Author: Hiranmay Karlekar
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 3, 2002
Thanks to the controversial referendum
in Pakistan giving a five-year term to President Pervez Musharraf, and
the continuing political turmoil in India over the carnage in Gujarat,
media in this country have by and large ignored the growing tension in
the ties between Pakistan and the United States.
Soured over Pakistan's close links
with the Taliban militia and the Al Qaeda and its becoming the principal
spawning ground of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism in the world, these
had warmed up remarkably after President Pervez Musharraf joined the war
against terrorism that the US declared following the terrorist attacks
on it on September 11, last year. Americans, however, now seem increasingly
to suspect that he is doing no more than going through the motions of cracking
down on the leaders and thousands of supporters of the Al Qaeda and Taliban
militia who have fled into Pakistan, as well as the Pakistani fundamentalist
Islamic terrorist groups the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate
had spawned.
The US Government has doubtless
not publicly expressed its misgivings. Western media reports about events
in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as US action on the ground have, however,
set several large straws afloat in the wind. According to a report by Christina
Lamb in The Sunday Telegraph about two months ago, most fighters and leaders
of Al Qaeda and the Taliban militia were alive and well in Pakistan. Protected
by the ISI, they moved about freely in Islamabad and other cities and the
public knew the names and addresses of quite a few Taliban ministers. According
to report by Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, datelined Peshawar,
March 20, up to 1,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, protected by sympathetic
clerics, were waiting for the US to leave Afghanistan to launch a jihad
against the Afghans supporting Mr Hamid Karzai's regime.
These reports tend to be corroborated
by the arrest of 65 Al Qaeda terrorists in Faisalabad and Lahore on March
27 and 28 in joint operations conducted by Pakistanis and US 'advisers'
comprising FBI and police personnel. Among those arrested in Faisalabad
on March 27 was Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda leader-second only to Osama
bin Laden in the organisation's hierarchy, according to some. Further,
a recent dispatch from Arnaud de Borchgrave, a writer and editor-at-large
of UPI, stated authoritatively that Osama bin Laden was being sheltered
in Peshawar by his sympathisers.
Sporadic attacks launched by Al
Qaeda and Taliban fighters on US forces in Afghanistan from Pakistan's
predominantly tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, lend credence to these
reports. Besides, many see the increased mortar and rocket attacks on the
bases of the ruling coalition's forces in Kandahar and Gardez in Afghanistan
as the beginning of a fightback by the Taliban and the Al Qaeda militia.
Also, there have been four attacks on members of the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul during the past month and a US special
forces soldier was shot in the face and wounded in Kandahar on April 20.
Kabul airport was itself hit by rockets hours before US Defence Secretary,
Mr Donald Rumsfeld arrived there on April 27 on his first visit to Afghanistan
in four months.
The US is also unhappy over the
scanty and unreliable intelligence inputs Islamabad has so far provided
it. Besides, Pakistan has done little to curb its own terrorist outfits
like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul Mujaheedin (HuM), Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JeM), Hijb-ul Mujaheedin (HM) and others it has created to carry on cross-border
terrorism against India. Though officially banned, most of them are active
under new names. Also, the manner in which their accounts were frozen in
banks gave them enough time to withdraw the bulk of their funds. Moreover,
over two-thirds of the 2,000 or so of the activists belonging to these
outfits, arrested after President Pervez Musharraf's January 12 address
to the people of Pakistan, have since been released. It is then hardly
surprising that The Washington Post stated recently, "Independent analysts
and Pakistani officials say Musharraf's military government is playing
a double game in the crackdown on terrorists." The report quotes experts
as saying that while providing crucial assistance to the US-led campaign
to track down foreign-born terrorists in Pakistan, the Musharraf Government
was far less aggressive towards its own terrorists active in India.
One should not be surprised if
this causes serious concern to the US. The Taliban and Al Qaeda have close
links, forged by the ISI, with the JeM, LeT, HuM and HM. They have trained
large sections of these militias in camps in Afghanistan-besides Pakistan-occupied
Kashmir and Pakistan-and also armed and funded them. In fact, the different
outfits have all been parts of the same complex of terrorist organisations
coordinated by the ISI. The close links among these become clear from the
fact that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a leading figure in the JeM, and now
standing trial in Pakistan in connection with the American journalist Daniel
Pearl's murder, had wired $ 100,000 to Mohammad Atta, identified by US
authorities as one of the leaders of the hijackers who crashed two aircraft
into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. The
money was sent to him prior to that day at the instance of Lt-Gen Mahmud
Ahmed, then Director-General of the ISI. Since the ban on these organisations
remains almost unenforced because President Musharraf wants to keep them
alive for cross-border terrorism against India, they are in a position
to give refuge to Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and fighters on the run-sand
they are obviously doing it.
Nor can the US count on President
Musharraf and Pakistan's ruling establishment, a large segment of which
is bitterly anti-American for reasons that are easy to understand. Clients,
whether individuals or governments, resent their patrons-especially when
the latter pushes them around. Pakistan has been a client state of the
US since the 1950s when it joined the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation
(SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact, which later became Central Treaty Organisation
(CENTO) and received huge helpings of economic and military aid. Trouble,
however, started from the beginning of the 1980s when Pakistan's development
of nuclear weapons upset the US, which also disapproved of the way in which
Pakistan was organising and guiding the Mujaheedin groups' resistance to
Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan and channelling US military and
other aid to them-favouring the fundamentalist Islamic elements who were
bitterly anti-US and neglecting the moderate ones which Washington DC favoured.
The US, however, did not make an issue of it then. It was determined to
get even with the USSR for the latter's role in inflicting a humiliating
defeat on it in Vietnam, and wanted to defeat the Soviet forces and compel
them to leave Afghanistan-for which it needed Pakistan's cooperation.
The US, however, no longer needed
Pakistan's services after the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989. It could
therefore invoke the Pressler Amendment to freeze economic and arms aid-and
sale of military hardware-to Islamabad for the latter's military nuclear
programme. Nor did it initially provide Islamabad the kind of assistance
that would have enabled it to have a puppet, fundamentalist Islamic government
installed in Afghanistan. Later, it did help in setting up the Taliban
but refused to recognise its government when it came to control the bulk
of Afghanistan in 1997 for its reactionary gender and other policies. A
large section of the ISI and the Pakistani military are, therefore, eager
to teach the US a lesson. The US, which has prevailed upon President Musharraf
to let its 'advisers' accompany Pakistani forces in ferreting out Al Qaeda
and Taliban elements in Pakistan, knows this. Much will depend on how it
copes with the situation. Failure to take an even firmer line with Pakistan,
if necessary, can not only sabotage its war against terrorism but also
endanger its own safety.
