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Osama: 'Got him! (sort
of)'
By B Raman
The
exasperation of Porter Goss, the director of the
US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with
Pakistan's role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden
and other al-Qaeda members is evident from his
remarks on bin Laden during an interview with Time
magazine, which was carried this week.
The
interview comes in the wake of the arrest of one
Hamid Hayat, a US citizen of Pakistani origin, his
father and some others by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) earlier this month. They
belonged to a 2,500-strong Pakistani community
living in Lodi, near Sacramento in California.
Hamid and his father have been charged by the FBI
with covering up from the law enforcement agency
the fact that he attended a six-month jihadi
training course at a camp near Rawalpindi during a
visit to Pakistan in 2003-04.
Hamid was
reported to have told the FBI that the camp was
being run by al-Qaeda, but the indications are
that it was actually run by the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM - which now calls itself
the Jamiat-ul-Ansar), a virulently anti-US
Pakistani jihadi organization that is a member of
bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jihad
against the Crusaders and the Jewish People formed
in 1998. Its then amir, Maulana Fazlur Rehman
Khalil, who was released by Pakistani authorities
after being detained for some months last year
without being prosecuted, was a co-signatory of
bin Laden's first fatwa of 1998 against the
US.
Pakistani authorities have sought to
ridicule the FBI's charge against Hamid by
pointing out that it was inconceivable that a
jihadi training camp attended by hundreds of
trainees, as claimed by him, could be located in
or near Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan army's
general headquarters are located.
Coincidentally, Yasin Malik, the head of
the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF),
one of the jihadi organizations in India's Jammu
& Kashmir (J&K) state, during a recent
visit to Pakistan, revealed that hundreds of
members of his organization had been trained in
the late 1980s in a camp at the very same place,
which was then run by Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a
Kashmiri, who used to be a member of the
government of Nawaz Sharif and is now the minister
for information in the cabinet headed by Shaukat
Aziz.
Among the members of the present
cabinet, Malik is considered very close to
President General Pervez Musharraf. He has a long
history of association with the HuM and Maulana
Fazlur Rehman Khalil, and obtained for the HuM a
large plot of land near Rawalpindi for starting a
jihadi training camp.
Embarrassed by the
disclosure of Malik, Sheikh Rashid strongly denied
running any such camp and maintained that he was
only running a humanitarian camp for refugees from
J&K. Malik also subsequently retracted his
statement and accused the media of misreporting
him. He asserted that what he had said was that
Sheikh Rashid was looking after the refugees. He
denied having said anything about jihadi training
organized by Sheikh Rashid.
The outspoken
Sheikh Rashid, who has many enemies in Pakistan
because of his proximity to Musharraf and his
habit of frequently dropping the name of
Musharraf, found himself contradicted not only by
Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP),
during whose government the jihadi training camp
was started, but also by General (retired) Mirza
Aslam Beg, who was the chief of the army staff at
that time; Brigadier (retired) Nasurullah Babar,
who was the interior minister in Benazir Bhutto's
cabinet; a former officer of the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI), Khalid Khawaja; and Hashim
Quereshi, a co-founder of the JKLF, who hijacked
an Indian Airlines aircraft to Lahore in Pakistan
in 1971.
While all of them asserted it was
correct that Sheikh Rashid ran a jihadi training
camp, the PPP revealed that the ISI, without
clearance from Benazir, had hundreds of acres of
land in the suburban areas of Islamabad
transferred for starting the camp. Hashim
Quereshi, who corroborated the allegations against
Sheikh Rashid during a media interview, was asked
whether any other member of the present cabinet
had been associated with jihadi terrorism. He
replied, "It would be easier to answer who are the
members of the present cabinet who were not
associated with terrorism?"
From a study
of the various statements emanating from these
persons, it is clear that the camp at which Hamid
attended a jihadi training course was probably the
one run by Sheikh Rashid on behalf of the HuM on a
large plot of land transferred to him by the ISI.
However, the name of the camp as given by Hamid in
his statement to the FBI slightly differs from the
name given by critics of Sheikh Rashid. According
to the FBI, Hamid gave the name as Tamal, whereas
the critics of Sheikh Rashid have given the name
as Tarnol.
While the White House, the
State Department and the Pentagon have been very
generous in their praise of the cooperation
received from Musharraf and the Pakistani
military-intelligence establishment in the "war
against terrorism", their positive perception of
the Pakistani army's role is not shared by their
officers at the field level - either by American
army officers deployed in Afghan territory across
the Pakistani border, or by US diplomats in Kabul,
or by US intelligence officers posted in
Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan.
American
army officers have been particularly outspoken in
giving expression to their dissatisfaction over
the effectiveness of the combing operations
conducted by the Pakistani security forces in the
Waziristan area of the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas. The Pakistan army's claim that the
security forces had fought vigorously against
foreign terrorists who had taken shelter in this
area, losing during their operations nearly 230
officers, has not been satisfactorily
corroborated. There are grounds to suspect the
casualty figures given by the Pakistan army.
During the past few months, the Pakistan
army has practically suspended its combing
operations in the area, claiming that most of the
foreign terrorists operating from this area have
been killed or captured or driven into
Afghanistan. This claim is not accepted by US army
officers, who demand that the combing operations
be resumed.
The Pakistan army has also not
taken any action to arrest Mullah Omar, the amir
of the Taliban, and other Taliban leaders who are
suspected of operating from the Pashtun areas of
Balochistan province in Pakistan. Since the end of
winter, these remnants, with the help of the
survivors of al-Qaeda operating from the
Waziristan area, have stepped up their acts of
violence in Afghanistan. There have also been one
or two acts of suicide terrorism, involving Arabs,
suspected to be al-Qaeda.
The differences
between the US officials in Afghanistan and their
Pakistani counterparts came to a head last week
when Geo TV, a private TV channel of Pakistan,
interviewed a leader of the Taliban, who assured
viewers that both Mullah Omar and bin Laden were
alive and well. In an interview to an Afghan TV
station, Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to
Afghanistan who is under orders of transfer to
Iraq, asserted that Mullah Omar and other Taliban
leaders were operating from Pakistan. He asked:
"If a TV station can get in touch with them, how
can the intelligence service of a country which
has nuclear bombs and a lot of security and
military forces not find them?" The Pakistan
Foreign Office strongly protested against
Khalilzad's TV interview and described his remarks
as irresponsible.
It is against this
background that one has to see the comments of
Porter Goss, which apparently reflect the
exasperation of his own officers in the field.
India has always said that Musharraf has not taken
any action to dismantle the training
infrastructure of pro-al-Qaeda Pakistani jihadi
organizations in Pakistani territory. While this
was not disputed by the US, it did not exercise
adequate pressure on Musharraf to dismantle these
camps because the US apparently felt that these
were being used only to train jihadis to operate
in J&K. The reported revelation by Hamid that
these camps were also used to train jihadis from
the Pakistani community in the US to operate in US
territory has come as a shock to US agencies.
In his interview to Time, Goss made the
following points: It is unlikely bin Laden will be
brought to justice until "we strengthen all the
links" in the chain in the US-led hunt for terror
suspects. "In the chain that you need to
successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have
some weak links . When you go to the very
difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in
sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of
our sense of international obligation, fair play.
We have to find a way to work in a conventional
world in unconventional ways that are acceptable
to the international community." Asked if he had a
good idea where bin Laden was, he said, "I have an
excellent idea of where he is."
He did not
mention Pakistan by name, but it was apparent that
he was talking of that country. On the Afghan side
of the border, 16,000 US troops have the
responsibility to hunt for bin Laden. If he was in
Afghan territory, there would be no reason for
Goss to talk of sanctuaries in sovereign states,
weak links, etc. If bin Laden was in Iranian
territory, there would be no reason not to name
Iran, since US relations with Tehran are already
at rock-bottom.
His reference to the need
to work in unconventional ways in a conventional
world is intriguing. Is he talking of the need for
US special forces operating clandestinely on their
own in Pakistani territory in order to kill or
capture bin Laden, with or without the concurrence
of Musharraf? Is the State Department refusing to
agree to this? If he has such an excellent idea of
where bin Laden is, why is the CIA not using
Predator aircraft to kill him?
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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