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Iraq: Why the US should change
course
By B
Raman
"The US is at our mercy. One leg caught in
Afghanistan and the other in Iraq. Allahu Akbar! "
So said Professor Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the
head of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), while addressing a
religious congregation earlier this month at Muridke,
near Lahore in Pakistan, where it has its headquarters
which contain, among other things, a mosque and a guest
house constructed in the past with funds given by Osama
bin Laden.
In the years when bin Laden was not
yet a persona non grata with the US, he used to stay in
this guest house and pray in this mosque during his
visits to Pakistan. After 1994, he stopped going there.
The guest house was thereafter used to put up jihadi
fugitives and trainees from Saudi Arabia and other
countries.
Ramzi Yousef, now in jail in the US
for his involvement in the February 1993 New York World
Trade Center explosion, stayed there after he escaped
from Manila in 1995 and before his arrest and
deportation to the US. Many of the terrorists involved
in the September 11, 2001, strikes in the US stayed
there on their way to and from al-Qaeda training camps
in Afghanistan.
And now this guest house is one
of the places in Pakistan reportedly being readied for
putting up another very special guest - Saddam Hussein.
The LET, which is a member of bin Laden's International
Islamic Front (IIF) and which is now acting as the
standard bearer of al-Qaeda and the IIF, claims that its
martyrs' squad in Iraq is protecting Saddam and trying
to spirit him out of Iraq to Pakistan so that he can be
saved from the hands of the American special forces,
which are hunting for him and who have placed a US$25
million bounty on his head.
How will they spirit
him out of Iraq, though, since it will be almost
impossible to do so by sea or air? By overland
clandestine routes through Iran, they say. It is the
same route that is being used by the LET and other
members of the IIF to smuggle trained and well-motivated
jihadis into Iraq to harass American troops. One is not
certain whether the Iranian authorities are aware of
this. It is estimated by security sources that at least
80-plus jihad-hardened terrorists from Pakistan,
belonging to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani components of
the IIF, have already managed to clandestinely move
across Iran in ones and twos and join the anti-US jihad
in Iraq.
Calls have been made in the Binori
madrassa (religious school) of Karachi and the
Akora Khattak madrassa of North-West Frontier
Province (NWFP) for more Arabic-knowing volunteers to
join the jihad in Iraq. The 80-plus contingent, which
has already gone, reportedly includes Arabs, Pakistanis
and at least four from Southeast Asia. This number does
not include those from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM)
and other organizations who had traveled by air to Saudi
Arabia under the guise of pilgrims during the hajj
season and from there moved over to Iraq. No estimate of
their number is available.
The LET, which is now
practically coordinating the jihad worldwide of the IIF
due to the incapacity of bin Laden, has, in consultation
with the other components of the IIF, made a division of
responsibilities. While the survivors of the Taliban and
the Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
will focus on Afghanistan, the survivors of the al-Qaeda
and the Pakistani components of the IIF will concentrate
on Iraq.
There is no proposal at present to
bring any more Iraqi volunteers to Pakistan for training
or for smuggling arms and ammunition into Iraq.
Thousands of trained fighters and large quantities of
arms and ammunition and explosives are already available
in Iraq.
From a study of reports emanating from
Iraq, one can discern the following three-point strategy
being followed by the jihadis:
Acts of sabotage, in Sunni as well as Shi'ite
majority areas, directed at oil and electricity
installations. The purpose is to create difficulties in
the efforts of the US-led occupation authority to
restore normal economic activity and ensure the
availability of essential supplies to the people,
thereby adding to their anger against the occupation
authority.
Attacks, with hand-held weapons and explosive
devices against the American forces only, while avoiding
such attacks on the British forces in southern Iraq and
against troops from other countries.
Attacks on Iraqis collaborating with the Americans.
While the attacks on the American forces and
their Iraqi collaborators are being made by the Iraqi as
well as non-Iraqi jihadis, the acts of sabotage have
been largely the work of Iraqis. For organizing the
anti-American resistance, lessons have been drawn not
only from the jihadi experience in Afghanistan, but also
from the experience of the French resistance and the
Serb resistance under Tito during World War II.
While the Americans and the British have not
been concealing the extent of their human casualties, it
is alleged that they have been concealing the large
number of acts of sabotage that have been taking place
all over Iraq. It was only after the recent public
demonstrations in Basra against fuel and electricity
shortages that the British admitted that their inability
to restore normal power supply even four months after
the occupation was due to acts of sabotage directed
against pylons.
The US continues to grope in the
dark in Iraq - literally as well as figuratively. People
are talking how within a few weeks of the end of the war
in 1991, the Saddam government restored supplies of
power and essential articles. If a superpower like the
US, with all its resources, is not able to do this even
four months after the occupation, it is unlikely to
command the respect of the people.
The US is
only now reluctantly admitting that its troops are
facing a well-organized and well-led jihad. Its hopes of
the jihad collapsing after the death of the two sons of
Saddam in an encounter with US forces have been belied
so far. US officials in Baghdad have been over-stating
the role of the Ansar-al-Islam in the jihad. Their
intelligence continues to face serious difficulties in
the collection and analysis of intelligence from the
ground. Their technical intelligence capability has been
of little help to them. It would take them months to
build up a human intelligence capability.
It is
not in the interests of India and other democracies that
the US falters in Afghanistan and Iraq and is bloodied
and beaten by the jihadis. India has been the worst
victim of these jihadis since 1993. If the US fails to
prevail over the jihadi terrorists, they will run amok
all over the Asian region, adding to the difficulties of
India and the countries of Southeast Asia. How one could
help the US without getting involved in a bloody
counter-insurgency operation in Iraq is a question that
needs the urgent attention of Indian policy makers. This
should also be discussed with Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon of Israel during his expected visit to India next
month.
There is also an urgent need for
mid-course policy corrections by the US. Its blind
hatred of the Ba'ath Party and witch-hunt of the Ba'ath
leaders and members are already proving
counter-productive. There is no competent Iraqi elite
outside the Ba'ath Party. By its witch-hunt against
them, it is unwisely denying itself the assistance of
the only elements that can help it in restoring
normalcy. It should admit that it has under-estimated
Iraqi patriotism, and make due amends for it.
Note: The LET, which was ostensibly
banned by Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf
on January 15, 2002, now calls itself Jamaat-ud-Dawa
(JUD), but people in Pakistan continue to refer to it as
the LET.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail:
corde@vsnl.com. He was also head
of the counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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