Afghanistan: Return of the
jihadis By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - With the onset of summer and the ice
now melting in the mountains of Afghanistan, the most
organized global struggle yet of the International
Islamic Front partners has begun to defeat the United
States and coalition forces at their hub in Afghanistan.
The early manifestations of this can already be
seen in Uzbekistan, where a series of terror attacks
over the past few days have left more than 40 people
dead, and in the foiled terror attacks in Britain and
the Philippines. But the real battlefield is
Afghanistan, where Pakistan, already the world's
backyard of radical Islam, will play an important role.
The Uzbek struggle Events in
Uzbekistan, including suicide attacks and culminating in
a shootout on Tuesday, are the bloodiest wave of
violence to hit the former Soviet republic since it
enlisted as a key US ally in the "war on terrorism" soon
after the 2001 September 11 attacks. A US air base there
proved an important strategic asset in the US aerial
attacks on Afghanistan.
Some reports have blamed
the Hizb ut-Tahrir, but this is unlikely to be the case,
as this group, although committed to the overthrow of
existing political regimes and their replacement with a
caliphate, has traditionally been non-violent.
Rather, the violence in Uzbekistan is much more
likely to be linked to Afghanistan and the struggle that
is to be played out there in the coming months.
Pakistan's Central Asia connection In
the development of Islamic radicalism in Uzbekistan, the
"Naqshband" circle of Sufis emerged as an underground
network during Soviet rule in opposition to the Soviet
system. These Sufis believed in militancy against
"tyrant" rulers. The network's first contact with
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) came when
the Sufis began resistance operations against the
Soviets after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
In collaboration with the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the ISI actively assisted the
militants, and also devised a strategy to take the
struggle back to USSR soil, apart from Afghanistan.
The go-between for this was the Hizb-i-Islami
Afghanistan (HIA), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is
now once again spearheading operations in Afghanistan.
The HIA helped spread the revolutionary literature of
the Muslim Brotherhood in the Central Asian republics.
The aim was not to convert ordinary Muslims, but to
recruit revolutionaries who would attack the Soviet
system from within their own regions, including
Uzbekistan. These operations were launched in the mid
and late 1980s, and over the years a whole new
generation has evolved committed to underground
operations. They are not an isolated community, like the
Pakistani tribals, who are easily identified with their
links to militants. This new generation of militants is
part and parcel of Central Asian urban culture, and like
any secret agents, they are not easily identifiable.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan army established a
special intelligence cell within the HIA for which
Pakistanis and Afghans were trained. All of the
Pakistanis were ISI operators. However, after 1989, at
the end of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the HIA
began to work independently and it absorbed many Arabs
into the intelligence cell, as well as Central Asian
youths. These were sent to training camps in
Afghanistan, where they were drilled by Arab
instructors. The Central Asian recruits, therefore,
forged good ties with many Arabs. In the early 1980s
Afghanistan also served as a testing ground for
Pakistani dictator Zia ul-Haq's vision, along with his
chief spy master, then Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdul
Rehman (later a full general), for an international
Islamic brigade. This matured into Osama bin Laden's
International Islamic Front, a loose umbrella front for
organizations that include al-Qaeda and independent
cells in Central Asia comprising militants nurtured by
the CIA-ISI nexus and trained in the HIA's Afghanistan
camps.
In this context, the terror in
Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan, cannot be seen in
isolation, rather as the beginning of a new jihad in
Afghanistan that will tap into resources, especially
those in Central Asia, developed over many years.
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