Cracking open Pakistan's jihadi
core By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The recent arrest of
two top Pakistani jihadis, Maulana Fazalur Rehman Khalil
and Qari Saifullah Akhtar, marks the beginning of the end
of an era that started in the mid-1980s when the dream of
an International Muslim Brigade was first conceived by
a
group of top Pakistan leaders.
The dream
subsequently materialized in the shape of the
International Islamic Front, an umbrella organization
for militant groups formed by Osama bin Laden in 1998
and loosely coordinated by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of
Pakistan.
The arrests in Pakistan, made under
relentless pressure from the United States, are aimed at
tracing all jihadi links to their roots, which are
mostly grounded in Pakistan's strategic core.
As a
former Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
operator and air force official, Khalid Khawaja,
commented in the Pakistani press on the arrests of the
two jihadis, "Every link of the arrested jihadi leaders
goes straight to top army officials of different times."
At one level the arrests are linked to
conspiracies against the government - including
assassination attempts on President General Pervez
Musharraf - and the recruitment of jihadis to fight
against US troops in Afghanistan, but the real motives
are much more far-reaching.
The present problems
in the "war on terror" are linked to the labyrinth of
groups developed during the decade-long Afghan
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in
the 1980s. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
sponsored much of the jihadi movement, using the ISI as
a front and a conduit.
For example, US planes
used to fly supplies, arms and ammunition for the Afghan
fighters to Islamabad, from where they were transferred
to the ISI Afghan cell's facility at Rawalpindi, from
where the ISI had its own network to distribute the
merchandise to the mujahideen groups of its choice.
This modus operandi exposed a serious
flaw in US strategic thinking. By not dealing directly
with the Afghan groups, the US had no control over which
ones benefited, and invariably only those factions that
were both anti-Western capitalism and anti-Soviet
socialism were cultivated by the ISI.
In this
environment, late Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haq
and his closest associate, the then director general of
the ISI, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, both of
whom died in a plane crash in 1988, saw their
opportunity to lay the foundations for a global Muslim
liberation movement.
Blissfully unaware of this
perspective, the CIA supported Pakistani efforts to
recruit Muslim youths from the Pacific to Africa, and a
whole generation of youngsters was trained in jihadi,
and, importantly, with strong anti-US overtones.
Youngsters were drawn from groups such as Abu Sayyaf
from the Philippines and Muslims from Arakan province in
Myanmar.
To keep the movements under the strict
control of the ISI, the ISI established proxies such as
al-Badr, the Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami and Harkatul Ansar
(or Harkatul Mujahideen as it was once known). Akhtar,
incidentally, was leader of Harkat, while Khalil was
head of the Harkatul Ansar.
Crucially, all this
was done without the CIA and, for that matter, the
leaders of the Islamic movements knowing just how much
control the ISI actually had.
To keep the Arab
movements under control, an al-Badr facility was
organized in Khost province in Afghanistan. A dynamic
law and master of arts graduate from Karachi University,
Bakhat Zameen Khan, a member of the Jamaat-i-Islami
(JI), a powerful religious party (who originally hailed
from Dir in North West Frontier Province), was chosen as
commander. He brought together all Arab jihadis at the
facility, and linked senior ones to the ISI. Out of this
camp, the Palestinian Hamas emerged, as well as the
Arab-sponsored Moro liberation movement led by Abu
Sayyaf.
Khan was gradually weaned from the JI,
and he exclusively allied al-Badr with the Hezb-i-Islami
(HIA) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who today plays a key
role in the Afghan resistance. As a result, the JI
announced its separation with al-Badr when it launched
the Hizbul Mujahideen militant movement in Kashmir in
1989.
Al-Badr was kicked out of Afghanistan
after the emergence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s
because of its affiliation with the HIA. The ISI then
set up new camps for al-Badr in Pakistani Azad Kashmir -
that portion of Kashmir administered by Pakistan.
In the Kargil operation of 1999, which almost
brought Pakistan and India to all-out war, al-Badr
fighters were initially sent by the Pakistan army to
occupy Indian bunkers. Later, another ISI connection,
the recently arrested Khalil, and his fighters battled
side-by-side with Khan and the Pakistan army against
Indian forces.
ISI makes up
ground Former Afghan prime minister and legendary
mujahideen Hekmatyar went into exile in Tehran once the
Taliban came to power in 1996. But as the Taliban regime
disintegrated in late 2001, the US put pressure on
Tehran to expel Hekmatyar, planning to arrest him as
soon as he returned to Afghanistan, where he believed he
could reinvent himself as an anti-US resistance
guerrilla leader.
By this time, though, Islamabad,
having been persuaded to abandon the Taliban and
join the United States' "war on terror", was in the process of
finding a substitute connection in Afghanistan.
Hekmatyar was the obvious choice. Khan was sent to
Tehran to assure Hekmatyar of Pakistan's support should
he return to Afghanistan.
Al-Badr members
were tasked to escort Hekmatyar from Iran to Afghanistan
and to keep him away from the Americans. He was kept in
a safe house in Chitral, where al-Badr members, along
with Pakistan commandos, guarded the premises. As soon
as al-Badr members located other diehard HIA
commanders, such as Kashmir Khan and Ustad Fareed, Hekmatyar was
launched in Afghanistan's Kunar province to reorganize
the HIA as a proxy of the ISI in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, al-Badr, with its long experience in
the region, helped many Arabs and their families,
desperately wanted by the US, by providing them shelter
and arranging fake passports for them to return to their
countries of origin.
From the mid-1980s, then,
to the present the ISI and al-Badr have virtually been
one and the same thing. The US State Department declared
al-Badr a terrorist organization a few years ago, and
has steadily put pressure on Islamabad to arrest its
operators. However, Pakistan, for obvious reasons, has
been reluctant to comply with US demands.
The
Harkat The Harkat-i-Jihadi-i-Islami was the
first-ever Pakistani militant organization to be formed
by clerics of the Deobandi school of Islamic thought.
The organization was soon cultivated by the ISI, which
provided its jihadis with special training facilities in
the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan, as well
as in Khost in Afghanistan.
The organization's
conservative and traditional outlook was well suited to
militants from other countries, such as from Bangladesh
and Muslims from Myanmar. They were grouped under the
Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami al-Alami (international) led by
Akhtar (now under arrest). Later, when Harkat was
outlawed by the US State Department, Harkatul Ansar was
formed. However, in secret, Harkat's structure was kept
intact.
Akhtar was a main character in
the infamous "Operation Caliphate" in which
several Pakistani army officers attempted to topple
Benazir Bhutto's government in 1995. Other leading players
were Major-General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi and Brigadier
Mustansir Billah.
The officers planned a coup
with the help of civilian guerrillas (in fake army
uniforms) led by Akhtar. The plotters aimed to occupy
General Army Headquarters during a corps commanders'
meeting and arrest key leaders and then take over the
government and proclaim the formation of an Islamic
caliphate. The plot failed miserably, many officers were
arrested, and huge piles of ammunition and army uniforms
were recovered from Akhtar's car.
The rebel
officers were released when Musharraf came to the power
in a bloodless coup in October 1999, as was Akhtar. He
immediately made his way to Kabul, where he became close
to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who only elevated
Pakistanis once the ISI had approved. Akhtar was
subsequently put in charge of several important
assignments, such as training police and armed forces,
and some administrative matters.
Khalil,
meanwhile, was a veteran of the Afghan war against the
Soviets and acclaimed by his Afghan colleagues for his
heroic role in the conquest of Khost city by defeating
the communist forces there in 1991. Khost was the first
Afghan city to fall to the mujahideen after the
withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989,
after which the central communist government fell like a
house of cards. The conquest of Khost was conceived in
the safe houses of the ISI in Peshawar in Pakistan's
tribal area by the then director general,
Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani.
In 1989, after
the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the
ISI, then headed by retired Lieutenant-General Hamid
Gul, had devised "Operation Jalalabad" in which the HIA,
led by Hekmatyar, was given a key role. The plan was to
capture the strategic city of Jalalabad, and then march
on Kabul to topple the communist regime. However, the
operation came to nothing.
When Durrani took
over the ISI he revamped its strategy. Instead of
Jalalabad, the center of operations was focussed on
Khost, from where the army would mobilize the mujahideen
movement for Kabul.
At first Hekmatyar's HIA
called the shots for the Khost operation. Under the new
strategy, the HIA was removed from the front line and
Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani was given the leading role,
along with Pakistani fighters commanded by Khalil. This
combination worked much better, and Khost fell to the
mujahideen in the holy month of Ramadan (1991). All
mujahideen circles still admit that "Khost was captured
by Punjabis".
Khalil's
Harkatul Ansar was a signatory of
a ruling issued by Osama bin Laden in 1998 in which
he announced war against the United States after the Americans fired cruise
missiles on Afghanistan in retaliation for al-Qaeda attacks
on US embassies in Africa. The missiles targeted positions
in Kandahar and in Khost, where several members
of the Harkatul Ansar were killed. Khalil publicly
denounced the US and vowed to take revenge, and
soon after made his way on to the United States' list
of "most dangerous" people.
At this time Khalil
was chosen by one of the architects of the Kargil
operation, then lieutenant-general (now General) Aziz
Khan to take part in the daring raid into Indian
territory. After Bakht Zameen Khan captured some Kargil
peaks, Khalil fought side-by-side with the Pakistan army
and al-Badr fighters, and remained part and parcel of
all military strategies.
After September 11,
2001, Khalil sent several thousand fighters to
Afghanistan well in advance of the US-led attack on the
country, and personally commanded the forces.
However, after the then director general of the
ISI, Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmed, retired the day
the US attacked Afghanistan, Khalil returned to Pakistan
and was placed under house arrest as Islamabad had done
an about-turn, under US insistence, on support for the
Taliban.
The ISI, jihadi leaders and the
Pakistani army have over the years been inextricably
linked, especially in Afghanistan. Now that two key
jihadi figures, Khalil and Akhtar, have been arrested,
it can easily be deduced that the story of their
involvement, and the quest to stamp out the jihadi
movement at its heart, will not end with them being
incarcerated: there has always been someone in the
Pakistani establishment, whether active or retired, to
pull the strings, as was the case with Khalil and
Akhtar, and with Bakhat Zameen Khan.
Now, with
the arrest of the the jihadi leaders, the "cover" has
been broken and there is little place left for the
"operators behind the scenes" to hide.
"The cat
is cornered against the wall and the much-awaited game
within the army is about to start," commented an
observer based in Washington.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is bureau chief, Pakistan, for Asia Times Online.
He can be reached atsaleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com .
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
a
group of top Pakistan leaders. 
