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South Asia
Extremist Islamist Terror & Subversion
Ajai Sahni
1. Terror in Very Slow
Motion
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Myth of the Locus of Terror
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Islamist endgame envisages, consequently,
an eventual and decisive confrontation between a corroded
and declining Western power, and an increasingly united
Islamist force.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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’.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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."
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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’.
-
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."
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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]
Graph
3
-
Significantly, the proportion of foreign
mercenaries and mujahiddeen involved in the militancy
in the State has been steadily rising, from a mere 6 per
cent in 1992 to an estimated 55 per cent today. A majority
of these are drawn from Pakistan and Pakistan occupied Kashmir
(PoK). There is also a limited engagement of the ‘Afghan
Alumni’, and terrorists from Afghanistan and at least 11
other countries have been identified in Kashmir. The number
of foreign terrorists killed in J&K has risen steadily
since 1991, when their activities were first noticed in
the State, and particularly after 1993, when the main indigenous
militant group, the JKLF, came overground:
Year
|
Number
|
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
|
03
19
97
125
119
194
258
394
348
403
|
2001
|
541
|
Total
|
2501
|
Table 1: Foreign Militants
Killed in J&K
(Source: Institute for
Conflict Management)
-
The conflict in Kashmir has been substantially
documented in the context of Pakistan’s strategy and "overriding
interest… to achieve internal security by provoking instability
among its neighbors." There is, however, comparatively
little understanding of the extremist or pan-Islamist agenda
in the rest of South Asia, and of its integral links to
the strategies and tactics that prepared the ground for
terrorism in Kashmir.
-
As with much of South Asia, the culture
and religious practices of the Muslims of Kashmir had little
in common with the rigid and distorted version of Wahabbi
Islam – with its ideological source in Saudi Arabia – that
is the dominant ideological force among contemporary extremist
Islamists. Kashmiri Islam was seeped with the mysticism
and values of the devotional Sufi order, and the Kashmir
Valley was, indeed, held up as a unique and inspirational
example of secular values at the time of Partition and Independence,
and in the decades that followed. The emergence of terrorism
in the State was preceded by decades of religious mobilisation
and reorientation centred primarily in the mosques in the
Valley. When terror broke out in the late 1980s, it was
the mosques and the madrassas that provided the motivation,
the moral sanction, and the initial impetus, not only to
the violence, but to the near complete ethnic cleansing
of the Valley of its Kashmiri Pandit minority. It is interesting
that, among the priority targets of the terrorists was the
network of secular school, most of which were shut down
under threat, especially in rural areas. This progressively
forced the children into the only surviving ‘educational’
institution – the madrassa – the ‘schools of hate’
that created new ‘supply lines’ for jihad.
-
There is today, a sustained effort – with
mixed results – to replicate these processes of religious
mobilisation and an extremist Islamist reorientation throughout
South Asia. In India, while there have been several political
factors and events contributing to higher levels of communal
polarisation, general communal conflict – expressed in the
incidence of communal riots – has been on a decline. Political
parties are yet to abandon the electoral strategy of exploiting
religious sentiments and insecurities, but the mass base
and credibility of those who seek to do so has suffered
steady erosion. Nevertheless, the intent and strategy of
Pakistan’s covert agencies and extremist religious groupings
is increasingly apparent in a wide range of activities intended
to provoke communal confrontations, engineer terrorist incidents,
and recruit soldiers for a pan-Islamist jihad in
pockets of Muslim populations across India. A process of
‘encirclement’ and massive demographic shifts that deepen
the danger compound these initiatives, particularly along
India's eastern borders.
-
During a three-day annual congregation of
the members of the Markaz-ad-Da’awa-wal-Irshad at Muridke
near Lahore on February 6, 2000, the Amir (Chief) of the
Markaz, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, declared that Kashmir was
a ‘gateway to capture India’ and that it was the aim of
the Markaz and its military wing, the Lashkar-e-Toiba, to
engineer India’s disintegration. Saeed added that his organisation’s
campaign in Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh) and Junagadh (Gujarat)
were among the highest priorities. Abdul Rahman Makki, the
LeT’s ideologue, expanded on this theme, proclaiming that
the group had opened a new unit in Hyderabad to liberate
the Indian city from "un-Islamic Indian rule".
These declarations are, at once, an expression of the pan-Islamist
ambitions shared by all extremist Islamist groups operating
in the region, and a reiteration of Pakistan’s larger strategy
of destabilisation beyond the scope of the supposed ‘core
issue’ of Kashmir.
-
Within this larger design was a series of
13 bomb blasts in various churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka
and Goa between May and July 2000, executed by an obscure
Islamist sect created in 1924, the Deendar Anjuman. The
Anjuman is headed by Zia-ul-Hassan – the son of the Anjuman’s
founder – who is based in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the
sect goes by the name Anjuman Hizbullah. Hassan is also
said to have floated a militant organisation, the Jamat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen
in Pakistan, in order to ‘capture India and spread Islam’.
Intelligence sources indicate that Hassan is bankrolled
by the ISI, and the Indian Union Home Minister stated in
Parliament that investigators had established linkages between
the Deendar Anjuman and Pakistan’s covert intelligence agency.
Investigations have exposed a network of the Anjuman’s subversive
activities extending across several small towns and urban
centres, including Nuzvid, Atmakur, Kurukunda, Palem, Vijayawada,
Khammam and Nandyal in Andhra Pradesh; and Batakurki, Ramdurg
and Hubli in Karnataka.
-
Another series of 19 explosions had earlier,
on February 14, 1998, left over 50 dead and more than 200
injured in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu. While
the Al Umma group, founded by S A Basha, was blamed, investigations
and subsequent arrests exposed the involvement of a wide
network of extremist Islamist organisations across South
India. These included the Indian Muslim Mohammadi Mujahideen,
the Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen, the Jihad Committee in Tamil
Nadu; and the Islamic Sevak Sangh, subsequently banned and
revived as the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), headed by
Abdul Nasser Madani, in Kerala. ISI agents involved, included
Azam Ghauri (who was subsequently killed in an encounter
with the police at Jagityal, Karimnagar District, Andhra
Pradesh, on April 6, 2000), Saleem Junaid, Farooq Ahmed
and Mohammad Mansoor.
-
The first major bomb blast in Tamil Nadu
occurred in 1993 when the RSS office was blown up in Chennai.
It was reported that Islamist fundamentalist groups, which
had been proliferating, had masterminded the blast. The
immediate causal factor for the proliferation is traced
to the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. The Tamil
Nadu police stumbled on an important lead when they arrested
a person, Imam Ali, in the Mettupalayam forests in 1994.
Imam Ali was found to be imparting training in explosives
to four youth. He reportedly confessed that he had been
training Islamist fundamentalists. According to intelligence
sources in Coimbatore, Kashmiri militants may also have
trained Imam Ali. Certain letters recovered from him pointed
towards linkages in Bangladesh. Three bomb blasts were subsequently
reported on different trains in Tamil Nadu and Kerala on
December 6, 1997, and pamphlets recovered from the incident
site pointed to the involvement of the Islamic Defence Force
(IDF). Ten members of two Islamist fundamentalist groups
were chargesheeted on October 5, 1998, for a bomb blast
on a Coimbatore-bound train on December 6, 1997. The IDF
also claimed responsibility for a bomb blast that occurred
under the Anna flyover in Chennai on January 10, 1998. This
was followed by another blast in a rice mill at Thanjavur
on February 8, 1998. Police investigations revealed that
Abdul Khader, son of the mill owner, Abdul Hameed, was connected
to Muslim fundamentalist organisations.
-
The professed objective of such Islamist
outfits, aided by Pakistan, vis-à-vis India is to
‘liberate’ the Muslims, not only of Jammu and Kashmir, but
the rest of India, from ‘Hindu control’, and to establish
‘two more independent homelands’ for the Muslims of the
sub-continent – one in North India and the other in the
South. After Tamil Nadu and Kerala, their focus shifted
to comprehend Andhra Pradesh as well. There has also been
a considerable flow of funds to the Al Ummah of Tamil Nadu
and its allied organisations in Kerala from Pakistan-based
Islamist terror groups, possibly through the Gulf.
-
The then Kerala Chief Minister E K Nayanar
admitted in June 1998 that certain terrorist groups had
been operating in his State. These included radical Islamist
outfits such as the National Development Front (NDF), the
Jamiyathul Ehsaniya, the Students Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI), the Islamic Movement and the Al-Umma, whose base
of operations covers Kozhikode, Malappuram and Thrissur
districts. The arrest of the Peoples Democratic Party Chairman,
Abdul Nasser Madani, for allegedly harbouring Al-Umma militants
involved in the Coimbatore bomb blasts indicated a nexus
between the PDP and the extremist outfits. Though Al-Umma
has been active in Kerala, its roots and theatre of operations
lie in Tamil Nadu. The free movement of people between these
two states has helped Al-Umma activists to slip across and
blend with the Muslim population of Malapuram.
-
13 NDF activists were arrested on September
6, 2001, while undergoing arms training at a college in
Palakkad. Recent intelligence reports have reportedly indicated
that the State is fast emerging as a haven for fundamentalist
and subversive forces. Central intelligence agencies had
reportedly apprised the State government regarding the Mumbai
Mafia’s role in training NDF activists in areas such as
Malapuram and Kasarkode.
-
By far the most dramatic serial blasts engineered
by the ISI took place in Bombay on March 12, 1993, and these
revealed a unique pattern of operation that has gradually
consolidated itself over the years – the use of organised
criminal networks to execute terrorist strikes. Nearly 1,800
kilograms of RDX, and a large number of detonators and small
arms, had been smuggled through the West Coast of India
prior to these blasts, which killed over 300 persons and
targeted critical commercial infrastructure, including the
country’s largest stock exchange at Dalal Street. The explosions
were executed by the notorious D-Company headed by Dawood
Ibrahim. Ibrahim now lives under state protection in Karachi,
and runs India’s largest criminal empire through aides located
outside India, and primarily in the Middle East.
-
Gujarat has currently become a significant
centre for subversive activities by various Islamist fundamentalist
organisations and Pakistan-sponsored terrorist outfits.
Since 1992, the State’s borders with Pakistan, including
the 1600 kilometre long coastline, has been subjected to
incessant subversive activity by these outfits who utilise
the State as a launch pad for various terrorist operations
in the rest of India. Particularly, the Kutch region, Saurashtra
and Junagadh have witnessed growing incidents of smuggling
of arms and ammunition, as also narcotics and fake currency.
The marshy area of the Rann of Kutch – the 512-kilometre
border with Pakistan comprising several hundred smaller
channels that merge into three large creeks (Sir Creek,
Kori and Mainwari) – renders it uniquely vulnerable to smuggling
with the help of small fishing boats called hodas.
Smugglers and gunrunners from Mumbai and Dubai frequent
this area. In the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri
mosque in 1992, the smuggling of RDX and other explosives
began to be routed increasingly through the Gujarat coast
to Porbander in the Saurashtra region. Indeed, a large cache
that arrived through the border, passed through Bulsar in
south Gujarat, and was subsequently trans-shipped to Mumbai,
where it was used to engineer the serial blasts that killed
more than 300 people and left thousands injured.
-
In August 1995, security force personnel
arrested 10 Pakistani nationals in the Kutch region. Six
AK-47 rifles were also seized from their possession. The
ISI has been able to set up well-organised bases in the
State. For example, Abdul Ghani alias Assadullah, a Kashmiri
terrorist collected RDX from Nepal and set up bases in Ahmedabad.
He also supplied RDX for the Delhi and Dausa blasts of May
1996. The Gujarat police later arrested him in June 1996.
On May 24, 1996, the State police arrested four Jammu and
Kashmir-based terrorists who subsequently confessed that
they had been sent by ‘Colonel Farooq’ of the ISI to set
up a base in Ahmedabad. They also revealed that they had
been asked to recruit youth in Gujarat and Maharashra for
terrorist training in Pakistan. In March 1998, police killed
six criminals allegedly belonging to the Dawood Ibrahim
gang in the walled area of Ahmedabad, and seized a huge
cache of arms and ammunition, including 10 kilograms of
RDX. On March 24, 1998 a huge cache of arms and ammunition
was recovered from the Gandhinagar and Daryapur areas of
Ahmedabad. The weapons were reportedly supplied by the ISI.
In July 1999, six terrorists arrested in Ahmedabad confessed
during their interrogation that the ISI had trained them
in explosives handling in Pakistan. In the same month, two
suspected ISI agents were arrested in
Bhuj and 24 kg of RDX and two Chinese-made pistols were
seized from their possession.
-
On July 24, 2000, five suspected ISI agents
were arrested in Sarwej. 25 Chinese-made pistols, five magazines,
200 rounds of ammunition and six kg of heroin and six AK-47
rifles were recovered from their possession. On April 2001,
seven persons, including four arms-dealers allegedly having
links with the ISI were arrested from various parts of the
capital city, Ahmedabad. On May 27, 2001, a Lashkar-e-Toiba
terrorist was arrested with an AK-56 rifle at the Hajipir
area of Rann of Kutch. During the course of interrogation,
he is reported to have said that he had acquired training
in terrorist activities at Muzaffarabad in Pakistan occupied
Kashmir (PoK), and had ‘sneaked into India for a special
task’. This was the third case since March 2001 when the
ISI sent armed terrorists into the Kutch region.
-
The ISI is also trying to create communal
tension with the help of fundamentalist outfits such as
the recently proscribed SIMI. There has also been a proliferation
of madrassas (religious seminaries) in the border
areas. These madrassas are reportedly securing funds
from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan as also from certain other Gulf
countries. Available evidence suggests that the ISI is using
the Gujarat border in its attempts to revive terrorism in
Punjab. Official sources have indicated that the ISI had
reportedly asked the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) terrorists
Wadhawa Singh and Mehal Singh, both located in Pakistan,
to revive terrorism in Punjab. In January 2000, five terrorists
of the BKI, with alleged links to the ISI, who were planning
to launch major countrywide terrorist activities by making
Gujarat their base, were arrested from the Narol area of
Ahmedabad. Criminal underground networks have also been
mobilised in this endeavour. Reports indicate that outfits
like the Khalistan Zindabad Force (Punjwar faction), based
in Sialkot, have also been instructed by the ISI to exploit
the porous Gujarat border. In August 1999, Chhota Shakil
of the Karachi-based Dawood Ibrahim gang is reported to
have visited Kabul twice in order to place orders for arms
and ammunition, as also to meet Osama bin Laden. As a result,
a red-alert was sounded in the border areas, especially
in the Rann of Kutch, which is considered to be a critical
route for the Dawood gang’s arms traffickers. The carriers
come from Karachi, cross the Kutch border into Gujarat and
make their way to Ahmedabad, Dawood’s biggest base in India
after Mumbai, from where their deadly contraband is distributed
throughout the country.
-
The ISI is also involved in circulating
fake Indian currency across the Gujarat border. The Agency
has set up a printing press at Sukkur where fake Indian
currency notes are printed, and brought into the country
via Shahgarh Budge near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan through Gujarat.
In a single seizure on November 3, 1998, police recovered
Rs. 2,749,700 worth of counterfeit currency from an aircraft
coming from Sharjah to Jamnagar.
-
The operational ISI units at Sialkot and
Karachi have been co-ordinating the attempts of various
terrorist outfits – Khalistani and Kashmiri – to breach
the western coast of the country. At least three Islamist
extremist / fundamentalist organisations – Lashkar-e-Toiba,
Ahl-e-Hadis and Tablighi Jamat – are active in Kutch. Of
late, the activities of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s student wing
have also been increasing in this thinly populated district.
-
India’s Northeast is another interesting
area of emerging Islamist militancy, and here it combines
with major demographic shifts that hold significant dangers
for the future stability of the region. Illegal migration
on a large scale across the border from Bangladesh is the
most potent single factor in the destabilisation of the
Northeast. In November 1998, the Governor of Assam, Lt.
Gen. (Retd.) S K Sinha, submitted a report to the Indian
President, which estimated the total volume of this infiltration
at six million people. Most of this increase was concentrated
in a few areas, with a dramatic impact on the local demography
and, hence, electoral politics. According to the report,
four districts of Assam – Dhubri, Goalpara, Barpeta and
Hailakandi – had been transformed into Muslim majority districts
by 1991 as a result of this mass infiltration. Another two
districts – Nagaon and Karimganj – would have had a Muslim
majority since 1998 and yet another district, Morigaon,
was fast approaching this position. This demographic destabilisation,
combined with the widespread violence and political instability
in the region, has created a unique recruiting ground for
the Islamists, and there has been a veritable efflorescence
of Muslim terrorist groups operating along India’s borders
with Bangladesh in the Northeast. In Assam alone, there
are over 15 terrorist groups operating under an Islamist
banner, and the ISI’s role in funding and arming these groups
has now been fairly well documented.
-
Reports in October 2001 indicated that,
inspired by the activities of Osama bin Laden, a new militant
group, the Islamic Security Force of India (ISFI) had intensified
its activities in various Muslim-dominated areas of Assam.
The militant group, which was constituted in Mumbai in the
year 2000, reportedly with the active support of Al Qaeda,
commenced recruiting Muslim youth to launch a jehad
against what it perceived as the repression and suppression
of the Muslim community. Official sources have indicated
that the ISFI’s activities came to light after recovery
of vital documents distributed in the remote areas of Darrang
district. From the seized documents it was found that the
ISFI has close links with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front (JKLF). ISFI is also reportedly associated with Al-Umar,
which has been providing financial help and arms and ammunition
to the militant group.
-
In Nagaon and Marigaon districts, there
is a section of active supporters of extremist and proscribed
groups such as the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam
(MULTA), Muslim United Liberation Front of Assam (MULFA)
and SIMI, who have been propagating the idea of a separate
Islamic State, comprising several districts of Assam. There
was also a spurt in pro-bin Laden mobilisation along and
across the Bangladesh border and, according to B P Rao,
Inspector General of Police (Law and Order), "We have
reliable intelligence inputs that efforts are being made
to export a group of highly-motivated Muslim fundamentalists,
carrying photographs of Laden, into Assam. They have plans
to cross over through the Indo-Bangla border in Karimganj
district of Assam." He also added that some processions
had been taken out by bin Laden supporters in certain areas
of the trouble-torn Nalbari district. Rao also pointed out
that there had been a ‘madrassa boom’ in Assam in
recent years: "Compared to other states, construction of
madrassas during the last couple of years has been
much more in Assam. As many as 350 of these, located in
minority pockets, are not registered – moreover, we have
reports that some of these are being used for propaganda
against the majority community and the government." The
Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind President, Maulana Syed Asad Madani,
has been reported to have called on Muslims in the State
to unite for jehad in view of the US attacks on Afghanistan.
-
In the wake of the Kargil war, Maj. Gen.
B P Bopanna had stated that "some madrassas
in the North-east have become the harbourers of ISI agents
of Pakistan." The Union Home Ministry has also been
particularly concerned about the mushrooming of madrassas
in the border areas, with extensive funds from the Gulf
countries. According to a report, 236 mosques and 157 madrassas
had recently come up in Assam, 194 mosques and 72 madrassas
in Tripura, 17 mosques and two madrassas in Meghalaya,
along their borders with Bangladesh.
-
The State Government of Assam admitted in
the Legislative Assembly on November 6, 2000, that some
top militants belonging to Muslim extremist outfits "had
been connected with the activities of madrassas"
but hastened to add that this should "not to malign
all the madrassas in a sweep." The State government
also spoke of taking legal action against the offending
madrassas. Documents with the Assam Police indicate
that the Nurani madrassa near Dhaka is being used
as transit camp by Harkat-ul-Muajhideen (HuM) cadres for
their trans-border movement to India. The Garijam madrassa
in the Kamrup district is under watch on suspicion that
it is being misused by the ISI.
-
The recent elections in Bangladesh, which
brought to power a regime that is relatively hostile to
India, have led to an increased vigil by the security establishment
in the Northeast. The militant and pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami
had 16 members elected to the Bangladesh Parliament. Furthermore,
the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) also has strong
linkages — including shared business activities — with terrorist
groups active in the Northeast, most prominently, the ULFA.
Since the BNP came to power, there has been a sudden escalation
in atrocities against minorities in Bangladesh, leading
to increased distress migration into Tripura. The Indian
Home Ministry apprehends a similar influx of refugees in
the Karimganj district of Assam, and there are suspicions
that some pro-Taliban elements from Bangladesh may enter
Assam along with the refugees to create disturbances in
the State.
-
In West Bengal, the State Government ascertained,
in March 1999, that there were at least three new groups
active in the State, which had been receiving monetary and
other support from Osama bin Laden. The three groups whose
names were not immediately disclosed reportedly planned
a conclave in mid-March at a mosque at the small town of
Dhulian in Murshidabad district bordering Bangladesh. The
bin Laden connection to certain Islamist fundamentalist
groups in the State was discovered when police arrested
a person from Lalgola, also a Murshidabad town adjacent
to the Bangladesh border, in the early part of year 1999.
The man from Lalgola was recruited as an ISI agent in New
Delhi, where his uncle lived. For several months, he carried
letters to Rajshahi, the neighbouring Bangladeshi town.
Then he was given the job of despatching a consignment of
explosives to a location in Haryana. The explosives were
said to have been used in terrorist actions in J&K.
Other than Calcutta, the government has identified Murshidabad,
and Shiliguri, as well as Kishangunj in Bihar, as the corridors
frequented by ISI agents operating in the State. While Murshidabad
and Kishangunj offer easy access from Bangladesh, Nepal
agents use the Shiliguri corridor into north Bengal.
-
More than 15 million illegal immigrants
are reported to have entered India over the last five decades
from Bangladesh, an intrusion that has completely changed
the demography of large parts of Assam, Meghalaya, West
Bengal, Tripura and Bihar. This has been observed in a 135-page
report of the Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Union Home
Minister L K Advani and submitted to the Government recently.
The report notes: "Today, we have 15 Million Bangladeshi,
2.2 Million Nepalese, 70,000 Sri Lankan Tamils and about
one lakh Tibetan migrants living in India. Demographic changes
have been brought about in the border belts of West Bengal,
several districts in Assam, Bihar, Tripura and Meghalaya
as a result of large-scale illegal migration. Even states
like Delhi, Maharastra and Rajasthan have been affected."The
GoM Report observed that smuggling of different consumer
and intermediate goods, trafficking in drugs and narcotics
etc., flourish through large parts of India. The ISI is
also reportedly involved in encouraging these activities.
Drug couriers are allowed passage on condition of collecting
and reporting trans-border intelligence. Trained saboteurs
and terrorists are prevailed upon to carry drugs for sustenance
and to recover operational expenses from the sale proceeds.
Passage to couriers of contraband is often conditional to
carrying and delivering arms and ammunition.
-
The Union government recently decided to
proscribe SIMI under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act 1967. A large number of its activists including its
national president were arrested. The ban came in the wake
of strong demands made by various State governments including
Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The Chief
Ministers of these States, during the annual conference
of police chiefs in Delhi on September 5, 2001, had recommended
a ban on SIMI, alleging that the outfit was indulging in
subversive and terrorist activities. SIMI is said to have
links with the ISI and has been acting in support of the
Taliban and Osama bin Laden. It has also been supporting
secessionists and advocating violence in order to establish
an ‘international Islamic order’. On July 31, 2001, police,
during a nation wide crackdown, arrested 23 persons belonging
to the SIMI and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen from Jalgaon, Kanpur,
Hyderabad and Delhi. These arrests revealed that the Kashmiri
terrorist groups had recruited many youth into terrorist
activity with SIMI’s assistance. In July 2001 the police
also arrested the office secretary of SIMI, Mohammed Waqar-ul-Hasan
on the charge of conspiring with Hizb terrorists who had
caused a bomb blast in Nagpur in May 2001. The Uttar Pradesh
government has also reportedly been able to establish SIMI’s
links with terrorist outfits in West Asia, including the
Hamas and the Hezbollah of Lebanon. The Union government
and State intelligence agencies have maintained that SIMI,
over the years, had developed fairly extensive contacts
in the Islamic world. The outfit is closely associated with
the Riyadh-based World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and
the International Islamic Federation of Students’ Organisation
in Kuwait. The group also has extensive links with the students’
wings of the Jamaat-e-Islami units in Pakistan, Bangladesh
and Nepal. The Chicago-based Anti-India Consultative Committee
of Indian Muslims was also in touch with SIMI. Jamayyatul
Ansar, an organisation of SIMI activists comprising expatriate
Indian Muslims, reportedly operates from Saudi Arabia.
-
The Union Home Secretary, on September 28,
2001, stated that the government had evidence linking the
SIMI with Al Qaeda. He said SIMI’s links with terrorist
outfits were exposed during investigations into 14 terrorist
acts causing 15 deaths and injuries to 80 persons in Uttar
Pradesh and Delhi in 2000-2001. The inter-linked triad of
concepts –Ummah, Khilafat and Jehad
– provides the rationale for SIMI's postures and activities.
SIMI cadres regard Osama bin Laden as an outstanding example
of a true Mujahid, one who has undertaken Jihad
on behalf of the Ummah. SIMI’s General Secretary,
Safdar Nagauri, while addressing a press conference in Lucknow
on October 10, 2001, alleged that declaring bin Laden as
an international terrorist was part of an ‘evil design of
America’. He admitted that cassettes of bin Laden’s speeches
were distributed during a SIMI meeting in Kanpur a few months
earlier.
-
Serial bombings and overt terrorist movements,
however, cannot be a measure of the penetration that has
been achieved by the extremist Islamists and their state
sponsors. Acts of terror – especially on a large scale –
represent the culmination of years of preparation that are
reflected in motivation, mobilisation and organisational
development. Evidence of these processes is mounting throughout
India, and is reflected in the number, both of fundamentalist
and of subversive groups in existence, and the geographical
spread of their activities. The most prominent of these
include the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JEI Hind), the All India
Milli Council (AIMC), All India Jihad Committee (AIJC),
the People’s Democratic Party (PDP, formerly the Islamic
Sewak Sangh), All India Muslim Federation (AIMF), Muslim
United Front (MUF), Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam
(TNMMK), National Development Front (Kerala), Tabligh Jamaat,
Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), Students Islamic
Organisations (SIO), Al Umma, Al Jihad, and the Muslim Sena
Sanghathan, Ikhwan-ul-Muslameen, Islami Inqalabi Mahaz,
Tanzim Isla-ul-Muslameen, and the Minorities United Front,
among others.
-
Each of these organisations runs one or
more ‘non-governmental organisations’ (NGO), many of which
have offices abroad. Substantial funds are received, and
ranges of interactions, including frequent ‘Tablighi conferences’
with foreign delegations, are organised. The flow of funds
is primarily through what are known as hawala (illegal)
channels and, while Pakistan largely defines the patterns
of use and the beneficiaries, the preponderance of such
transfers originate in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab
Emirates, Qatar and Oman. Thus, very substantial transfers
of foreign funds generated under the pretext of providing
relief to the Coimbatore riot victims were diverted for
use in executing the Coimbatore blasts.
-
The range, volume and the persistence of
such subversive activity throughout the country is more
a measure of Pakistan’s tenacity and the intensity of the
extremist Islamist vision, than it is of the present impact
these activities have had on the larger Muslim community
in India. The tragic loss of life, wasted human and developmental
resources and the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that
sporadic incidents of terrorism generate notwithstanding,
India has the flexibility, the resilience and the political
space to absorb a level of subversive and extremist Islamist
activities significantly higher than the present. Nevertheless,
the sheer lethality of weaponry and explosives, the possibility
of an escalation to a new generation of Chemical and Biological
Weapons, and the inherent uncertainty of the politics of
a complex society characterised by immense religious and
cultural diversity, make the existing risks and levels of
activity unacceptable.
-
These risks are even greater and less acceptable
in countries where such space is wanting, where political
instability is at higher levels, and where the roots of
democracy are yet to take firm hold of the soil. Islamist
subversion threatens peace and regime stability more immediately
in neighbouring Bangladesh, where religious extremism has
emerged as a major threat to the prevailing political order
and to internal security. There are grave and immediate
dangers to peace and stability in Bangladesh: the revival
of the activities of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the return to
Bangladesh and its politics of Pakistan-backed elements
who collaborated closely with the genocidal campaign of
1971 in what was then East Pakistan, the rising rhetoric
of Islamic hukumat (rule), and the deepening linkages
between militant Bangladeshi groups and the extremist Islamists
in Pakistan, Afghanistan and West Asia. Here again, the
pattern of funding, subversion and mobilisation through
the mosque and the madrassa is clearly in evidence.
Prior to Independence, there were 1,467 madrassas
in Bangladesh. Their number has currently risen to over
6,500, with more than 90,000 teachers and about 1.8 million
students. A large number of these institutions have been
established as a result of massive foreign aid, primarily
from Gulf countries, and largely unmediated by official
channels. Bangladesh’s madrassas are the chief recruiting
ground for Islamist militant groups, including several that
are linked to Pakistan and also to Osama bin Laden’s Al
Qaeda. The latter category includes the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami,
which was established by Shawkat Osman, alias Sheikh Farid
in 1992 with bin Laden’s backing, and which has an estimated
strength of about 15,000. The Harkat maintains several camps
in the hilly areas of Chittagong, where the cadres are given
arms training. Several hundred recruits have also been trained
in Afghanistan. The cadres, recruited mainly from among
students of various madrassas, style themselves
as the ‘Bangladeshi Taliban.’ Reports suggest that foreign-aided
religious fanatics are actively conspiring to establish
‘Islamic hukumat’ by waging war and killing progressive
intellectuals, as well as various minority groups and ‘heretical’
sects, such as the Ahmadiyas.
-
In addition to the JEI, the prominent fundamentalist
Islamist political parties in Bangladesh include the Muslim
League, Tabligh Jamaat, Jamaat-e-Tulba and Jamaat-ul-Muderessin.
One significant pro-Iranian group, the Islamic Shasantantra
Andolan (Movement for Islamic Constitution) is also active.
The subversive activities of the ISI and foreign extremist
Islamist agencies in Bangladesh increased radically after
Sheikh Hasina’s broadly secular Awami League came to power
in June 1996, and this has contributed to an upsurge in
militant and fundamentalist political activity. Superimposed
over a history of military coups, a politics dominated by
the rhetoric of Islam, and increasing international linkages,
including networks with insurgent groups operating in India’s
Northeast, extremist Islamist militancy constitutes the
most serious existing internal security threat in Bangladesh.
-
The recent Bangladesh elections have brought
a new right wing regime, backed by Islamist fundamentalist
forces, into a clear majority. Apart from the BNP itself,
which has exploited an Islamist platform for political ends
since its inception, the new Parliament has 16 members from
the militant Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami, which has been linked
to several acts of extremist violence over the past years,
and that runs several training camps for pan-Islamist militants
in the country. The Jamaat is overtly pro-Pakistan, and
reportedly secures substantial support from the ISI, including
funding, arms flows and technical and training assistance.
-
According to sources, subsequent to the
‘9/11’ incidents in USA, and the increasing pressure on
Pakistan – and directly on the ISI to curb subversive activities
in the region – the situation in the Bangladesh ISI unit
became somewhat confused. There has, however, been no brief
for a withdrawal of activities, though a low profile is
currently being maintained. The new regime is expected to
provide a more favourable context for the operation of extremist
forces in the country. Many BNP MPs, leaders and officials
have direct business linkages, including partnerships, with
corporations and financial operations that are run by or
co-owned with leaders of terrorist groups operating in India’s
Northeast and in Bangladesh.
-
Despite a temporary lull in militant activities
– partially because of the international pressure on Islamist
extremist groupings after the September 2001 attacks, and
partially because the imperatives of anti-state violence
have declined because of a sympathetic incumbent regime
– terrorist and subversive activities of religious extremists
and pan Islamist terrorist outfits remain the most serious
threat to internal security in Bangladesh. During Begum
Khaleda Zia’s last tenure, Bangladesh had encouraged and
allowed a large number of volunteers to fight in Afghanistan
against the former Soviet Union and subsequently in Jammu
and Kashmir. A large number of these mujahideen are
now present in the country and are spearheading the Islamist
fundamentalist movement in Bangladesh with their extensive
connections with the international Islamic jihad
movement.
-
Available evidence prior to the October
elections suggested increasing involvement of Islamist fundamentalist
organisations in terrorist and subversive activities in
Bangladesh. There were a number of bomb blasts in the country
in the year 2001. On January 20, there were two separate
bomb blasts in Dhaka in which an estimated six persons were
killed and 50 others injured. The then Home Minister Mohammad
Nasim held Jamaat-e-Islami and its associated organisations
responsible for the blasts. On April 14, 2001, at least
eight persons were killed in a bomb blast at a Bengali New
Year cultural function in Dhaka. On June 8, 2001, police
arrested four persons including Maulana Mohammad Akbar Hossain,
Vice Principal of Siddirganj Madrassah, for their alleged
involvement in the blast. Ten persons were killed and 25
others injured in a bomb blast at a Catholic Church mission
church at Baniachar, Gopalganj district, on June 3. Again
on June 15, an estimated 21 persons were killed and over
100 injured in a bomb blast at the Awami League party office
at Narayanganj town. The then Foreign Minister had stated
that the unholy nexus of extreme religious zealots and fundamentalist
elements with organised international terrorist groups was
responsible for the blast. On June 29, 2001, police arrested
an activist of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the student
wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, for his alleged involvement
in the Narayanganj blast.
-
Earlier, an alliance of Islamist fundamentalist
groups, the Islamic Okiya Jote (IOJ), a member of the new
ruling alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party
(BNP), had intensified its campaign against the December
2000 High Court verdict banning two fatwas (religious
edicts). The alliance declared the two judges, Golam Rabbani
and Nazmun Ara Sultana, who had delivered the verdict, as
murtad (enemies of Islam) and pronounced ‘death sentences’
on them. The IOJ had also declared a jehad against
the United Forum of Citizens, a group of NGOs which supported
the High Court’s action of banning the fatwas. At
the time of the High Court Order, a series of protest strikes
had been organised by the BNP alliance and, following the
murder of a policeman, who was dragged inside a mosque and
killed on February 3, 2001, the police launched a major
crackdown. Top leaders of the alliance, including its Chief,
Shaikhul Hadith Maulana Azizul Huq, who is also the Chief
of the Ulema Mashaek organisation; the Secretary-General
Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini, who is also the Convenor of the
‘Committee for Implementation of Islamic Laws’ and also
the Secretary-General of the radical Islamic Unity Alliance,
and several activists were arrested under the Public Safety
Act on charges of threatening to kill the two High Court
judges and damaging public and private properties. A madrassa,
run by IOJ leaders was raided and a large number of weapons
were seized. The township of Brahmanbaria, the stronghold
of the Jamaat-e-Islami, which borders the Indian state of
Tripura, witnessed several violent protests against the
crackdown in which seven persons were killed and an estimated
100 injured during clashes between Islamist fundamentalists
and security force personnel.
-
Islamist extremism in Bangladesh also has
widespread foreign connections. On January 9, 1999, police
in Chittagong arrested Syed Muhammad Nurul Afsar, a man
with a ‘Libyan connection’, on charges of smuggling firearms
and explosives into the country. Police said Afsar had travelled
to Libya several times to be trained in the use of explosives.
He had visited Czechoslovakia in June 1998 to purchase weapons
and explosives, which were then shipped to Bangladesh. Police
described Afsar as a ‘high ranking terrorist’ belonging
to an obscure group called Freedom in Bangladesh, dedicated
to turning the country into an Islamic theocracy. In January
1999, Delhi Police picked up Bangladeshi Sayed Abu Nasir
and charged him with planning bomb attacks on the US consulates
in Chennai and Calcutta. Two kilograms of RDX explosive
was seized from him. The police claimed Nasir was a member
of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and that he entered India in October
1998 along with six others. Three of his Indian contacts
were picked up from Shiliguri near the Bangladesh border,
but the others, believed to be four Egyptians, a Sudanese
and a Myanmar national, escaped. In the latter half of January
1999, police in Bangladesh arrested five people suspected
of plotting the January 18, 1999 assassination attempt on
the life of celebrated poet Shamsur Rahman. All belonged
to Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HUJI), which has been building
up its operations in the country since early 1990s. In the
next few days, police picked up an interesting melange of
people, who included apart from two more Bangladeshis, an
Afghan, a Pakistani and two South Africans. Police said
interrogation of this lot revealed a plan to assassinate
28 Bangladeshi intellectuals, who had been dubbed ‘atheists
and enemies of Islam.’ These included National Professor
Kabir Choudhury, writer Taslima Nasreen and the Director
General of the Islamic Foundation, Maulana Abdul Awal.
-
Intellectuals, cultural organisations and
sects of Islam, which are regarded as ‘deviant’ by the fundamentalists,
have also been preferred targets of violence. On March 7,
1999, six persons were killed and more than 100 injured
when two bombs planted by suspected religious extremists
exploded at a cultural function in Bangladesh's western
Jessore district. The function was organised by Udichi Shilpi
Gosthi – a Dhaka-based pro-liberation and left-oriented
organisation of cultural activists. On October 8, 1999,
seven people were killed and about 40 injured when a bomb
exploded during Friday prayers, at the Kadiani Mosque of
the Ahamadiya sect of Muslims in Khulna. Police suspicions
for this bombing focused on religious extremists who had
earlier demanded a ban on the activities of the Ahamadiyas,
who are regarded by orthodox Muslims as a blasphemous non-Muslim
sect. The same day, powerful explosive devices were recovered
from a mosque of the Ahamadiya sect and the office of a
Bengali language daily, Janakantha, in Dhaka.
-
On July 21, 2000, an assassination plot
to kill the then Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina
Wajed, was unearthed. Investigations revealed the main suspect
in the plot to be Mufti Abdul Hannan, a Pakistan-trained
leader of the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HUJI), who had
manufactured the explosives at a soap factory, Sonar Bangla
Chemical Industries Limited, near Gopalganj. While Hannan
evaded the Bangladesh police, many of his associates including
his brother Motiar Rehman were arrested. According to Mohammed
Jashimuddin, then Superintendent of Police of Gopalganj,
Hannan had recieved training in Peshawar before taking part
in the Afghan war. A central committee member of HUJI, he
returned to Bangladesh in 1998 and had been training madrassa
students to use fire arms and manufacture explosives.
-
A number of transnational Islamist terrorist
groups, including the Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden, have
established a presence in Bangladesh in alliance with the
various fundamentalist organisations in the country. Indian
Intelligence discovered in early 2001 that bin Laden was
generously donating funds to the Pakistan-based extremist
outfit Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), which had contacts with
the Dhaka-based Bangladesh Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI).
The HuJI was, in fact, established with Osama bin Laden’s
aid in 1992, under the leadership of Shawkat Osman alias
Sheikh Farid, and with Imtiaz Quddus as its ‘General Secretary’.
It has an estimated strength of about 15,000 and strong
connections with the ISI.
-
HuJI was assigned the task of recruiting
Bangladeshi and Indian Muslims to fight in Kashmir under
the command of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. Reports in 1999
said that HuJI planned to recruit 5,000 mujahids from
madrassas in Bangladesh. Another 10,000 were to be
recruited from among the Muslim refugees at Rohingya, who
fled the Arakan province of Myanmar and were staying at
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. HuJI terrorists have been active
against secular politicians and intellectuals in Bangladesh.
The professed objective of this Islamist radical group is
to turn Bangladesh into a Dar-ul-Islam or a land
of believers. The previous Awami League-led government of
Sheikh Hasina Wajed had tried to curb the activities of
the group, and arrested a number of its activists.
-
HuJI is also said to maintain six terrorist
camps in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh,
where the cadres are imparted arms training. Several hundred
recruits have also been trained in Afghanistan. HuJI activists
frequently cross over to India for terrorist activities.
The cadres of the outfit who style themselves as the ‘Bangladeshi
Taliban’ are alleged to infiltrate regularly into India’s
eastern corridor and maintain contacts with terrorist and
subversive outfits of the region.
-
The Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda connection
in Bangladesh came to light during the visit of the then
United States President, Bill Clinton, to Bangladesh in
March 2000. President Clinton’s scheduled visit to Joypura
village and the national memorial at Savan were reportedly
cancelled due to alleged threats that emanated from Al Qaeda.
-
The ISI is deeply involved with the Islamist
terrorist outfits operating in Bangladesh. On June 2000,
an Indian intelligence agency intercepted a radiogram, which
revealed that the ISI had set up a strong base in Kurigram
and Rangpur areas of Bangladesh near the Coochbihar border.
There was also direct evidence that a section of officials
and personnel of the Bangladesh Rifles were colluding with
the ISI. Indian intelligence also believes that the ISI,
in collusion with the HuJI, was training militants in the
use of sophisticated arms and explosives at camps set up
at Rangmari, Sundermari, Masaldanga and other villages.
This area is one of the epicentres of the ISI’s operations,
from where it exports terror into India.
-
Rising extremist Islamist activity, despite
the fact that Muslims constitute a bare three per cent of
the population is also challenging the security agencies
of the infant democracy of Nepal. Such activity is, presently,
primarily directed against India, but its linkages with
organised criminal operations and the destabilisation of
pockets of Muslim concentrations in the Terai region bordering
India are a cause of increasing concern for Kathmandu. A
succession of recent reports has documented rising activities
of the ISI and by the Pakistan Embassy at Kathmandu, involving
strong organised criminal networks and prominent political
leaders in a range of activities targeting India and reinforcing
the Islamist agenda within Nepal. The Muslim pockets of
the Terai, especially Bardiya, Banke, Rupendehi and the
Parsa-Morang belt have seen increasing ‘tablighi’
activities, and the construction of mosques and madrassas
with financial flows from Pakistan – often directly from
the Embassy at Kathmandu – from Saudi Arabia and from a
range of pan-Islamist organisations. Over the past two decades,
more than 275 mosques and madrassas have been built
in just the four districts of Rupandehi, Banke, Kapilvastu
and Bardiya. There are some 15 major tablighi/fundamentalist
organisations in Nepal, and at least five of these are well
within the ambit of Pakistan’s influence and control. These
include the Jamaat-e-Millat-e-Islamia; the Nepal Islamic
Yuba Sangh; the Nepal Muslim League; the Nepal Muslim Ekta
Sangh; and the Democratic Muslim Welfare Association. Nepal
is, consequently, emerging as an important ‘staging post’
for Pakistan’s strategy of erosion and encirclement against
India, and is increasingly the preferred route for terrorists
movements to various areas of low-intensity conflict in
J&K and the Northeast.
-
In Sri Lanka, the Muslim community and emerging
fundamentalist forces have generally aligned themselves
with the interests of the government. The Island nation’s
Muslim population is mainly Tamil, but has been driven out
of the ethnically cleansed northern areas controlled by
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and is now
concentrated along the eastern coast, the north-west coast,
Kandy and suburban Colombo. Islamist fundamentalist mobilisation
in Sri Lanka began after a succession of attacks on the
Muslims by the LTTE in the early 1990s, after which the
government decided to arm the Muslim youth for self-defence.
The conflict between Hindu and Muslim Tamils resulted in
the polarisation of mindsets on the issue of religious identity.
There are, today, nearly a dozen Muslim fundamentalist organisations
in Sri Lanka who are funded by foreign countries, primarily
Saudi Arabia, with at least two political parties drawing
significant support from Iran.
7. The Extremist Islamist
Internationale
-
The threat of extremist Islamist terror
in South Asia must be estimated, not just in terms of visible
violence and subversion, but the unique and lethal mix of
a virulent and vigorously propagated ideology; international
and state support and sponsorship; the movement of experienced
cadres across theatres that span the entire world; and the
access to and destructive potential of contemporary weapons
and information technologies. Pakistan’s experience and
the Afghan war have given rise to "a kind of Islamic
‘internationale’ through the recruitment of volunteers throughout
the Muslim world" and "a global network of radical
Muslim terrorists." Among these are the experienced
and ideologically motivated Arab Afghans, with their roots
in West Asia. South Asia is, moreover, awash with small
arms and lethal explosives. The recovery of gas masks from
bunkers held by Pakistani forces and irregulars during the
Kargil War, and recent reports regarding Osama bin Laden’s
intent to use chemical weapons suggest that extremist Islamist
forces and their state sponsors are, at least, evaluating
the possibility and impact of the use of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in their low-intensity wars in various
countries. Indeed, when asked by Time in 1998 about
reports that he was trying to acquire nuclear and chemical
weapons, bin Laden replied, "If I seek to acquire these
weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for
Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent
the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims." Laden
in a recorded interview released by the Qatar-based Al
Jazira in the aftermath of the September 11,2001, attacks,
said that "we supported the Pakistani people and congratulated
them when god was gracious enough to enable them to acquire
the nuclear weapon. We regard this as one of our rights,
our Muslim rights…it is the duty of the Muslims to possess
them…we believe that the right to self-defence is to be
enjoyed by all people. Israel is stockpiling hundreds of
nuclear warheads and bombs and the Christian West is largely
in possession of such weapons. Hence we regard this as a
right." On or about May 29, 1998, bin Laden had also
issued a statement entitled "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam"
under the banner of the "International Islamic front
for Fighting the Jews and Crusaders" in which he stated
that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much
force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God."
-
It is not necessary to belabour the obvious
point that there are ‘many Islams’, and that the adherents
of the murderous mix of religion and terror are only a small
fraction of Muslims in the world. There is, however, a difficulty
that needs to be confronted: that of the separation of legitimate
religious, educational and charitable activity engaged in
by Islamist religious institutions, including the madrassas,
from overt or covert support to terrorism and a militant
Islamist agenda. This difficulty is enormously compounded
by the ideological continuity among those who currently
propagate the dogmas of Islamist extremism from the fringes
of Europe and through Asia and Africa, as also by the continuity
of sources of finance and support through every theatre
of Islamist terrorism and ‘fundamentalist’ subversion in
the world. In the absence of enormous co-operation in documentation
and sharing of intelligence, and the containment of terrorist
funding, movement and activities, between nations who have
a stake in defeating terrorism and across all traditional
borders of suspicion and narrow ‘interests of state’, it
is not clear how this challenge can be met.
|
NOTES
-
Ashton Carter, John Deutch and Philip Zelikow, "Catastrophic Terrorism", Foreign Affairs, Washington, November/December
1998.
-
Ely Karmon, Osama bin Laden: Speculations on Possible
State Sponsorship, The International Policy Institute for Counter-terrorism,
September 17, 2001, Herzliya, Israel.
-
Ambassador Michael A Sheehan, Coordinator for Counterterrorism,
US Department of State, Statement for the Record Before the House
International Relations Committee July 12, 2000, http://www.state.gov/.
Ambassador Sheehan was echoing Secretary of State Madeline Albright's
earlier statement (of May 1, 2000) that there had been an "eastward
shift in terrorism's center of gravity" towards South Asia.
-
Total Fatalities: 1990 - 1177; 1991 - 1393; 1992
- 1909; 1993 - 2567; 1994 - 2899; 1995 - 2796; 1996 - 2903; 1997
- 2372; 1998 - 2261; 1999 - 2538; 2000 - 3288; 2001 - 4499. Source:
South Asia Terrorism Portal; Countries; India; J&K; Data Sheets;
Annual Casualties; www.satp.org.
-
Altaf Gauhar, The Challenge of Islam, London: Islamic
Council of Europe, 1978, p. 309.
-
Allah Buksh K. Brohi, "Preface", in S K Malik,
The Quranic Concept of War, New Delhi: Himalayan Books, 1986, pp.
xix-xx
-
See Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000, US State
Department, www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/index.cfm?docid=2432
-
Ibid.
-
There is significant evidence of progressive shifts
in the US position on this count since this paper was presented,
but the general observations remain valid for the context within
which they are made. The evolving US position, moreover, is not
entirely unambiguous, and is subject to possible and subsequent
dilution or reversal.
-
"Terrorism: New option backed", Dawn, Karachi,
May 10, 2001. Also available at www.dawn.com/2001/05/10/top15.htm
-
The anthrax attacks are now believed to have
been unrelated to Islamist terrorist groups, but the early discourse
on them was based on a presumption that their source was the same
as the 9/11 operations.
-
Cited in Lisa Beyer, "Osama's Edngame," Time,
October 15, 2001, vol. 158 no. 17. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000996,00.html
-
The imagery of this description is based on private
conversations with some Indian Islamist fundamentalists and their
assessments of the rising 'crisis of morality' and the 'disintegration
of the social and political order' in the world.
-
See "Bin Laden: No 'security or safety' for U.S.",
http://asia.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/10/07/bin.laden.statement/
-
The humiliating defeat of the Taliban and dishonourable
flight of the leaders of the Al Qaeda has, however, diminished American
vulnerabilities to such a process. The '9/11' aftermath weakened
the world image of the US. The collapse of the Taliban-Al Qaeda
has strengthened it immensely. Future attacks in America, unless
they exceeded a certain improbable scale and frequency, would, in
fact contribute to a consolidation of counter-terrorism measures
and a deepening legitimacy for the American cause, as against the
growing delegitimisation of Islamist extremist violence. Here it
is significant to understand the role of success in consolidating
terrorism as a strategy. As Fareed Zakaria has noted in another
context, "Military victory is indeed essential. Radical political
Islam is an 'armed doctrine,' in Edmund Burke's phrase. Like other
armed doctrines before it - fascism, for example - it can be discredited
only by first being defeated." Fareed Zakaria, "How to Save the
Arab World", Newsweek, December 24, 2001, p. 23. (Author's note).
-
S K Malik, The Quranic Concept of War, p. 59.
-
See "Iraqi clerics declare jihad vs US-led war
on Afghanistan", http://www.inq7.net/brk/2001/oct/17/brkafp_17-1.htm
-
An interesting assessment of the power (or absence
thereof) of the Muslim 'Ummah' has been given by General Pervez
Musharraf in his address to a gathering of Ulema on June 5, 2001,
http://www.pak.gov.pk/public/chief/CE_Seert_Conf.htm
-
Quoted in Pakistan-based Urdu paper, Ausaf, December
27, 2000. See www.armyinkashmir.org/articles/jihad_machine.html.
-
Three senior army personnel including the ISI
Chief Gen. Ahmad were removed on October 8, 2001.
-
"Sidelining of Islamist generals puts Musharraf
on safer ground",
-
See "About Turn", www.rediff.com/news/2001/oct/17spec.htm
-
‘Ibid.
-
"Jihad enrolment drive gathers momentum: JI", Dawn,
Karachi, October 21, 2001. Also see "Pakistan's tribals decide to
fight beside Taliban", www.thenewspapertoday.com/world/inside.phtml?NEWS_ID=27926
-
"Peshawar: Drive for recruiting volunteers continues
in NWFP, Fata", Dawn, October 21, 2001. Also at www.dawn.com/2001/10/21/local18.htm
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid,
-
Ibid.
-
"The choice between jehad and jirga", The News,
Islamabad, October 21, 2001. Also at www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2001-weekly/nos-14-10-2001/spr.htm
-
"Fundos boast thousands of jehadis for Taliban
cause", The Friday Times, Lahore, October 19-25, 2001. Ibid.
-
Ibid
-
"Scholar calls for Jihad", Dawn, September 19,
2001. Also at www.dawn.com/2001/09/19/nat23.htm.
-
"Scholar calls for Jihad", Dawn, September 19,
2001. Also at www.dawn.com/2001/09/19/nat23.htm.
-
The Dar-ul-Uloom seminary at Deoband has, however,
repeatedly repudiated all connections with the ideologies and terrorists
that claim their inspiration from the teachings of this influential
centre of traditional Islamic learning. See, for instance, Sankarshan
Thakur, "What Taliban have done is horrifying, un-Islamic but you
need to ask why", The Indian Express, New Delhi, March 14, 2001.
-
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New
Great Game in Central Asia, London: I B Tauris, 2001, p. 90. Haqqania
is in Akhora Khatak, in the North West Frontier Province
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid, pp. 90-1.
-
See "Master or Victim: Pakistan's Afghan War",
in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central
Asia, pp. 183-195. Jessica Stern refers to this as a typical "principal-agent"
problem, observing that the interests of the state (principal) and
those of the militant groups (the agent) are not fully aligned.
See, Pakistan's Jihad Culture, Foreign Affairs, November-December,
2000 at http://www.foreignaffairs.org/issues/0011/stern.html
-
Ibid., p. 194.
-
John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or
Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. xiii.
-
Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap:
Afghanistan's Untold Story, Lahore: Jang Publishers, 1992, p. 3.
-
See John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America
and International Terrorism, London: Pluto, 1999; Also see, Vijendra
Singh Jafa, "India & Pakistan in a Quagmire: Superpower Games and
Human Tragedies", Faultlines: Writings on Conflict & Resolution, New
Delhi, vol. 6, August 2000, New Delhi: ICM-Bulwark Books, pp. 109-110.
-
K P S. Gill and Ajai Sahni, eds., Terror & Containment:
Perspectives on India's Internal Security, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing
House, 2001, pp. 13-15.
-
Olivier Roy, Middle East Report, Winter 1997,
cited in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 187.
-
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 89.
-
Jessica Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture," Foreign
Affairs, November/December 2000, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/issues/0011/stern.html.
-
Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 87.
-
Afzaal Mahmood, "What price Jihad culture," Dawn,
January 15, 2001. Also at http://www.dawn.com/2001/01/15/op.htm
-
In April 1995, for instance, the Benazir Bhutto
government released a list of 38 foreign funded madrassas and sectarian
organizations that possessed arms and imparted weapons training
to local and foreign students. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya,
UAE and Kuwait were identified as the sources of funding and support
to these organizations. Shafiq Awam, "Foreign-funded madaris list
provided to govts," The Nation, Lahore, April 16, 1995.
-
See South Asia Terrorism Portal; Countries; Pakistan;
Backgrounder; www.satp.org
-
Ibid
-
"Jihad culture spreading world over, says Lashkar
chief,", News, December 3, 2000. Also at http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/dec2000-daily/03-12-2000/metro/k2.htm.
-
An expression used by Mujibur Rehman Inqalabi,
the SSP's 'second in command' to describe the madrassas. See Jessica
Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture."
-
In 1988, after hundreds of Shia had been massacred
by the SSP, their leaders fled to Kabul where they were offered
sanctuary. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, p. 92.
-
Ibid, p. 186.
-
Robin Wright, "The Chilling Goal of Islam's New
Warriors", Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2000. Also at http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20001228/t000123583.html.
-
For instance, 127 Islamic organizations addressed
a joint Press Conference on April 29, 2000, protesting against the
Musharraf government's bid to bring peripheral amendments to Pakistan's
blasphemy law. The government backed off on the 7th of May, and
on May 16, 2000, Musharraf himself told the Press that "there would
be no change in the blasphemy law whatsoever in view of the pressing
demand from the public, including the Ulema and the Mashaikh." The
attempt to reserve seats for women in local bodies was similarly
abandoned when the Islamists argued that this was a move intended
'to spread vulgarity' among the people. The March 1, 2000, ban on
the public display of firearms is also held in open contempt by
most of the major militant Islamic groupings.
-
Hasan Khan, "Harkat chief for military training
at Madaris,", www.afghanradio.com/news/2000/october/oct23k2000.htm
-
Robin Wright, "The Chilling Goal of Islam's New
Warriors."
-
The State of J&K comprises a total area of 152,298
square kilometers, with a population of 6,815,000. It is divided
into three regions: the Muslim majority Kashmir region (HQ Srinagar),
with an area of 15, 898 square kilometers and a population of 3,977,000;
the Hindu majority Jammu region (HQ Jammu), with an area of 26,293
square kilometers and a population of 2,538,000; and the Buddhist
majority Ladakh region (HQ Leh), with a population of 300,000. Cf.
www.jammukashmir.nic.in.
-
The Hizb has recently reduced its operation, first
after its own unilateral cease-fire of July 2000, and subsequently
after the Indian Prime Minister's declaration of cease-fire. The
Hizb is the largest terrorist group in J&K, and is dominated by
'local' cadres. The other groups are primarily drawn from Pakistani
and other foreign elements.
-
Data and analysis on Kashmir are primarily based
on research and documentation at the Institute for Conflict Management
and the South Asia Terrorism Portal, www.satp.org.
-
Till December 31, 2001. The data is based on
the South Asia Terrorism Portal's compilations from official and
media sources in India. www.satp.org.
-
The proportion of foreigners among the active
militants would be higher - upto 75 percent - since the Hizb reduced
its operations.
-
Shaul Shay and Yoram Schweitzer, "The 'Afghan
Alumni' Terrorism: Islamic Militants against the Rest of the World",
ICT Papers, The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism,
Herzilya, Israel, September 2000, vol. 6.
-
Mark Huband, Warriors of the Prophet: The Struggle
for Islam, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999, p. 9. Also see Manoj
Joshi, The Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the Nineties, New Delhi: Penguin
Books, 1999; Tavleen Singh, Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors, New Delhi:
Penguin Books, 1996.
-
Over 400,000 Kashmiri Pandits - out of an original
population in the Kashmir Valley of 425,000 prior to 1989 - continue
to be displaced. Official records indicate that some 216,820 of
them live as migrants in makeshift camps at Jammu, another 143,000
at Delhi and thousands of others are now dispersed across the country.
Many of those registered at the camps have also been dispersed according
to the exigencies of employment and opportunities for education,
trade or business. There has been little effort to facilitate their
return to the Valley in recent years. Earlier attempts were neutralized
by brutal campaigns of selective murder, including the killing of
seven Pandits at Sangrama in Budgam district in March 1997, three
at Gul in Udhampur district in June 1997, 26 in the massacre at
Wandhama in Srinagar district in January 1998, and 26 at Prankote
in Udhampur district in April 1998. The possibility of reversing
the terrorists' ethnic cleansing of the Valley remains remote, and
there are now reports of a hidden migration from some of the border
areas in the Jammu region where the Hindus are a minority. www.satp.org.
-
Jessica Stern, "Pakistan's Jihad Culture."
-
Praveen Swami, "The 'liberation' of Hyderabad,"
Frontline, Chennai, vol. 17, no. 10, May 13-26, 2000, http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1710/17100390.htm.
-
"Church blast cases busted; 15 arrested," indiainfo.com,
July 17, 2000.
-
"Centre may consider ban on ISI-backed Deendar
Anjuman," Indian Express, August 4, 2000.
-
"30 killed as serial blasts rock Coimbatore."
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/15/front.htm#Story1;
"Panic Following Blasts," http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/15/thb02.htm#Story2;
"Union Home Ministry reviews situation,"http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb01.htm#Story5;
"Six extremists die in Coimbatore blasts, toll 44," http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb02.htm#Story1;
"Arrests throughout the state" http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb02.htm#Story2
-
"30 killed as serial blasts rock Coimbatore."
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/15/front.htm#Story1;
"Panic Following Blasts," http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/15/thb02.htm#Story2;
"Union Home Ministry reviews situation,"http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb01.htm#Story5;
"Six extremists die in Coimbatore blasts, toll 44," http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb02.htm#Story1;
"Arrests throughout the state" http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/1998/02/16/thb02.htm#Story2
-
"Weapons of anarchy", The Week, Cochin, March
8, 1998.
-
Ibid. Blasts occurred on the Cheran Express,
Pandyan Express and Alleppey Express trains on December 6, 1997,
the anniversary of the Babri mosque demolition. Official sources
indicated that the Islamic Defence Force of Kerala, a shadowy outfit,
was behind these explosions, which killed nine persons.
-
"Ten charged in train blasts case", Tribune, Chandigarh,
October 6, 1998. Also at www.tribuneindia.com/98oct06/head4.htm.
Among those chargesheeted was Erwadi Kasim, President of the IDF.
-
See "Messages from the States", Frontline, vol.
15 no. 6, March 21 - April 3, 1998. Ibid
-
See "The fundamentalist underworld", www.rediff.com/news/1998/jun/26isi.htm.
Also see "7 `terrorist' groups identified in Kerala", www.kerala.org/news/online/1997/march/news/news38.html.
-
Ibid
-
Ibid. The organisation's suspected links with
the perpetrators of the Coimbatore blasts surfaced with the arrest
of NDF office bearer Zubair on the grounds that he had harboured
Al-Umma activists Ommai Babu, prime accused in the blasts case.
-
"Kerala a haven for subversive forces", The Hindustan
Times, New Delhi, September 7, 2001
-
SSee Ghulam Hasnain, At Home in Exile, Outlook,
New Delhi, November 20, 2000 (also at www.outlookindia.com), pp.
30-38.
-
See "Extending terror", Frontline, vol. 16, no.
6, March 13 - 26, 1999.
-
See South Asia Terrorism Portal; Terror
Tuesday; International Linkages of Islamist Terrorist outfits; Gujarat;
www.satp.org
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
Ibid.
-
See "Militants held", www.indian-express.com/ie/daily/20000121/ina21083.html
-
See "IB suspects Dawood-Osama tie-up for
terror campaign", www.hvk.org/articles/0899/29.html
-
See South Asia Terrorism Portal; Terror
Tuesday; International Linkages of Islamist Terrorist outfits; Gujarat;
www.satp.org.
-
"Report on Illegal Migration into Assam
submitted to the President of India by the Governor of Assam, November
8, 1998," See South Asia Terrorism Portal; India; Documents; Assam;
www.satp.org.
-
South Asia Terrorism Portal; India; Assam;
Terrorist outfits; www.satp.org
-
"ISI Activities in Assam: Statement laid
on the table of the house of Assam Legislative Assembly under item
no. 12 dated 6.4.2000 by Shri Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, Chief Minister,
Assam," See South Asia Terrorism Portal; India; Documents; Assam;
www.satp.org.
-
"ISI Activities in Assam: Statement laid
on the table of the house of Assam Legislative Assembly under item
no. 12 dated 6.4.2000 by Shri Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, Chief Minister,
Assam," See South Asia Terrorism Portal; India; Documents; Assam;
www.satp.org.
-
"Laden aides in Nagaon, Govt asks police
to keep strict vigil", The Sentinel, Guwahati, October 16, 2001.
-
"Laden aides in Nagaon, Govt asks police
to keep strict vigil", The Sentinel, Guwahati, October 16, 2001.
-
See "Army's wake-up call behind arrest of
ISI operatives", www.mumbai-central.com/nukkad/aug1999/msg00050.html.
Maj. Gen. Bopanna was General-officer-Commanding, 21 Mountain Division.
-
"Monitor madrasas: Centre to NE", Sentinel,
October 7, 2001
-
-
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