Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	May 11, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

THE ROVING EYE
Al-Qaeda vs France, or India vs Pakistan?
By Pepe Escobar

PARIS - The suicide bombing which killed 11 Frenchmen and seriously wounded at least four in Karachi happened while the new Chirac government - after a surreal two weeks - was not even fully in power in Paris. As France - and Europe - are beginning to realize, radical Islam is back with a vengeance.

Is it? An official from the DST (Directorate of Territorial Security), a specialist on al-Qaeda, says, "The kamikaze driving the car bomb was most certainly an arm of al-Qaeda, which wants to strike against a Western member of the international coalition [against terrorism]". The French media are frantically assuming - without any proof - that this was an al-Qaeda operation. Only the head of the joint chiefs of staff, Jean-Pierre Kelche, is manifesting a degree of skepticism: for him, al-Qaeda's hand is no more than "a non-negligible probability".

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was also murdered in Karachi. His wife is French. An anti-terrorist specialist in Paris assures that "France is being targeted because it is a nation of crusaders, and partner of the Americans in the destruction of bin Laden's network. We must also not forget that the French inquiry regarding Richard Reid (the shoe-bomber intercepted on a Paris-Miami flight last December) revelead that he was in contact with al-Qaeda, and his commander was based in Pakistan."

The suicide bombing is just one more aftershock of September 11. The New Afghan War is far from over. There was no American victory. The specter of the urban guerrilla is everywhere. It is easier for ultra-chic Hamid Karzai to travel to Europe and the US than to go by Toyota Land Cruiser to Kandahar. There is no serious project to create a professional and independent army in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden - "mysteriously" absent from all newscasts - is alive and well and maybe hidden in Pakistan's tribal areas, if not in northern Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, northern Georgia ... The Pentagon's inability to capture bin Laden or Mullah Omar is nothing less than mind-boggling. Pakistan's tribal areas remain radical Islam territory par excellence.

So according to a classic hypothesis, al-Qaeda is the number one suspect. France was the only participant in the hazy anti-Taliban coalition actually involved in aerial combat in Afghanistan. Last March, Mirage 200d and Super-Etendard planes were bombing positions in eastern Afghanistan. As an ally of the American Grand Satan, France is considered an enemy of Islam by hardcore Islamists.

As the Frenchmen from the Direction of Naval Construction were supervising the construction of a Pakistani submarine in Karachi, the supposed al-Qaeda attack may have also managed to strike a vital Pakistani military target. But the number one target may be President General Musharraf himself. Musharraf's bitter war against radical Islamists - although intensified by all-out pressure from the US - is absolutely genuine.

The fact that Musharraf banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohamad - two of the crucial groups battling against India in Kashmir, and considered "terrorist organizations" by Washington - may also play an important part. Masoud Azar, Jaish-e-Mohamad's leader, lives in Karachi, and the bombing displays his classic operational mode: car-bomb plus suicide commando.

Al-Qaeda though, may have subcontracted the whole operation to Lashkar or Jaish. The objectives, anyway, are clear: to destabilize the Pakistani government, and to discredit Musharraf in Europe and the US. But the strategy is bound to backfire. Musharraf will never step back from his war against radical Islam to once again support the guerrilla-prone Taliban or Islamist groups fighting in Kashmir.

Just like Jacques Chirac in France, Musharraf has just emerged from a North Korea-like electoral score - his victory by 97 percent in a referendum that will keep him in power, like Chirac, for another 5 years. But the bombing is one more proof that Pakistan is not totally under Musharraf's control - even if radical Islamists are supported by no more than 3 percent of the population.

The French engineers and technicians in Karachi were supervising the construction of an Agosta 90B submarine. "Khalid", the first one of three submarines - a contract valued at 820 million euros (US$746 million) - was entirely built in Cherbourg, France, and delivered in 2000. The second was partially built in Cherbourg, where it is being assembled, and the third was supposed to be entirely built in Karachi.

But Karachi's naval installations are not really equipped to deal with high-technology vessels: that's why there are 89 French engineers and technicians on the spot. Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world to which France sells classic-propulsion submarines, a booming sub-section of the arms market. Pakistan is an elite client of the French arms industry.

So it's no wonder that the other possibility for the Karachi bombing is the hidden hand of Pakistan's bitter enemy - India. The new made-in-France Pakistani submarines are much more efficient than those old made-in-Russia Indian submarines. So it's time to place our bets: whodunnit, al-Qaeda or Indian intelligence?

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