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Entangled in terror's
net
By Syed Saleem
Shahzad
KARACHI - The September 11 attacks
on the US forever changed the life of Kashif Khan
Sherwani, now 25. Inspired by the event, he
decided to abandon his lower middle-class family,
including three younger brothers, two younger
sisters and elderly parents, and respond to the
call for jihad in Afghanistan. US troops captured
this emotional, but untrained, young man after the
Taliban retreated from Kabul in the face of the
US-led invasion of the country in late 2001, and
he was sent to Guantanamo prison in Cuba.
Ten months ago, after his
family had given up all hope for him, he
was released and allowed to rejoin them in
Karachi. He remained a devout Muslim and attended prayers
regularly.
His life slowly returned to
some sort of normalcy. He married and joined his
father's small business. A constant reminder of
his past, though, were the weekly visits to the
local police station that he was obliged to make
to inform officials of his whereabouts. He never
missed reporting in.
Then came the London
suicide attacks on July 7, and once again Kashif
Khan Sherwani's life was thrown into turmoil.
Khan was summoned to the police station,
where he was placed in custody on what he claims
are trumped-up charges of distributing pamphlets.
The policeman handling his case was under pressure
to effect as many arrests as possible. This was
true of all police as Pakistan was under close
scrutiny - three of the London bombers were of
Pakistani origin and had visited Pakistan prior to
the attacks.
Khan's is a similar story to
hundreds of others rounded up by the law-enforcing
agencies. Almost all come from poor or lower
middle-class families. In most cases, they were no
longer associated with any jihadi outfits, but
since they had either been in Guantanamo or had
been booked by the police in the past, they were
the "usual suspects" to be rounded up in the
country's periodic crackdowns in the "war on
terror".
This creates a vicious cycle,
though.
Each time the men are arrested, it
becomes more difficult for them to be assimilated
into society. They are shunned in the work place -
if they can get jobs - and even their families
eventually turn against them: police raids and
legal and other "fees" to secure a release prove
too much to bear.
"The result is that the
men escape from normal life. These frustrated
souls are left with no option except to flee to
the tribal areas and join pro-Taliban movements,"
a senior security official told Asia Times Online.
Different intelligence agencies in the
country, including the Intelligence Bureau and the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), have repeatedly
reported to the top leadership that these sweeps
are futile exercises that force young men who
might already have left the jihadi fold to return.
Instead of keeping these men in the mainstream of
society, repeated arrests drag them into
militancy, or even a criminal life.
However, relentless foreign pressure,
especially from the US, which counts Pakistan as
an important ally in the "war on terror", leaves
the Pakistani leadership with little choice. After
July 7, President General Pervez Musharraf, who is
also chief of army staff, sent a strong note to
all intelligence outfits warning them against
"deliberate negligence" in arresting jihadis.
Further, he summoned a meeting of the
country's top police officials and specifically
told them to round up as many jihadis as they
could and not to take any advice from any other
quarters. And in a televised address last week,
Musharraf called on the nation "to wage a holy war
against preachers of hate" and announced steps to
curb militant Islamic schools and groups.
Over a thousand people were subsequently
arrested, including the hapless Kashif Khan
Sherwani. Pakistani officials say that some of
those detained would be tried under the country's
anti-terrorism law, which allows the authorities
to hold a suspect for up to a year without laying
charges.
"It is a fact that only a few
among them would be criminals - those who are
involved in any crime stay underground and do not
stay at their homes. However, it is our duty to
round up suspects and interrogate them to clear
all doubts of any possible involvement. Former
jihadis are always suspect because they know
people involved in anti-state activity. Maybe they
are not involved in such activities, but there is
always the doubt that at any moment they could be
in touch with criminals and join them," an officer
of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID -
police intelligence), Karachi, told Asia Times
Online.
Zain Anwar and Kashan Anwer are
two US nationals of Pakistani origin. Their late
father was a member of the provincial assembly in
Karachi and belonged to the Muttahida Qaumi
Movement, an ethnocentric party of Indian
immigrants. They went to Afghanistan a long time
ago. Last year, they were picked up by the police
in Pakistan, and then passed through many hands,
including the ISI and the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation. Recently, they were cleared and
released.
"After eight months of
detention, law-enforcing agencies realized that
they were mistaken and the boys were innocent.
However, the careers of these boys are destroyed.
They just cannot go back to the US any more
because they are permanent suspects. Nobody will
hire them for work in Pakistan either as there is
no guarantee that they will not be picked up in
future. I think a case should be registered
against those who wrongly detained them and kept
them in illegal detention for eight months," said
Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI official who now
works as a human-rights activists for jihadis who
are wrongly implicated by police and intelligence
agencies.
A police official in the CID
Karachi who was involved with Zain and Kashan from
their arrest until their release comments, "It is
true that Zain and Kashan were innocent. But they
were not picked up on totally baseless grounds.
They know Atif Kamran. Atif was the one who
planned to kill Musharraf. They confessed during
interrogation that they met Atif Kamran several
times. Now, once a security agency knows about such
an association, especially with the background of
Zain and Kashan, it becomes impossible to ignore.
Both were US nationals. Jihadi organizations
always look for such youths to cultivate them and
send them to the US or the UK and use them as
suicidals (suicide bombers). Now tell us what
choice we had? There is no doubt that we ruined
their careers, but our experience tells us that it
was essential to scan them inside out."
In
the highly charged times that invariably follow
attacks such as the ones on London, Western
governments and intelligence agencies, in
knee-jerk reaction, come down heavily on Pakistan to
do something about militants and jihadis, and do
it quickly. But the issue is not that simple.
Those who are dedicated to making trouble
are actually few in number, compared to the vast
numbers who might at some time have had a loose
association with jihadi outfits, and who could,
with sensitive handling, be brought back into
mainstream society.
For all practical
purposes, jihadis are bracketed into three
categories.
1) Global jihadis. These are the
real extremists.
2) Untrained jihadis who join
the anti-US movement because they are concerned
about the Muslim cause and who out of pure emotion
go to places such as Afghanistan.
3) Those who
fight for a national cause in Kashmir.
However, the US establishment is not
prepared to make any distinction as far as
militancy is concerned. And they want Pakistan to
abandon militancy at all costs.
"Most of
these youths are isolated. We have to bring them
back into the fold of society. Through incentives
we have to create a vested interest among them to
be successful persons in society. Without
incentives and vested interests, nobody can
successfully be part of society," said the former
managing director of Pakistan International
Airlines and senior sports administrator, Arif Ali
Khan Abbasi.
"You know my interaction with
youth training is as old as from the 1960s when I
was myself playing first-class cricket. In
Pakistan and the West Indies, cricketers come only
from lower and lower- middle-class families.
Obviously many are not good students. We
disciplined them, but it is not a single-track
strategy to make them disciplined. Of course, we
do not expect all boys to go to bed at 10 o'clock
sharp, though they must wake up early and play the
game with full concentration. There are various
ways we adopt to discipline them; the foremost are
incentives and vested interests, which takes them
up the ladder of success.
"We still
talk about Masters of Arts and Bachelor of Arts,
which only produce glorified clerks who would
always curse their fortune. Why do we not talk
about technical schools and absorb these
isolated jihadis into them and create vested interests
in them to be rich and dignified persons?" asked
Abbasi.
"I was coming back home from
Germany. On the seat next to me was gentlemen, in
Club class, a Pakistani coming back to Lahore to
get his son admitted in the elitist Atchison
College in Lahore. He was bricklayer in Germany,
but through his technical skills he earned a lot
of money and was ambitious to integrate his son
with the elites of the country. The same happened
with my mechanic in Karachi, who is an uneducated
person, but a rich professional, and he got his
son admitted in the elitist Karachi Grammar
School. When you set such kinds of trends in
society, deviations generally stop and society
moves on track," Abbasi observed.
Meanwhile, Kashif Khan Sherwani languishes
in custody as his lawyers try to get him bail.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.)
Syed Saleem Shahzad, Bureau
Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be
reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com |
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