Author: Arindam Banerji
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: August 27, 2004
URL: http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/27ariban.htm
The game's over. Khel khataam.
The Independent, London, reported
it rather matter of factly: 'Like so much in the war on terror, the trail
of the latest warnings of imminent al- Qa'ida attacks and orange alerts
in the United States appears to lead back to Pakistan.'
Pakistan is 'widely seen as the
ground zero of terrorism,' and a 'flurry of arrests over the last 48 hours
of suspected Al Qaeda elements, all of whose trail leads back to Pakistan,'
agreed the Christian Science Monitor.
'Pakistan is continuing to provide
a 'production line' of new terrorists,' says The Observer, London.
Hai Ram!! Kya karen?
It seems the secret is out.
The firangs may have actually figured
it out -- they've independently surmised that all international terrorism
originates from Pakistan.
You have to admit this was not an
easy one to deduce -- after all, there have been very few hints and suggestions
to go by over the past few years about Pakistani complicity in global terrorism.
But, we have to be careful -- Western standards of evidence can often be
very exacting.
After all, these were these were
the same firangs, who only after thoroughly investigating some entirely
invisible signs of yellow cake from Niger, decided to take the relatively
measured action of bombing 11,000 odd Iraqi civilians, including women
and children, to their deaths.
But some of the clues may have been
too subtle even for our favorite Yankees and their stiff-upper lipped angrez
cousins, so, I thought - - perhaps, we should lay it all out, in our favorite
name-the-country game questionnaire:
* Remember the Bali bombings --
where did Hambali and his brothers get indoctrinated?
* The embassy bombings in Africa
-- where did the main perpetrators fly 'home' to after the bombings?
* Aimal Kasi, the man who decided
to take target practice on a traffic stop outside the CIA headquarters
-- where did he come from?
* The 1993 World Trade Center bombings,
the Daniel Pearl murder, the Madrid bombings -- which country has common
links to all?
* Which country has played mid-wife
to both Al Qaeda and the Taliban?
* Rassam, the Algerian, who was
trying to do his holy duty and blow up Los Angeles airport a few years
ago -- where was his Algerian cell based? Which country did he first travel
to for training?
* Which is the only country whose
nuclear scientists have maintained deep relationships with terrorist groups,
including Al Qaeda?
* While civilised countries around
the world are spending billions of dollars building schools, roads and
hospitals in Afghanistan, which country is spending untold millions in
financing and stewarding a resurgent Taliban, that is engaged in burning
schools for girls and even poisoning girls who dare to get educated?
* Which country's intelligence chiefs
have been directly linked with financial dealings with the 9/11 planners,
according to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn?
Hold it, Hold it -- no need to look
for your atlas or pound out those Google searches -- the answer is
obvious. It's that giant terrorist camp you find as soon as you cross our
western borders. Who else could it be?
Ok, ok -- I'm being mean to the
Pakistanis -- but, this is supposed to be a factual satire, you see.
In any case, what is this hullabaloo
all about?
First, came the report created by
the high-powered independent commission that was looking into the 911 attacks
in the US. The full text of the 9/11 Commission Report had more mentions
of Pakistan, than Iran and Iraq combined. Yet the highly respected US think
tank, Center for Strategic and International quipped: 'It (the 9/11 Commission)
badly understates the role of the ISI in Pakistan, however, and makes largely
feel good proposals.'
Next came the arrest of African
embassy bombing accused Ghailani in Pakistan.miraculously timed to be announced
exactly three hours before John Kerry's presidential nomination speech.
'Security experts close to the corridors
of power in Pakistan tell AsiaTimes Online that as the November presidential
elections in the US draw closer, more such dramatic -- and timely -- arrests
can be expected. Already, though, under intense pressure from the US, Pakistan
has handed over as many as 350 suspected al-Qaeda operators into US custody.
Most have been low-ranking, but some important names are, according to
Asia Times Online contacts, being held in Inter-Services Intelligence safe
houses to be presented at the right moment,' said Said Saleem Shehzad in
Asia Times.
Third, the threat warnings went
off all over the US, based upon the arrest of a Pakistani computer engineer,
Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, in Lahore. This 'gifted graduate of Karachi University,
with what police describe as "a flawless English accent," comes from a
respectable middle class background. His mother is a university botany
professor and his father worked for Pakistan International Airlines.'
This gent would travel abroad on
behalf of Al Qaeda to evaluate possible sites and buildings for destruction,
and in his spare time, would use his skills in encrypting messages and
hiding electronic communications. While the rest of the world was scratching
its head at the thought of a kid growing up in Karachi or Lahore planning
to destroy buildings all the way across the world, the Pakistanis themselves
did not find this surprising at all.
As one quipped: 'Every second jihadi
I know has a computer and is always busy checking information on buildings
in the US -- their height and width and their possible vulnerable areas
-- and it is their routine practice to make plans with computer graphics
to bring down US buildings to the ground.'
In London, Scotland Yard announced
the arrest of Babar Ahmad, a British subject of Pakistani descent, on a
extradition request from the US District Court in Connecticut.
Ahmad, 30, is accused of soliciting
funds and property through the Internet for 'acts of terrorism in Chechnya
and Afghanistan,' including political murder between 1998 and the end of
2003, US officials said.
Meanwhile, in Germany, a German-Moroccan
fugitive allegedly involved in the September 11 attacks has been sending
e-mail messages from Pakistan to his wife in Germany. The German news magazine
Focus says in its latest edition German police have traced Internet messages
from Said Bhaiji from Islamabad and Lahore in Pakistan.
British secret agents have foiled
a massive terror attack in the UK which could have left tens of thousands
dead, The People reveals. The plot by Al Qaeda is thought to have involved
chemical or biological weapons triggered by a home-made bomb.
But the horrific plan was thwarted
after a joint operation by MI5 agents in this country and MI6 spies working
undercover in Pakistan. 'There is no doubt there are strong links between
terrorists in Pakistan and those hiding in Britain,' said Patrick Mercer,
the Conservative Party's homeland security spokesperson, after returning
from Islamabad.
Mercer said preventive homeland
security for the UK had to now begin in Islamabad.
Meanwhile, 'a source close to Uzbek
extremist groups told The Associated Press on Saturday that al-Qaida directed
and financed the group behind Friday's bombings and that the attacks were
retaliation for Uzbekistan's support of the US-led war on terrorism. The
source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the group was based in
Pakistan and had been founded by several former fighters of the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan, an al-Qaida-linked terror group.'
Saleem Shehzad, a Pakistani journalist,
in his latest column tells us: 'As a former Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence
operator and air force official, Khalid Khawaja, commented in the Pakistani
press on the arrests of the two jihadis, "Every link of the arrested jihadi
leaders goes straight to top army officials of different times."
'"The US State Department declared
al-Badr a terrorist organization a few years ago, and has steadily put
pressure on Islamabad to arrest its operators. (But) From the mid-1980s,
then, to the present the ISI and al- Badr have virtually been one and the
same thing.'
Finally, as CNN's Pentagon correspondent
Barbara Starr, reported: 'Well, defense and intelligence sources are now
confirming to CNN that there is 'recent intelligence that Al Qaeda training
camps inside Pakistan have recently been reactivated.' The intelligence,
we are told, is based in part on imagery, overhead imagery gathered in
the last month.
More importantly, all the above
reports are just from the past two weeks, and that too, I've left out about
half a dozen other reports, for the sake of brevity.
