Late last year, Bilal Ahmad Mir decided to
undertake the most dangerous decision of his life:
he volunteered to leave the comfort of the
Hizb-ul-Mujahideen's (HM's) offices in the capital
of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Muzaffarabad,
and take charge of a terror cell in northern
Kashmir.
Mir's handlers at Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate
armed him as best they could. He was given a
legitimate Pakistani passport, AH0992231, stamped
with a Nepal visa issued in Islamabad. On March 3,
Mir flew from the Pakistani port city of Karachi
to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu on Pakistan
International Airways flight 268 - and promptly
handed himself over to waiting Indian intelligence
operatives who his family had made contact with
the previous summer.
Even as India
prepares to resume dialogue on Jammu
and
Kashmir (J&K), stalled by
the political crisis that swept Pakistan, J&K
is readying for elections to its legislative
assembly. By this winter, J&K should have a
new government in place. Meanwhile, India and
Pakistan will likely be fleshing out a five-point
peace formula reached by their covert negotiators,
S K Lambah and Tariq Aziz, which includes the
recognition of the Line of Control (LoC) as a de
facto border between the two sections of Kashmir,
cooperative management of some agreed subjects,
free trade and movement, and demilitarization -
all contingent on an end to terrorism.
For
the leadership of the HM, the numerically largest
terror group operating in J&K, the prospect of
an historic peace deal must appear just as the
butcher's blade does to the chicken whose neck it
is about to sever.
Deal or no deal, the HM
and other Islamist terror groups won't be players
in influencing the outcome of the electoral
process in J&K - for the first time since
1995. In 1996, when the state took its first steps
toward the restoration of democracy, 61 political
workers were killed in terror strikes. Another 57
died in 1997. In 2001, the year before the fateful
elections that brought the Congress-People's
Democratic Party (PDP) alliance to power, 76
political workers were killed. One hundred party
workers were killed in 2002.
Politicians
were forced to cut deals with Islamist terror
groups, making clear just where the real power
lay. Indeed, the killing of National Conference
workers was a major reason for the party's defeat
in 2002, and led it to soften its stand on
terrorism thereafter.
But now, jihadi
organizations just don't have the muscle left to
enforce compliance. This year, the United Jihad
Council (UJC) announced it would not use force to
obstruct the democratic process - the customary
transformation of necessity to virtue. Few
politicians take that promise at face value. As in
past elections, the path to democracy will more
likely than not be punctuated by assassinations
and bombings. But the fact is, the jihad is
waning.
Mir isn't the only senior HM
commander to have given up the fight in recent
months. Since late 2007, the HM's "supreme
commander" in J&K, Nasir Ahmed Bhat, has been
living in a safe house outside Srinagar, under the
secret protection of the state government.
On the eve of the next assembly elections,
the J&K government hopes to use Bhat - better
known as "Ghazi Misbahuddin", the alias
traditionally used by the HM's senior-most field
commander - to demonstrate its willingness to talk
to terrorists who decide to abjure violence. HM's
"supreme commander", Mohammad Yusuf Shah aka Syed
Salahuddin, has refused to meet this condition,
but others in the organization seem increasingly
willing to take whatever deals are on offer.
Unnoticed, over a dozen mid-ranking
commanders at the Hizb's camps in Pakistan have
returned to India since January 2008. Most experts
believe the flow home from HM camps would have
been even higher if India had not come down hard
on cross-LoC surrenders, after intelligence
reports warned that some rehabilitated terrorists
had reactivated their connections with jihadi
groups. All the major political parties in Jammu
and Kashmir, though, are lobbying for a proper and
secure rehabilitation policy to be put in place -
and one most likely will be, once a new government
takes office.
Even as things are, the HM
is desperately short on both leadership and cadre.
Kulgam-born Riyaz Ahmad Bhat was scheduled to
replace Nasir Ahmed Bhat, but flatly refused to
run the risk. His parents, family sources said,
have now traveled to Pakistan to secure their
son's marriage - and thus ensure he stays on at a
HM camp rather than risk death at home. Muzaffar
Ahmed Dar, a long-standing HM operative from
Magam, with an undistinguished record of service
in the organization, was obliged to take charge in
his stead. He has little, however, to take charge
of.
Across the north Kashmir zone, the HM
has just three commanders of significance:
Mohammad Shafi Shah, a Papchan-Bandipora resident
who uses the code name "Dawood"; his old friend
from the adjoining village of Chuntimulla, Ali
Mohammad Lone; and Tanvir Ahmad, from Baramulla's
Bagh-e-Islam neighborhood. Together, these three
HM formation leaders are believed to have less
than three dozen men under their command.
In its one-time south Kashmir strongholds,
the decimation of the HM has been even more
marked. Just one commander of consequence has
survived the thorough destruction of the
organization by the J&K police - Pervez Ahmad
Dar, who uses the code name "Pervez Musharraf".
Panzgam resident Raees Dar, known to his
associates as "Kachroo" or "brown-hair", was
arrested by the J&K police on March 31; the
organization's all-powerful financial chief Farooq
Dar, code-named Hanif Khan, was shot dead near
Tral on February 10.
Since the arrest of
Tajamul Islam, the Karachi-bred son of one of HM
chief Mohammad Yusuf Shah's most trusted aides,
the central division has had no leadership at all.
On March 19, in a desperate attempt to demonstrate
its continuing presence, the HM carried out a
bombing at Srinagar's Jehangir Chowk. Cadre and
resources for the operation had to be mobilized by
Tanvir Ahmed's north Kashmir cell - leading to a
series of errors which led to its rapid unraveling
by police investigators.
Indeed, the ease
with which attempted HM terror operations have
been stopped suggests a high degree of penetration
by the J&K police and Intelligence Bureau -
another sign of the demoralization in the rebel
ranks. At least one ranking commander, south
Kashmir-based Javed "Seepan" Sheikh, is rumored to
be a police asset, which has led to mistrust and
factionalism within the HM's already-fractured
ranks.
Does all this mean that the waning
of the jihad is an inexorable process? Not just
yet: Pakistan's covert services, and the Islamist
terror groups it helped create, aren't quite ready
to give up the fight.
Addressing a March 1
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) gathering in Muzaffarabad by
telephone, its Lahore-based amir Hafiz Mohammad
Saeed announced that restrictions placed on his
operations in Pakistan-administered J&K would
soon be lifted. While the jihad in J&K had
suffered because of the fallout of the United
States' war in Afghanistan, he said, things were
changing. Saeed also announced the Lashkar would
soon be setting up a new magazine devoted to the
jihad in J&K.
On the ground, there are
signs that the LeT war machine is preparing itself
for renewed battle. In March, the Lashkar began
installing new state-of-the-art wireless
communications equipment at its control station in
Kel, just across the LoC from the critical
infiltration routes across the Lolab mountains.
A training center just outside of
Balakote, in Pakistan-administered J&K's
Muzaffarabad district, has been revived under the
command of one of the Lashkar's top irregular
warfare instructors, Wagah resident Sagir Ahmed.
And, sources indicate, since January, a former
Pakistani army officer known to his subordinates
as "Captain Salim" has been training cadre for
combat in J&K at a new camp in Lala Moosa,
near Gujranwala.
Perhaps most important of
all, the ISI has resumed direct funding for the
HM, which was shut off under international
pressure in 2006. Married cadre at the HM camps in
Pakistan-administered J&K now receive 10,000
Pakistani rupees (US$158) a month, up from 5,200
rupees; single men receive 8,000 rupees against
the 4,200 rupees on offer before ISI funding was
cut off.
All of this, of course, might
prove to be too little - and too late. Despite
energetic infiltration efforts last summer,
violence levels have continued to drop.
Jihadi organizations in J&K have,
however, demonstrated that they can put up a fight
in the one area where they are still present in
some strength - the dense forests above Baramulla,
where the major infiltration routes across the LoC
converge. Bucking the dramatic state-wide fall in
violence, Baramulla saw an escalation in 2007,
with 22 Indian soldiers and policemen killed in
combat against 16 in 2006, while 103 terrorists
were killed, up from 95. Should high levels of
infiltration take place this spring and summer,
jihadi groups could well try to replicate this
model elsewhere.
Whether this outcome is
realized depends on two factors: the competence of
India's pre-election counter-terrorism operations,
and the extent to which Pakistan is willing to go
to revive the dying jihad.
It is the
second of these that could prove most important.
While politicians like People's Party of Pakistan
chief Asif Ali Zardari have laid out a brave
agenda for peacemaking with India, the power to
shape strategic policy lies not with them, but
with Pakistan's army.
General Ashfaq
Pervez Kiani represents the Pakistani army's
institutional consensus - a consensus that
includes among its pillars the belief that
sub-conventional warfare is an integral component
of national security.
In recent weeks,
restraints imposed on anti-India jihadi groups
like the Lashkar and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM)
have been loosened, in an evident effort to
restore the Pakistan army's legitimacy among
Islamists, who have so spectacularly turned on it
in recent months. With its forces heavily
committed to the west, though, it is unclear just
how far Pakistan's military establishment can risk
precipitating a potentially war-inducing crisis
with India.
But this much is clear: the
jihad in Jammu and Kashmir is clinging to the edge
of the abyss by its fingernails. Whether it is any
position to grab the rope Pakistan's military
establishment has thrown it - and if that rope is
strong enough to take the load - remains to be
seen.
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