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The Pakistan striptease
(continued)
By B Raman
How
big a catch is Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a 40-year-old
Libyan married to a Pakistani, fluent in Urdu and
Arabic and suffering from leucoderma
,
whose arrest was announced by the Pakistani
authorities at Islamabad on Wednesday?
They have not announced how and where he
was captured, but reports from non-governmental
sources indicate that a Pakistani security patrol
near Mardan, 30 miles north of Peshawar, had
stopped for an identity check on a man on a
two-wheeler with a person in a burqa (veil)
sitting behind him. The person in the burqa
opened fire, and the pair tried to escape. They
were captured after a chase. The person in the
burqa turned out to be
 Abu Faraj. In the
wake of his arrest, the Pakistani authorities in
North-West Frontier Province and in the
Federally-Administered Tribal Areas have
reportedly arrested seven Pakistanis, three
Uzbeks, one Afghan and one Chechen.
Abu
Faraj has been described as an operative of
al-Qaeda in North Africa, who had shifted to
Afghanistan from Sudan along with Osama bin Laden
in 1996 and had been assisting him in his work in
Afghanistan. Some reports have described him as
bin Laden's personal assistant, and others as one
of his bodyguards.
He apparently did not
occupy any high place in the al-Qaeda hierarchy,
as would be evident from the facts that he was not
one of the top guns of al-Qaeda for whom the
Federal Bureau of Investigation had issued
look-out notices after September 11, and that his
name did not figure prominently in the report of
the US's 9-11 Commission, which had at its
disposal details of the interrogation of all the
al-Qaeda operatives arrested in Pakistan,
including that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM),
the alleged mastermind behind the September 11
terrorist strikes in the US, who was arrested at
Rawalpindi in March, 2003.
Nor did his
name figure prominently in reports regarding the
investigation into the kidnapping and murder of
Daniel Pearl, the journalist of the Wall Street
Journal, and other terrorist attacks directed
against French and American nationals in Karachi
and Islamabad by suspected pro-al-Qaeda jihadi
elements in 2002, and the attempt to kill the then
Corps Commander of Karachi in June 2004.
His name figured for the first time in
May, 2004, as the suspected mastermind of the two
unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Pakistan's
President General Pervez Musharraf at Rawalpindi
in December, 2003. After the two attempts to kill
Musharraf, the only other incident in the
investigation of which his name figured was the
attempt to kill Shaukat Aziz, the present prime
minister and the then finance minister, in July
last year. Initially, the Pakistani authorities
had described him merely as an al-Qaeda operative,
but by September, 2004 they started describing him
as the successor to KSM as the No 3 in al-Qaeda.
Similarly, initially, they had projected
him as the co-ordinator of al-Qaeda operations in
Pakistan, but by October last they started
describing him as also the co-ordinator of its
operations in Europe and the US as well. Shortly
after the July, 2004 Lahore arrest of Mohammad
Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani who was said to be
the computer expert of al-Qaeda, and the death of
Amjad Farooqi, projected as another big fish of
al-Qaeda, in an encounter with security forces at
Nawabshah in Sindh in September last, Abu Faraj
found himself promoted by the Pakistani and US
authorities and non-governmental al-Qaeda watchers
of the world as number 3 in al-Qaeda, and a
vigorous man-hunt was launched for him in the
South Waziristan area of Pakistan.
According to reliable police sources in
Pakistan, US intelligence had been convinced since
September last year that Abu Faraj was operating
from sanctuaries in the South Waziristan area and
kept up pressure on Pakistan's
military-intelligence establishment to smoke him
out. The same police sources believed that he was
operating along with Tohir Yuldashev, the leader
of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who once
narrowly escaped capture by the Pakistan army.
It is interesting to note that while all
the important arrests and killings of al-Qaeda
leaders till now were made in major towns of
Pakistan, like Lahore, Faislabad and Gujrat in
Punjab, Karachi, Rawalpindi and Nawabshah in
Sindh, the arrest of Abu Faraj is reported to have
been made in the tribal areas, thereby indicating
that he felt himself safer in the tribal areas
than elsewhere in Pakistan.
The Pakistani
authorities have not so far taken their public
into confidence regarding the details of the two
plots to kill Musharraf in December 2003, in which
four junior officers of the army and six of the
air force were allegedly involved. One of the army
officers named Islamuddin has already been
court-martialed and sentenced to death, even
before the investigation is complete, but the
Pakistani authorities have denied media
speculation that he has already been executed.
Another army officer named Havaldar Younis has
been sentenced to 10 years rigorous imprisonment.
Much to the discomfiture of the authorities, one
of the air force officers, who was being held in
custody in an air force station, managed to escape
in November last.
In December, 2004 the
Lahore police arrested a band of four hoodlums who
indulged in mugging. The chief investigating
officer projected them as the trusted men of Abu
Faraj and their arrests as yet another major
breakthrough in the hunt for Abu Faraj, Dr Aiman
al-Zawahiri and bin Laden. According to the
police, one of the hoodlums admitted that Abu
Faraj had taken him in his car to the vicinity of
a United Nations vehicle in February, 2004, and
asked him to throw a hand-grenade at it.
Abu Faraj could have thrown the
hand-grenade himself. Why should he take an
eye-witness in his car and ask him to throw it?
What kind of an al-Qaeda top general is he if he
did not have the confidence to throw a
hand-grenade himself? Other police officers
debunked the claim of the investigating officer
that the hoodlums belonged to al-Qaeda. The News,
the prestigious daily of Pakistan, reported on
January 8 as follows, "In the post-September 11
scenario, Pakistani intelligence agents admit,
there are multiple problems in identifying the
actual enemy of the state."
In reports
relating to the investigation leaking out of the
police and the Inter-Services Intelligence from
time to time, the names of various organizations
have figured as the perpetrators of the two plots
to kill Musharraf - the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the
Harkat-ul-jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Jundullah and finally
al-Qaeda. In August last, Qari Saifullah Akhtar,
the head of the HUJI, was arrested by Dubai
authorities and deported to Pakistan. One does not
have details of his interrogation.
One
need not be surprised that President George W Bush
seems happier than even Musharraf over the arrest
of Abu Faraj, whom he has described as a top
general of bin Laden and whose arrest he has
hailed as a critical victory in the so-called "war
against terrorism". It should help temporarily in
drawing attention away from the continuing rampage
of the resistance fighters and terrorists in Iraq,
who have already killed 12 Americans and about 200
Iraqis, mainly Shi'ite and Kurdish recruits to the
police, since April 29, thereby negating the
claims of the US that the resistance movement and
the foreign terrorists headed by Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi were showing signs of internal
dissension and loss of morale since the elections
in Iraq earlier this year.
In my three
decades with the Indian intelligence, I have
learnt one lesson. Never make a tall claim. Tall
claims have a nasty way of coming back to haunt
you.
Will the arrest of Abu Faraj turn out
to be yet one more striptease act in the long show
in Pakistan since the beginning of 2002, or will
it be the prelude to the ultimate striptease,
namely, the arrest or neutralization of bin Laden
and al-Zawahiri? I wish I had the answer.
One does not know when the ultimate
striptease will come about. So long as the show
lasts, let us not leave the ringside seat.
Interesting days and sights ahead.
B
Raman is additional secretary (retired),
cabinet secretariat, government of India, New
Delhi, and, presently director, Institute for
Topical Studies, Chennai, and distinguished fellow
and convener, Observer Research Foundation,
Chennai Chapter. Email: itschen36@gmail.com
(Copyright 2005 B
Raman) |
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