Riding the Jehadi Tiger

Riding the Jehadi Tiger
Praveen Swami

Terror, like chickens, comes home to roost. Arrests made earlier this month near Baghdad have blown the lid off links between the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Islamist groups fighting the United States military in Iraq: evidence that ought to cause at least some embarrassment to USA's South Asia establishment, currently in the throes of a grand détente with Pakistan. Part of the deal seems to have been to give Pakistan's military considerable freedom to continue its support to officially-authorised jehadis. If nothing else, the Iraq arrests illustrate the profound unwillingness of the US' counter-terror czars to learn that riding the jehadi tiger is a profoundly dangerous occupation.

In March - and possibly even earlier - United States forces detained Pakistani national Dilshad Ahmad and four others in Baghdad. Details of these detentions, and of the LeT's activities in Iraq, are hazy. However, Ahmad, a long-time Lashkar operative from the Bahawalpur area of the province of Punjab, had played a key role in the Lashkar's trans-Line of Control (LoC) operations, serving between 1997 and 2001 as the organisation's commander for the forward camps from where infiltrating groups of terrorists are launched into Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) with Pakistani military support. Ahmad is believed to have made at least six secret visits to Lashkar groups operating in J&K during this period. He also authored several articles on the now-defunct Lashkar website, one describing in particularly macabre terms the merits of severing Indian soldiers' limbs from their bodies.

A close associate of Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, the second-in-command in the Lashkar military hierarchy, Ahmad long had a key role in shaping the organisation's ideological and military agenda: a fact that raises obvious questions about his work in Iraq. In 1998, he addressed a major LeT conference in Muridke, arguing for the need to extend the organisation's activities outside J&K. Ahmad is believed to have played a key role in building the infrastructure for the dozens of Lashkar cells, which have since carried out bombings in several major Indian cities. At least four other Lashkar operatives are known to have been arrested in the intelligence-led operation that ended in Ahmad's arrest, but nothing else is publicly available on their intentions or origins. US officials had kept a tight lid on news of the arrests until it was first reported in The Hindu on April 1.

For the US, the arrests are a potentially embarrassing election-time reminder that the LeT, proscribed by all major western capitals including Washington, continues to operate freely in Pakistan. In January, as politicians across the sub-continent prepared for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit in Islamabad, Pakistan took stern measures to put a lid on the LeT's anti-India polemic. The Lashkar's web-site was shut down, and its overall political and religious chief, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed was barred from addressing a rally in the town of Multan. Soon after SAARC, however, the restraints on the Lashkar were lifted. In February, Saeed was allowed to travel to Islamabad to attend the funeral prayers organised by Pakistani bureaucrat-businessman Zahoor Ahmad Awan, whose son, a Lashkar operative, was killed by Indian troops. Saeed told the assembly that the fighting in Jammu and Kashmir was "the greatest jehad in the entire history of Islam."

As important, the Lashkar has again been given considerable freedom to continue building its military infrastructure. In the build-up to the Eid festival in March, the organisation, now operating under the new label of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was reported to have raised Rs. 780 million from the sale of hides of sacrificial animals donated by followers. The Lashkar proclaimed, through advertisements and announcements by loyal clerics, that the proceeds would be used for the "Mujahideen who have sacrificed their lives for Islam" and for "the parents, widows and children of martyrs who waged jehad in Kashmir and Afghanistan." Although this activity seems in express violation of the Pakistan Government's ban on raising funds for jehad-related activities, no real action appears to have been taken against those involved. Two Lashkar cadres were briefly detained in Karachi during the fundraising drive, a purely token gesture.

Such activity has serious consequences for India. Police authorities in New Delhi recently arrested three members of a Lashkar squad tasked to attack the Indira Gandhi International Airport. The organisation has also been active in targeted attacks on candidates involved in the ongoing Parliamentary elections in J&K, and have issued warnings to voters not to exercise their franchise. According to police officials in J&K, a little over half of all terrorist acts in the State are now committed by the organisation. This escalating military activity is part of a pattern. Pakistan formally banned the LeT in the wake of the 2001-2002 'near-war' with India, but soon allowed the organisation to resume operations under a new label, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa is on a terrorism watch-list in Pakistan, but publicly collects funds and recruits cadre for its operations.

In other words, Pakistan seems willing to temporarily close the terror tap - cross-border infiltration is at an all time low, and violence levels in J&K have fallen significantly. But it is becoming clear that the country's military establishment isn't willing to seal the pipeline that feeds terror just yet. Washington's tolerance seems to be driven by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's claims that he cannot take on the entire religious right without provoking a major backlash. As a result, Pakistan's military establishment has been able to keep the infrastructure of anti-India terrorism intact. It is worth noting that this infrastructure has, historically, imposed great costs on the US. General Zia-ul-Haq's diversion of Afghan war equipment for jehadis in J&K helped build the LeT in the first place, as well as allied jehadi groups now active against Coalition Forces in Afghanistan.

Jehadi groups seem to have largely respected the unspoken US-Pakistan deal - a romance that obviously cannot speak its name - this time around. Although Lashkar cadre were in the past believed to have fought in northern Afghanistan and Chechnya, no similar global activity was noticed in Iraq until the recent arrests. The Lashkar's house journal, Majallah ad Dawa, has been relatively restrained in its criticism of the US occupation of Iraq. In the current issue of the magazine, Saeed calls on believers to "never to make friends with Jews and Christians," but there is no express call for jehad directed at the US. By contrast, Majallah ad Dawa's position on India is more aggressive. One article claims that Indian Muslims have come to realise that "without migration and jehad there is no future"; another, in a recent issue, asks Pakistani school-children to join the jehad and advises them on how to identity Indian soldiers to be attacked.

The lessons seem fairly obvious to anyone who doesn't work in the President George Bush's Administration. "As long as someone has a gun in his hand," says a senior Indian military official, "he decides when he wants to use it, not you. If someone is walking around with a gun, and you want to stop him from using it, the only really sure-fire solution is to take it away."

Courtesy: South Asia Terrorism Portal