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India, Israel linked to Pakistan
plot
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - For the past 23 years, Afghanistan has
served as a proxy military playing field for different
countries, including the former Soviet Union, the United
States and Pakistan. Now, after a year of the US-led war
on terrorism, a new proxy war has begun in Afghanistan,
this time aimed at Pakistan and involving the
intelligence networks of India and Israel.
It
has been learned from highly placed intelligence sources
that India's Reasearch and Analysis Wing (RAW) and
Israel's Mossad are collaborating to train several
hundred militants to be used in an attempt to
destabilize the administration of President General
Pervez Musharraf.
The sources say that training
camps have been established near the southern Afghan
city of Kandahar, and the eastern city of Jalalabad,
which lies close to Pakistan's western tribal areas. It
is said that RAW has arranged most of the "human
resources", while training is the responsibility of the
Special Operations Division (Metsada) of Mossad. Metsada
generally conducts highly sensitive assassination,
sabotage, paramilitary and psychological warfare
projects.
Once trained, the recruits will
infiltrate the border areas of Pakistan's North West
Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan Province, where
they will attempt to forge links with local tribespeople
and militants in an effort to rally support for an
uprising against Musharraf, who is widely discredited in
these regions for abandoning the Taliban and siding with
the US in its war on terror. These provinces have a
strong pro-Taliban history.
Musharraf's decision
to throw in his lot with the US resulted in pressure
from Washington to clamp down on militant organizations
and to stem the flow of jihadis from Pakistani soil into
Indian-administered Kashmir. And since Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had strong (albeit
covert) links with the militant organizations, it was
able to bring pressure to bear on the leaders for them
to back off for the interim.
However, while most
of the leaders of these groups have been ready to
cooperate with the military government, some of the rank
and file have been less accommodating. Although their
numbers are not great - a matter of hundreds - they are
still a source of concern to Musharraf as they are fully
equipped and trained. Nevertheless, the chaos that had
been predicted by many for Pakistan, with disgruntled
militant groups causing mayhem, never materialized,
largely because of the understanding between the
militant groups and the ISI.
The move by RAW and
Mossad, as indicated by the intelligence sources, will
tap into a large section of the population in NWFP and
Balochistan that feels betrayed by Musharraf over his
ditching of the Taliban. For India's part, it hopes to
stoke the fires of unrest by using those militants who
refuse to muzzle their guns despite the entreaties of
their leaders. It has long been India's desire to
portray Pakistan as an unstable country that supports
cross-border terrorism into Kashmir in order to gain
international support for Delhi's position on Kashmir -
that of staging elections.
In recent times,
little-known organizations such as the al-Iqwan and the
al-Faran have been the brainchild of RAW, the sources
said. These groups have carried out a number of
relatively minor incidents in Indian-administered
Kashmir, such as kidnapping foreign tourists, which New
Delhi has used to back its claim that Kashmiri fighters
are international terrorists. These organizations have
not been heard of since.
RAW has not been
capable of setting up groups to carry out larger
incidents without its hand being shown, hence its
collaboration with Mossad, which is undoubtedly
thoroughly professonal and which is thought to have
carried out a number of high-profile incidents without
leaving a trail.
Within Pakistan, a few small
groups are known to be beyond the control of the
Pakistani government. Two of them, the al-Saiqa and the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami, have revealed themselves
through fax messages to newspaper offices in which they
have claimed responsibility for incidents.
Al-Saiqa comprises only a handful of men and is
based in NWFP. It has claimed responsibility for various
attacks on members of different security agencies early
this year. More recently, it owned up to an attack on
foreign tourists visiting a Buddhist site in NWFP in
which a German citizen was killed.
The
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen al-Alami is based in the Pakistani
port city of Karachi and also comprises only a handful
of youths. It is thought to be behind plots to
assassinate Musharraf and interior minister Moinuddin
Haider.
Similar small groups in Pakistan share
the vision of once again turning Pakistan into a
paradise for militant groups, and they all operate
beyond the apparatus of the Pakistani intelligence
network, as well as beyond the control of the mainstream
militant groups. All have a footing of some sort in the
tribal areas and remote rural regions.
It is
into these groups that the new alliance between RAW and
Mossad will feed their trained men in the hope of
keeping the wheels of unrest moving sufficiently until
popular unrest is strong enough to create anarchy in the
country.
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