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Pakistan's dubious al-Qaeda
suspect
By B Raman
Time
magazine of the United States (August 31) carried a
commentary on a book written by Gerald Posner, titled
Why America Slept.
The commentary says,
"Most of his new book is a lean, lucid retelling of how
the CIA, FBI and US leaders missed a decade's worth of
clues and opportunities that, if heeded, Posner argues,
might have forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories.
He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those
surrounding the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr
assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated lawyer is
adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information -
most of his sources are other books and news stories -
into a pattern made tidy and linear by hindsight.
"His indictment of US intelligence and
law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground,
though sometimes the might-have-beens and
could-have-beens are stretched thin. The stuff that is
going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account -
based on Zubaydah's claims as told to Posner by 'two
government sources' who are unnamed but 'in a position
to know' - of what two countries [Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia] allied to the US did to build up al-Qaeda and
what they knew before that September day."
The
reference is to Abu Zubaydah, then projected by the US
intelligence agencies as the No 3 to Osama bin Laden in
the al-Qaeda. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities
at the insistance of the US intelligence, from the house
of an office-bearer of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a
member of bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF),
at Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab on March 28 last year
and flown by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
to the US naval base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego
Garcia for interrogation. It is not known where he is
kept presently.
The book, according to the
commentary, refers to a 1996 meeting in Pakistan between
bin Laden and Mushaf Ali Mir, a high-ranking officer of
the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), who subsequently became
the chief of the air staff in November 2000 and died in
a mysterious plane crash in February this year. The
book, according to Time, cites Abu Zubaydah as having
claimed that he was present at the meeting during which
"bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military
but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to get protection,
arms and supplies for al-Qaeda. Zubaydah told
interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was blessed
by the Saudis."
The mention of Mushaf Ali Mir by
Abu Zubaydah as the ISI's contact man with bin Laden is
surprising for the following reasons. First, the
Pakistani army, which has always controlled the ISI,
never associates officers of the air force and the navy
with its sensitive covert operations. Second, it
generally does not allow officers of the air force and
the navy to head the ISI or to occupy sensitive
positions in it.
Since 1988, when the Pakistan
army used bin Laden and his tribal hordes to brutally
suppress a Shi'ite revolt in Gilgit in Pakistan,
contacts with bin Laden have always been handled by
senior officers of the army. Among those who had handled
bin Laden (in order of importance) are General Mohammad
Aziz, a Kashmiri from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK)
belonging to the Sudan tribe, who is now chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Pervez
Musharraf (now president), General Mehmood Ahmed,
director general of the ISI from October 1999 to October
2001, when he was reportedly removed under US pressure
because of his links with al-Qaeda, and
Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present director
general of the ISI since October 2001, who was before
that the Corps Commander at Peshawar, the capital of the
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).
General
Aziz was deputy director general of the ISI as a
major-general until November, 1998, when Musharraf
appointed him as his Chief of the General Staff (CGS)
after his promotion as a Lieutenant-General. Since
Musharraf did not trust Lieutenant-General Ziauddin,
whom Nawaz Sharif, the then prime minister, had
appointed as the director general of the ISI, he ordered
the transfer of all files relating to the Taliban,
al-Qaeda and terrorist operations in India from the ISI
to the office of the CGS. Aziz continued handling these
operations.
There were four phases in the ISI's
relations with bin Laden. In the first phase before
1990, the ISI did not feel the need to keep the
relations secret from the US's Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA).The two were operating him jointly. In
fact, it was the CIA which brought him from Saudi Arabia
initially, to make use of his civil engineering skills
for the construction of tunnels in difficult terrain in
Afghanistan. He subsequently became the head and mentor
of the Arab mercenaries who had been brought by the
Western intelligence agencies to Afghanistan for helping
the Afghan mujahideen in their jihad against the Soviet
troops.
In the second phase between 1990 and
1996, there were no reports of any contacts between the
ISI and bin Laden. He was initially in Saudi Arabia and
then the Sudan. During this period, Pakistani jihadi
leaders such as Maulana Masood Azhar, then of the
Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) and now of the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM), Fazlur Rahman Khalil, then of the HUA and now of
the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), and Professor Hafeez
Mohammad Sayeed, the head of the Markaz Dawa al-Irshad,
the political wing of the LET, used to visit bin Laden,
initially in Saudi Arabia and then in Sudan. Since all
these jihadi leaders had close contacts with the ISI, it
was very likely that they had kept the ISI informed of
their discussions with bin Laden and of the activities
of al-Qaeda in Somalia and Saudi Arabia.
The
third phase was between 1996 and October 7, 2001. In the
beginning of 1996, the Sudanese government asked him to
leave Khartoum. Through the Pakistani jihadi leaders, he
sought the permission of the Burhanuddin Rabbani
government, then in power in Kabul, to shift to
Jalalabad in Afghanistan. After consulting the Benazir
Bhutto government, then in office in Islamabad, Rabbani
allowed him and his entourage to shift to Jalalabad.
Shortly thereafter, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and
Kabul in September, 1996. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the head
of the Taliban, ordered the shifting of bin Laden and
his entourage to Kandahar, where the Taliban had set up
its religious headquarters.
A number of serving
and retired officers of the Pakistan army and the ISI,
such as Mohammad Aziz, Lieutenant-General (retd) Hamid
Gul, former director general of the ISI, and
Lieutenant-General (retd) Javed Nasir, another former
director general of the ISI, called on bin Laden at
Jalalabad and then Kandahar and used to remain in touch
with him. Aziz used to organize his periodic medical
check-ups at a Pakistani military hospital at Peshawar.
None of the reports received during this period
mentioned the presence of either Mushaf Ali Mir or Abu
Zubaydah at any of these meetings.
The US was
aware of the shifting of bin Laden and his entourage to
Afghanistan. Though al-Qaeda had been suspected in the
attack on US troops in Somalia in 1993, and in the
explosions in Saudi Arabia in 1996 targeting US troops,
the US did not exercise pressure on the Taliban to hand
over bin Laden. During this period, Unocal, a US oil
company, was very hopeful of getting the approval of the
Taliban government for its oil and gas pipeline project,
and US officials such as Robin Raphael, then assistant
secretary of state, used to interact with the Taliban on
this subject. There were no reports of their ever having
raised the issue of bin Laden with the Taliban.
It was only after bin Laden formed his
International Islamic Front (IIF) in February 1998 and
called for a jihad against the US and Israel that the US
started pressuring the Nawaz Sharif government to make
the Taliban hand over bin Laden to the US for trial. The
pressure increased after the explosions organized by
al-Qaeda outside the US embassies in Nairobi and
Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998.
By then, Unocal
had also abandoned its pipeline project in collaboration
with the Taliban following an outcry among women's
groups in the West over the Taliban's anti-women
policies. In the midst of all these happenings, Mohammad
Aziz and Hamid Gul kept in regular touch with bin Laden
and the Taliban leader. The Taliban had allowed the HUM
to set up training camps in its territory with Arab and
Chechen instructors from al-Qaeda. These were among the
camps destroyed by the US cruise missile strikes in
retaliation for the explosions in Kenya and Tanzaniya.
As the US pressure increased, Musharraf and
Mohammad Aziz presented to Nawaz in the beginning of
1999 a plan for shifting all the terrorists belonging to
al-Qaeda and its allied organizations from Afghanistan
to the Kargil heights in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K),
and let them loose against the Indian army. They argued
that by doing so they would be able to escape US
pressure and, at the same time, add to the difficulties
of the Indian army. It was this plan which Nawaz
approved.
After the fighting in Kargil broke
out, Nawaz was totally surprised to learn that Musharraf
and Aziz had used regular Pakistani army troops and not
the terrorists for occupying the Kargil heights. Why
Musharraf changed the plan is not clear. Some say that
he and Aziz did shift some of the terrorists from
Afghanistan to Skardu in Gilgit, and sent them to occupy
the Kargil heights. They were surprised by the ease with
each they moved into the heights, and by the reports
received from the terrorists that there was no Indian
army presence on the other side. They then decided to
send the army in to replace the terrorists and occupy
the area.
Others say that Musharraf and Aziz had
from the beginning planned to send the troops and not
the terrorists, but had told Nawaz that they would be
using the terrorists since they felt that Nawaz would
never approve the plan if they told him that they
intended to use regular troops.
After the
withdrawal of the Pakistani troops from the Kargil area
under US pressure, the US again took up with Nawaz the
question of Pakistani help to get hold of bin Laden.
This matter came up during a visit of Ziauddin to
Washington. The US wanted Pakistan's help for organizing
a commando operation into Kandahar to catch bin Laden
and his entourage. Nawaz asked the US to be patient, and
sent Ziauddin to Kandahar to persuade Mullah Omar to
hand over bin Laden to the US. He refused.
Nawaz
and Ziauddin had not kept Musharraf and Aziz in the
picture. On coming to know of Ziauddin's secret visit to
Kandahar, Musharraf sent Aziz to Mullah Omar to tell him
that he should not obey any instructions of Ziauddin.
Nawaz came to know of this, and this was one of the
factors that contributed to his decision to sack
Musharraf on October 12, 1999, which in turn led to his
overthrow and Musharraf assuming power in a bloodless
coup.
After Musharraf took over power, Aziz, who
continued to be his CGS, and Lieutenant-General Mahmood
Ahmed, who had replaced Ziauddin as the director general
of the ISI, continued to remain in touch with bin Laden,
who kept coming to Peshawar for his medical check-ups at
the local military hospital. In the middle of 2001, a
function was held in Kabul at which the first group of
Taliban officers trained by the Pakistan army passed
out. Among those who attended this function were bin
Laden, Hamid Gul and Ehsanul Haq, then Corps Commander,
Peshawar.
After September, under US pressure,
Musharraf sent a team of Pakistani mullahs headed by
Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, the chief of the Binori
madrassa (religious school) of Karachi, to
Kandahar, ostensibly to persuade the Taliban to hand
over bin Laden to the US. Mahmood Ahmed accompanied
them. Surprisingly, instead of asking him to hand over
bin Laden, the mullahs, in the presence of Mahmood
Ahmed, complimented him for resisting US pressure.
It was reported that the US somehow came to know
of this and it was under its pressure that Musharraf had
to remove Aziz and Mahmood Ahmed from their posts when
the US operations began in Afghanistan on October 7,
2001.
During his interrogation by Karachi
police, Omar Sheikh, the principal accused in the case
relating to the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, a
US journalist, last year, was reported to have stated
that during a visit to Kandahar in the middle of 2001 he
had come to know of al-Qaeda's plans for the terrorist
strikes in the US, and had conveyed this to Ehsanul Haq
at Peshawar on his return from Kandahar. Ehsanul Haq is
a close personal friend of Musharraf, and it is very
unlikely that he would not have immediately informed
Musharraf about it. Thus, definitely Ehsanul Haq and
most probably Musharraf himself were aware of al-Qaeda's
plans for the terrorist strikes in the US, but for
reasons not clear, they chose not to alert the US.
From his new post as chairman, Joint Chiefs of
Staff Committee, to which he had been transferred from
his post as Corps Commander, Lahore, Aziz continued to
keep in touch with bin Laden and other jihadi leaders.
It was he who alerted al-Qaeda, the HUM and the JEM of
the impending freezing of their bank accounts last year
and advised them to remove the bulk of their balances
before the instructions for the freezing reached their
banks.
It was Aziz who also reportedly persuaded
Mufti Shamzai to give shelter to bin Laden in the Binori
madrassa after an injured bin Laden managed to
escape into Pakistan from Tora Bora in Afghanistan in
the face of intense bombing. It was also reported that
Aziz also arranged for the treatment of bin Laden for a
shrapnel injury by serving and retired doctors of the
Pakistan army.
Since August last year, bin Laden
has disappeared from the Binori madrassa. One is
no longer certain whether he is alive or dead and, if he
is alive, where he is . Since a number of messages
purported to be his have been circulating, he is
presumed to be alive, unless proved to be dead. After
August last year, there has not been a single reliable
report of his being sighted anywhere in Pakistan or
Afghanistan or elsewhere in the world. Like the
proverbial ghosts, he is only heard, not seen.
So why then did Abu Zubaydah mention to his FBI
and CIA interrogators that it was Mushaf Ali Mir who was
in touch with bin Laden? One can only speculate. It was
probably to draw suspicion away from Mohammad Aziz,
Musharraf and Ehsanul Haq.
There is, however,
one intriguing aspect about Mushaf Ali Mir. He did not
enjoy a great reputation in the air force. He was
heading the military equipment manufacturing complex at
Kamra. In November, 2000, Musharraf, who liked Mushaf
Ali Mir tremendously, superseded five highly
distinguished officers of the air force and appointed
Mir as the Chief of the Air Staff. The supersession of
so many officers came in for strong criticism from a
number of retired officers of the Pakistani armed
forces. Why did Musharraf feel obliged to promote this
mediocre officer, even at the risk of causing widespread
unhappiness in the air force? A question to which there
has been no answer.
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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