South Asia
Extremist Islamist Terror & Subversion
Ajai Sahni

1. Terror in Very Slow Motion

1. Despite the shock and outrage the September 11, 2001, attacks inspired, a point that must clearly be noticed is that, other than their timing and the specific contours and character of the co-ordinated terrorist operations, these attacks were not as entirely unanticipated as they may have been projected to be in the post-Black Tuesday phase. While, in many ways, they did constitute a watershed in history, they lay along an interrupted continuum that extended several years into the past. In a sense, indeed, this was terrorism in very slow motion, and its inevitability had long been remarked by the strategic and intelligence communities. John Deutch, a former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had – in a joint paper with Ashton Carter and Phillip Zelikov – warned in November 1998 that:

An act of catastrophic terrorism would take place, which would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security. Like Pearl Harbour, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond through draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence would follow. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently…1

The literature on catastrophic terrorism and on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) terrorism targeting USA has burgeoned in recent years, but the language and idiom of the particular citation above has an uncanny precision when it is compared with the discourse and events in the wake of Black Tuesday.

2. Even the method used by the terrorists in the US attacks was not entirely unprecedented. Ely Karmon notes that

A coordinated hijacking of four planes has, indeed, already taken place. In September 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine diverted a Pan-Am airliner to Cairo while three others – TWA, Swissair, and BOAC planes – were diverted to Dawson airport in Jordan. All were blown up on the ground.

Based on intelligence, the hijacking of a plane in order to crash it in a populated area has been feared in Israel since the mid-1970’s. This is why, in 1972, a Libyan plane that penetrated Israeli airspace was downed by Israeli warplanes when it failed to react to Israeli warnings. A similar incident occurred on May 24, 2001, when a small Lebanese civilian plane was shot down north of Tel-Aviv by Apache attack helicopters, because it was feared to be part of a Hizballah suicide operation. In December 1994 an Air-France Airbus was hijacked by Algerian GIA terrorists, landed in Marseille for refueling and was stormed by French counter-terrorist teams when it became clear that they were planning a suicide mission over Paris. 2

3. Furthermore, the US has, rightly or otherwise, long regarded itself as the primary target of what it narrowly defines as "international terrorism." Those who have, moreover, studied the pattern and expanding networks of terrorist organisations across the world are clear that, while September 11 represented a major event, a critical development in the unfolding extremist Islamist agenda, it did not constitute a radical discontinuity.

4. In the discourse on catastrophic terrorism targeting the US, the arguments have focused overwhelmingly on technologies – nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, cyber-terrorism, etc. The gravest evidence of the mounting danger, however, comes from the spread of the ideologies and networks of terrorism.

5. The manner in which we look upon and interpret these recent events is of crucial strategic significance and has critical impact on the strategies of response against terrorism in what the US has dubbed the "Global War on Terror". In significant measure, the strategies of response that are currently being manifested appear to be flawed, and this is at least in part a consequence of a conceptual failure to correctly define and interpret the catastrophic terrorism witnessed on September 11, 2001.

2. The Myth of the Locus of Terror

1. It is perplexing to note that the idea of a "geographical shift of the locus of terror from the Middle East to South Asia" 3had been increasingly and vigorously propounded, identifying Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir as the new loci and primary sources of extremist Islamist militancy. This idea has survived, if not been reinforced, in US strategic perceptions by the events of Black Tuesday. There are, however, some difficulties with this notion. The first and more obvious is the fact that there is no evidence of any sudden or abrupt ‘shift’, or a radical discontinuity in the situation – Afghanistan’s spiral into chaos had been an inexorable fact for over a decade, as had Pakistan’s complicity and steady decline. Even a cursory glance at fatalities in Kashmir would confirm, moreover, that terrorism has been at comparable – albeit escalating – levels in this theatre for over a decade. 4

2. More significantly, however, it is dangerous to focus inordinately on the transient geographical location or concentrations of terrorist incidents, activities and movements, to the exclusion of their ideological and material sources, their state sponsors, or their intended targets and proclaimed goals. The error here is the belief that the threat of Islamist terrorism is contained within the regions of its most visible manifestation. Extremist Islam must, however, be recognised for its essential character as an ideology, and terrorism as a method that it accepts and justifies. A method will be adopted wherever it is perceived to have acceptable probabilities of success. An ideology extends wherever it has believers. These are the actual limits or foci of extremist Islamist terrorism. The identification of the locus of terrorism with the transient geographical location where it finds the largest number of victims, is a grave error of judgement.

3. A closer analysis would indicate that it is more accurate to speak of the spread or expansion of the sphere of terrorism, rather than any dramatic ‘shift’. Indeed, as terrorists and their state sponsors secure even limited successes in one region, their methods are adopted in others, threatening an ever-widening spectrum of nations and cultures. It is, now, increasingly clear that no nation in the world is entirely free of the threat from extremist Islamist terrorism. This includes not only the affluent – or ‘decadent’ as the Islamist would have it – West, but also Muslim majority ‘Islamic’ nations that do not conform to the extremist Islamist’s notion of his Faith and its practices. The extremist Islamist vision is not limited to its current sphere of militancy, or to the economic and political jockeying for control of Central Asia that some ‘Great Game’ theorists believe, but to God’s ‘universal empire’. "The world is divided into opposing forces," Altaf Gauhar insists, "there is no common ground between secularism and Islam." 5Allah Buksh Brohi is even more explicit:

Many Western Scholars have pointed their accusing fingers at some of the … verses in the Qur’an to be able to contend that world of Islam is in a state of perpetual struggle against the non-Muslims. As to them it is sufficient answer to make, if one were to point out, that the defiance of God’s authority by one who is His slave exposes that slave to the risk of being held guilty of treason and such a one, in the perspective of Islamic law, is indeed to be treated as a sort of that cancerous growth on that organism of humanity, which has been created "Kanafsin Wahidatin" that is, like one, single, indivisible self. It thus becomes necessary to remove the cancerous malformation even if it be by surgical means (if it would not respond to other treatment), in order to save the rest of Humanity… The idea of Ummah of Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam, is incapable of being realised within the framework of territorial states much less made an enduring basis of viewing the world as having been polarised between the world of Islam and the world of war. Islam, in my understanding, does not subscribe to the concept of the territorial state… 6

The ‘surgical’ removal of the ‘cancerous malformation’ that is the non-Islamic world is what the Islamist terrorists believe they are engaged in.

4. Unfortunately, the ‘loci of terrorism’ thesis lends itself to local, capricious and fitful responses, often dictated by transient political pressures or short-term (and potentially counter-productive) considerations. Thus, the US and its primary allies, conceding that all terrorism is reprehensible and demands a global response, have not really commended measures that can be situated in a multilateral and pre-emptive framework. The US State Department’s annual report, Patterns of Global Terrorism (PGT) and its subsequent addendum are flawed in their inherent logic. For instance, the PGT 2000 explicitly elaborates on the long and enduring support that the Musharraf regime has extended to the Taliban and terrorist groups active in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). At the same time, it also alludes to the ‘fact’ that the Government of Pakistan "generally has cooperated with US requests to enhance security for US facilities and personnel." 7Pakistan’s role in fuelling and sustaining terrorism in J&K and persisting mischief in Afghanistan are clearly recognised in the report: "Pakistan's military government, headed by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, continued previous Pakistani Government support of the Kashmir insurgency, and Kashmiri militant groups continued to operate in Pakistan, raising funds and recruiting new cadre… The United States remains concerned about reports of continued Pakistani support for the Taliban's military operations in Afghanistan. Credible reporting indicates that Pakistan is providing the Taliban with materiel, fuel, funding, technical assistance, and military advisers. Pakistan has not prevented large numbers of Pakistani nationals from moving into Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. Islamabad also failed to take effective steps to curb the activities of certain madrassas, or religious schools, that serve as recruiting grounds for terrorism."8 And yet, Pakistan is the principal ally and frontline state in the US’ Global War on Terror.

5. Such contradictory observations are not surprising since US counter-terrorism perspective has for long been steeped in a myopic view – it proposes to attack/counter only if it’s own citizens are victims. The US has been consistently reluctant – and in substantial measure remains so – to accept the fact that any effective strategy to counter terrorism must be premised on global efforts supplementing national and bilateral strategies, however resilient and effective the latter may be. US counter-terrorism perspectives have critically failed to recognise that the combination of chaos and paralysis that terrorism produces, affects not only particular ‘victim’ societies, but the composite global order. 9

6. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, indicated at a hearing of a special Senate Appropriations Sub-committee that the US "seeks to create an environment that is intolerant of terrorism and isolate those who threaten the US, its friends and allies." But, he also added that "I think you lose credibility when you do it (target the nation of origin) that way."10 Even as the US acknowledges convincing reports of Pakistan’s complicity in supporting terrorist activity in J&K and to the Taliban, it rules out any action against Pakistan. By stating that targeting the nation of origin produces a ‘loss of credibility’, it effectively places Pakistan beyond the purview of its proposed new policy. The relative lack of consistency in the US policy is revealing. Powell, at a Press briefing, observed that State sponsors of terrorism are increasingly isolated. The PGT report, on the other hand, clearly points to the contrary.

3. The Islamist Extremist Endgame

1. The impact of the catastrophic terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, in USA, is still reverberating across the world, and subsequent events have left a trail of unanswered questions in the public mind, and among the strategic community. The most important of these relate to what it was, precisely, that the terrorists sought to achieve in terms of definable strategic gains. True, some 4,000 people were killed in a simultaneous multi-strike operation, and two among the great symbolic edifices of the United States of America – the World Trade Centre representing its economic might, and the Pentagon its military prowess – were successfully targeted. But, what precisely had this act of apparently wanton destruction achieve? How did it undermine or detract from the overwhelming military and economic power of the US? How did it further the Islamist extremist cause?

2. To many Western strategists, the suicide attacks, and the subsequent and apparently related cases of bio-terrorism in the US, are acts of unadulterated evil, of a rage that finds its justification and end in the suffering it inflicts. They are acts, equally, that inescapably condemn not just their perpetrators, but their entire network of support, their ideological bases, and the causes they represent, to an inevitable and possibly hideous end at the hands of a wounded and righteous global community. Considering the firepower, the technologies and the resources available to America, on the one hand, and the poverty, the isolation and the primitive conditions in which Osama bin Laden’s cohorts and the Taliban subsisted, the attacks on the US appear suicidal, not only for the 19 hijackers who went down with the planes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but for the Pan-Islamist extremist movement itself.

3. In some measure, this point of view is reinforced by the apparent and increasing isolation of the Islamist extremists within the Muslim world, as even collaborators and state sponsors, such as Pakistan, turn their back against the intemperate excesses of what is evidently the most rabidly fanatical element among them. The over-arching malignancy of the Black Tuesday attacks and the accumulating evidence of bio-terrorism in USA (and in an increasing number of other countries as well) 11have driven a wedge between those who have, for decades, used limited doses of terrorism to further their political or strategic objectives, and the fundamentalist or millenarian terrorists who seek goals that go far beyond the tangible world and all existing structures of contemporary human social and political organisation, to a vision that seeks to establish the ‘Empire of Allah’ through acts of extreme violence. Within this millenarian vision, a final, apocalyptic confrontation between the ‘armies of the faithful’ and of the ‘unbelievers’ is not only a conceivable eventuality, it may even be a desired end envisaged by their interpretation of the Holy Book, an objective to be actively pursued. This malignant worldview has created deep apprehensions in much of the Muslim world, as it has among non-Muslims, though it may have inspired a small minority of fanatics to an emulative frenzy.

4. This has crucial repercussions on the character and scale of violence that would be acceptable to the fundamentalist terrorist. No ‘strategic terrorist’ would resort to violence beyond a certain scale, because in doing so, he would destabilise the situation to a point where he cannot make any rational calculations of the outcome, and hence of strategic gains and losses. Pakistan and its leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, fit well into this paradigm – they have, for decades, used measured doses of terror to further their objectives in J&K and in other parts of India. In the wake of the September attacks, however, they have found it entirely convenient to join (albeit under pressure) the US coalition against terrorism. In doing this, they apparently turned directly against their own proteges and long-time partners and friends – bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and the Taliban – because no useful strategic purpose could be served by a continuing overt association with these groupings. Indeed, in the emerging situation, such an association could, in fact, place Pakistan’s own survival at risk.

5. The fundamentalist or millenarian terrorist, on the other hand, conceives of no limit to his potential violence. In his perverse vision, the existing world order is corrupt beyond redemption, and must be destroyed – calculations of relative strategic advantage and loss are in the hands of a ‘higher power’ to whose ‘will’ he ‘submits’. The lives of men and women – both of those who are loyal to the fundamentalist cause, and those of the ‘enemy’ – have no intrinsic worth, but are mere instrumentalities to the will of God (of which the fundamentalist alone is apparently aware). In other words, he operates within a context in which physical, material and political consequences do not have the same significance or weight that they would have in the planning and projections of conventional parties in conflict.

6. This is, of course, a reductionist portrait, and strategic and fundamentalist motives combine in various proportions in different actors in the theatre of terror. To the extent, however, that the one or the other set of motives dominates, it is necessary to understand the dramatic shift in patterns of behaviour and strategies this would provoke, and the radically different tactics and policies that are necessary to deal with these patterns.

7. It is within this context that the American gameplan evolved. Briefly, the US formulated a staged policy which envisaged a long-term struggle, and which sought to bring into being the broadest conceivable coalition of nations into the campaign against global terrorism. The first stage focused on Afghanistan, on the one hand, and on a painstaking investigative process to document and dismantle the international support structures of terrorism, on the other. Within Afghanistan, the military infrastructure of the Taliban was to be destroyed, an interim government installed at Kabul with control of the towns and cities of the country, consigning the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces to a fugitive existence, from where they can be ‘smoked out’ and ‘brought to justice’, or where ‘justice can be brought to them’. Thereafter, the world community could dedicate itself to systematically, if gradually, destroying the global network of terror that is presently in existence.

8. There is both clarity and simplicity in this scheme, and given America’s overwhelming technological, military and economic might, and the apparent and emerging counter-terrorist consensus across the world, these would appear to be realistic and entirely achievable projections. War, however, is a notoriously unpredictable business and a war against terrorism even more so.

9. And to return to original theme of this section, moreover, if there was such an easy inevitability to events, what, precisely was it that led the fundamentalist terrorists to escalate the scale of violence to a level that would provoke such overwhelming retaliation – and their own certain defeat? Was this a disastrous miscalculation? Or the design of a small group of hate-impelled fanatics who were beyond caring about consequences?

10. It is more than evident that months, if not years of planning went into the Black Tuesday attacks, and that this planning reflects a high – if perverted – level of intellectual and strategic capabilities. It is difficult to understand how such planners could have failed to foresee the outcome of a direct and dramatic attack on the heart of America. Indeed, subsequent events and statements emanating from the Al Qaeda and the Taliban are sufficient proof that these repercussions were not only foreseen, but were to be welcomed as links in the chain of events that was intentionally initiated through the September 11 terrorist strikes. Roland Jacquard, President of the International Observatory on Terrorism at Paris, notes that bin Laden intended the ‘9/11’ attacks to be so "audacious, impudent and massively inhumane" as to ensure a "massive, inordinate" US retaliation that would further inflame Muslim opinion against the US and against the Arab regimes allied with Washington. "His design," Jacquard asserts, "is to create sufficient instability to bring about Islamic revolution."12 This, it appears, is the general interpretation of the Islamist extremist gameplan, and there is, certainly, an element of truth in it. It is too much of a gamble, however, to be the entire truth.

11. The fundamentalist terrorists’ own projections and motives go well beyond how they hope to benefit from the current violence directed against them, and must comprehend clear ideas regarding where their own violence would be directed in future. Whether or not they succeed in their plans will depend substantially on the world’s ability to out-guess them, and to create appropriate and effective defences that can contain the impact of such future violence.

12. To the Islamist fundamentalist terrorist, the present World Order is not only irrevocably unjust, it is utterly debased, a challenge and insult to God’s will on earth. It cannot be reformed through any progressive accretions of good, through conciliation and compromise. The power of what he regards as evil is too great in the present arrangement for any limited measure to succeed. The system cannot, in other words, be ‘improved’; it must be swept aside, destroyed, whatever the costs.

13. Crucially, moreover, he does not share the popular assessment of the strength and stability of this system, or of the power of those who dominate it. He is, consequently, not awed into impotent acceptance by the spectacle of America’s might, its smart missiles and planes, its nuclear arsenal, its unending destructive power. It is a power that is undermined, in his eyes, by its corruption, by its deviation from ‘God’s Way’, its ‘infidelity’.

14. The apparent stability of the world order, in this view, is a stagnant pool; the act of terror, a rock, or even a pebble, thrown into it. What matters, is not the immediate or direct impact, but the ripples it will create. And, with a thousand little pebbles, the wasted, crumbling, degenerate walls and structures of this system will collapse, and a deluge will wash away the ‘evil of the world’.

15. Today’s fundamentalist terrorist, consequently, does not seek to mobilise masses before a great rebellion. He is a catalyst. He destabilises the situation, provides a model for action, and consequences follow – and are clearly envisaged by him – even if and after he dies. His personal survival is not essential or integral to the success of his cause. You cannot, in fact, ‘decapitate’ the new and global insurrection of terror. Where one head falls, others will spring to fill the breach.

16. The great empires of history did not collapse at the height of their powers through cataclysmic upheavals from within or without. They declined gradually through a process of erosion at the peripheries and of corruption and corrosion at the Centre. The leadership of Islamist millenarian groupings has a fairly sophisticated, though possibly intuitive, understanding of this dynamic. Accurately or otherwise, they point to Russia; one of the two ‘Great Powers’ of the world that, in a matter of years – its armies, its missiles, its tanks and planes, its great nuclear arsenals, all intact – collapsed to the status of a Third World country, barely capable of managing its own internal contradictions, its economy surviving on the fitful injection of capital and aid from the affluent West. If this can be the fate of one ‘Evil Empire’, so can it be engineered for another.

17. Both the September 11 strikes and the US attacks on Afghanistan can, consequently, be examined as part of a meticulously planned chain of events. The strikes in US were intended to attract retaliatory violence; they were expected to result in a consolidation of the extremist Islamist forces, to undermine US prestige and that country’s sense of invulnerability, and to catalyse a chain of events that would destabilise the emerging unipolar world order in unpredictable ways, in order to create a space of political uncertainty in which the Islamists could make a focused bid for power.

18. What we have seen as yet is thus only the first phase of an elaborate endgame of the Islamists’ imaginings, and its fundamentals were articulated by its ideologues decades ago – as far back as in the 1920s – in what was then undivided India, and in Egypt. Its principles have only gradually translated themselves into political violence, militancy, terrorism, and an incipient pan-Islamic movement in widening areas across the world. The timeframes of this gameplan are in the decades, if not the centuries, and the Western orientation that has, in the past, sought closure in a confrontation of a few weeks, months or even the projected two years that the Americans believe their Afghan campaign will last, can lead to grave miscalculations, and will have to be abandoned for a slower, unwavering and consistent war against terrorism on all fronts. In the absence of such a coherent and sustained response, the economies and the political and social structures of Western nations will suffer gradual erosion; and each phase of such progressive erosion will lead to a consolidation of the extremist position.

19. This is the process of induced collapse that terrorist actions seek to create through a new ‘war of a thousand cuts’. For this, they will not require spectacular exhibitions of the kind that brought down the Twin Towers in New York. A continuous succession of incidents of low-grade violence – an anthrax scare that affects a few score of people, a little suitcase or car bomb in a shopping mall, an innocuous IED that blows up a restaurant, a bus or a train – with each incident claiming no more than a few lives, can undermine popular confidence, create a paralysis of terror in public and institutional responses, and, more importantly, destroy the competitive advantages of the US economy. This is crucial. The terrorist intent is eventually to take the war onto American soil, and to hurt American interests overseas, wherever this is possible. Osama bin Laden clearly articulated these objectives in his statement on the Al Jazeera television network, saying "The US will never know security or safety unless we know security and safety in our land and in Palestine." 14

20. If these campaigns can be sustained, however fitfully, over an extended period of time, there will eventually be a flight of capital from US soil and US corporations, as transaction costs increase unbearably, undermining the economy. Events in the wake of ‘9/11’ have also demonstrated that the US is substantially vulnerable to communal and ethnic polarisation. Continued terrorist violence will also be calculated to aggravate such trends, to induce the ‘ghettoisation’ of American society, and an eventual reverse migration of specialised human resources – particularly those of Asian origin – creating new problems for the viability of American enterprise. Needless to say, such processes can be expected, over time, to undermine the American power across the world, notwithstanding the overwhelming military arsenal at the disposal of the US Forces.15

21. Terror is at the heart of this vision, conceived of, by the ideologues of extremist Islam, not merely as a transient tactic, but as the essential objective of their ‘war to advance God’s purpose on earth.’ And it is crucial that we understand the concept behind this strategy, and it’s projected intent and impact. Brigadier S K Malik, unsurprisingly a Pakistani, writes in his Quranic Concept of War:

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him. 16

22. Islamist extremist terrorists had been active in many countries – particularly in Asia – long before September 11, 2001, and their activities continue. In addition, there are sleeper and sympathetic cells in an estimated 70 countries world-wide. Strong Islamist extremist networks exist in Canada, Australia, France, UK, and Germany, and there is also a very significant, though largely passive presence in several other European nations. Europe has been at risk for a long time. Islamist extremist networks have been consolidating themselves throughout the continent for decades now, and have been encouraged substantially by regimes that have maintained an ambivalent official attitude towards terrorists whose activities target countries other than their host countries in Europe. These European nations have, for all these years, acted on an assumption that they would never be targeted by the Islamist extremists, and have tolerated or even sought to manipulate these forces in terms of their perceived ‘strategic interests’. In the process, they have permitted the build up of these forces on their own soil. It is known that a number of terrorist cells have survived Black Tuesday on US soil as well. It can be expected that these will be activated in the uncertain future.

23. At the same time, as the memory and the horror of the September 11 incidents recedes and the images of the victims of the war in Afghanistan are reiterated with greater frequency, the moral consensus in favour of US actions will be diluted. In the first days after the terrorist strikes in USA, hardly a voice could be heard offering even a qualified justification of the outrage. After less than a few weeks of US bombings in Afghanistan, these voices began to emerge, albeit on the periphery of the world community. Thus over 60 clerics in Iraq issued a Fatwa against all Muslim nations that offered any assistance to the US ‘blasphemers’ in their campaigns against the ‘innocent Afghans’. There were widespread street protests against the US action in a number of countries, though most prominently in Pakistan and Indonesia. Even in the relatively eclectic and moderate Muslim community in India, at least some voices spoke out in favour of bin Laden and the Taliban, and overtly against the US. Over time, these voices will strengthen, not only among moderate Muslims, but within the Western democracies and the US itself, questioning the morality of the US campaign, sowing confusion in the minds of policy makers in the US and among its allies. As the American position on a number of issues has already demonstrated, moreover, old patterns and calculations of geo-political advantage are already re-emerging, and conventional considerations of strategic ‘interests of state’ may reassert their priority over a principled and concerted war against all manifestations of terrorism.

24. As these trends consolidate, terrorist actions will seek to secure a greater convergence, first among extremist Islamist groups, and then among larger Muslim communities, projecting the ideal of a new Khilafat or caliphate. There have already been significant moves in the direction of such convergence, with the more virulent fundamentalist Islamist elements virtually across the world throwing in their lot under bin Laden’s banner. Osama bin Laden had, moreover, increasingly reiterated his Pan-Islamist agenda, linking himself to a variety of emotive ‘Muslim causes’ – including, for instance, Palestine and Kashmir – in different countries, and had also sought to project himself as ‘Shiekh-ul-Islam’, a title last held by the Caliphs.

25. The Islamist endgame envisages, consequently, an eventual and decisive confrontation between a corroded and declining Western power, and an increasingly united Islamist force.

26. There are, of course, a number of possibly grave miscalculations in this grand design. In the first instance, a variety of conflicting forces that undermine the extremist cause have also been brought into increasing operation by recent events. Secondly, even with a substantial degradation of western powers, the gap between the technological and destructive capabilities of these and any eventually consolidated ‘Islamic World’, is virtually unbridgeable in the foreseeable future. A direct confrontation would be unimaginably bloody, but the defeat of the comparatively primitive forces of fundamentalist Islamist extremism would, consequently, be inevitable. This gap may, however, be wiped out at a stroke if the Islamist terrorists are able to weaponize certain bio-technological strains that may not be entirely outside their competence in coming years.

27. Most significantly, however, the projected Islamist endgame underestimates the resilience of countries such as the US, in particular, and of democratic societies in general. While Islamist fundamentalism has created a banner under which many ‘Muslim’ grievances and frustrations are articulated today, the promise of the ideologies of liberal democracy offer a strong and attractive incentive to millions who are equally distressed by authoritarian and oppressive regimes – including fundamentalist regimes – in different parts of the ‘Muslim World.’

28. What we are seeing, consequently, is a global struggle that seeks, on the one hand, the preservation and evolution of the present world order, and, on the other, its unqualified destruction. Eventually, neither vision can be expected to emerge unscathed or unamended, and the unipolar New World Order will have to accommodate alternative perspectives to create a more balanced and humane system.

29. This is an immensely complex war, and understanding its various dimensions – military, political, social, economic, and most importantly, ideological – is the first step towards securing an acceptable outcome. The fight against terrorism is as complex as the support structures of terrorism, and will have to be extended into the areas of ideology, social structures, finance, coalitions and affiliations, development and various aspects of the international economic and political order. There is, in this, no ‘either-or’ conflict between military and non-military means. Military means will remain necessary to contain the immediate threat and impact of terrorism. In the absence of such a response, successive waves of terror will simply demolish the structures of governance and order in target societies, undermining and eventually eliminating even the possibility of non-military solutions. Excessive emphasis on military means, to the exclusion of all others, however, will always leave a residual potential for revival. The world will have to adopt a composite, balanced and graded response to all facets of terrorism, its support structures, and its underlying motives and incentives.

4. Pakistan: A Frontline State?

1. Pakistan has been declared, by the US, as a ‘frontline state’ in the Global War on Terror and, by virtue of its geographical location, it is certainly located on the ‘frontline’ of what the US currently conceives of as the primary locus of terrorism. The unanswered question, however, is which side of the battlelines does it stand on? The ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks and the subsequent and critically fluid response strategies have not resulted in any perceptible change in Pakistan’s policies with regard to India, and there is no evidence that the Pakistani jehad in J&K has been reversed, or even diluted. Pakistan’s raison d etre remains inexorably tied to the ideologies of hatred and religious exclusion that led to its creation as a separate nation over half a century ago, and there is little indication that Pakistan has, despite apparent US pressure, chosen to alter the ideologies that defined the perverted course of its history.

2. Unfortunately, Western perspectives have yet to come to terms in full measure with what they have known for decades, and what they have found to be politically or strategically expedient to deny. In the foreseeable future, it is more than likely that Pakistan would continue its present agenda of bleeding India. Indeed, Pakistan may even reduce the relative levels of terrorist violence in J&K, even as it initiates lethal terrorist attacks at metropolitan centres such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, etc. A shift in the pattern of violence from Kashmir to other centres would offer Pakistan greater ‘deniability’, and enable it to argue that Indian Muslims have been pushed to a point of no return by the government’s ‘atrocities’. However, such a shift in strategies should not be perceived as a radical departure or even as a ‘nuanced’ reorientation of the jehadi agenda. It lies entirely within the paradigm that has been sustained since the Zia-ul-Haq regime, and has progressively translated itself into the Islamist fundamentalist agenda in the region. As Fazl-ur-Rahman, Chief of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM), expressed it, "Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai and Washington are the real targets of Militants. Muslims should co-operate with militants for dominance of Islam in the world."

3. Apprehensions that the current military operation in Afghanistan and turmoil in Pakistan will result in increased cross-border infiltration of terrorists are not misplaced. Recent reports indicate that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), has shut down or transferred terrorists from nearly a dozen terrorist training camps in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and planned to push these terrorists into India through the Line of Control and international borders in J&K, Punjab and Rajasthan. Moreover, the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan has released a large number of terrorists from that theatre. At least part of this dispersal may seek shelter and relocate their terrorist operations on Indian Territory.

4. It is within this context that the US strategies of response have to be assessed. The conventional ‘pick and drop’ Cold War stratagem has been revitalised in the new ‘great game’ that is being played out in familiar geographical terrain, and this represents a crucial failure of critical understanding. Pakistan and its ISI, with their deep and continuous involvement in Afghanistan and with the Taliban, have, it was argued, the most ‘reliable’ intelligence that could help locate America’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorist camps. Pakistan was, consequently, cast in the unlikely role of a ‘frontline state’ in the war against terrorism. The fact is, it has long been the frontline state sponsor of terrorism in this region. Any objective assessment of the internal conditions and long-term policies of the Pakistani State would demonstrate a fundamental and irreducible opposition between what that country’s ruling elite perceives as its strategic interests, and those of the emerging alliance against terrorism. This implies that the US reliance on Pakistan could be one of the worst strategic blunders for a multiplicity of reasons. Even as US Forces were deeply engaged in Afghanistan, there was continuing evidence of continued Pakistani military presence there in support of the Taliban, as well as the ongoing mobilisation of Islamist fundamentalist forces from J&K, PoK and within Pakistan. There was at least some evidence to suggest that these forces were actively, if ‘unofficially’, being encouraged to join forces with the Taliban.

5. Pakistan’s ambivalence is evident in the ‘neutralisation’20 of three senior Islamist Army commanders reportedly sympathetic to the Taliban who were superseded or sidelined with great publicity. The most significant of these changes was the removal of Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmad, Director General of the ISI, who had extensive linkages with the Taliban regime. Gen. Ahmad, who was in the US during the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks, also led a delegation of Pakistani mullahs (clerics) to Afghanistan apparently to negotiate Osama bin Laden’s surrender. Reports from Islamabad indicated that instead of asking for bin Laden to be handed over unconditionally, Gen. Ahmed praised the efforts of Taliban Chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, in his fight against the ‘Great Satan’,21 and advised him on ways to counter Washington’s planned offensive. Media reports also indicate that the US administration had complained to Pakistan that Gen. Ahmad was not providing the US with real-time intelligence inputs that were crucial to track bin Laden, despite a firm commitment in this regard during his recent visit to Washington.22 After his dismissal, Ahmad is said to have crossed over into Afghanistan to continue to advise the Taliban regime on the course of the war, and there are at least some suggestions that his dismissal was, in fact, intended to facilitate such a role. Indeed, Ahmad’s linkages with the Taliban represent a continuation of the Pakistan covert and overt terrorist agenda in the region. As Shireen Mazari noted, "So obsessed is the [Pakistani] military with ensuring the military success of the Taliban that it is dragging Pakistan into a confrontation the country does not need and cannot afford."23

6. Amidst the increasingly volatile anti-US protests in various parts of Pakistan during the initial phase of the Afghan campaign, the religious leadership had appealed to the Muslims of the world to be prepared for waging a jehad against the US and its allies. The attacks on Afghanistan, they asserted, cannot be considered to be an intervention in an individual Islamic country but are a direct and open aggression on the Islamic world. Reports from various parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan indicated that that hundreds of youth had left for Afghanistan to join the Taliban militia in the ‘holy war’ against the US and its allies, 24and thousands of others were in readiness to do so. The Jamaat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) had claimed that hundreds of thousands of people had ‘volunteered’ to fight against US ground forces in Afghanistan. Pakistani media reports indicated that cadres of the JUI, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and the Pakistan Afghanistan25 Defence Council (PADC), occupied footpaths and street corners where they exhorted the local populace for jehad and to mobilise donations for their Afghan campaign.26 Announcements in this regard were also made over loudspeakers from mosques and camps set up on highways. The Fazlur Rahman faction of the JUI is reported to have received more than Rs 3 million in cash from the tribal areas alone.27 The JUI (Fazlur), a staunch supporter of the Taliban regime, reportedly established approximately 1,000 camps in tribal areas and in 24 districts of the NWFP, where cadres recruited ‘volunteers’ for jehad and collected donations. Haji Jalil Jan, Provincial Deputy General Secretary of the JUI (Fazlur), indicating that his party had prepared lists of jehadis at district level and in tribal areas, added that the Taliban regime had, however, advised the party leadership not to send more jehadis to Afghanistan unless the US landed its ground forces in the country. 28

7. In Malakand division, the Tehreek-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM), led by Sufi Muhammad, had announced that in case an attack was launched on Afghanistan from Pakistan, jehad would be launched against the Pakistan government. Sufi Muhammad said that TNSM activists would join the Taliban militia in a ‘holy war’ against the ‘infidels’. "Preparations for jehad have started already and the registration of youth has commenced throughout the Malakand division." 29

8. The concentration of madrassas (religious seminaries), run by the pro-Taliban Jamaat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), factions of Maulana Fazlur Rahman and Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, in the NWFP also mobilised strong opposition to the air strikes on Afghanistan. The academic sessions in the religious schools had ended at the time of the initiation of the US campaign, and students, mostly Afghans, were ready to leave for Afghanistan. Elders and religious leaders from Orakzai, Kurram, Khyber, North Waziristan and South Waziristan agencies also supported the JuI. At a meeting at Darul-ul Uloom Zargari in Hangu, they had vowed to work under the leadership of Maulana Fazlur Rahman to prepare people for jehad in Afghanistan.

9. Religious parties were reported to have initiated a vigorous recruitment drive to enlist young men to fight alongside the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.30 News sources indicated that the Taliban had requested Deobandi groups in Pakistan to send in approximately 500,000 volunteers before the anticipated US ground campaign commenced. Long queues of potential recruits were witnessed at various madrassas in Pakistan. In Karachi, approximately a dozen mosques and madrassas, especially the Binori Town seminary, the largest Deobandi madrassa in Pakistan, were at the forefront of the enlistment drive. The clergy at the Binori Seminary, including Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, are considered very close to the Taliban Chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar. Shamzai was also the leader of a delegation, which the former Director General of the ISI, Lt. Gen. (Retd) Mahmud, took to Kandahar in an apparent attempt to impress upon Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden to the US authorities. Maulana Masood Azhar, the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) Chief also maintains close linkages with the Binori clergy. In fact, the first visuals of Azhar’s release consequent to the terrorist-hostages swap at Kandahar were of his arrival at the Binori mosque. Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, on September 18, 2001, gave a call for Jehad to defend Afghanistan if the US launched attacks against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Shamzai said in his fatwa "If non-Muslim forces attack Afghanistan, it would be the religious duty of every Muslim to fight jihad side by side with their Afghan brothers." In a direct warning to Pakistan, he said Muslim countries that supported an attack against Afghanistan by non-Muslim forces would lose their authority under Islam.

10. Primarily, it is a version (or perversion) of the Deobandi creed that forms the religious and ideological base for both JeM as also the Taliban. In fact, the Taliban movement was launched by students of the same network of JUI-run madrassas, which are the JeM’s parent organisations. The leader of the JUI, Maulana Samiul Haq, a former member of the National Assembly and Senate and whose madrassa – Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqania – was an important training base for the Taliban leadership. According to Ahmed Rashid, "In 1999, at least eight Taliban cabinet ministers in Kabul were graduates of Haq's madrassa and dozens more served as Taliban governors in the provinces, military commanders, judges and bureaucrats." The intensity of the Haqqania madrassa enlistment is elucidated by Rashid: "In February 1999, the madrassa had a staggering 15,000 applicants for some 400 new places making it the most popular madrassa in northern Pakistan." Indeed, Rashid quotes Samiul Haq to indicate the Taliban-Madrassa nexus: "Before 1994, I did not know Mullah Omar because he had not studied in Pakistan, but those around him were all Haqqania students and came to see me frequently to discuss what to do. I advised them not to set up a party because the ISI was still trying to play one Mujaheddin party against the other in order to keep them divided. I told them to start a student movement. When the Taliban movement began I told the ISI, ‘let the students take over Afghanistan’". Haq, according to Rashid, was in constant touch with Mullah Omar and assisted him in dealing with ‘international relations’ and also offered advice on important Sharia decisions. He was also the principal organiser for the recruitment of Pakistani students to fight for the Taliban. An instance of the deeper involvement is evident when "after the Taliban defeat in Mazar in 1997 he (Haq) received a telephone call from Omar asking for help. Haq shut down his madrassa and sent his entire student body to fight alongside the Taliban. And after the battle for Mazar in 1998, Haq organised a meeting between Taliban leaders and 12 madrassas in the NWFP to organise reinforcements for the Taliban army. All the madrassas agreed to shut down for one month and send 8,000 students to Afghanistan. The help the Taliban receive from Pakistan’s Deobandi madrassas is an important level of support they can rely upon, quite apart from the government and the intelligence agencies." JUI's fate has been intricately linked to the presence or absence of a Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban rose from madrassas run by the JUI to capture a country bereft of a central authority. Consequently, they also revived JUI politically. The Islamist revanchist backlash, which became more pronounced after the US air strikes, assumed critical dimensions vis-à-vis the various liberal forces within Pakistan. Groupings that had strong linkages with the Taliban regime were in the lead in the demonstrations and riots that occurred in various parts of Pakistan after ‘9/11’.

11. The danger in Pakistan has gradually escalated over the past decade, as it becomes increasingly uncertain whether its leadership is "master or victim" of the militant fundamentalism it fuelled for its campaign against the Russian presence in Afghanistan through the 1980s, and continues to stoke in pursuit of its strategic ambitions in Kashmir, despite recent and cosmetic changes under US pressure. Ahmed Rashid notes the devastating potential of Pakistan’s flirtations with ‘fundamentalist’ mass mobilization:

In the late 1990s the repercussions were much more pervasive, undermining all the institutions of the state… law and order broke down as Islamic militants enacted their own laws and a new breed of anti-Shia Islamic radicals, who were given sanctuary by the Taliban, killed hundreds of Pakistani Shias between 1996 and 1999. This sectarian bloodshed is now fuelling a much wider rift between Pakistan’s Sunni majority and Shia minority and undermining relations between Pakistan and Iran. At the same time, over 80,000 Pakistani Islamic militants have trained and fought with the Taliban since 1994. They form a hardcore of Islamic activists, ever ready to carry out a similar Taliban-style Islamic revolution in Pakistan.

12. Pakistan’s entire posture has been based on ‘deniability’ of its support to terrorism. Thus, their public posture proclaims their firm opposition to terrorism, even as they fund, support and encourage it with unprecedented vigour. This duplicity has been possible because the Western nations have found it expedient, for their own misconceived strategic goals, to pretend that there was insufficient ‘evidence’ of Pakistan’s involvement in the past. In fact, this posture is very similar to what the Taliban did with the Americans: proclaiming loudly that there was no evidence, or no sufficient evidence to act against bin Laden. Interestingly, after the Pakistan leadership publicly accepted – under mounting US pressure – that there was, in fact, sufficient prima facie evidence against bin Laden, the Taliban stand shifted, and they asserted that, even if evidence was given, bin Laden could not be handed over to the US. The demand for evidence, here, is no more than an obstructive device, unrelated to any principled quest for the truth or for the protection of rights. This, precisely, has been the Western position in the past, where the reality – for instance of the proxy war in J&K – that had been documented and acknowledged by the intelligence agencies of these countries, was deliberately ignored since it was erroneously believed to constitute no direct threat to Western interests. The Black Tuesday attacks in New York and Washington changed this in significant measure.

13. Pakistan is currently in an extremely difficult situation, and there is a process of violent internal churning that is being built up. Given the history of that country, it is possible that it will seek to cope with these internal pressures by trying to focus attention elsewhere – by provoking greater violence in Kashmir and other parts of India. There are, of course, grave risks involved in such adventurism, far greater than ever before. In order to maintain deniability, Pakistan may, in fact, increasingly direct its covert war away from Kashmir, and into other parts of India, especially the metropolii and various areas where it has already penetrated and established cells.

5. The Assembly Lines of Jehad

1. South Asia comprises the largest concentration of Muslims in the world, with over 395 million people professing Islam as their Faith. Indeed, India has the second largest population of Muslims – after Indonesia – for any country in the world: nearly 142 million.

2. As a region, South Asia has a long history, both of communal confrontation and violence, on the one hand, and of co-existence within an eclectic culture that has accepted differences, on the other. This dualism is ingrained in the unique and diverse set of practices and beliefs that particularly comprise Indian Islam – and at some point of time, also comprised sub-continental Islam. There is, consequently, a clear note of caution that must be sounded here. There has been a long and widely acknowledged process of the demonisation of Islam over the years – indeed, perhaps over the centuries. John Esposito rightly warns against "the temptation to view Islam through the prism of religious extremism and terrorism," and identifies the "demonisation of a great religious tradition due to the perverted actions of a minority of dissident and distorted voices" as "the real threat."

3. The total strength of extremist Islamist terrorists in India would number a few thousand in a population of 142 million. The number of those who sympathise with their cause would certainly be many times greater, and those who are ambivalent in their responses could be a significant proportion of the total population. The fact, however, remains that even the sum of all these would only be a very small fraction of those who seek to live in peace, within the culture of coexistence that has become the essence of the Indian Weltanschauung.

4. This is not the case with India alone. Even in Pakistan, the country marked by the most rabid and widespread extremism in this region, the constituency of militant Islam is small in proportion to the total population, and this has repeatedly been borne out in the occasional elections that have been held in that country between its extended periods of military rule. Despite decades of military patronage, a continuous flow of governmental and international funding, and a political discourse dominated by Islam, the electoral performance of religious ‘fundamentalist’ political parties, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and the Jamaat-e-Ulema Pakistan (JUP), has been dismal. In 1988, they won 11 seats out of 207 in the National Assembly, claiming a mere 6.6 per cent of the vote. In 1990, they slipped down to 10 seats, with 5.4 per cent of the vote. In 1993, the Pakistan Islamic Front (PIF), headed by the JEI, bagged 3 seats, and electoral support for all religious parties was a bleak 3 per cent. The JEI and the JUP boycotted the 1997 elections, and two seats were returned in the National Assembly to the JUI (Fazlur Rahman faction) that participated.

5. This said, it must also be emphasized in the strongest terms possible that moderate Islam is, today, under deep, penetrating and sustained attack in every concentration of Muslim populations throughout South Asia, and there is a ‘hardening’ of beliefs that may lend itself to the extremist jehad in an uncertain future. The demonisation of Islam is loudly protested, both by neutral scholars and by the apologists for extremist Islam. But, there is a neglect of an even more vicious process of the demonization of all other Faiths and nations among the people of Islam – and this goes beyond the ‘Great Satan’, America, or the ‘Brahminical conspiracy’ of ‘Hindustan’, or the visceral anti-Semitism of the Arabs, to embrace all Kafirs or non-Muslims, and also all Muslims who do not conform to the perverse vision of extremist Islam. There is a profound ideology of hatred that is being fervently propagated through the institutions of Islam, particularly the madrassas or religious schools and seminaries that are proliferating rapidly across South Asia and is winning many ardent converts. As stated before, these are still a minority among South Asia’s Muslims; but this is a vocal, armed, well-supported, extremely violent and growing minority. The majority, by contrast, has tended to passivity and conciliation, and there is little present evidence of the courage of conviction or of the will for any moderate Islamist resistance to the rampage of extremist Islam.

6. What Pakistan achieved in Afghanistan was, indeed, extraordinary. The ‘tactic of a thousand cuts’ produced such an unbearable ‘haemorrhaging of men and money’, that the wounded Soviet superpower eventually withdrew before what the world had thought of as a rag-tag army of ‘the lunatics of Allah’. The billions of dollars and the unlimited supplies of arms and ammunition that were pumped in by an unlikely coalition of backers, the unrelated unravelling of a corrupt Soviet system, and the fact that it was the Afghans themselves who did most of the fighting, cannot detract from the triumph of the Pakistani architects of the ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan.

7. This is the second tainted triumph that has brought inconceivable misfortune upon Pakistan. The first occurred when it was forged as a separate nation out of a philosophy of hatred and exclusion, an ideology that denied the possibility of the coexistence of communities with any significant differences of culture, belief or values under a single political order. Less than three per cent of the population of Pakistan now comprises non-Muslims, and the proportion declines each year. But, the intolerance and the rage that created the nation must constantly find new enemies. It was this bigotry that resulted in its first dismemberment and the creation of Bangladesh. It is the same malevolence that seeks out new victims among subgroups of the Muslims themselves – such as the Ahmadiyas and the Shias. Today, as sectarian divisions inevitably compound themselves, every regional and cultural group in Pakistan – the Punjabis, the Sindhis, the Pashtuns, the Baluchis and the Mohajirs – sees the other as an enemy.

8. This is the fractious milieu within which General Zia-ul-Haq created the Taliban, and to which they victoriously returned after establishing their ‘control’ over most of Afghanistan. Olivier Roy succinctly defined the Frankenstienian dilemma that confronts Pakistan:

The apparent victor, Pakistan, could pay dearly for its success. The triumph of the Taliban has virtually eliminated the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On both sides, Pashtun tribes are slipping towards fundamentalism and becoming increasingly implicated in drug trafficking. They are gaining autonomy, already small fundamentalist tribal emirates are appearing on Pakistani soil. The de facto absorption of Afghanistan will accentuate centrifugal tendencies within Pakistan.

9. At the heart of the crisis is the network of increasingly powerful marakiz (centres) and madrassas that has now established itself as the source, not only of international ‘pan-Islamic’ terrorism, but of an overwhelming proportion of internal strife as well. Its roots can be traced back to General Zia-ul-Haq’s vigorous use of Islam as a tool of regime legitimization, a trend that was first introduced by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1971, and that has been variously reinforced by every succeeding regime. The growth of these madrassas is, indeed, an accurate index of Pakistan’s mounting difficulties. In 1947, there were 137 madrassas in the entire country. By 1971, this number had grown to 900. But, with Zia’s policy of generously funding "madrassas of all sectarian persuasions…. by the end of the Zia era in 1988, there were 8,000 madrassas and 25,000 unregistered ones, educating over half a million students. As Pakistan’s state-run educational system steadily collapsed, these madrassas became the only avenue for boys from poor families to receive the semblance of an education." Sources indicate that by the middle of the year 2000, the number of madrassas had grown to nearly 9,500, and some commentators in Pakistan estimate the current number of unregistered madrassas at between 40,000 and 50,000.

10. The mind-blunting curriculum of most of these madrassas entirely neglects all branches of secular instruction, including the basics of mathematics and science, and comprises 16 long years of purely theological education, recitation of the Quran, Fiqah (interpretation of the Sharia), and indoctrination for jihad. The inevitable consequence of such an education has been the chronic "inability to produce reality-based theories of change", extraordinarily narrow and exclusionary perspectives, and deepening sectarian divisions that spill over into increasing violence. With an estimated 60 per cent of funding emanating from abroad, these schisms are magnified further by the ideological and strategic contests of foreign funding agencies and states. Afzaal Mahmood, for instance, notes that, "By allowing Iran and Saudi Arabia to fund, influence and use some sectarian organisations of their liking, we have virtually encouraged Teheran and Riyadh to fight a proxy war on the soil of Pakistan, with serious consequences for sectarian harmony and law and order in the country." Funds have also come from Libya, Iraq and several other Gulf countries, creating an intricately nuanced web of conflict. Shia and Sunni madrassas have spawned rival terrorist forces that visit gratuitous slaughter on sectarian rivals – most prominently, the Sunni outfit Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP); and the Shia outfits Tehreek-e-Jafaria Pakistan (TJP) and Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan (SMP). There is also a deep schism between Sunni Deobandi and Barelvi madrassas, and a large number of Ahle Hadis madrassas have also emerged recently in Baluchistan, Sindh and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Most sectarian bombings and shootouts originate from or occur at mosques housing these schools, and significant proportions of those killed are madrassa students. Patterns of international rivalry are also visible in the some retaliatory killings. Thus, Iranian diplomat, Sadiq Ganji, was gunned down in Lahore following the assassination of SSP founder Haq Nawaz Jhangvi in March 1990. Similarly, the 1997 assassination of Jhangvi’s successor, Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi and 26 others in a bomb blast at the Lahore Sessions Court, saw the alleged revenge killing of Iranian diplomat Muhammad Ali Rahimi and six others in an attack on the Iranian Cultural Center at Multan.

11. Sectarian violence is, however, a relatively minor consequence of the proliferation of madrassas. Their primary output has been the export of international extremist Islamist terrorism, and this has created enormous internal concentrations of armed, trained and indoctrinated irregular (terrorist) forces who, at some point of time or the other, may have been supported by the government through the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) that oversaw the Afghan campaign, and that currently guides the export of terror into Jammu & Kashmir and other theatres across the world, but who do not acknowledge the power of the government to define their long-term goals and objectives. Their allegiance is commanded by the various ‘spiritual leaders’ who run madrassas that have acquired extraordinary notoriety over the past years, both as hotbeds of terrorism and as the spawning ground of the Afghani Taliban. It is here that a ‘theology of rage’ is taught, and the Talib (student) exhorted to practice a ‘sacred violence’ that is his greatest duty in Islam. These institutions include most prominently the Dar-ul-Uloom Haqqani at Akora Khattak; the Markaz-ad-Da’awa-wal-Irshad (MDI) at Muridke; the Jamiat-ul-Uloom Islamia Madrassa in Karachi; the Dar-ul-Uloom, Pashtoonabad; the Dar-ul-Iftah-ul-Irshad, Nazimabad; and the Ahle-Sunnat-wal Jamaat madrassa at Rawalpindi. Many of these institutions run a multiplicity of schools across the country – the Markaz-ad-Da’awa-wal-Irshad, for instance, had 137 madrassas by late 2000. These, however, are only a sampling, the visible tip of the iceberg, and there are hundreds of less known ‘Jihad factories’ – the ‘supply line for jihad’ – that indoctrinate their students and give them ‘military’ training, both for the sectarian war, and for international terrorism.

12. The apparatus of training for terrorism reflects the same curious dualism and principal-agent conflict that characterises the growth of the madrassas. A number of training camps, especially those that fuel the terrorist movement in J&K, have long been run by the Army and the ISI; most, however, function with various degrees of autonomy under the charge of quasi-independent extremist Islamist institutions and groupings; and even where active state support is lacking, their activities are fully tolerated on Pakistani soil. Occasional difficulties did, of course, crop up – and the Taliban in Afghanistan had willingly provided sanctuary and space to armed groups whose sectarian activities may have passed beyond Islamabad’s levels of declared tolerance, and whose sectarian orientation was in conformity with their own. This may have been a highly collusive and convenient arrangement, and Pakistan had, at least on occasion, found it opportune to relocate specific training camps in Afghanistan when international pressure becomes excessive. This, for instance, happened in 1992-93, when Pakistan feared that the US would declare it a state sponsor of terrorism for its activities in J&K. In response, Pakistan simply moved most of its Kashmiri militant groups to bases in eastern Afghanistan, and by ‘privatising’ its support to the Kashmiri mujaheddin, made the Islamic parties responsible for their training and funding. The shift was temporary, and while a number of camps continued to function in Afghanistan till the US campaign commenced, there was a proliferation within Pakistan as well, and one estimate in late 2000 placed the number of existing terrorist training camps in Pakistan at 128. This is, however, a fluctuating figure, and the location of many of these camps is frequently changed. Various sources and agencies have identified a significant number of such camps over the years, and they extended from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), through Pakistan, to Afghanistan.

13. The ‘privatisation’ of these camps and of the jehadi armies, however, had disastrous consequences, and there was mounting evidence of a loss of control as the autonomous religious groups challenged, not only their Army and ISI handlers, but the government itself. No clear division now exists between various social, political, religious and terrorist organisations; and most groups that have actively participated in street violence and acts of terrorism, both within Pakistan and abroad, are also openly active on Pakistan’s political landscape. There has, moreover, been increasing penetration by extremist Islamist elements into Pakistan’s Army, and elements of ‘Islamisation’ have been introduced into the Army’s training programs at various levels. In 1992, the then Prime Minister appointed a well-known Tablighi (congregationist), Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, as the Director General of the all-powerful ISI. General Pervez Musharraf’s military regime, moreover, lacks the capabilities and support to contain the extremist elements and has, on more than one occasion, been forced to back off on policies and reforms in the face of Islamist opposition. The cumulative impact of nearly two and a half decades of ‘Islamisation’ has now put in doubt the Army’s ability – indeed, will – to suppress the extremist Islamist forces in case of an open confrontation with government, and it is apparent that at least some sections within the Army would side with the extremists if such an eventuality emerged.

14. Such a confrontation now appears increasingly probable. The madrassas and the mujahiddeen are committed to the establishment of a ‘Taliban style’ government for Pakistan, and some of the groups recently put Pervez Musharraf’s military regime on notice to establish ‘Islamic rule’ in the country, or to face the consequences. Maulana Samiul Haq, the chief of his own faction of the JUI, speaking at the Jamia Ashrafia at Peshawar in January 2001, declared that both the so-called democratic and martial law regimes had been tested and had failed to deliver, and that, consequently, only the Islamic Sharia could ‘solve the problems faced by the masses.’ Maulana Jalil Jan, the provincial leader of the JUI (F) added that, if the government failed to implement Islamic Sharia, the ‘religious students will resort to the use of force to do the same’.

15. Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who headed the ISI through critical periods of the Agency’s campaign in Afghanistan, shares the vision of the Islamist fundamentalists and argues that "Pakistan will go through its own version of an Islamic revolution…. The army is the last hope. And if the army fails – and it probably will – then people will realise they will have to do it themselves, revolt against the system… Because everything else in this country has failed, Islam will have to lead the way."

16. It seems clear that, unless current trends are radically and immediately reversed, it is only a matter of time before Pakistan is sucked into the turmoil of an Afghanistan-like anarchy.

6. The Web of Terror: Erosion & Encirclement

1. Among the primary targets of the armies of mujahiddeen, and their suicidal hard core, the fidayeen, who pour out of the madrassas and Pakistani terrorist training camps, is the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), though recent events may gradually induce a shift in strategy, with increasing terrorist incidents in various metropolitan areas in India. It is significant, in this context, that the leadership of the terrorist movement in J&K passed out of the hands of local militants, into groups created by and based in Pakistan as far back as in 1993, when the most powerful terrorist group indigenous to the State, the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chose to give up arms and seek a ‘political solution’ to its grievances. The JKLF still demands Kashmiri ‘Independence’, but is strongly opposed to any amalgamation with Pakistan. The Pakistan-based groups, quite naturally, are far more amenable to a merger with that country.

2. Terrorist groupings enjoyed substantial mass support, particularly in the Kashmir Valley, as long as the movement for secession remained indigenous. Progressively, however, a process of disillusionment with the activities of Pakistan sponsored militants has combined with exhaustion to diminish this base, and terrorism is now sustained purely on inputs – ideologies, material, and increasing numbers of men – from across the border. The terrorist groups currently most active in the State are each headquartered in Pakistan, and include the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen (HM), linked to the JeI in Pakistan; Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the armed wing of the Markaz-ad-Da’awa-wal-Irshad; the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami (HuJI) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahiddeen (formerly the Harkat-ul-Ansar), linked to the JUI, the Pakistan Tablighi Jamaat and to the Hizb-e-Islami of Afghanistan; Al Badr; and the Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM). There are another score of minor and dormant groupings, also located in Pakistan. The umbrella Muttahida Jehad Council co-ordinates the activities of 13 of the most prominent terrorist factions.

3. The years 1997, 1998 and the first half of 1999 had seen a gradual decline in violence and fatalities in J&K, but there was a radical escalation after the Kargil War of May-July 1999. The trends underwent a further deterioration after two cease-fires – the first announced unilaterally by the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in July 2000, and the second, again unilaterally, by the Indian Prime Minister, A B Vajpayee, in November 2000 – as the possibility of an emerging peace process threatened the entrenched interests and ideological ambitions of the extremist Islamist groups in Pakistan, and of their official sponsors there. A total of 30,275 persons had died in this conflict between 1988 and 2001. These include 11,377 civilians, 15,246 terrorists, and 4,102 security force (SF) personnel. Among the civilian fatalities, 8,712 (nearly 85 per cent) have been Muslims. [Graphs 1, 2 & 3]