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THE ROVING EYE
Pakistan in the
shadow of terror
By Pepe
Escobar
ISLAMABAD - The absolute majority of them
come from an authentic United Nations of the Islamic
world: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh,
Chechnya, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Macedonia,
Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria,
Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and Yemen. They are
the 300-odd foreigners who have been arrested by
Pakistani authorities since November 2001, and referred
to this week by President General Pervez Musharraf as
suspected of being linked with Osama bin Laden and
al-Qaeda.
As soon as the Taliban abandoned Kabul
last November, US Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on the record that
America was planning action against "40 to 50
countries". One wonders which of the above "terrorist
exporters" figure in the Pentagon hit list.
The
foreigners have been extensively grilled by joint teams
of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) operatives.
Where are they now? A few dozen have been released -
nothing could be proved against them. Another few dozen
are still under ISI custody. But most - including 78
Saudis - have been transferred by the Americans as
"unlawful combatants" to the infamous Camp X-Ray in
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Among them are plenty of Western
passport-holders: Mamdouh Ahmed Habib, an Egyptian
carrying an Australian passport; Mehdi Gazali, a Muslim
Swede; Melintok James Alexander, a Scotsman converted to
Islam; and four Frenchmen - Abdul Wasab, Yusuf, Ali and
Abdullah.
Dr Khalid Wazem Diab, an American
of Syrian descent with a PhD in aeronautics, is a case
apart. The man, in his late 50s, spent the 1990s in
Afghanistan, was arrested in Kurram agency, in the
Pakistani tribal areas, and is now being kept at an
undisclosed US base in Pakistan. The only other
Americans arrested so far in Pakistan or Afghanistan are
John Walker Lindh and Yaser Esam Hamdi, both being held
in the US.
Rumsfeld claimed
last January that the men at Camp X-Ray were "the
hardest of the hardcore" of al-Qaeda fighters. They are
not. They are the poor souls who assumed the rearguard
while al-Qaeda's leadership and prize fighters escaped
unharmed from eastern Afghanistan to the neighboring
tribal areas in Pakistan - where they still remain.
It has been widely argued throughout Europe and
Asia that the detention of these "unlawful combatants"
in Guantanamo is illegal. While being denied
prisoner-of-war status, they have been transported
without the protection of international law or the
Geneva Convention and incarcerated outside US sovereign
territory, where they are unprotected by the US
constitution. In the event of prosecution - by a
military tribunal - they have no rights to a trial by
jury.
They have been bound, manacled, hooded,
shackled, shaved, sedated, caged and thoroughly
humiliated. At least four have tried to commit suicide
in the past few weeks. Some have reportedly converted to
Christianity. And now they have totally disappeared from
media attention - even as, for critics around the world,
their treatment represents the epitome of contempt
within the Bush administration for civilized
international opinion. Five-hundred and ninety-eight
prisoners are being held in Camp X-Ray; "Delta", another
camp, was opened in April, allowing the Pentagon to
double the number of prisoners during the past four
months.
The one and only real hardcore al-Qaeda
member to have been arrested in Pakistan so far is Abu
Zubaidah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, described
by US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as "a
highly dangerous character". He was arrested on March 29
along with 20 other Arabs in Faisalabad, and is still
being interrogated by the FBI in an undisclosed
location. He is suspected of being connected to all
recent major al-Qaeda operations, from the bombing of
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the
attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 and
September 11. He is supposed to have reorganized
al-Qaeda in Pakistan following their exodus en masse
from the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan last
December.
Musharraf has spent some time denying
it, but any decent intelligence source in Pakistan
confirms that there are at least 300 to 400 al-Qaeda
operatives spread around the country. And they are being
supported by a cluster of splinter Pakistani jihadi
groups. Two particular sensitive areas are the Chitral
Valley bordering the mountainous Afghan province of
Kunar, and the region of Swat, not far from the
Karakoram highway.
Nine German tourists
travelling on the highway towards China, along with four
tribals, were hurt by a hand grenade attack last July in
Mansehra. There were a lot of subsequent arrests at the
time, including that of Maulana Nazir Ahmed, the local
chief of the Sipah-e-Sahaba jihadi group, now extinct,
as well as 13 members of the jihadi group Harakat
Mujahedeen, outlawed both by the US and Pakistan. The
Harakat Mujahedeen once ran a military training camp
close to Mansehra.
Karachi, the capital of
Sindh, is nowadays awash with FBI agents. According to
Pakistani officials of the Crime Investigation
Department, the splinter jihadi groups - now all
anti-Musharraf - used to be based in Karachi. When the
FBI moved in, they started moving out north to the
Punjab. As many as a staggering 130,000 people in the
Punjab could at some time have received military
training in Afghanistan - or been involved in
anti-Soviet jihad and subsequent civil war in
Afghanistan that culminated in the Taliban taking over
in 1996. The hardcore jihadi group Lashkar-e-Jangvi was
recently engaged in a blitzkrieg in the Punjab to
recruit new blood - angry young men who received their
training in Afghan military camps.
Now the
splinter jihadi groups are leaving the Punjab and
spreading around selected parts of the tribal areas,
where any kind of travelling by foreigners has been
strictly prohibited by Pakistani authorities. The
Americans have established military bases in four of the
eight tribal agencies - including ultra-hardcore and
famously pro-Taliban Waziristan agency. Pashtun sources
confirm that anti-American sentiment in all agencies is
running at fever pitch.
The region of Malakand
is also particularly sensitive. Malakand is the
headquarters of another banned jihadi group, the
Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM). The TNSM's
chief is none other than the extremely influential
black-turbaned Sufi Muhamad - now locked up in a
Pakistani jail. In the beginning of the US Afghan
campaign last year, Sufi Muhamad persuaded as many as
8,000 tribals armed with Kalashnikovs and little else to
march to Afghanistan on a jihad against the Americans.
Hundreds of his unprepared followers were captured and
maybe a few thousand killed by American bombing; the
ones who managed to return were in a state of shock.
Pakistani police don't have a clue on how to
deal with a brand new and obscure jihadi group,
al-Saiqa, which is headed by one Inayat Shah, aka
Shajee. They have distributed pamphlets warning local
police not to try to disturb jihadi groups, and they are
suspected of being behind the attack on the German
tourists. But there's absolutely no intelligence about
them. They seem to be unreachable. Police sources in
Peshawar explain that they are based on the other side
of the mighty Indus river - and there's simply no bridge
over the river in Indus Kohistan, a vast and wild area
east of the Karakoram highway. Al-Saiqa is strongly
suspected of playing a key role in sheltering al-Qaeda
operatives and splinter jihadi groups in wild Kohistan.
But the crucial link between jihadi groups and
al-Qaeda still seems to point to Lashkar-e-Jangvi.
Police experts comment that the group always had a wide
knowledge of basic explosives, but that it had never
been able to develop car bombs and poison gas. Now they
can - which means that they must have received outside
support.
Lashkar-e-Jangvi may be outlawed and
under pressure, but on a smaller scale than al-Qaeda it
seems to be in the process of regrouping. Qari Abdul Hai
is trying hard to reunify the leadership - which split
basically because of a personality clash. Apart from Hai
the other key player is Asif Ramzi - whose main targets
are foreigners and western interests. The so-called
group from Lahore still prefers to target the Pakistani
Shia community.
All of the Lashkar-e-Jangvi
factions badly needed cash. So Asif Ramzi took over: he
is a man with powerful foreign connections - meaning
al-Qaeda and plenty of Arab wealth. In return, the Arabs
can now count on Lashkar's manpower and logistical
support.
No wonder that residents say that
security in Islamabad has never been so tight, and the
police are bracing themselves for a possible slew of car
bombings and even poison gas attacks on crowded markets
in big Pakistani cities. The hardest of the hardcore are
definitely not in Camp X-Ray. They are haunting the
streets of Pakistan.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contactcontent@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
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