Author: David W. Jones
Publication: The Washington Times
Date: November 14, 2002
URL: http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20021114-61895800.htm
Indian officials say they have presented
the United States with voluminous evidence that Pakistani support
for an insurgency in India's Kashmir Valley continues unabated five
months after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf pledged to an American
envoy that it would end.
Frustrated with the failure of the
United States and its allies to hold Gen. Musharraf to the June 6
promise made to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - which
headed off a likely Indian military attack on Pakistan - Indian leaders
accuse the West of a double standard in its war on terrorism.
"We get the feeling that terrorists
are bad [only when] they are attacking the United States," External
Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha said in an interview in his New Delhi
office. "The war [against terrorism] is being fought with standards
that are open to question."
U.S. officials, grateful to Pakistan
for assistance in the war on al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan,
acknowledge that infiltration continues despite Gen. Musharraf's
promise but say they are not convinced of a government role. Pakistani
officials suggest the evidence may have been fabricated by India
to disguise its inability to cope with an indigenous uprising.
India's evidence, which was shown
to The Washington Times, includes aerial surveillance photographs
of purported training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-held Kashmir,
statements by captured infiltrators, intercepts of radio transmissions
between Kashmir and Pakistan, identifying documents and notebooks
seized from killed or captured insurgents, and material published
in the Pakistani press.
"The direct role of the Pakistani
army is known through technical and human intelligence," said Girish
Chandra Saxena, the New Delhi-appointed governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
"We also know it from the types
of arms captured - remote- control mines and wireless sets that would not
otherwise be available to them. We intercept messages from Pakistan,
thousands in a month, both in code and clear. We have shared all
of this with the U.S. administration."
Lt. Gen. V.T. Patankar, the suave
and engaging commander of Indian forces in Kashmir, said there are
40 to 45 guerrilla training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir,
down from a high of 142, "but now they are larger."
"Many training camps are close to
Pakistani army camps. Some of the militants have been given fatigues.
They share a firing range at the Chakothi camp" in Pakistani-held
Kashmir near the Line of Control (LOC), which divides Kashmir into
its Indian and Pakistani sectors.
"Most infiltration is aided by heavy
fire across the LOC" from the Pakistan army, he said.
Gen. Patankar and his aides also
displayed dozens of captured training notebooks, identity cards and
code books during a briefing at the Indian army's heavily guarded
XV Corps headquarters in Srinagar. He said similar briefings had
been given to U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill and other American
officials.
The United States remains skeptical
about some of the evidence, and indeed it is hard for a layman to
tell whether India's aerial photographs show what the Indians claim
they do.
Similarly it seems surprising that
Pakistani guerrillas would cross the Line of Control carrying laminated
identity cards with the names of proscribed terrorist groups printed
in large letters - and in English.
Mohammad Sadiq, deputy chief of
mission at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said yesterday that
some sites identified by India in the past as training camps have
been in fact civil-defense facilities open to the public.
Pointing out that Pakistan has proposed
neutral observers patrol the Line of Control, he good-naturedly noted
it "speaks very poorly of both of us" if Pakistan were allowing its
radio transmissions to be picked up by India and the Indians were
incapable of acting on them.
Asked whether he thought India might
have fabricated its evidence, he said, "India is capable of doing
it."
Nevertheless, a senior U.S. official
knowledgeable about the region acknowledged last week that the infiltration
has been continuing and has increased in recent weeks. "We continue
to focus on it closely. It is something we have a strong interest
in."
Mr. Blackwill, the U.S. ambassador
in New Delhi, went further in public remarks late last month that
infuriated Pakistan, saying, "The problem in Kashmir is cross-border
terrorism. It's virtually now, in my judgment, entirely externally
driven."
Such statements do little to assuage
the Indians, who see them as further evidence that the United States
is simply allowing Pakistan to foment terrorism against India as
long as it cooperates in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
"We realize the problem of the international
community. They won't pressure Gen. Musharraf beyond a certain point
because they fear the alternative to Musharraf in Pakistan is more
fundamentalism," said Mr. Sinha, the foreign minister.
"But he has been pushed to the wall
on Afghanistan and still was able to get 98.5 percent in a referendum.
But you say that on Kashmir he cannot be pushed?"
The Indian officials are particularly
incensed that assistance to the Kashmir insurgency has continued
after Gen. Musharraf's promises to end to it.
Most residents of the Kashmir Valley
agree the insurgency began in 1989 as an indigenous uprising fed
by years of poor local government and a history of severely flawed
state elections.
But over the years, Indian security
forces say, the movement has been taken over by Pakistani and other
foreign "jihadis," or holy warriors, many of them trained in the
same religious schools that gave rise to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Of the three main guerrilla groups,
they say, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are headed by Pakistanis
and run from the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Bahawalpur, respectively.
Both are on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.
The third main group, the largest
and the only one with a preponderance of local members, is the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen,
which is headed by Sayeed Salauddin, a Kashmiri living in Muzaffarabad,
the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
India moved more than half a million
troops to the Pakistani border following a December 2001 attack on
the Indian Parliament that was blamed on Jaish-e-Mohammed, prompting
Gen. Musharraf to declare on Jan. 12 that Pakistan "will not allow
its territory to be used for terrorist activity anywhere in the world."
When India again prepared to attack
in early June, following the massacre of more than two dozen women
and children at an Indian army camp in Kashmir, top U.S. diplomats
rushed to the region to head off what they feared could develop into
a nuclear exchange.
Mr. Armitage arrived in New Delhi
from Pakistan on June 7 with what the Indians say was a firm pledge
from Gen. Musharraf to permanently end the infiltration of militants
into Kashmir.
Mr. Armitage "told us that Gen.
Musharraf had promised a permanent end to infiltration and made these
points: One, it will be visible. Two, it will be to your satisfaction.
Three, he would dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism," said
Mr. Sinha, who took over the foreign ministry post in July.
He said the infiltration levels
declined during June and July but began picking up again in August
and September. "Gen. Musharraf made a promise to Richard Armitage,
but he has not kept it."
Another senior official close to
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said India has "communicated
to the [United States and Britain] our deep disappointment at their
failure to persuade Gen. Musharraf to implement his commitments made
to them."
"I am not going to doubt the sincerity
of the administration in pushing Musharraf to do what he had promised,
but we certainly have a feeling that both the U.S. and [Britain]
did not put all the pressure they could have on Musharraf," the official
said.
The senior U.S. official, who appeared
surprised at the bluntness of the Indian criticism, acknowledged
there are "extremist elements in Pakistan that are of great concern,"
but said, "The degree to which there is government support for them
is no longer clear."
Noting that the United States placed
both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed on its list of foreign
terrorist organizations following the Dec. 13 attack on the Indian
Parliament, the official said the Pakistani government subsequently
banned both groups.
"The American view is that their
offices have been closed and that large numbers of their members
have been jailed where there is sufficient evidence to hold them.
The United States believes the groups are a threat to Pakistan as
well as to India. "
"Pakistan is our friend, and they
are proving it every day. I think you cannot overlook the fact that
there are over 400 terrorists that Pakistan has helped us to catch.
Some of the most important ones were caught with help from President
Musharraf."
Asked, however, whether the United
States sees the struggle in Kashmir as part of the wider war against
terrorism, the official hesitated. "All violence against civilians
for political purposes," he said, "is unacceptable."
