control----even terrorism directed against Afghan and US troops. What is this change of policy, which could ultimately cost him the support of the West, due to?
8. These are questions crying out for an answer as more and more US and Afghan troops die in Afghanistan at the hands of jihadi terrorists operating from sanctuaries in Pakistan. But, the Bush Administration is evading addressing these questions lest its examination prove its policy of trusting and lionising Musharraf to have been seriously wrong.
9. The Bush Administration in the US and the Government headed by Mr.Tony Blair in the UK share a common trait----a dogged refusal to admit their errors. We saw it and continue to see it in their refusal to admit that their unwarranted over-demonisation of Saddam Hussein on the basis of fabricated and incorrect intelligence has been responsible for the current mess in Iraq. And we have been seeing it in their refusal to admit that their policy of trusting Musharraf and closing their eyes to his charade of acting against jihadi terrorism and Islamic extremists could create for them a similar mess in Afghanistan.
10. It is widely known in Pakistan that:
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The ISI helped the survivors of the Taliban, including its Amir Mullah Mohammad Omar, find sanctuaries in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Balochistan and Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and keep their fighting capability intact.
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It helped Gulbuddin Heckmatyar and his followers in the Hizbe Islami to re-enter Pakistan from Iran, where they had taken sanctuary before 9/11, and facilitated an understanding between the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami to operate jointly in Afghan territory.
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While claiming to have effectively sealed the border during the US’ Operation Tora Bora against Osama bin Laden and other survivors of the Al Qaeda towards the end of 2001, the Pakistan Army quietly let them take shelter in Pakistani territory.
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The ISI and other Pakistani intelligence agencies rounded up only those operatives of the Al Qaeda about whose presence in Pakistani territory, the US agencies had independently procured precise intelligence and avoided action against those, including bin Laden and his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, about whose location the US agencies were unable to get such precise intelligence.
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The Pakistani Army and intelligence agencies allowed many of the survivors of the Al Qaeda and the Pakistani jihadi organisations, which are members of the IIF, to go to Iraq in 2003 to start a new front of the jihad against the US. Now that the jihad in Iraq has become self-sustaining as a result of the induction of a large number of Saudis, Syrians, Kuwaitis and others, those who went from Pakistan have been sent back to Pakistan on the orders of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Al Qaeda in Iraq, in order to re-activate the original front of the global jihad against the US. The Pakistani agencies closed their eyes to the return of these jihad-hardened terrorists to Afghanistan through Pakistani territory.
11. There has been a certain method in the manner in which Musharraf has repeatedly hoodwinked the US and other countries of the West---whether in matters relating to jihadi terrorism from Pakistani territory or nuclear proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
12. First, totally deny any wrong-doing by Pakistan so long as he feels the international community has no strong evidence against him. Second, admit the wrong-doing, wholly or partly, when he feels the US has got hold of some evidence against Pakistan, but blame the wrong-doing on others--- the fundamentalist and jihadi organisations in the case of terrorism and A.Q.Khan in the case of nuclear proliferation--- and deny any complicity of the Pakistani Army. Third, launch a flurry of actions against the wrong-doers as projected by him.Four, slow down and ultimately call off the actions when he feels the US and international attention is diverted elsewhere. Five, re-start the charade when he finds that their attention is back on him and Pakistan.
13.We have been seeing the re-start of the charade on the jihad in Afghanistan since May,2005. Till May 2005, Musharraf and his officers were indignantly denying allegations emanating from US diplomats and military officers in Afghanistan about the activities of the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the Hizbe Islami from sanctuaries in Pakistani territory. After the deaths of a growing number of US soldiers at the hands of the terrorists operating from Pakistan, they have been grudgingly admitting that infiltrations into Afghanistan have been taking place despite the claimed sealing of the border by the Pakistani troops. At the same time, they have been blaming the fundamentalist coalition called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which is in power in the NWFP and is part of the ruling coalition in Balochistan, for these infiltrations and promised to act against them.
14. In media interviews, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the leader of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI), which is an important constituent of the MMA, has strongly denied any MMA role in the recent infiltrations into Afghanistan and the subsequent upsurge in attacks on the US and Afghan security forces. He has alleged that it was the Army itself, which has facilitated these infiltrations and that it is now trying to put the blame on the fundamentalists.
15. The “News”, the prestigious daily, in its issue of August 8,2005, has quoted the Maulana as saying as follows: “ If people are being sent to Afghanistan, then it must be seen who is transporting people to Afghanistan via black road after crossing military checkposts. Is any common civilian capable of doing so? Similarly, if people are taken to military camps, then who takes them to the camps in Manshera and elsewhere? Neither the tribal elders nor the common people can do that. Whom such allegations (against the fundamentalists) are meant to deceive---Washington, the West or our own nation?”
16. The same day, the prestigious “Daily Times” of Lahore quoted the Maulana as saying as follows: “They (the Army) must also give the nation the identities of the men being moved from Waziristan to militant camps in Manshera. This is hypocrisy. The rulers are not only trying to deceive the US and the West, but also hoodwinking the entire nation. We ask the rulers to reveal the identities of the people being transported to Afghanistan from Waziristan in private vehicles. Reveal who is supervising their trouble-free entry into Afghanistan and reasons for their infiltration. We will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jihadis or crack down on them. We can’t afford to be hypocritical anymore.” The Maulana warned that if pressured he would reveal more facts that would open a Pandora’s Box. Musharraf has maintained a discreet silence on the allegations against the Army.
17. Thus, everybody in Pakistan is agreed that there has been large-scale infiltration of jihadi terrorist elements into Afghanistan from Pakistan since May,2005, and that they are responsible for the current upsurge in attacks on the US and Afghan forces. The only difference is as to who is responsible for this infiltration and why. Musharraf and the Army blame the MMA Government in the NWFP for facilitating this infiltration. MMA leaders strongly deny this and accuse the Army of facilitating this infiltration and putting the blame on the fundamentalists.
18. Why should Musharraf covertly facilitate this infiltration and the attacks on the US and Afghan forces, while openly condemning it----in a double-dealing and an act of dissimulation, which bring to mind the act of the cleric in the Lodhi mosque in California, who was active in joining inter-faith groups campaigning against terrorism as one of their staunch allies and at the same time, was covertly helping the Al Qaeda and the HUM?
19. Two reasons are cited by well-informed sources in Pakistan for Musharraf’s duplicity. First, to save his own life and to prevent these pro-bin Laden jihadis from creating trouble for him in Pakistan, they say that he has made a secret deal with them. Under this deal, he would allow them to operate freely in Afghanistan so long as they do not operate in Pakistani territory. They point out that there have been no more attempts by the pro-bin Laden jihadis and their supporters in the Army to kill Musharraf since the two failed attempts in December, 2003. There have been no major terrorist attacks attributable to the Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistani territory since the middle of last year, when they unsuccessfully tried to kill Mr.Shaukat Aziz, the then Finance Minister and presently the Prime Minister.
20. The second reason cited is the concern in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment over the implications of a long stay of the US and other NATO forces in Afghan territory to Pakistan’s strategic objective of using Afghanistan as a rear base for its activities against India.
21. It would be logical to ask: By following such a deceitful policy, Musharraf runs the risk of losing the hard-earned American political, economic and military support to his regime. Would it not be suicidal for him to do so? That is Musharraf in a nutshell. Not hesitating to indulge in deceitful actions if they were in his and Pakistan’s interests, so long as there is no danger of his being caught in his duplicity.
22. This duplicity, which became evident in the two seeming crack-downs on jihadi terrorists, extremists and madrasas ordered by him after 9/11, has again become evident in the implementation of the third crack-down ordered by him after the investigation by the London Police into the July 7 explosions determined that three of the four terrorists involved in the explosions were British citizens of Pakistani origin, who had visited Pakistan in the months before the explosions. One of them had stayed in the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) at Muridke, near Lahore, and met a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), who was allegedly involved in a terrorist strike on a church congregation at Islamabad in March,2002, in which the wife of an officer of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US and their daughter were killed.
23. A literal army of Western journalists descended on Pakistan not only to investigate the activities in Pakistan of these three perpetrators of the July 7 blasts, but also to enquire into the effectiveness of the implementation of the two crack-downs ordered by Musharraf in 2002 with great fanfare, which won him praise from the Bush administration as the US’ stalwart ally in the so-called war against terrorism.
24. What did they find?
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That the jihadi terrorist organisations ostensibly banned by Musharraf in 2002 continue to function under different names and run terrorist training camps.
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That the LET, one of the banned jihadi organisations, was co-ordinating the activities of the IIF on behalf of the Al Qaeda and had opened secret cells in a number of Western countries.
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That the leaders and cadres of these organisations arrested in 2002 on the orders of Musharraf or placed under house arrest, have been released on the ground that there was no evidence of their involvement in acts of terrorism in Pakistani territory.
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That the freezing of the bank accounts of the banned organisations under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 has not affected the flow of money into new accounts opened by them under different names.
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That there is a free flow of heroin money from Afghanistan into Pakistan adding to the coffers of the Al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations.
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That no action has been taken by the Pakistani agencies to trace bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and to prevent the flow of money and volunteers to Iraq.
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That only a half of the about 12,000 madrasas had complied with an order issued by Musharraf in 2002 to register themselves with the Government under the Societies Act. The remaining had defied his orders and refused to register themselves. No action had been taken against them.
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That the decision to launch a jihad in Southern Thailand in January,2004, was taken at a secret meeting of the jihadi leaders held in Lahore and that 1,200 Muslims from Southern Thailand, known locally as Pattanis, are studying in the Pakistani madrasas.
25. In 1993, the Pakistani agencies, reportedly on a tip-off from the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation, had found a brother of Hambali of the Jemaah Islamiya (JI) and some other Indonesians and Malaysians studying in a madrasa of the LET in Karachi. They arrested them and deported them to their countries.
26. Thereafter, Musharraf had ostensibly issued an order for a strict control over the admission of foreign students into the madrasas. Their admission was made conditional on their governments issuing a no objection certificate. Despite this, nearly 6,500 foreign students were studying in the madrasas as on July 7,2005. Of these, 2,500 were the children of the Afghan refugees staying in the NWFP, Balochistan and the FATA. About 1,400 had joined the madrasas legally after obtaining a study visa from the Pakistani diplomatic mission in their country for the specific purpose of joining a madrasa. The remaining 2,600 had joined the madrasas illegally. That is, they arrived in Pakistan on tourist visas, joined a madrasa and overstayed their stay or got their stay regularised with the help of their contacts in the Pakistani jihadi organisations.
27. Apparently embarrassed by these disclosures, Musharraf admitted during a talk with foreign media personnel that the two crack-downs ordered by him in 2002 had not been satisfactorily implemented because of fears of a backlash from the religious elements at a time when he feared a military confrontation with India. He assured them that the third crack-down ordered by him after the London blasts would be implemented seriously.
28. What are the details of the crack-down ordered by him after the London blasts and how are they being implemented?
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He has ordered the police to arrest the leaders and cadres of all organisations banned in 2002 under whatever name they may be operating. Nearly a month after the issue of the orders, only about 200 cadres have been arrested. None of the leaders has been arrested,
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He has ordered all unregistered madrasas to register themselves before December 31,2005. At the same time, Government spokesmen have assured the officials of the madrasas that the purpose of the registration is to maintain a correct data-base of the madrasas in the country and that the registration would be voluntary. Non-registration would not entail any penal consequences.
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Organisations registered under the Societies Act are required to submit annual audited statements of their accounts, indicating details of income and expenditure and identifying the sources of funding. If the Government is not satisfied with the auditing, it could order an independent audit. The madrasas have been assured that they need not identify the sources of their funding and that the provision for an independent audit would not apply to them.
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He has ordered the expulsion of only the 1,400 foreign students who have legally enrolled themselves in the madrasas. The 2,500 children of Afghan refugees have been exempted from the expulsion orders. They are the recruiting reserves of the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami. The expulsion orders have not been made applicable to the 2,600 foreign students, who have enrolled themselves illegally on the ground that the Government does not have data regarding them. The illegal enrollments have been mostly in the madrasas controlled by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam, the LET, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Jammat-ul-Fuqra (JUF) and other fundamentalist and jihadi terrorist organisations. They would thus be spared of expulsions. Those, who have legally enrolled themselves, are mostly in madrasas run by genuine educational foundations, who have already registered themselves and are not linked to fundamentalist and jihadi organisations. They have been regularly feeding to the Government details of foreign students studying in them.
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As he did in 2002, Musharraf has once again announced that the madrasas would be required to include general subjects like science, computer literacy, Urdu, English etc in their curricula and that the extra expenditure in this regard would be met by the Government. To do this effectively, the Government has to either amend the Societies Act, which deals with only the submission of annual accounts and not the curricula, or bring forward a separate law to regulate the accounts and curricula of the madrasas. He has so far shown no inclination to do so.
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The Governments of all Islamic countries have been informed of the identities of their students being expelled from the madrasas, but no such intimation has so far been sent to the Governments of non-Islamic countries.
29.According to Mr.Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, Minister of the Interior (“News” of August 8,2005), of the 1405 legally enrolled foreign students from 56 countries in the madrasas, 42 are from the US, 23 from the UK, over 20 from France, four from Canada and others are from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other countries.
30. Since Musharraf does not admit the presence of jihadi terrorist training centres in Pakistani territory-----whether directed against India or the West or other countries--- the post-July 7 orders issued by him do not relate to them.
31. Since the beginning of 2004, the jihadi terrorist organisations, which are members of the IIF, have modified their training methods. While those meant for operations against India, are being trained in large numbers in their camps in the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, those meant for operations in South-East Asia, West European countries and the US are being trained in small cells of not more than four or five each in the safe houses of these organisations----with members of each cell not knowing the identities of the members of the other cells.
32. According to reliable sources, 20 volunteers from the UK divided into five cells, 15 from Italy divided into four cells and about 10 from France divided into two cells were thus trained last year in the safe houses of the HUM, the LET, the JEM and the JUF and sent back to their respective countries for organising terrorist strikes at a time and against a target of their choosing. These numbers do not include those trained by Al-Zarqawi’s set-up in Iraq.
A.Q.KHAN
33. The methods followed by Musharraf for hoodwinking the international community (to use the phrase of Maulana Fazlur Rahman) have again become evident in his recent admission in an interview to the Kyodo news agency of Japan that Dr.A.Q.Khan had supplied centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea.
34. Musharraf had admitted the role of Khan in the supply of centrifuges and other material to Libya only after the British and American officials, acting jointly, had intercepted off the Italian coast a consignment of centrifuges manufactured by a Malaysian company at the instance of Khan. After Libya made a clean breast of the project, Musharraf came out with more details.
35. He admitted the role of Khan in the supply of centrifuges to Iran only after Teheran admitted this to inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Vienna, who found traces of enriched uranium in some of the centrifuges in the Iranian plant. The Iranian officials strongly denied US allegations that the presence of these traces indicated that Iran has already embarked on uranium enrichment. They contended that the traces seemed to have come from the plant of the suppliers---meaning Pakistan—from whom it had bought them second-hand.
36. Musharraf and other Pakistani authorities had for long been denying any nuclear or missile supply relationship with North Korea, even though Mrs.Benazir Bhutto under whose prime ministership it started had been talking about it.
37. Musharraf himself admitted the missile supply relationship in a press interview before a visit to South Korea two years ago, but he continued to deny any nuclear supply relationship with North Korea till now. He has now admitted that Khan did supply centrifuges to North Korea, but has insisted that Khan would have had no role in helping North Korea acquire a military nuclear capability since his expertise was confined to uranium enrichment.
38. Why did Musharraf find himself constrained to make this admission now? For many months, the IAEA had been demanding that Pakistan should hand over to it some of its old centrifuges from the Kahuta plant in order to enable it to compare them with the centrifuges in the Iranian plant to see whether the Iranian contention was correct.
39. Musharraf resisted this demand till March last, when Ms.Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, visited Pakistan. After the visit, Musharraf agreed to hand over some of the centrifuges to the IAEA. Media reports from Vienna indicate that the examination of the centrifuges handed over by Pakistan indicate that the Iranian contention was correct.
40. In the 1990s, Khan had got the centrifuges of the 1970 vintage in Kahuta replaced by new ones. Of the replaced old centrifuges, he supplied some to Iran and some to North Korea and allegedly some to Iraq of Saddam Hussein .
41. After the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, there were reports from reliable sources in Pakistan that before the US occupation, Khan had taken a plane to Damascus and airlifted from there to Pakistan some nuclear-related “material”, which had been moved by road from Baghdad to Damacus.
42. What were those material? According to some sources, those were second-hand centrifuges from Kahuta and documents relating to their assembling. It was said that the Saddam Hussein Government had not been able to install them and that they were lying in a godown. To prevent their falling into American hands, Khan managed to have them brought back to Pakistan via Damascus.
43. It is likely that the IAEA might ask Pakistan how many centrifuges were replaced in Kahuta and where did the replaced centrifuges go? Any detailed enquiry would have brought out not only their supply to Iran and North Korea, but also to Iraq.
44. In the hope of pre-empting a detailed enquiry, Musharraf has admitted the supply of some of the centrifuges to North Korea. He feels that while he could limit the damages, if any, to Pakistan’s relations with the US by admitting the supplies to North Korea, he may not be able to do so if the supply to Iraq is exposed. He is frantically trying to limit the enquiries to North Korea.
45. Unless the US takes Khan into its custody and interrogates him outside Pakistan, it might not be able to establish Khan’s relationship with Iraq and the details of the complicity of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment in the nuclear trade of Khan.
46. Annexed is an article written by me on April 8,2003, on the Pakistan-North Korea Nexus.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India.
ANNEXURE
PAKISTAN-NORTH KOREA NEXUS (My article of April 8,2003)
Pakistan's arms supply relationship with North Korea dates back to 1971 when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister under the late General Yahya Khan, visited Pyongyang and sought North Korean arms supplies to strengthen the Pakistani armed forces in the face of a looming war with India.
Pakistan then did not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. The visit led to the signing of an agreement on September 18, 1971, 10 weeks before the outbreak of the war with India, for the supply of North Korea-made conventional weapons to Pakistan.
Under another agreement signed the same day, the two countries agreed to set up mutual consular relations, which were upgraded to full-fledged diplomatic relations on November 9, 1972.
Under the September agreement, Pakistan received from North Korea, in return for payment in US dollars, many shipments of items such as rocket launchers, ammunition, etc. In the 1980s, Pakistan also acted as an intermediary in facilitating arms supply agreements concluded by Pyongyang with Libya and Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, North Korea became the principal supplier of weapons to Iran, which was the target of an arms embargo imposed by the Western countries.
To escape detection by Western intelligence agencies, North Korean arms shipments meant for Iran used to be received by sea at Karachi and from there transported in Pakistani trucks to Iran across Balochistan. Amongst the supplies made by North Korea to Iran via Karachi were more than 100 Scud-B (known as the Hwasong 5 in North Korea) ballistic missiles and equipment for the assembly, maintenance and ultimate production of these missiles on Iranian territory.
In this transaction, Pakistan played a double game. On one hand, the then ruling military regime of the late Zia-ul-Haq collaborated with the US Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi intelligence in destabilisation operations directed at the Sunni Balochis living on the Iranian side of the border. At the same time, it clandestinely allowed the transport by road of North Korean arms and ammunition meant for use by the Iranian army against the Iraqis. Pakistani army officers were also sent to Libya to help train Libyan army officers in the use and maintenance of North Korean weaponry.
During the Zia regime, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and its North Korean counterpart collaborated closely for the clandestine acquisition of nuclear- and missile-related equipment and technology from erstwhile West Germany and other Western countries. Since North Korea did not have either a presence or funds and other capability to indulge in clandestine procurement from the West, it gave lists of its requirements to the ISI, which procured them and passed them on.
This co-operation between the two countries, the foundation for which was laid by Bhutto, was strengthened during the two tenures of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96). It was during this time that Pakistan failed in its efforts to develop indigenous missile production capability (the Hatf series) and sought Chinese and North Korean supplies of missiles as well as technology for their production in Pakistan.
In her second tenure, Benazir Bhutto visited Pyongyang during which the scope of the arms supply agreement concluded when her father was foreign minister was expanded to include co-operation in the nuclear and missile fields -- including the training of Khan Research Laboratories' scientists and engineers in North Korea, the training of North Korean scientists and engineers at the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta, and the supply of No-Dong missiles and related technology to Pakistan.
Earlier, during Nawaz Sharief's first tenure as prime minister (1990-93), Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, then director-general of the ISI, visited Pyongyang to sign a secret agreement with North Korea's intelligence organisation for joint production, through reverse engineering, of the US-made, shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and their batteries. Some of the missiles in the Pakistani army's stock were given to North Korean intelligence for this purpose. Iranian intelligence agreed to fund the project.
It is not known whether this project succeeded in producing an imitation of the Stingers and their batteries. The ISI was particularly interested in the batteries because it was unable to use a large number of the Stinger missiles in its stocks since the life period of the batteries supplied by the US before 1988 for use of the missiles against the Soviets in Afghanistan had expired.
Throughout the 1990s, whoever was at the helm in Islamabad, the trilateral co-operation involving Pakistan, Iran and North Korea in the development and production of the Scud-C (called Hwasong 6 in North Korea) and the No-Dong missiles continued without interruption, despite Tehran's anger against Pakistan for backing the Taliban and failing to prevent the periodic massacre of Pakistani Shias and Iranian nationals by the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba and its militant wing, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
In 1992, when Nawaz Sharief was prime minister, a team of Pakistani scientists and engineers had visited North Korea's missile development centre, reportedly for joint examination of some technical problems encountered by the Koreans in the development of the No-Dong. The same year saw a visit by Kim Yong-nam, then North Korea's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, to Syria, Iran and Pakistan in July-August. Pakistani and Iranian scientists and engineers visited North Korea in May 1993 to witness the launching of one No-Dong and three Scud missiles (model not known).
Benazir's visit to Beijing and Pyongyang in December 1993 was followed by the visits of a number of North Korean personalities to Pakistan in 1994-95 to discuss bilateral nuclear and missile co-operation. Important amongst these were:
In April 1994, Pak Chung-kuk, deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly, visited Iran and Pakistan with a team of officials from the North Korean foreign ministry and the nuclear and missile establishment.
In September the same year, Choe Hui-chong, chairman of the State Commission of Science and Technology, visited Pakistan at the head of a team of North Korean nuclear and missile experts.
In November 1995, a delegation of North Korean military officers and nuclear and missile experts headed by Choe Kwang, vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission, minister of the People's Armed Forces and marshal of the Korean People's Army, visited Pakistan. The delegation met senior officials of the armed forces and visited Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishments, including KRL. The team included senior officials of the fourth machine industry bureau of the second economic committee and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation (also known as the North Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation).
During the visit, KRL and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation signed an agreement to supply Pakistan with No-Dong missiles as well as fuel tanks and rocket engines. The agreement also provided for stationing North Korean missile experts in KRL to train their Pakistani counterparts in the use and maintenance of the missiles supplied by North Korea and for the supply and development of mobile erector launchers for the missiles.
These visits contributed to the speeding up of Pakistan's missile programme and culminated in KRL firing the Ghauri missile on April 6, 1998. Pakistan projected Ghauri as its own, indigenously developed missile.
Despite this, the US state department imposed a two-year sanction against KRL and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation on April 24, 1998, which expired on April 23, 2000.
KRL had earlier been the subject of similar sanctions imposed by the state department in August 1993 for its clandestine procurement of M-11 missiles from China.
The sanctions imposed on March 24, 2003, are the third against KRL. These sanctions have had no effect either on Pakistan or North Korea.
KRL and the North Korean corporation are State-owned entities, run and managed by officers of the armed forces of the two countries. Pakistan used a US-supplied aircraft from its air force for transporting the missiles. Missiles and other weapons sent by North Korea to Iran in the 1980s transited through Pakistan, escorted by Pakistani troops. Pakistan and North Korea have a joint project for reverse-engineering US-made Stingers.
North Korean scientists witnessed Pakistan's Chagai nuclear tests in May 1998. Pakistan has been helping North Korea in the development of its uranium enrichment facility. The two countries have been training each other's nuclear and missile scientists in their respective establishments. In return for North Korea's assistance, Pakistan diverted to it wheat purchased from the US and Australia, paying for the grain from its huge dollar reserves built up after 9/11, thereby enabling Pyongyang to withstand the economic boycott imposed by the West.
To hoodwink US intelligence, Pakistan transported some of the Chinese and North Korean missiles by road via the Karakoram Highway. Pakistan's diplomatic mission in Pyongyang is generally headed and staffed by serving or retired army officers, who had previously served in the ISI's clandestine nuclear and missile procurement set-up. The latest instance in this regard is Major General (retd) Fazle Ghafoor.
For the US to pretend, despite all this, that Pakistan's repeated violations of nuclear and missile-related regulations are the misdeeds of errant individual entities for which the State cannot be held responsible shows the extent to which it is prepared to close its eyes to what Pakistan has been doing.
If there is one country in the world which has been systematically violating all regulations relating to nuclear and missile proliferation and from which there is a real danger of leakage of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies to pan-Islamic terrorists, it is Pakistan.
US's double standards in this matter are evident from the alacrity and vigour with which it has acted against Iraq despite the lack of credible evidence against it and the care with which it protects the regime in Pakistan, despite all the evidence available against it.
The London explosions of July 7,2005, have once again focussed the spotlight on Pakistan and its President Gen.Pervez Musharraf.
2. Even before July 7, American and European media was replete with reports voicing concern over the fact that Pakistan was continuing to be the main hub of jihadi terrorism in the world despite the seeming crack-downs against terrorist and extremist organisations ordered by Musharraf from time to time since 9/11.
3. Amongst the developments, which triggered off these media reports were the following:
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A report submitted by the security experts of the European Union (EU) to the European Parliament in October last year, which highlighted the large number of Pakistanis or persons of Pakistani origin detained for questioning by the law-enforcing agencies of different EU countries after the Madrid blasts of March,2004. The fact that none of them could be prosecuted for want of sufficient evidence of their involvement in acts of terrorism did not mean that the agencies’ suspicion against them was unwarranted.
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The arrest at Lodhi near Sacramento in California in June this year of a US resident of Pakistani origin (Hamid Hayat), who reportedly admitted during his interrogation that during a visit to Pakistan he had undergone jihadi training in a camp near Rawalpindi. The camp is suspected to have been run by the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a founding-member of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Its then Amir, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, was also a co-signatory of a fatwa issued by the Al Qaeda and other members of the IIF in 1998 calling for attacks against US and Israeli nationals and interests.
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Three facts ascertained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shocked the American authorities and large sections of their public.
Firstly, Hamid Hayat reportedly stated during the interrogation that during the training the trainees practiced firing on a portrait of President Bush. Thus, a training camp in which the trainees were motivated to hate Bush to such an extent as to create in them an urge to kill him was being run right under the nose of the military-intelligence establishment.
Secondly, a Pakistani cleric, hailing from a well-known anti-US madrasa of Karachi, had managed to obtain a resident visa for working as a cleric in a Lodhi mosque. What shocked American observers most was that openly this cleric was condemning the Al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism and participating in inter-faith meetings against terrorism, but covertly he was supporting the activities of the HUM and the Al Qaeda and motivating young Muslims in the US to go to Pakistan for training.
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Thirdly, the report carried by the “Herald”, the prestigious monthly journal of Karachi published by the “Dawn” group of publications, giving details of the revival of jihadi terrorist training camps in the Manshera area of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). After the publication of this report, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) started harassing Mr.Amir Mir, the journalist who discovered the revival of the training camps and wrote on it. This brought to public memory two past instances of similar harassment of journalists in 2002. In the first instance, the then Editor of the “News” of Islamabad was harassed for carrying details of the interrogation of Omar Sheikh, the mastermind behind the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, in defiance of a directive from the ISI not to publish them. The Editor, who was sacked by the publishers under military pressure, went away to the US fearing a threat to his life from the ISI. In the second instance, a journalist of a periodical was illegally detained and allegedly tortured following the publication by his journal of an investigative report by him, which showed that, contrary to the denials of the Pakistani authorities, Dawood Ibrahim, the Indian trans-national mafia leader , wanted for his involvement in acts of terrorism and other offences in India, was living in Karachi under the protection of the Pakistani agencies. This report created considerable embarrassment for Musharraf, who has been consistently denying Dawood’s presence in Pakistan. The present harassment of the journalist of the “Herald’ for writing the report about the revival of training camps in Manshera has led to a number of journalists’ organisations of the West such as the Reporters Without Borders of France addressing communications to Musharraf, expressing their concern over the dangers of the ISI getting this journalist killed by criminal elements and then projecting his death as due to a traffic accident.
4. The suspicion that Musharraf has been double-dealing with the international community on the question of continued Pakistani support to the jihadi terrorists and the involvement of the Pakistani military establishment in the proliferation activities of Dr.A.Q.Khan, the nuclear scientist, has been further strengthened by some recent developments.
5. The first of these developments is the upsurge in attacks on US and Afghan troops in Afghan territory by Pakistan-based remnants of the Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Heckmatyar’s Hizbe Islami since the end of the last winter in March,2005. The stepped-up activities of these elements from Pakistani territory have already cost the lives of 45 US troops and nearly 700 members of the Afghan Army, Police and other Government supporters.
6. Since the US launched its military strikes against the Al Qaeda and the Taliban on October 7,2001, this is the highest casualty rate sustained by the US forces in Afghanistan. Suicide terrorism, which had practically disappeared from Afghan territory for nearly three years, has made its appearance once again. For the first time since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7,2001, Afghanistan witnessed violent anti-US riots instigated by the Pakistan-based Hizbut Tehrir in protest against the alleged desecration of the Holy Koran by the US guards at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Fifteen persons were killed in the riots.
7.Who is responsible for this disturbing upsurge in terrorism and other acts of political violence in Afghan territory? If they are from Pakistan as alleged by the Afghan authorities and even by the junior and middle level US officers fighting and bleeding in Afghanistan, who do not agree with the projection of Musharraf by Washington as a stalwart ally against terrorism, how are they able to move back and forth across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border despite Musharraf’s claims of having effectively sealed the border to make such infiltration difficult? How has there been an increase in their ranks since the beginning of this year? After 9/11, Musharraf effectively controlled acts of jihadi terrorism directed against the US from Pakistani territory, while taking no action against terrorism directed against India. Now, he is not controlling---or at least not able to control----even terrorism directed against Afghan and US troops. What is this change of policy, which could ultimately cost him the support of the West, due to?
8. These are questions crying out for an answer as more and more US and Afghan troops die in Afghanistan at the hands of jihadi terrorists operating from sanctuaries in Pakistan. But, the Bush Administration is evading addressing these questions lest its examination prove its policy of trusting and lionising Musharraf to have been seriously wrong.
9. The Bush Administration in the US and the Government headed by Mr.Tony Blair in the UK share a common trait----a dogged refusal to admit their errors. We saw it and continue to see it in their refusal to admit that their unwarranted over-demonisation of Saddam Hussein on the basis of fabricated and incorrect intelligence has been responsible for the current mess in Iraq. And we have been seeing it in their refusal to admit that their policy of trusting Musharraf and closing their eyes to his charade of acting against jihadi terrorism and Islamic extremists could create for them a similar mess in Afghanistan.
10. It is widely known in Pakistan that:
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The ISI helped the survivors of the Taliban, including its Amir Mullah Mohammad Omar, find sanctuaries in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Balochistan and Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and keep their fighting capability intact.
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It helped Gulbuddin Heckmatyar and his followers in the Hizbe Islami to re-enter Pakistan from Iran, where they had taken sanctuary before 9/11, and facilitated an understanding between the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami to operate jointly in Afghan territory.
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While claiming to have effectively sealed the border during the US’ Operation Tora Bora against Osama bin Laden and other survivors of the Al Qaeda towards the end of 2001, the Pakistan Army quietly let them take shelter in Pakistani territory.
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The ISI and other Pakistani intelligence agencies rounded up only those operatives of the Al Qaeda about whose presence in Pakistani territory, the US agencies had independently procured precise intelligence and avoided action against those, including bin Laden and his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, about whose location the US agencies were unable to get such precise intelligence.
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The Pakistani Army and intelligence agencies allowed many of the survivors of the Al Qaeda and the Pakistani jihadi organisations, which are members of the IIF, to go to Iraq in 2003 to start a new front of the jihad against the US. Now that the jihad in Iraq has become self-sustaining as a result of the induction of a large number of Saudis, Syrians, Kuwaitis and others, those who went from Pakistan have been sent back to Pakistan on the orders of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Al Qaeda in Iraq, in order to re-activate the original front of the global jihad against the US. The Pakistani agencies closed their eyes to the return of these jihad-hardened terrorists to Afghanistan through Pakistani territory.
11. There has been a certain method in the manner in which Musharraf has repeatedly hoodwinked the US and other countries of the West---whether in matters relating to jihadi terrorism from Pakistani territory or nuclear proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
12. First, totally deny any wrong-doing by Pakistan so long as he feels the international community has no strong evidence against him. Second, admit the wrong-doing, wholly or partly, when he feels the US has got hold of some evidence against Pakistan, but blame the wrong-doing on others--- the fundamentalist and jihadi organisations in the case of terrorism and A.Q.Khan in the case of nuclear proliferation--- and deny any complicity of the Pakistani Army. Third, launch a flurry of actions against the wrong-doers as projected by him.Four, slow down and ultimately call off the actions when he feels the US and international attention is diverted elsewhere. Five, re-start the charade when he finds that their attention is back on him and Pakistan.
13.We have been seeing the re-start of the charade on the jihad in Afghanistan since May,2005. Till May 2005, Musharraf and his officers were indignantly denying allegations emanating from US diplomats and military officers in Afghanistan about the activities of the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the Hizbe Islami from sanctuaries in Pakistani territory. After the deaths of a growing number of US soldiers at the hands of the terrorists operating from Pakistan, they have been grudgingly admitting that infiltrations into Afghanistan have been taking place despite the claimed sealing of the border by the Pakistani troops. At the same time, they have been blaming the fundamentalist coalition called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which is in power in the NWFP and is part of the ruling coalition in Balochistan, for these infiltrations and promised to act against them.
14. In media interviews, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the leader of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI), which is an important constituent of the MMA, has strongly denied any MMA role in the recent infiltrations into Afghanistan and the subsequent upsurge in attacks on the US and Afghan security forces. He has alleged that it was the Army itself, which has facilitated these infiltrations and that it is now trying to put the blame on the fundamentalists.
15. The “News”, the prestigious daily, in its issue of August 8,2005, has quoted the Maulana as saying as follows: “ If people are being sent to Afghanistan, then it must be seen who is transporting people to Afghanistan via black road after crossing military checkposts. Is any common civilian capable of doing so? Similarly, if people are taken to military camps, then who takes them to the camps in Manshera and elsewhere? Neither the tribal elders nor the common people can do that. Whom such allegations (against the fundamentalists) are meant to deceive---Washington, the West or our own nation?”
16. The same day, the prestigious “Daily Times” of Lahore quoted the Maulana as saying as follows: “They (the Army) must also give the nation the identities of the men being moved from Waziristan to militant camps in Manshera. This is hypocrisy. The rulers are not only trying to deceive the US and the West, but also hoodwinking the entire nation. We ask the rulers to reveal the identities of the people being transported to Afghanistan from Waziristan in private vehicles. Reveal who is supervising their trouble-free entry into Afghanistan and reasons for their infiltration. We will have to openly tell the world whether we want to support jihadis or crack down on them. We can’t afford to be hypocritical anymore.” The Maulana warned that if pressured he would reveal more facts that would open a Pandora’s Box. Musharraf has maintained a discreet silence on the allegations against the Army.
17. Thus, everybody in Pakistan is agreed that there has been large-scale infiltration of jihadi terrorist elements into Afghanistan from Pakistan since May,2005, and that they are responsible for the current upsurge in attacks on the US and Afghan forces. The only difference is as to who is responsible for this infiltration and why. Musharraf and the Army blame the MMA Government in the NWFP for facilitating this infiltration. MMA leaders strongly deny this and accuse the Army of facilitating this infiltration and putting the blame on the fundamentalists.
18. Why should Musharraf covertly facilitate this infiltration and the attacks on the US and Afghan forces, while openly condemning it----in a double-dealing and an act of dissimulation, which bring to mind the act of the cleric in the Lodhi mosque in California, who was active in joining inter-faith groups campaigning against terrorism as one of their staunch allies and at the same time, was covertly helping the Al Qaeda and the HUM?
19. Two reasons are cited by well-informed sources in Pakistan for Musharraf’s duplicity. First, to save his own life and to prevent these pro-bin Laden jihadis from creating trouble for him in Pakistan, they say that he has made a secret deal with them. Under this deal, he would allow them to operate freely in Afghanistan so long as they do not operate in Pakistani territory. They point out that there have been no more attempts by the pro-bin Laden jihadis and their supporters in the Army to kill Musharraf since the two failed attempts in December, 2003. There have been no major terrorist attacks attributable to the Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistani territory since the middle of last year, when they unsuccessfully tried to kill Mr.Shaukat Aziz, the then Finance Minister and presently the Prime Minister.
20. The second reason cited is the concern in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment over the implications of a long stay of the US and other NATO forces in Afghan territory to Pakistan’s strategic objective of using Afghanistan as a rear base for its activities against India.
21. It would be logical to ask: By following such a deceitful policy, Musharraf runs the risk of losing the hard-earned American political, economic and military support to his regime. Would it not be suicidal for him to do so? That is Musharraf in a nutshell. Not hesitating to indulge in deceitful actions if they were in his and Pakistan’s interests, so long as there is no danger of his being caught in his duplicity.
22. This duplicity, which became evident in the two seeming crack-downs on jihadi terrorists, extremists and madrasas ordered by him after 9/11, has again become evident in the implementation of the third crack-down ordered by him after the investigation by the London Police into the July 7 explosions determined that three of the four terrorists involved in the explosions were British citizens of Pakistani origin, who had visited Pakistan in the months before the explosions. One of them had stayed in the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) at Muridke, near Lahore, and met a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), who was allegedly involved in a terrorist strike on a church congregation at Islamabad in March,2002, in which the wife of an officer of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the US and their daughter were killed.
23. A literal army of Western journalists descended on Pakistan not only to investigate the activities in Pakistan of these three perpetrators of the July 7 blasts, but also to enquire into the effectiveness of the implementation of the two crack-downs ordered by Musharraf in 2002 with great fanfare, which won him praise from the Bush administration as the US’ stalwart ally in the so-called war against terrorism.
24. What did they find?
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That the jihadi terrorist organisations ostensibly banned by Musharraf in 2002 continue to function under different names and run terrorist training camps.
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That the LET, one of the banned jihadi organisations, was co-ordinating the activities of the IIF on behalf of the Al Qaeda and had opened secret cells in a number of Western countries.
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That the leaders and cadres of these organisations arrested in 2002 on the orders of Musharraf or placed under house arrest, have been released on the ground that there was no evidence of their involvement in acts of terrorism in Pakistani territory.
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That the freezing of the bank accounts of the banned organisations under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 has not affected the flow of money into new accounts opened by them under different names.
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That there is a free flow of heroin money from Afghanistan into Pakistan adding to the coffers of the Al Qaeda and other terrorist organisations.
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That no action has been taken by the Pakistani agencies to trace bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and to prevent the flow of money and volunteers to Iraq.
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That only a half of the about 12,000 madrasas had complied with an order issued by Musharraf in 2002 to register themselves with the Government under the Societies Act. The remaining had defied his orders and refused to register themselves. No action had been taken against them.
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That the decision to launch a jihad in Southern Thailand in January,2004, was taken at a secret meeting of the jihadi leaders held in Lahore and that 1,200 Muslims from Southern Thailand, known locally as Pattanis, are studying in the Pakistani madrasas.
25. In 1993, the Pakistani agencies, reportedly on a tip-off from the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation, had found a brother of Hambali of the Jemaah Islamiya (JI) and some other Indonesians and Malaysians studying in a madrasa of the LET in Karachi. They arrested them and deported them to their countries.
26. Thereafter, Musharraf had ostensibly issued an order for a strict control over the admission of foreign students into the madrasas. Their admission was made conditional on their governments issuing a no objection certificate. Despite this, nearly 6,500 foreign students were studying in the madrasas as on July 7,2005. Of these, 2,500 were the children of the Afghan refugees staying in the NWFP, Balochistan and the FATA. About 1,400 had joined the madrasas legally after obtaining a study visa from the Pakistani diplomatic mission in their country for the specific purpose of joining a madrasa. The remaining 2,600 had joined the madrasas illegally. That is, they arrived in Pakistan on tourist visas, joined a madrasa and overstayed their stay or got their stay regularised with the help of their contacts in the Pakistani jihadi organisations.
27. Apparently embarrassed by these disclosures, Musharraf admitted during a talk with foreign media personnel that the two crack-downs ordered by him in 2002 had not been satisfactorily implemented because of fears of a backlash from the religious elements at a time when he feared a military confrontation with India. He assured them that the third crack-down ordered by him after the London blasts would be implemented seriously.
28. What are the details of the crack-down ordered by him after the London blasts and how are they being implemented?
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He has ordered the police to arrest the leaders and cadres of all organisations banned in 2002 under whatever name they may be operating. Nearly a month after the issue of the orders, only about 200 cadres have been arrested. None of the leaders has been arrested,
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He has ordered all unregistered madrasas to register themselves before December 31,2005. At the same time, Government spokesmen have assured the officials of the madrasas that the purpose of the registration is to maintain a correct data-base of the madrasas in the country and that the registration would be voluntary. Non-registration would not entail any penal consequences.
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Organisations registered under the Societies Act are required to submit annual audited statements of their accounts, indicating details of income and expenditure and identifying the sources of funding. If the Government is not satisfied with the auditing, it could order an independent audit. The madrasas have been assured that they need not identify the sources of their funding and that the provision for an independent audit would not apply to them.
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He has ordered the expulsion of only the 1,400 foreign students who have legally enrolled themselves in the madrasas. The 2,500 children of Afghan refugees have been exempted from the expulsion orders. They are the recruiting reserves of the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami. The expulsion orders have not been made applicable to the 2,600 foreign students, who have enrolled themselves illegally on the ground that the Government does not have data regarding them. The illegal enrollments have been mostly in the madrasas controlled by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam, the LET, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Jammat-ul-Fuqra (JUF) and other fundamentalist and jihadi terrorist organisations. They would thus be spared of expulsions. Those, who have legally enrolled themselves, are mostly in madrasas run by genuine educational foundations, who have already registered themselves and are not linked to fundamentalist and jihadi organisations. They have been regularly feeding to the Government details of foreign students studying in them.
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As he did in 2002, Musharraf has once again announced that the madrasas would be required to include general subjects like science, computer literacy, Urdu, English etc in their curricula and that the extra expenditure in this regard would be met by the Government. To do this effectively, the Government has to either amend the Societies Act, which deals with only the submission of annual accounts and not the curricula, or bring forward a separate law to regulate the accounts and curricula of the madrasas. He has so far shown no inclination to do so.
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The Governments of all Islamic countries have been informed of the identities of their students being expelled from the madrasas, but no such intimation has so far been sent to the Governments of non-Islamic countries.
29.According to Mr.Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, Minister of the Interior (“News” of August 8,2005), of the 1405 legally enrolled foreign students from 56 countries in the madrasas, 42 are from the US, 23 from the UK, over 20 from France, four from Canada and others are from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and other countries.
30. Since Musharraf does not admit the presence of jihadi terrorist training centres in Pakistani territory-----whether directed against India or the West or other countries--- the post-July 7 orders issued by him do not relate to them.
31. Since the beginning of 2004, the jihadi terrorist organisations, which are members of the IIF, have modified their training methods. While those meant for operations against India, are being trained in large numbers in their camps in the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) and the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, those meant for operations in South-East Asia, West European countries and the US are being trained in small cells of not more than four or five each in the safe houses of these organisations----with members of each cell not knowing the identities of the members of the other cells.
32. According to reliable sources, 20 volunteers from the UK divided into five cells, 15 from Italy divided into four cells and about 10 from France divided into two cells were thus trained last year in the safe houses of the HUM, the LET, the JEM and the JUF and sent back to their respective countries for organising terrorist strikes at a time and against a target of their choosing. These numbers do not include those trained by Al-Zarqawi’s set-up in Iraq.
A.Q.KHAN
33. The methods followed by Musharraf for hoodwinking the international community (to use the phrase of Maulana Fazlur Rahman) have again become evident in his recent admission in an interview to the Kyodo news agency of Japan that Dr.A.Q.Khan had supplied centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea.
34. Musharraf had admitted the role of Khan in the supply of centrifuges and other material to Libya only after the British and American officials, acting jointly, had intercepted off the Italian coast a consignment of centrifuges manufactured by a Malaysian company at the instance of Khan. After Libya made a clean breast of the project, Musharraf came out with more details.
35. He admitted the role of Khan in the supply of centrifuges to Iran only after Teheran admitted this to inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Vienna, who found traces of enriched uranium in some of the centrifuges in the Iranian plant. The Iranian officials strongly denied US allegations that the presence of these traces indicated that Iran has already embarked on uranium enrichment. They contended that the traces seemed to have come from the plant of the suppliers---meaning Pakistan—from whom it had bought them second-hand.
36. Musharraf and other Pakistani authorities had for long been denying any nuclear or missile supply relationship with North Korea, even though Mrs.Benazir Bhutto under whose prime ministership it started had been talking about it.
37. Musharraf himself admitted the missile supply relationship in a press interview before a visit to South Korea two years ago, but he continued to deny any nuclear supply relationship with North Korea till now. He has now admitted that Khan did supply centrifuges to North Korea, but has insisted that Khan would have had no role in helping North Korea acquire a military nuclear capability since his expertise was confined to uranium enrichment.
38. Why did Musharraf find himself constrained to make this admission now? For many months, the IAEA had been demanding that Pakistan should hand over to it some of its old centrifuges from the Kahuta plant in order to enable it to compare them with the centrifuges in the Iranian plant to see whether the Iranian contention was correct.
39. Musharraf resisted this demand till March last, when Ms.Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, visited Pakistan. After the visit, Musharraf agreed to hand over some of the centrifuges to the IAEA. Media reports from Vienna indicate that the examination of the centrifuges handed over by Pakistan indicate that the Iranian contention was correct.
40. In the 1990s, Khan had got the centrifuges of the 1970 vintage in Kahuta replaced by new ones. Of the replaced old centrifuges, he supplied some to Iran and some to North Korea and allegedly some to Iraq of Saddam Hussein .
41. After the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, there were reports from reliable sources in Pakistan that before the US occupation, Khan had taken a plane to Damascus and airlifted from there to Pakistan some nuclear-related “material”, which had been moved by road from Baghdad to Damacus.
42. What were those material? According to some sources, those were second-hand centrifuges from Kahuta and documents relating to their assembling. It was said that the Saddam Hussein Government had not been able to install them and that they were lying in a godown. To prevent their falling into American hands, Khan managed to have them brought back to Pakistan via Damascus.
43. It is likely that the IAEA might ask Pakistan how many centrifuges were replaced in Kahuta and where did the replaced centrifuges go? Any detailed enquiry would have brought out not only their supply to Iran and North Korea, but also to Iraq.
44. In the hope of pre-empting a detailed enquiry, Musharraf has admitted the supply of some of the centrifuges to North Korea. He feels that while he could limit the damages, if any, to Pakistan’s relations with the US by admitting the supplies to North Korea, he may not be able to do so if the supply to Iraq is exposed. He is frantically trying to limit the enquiries to North Korea.
45. Unless the US takes Khan into its custody and interrogates him outside Pakistan, it might not be able to establish Khan’s relationship with Iraq and the details of the complicity of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment in the nuclear trade of Khan.
46. Annexed is an article written by me on April 8,2003, on the Pakistan-North Korea Nexus.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India.
ANNEXURE
PAKISTAN-NORTH KOREA NEXUS (My article of April 8,2003)
Pakistan's arms supply relationship with North Korea dates back to 1971 when the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then foreign minister under the late General Yahya Khan, visited Pyongyang and sought North Korean arms supplies to strengthen the Pakistani armed forces in the face of a looming war with India.
Pakistan then did not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. The visit led to the signing of an agreement on September 18, 1971, 10 weeks before the outbreak of the war with India, for the supply of North Korea-made conventional weapons to Pakistan.
Under another agreement signed the same day, the two countries agreed to set up mutual consular relations, which were upgraded to full-fledged diplomatic relations on November 9, 1972.
Under the September agreement, Pakistan received from North Korea, in return for payment in US dollars, many shipments of items such as rocket launchers, ammunition, etc. In the 1980s, Pakistan also acted as an intermediary in facilitating arms supply agreements concluded by Pyongyang with Libya and Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, North Korea became the principal supplier of weapons to Iran, which was the target of an arms embargo imposed by the Western countries.
To escape detection by Western intelligence agencies, North Korean arms shipments meant for Iran used to be received by sea at Karachi and from there transported in Pakistani trucks to Iran across Balochistan. Amongst the supplies made by North Korea to Iran via Karachi were more than 100 Scud-B (known as the Hwasong 5 in North Korea) ballistic missiles and equipment for the assembly, maintenance and ultimate production of these missiles on Iranian territory.
In this transaction, Pakistan played a double game. On one hand, the then ruling military regime of the late Zia-ul-Haq collaborated with the US Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi intelligence in destabilisation operations directed at the Sunni Balochis living on the Iranian side of the border. At the same time, it clandestinely allowed the transport by road of North Korean arms and ammunition meant for use by the Iranian army against the Iraqis. Pakistani army officers were also sent to Libya to help train Libyan army officers in the use and maintenance of North Korean weaponry.
During the Zia regime, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and its North Korean counterpart collaborated closely for the clandestine acquisition of nuclear- and missile-related equipment and technology from erstwhile West Germany and other Western countries. Since North Korea did not have either a presence or funds and other capability to indulge in clandestine procurement from the West, it gave lists of its requirements to the ISI, which procured them and passed them on.
This co-operation between the two countries, the foundation for which was laid by Bhutto, was strengthened during the two tenures of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister (1988-90 and 1993-96). It was during this time that Pakistan failed in its efforts to develop indigenous missile production capability (the Hatf series) and sought Chinese and North Korean supplies of missiles as well as technology for their production in Pakistan.
In her second tenure, Benazir Bhutto visited Pyongyang during which the scope of the arms supply agreement concluded when her father was foreign minister was expanded to include co-operation in the nuclear and missile fields -- including the training of Khan Research Laboratories' scientists and engineers in North Korea, the training of North Korean scientists and engineers at the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant at Kahuta, and the supply of No-Dong missiles and related technology to Pakistan.
Earlier, during Nawaz Sharief's first tenure as prime minister (1990-93), Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, then director-general of the ISI, visited Pyongyang to sign a secret agreement with North Korea's intelligence organisation for joint production, through reverse engineering, of the US-made, shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and their batteries. Some of the missiles in the Pakistani army's stock were given to North Korean intelligence for this purpose. Iranian intelligence agreed to fund the project.
It is not known whether this project succeeded in producing an imitation of the Stingers and their batteries. The ISI was particularly interested in the batteries because it was unable to use a large number of the Stinger missiles in its stocks since the life period of the batteries supplied by the US before 1988 for use of the missiles against the Soviets in Afghanistan had expired.
Throughout the 1990s, whoever was at the helm in Islamabad, the trilateral co-operation involving Pakistan, Iran and North Korea in the development and production of the Scud-C (called Hwasong 6 in North Korea) and the No-Dong missiles continued without interruption, despite Tehran's anger against Pakistan for backing the Taliban and failing to prevent the periodic massacre of Pakistani Shias and Iranian nationals by the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba and its militant wing, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
In 1992, when Nawaz Sharief was prime minister, a team of Pakistani scientists and engineers had visited North Korea's missile development centre, reportedly for joint examination of some technical problems encountered by the Koreans in the development of the No-Dong. The same year saw a visit by Kim Yong-nam, then North Korea's foreign minister and deputy prime minister, to Syria, Iran and Pakistan in July-August. Pakistani and Iranian scientists and engineers visited North Korea in May 1993 to witness the launching of one No-Dong and three Scud missiles (model not known).
Benazir's visit to Beijing and Pyongyang in December 1993 was followed by the visits of a number of North Korean personalities to Pakistan in 1994-95 to discuss bilateral nuclear and missile co-operation. Important amongst these were:
In April 1994, Pak Chung-kuk, deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly, visited Iran and Pakistan with a team of officials from the North Korean foreign ministry and the nuclear and missile establishment.
In September the same year, Choe Hui-chong, chairman of the State Commission of Science and Technology, visited Pakistan at the head of a team of North Korean nuclear and missile experts.
In November 1995, a delegation of North Korean military officers and nuclear and missile experts headed by Choe Kwang, vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission, minister of the People's Armed Forces and marshal of the Korean People's Army, visited Pakistan. The delegation met senior officials of the armed forces and visited Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishments, including KRL. The team included senior officials of the fourth machine industry bureau of the second economic committee and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation (also known as the North Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation).
During the visit, KRL and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation signed an agreement to supply Pakistan with No-Dong missiles as well as fuel tanks and rocket engines. The agreement also provided for stationing North Korean missile experts in KRL to train their Pakistani counterparts in the use and maintenance of the missiles supplied by North Korea and for the supply and development of mobile erector launchers for the missiles.
These visits contributed to the speeding up of Pakistan's missile programme and culminated in KRL firing the Ghauri missile on April 6, 1998. Pakistan projected Ghauri as its own, indigenously developed missile.
Despite this, the US state department imposed a two-year sanction against KRL and the Changgwang Sinyong Corporation on April 24, 1998, which expired on April 23, 2000.
KRL had earlier been the subject of similar sanctions imposed by the state department in August 1993 for its clandestine procurement of M-11 missiles from China.
The sanctions imposed on March 24, 2003, are the third against KRL. These sanctions have had no effect either on Pakistan or North Korea.
KRL and the North Korean corporation are State-owned entities, run and managed by officers of the armed forces of the two countries. Pakistan used a US-supplied aircraft from its air force for transporting the missiles. Missiles and other weapons sent by North Korea to Iran in the 1980s transited through Pakistan, escorted by Pakistani troops. Pakistan and North Korea have a joint project for reverse-engineering US-made Stingers.
North Korean scientists witnessed Pakistan's Chagai nuclear tests in May 1998. Pakistan has been helping North Korea in the development of its uranium enrichment facility. The two countries have been training each other's nuclear and missile scientists in their respective establishments. In return for North Korea's assistance, Pakistan diverted to it wheat purchased from the US and Australia, paying for the grain from its huge dollar reserves built up after 9/11, thereby enabling Pyongyang to withstand the economic boycott imposed by the West.
To hoodwink US intelligence, Pakistan transported some of the Chinese and North Korean missiles by road via the Karakoram Highway. Pakistan's diplomatic mission in Pyongyang is generally headed and staffed by serving or retired army officers, who had previously served in the ISI's clandestine nuclear and missile procurement set-up. The latest instance in this regard is Major General (retd) Fazle Ghafoor.
For the US to pretend, despite all this, that Pakistan's repeated violations of nuclear and missile-related regulations are the misdeeds of errant individual entities for which the State cannot be held responsible shows the extent to which it is prepared to close its eyes to what Pakistan has been doing.
If there is one country in the world which has been systematically violating all regulations relating to nuclear and missile proliferation and from which there is a real danger of leakage of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies to pan-Islamic terrorists, it is Pakistan.
US's double standards in this matter are evident from the alacrity and vigour with which it has acted against Iraq despite the lack of credible evidence against it and the care with which it protects the regime in Pakistan, despite all the evidence available against it.
THE INSIDERS (19-1-2004)
B.RAMAN
Nearly a month after the two failed attempts to kill Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf in the highly-guarded cantonment town of Rawalpindi, the Pakistani investigating agencies seem to be still groping in the dark in their attempts to unravel the conspiracy to kill him.
2. Contrary to the repeated claims of different Ministers of the Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali Cabinet that the two cases have almost been solved and that the agencies are in the process of rounding up the conspirators, independent reports from usually well-informed sources indicate that apart from establishing the identities of the two suicide bombers of the December 25 attempt and detaining a junior level police officer of the Islamabad Special Branch, the agencies have not been able to make any other forward movement so far.
3. Raids have been conducted in many madrasas and hospitals run by madrasas and Islamic charity organisations in many cities and smaller town of Punjab and Sindh, over a hundred suspects rounded up and many police officers of Islamabad and Rawalpindi with different levels of seniority have been questioned, but without any useful lead so far.
4. Surprisingly---and intriguingly-- there are no reports of any officers of the presidential security set-up and the armed forces being questioned in order to determine any complicity from their ranks. The Government has also played down the fact that one of the two suicide bombers----Muhammad Jameel, resident of Androot, Police Station Torarh, in Poonch district, Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK)--- belonged to the Sudan tribe of the POK, the same tribe to which Gen.Mohammad Aziz Khan, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and Maj.Gen. (retd) Mohammad Anwar Khan, the President of the POK, belong.
5. According to a retired senior officer of the Pakistani Police, who continues to be in touch with his former department, some associates of Jameel who were rounded up by the Police from his village in the POK told the police during their interrogation that one of the reasons why Jameel volunteered for this suicide mission was his anger over Musharraf's decision to retain the post of the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), thereby depriving Gen. Aziz of an opportunity to become the COAS.
6. There are many Sudans serving in the Pakistan Army in different ranks, but Gen.Aziz was the first Kashmiri to have risen to such a senior position. According to Jameel's associates, he allegedly blamed Musharraf for preventing a Kashmiri from becoming the COAS for the first time in the history of the Pakistani army.
7. During their searches of hospitals run by the madrasas and Islamic charity organisations, the investigating agencies have reportedly been looking for any patient who might have recently been admitted for the treatment of any unnatural injuries---such as those caused by gunshot or explosives. It is not quite clear whether their search for an injured person is in connection with the attempts on Musharraf's life or the recent incidents of violence earlier this month in the south Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the army has launched another drive---unsuccessful so far---to round up the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. During this drive, four military personnel were killed when the local tribals fired mortar shells at their post.
8. The investigations into the attempts on the life of Musharraf have so far been directed against the two factions of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami, which was found to have been responsible for the earlier attempt to kill Musharraf at Karachi in April, 2002, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Sunni extremist organisation, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Hizbul Tehrir (HT).
9. Initially, the investigating agencies described Jameel as a member of the JEM, but they are now projecting him as a member of the HUJI. The HUJI, headed by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, has close links with HT and the two have some following in the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the lower and middle levels.
10. In 1995, the Pakistani authorities arrested a group of army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi on a charge of plotting, in association with the HUJI, to have Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, and Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then COAS, assassinated, seize power and set up an Islamic State ruled according to the Sharia. Maj.Gen.Abbasi, who used to be a close personal friend of Musharraf, had served in the late 1980s as the ISI station chief in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi. He was expelled by the Government of India on a charge of indulging in espionage.
11. After his return to Islamabad, he was posted by Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, who was the COAS during the first tenure of Nawaz Sharif as the Prime Minister, to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). While posted there, he tried to organise a raid, without the approval of the COAS, on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area, but it failed disastrously.
12. On coming to know of this, Gen.Asif Nawaz withdrew him from the Northern Areas and issued a severe reprimand. Thereafter, he drifted towards the HUJI.
13. Abbasi and his associates were court-marialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for their role in the conspiracy of 1995, but, surprisingly, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who was also arrested along with the plotters, was not prosecuted and was released from jail.
14. After Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif and seized power on October 12,1999, Abbasi was also released from jail. During the last two years, he had been travelling round the country and making anti-US speeches to gatherings consisting of ex-servicemen and jihadi elements. There were also reports of his gravitating towards the HT.
15. Since the middle of last year, the HT has stepped up its criticism of Musharraf and some of its leaders have even been calling for his assassination for betraying the cause of Islam by collaborating with the US. According to some reports, the Pakistani authorities suspected that the HT's sympathisers in the Army were responsible for the circulation of anonymous anti-Musharraf letters typed on the letter-head of the Army headquarters last year.
16. These letters called Musharraf and his associates "national criminals" and accused him of helping the Americans, the Christians and the Jews to kill the Afghans and turning Pakistan, "the fort of Islam, into a slaughterhouse of the Muslims."
17. After the two attempts to kill Musharraf last month, a member of the Senate, the upper House of the Parliament, revealed that some members of Parliament had been in receipt of a letter from the UK branch of the HT, warning them not to support the regularisation of the 2002 election of Musharraf as the President in a referendum. The letter accused Musharraf of "working for the American interests in Pakistan and helping the US in routing of the Muslims".
18. Last year, the ISI and the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence detained for questioning some officers on suspicion of having links with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Amongst them were Major Ali Quddus, Lt.Gen.Khalid Abbasi, Assistant Adjutant-General, Major Mohammad Atta, who was working in the office of the Quarter-Master General, and Ahsan Aziz (rank not known), an army engineer. While Ali Quddus was suspected of links with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad of Al Qaeda, who was arrested in Rawalpindi in March last, the others were suspected of helping the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ahsan Aziz is also from the POK and is believed to be a Sudan too.
19. Gen. Aziz, who had been keeping quiet ever since he was removed from the post of Corps Commander in Lahore in October, 2001, allegedly under US pressure, started openly criticising Musharraf's policies in the middle of last year without, however, personally criticising him. When Musharraf was away to the US in June last, he undertook a tour of the POK accompanied by Maj.Gen.Anwar Khan, who had served under him in the ISI before 1999. Addressing a meeting in the Rawalakot district, he was reported to have said: "America is the No.1 enemy of the Muslim world and is conspiring against Muslim nations all over the world. All the defects and setbacks that the Islamic world has suffered have been due to disunity and splits in Muslim ranks besides the presence of and tolerance shown to hypocrites within. It was because of the machinations of these elements that most of our movements came to naught. We would, therefore, have to tackle and put an end to such elements to be able to engage and face the mightiest of the world powers."
20. Muhammad Naeem of the Islamabad Special Branch, who has been detained since December 28 and is under interrogation, was on plainclothes duty on December 25 at the Islamabad Convention Centre where Musharraf had gone to address a meeting. As Musharraf left the Convention Centre after the meeting to return to Rawalpindi, Naeem is suspected to have alerted Jameel that Musharraf's convoy had started.
21. It is, however, believed that Naeem did not know which of the four routes on which the police had been deployed on route security duty would the convoy be taking. The suicide bombers apparently knew of it from another insider, who was privy to the decision on the route to be taken by the convoy. Who was that second insider? Was he from the police or the Army? That is the question to which the investigating agencies have not so far been able to find the answer.
22. Till all the insiders---whether two or more---are identified and arrested and the entire conspiracy unravelled , the threat to Musharraf from his own colleagues and men in the army and the police would remain as high as ever.
23.This may please be read in continuation of the earlier articles on the attempts on Musharraf's life, which are available at www.saag.org .
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
Nearly a month after the two failed attempts to kill Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf in the highly-guarded cantonment town of Rawalpindi, the Pakistani investigating agencies seem to be still groping in the dark in their attempts to unravel the conspiracy to kill him.
2. Contrary to the repeated claims of different Ministers of the Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali Cabinet that the two cases have almost been solved and that the agencies are in the process of rounding up the conspirators, independent reports from usually well-informed sources indicate that apart from establishing the identities of the two suicide bombers of the December 25 attempt and detaining a junior level police officer of the Islamabad Special Branch, the agencies have not been able to make any other forward movement so far.
3. Raids have been conducted in many madrasas and hospitals run by madrasas and Islamic charity organisations in many cities and smaller town of Punjab and Sindh, over a hundred suspects rounded up and many police officers of Islamabad and Rawalpindi with different levels of seniority have been questioned, but without any useful lead so far.
4. Surprisingly---and intriguingly-- there are no reports of any officers of the presidential security set-up and the armed forces being questioned in order to determine any complicity from their ranks. The Government has also played down the fact that one of the two suicide bombers----Muhammad Jameel, resident of Androot, Police Station Torarh, in Poonch district, Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK)--- belonged to the Sudan tribe of the POK, the same tribe to which Gen.Mohammad Aziz Khan, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and Maj.Gen. (retd) Mohammad Anwar Khan, the President of the POK, belong.
5. According to a retired senior officer of the Pakistani Police, who continues to be in touch with his former department, some associates of Jameel who were rounded up by the Police from his village in the POK told the police during their interrogation that one of the reasons why Jameel volunteered for this suicide mission was his anger over Musharraf's decision to retain the post of the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), thereby depriving Gen. Aziz of an opportunity to become the COAS.
6. There are many Sudans serving in the Pakistan Army in different ranks, but Gen.Aziz was the first Kashmiri to have risen to such a senior position. According to Jameel's associates, he allegedly blamed Musharraf for preventing a Kashmiri from becoming the COAS for the first time in the history of the Pakistani army.
7. During their searches of hospitals run by the madrasas and Islamic charity organisations, the investigating agencies have reportedly been looking for any patient who might have recently been admitted for the treatment of any unnatural injuries---such as those caused by gunshot or explosives. It is not quite clear whether their search for an injured person is in connection with the attempts on Musharraf's life or the recent incidents of violence earlier this month in the south Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the army has launched another drive---unsuccessful so far---to round up the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. During this drive, four military personnel were killed when the local tribals fired mortar shells at their post.
8. The investigations into the attempts on the life of Musharraf have so far been directed against the two factions of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami, which was found to have been responsible for the earlier attempt to kill Musharraf at Karachi in April, 2002, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Sunni extremist organisation, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Hizbul Tehrir (HT).
9. Initially, the investigating agencies described Jameel as a member of the JEM, but they are now projecting him as a member of the HUJI. The HUJI, headed by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, has close links with HT and the two have some following in the Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) at the lower and middle levels.
10. In 1995, the Pakistani authorities arrested a group of army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi on a charge of plotting, in association with the HUJI, to have Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, and Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then COAS, assassinated, seize power and set up an Islamic State ruled according to the Sharia. Maj.Gen.Abbasi, who used to be a close personal friend of Musharraf, had served in the late 1980s as the ISI station chief in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi. He was expelled by the Government of India on a charge of indulging in espionage.
11. After his return to Islamabad, he was posted by Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, who was the COAS during the first tenure of Nawaz Sharif as the Prime Minister, to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). While posted there, he tried to organise a raid, without the approval of the COAS, on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area, but it failed disastrously.
12. On coming to know of this, Gen.Asif Nawaz withdrew him from the Northern Areas and issued a severe reprimand. Thereafter, he drifted towards the HUJI.
13. Abbasi and his associates were court-marialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for their role in the conspiracy of 1995, but, surprisingly, Qari Saifullah Akhtar, who was also arrested along with the plotters, was not prosecuted and was released from jail.
14. After Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif and seized power on October 12,1999, Abbasi was also released from jail. During the last two years, he had been travelling round the country and making anti-US speeches to gatherings consisting of ex-servicemen and jihadi elements. There were also reports of his gravitating towards the HT.
15. Since the middle of last year, the HT has stepped up its criticism of Musharraf and some of its leaders have even been calling for his assassination for betraying the cause of Islam by collaborating with the US. According to some reports, the Pakistani authorities suspected that the HT's sympathisers in the Army were responsible for the circulation of anonymous anti-Musharraf letters typed on the letter-head of the Army headquarters last year.
16. These letters called Musharraf and his associates "national criminals" and accused him of helping the Americans, the Christians and the Jews to kill the Afghans and turning Pakistan, "the fort of Islam, into a slaughterhouse of the Muslims."
17. After the two attempts to kill Musharraf last month, a member of the Senate, the upper House of the Parliament, revealed that some members of Parliament had been in receipt of a letter from the UK branch of the HT, warning them not to support the regularisation of the 2002 election of Musharraf as the President in a referendum. The letter accused Musharraf of "working for the American interests in Pakistan and helping the US in routing of the Muslims".
18. Last year, the ISI and the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence detained for questioning some officers on suspicion of having links with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Amongst them were Major Ali Quddus, Lt.Gen.Khalid Abbasi, Assistant Adjutant-General, Major Mohammad Atta, who was working in the office of the Quarter-Master General, and Ahsan Aziz (rank not known), an army engineer. While Ali Quddus was suspected of links with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad of Al Qaeda, who was arrested in Rawalpindi in March last, the others were suspected of helping the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ahsan Aziz is also from the POK and is believed to be a Sudan too.
19. Gen. Aziz, who had been keeping quiet ever since he was removed from the post of Corps Commander in Lahore in October, 2001, allegedly under US pressure, started openly criticising Musharraf's policies in the middle of last year without, however, personally criticising him. When Musharraf was away to the US in June last, he undertook a tour of the POK accompanied by Maj.Gen.Anwar Khan, who had served under him in the ISI before 1999. Addressing a meeting in the Rawalakot district, he was reported to have said: "America is the No.1 enemy of the Muslim world and is conspiring against Muslim nations all over the world. All the defects and setbacks that the Islamic world has suffered have been due to disunity and splits in Muslim ranks besides the presence of and tolerance shown to hypocrites within. It was because of the machinations of these elements that most of our movements came to naught. We would, therefore, have to tackle and put an end to such elements to be able to engage and face the mightiest of the world powers."
20. Muhammad Naeem of the Islamabad Special Branch, who has been detained since December 28 and is under interrogation, was on plainclothes duty on December 25 at the Islamabad Convention Centre where Musharraf had gone to address a meeting. As Musharraf left the Convention Centre after the meeting to return to Rawalpindi, Naeem is suspected to have alerted Jameel that Musharraf's convoy had started.
21. It is, however, believed that Naeem did not know which of the four routes on which the police had been deployed on route security duty would the convoy be taking. The suicide bombers apparently knew of it from another insider, who was privy to the decision on the route to be taken by the convoy. Who was that second insider? Was he from the police or the Army? That is the question to which the investigating agencies have not so far been able to find the answer.
22. Till all the insiders---whether two or more---are identified and arrested and the entire conspiracy unravelled , the threat to Musharraf from his own colleagues and men in the army and the police would remain as high as ever.
23.This may please be read in continuation of the earlier articles on the attempts on Musharraf's life, which are available at www.saag.org .
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
Thursday, April 9, 2009
AMJAD FAROOQI : THE UNTOLD STORY (29-9-2004)
B.RAMAN
The Pakistani security agencies claimed to have killed on September 26, 2004, Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder, alias Doctor who, according to them, was the mastermind behind the two abortive attempts to kill Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December last year. According to them, he was killed during an encounter with the para-military forces who had surrounded a rented house in Nawabshah in Sindh, where he along with some others had been living for the last two months.
2. On August 20, 2004, the Pakistani authorities had announced cash rewards amounting to Rs.20 million each (US $ 344800) to anyone who would give information leading to the capture of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a Pakistani national, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, said to be belonging to Al Qaeda.Amjad Hussain Farooqi was accused of acting at the instance of the Libyan in his attempts to kill Musharraf.
3. Talking to the media at The Hague on September 27,2004, Musharraf was reported to have stated as follows:" We eliminated one of the very major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only involved on attacks on me, but also on attacks elsewhere in the country. So a very big terrorist has been eliminated."
4.All accounts from Nawabshah indicate that if the Pakistani authorities had wanted they could have caught him alive and questioned him about the role of Pakistani civilian and military officials in the various terrorist incidents of the last three years, including the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, the attempts to kill Musharraf himself and Shaukat Aziz, the Prime Minister, and the attacks directed against American and French targets. But, they did not want him alive.
5.In a report under the heading "Real conspirators in Musharraf case may never be exposed", Kamran Khan, the Pakistani investigative journalist, stated as follows in the "News" of September 28, 2004: "Senior lawyers say that the killing of Amjad Farooqi, the main accused in President Musharraf and Daniel Pearl cases, may also influence the final outcome of the two most important cases. A nationwide military investigation launched after two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf last year had unveiled that some civilian and low level military individuals were the field operatives while Amjad Farooqi played an anchor in the abortive bids on Gen Musharraf’s life. Because of the most sensitive nature of the probe the principal investigative work was carried out under the supervision of the Commander Corps 10, who received inputs from all federal and provincial law enforcement agencies in the most extensive investigation of a crime case in Pakistan. "It was very important to catch Amjad Farooqi alive," said a senior law-enforcement official. "Farooqi was the key link between the foot soldiers and those who ordered the murder." "Amjad Farooqi is now dead with the most important secret and we still don’t know for sure the real identity of the Pakistani or al-Qaeda or any other foreign elements who had launched Farooqi into action to remove General Musharraf from the scene," said a second senior law-enforcement official. Some circumstantial evidence collected during the investigation of President Musharraf case had cited some connection between Abu Feraj, an al-Qaeda operative of Libyan origin, and Amjad Farooqi, hence the suspicion that al-Qaeda could be behind the murder attempts through Amjad Farooqi.The military investigators had found solid evidence to connect Amjad Farooqi with the suicide bombers involved in December 25 attacks on President Musharraf. Farooqi’s connections were also established with the group of low level Pakistan Air Force technicians who had planted bombs under Lai Bridge for the December 11 bid on the President’s life. The military investigators were also baffled how come the Air Intelligence, the intelligence wing of the PAF, detected no signs that about two dozen PAF men posted at the Chaklala airbase had been attending meetings with religious extremists and in the first week of December were making active preparations at the heart of the PAF base to bomb the presidential motorcade. Pakistani officials, worried that Farooqi’s killing would prevent them from getting the full knowledge about Farooqi’s connections and his actions, said that if captured alive Farooqi could have provided crucial information on the plot to kidnap and murder the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.Pakistani officials believed that, like in the murder attempts against the President, Farooqi was an anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for the world was the work of Amjad Farooqi- Khalid Sheikh Muhammad combine," said a senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified.
6. The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligence-police establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were his links with the Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organisation he belonged? Read the following.
7.In April,1992, the coalition of Afghan Mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek Commander, against Najibullah, the then President of Afghanistan, managed to invade and capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from power, was taken by the United Nations into its protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The efforts of the UN to persuade the Mujahideen to allow Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living, failed.
8. The Mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible by the assistance of a large number of jihadis from the Pakistani madrasas, who had been trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen. The Pakistani contingents, which participated in the invasion of Kabul, belonged to the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Amjad Farooqi, then an 18-year-old youth, entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
9. In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari, the husband of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, flew into Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmenistan authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from there ship it to Karachi.
10.Zardari did not agree to it. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. The first two cotton convoys from Turkmenistan were looted by Mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
11. Zardari thereupon sent Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's Interior Minister, and Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan to provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mulla Mohammad Omar, who subsequently became the Amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from the madrasas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton convoys. Thus, was the Taliban born.
12.Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Amjad Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to help Mulla Omar in organising this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar himself travelled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Amjad Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
13. A few months later, Mulla Omar deputed Amjad Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so without difficulty, to the pleasant surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton convoy protection force, the Taliban became the ruler of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Amjad Farooqi and his associates, it started gradually extending its administrative control to other areas.
14. In the beginning of 1995, Amjad Farooqi left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent him along with some others into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known till today. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
15. In October,1995, Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of Army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the Army were arrested. They were found to have been plotting in tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and the Qari were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates were court-martialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the Qari was released without any action being taken against him.
16.Before 1990, there were two jihadi organisations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form the HUA, with Maulana Khalil as the Amir and Qari Akhtar as the Deputy Amir. Amjad Farooqi used to work closely with the Qari.
17. In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a Brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India. The Government of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister, Abbasi organised a raid on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian Army with heavy casualties.Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had been nursing an anger against the Pakistan Army's senior leadership and hobnobbing with the Qari. A few months after capturing power on October 12,1999, Musharraf had Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US organisation called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem with the HUJI.
18. In September,1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi students from the Pakistani madrasas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Amjad Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After capturing Kabul, Amjad Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him and hung him from a lamp-post.
19. When the Taliban, with the help of the madrasa students from Pakistan, captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, which was in power in Kabul till September,1996,to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of the Benazir Bhutto Government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden shifted to Kandahar by Amjad Farooqi and his men.
20.In October,1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed their original existence under their previous names. Qari Saifullah Akhtar took over as the Amir of the HUJI and made Amjad Farooqi his deputy.
21. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladesh branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI ( B ). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Amjad Farooqi used to represent the Qari at the meetings of the shoora (consultative council )of the IIF.
22. In December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to be belonging to the HUM, hijacked an aircraft of the Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The Government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the hijacking.
23. Amongst the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by name Mansur Hasnain. Sections of the Pakistani media reported that this hijacker was none other than Amjad Farooqi. After their release from detention by the Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers formed a new organisation called the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrasa, Karachi, who used to be looked upon as the mentor of bin Laden, Mulla Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
24. Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was made in charge of an office run by Al Qaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden to procure medicines and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to meet bin Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar,
25. When the USA launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October,2001, the Pakistani components of the IIF called upon their members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the US. Over 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Amjad Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the survivors, including Amjad Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori madrasa of Karachi where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the madrasa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with Ramzi Binalshibh.
26. On January 12,2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist strike on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi in December,2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under house-arrest. The whole thing was a farce as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in the Army and did not take any action against Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Amjad Farooqi.
27. In January,2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the USA's "Wall Street Journal" in Mumbai (Bombay) in India, along with his wife Marianne went to Karachi to enquire into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house of an American free-lance journalist of sub-continental origin, who had worked for some time as a free-lancer for the WSJ, where she had come to know Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing on the sub-continent.
28. Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the USA in order to get introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might be knowing about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought were James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin, who often used to write articles for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
29. Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist organisation based in the USA and the Caribbean with a large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
30. Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in E-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late 1980s and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the Karachi Police, Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
31.On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of Katrachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out of it. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then went away from there. Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
32. Subsequently, E-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife and young child in order to force him to surrender. On February 5, 2002,he surrendered to Brig (retd) Ejaz Shah, the Home Secretary of Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its custody till February 12,2002, and then handed him over to the Karachi Police for interrogation. The public announcement about his arrest claimed he was arrested on February 12 and did not refer to the fact that he was in the ISI's custody since February 5, 2002.
33.Omar Sheikh told the Police that the kidnappers operated in three groups. Omar himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the confidence of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting. They kidnapped him and handed him over to Amjad Hussain Farooqui for keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh , with the help of Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the Special Branch of the Sindh Police, and his cousins Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim arranged for taking the photograph of Pearl in custody, having it scanned and sending the E-Mail with his photograph to the media and others making their demands. According to the Police, Saquib and Nasim belonged to the JEM, thereby indicating the possibility that the kidnapping might have been jointly planned and carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
34. A few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing of Pearl, along with pictures showing his throat being slit. However, his dead body was not recovered. On May 16, 2002, the Karachi Police claimed to have recovered the remains of an unidentified dead body cut into 10 pieces, which were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot of land in the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of Karachi. They further claimed that the remains were recovered following a tip-off from a human source and that, according to the source, the remains were of Pearl. The local media also reported that there was an improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to have been held in captivity before his murder and that the plot belonged to Al Rashid Trust of Karachi. DNA tests and other forensic examination determined that the remains were of Pearl.
35.The Al-Rashid Trust, whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 because of its suspected links with Al Qaeda, is also closely linked with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the offices of the two used to be located in the same buildings in different cities of Pakistan. The two also had common cadres to undertake fund-raising activities for both the organizations.
36.Initially, it was not clear as to who gave the information to the Karachi Police about the burial of these remains in a plot of land belonging to the Al Rashid Trust----a human source as claimed by the Police or by some new suspects who had been picked up by the Police, but whose arrest had not been shown in Police records, lest the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted to interrogate them or sought their extradition to the US?
37.The answer came in a report carried by the "News" (May 23, 2002), the prestigious daily of Pakistan, which revealed that the information about the remains was given to the Karachi Police by one Fazal Karim -- a resident of Rahim Yar Khan and a father of five-- who was in Police custody, but had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper,Fazal Karim had identified Lashkar-e- Jhangvi's Naeem Bukhari as the ring leader of the group that also included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and mother Baloch) who took part in Pearl's kidnapping, his murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a dozen cases of anti-Shia killings. Fazal Karim reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning Pearl's kidnapping.
38.According to Karachi Police sources, Amjad Farooqi was also taken into custody on the basis of the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI ordered them to release him and let him go. Fazal Karim reportedly named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the beheading of Pearl as KSM, but the military regime did not admit this. On the basis of his information, the Police also rounded up some others involved in the kidnapping and murder.
39.Intriguingly, on May 14, 2002, two days before the recovery of the remains of the dead body of Pearl by the Karachi Police, the Punjab Police claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding leader of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which Amjad Farooqi had started his career as a terrorist, and three of his associates were killed in an encounter in a Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a Shia leader. Sections of the Pakistani media expressed doubts over the Police version and alleged that Riaz Basra was in the informal custody of the ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January, 2002, without it taking any action against him and that the Police, for reasons not clear, had shown him as having been killed in an encounter.
40. During the trial of Omar Sheikh and his associates, the defence lawyers drew the attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports about the arrest of Fazal Karim and others and urged that the court should order a re-investigation of the case in order to determine their responsibility for the offence. The prosecution described the media reports as baseless and opposed any re-investigation. The court rejected the defence plea.
41. The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to death and others to various terms of imprisonment. The appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh has not been disposed of by the court so far under some pretext or the other. In the meanwhile, KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi by the Pakistani authorities in March, 2003,and handed over to the FBI, which had him flown out of the country. In an article written in the "Salon", an online journal, in October,2003,the free-lance journalist in whose Karachi house Pearl and his wife had stayed said that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence that KSM had admitted having personally killed Pearl. The defence lawyers of Omar Sheikh again raised the question of a re-investigation, but their plea was again opposed by the prosecution and rejected by the court.
42. In December, 2003, there were two unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf in Rawalpindi with explosives. In the second incident, suicide bombers were involved. There were strong indications of the involvement of insiders from the Pakistani Army and Police in both the incidents. Till June,2004, Musharraf blamed the JEM for the attempts just as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. Subsequent investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not the JEM, which was involved. Of all the pro-bin Laden jihadi organisations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the largest following in the Army. The investigation into Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the Air Force.
43. By the end of January,2004, the investigators had started gathering evidence of the involvement of junior officials of the Army and the Air Force belonging to the HUJI and the Hizbut Tahreer in the two assassination attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated by Amjad Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan.However, Musharraf did not openly admit this.
44. On June 10, 2004, the Corps Commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Karachi. With the help of a mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at the scene, the Karachi Police established that the attempt was jointly organised by the HUJI and a new organisation called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had been trained by the Uzbecks and Chechens in the South Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The Police managed to identify and round up the Jundullah members involved in the incident.
45. During their interrogation, they reportedly admitted their involvement and said that they were acting under the leadership of Amjad Farooqi. The Police had kept the arrest and interrogation of the Jundullah members a secret lest Amjad Farooqi be alerted before they got him. But, Sheikh Rashid, the Information Minister, prematurely announced it to the media, thereby alerting Amjad Farooqi before the Police could arrest him. He managed to escape from his Karachi hide-out and fled to Nawabshah.
46. For the first time, Musharraf admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June, 2004, the involvement of junior officers of the Army and the Air Force in the plot against him and the role of Amjad Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
47. A man-hunt for Farooqi and the Libyan was launched by the Police. Before they could get Farooqi alive, someone in the military-intelligence establishment would seem to have ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of the Police. Who is that somebody?
48.Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Amir of the HUJI, was picked up by the Dubai authorities on August 6, 2004, and handed over to the Pakistani authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the next day. The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
49. After the suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May 8, 2002,which killed 11 French experts working in a submarine project, Khaled Ahmed, the well-known Pakistani analyst, had written an article titled "The Biggest Militia We Know Nothing About" in the prestigious "Friday Times" of Lahore. In this article, he gave details of the HUJI. Extracts from the article are given in the Annexure.
50.One of the most mysterious aspects of the activities of the jihadi organisations in Pakistan is why Musharraf has always been reluctant to or even afraid of taking action against the HUJI. He has avoided banning it even after evidence of its penetration into the Army and the Air Force and its involvement in the plots against him.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
ANNEXURE: HUJI
"ARY DIGITAL TV’s host Dr Masood, while discussing the May 8 killing of 11 French nationals in Karachi, named one Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami as one of the suspected terrorists involved in the bombing. When the Americans bombed the Taliban and Mulla Umar fled from his stronghold in Kandahar, a Pakistani personality also fled with him. This was Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Pakistan’s biggest jehadi militia headquartered in Kandahar. No one knew the name of the outfit and its leader. A large number of its fighters made their way into Central Asia and Chechnya to escape capture at the hands of the Americans, the rest stole back into Pakistan to establish themselves in Waziristan and Buner. Their military training camp (maskar) in Kotli in Azad Kashmir swelled with new fighters and now the outfit is scouting some areas in the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province )to create a supplementary maskar for jehad in Kashmir. Its ‘handlers’ (in the Inter-Services Intelligence) have clubbed it together with Harkatul Mujahideen to create Jamiatul Mujahideen in order to cut down the large number of outfits gathered together in Azad Kashmir. It was active in Held Kashmir under the name of Harkatul Jahad Brigade 111.
"The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Qari Saifullah Akhtar was an adviser to Mulla Umar in the Taliban government. His fighters were called ‘Punjabi’ Taliban and were offered employment, something that other outfits could not get out of Mulla Umar. The outfit had membership among the Taliban too. Three Taliban ministers and 22 judges belonged to the Harkat. In difficult times, the Harkat fighters stood together with Mulla Umar. Approximately 300 of them were killed fighting the Northern Alliance, after which Mulla Umar was pleased to give Harkat the permission to build six more maskars in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the Taliban army and police also received military training. From its base in Afghanistan, Harkat launched its campaigns inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya. But the distance of Qari Saifullah Akhtar from the organisation’s Pakistani base did not lead to any rifts. In fact, Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami emerged from the defeat of the Taliban largely intact. In Pakistan Qari Akhtar has asked the ‘returnees’ to lie low for the time being, while his Pakistani fighters already engaged are busy in jehad as before.
"The Harkat is the only militia which boasts international linkages. It calls itself ‘the second line of defence of all Muslim states’ and is active in Arakan in Burma, and Bangladesh, with well organised seminaries in Karachi, and Chechnya, Sinkiang, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The latest trend is to recall Pakistani fighters stationed abroad and encourage the local fighters to take over the operations. Its fund-raising is largely from Pakistan, but an additional source is its activity of selling weapons to other militias. Its acceptance among the Taliban was owed to its early allegiance to a leader of the Afghan war, Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi and his Harkat Inqilab Islami whose fighters became a part of the Taliban forces in large numbers. Nabi Muhammadi was ignored by the ISI in 1980 in favour of Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami. His outfit suffered in influence inside Afghanistan because he was not supplied with weapons in the same quantity as some of the other seven militias.
"According to the journal Al-Irshad of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, published from Islamabad, a Deobandi group led by Maulana Irshad Ahmad was established in 1979. Looking for the right Afghan outfit in exile to join in Peshawar, Maulana Irshad Ahmad adjudged Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi as the true Deobandi and decided to join him in 1980. Harkat Inqilab Islami was set up by Maulana Nasrullah Mansoor Shaheed and was taken over by Nabi Muhammadi after his martyrdom. Eclipsed in Pakistan, Maulana Irshad Ahmad fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets till he was killed in battle in Shirana in 1985. His place was taken by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, which was not liked by some of the Harkat leaders, including Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khaleel who then set up his own Harkatul Mujahideen.
"The sub-militia (of the HUJI) fighting in Kashmir is semi-autonomous and is led by chief commander Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. Its training camp is 20 km from Kotli in Azad Kashmir, with a capacity for training 800 warriors, and is run by one Haji Khan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami went into Kashmir in 1991 but was at first opposed by the Wahhabi elements there because of its refusal to criticise the grand Deobandi congregation of Tableeghi Jamaat and its quietist posture. But as days passed, its warriors were recognised as ‘Afghanis’. It finally had more martyrs in the jehad of Kashmir than any other militia. Its resolve and organisation were recognised when foreigners were seen fighting side by side with its Punjabi warriors.
"To date, 650 Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami mujahideen have been killed in battle against the Indian army: 190 belonging to both sides of Kashmir, nearly 200 belonging to Punjab, 49 to Sindh, 29 to Balochistan, 70 to Afghanistan, 5 to Turkey, and 49 collectively to Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and the Arab world.
"The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami in Uzbekistan is Sheikh Muhammad Tahir al-Farooq. So far 27 of its fighters have been killed in battle against the Uzbek president Islam Karimov, as explained in the Islamabad-based journal Al-Irshad. Starting in 1990, the war against Uzbekistan was bloody and was supported by the Taliban, till in 2001, the commander had to ask the Pakistanis in Uzbekistan to return to base.
"In Chechnya, the war against the Russians was carried on under the leadership of commander Hidayatullah. Pakistan’s embassy in Moscow once denied that there were any Pakistanis involved in the Chechnyan war, but journal Al-Irshad (March 2000) declared from Islamabad that the militia was deeply involved in the training of guerrillas in Chechnya for which purpose commander Hidayatullah was stationed in the region. It estimated that ‘dozens’ of Pakistani fighters had been martyred fighting against Russian infidels.
"When the Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami men were seen first in Tajikistan, they were mistaken by some observers as being fighters from Sipah Sahaba, but in fact they were under the command of commander Khalid Irshad Tiwana, helping Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev resist the Uzbek ruling class in the Ferghana Valley. The anti-Uzbek warlords were being sheltered by Mulla Umar in Afghanistan.
"Maulana Abdul Quddus heads the Burmese warriors located in Karachi and fighting mostly in Bangladesh on the Arakanese border. Korangi is the base of the Arakanese Muslims who fled Burma to fight the jehad from Pakistan. A large number of Burmese are located inside Korangi and the area is sometimes called mini-Arakan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has opened 30 seminaries for them inside Korangi, there being 18 more in the rest of Karachi. Maulana Abdul Quddus, a Burmese Muslim, while talking to weekly Zindagi (25-31 January 1998), revealed that he had run away from Burma via India and took religious training in the Harkat seminaries in Karachi and on its invitation went to Afghanistan, took military training there and fought the jehad from 1982 to 1988. In Korangi, the biggest seminary is Madrasa Khalid bin Walid where 500 Burmese are under training. They were trained in Afghanistan and later made to fight against the Northern Alliance and against the Indian army in Kashmir. The Burmese prefer to stay in Pakistan, and very few have returned to Burma or to Bangladesh. There are reports of their participation in the religious underworld in Karachi.
"Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has branch offices in 40 districts and tehsils in Pakistan, including Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Khanpur, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Mianwali, Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan, Dera Ismail Khan, Swabi and Peshawar. It also has an office in Islamabad. Funds are collected from these grassroots offices as well as from sources abroad. The militia has accounts in two branches of Allied Bank in Islamabad, which have not been frozen because the organisation is not under a ban. The authorities have begun the process of reorganisation of jehad by changing names and asking the various outfits to merge. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has been asked to merge with Harkatul Mujahideen of Fazlur Rehman Khaleel who had close links with Osama bin Laden. The new name given to this merger is Jamiatul Mujahideen. Jamaat Islami’s Hizbul Mujahideen has been made to absorb all the refugee Kashmiri organisations. Jaish and Lashkar-e-Tayba have been clubbed together as Al-Jahad. All the Barelvi organisations, so far located only in Azad Kashmir, have been put together as Al-Barq. Al-Badr and Hizbe Islami have been renamed as Al-Umar Mujahideen. "
The Pakistani security agencies claimed to have killed on September 26, 2004, Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder, alias Doctor who, according to them, was the mastermind behind the two abortive attempts to kill Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December last year. According to them, he was killed during an encounter with the para-military forces who had surrounded a rented house in Nawabshah in Sindh, where he along with some others had been living for the last two months.
2. On August 20, 2004, the Pakistani authorities had announced cash rewards amounting to Rs.20 million each (US $ 344800) to anyone who would give information leading to the capture of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a Pakistani national, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, said to be belonging to Al Qaeda.Amjad Hussain Farooqi was accused of acting at the instance of the Libyan in his attempts to kill Musharraf.
3. Talking to the media at The Hague on September 27,2004, Musharraf was reported to have stated as follows:" We eliminated one of the very major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only involved on attacks on me, but also on attacks elsewhere in the country. So a very big terrorist has been eliminated."
4.All accounts from Nawabshah indicate that if the Pakistani authorities had wanted they could have caught him alive and questioned him about the role of Pakistani civilian and military officials in the various terrorist incidents of the last three years, including the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, the attempts to kill Musharraf himself and Shaukat Aziz, the Prime Minister, and the attacks directed against American and French targets. But, they did not want him alive.
5.In a report under the heading "Real conspirators in Musharraf case may never be exposed", Kamran Khan, the Pakistani investigative journalist, stated as follows in the "News" of September 28, 2004: "Senior lawyers say that the killing of Amjad Farooqi, the main accused in President Musharraf and Daniel Pearl cases, may also influence the final outcome of the two most important cases. A nationwide military investigation launched after two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf last year had unveiled that some civilian and low level military individuals were the field operatives while Amjad Farooqi played an anchor in the abortive bids on Gen Musharraf’s life. Because of the most sensitive nature of the probe the principal investigative work was carried out under the supervision of the Commander Corps 10, who received inputs from all federal and provincial law enforcement agencies in the most extensive investigation of a crime case in Pakistan. "It was very important to catch Amjad Farooqi alive," said a senior law-enforcement official. "Farooqi was the key link between the foot soldiers and those who ordered the murder." "Amjad Farooqi is now dead with the most important secret and we still don’t know for sure the real identity of the Pakistani or al-Qaeda or any other foreign elements who had launched Farooqi into action to remove General Musharraf from the scene," said a second senior law-enforcement official. Some circumstantial evidence collected during the investigation of President Musharraf case had cited some connection between Abu Feraj, an al-Qaeda operative of Libyan origin, and Amjad Farooqi, hence the suspicion that al-Qaeda could be behind the murder attempts through Amjad Farooqi.The military investigators had found solid evidence to connect Amjad Farooqi with the suicide bombers involved in December 25 attacks on President Musharraf. Farooqi’s connections were also established with the group of low level Pakistan Air Force technicians who had planted bombs under Lai Bridge for the December 11 bid on the President’s life. The military investigators were also baffled how come the Air Intelligence, the intelligence wing of the PAF, detected no signs that about two dozen PAF men posted at the Chaklala airbase had been attending meetings with religious extremists and in the first week of December were making active preparations at the heart of the PAF base to bomb the presidential motorcade. Pakistani officials, worried that Farooqi’s killing would prevent them from getting the full knowledge about Farooqi’s connections and his actions, said that if captured alive Farooqi could have provided crucial information on the plot to kidnap and murder the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.Pakistani officials believed that, like in the murder attempts against the President, Farooqi was an anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for the world was the work of Amjad Farooqi- Khalid Sheikh Muhammad combine," said a senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified.
6. The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligence-police establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were his links with the Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organisation he belonged? Read the following.
7.In April,1992, the coalition of Afghan Mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek Commander, against Najibullah, the then President of Afghanistan, managed to invade and capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from power, was taken by the United Nations into its protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The efforts of the UN to persuade the Mujahideen to allow Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living, failed.
8. The Mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible by the assistance of a large number of jihadis from the Pakistani madrasas, who had been trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen. The Pakistani contingents, which participated in the invasion of Kabul, belonged to the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Amjad Farooqi, then an 18-year-old youth, entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
9. In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari, the husband of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, flew into Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmenistan authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from there ship it to Karachi.
10.Zardari did not agree to it. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. The first two cotton convoys from Turkmenistan were looted by Mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
11. Zardari thereupon sent Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's Interior Minister, and Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan to provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mulla Mohammad Omar, who subsequently became the Amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from the madrasas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton convoys. Thus, was the Taliban born.
12.Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Amjad Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to help Mulla Omar in organising this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar himself travelled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Amjad Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
13. A few months later, Mulla Omar deputed Amjad Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so without difficulty, to the pleasant surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton convoy protection force, the Taliban became the ruler of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Amjad Farooqi and his associates, it started gradually extending its administrative control to other areas.
14. In the beginning of 1995, Amjad Farooqi left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent him along with some others into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known till today. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
15. In October,1995, Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of Army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the Army were arrested. They were found to have been plotting in tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and the Qari were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates were court-martialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the Qari was released without any action being taken against him.
16.Before 1990, there were two jihadi organisations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form the HUA, with Maulana Khalil as the Amir and Qari Akhtar as the Deputy Amir. Amjad Farooqi used to work closely with the Qari.
17. In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a Brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India. The Government of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister, Abbasi organised a raid on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian Army with heavy casualties.Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had been nursing an anger against the Pakistan Army's senior leadership and hobnobbing with the Qari. A few months after capturing power on October 12,1999, Musharraf had Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US organisation called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem with the HUJI.
18. In September,1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi students from the Pakistani madrasas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Amjad Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After capturing Kabul, Amjad Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him and hung him from a lamp-post.
19. When the Taliban, with the help of the madrasa students from Pakistan, captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, which was in power in Kabul till September,1996,to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of the Benazir Bhutto Government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden shifted to Kandahar by Amjad Farooqi and his men.
20.In October,1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed their original existence under their previous names. Qari Saifullah Akhtar took over as the Amir of the HUJI and made Amjad Farooqi his deputy.
21. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladesh branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI ( B ). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Amjad Farooqi used to represent the Qari at the meetings of the shoora (consultative council )of the IIF.
22. In December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to be belonging to the HUM, hijacked an aircraft of the Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The Government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the hijacking.
23. Amongst the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by name Mansur Hasnain. Sections of the Pakistani media reported that this hijacker was none other than Amjad Farooqi. After their release from detention by the Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers formed a new organisation called the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrasa, Karachi, who used to be looked upon as the mentor of bin Laden, Mulla Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
24. Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was made in charge of an office run by Al Qaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden to procure medicines and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to meet bin Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar,
25. When the USA launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October,2001, the Pakistani components of the IIF called upon their members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the US. Over 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Amjad Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the survivors, including Amjad Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori madrasa of Karachi where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the madrasa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with Ramzi Binalshibh.
26. On January 12,2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist strike on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi in December,2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under house-arrest. The whole thing was a farce as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in the Army and did not take any action against Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Amjad Farooqi.
27. In January,2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the USA's "Wall Street Journal" in Mumbai (Bombay) in India, along with his wife Marianne went to Karachi to enquire into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house of an American free-lance journalist of sub-continental origin, who had worked for some time as a free-lancer for the WSJ, where she had come to know Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing on the sub-continent.
28. Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the USA in order to get introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might be knowing about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought were James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin, who often used to write articles for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
29. Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist organisation based in the USA and the Caribbean with a large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
30. Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in E-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late 1980s and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the Karachi Police, Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
31.On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of Katrachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out of it. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then went away from there. Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
32. Subsequently, E-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife and young child in order to force him to surrender. On February 5, 2002,he surrendered to Brig (retd) Ejaz Shah, the Home Secretary of Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its custody till February 12,2002, and then handed him over to the Karachi Police for interrogation. The public announcement about his arrest claimed he was arrested on February 12 and did not refer to the fact that he was in the ISI's custody since February 5, 2002.
33.Omar Sheikh told the Police that the kidnappers operated in three groups. Omar himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the confidence of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting. They kidnapped him and handed him over to Amjad Hussain Farooqui for keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh , with the help of Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the Special Branch of the Sindh Police, and his cousins Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim arranged for taking the photograph of Pearl in custody, having it scanned and sending the E-Mail with his photograph to the media and others making their demands. According to the Police, Saquib and Nasim belonged to the JEM, thereby indicating the possibility that the kidnapping might have been jointly planned and carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
34. A few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing of Pearl, along with pictures showing his throat being slit. However, his dead body was not recovered. On May 16, 2002, the Karachi Police claimed to have recovered the remains of an unidentified dead body cut into 10 pieces, which were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot of land in the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of Karachi. They further claimed that the remains were recovered following a tip-off from a human source and that, according to the source, the remains were of Pearl. The local media also reported that there was an improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to have been held in captivity before his murder and that the plot belonged to Al Rashid Trust of Karachi. DNA tests and other forensic examination determined that the remains were of Pearl.
35.The Al-Rashid Trust, whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 because of its suspected links with Al Qaeda, is also closely linked with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the offices of the two used to be located in the same buildings in different cities of Pakistan. The two also had common cadres to undertake fund-raising activities for both the organizations.
36.Initially, it was not clear as to who gave the information to the Karachi Police about the burial of these remains in a plot of land belonging to the Al Rashid Trust----a human source as claimed by the Police or by some new suspects who had been picked up by the Police, but whose arrest had not been shown in Police records, lest the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted to interrogate them or sought their extradition to the US?
37.The answer came in a report carried by the "News" (May 23, 2002), the prestigious daily of Pakistan, which revealed that the information about the remains was given to the Karachi Police by one Fazal Karim -- a resident of Rahim Yar Khan and a father of five-- who was in Police custody, but had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper,Fazal Karim had identified Lashkar-e- Jhangvi's Naeem Bukhari as the ring leader of the group that also included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and mother Baloch) who took part in Pearl's kidnapping, his murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a dozen cases of anti-Shia killings. Fazal Karim reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning Pearl's kidnapping.
38.According to Karachi Police sources, Amjad Farooqi was also taken into custody on the basis of the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI ordered them to release him and let him go. Fazal Karim reportedly named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the beheading of Pearl as KSM, but the military regime did not admit this. On the basis of his information, the Police also rounded up some others involved in the kidnapping and murder.
39.Intriguingly, on May 14, 2002, two days before the recovery of the remains of the dead body of Pearl by the Karachi Police, the Punjab Police claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding leader of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which Amjad Farooqi had started his career as a terrorist, and three of his associates were killed in an encounter in a Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a Shia leader. Sections of the Pakistani media expressed doubts over the Police version and alleged that Riaz Basra was in the informal custody of the ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January, 2002, without it taking any action against him and that the Police, for reasons not clear, had shown him as having been killed in an encounter.
40. During the trial of Omar Sheikh and his associates, the defence lawyers drew the attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports about the arrest of Fazal Karim and others and urged that the court should order a re-investigation of the case in order to determine their responsibility for the offence. The prosecution described the media reports as baseless and opposed any re-investigation. The court rejected the defence plea.
41. The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to death and others to various terms of imprisonment. The appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh has not been disposed of by the court so far under some pretext or the other. In the meanwhile, KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi by the Pakistani authorities in March, 2003,and handed over to the FBI, which had him flown out of the country. In an article written in the "Salon", an online journal, in October,2003,the free-lance journalist in whose Karachi house Pearl and his wife had stayed said that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence that KSM had admitted having personally killed Pearl. The defence lawyers of Omar Sheikh again raised the question of a re-investigation, but their plea was again opposed by the prosecution and rejected by the court.
42. In December, 2003, there were two unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf in Rawalpindi with explosives. In the second incident, suicide bombers were involved. There were strong indications of the involvement of insiders from the Pakistani Army and Police in both the incidents. Till June,2004, Musharraf blamed the JEM for the attempts just as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for the kidnapping and murder of Pearl. Subsequent investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not the JEM, which was involved. Of all the pro-bin Laden jihadi organisations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the largest following in the Army. The investigation into Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the Air Force.
43. By the end of January,2004, the investigators had started gathering evidence of the involvement of junior officials of the Army and the Air Force belonging to the HUJI and the Hizbut Tahreer in the two assassination attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated by Amjad Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan.However, Musharraf did not openly admit this.
44. On June 10, 2004, the Corps Commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Karachi. With the help of a mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at the scene, the Karachi Police established that the attempt was jointly organised by the HUJI and a new organisation called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had been trained by the Uzbecks and Chechens in the South Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The Police managed to identify and round up the Jundullah members involved in the incident.
45. During their interrogation, they reportedly admitted their involvement and said that they were acting under the leadership of Amjad Farooqi. The Police had kept the arrest and interrogation of the Jundullah members a secret lest Amjad Farooqi be alerted before they got him. But, Sheikh Rashid, the Information Minister, prematurely announced it to the media, thereby alerting Amjad Farooqi before the Police could arrest him. He managed to escape from his Karachi hide-out and fled to Nawabshah.
46. For the first time, Musharraf admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June, 2004, the involvement of junior officers of the Army and the Air Force in the plot against him and the role of Amjad Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
47. A man-hunt for Farooqi and the Libyan was launched by the Police. Before they could get Farooqi alive, someone in the military-intelligence establishment would seem to have ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of the Police. Who is that somebody?
48.Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Amir of the HUJI, was picked up by the Dubai authorities on August 6, 2004, and handed over to the Pakistani authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the next day. The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
49. After the suicide bomb attack in Karachi on May 8, 2002,which killed 11 French experts working in a submarine project, Khaled Ahmed, the well-known Pakistani analyst, had written an article titled "The Biggest Militia We Know Nothing About" in the prestigious "Friday Times" of Lahore. In this article, he gave details of the HUJI. Extracts from the article are given in the Annexure.
50.One of the most mysterious aspects of the activities of the jihadi organisations in Pakistan is why Musharraf has always been reluctant to or even afraid of taking action against the HUJI. He has avoided banning it even after evidence of its penetration into the Army and the Air Force and its involvement in the plots against him.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com )
ANNEXURE: HUJI
"ARY DIGITAL TV’s host Dr Masood, while discussing the May 8 killing of 11 French nationals in Karachi, named one Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami as one of the suspected terrorists involved in the bombing. When the Americans bombed the Taliban and Mulla Umar fled from his stronghold in Kandahar, a Pakistani personality also fled with him. This was Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Pakistan’s biggest jehadi militia headquartered in Kandahar. No one knew the name of the outfit and its leader. A large number of its fighters made their way into Central Asia and Chechnya to escape capture at the hands of the Americans, the rest stole back into Pakistan to establish themselves in Waziristan and Buner. Their military training camp (maskar) in Kotli in Azad Kashmir swelled with new fighters and now the outfit is scouting some areas in the NWFP (North-West Frontier Province )to create a supplementary maskar for jehad in Kashmir. Its ‘handlers’ (in the Inter-Services Intelligence) have clubbed it together with Harkatul Mujahideen to create Jamiatul Mujahideen in order to cut down the large number of outfits gathered together in Azad Kashmir. It was active in Held Kashmir under the name of Harkatul Jahad Brigade 111.
"The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, Qari Saifullah Akhtar was an adviser to Mulla Umar in the Taliban government. His fighters were called ‘Punjabi’ Taliban and were offered employment, something that other outfits could not get out of Mulla Umar. The outfit had membership among the Taliban too. Three Taliban ministers and 22 judges belonged to the Harkat. In difficult times, the Harkat fighters stood together with Mulla Umar. Approximately 300 of them were killed fighting the Northern Alliance, after which Mulla Umar was pleased to give Harkat the permission to build six more maskars in Kandahar, Kabul and Khost, where the Taliban army and police also received military training. From its base in Afghanistan, Harkat launched its campaigns inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Chechnya. But the distance of Qari Saifullah Akhtar from the organisation’s Pakistani base did not lead to any rifts. In fact, Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami emerged from the defeat of the Taliban largely intact. In Pakistan Qari Akhtar has asked the ‘returnees’ to lie low for the time being, while his Pakistani fighters already engaged are busy in jehad as before.
"The Harkat is the only militia which boasts international linkages. It calls itself ‘the second line of defence of all Muslim states’ and is active in Arakan in Burma, and Bangladesh, with well organised seminaries in Karachi, and Chechnya, Sinkiang, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The latest trend is to recall Pakistani fighters stationed abroad and encourage the local fighters to take over the operations. Its fund-raising is largely from Pakistan, but an additional source is its activity of selling weapons to other militias. Its acceptance among the Taliban was owed to its early allegiance to a leader of the Afghan war, Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi and his Harkat Inqilab Islami whose fighters became a part of the Taliban forces in large numbers. Nabi Muhammadi was ignored by the ISI in 1980 in favour of Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami. His outfit suffered in influence inside Afghanistan because he was not supplied with weapons in the same quantity as some of the other seven militias.
"According to the journal Al-Irshad of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami, published from Islamabad, a Deobandi group led by Maulana Irshad Ahmad was established in 1979. Looking for the right Afghan outfit in exile to join in Peshawar, Maulana Irshad Ahmad adjudged Maulvi Nabi Muhammadi as the true Deobandi and decided to join him in 1980. Harkat Inqilab Islami was set up by Maulana Nasrullah Mansoor Shaheed and was taken over by Nabi Muhammadi after his martyrdom. Eclipsed in Pakistan, Maulana Irshad Ahmad fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets till he was killed in battle in Shirana in 1985. His place was taken by Qari Saifullah Akhtar, which was not liked by some of the Harkat leaders, including Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khaleel who then set up his own Harkatul Mujahideen.
"The sub-militia (of the HUJI) fighting in Kashmir is semi-autonomous and is led by chief commander Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. Its training camp is 20 km from Kotli in Azad Kashmir, with a capacity for training 800 warriors, and is run by one Haji Khan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami went into Kashmir in 1991 but was at first opposed by the Wahhabi elements there because of its refusal to criticise the grand Deobandi congregation of Tableeghi Jamaat and its quietist posture. But as days passed, its warriors were recognised as ‘Afghanis’. It finally had more martyrs in the jehad of Kashmir than any other militia. Its resolve and organisation were recognised when foreigners were seen fighting side by side with its Punjabi warriors.
"To date, 650 Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami mujahideen have been killed in battle against the Indian army: 190 belonging to both sides of Kashmir, nearly 200 belonging to Punjab, 49 to Sindh, 29 to Balochistan, 70 to Afghanistan, 5 to Turkey, and 49 collectively to Uzbekistan, Bangladesh and the Arab world.
"The leader of Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami in Uzbekistan is Sheikh Muhammad Tahir al-Farooq. So far 27 of its fighters have been killed in battle against the Uzbek president Islam Karimov, as explained in the Islamabad-based journal Al-Irshad. Starting in 1990, the war against Uzbekistan was bloody and was supported by the Taliban, till in 2001, the commander had to ask the Pakistanis in Uzbekistan to return to base.
"In Chechnya, the war against the Russians was carried on under the leadership of commander Hidayatullah. Pakistan’s embassy in Moscow once denied that there were any Pakistanis involved in the Chechnyan war, but journal Al-Irshad (March 2000) declared from Islamabad that the militia was deeply involved in the training of guerrillas in Chechnya for which purpose commander Hidayatullah was stationed in the region. It estimated that ‘dozens’ of Pakistani fighters had been martyred fighting against Russian infidels.
"When the Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami men were seen first in Tajikistan, they were mistaken by some observers as being fighters from Sipah Sahaba, but in fact they were under the command of commander Khalid Irshad Tiwana, helping Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev resist the Uzbek ruling class in the Ferghana Valley. The anti-Uzbek warlords were being sheltered by Mulla Umar in Afghanistan.
"Maulana Abdul Quddus heads the Burmese warriors located in Karachi and fighting mostly in Bangladesh on the Arakanese border. Korangi is the base of the Arakanese Muslims who fled Burma to fight the jehad from Pakistan. A large number of Burmese are located inside Korangi and the area is sometimes called mini-Arakan. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has opened 30 seminaries for them inside Korangi, there being 18 more in the rest of Karachi. Maulana Abdul Quddus, a Burmese Muslim, while talking to weekly Zindagi (25-31 January 1998), revealed that he had run away from Burma via India and took religious training in the Harkat seminaries in Karachi and on its invitation went to Afghanistan, took military training there and fought the jehad from 1982 to 1988. In Korangi, the biggest seminary is Madrasa Khalid bin Walid where 500 Burmese are under training. They were trained in Afghanistan and later made to fight against the Northern Alliance and against the Indian army in Kashmir. The Burmese prefer to stay in Pakistan, and very few have returned to Burma or to Bangladesh. There are reports of their participation in the religious underworld in Karachi.
"Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has branch offices in 40 districts and tehsils in Pakistan, including Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Khanpur, Gujranwala, Gujrat, Mianwali, Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan, Dera Ismail Khan, Swabi and Peshawar. It also has an office in Islamabad. Funds are collected from these grassroots offices as well as from sources abroad. The militia has accounts in two branches of Allied Bank in Islamabad, which have not been frozen because the organisation is not under a ban. The authorities have begun the process of reorganisation of jehad by changing names and asking the various outfits to merge. Harkat al-Jahad al-Islami has been asked to merge with Harkatul Mujahideen of Fazlur Rehman Khaleel who had close links with Osama bin Laden. The new name given to this merger is Jamiatul Mujahideen. Jamaat Islami’s Hizbul Mujahideen has been made to absorb all the refugee Kashmiri organisations. Jaish and Lashkar-e-Tayba have been clubbed together as Al-Jahad. All the Barelvi organisations, so far located only in Azad Kashmir, have been put together as Al-Barq. Al-Badr and Hizbe Islami have been renamed as Al-Umar Mujahideen. "
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