Just who is fooling whom?
By B Raman

The high-profile visit of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the controversial leader of the Jamiat-ul-ulema Islam (JUI) of Pakistan, to India and the attention accorded to him in governmental and non-governmental circles in New Delhi are being viewed by many India-watchers in the United States with a mixture of bewilderment and concern.

Rahman is a fundamentalist with a difference, known for his proximity to former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians (PPPP). Despite his fundamentalist orientation, he supported her right to become premier and opposed the campaign of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) in the 1990s against a woman heading the government of an Islamic country.

Benazir Bhutto rewarded Rahman by making him the chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and allegedly asked the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to place a large amount from its secret service fund at his disposal during his travels abroad.

He loves foreign travel and the good things of life, and during Bhutto's second tenure as prime minister he spent more time abroad than in Pakistan. The detractors of the Maulana (teacher) and Benazir used to allege that he had a roving eye and was a secret admirer of hers - politically as well as physically.

In 1993-94, Pakistan's cotton crop was practically destroyed by insects for two years in succession and many textile mills were threatened with closure. Asif Zirdari, Benazir's husband, through a business connection in Hong Kong, entered into a contract with Turkmenistan for emergency supplies of cotton. The responsibility for transporting the goods to Pakistan by road via Afghanistan was given to the Hong Kong-based Pakistani businessman.

But his cotton convoys were attacked and the cotton looted by armed followers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-e-Islami (HEI) and Ismail Khan, the pro-Tehran warlord of Herat in Afghanistan. Zirdari then asked Major General (retd) Naseerullah Babbar, Benazir's interior minister, to organize a special force to escort the cotton convoys through Afghanistan. Naseerullah, with the help of the now president, General Pervez Musharraf, organized the Taliban by rallying round many of the dregs of the Afghan war of the 1980s against the Soviet troops under the leadership of Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban.

They were helped in this by Rahman and his protege, Mufi Shamzai of the Binori madrassa (religious school) of Karachi. Thus, the Taliban came into existence in 1994. The role played by Fazlur Rahman in helping Benazir and her husband in creating the Taliban led to serious differences between him and Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the JEI, who was a strong supporter of Gulbuddin. Another person who was a strong critic of the Maulana's soft corner for Benazir and Zirdari was Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, who was the director-general of the ISI during her first tenure as prime minister.

The US started viewing the Maulana with suspicion in 1995 due to the proximity of the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), then headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, to the Maulana. In March, 1995, Kamran Khan, a well-known investigative journalist, came out with a series of articles under the title "Jihad Worldwide" in the News, a prestigious daily. In these articles, he exposed not only the role played by the HUA in organizing terrorist operations in India's Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the southern Philippines, the Arakan area of Myanmar and Chechnya, but also its attempts to carry its jihad to the US homeland by recruiting and training a group of Afro-American Muslims. It was suspected that the HUA could not have been indulging in such activities without the complicity of Fazlur Rahman.

This was followed by the kidnapping of some Western tourists, including two Americans, one of whom escaped, by the HUA in J&K under the name al-Faran. The Clinton administration in the US sought Benazir's help in getting them released. She and Zirdari asked Rahman to go to India to persuade the HUA to release them.

At the request of the US embassy in New Delhi, the Narasimha Rao government, then in power, agreed to let him come. The Rao government hoped that he would keep his mission unpublicized, but Rahman, who has a weakness for publicity, made the visit high profile. After reaching New Delhi, he demanded that he should be allowed to visit Srinagar in Kashmir, to which the Indian intelligence agencies were strongly opposed.

On coming to know of his visit, circles close to the present ruling coalition in New Delhi, which were then in opposition, strongly criticized the Rao government for allowing the patron of the HUA to visit India. Thereupon, the government totally cut of all contacts with him and he went back to Pakistan.

In October 1997, the US State Department designated the HUA as a foreign terrorist organization under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Consequently, it is a crime for anyone in the US to be associated with it and foreigners associated with it are not entitled to US visas. Rahman, as the suspected supporter if not the mentor of the HUA, is covered by this ban. After the ban, the HUA ostensibly split into two organizations, called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI). The Maulana is viewed by many in Pakistan and the US as the patron of both.

After the explosions outside the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August,1998, the Clinton administration exercised considerable pressure on the Nawaz Sharif government and Lieutenant-General Ziauddin, the then director-general of the ISI, to help the US Special Forces in organizing a commando raid into Kandahar in southern Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and take him to the US for trial.

This pressure was kept up during 1999. Nawaz Sharif, fearing an adverse reaction from Musharraf, his Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), was initially hesitant to cooperate. However, after a visit to Washington DC by Ziauddin after the Kargil war, Nawaz agreed to pressurize the Taliban to hand over bin Laden to the US and, if this failed, to cooperate with the US Special Forces in their planned raid.

Ziauddin met Mullah Omar at Kandahar in this connection. While sticking to his refusal to hand over bin Laden to the US, Omar agreed to consider expelling him to another Islamic country. On coming to know of this, Musharraf, who was not kept in the picture by Nawaz or Ziauddin, sent Mohammad Aziz, then his chief of the general staff, along with Rahman, to Kandahar to tell Omar that he should not carry out any instructions received from Ziauddin. It was on coming to know of this that Nawaz decided to sack Musharraf and appoint Ziauddin as the COAS, triggering off the coup and his overthrow in October 1999.

Following the visit of Ziauddin to Kandahar, there were many speculative reports in the Pakistani media that US Special Forces had already arrived in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan and were about to raid Kandahar. Rahman issued a statement warning the US that if bin Laden was killed or captured, no American national in Pakistan would be safe. A senior US diplomat posted in Islamabad thereupon visited him and reportedly warned him that if any US nationals in Pakistan came to harm, the US would hold him personally responsible and act against him. Thereafter, he lowered his anti-US rhetoric.

After September 11, Musharraf sent a delegation of Pakistani mullahs headed by Mufti Shamzai to Kandahar to persuade the Taliban to hand over bin Laden to the US in order to avert a war. The delegation was accompanied by Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmed, the then ISI chief.

Before going to Kandahar, the mullahs and the ISI chief had met Rahman at Peshawar. They then met Omar at Kandahar and came back and reported to Musharraf that he had refused to cooperate. It was said that the US came to know from one of its sources in the mullahs' delegation that instead of pressurizing Omar to hand over bin Laden to the US, the delegation, in the presence of Mehmood Ahmed, congratulated him for resisting US pressure and encouraged him to continue to do so.

It was after this that the US pressured Musharraf to remove Mehmood Ahmed, known to be close to Fazlur Rahman, from his post. He did so on October 7, 2001, and appointed Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, then corps commander in Peshawar and a close personal friend of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, as the new director-general.

Musharraf's decision to cooperate with the US against the Taliban led to a re-alignment in Pakistan. The JEI and the JUI forgot their past differences over the role played by Fazlur Rahman in helping the Benazir government in the creation of the Taliban as a counter to Gulbuddin's HEI and joined hands in backing the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the HEI in their joint operations against the US forces in Afghanistan.

Despite the formation of the coalition of six fundamentalist parties called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), of which the JUI and the JEI are the driving force, suspicions continue to mark the relations between the Maulana and Qazi. Each suspects the other of continuing to maintain clandestine contacts with the military-intelligence establishment. There was also friction over the decision of the Maulana to nominate one of the members of his party as the chief minister of the NWFP without consulting Qazi.

Since September 11, US suspicions of the Maulana have worsened because of the active role played by the HUM under the names of the al-Alami-International and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in the terrorist strikes against French and American nationals in Karachi and Islamabad. There were reports before the US invasion of Iraq that the HUM had sent its cadres to Saudi Arabia under the cover of hajj pilgrims and that they were to infiltrate into Iraq to start a jihad against US troops. When an injured bin Laden escaped into Pakistan from Afghanistan in the beginning of last year, Mufti Shamzai, a protege of Fazlur Rahman, gave him shelter in his madrassa in Karachi till last August.

Five Pakistani jihadi organizations are members of bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF)- the HUM, the HUJI, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ). Of these, the HUM, the HUJI, the JEM and the LEJ are close to the Maulana. The LET, despite its strong Wahhabi orientation, is not. The Maulana's perceived hobnobbing with India could act as a red rag to the bull and provoke an intensification of the terrorist strikes in Indian territory.

The questions being asked in the US are: did the Maulana go to India on his own, or at the insistance of the government of India or the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party? What was the motive? What would be its implications?

It is alleged by many in the US that the government of India has been making overtures to the Maulana through PPPP circles close to Benazir Bhutto in the hope of using his services for persuading key leaders of India to react more positively to the proposals made by Kanchi Shankaracharya for a solution to the Ayodhya Babri mosque issue, and to pressurize the jihadi organizations close to him to stop their terrorist activities in India.

There is the nagging doubt, though, that this exercise might prove counter-productive and lead to an aggravation of the ground situation in J&K.

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.