Author: Tim Mcgirk
Publication: Time
Date: January 26, 2003
Once nurtured by Musharraf, the
violent group Jaish-e- Muhammad now seems bent on killing him
In the half-hour before Mohammed
Jamil ended his life, he was a busy man. As he sat in a pickup truck loaded
with C4 plastic explosives, he made and received no fewer than 109 calls
on his cell phone, talking, at least in some cases, to accomplices in his
effort to incinerate the President of Pakistan. Jamil, 23, might have assumed
that the evidence he was creating would disintegrate in the blast he planned
for Pervez Musharraf. If he did, he was wrong. Not only did he and a second
car bomber fail to kill Musharraf in their Dec. 25 attempt, but the memory
card of Jamil's cell phone, which investigators found intact amid the detritus
of the blasts, has led authorities to dozens of suspected collaborators.
Many belong to a violent Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e-Muhammad. Once
allied with Musharraf's government, the group is now linked to al-Qaeda,
whose leader, Osama bin Laden, called for Musharraf's overthrow in a recent
audiotape.
One phone call that particularly
disturbed investigators was between Jamil and a policeman on Musharraf's
security beat. An investigator on the case told TIME that the policeman,
who has been arrested and is being interrogated, informed Jamil in which
car Musharraf-who uses several decoy limousines- was riding. U.S. and Pakistani
investigators say they believe that insiders within the President's guard
were also in on a failed Dec. 14 hit, allowing would-be killers to plant
five explosive charges under a bridge that blew up just after Musharraf
crossed it. Jaish-e-Muhammad is also suspected in that near miss. Under
a new order, police officers assigned to the President's motorcade are
prohibited from carrying cell phones while on duty for fear they will use
them to coordinate attacks on Musharraf.
That Jaish-e-Muhammad has the capacity
to launch sophisticated attacks on the President, possibly with insider
help, is a situation partly of Musharraf's making. The government in Islamabad
has long coddled militant Islamic groups, encouraging them first to help
drive the Soviets out of neighboring Afghanistan and later to torment Indian
troops in the part of the disputed state of Kashmir that is under Indian
control. It was to this latter cause that Jaish-e- Muhammad was devoted.
Official tolerance of these groups, and in some cases assistance to them,
continued after Musharraf took power in a 1999 coup. The President was
especially supportive of Jaish-e-Muhammad's leader, warrior-cleric Maulana
Masood Azhar. When Azhar was released from an Indian jail in a prisoner
exchange in December 2000, he was permitted to stage a huge rally in Karachi
attended by gun-toting followers. In 2001 Musharraf even tried unsuccessfully
to persuade the various Kashmiri guerrilla groups to unite under Azhar.
The government's partnership with
extremists was tested after 9/11, however, when Musharraf sided with the
Bush Administration in its battle against Islamic militancy. Even so, Musharraf
treated homegrown radicals gingerly at first. Under pressure from Washington,
he banned various militant organizations in January 2002, but he left their
leaders largely unfettered and allowed the organizations to reconstitute
under new names. When it came to Jaish-e-Muhammad, Musharraf acted like
a parent in denial after his favorite son has turned delinquent. Pakistan's
intelligence services, which had helped build up the group and infiltrate
its fighters into Indian-controlled Kashmir, were hesitant to crack down,
even after Jaish-e- Muhammad began unleashing religious terrorism within
Pakistan. Officials hold the outfit and its offshoots responsible for a
May 2002 bombing in Karachi that killed 11 French naval technicians and
another explosion outside the U.S. consulate in the same city in June 2002
that killed 12 Pakistanis. Diplomats in Islamabad say that one reason Musharraf
was reluctant to get tough on Muslim extremists was that most were allied
with religious parties he needed to prop up his regime.
After the two attempts on his life,
Musharraf seems to have a new attitude. Acting on information gleaned from
Jamil's cell phone, police in the central region of Punjab last week arrested
more than 35 suspects from mosques and seminaries, most thought to be connected
to Jaish-e- Muhammad. An unspecified number were released. Still, U.S.
officials are encouraged that Musharraf finally seems committed to going
after Jaish-e- Muhammad, a request Washington has made to Islamabad for
years, to little effect. "He's serious," says a U.S. State Department official.
"He was born again on Dec. 25."
One of those arrested last week
was wanted as an accessory in the January 2002 abduction and murder of
U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl. The Pakistanis have already convicted Ahmad
Omar Saeed Sheikh, a militant close to Jaish- e-Muhammad, of abducting
Pearl and sentenced him to death. A witness says it was al-Qaeda commander
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who actually killed the journalist. Arrested by
the U.S. on March 1, 2003, Mohammed remains in U.S. custody. According
to a senior Pakistani antiterrorism official, he is being held at a military
base on Diego Garcia. Pakistan's Interior Minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat,
told TIME "there's a strong possibility" that the Dec. 25 plotters were
also "involved with al-Qaeda."
The two groups certainly know each
other. Throughout the 1990s, before marching off to fight the Indians in
Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad militants crossed into Afghanistan to attend
al-Qaeda training camps. Pakistan's intelligence services looked the other
way. Officials in Pakistan say that these days Jaish-e-Muhammad activists
give shelter to al-Qaeda militants and that al-Qaeda provides funding and
guidance to Jaish-e-Muhammad, perhaps contracting the group out for killings.
Says retired General Talat Masood, a consultant on security affairs in
Islamabad: "The military had an alliance with these jihadi groups, but
they got totally out of control."
Suicide bomber Jamil was known to
Pakistani intelligence. A reedy young man from the village of Rawalakot
in the Himalayan foothills near the Indian border, he fought alongside
the Taliban against the Americans in Afghanistan. Wounded in the fall of
Kabul, he was allowed to return home to Pakistan. On arrival in Peshawar,
he was interrogated by Pakistani intelligence services and dismissed as
harmless in April 2002. Like many Muslim extremists, Jamil, according to
his relatives in Rawalakot, viewed Musharraf as too pro- Western. Militants
complain that Musharraf betrayed the Taliban and, given his peace overtures
to India in early January, they now accuse him of selling out Kashmiri
Muslims too. Jamil's rants against the U.S. and Musharraf were so incessant
that his family kicked him out, neighbors say. But was Jamil the ringleader
of the Dec. 25 plot? "Of course not," scoffs Interior Minister Hayat. "The
ringleaders never blow themselves up. They get minions to do that."
However dedicated Musharraf may
now be to weeding out Pakistan's extremists, the task will be long and
dangerous. On Thursday, terrorists in Karachi bombed a Christian study
center, injuring 14 people. Says Hayat: "Their tentacles are spread far
and wide." On the run now, these groups may be more dangerous than ever.
Says an ex-commander of one of them in Lahore: "The boys aren't listening
to anyone. They're desperate. They don't accept that the days of jihad
are over."
-With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington
and Ghulam Hasnain/Lahore
