Posted on 08/11/2004 6:53:40 AM PDT by mondoman
KARACHI - The recent arrest of two top Pakistani jihadis, Maulana Fazalur Rehman Khalil and Qari Saifullah Akhtar, marks the beginning of the end of an era that started in the mid-1980s when the dream of an International Muslim Brigade was first conceived by a group of top Pakistan leaders.
The dream subsequently materialized in the shape of the International Islamic Front, an umbrella organization for militant groups formed by Osama bin Laden in 1998 and loosely coordinated by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of Pakistan.
The arrests in Pakistan, made under relentless pressure from the United States, are aimed at tracing all jihadi links to their roots, which are mostly grounded in Pakistan's strategic core.
As a former Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) 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."
At one level the arrests are linked to conspiracies against the government - including assassination attempts on President General Pervez Musharraf - and the recruitment of jihadis to fight against US troops in Afghanistan, but the real motives are much more far-reaching.
The present problems in the "war on terror" are linked to the labyrinth of groups developed during the decade-long Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sponsored much of the jihadi movement, using the ISI as a front and a conduit.
For example, US planes used to fly supplies, arms and ammunition for the Afghan fighters to Islamabad, from where they were transferred to the ISI Afghan cell's facility at Rawalpindi, from where the ISI had its own network to distribute the merchandise to the mujahideen groups of its choice.
This modus operandi exposed a serious flaw in US strategic thinking. By not dealing directly with the Afghan groups, the US had no control over which ones benefited, and invariably only those factions that were both anti-Western capitalism and anti-Soviet socialism were cultivated by the ISI.
In this environment, late Pakistani dictator General Zia ul-Haq and his closest associate, the then director general of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Akhtar Abdur Rehman, both of whom died in a plane crash in 1988, saw their opportunity to lay the foundations for a global Muslim liberation movement.
Blissfully unaware of this perspective, the CIA supported Pakistani efforts to recruit Muslim youths from the Pacific to Africa, and a whole generation of youngsters was trained in jihadi, and, importantly, with strong anti-US overtones. Youngsters were drawn from groups such as Abu Sayyaf from the Philippines and Muslims from Arakan province in Myanmar.
To keep the movements under the strict control of the ISI, the ISI established proxies such as al-Badr, the Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami and Harkatul Ansar (or Harkatul Mujahideen as it was once known). Akhtar, incidentally, was leader of Harkat, while Khalil was head of the Harkatul Ansar.
Crucially, all this was done without the CIA and, for that matter, the leaders of the Islamic movements knowing just how much control the ISI actually had.
To keep the Arab movements under control, an al-Badr facility was organized in Khost province in Afghanistan. A dynamic law and master of arts graduate from Karachi University, Bakhat Zameen Khan, a member of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), a powerful religious party (who originally hailed from Dir in North West Frontier Province), was chosen as commander. He brought together all Arab jihadis at the facility, and linked senior ones to the ISI. Out of this camp, the Palestinian Hamas emerged, as well as the Arab-sponsored Moro liberation movement led by Abu Sayyaf.
Khan was gradually weaned from the JI, and he exclusively allied al-Badr with the Hezb-i-Islami (HIA) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who today plays a key role in the Afghan resistance. As a result, the JI announced its separation with al-Badr when it launched the Hizbul Mujahideen militant movement in Kashmir in 1989.
Al-Badr was kicked out of Afghanistan after the emergence of the Taliban in the mid-1990s because of its affiliation with the HIA. The ISI then set up new camps for al-Badr in Pakistani Azad Kashmir - that portion of Kashmir administered by Pakistan.
In the Kargil operation of 1999, which almost brought Pakistan and India to all-out war, al-Badr fighters were initially sent by the Pakistan army to occupy Indian bunkers. Later, another ISI connection, the recently arrested Khalil, and his fighters battled side-by-side with Khan and the Pakistan army against Indian forces.
ISI makes up ground Former Afghan prime minister and legendary mujahideen Hekmatyar went into exile in Tehran once the Taliban came to power in 1996. But as the Taliban regime disintegrated in late 2001, the US put pressure on Tehran to expel Hekmatyar, planning to arrest him as soon as he returned to Afghanistan, where he believed he could reinvent himself as an anti-US resistance guerrilla leader.
By this time, though, Islamabad, having been persuaded to abandon the Taliban and join the United States' "war on terror", was in the process of finding a substitute connection in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar was the obvious choice. Khan was sent to Tehran to assure Hekmatyar of Pakistan's support should he return to Afghanistan.
Al-Badr members were tasked to escort Hekmatyar from Iran to Afghanistan and to keep him away from the Americans. He was kept in a safe house in Chitral, where al-Badr members, along with Pakistan commandos, guarded the premises. As soon as al-Badr members located other diehard HIA commanders, such as Kashmir Khan and Ustad Fareed, Hekmatyar was launched in Afghanistan's Kunar province to reorganize the HIA as a proxy of the ISI in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, al-Badr, with its long experience in the region, helped many Arabs and their families, desperately wanted by the US, by providing them shelter and arranging fake passports for them to return to their countries of origin.
From the mid-1980s, then, to the present the ISI and al-Badr have virtually been one and the same thing. 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. However, Pakistan, for obvious reasons, has been reluctant to comply with US demands.
The Harkat The Harkat-i-Jihadi-i-Islami was the first-ever Pakistani militant organization to be formed by clerics of the Deobandi school of Islamic thought. The organization was soon cultivated by the ISI, which provided its jihadis with special training facilities in the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan, as well as in Khost in Afghanistan.
The organization's conservative and traditional outlook was well suited to militants from other countries, such as from Bangladesh and Muslims from Myanmar. They were grouped under the Harkat-i-Jihad-i-Islami al-Alami (international) led by Akhtar (now under arrest). Later, when Harkat was outlawed by the US State Department, Harkatul Ansar was formed. However, in secret, Harkat's structure was kept intact.
Akhtar was a main character in the infamous "Operation Caliphate" in which several Pakistani army officers attempted to topple Benazir Bhutto's government in 1995. Other leading players were Major-General Zaheer ul-Islam Abbasi and Brigadier Mustansir Billah.
The officers planned a coup with the help of civilian guerrillas (in fake army uniforms) led by Akhtar. The plotters aimed to occupy General Army Headquarters during a corps commanders' meeting and arrest key leaders and then take over the government and proclaim the formation of an Islamic caliphate. The plot failed miserably, many officers were arrested, and huge piles of ammunition and army uniforms were recovered from Akhtar's car.
The rebel officers were released when Musharraf came to the power in a bloodless coup in October 1999, as was Akhtar. He immediately made his way to Kabul, where he became close to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who only elevated Pakistanis once the ISI had approved. Akhtar was subsequently put in charge of several important assignments, such as training police and armed forces, and some administrative matters.
Khalil, meanwhile, was a veteran of the Afghan war against the Soviets and acclaimed by his Afghan colleagues for his heroic role in the conquest of Khost city by defeating the communist forces there in 1991. Khost was the first Afghan city to fall to the mujahideen after the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989, after which the central communist government fell like a house of cards. The conquest of Khost was conceived in the safe houses of the ISI in Peshawar in Pakistan's tribal area by the then director general, Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani.
In 1989, after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the ISI, then headed by retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, had devised "Operation Jalalabad" in which the HIA, led by Hekmatyar, was given a key role. The plan was to capture the strategic city of Jalalabad, and then march on Kabul to topple the communist regime. However, the operation came to nothing.
When Durrani took over the ISI he revamped its strategy. Instead of Jalalabad, the center of operations was focussed on Khost, from where the army would mobilize the mujahideen movement for Kabul.
At first Hekmatyar's HIA called the shots for the Khost operation. Under the new strategy, the HIA was removed from the front line and Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani was given the leading role, along with Pakistani fighters commanded by Khalil. This combination worked much better, and Khost fell to the mujahideen in the holy month of Ramadan (1991). All mujahideen circles still admit that "Khost was captured by Punjabis".
Khalil's Harkatul Ansar was a signatory of a ruling issued by Osama bin Laden in 1998 in which he announced war against the United States after the Americans fired cruise missiles on Afghanistan in retaliation for al-Qaeda attacks on US embassies in Africa. The missiles targeted positions in Kandahar and in Khost, where several members of the Harkatul Ansar were killed. Khalil publicly denounced the US and vowed to take revenge, and soon after made his way on to the United States' list of "most dangerous" people.
At this time Khalil was chosen by one of the architects of the Kargil operation, then lieutenant-general (now General) Aziz Khan to take part in the daring raid into Indian territory. After Bakht Zameen Khan captured some Kargil peaks, Khalil fought side-by-side with the Pakistan army and al-Badr fighters, and remained part and parcel of all military strategies.
After September 11, 2001, Khalil sent several thousand fighters to Afghanistan well in advance of the US-led attack on the country, and personally commanded the forces.
However, after the then director general of the ISI, Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmed, retired the day the US attacked Afghanistan, Khalil returned to Pakistan and was placed under house arrest as Islamabad had done an about-turn, under US insistence, on support for the Taliban.
The ISI, jihadi leaders and the Pakistani army have over the years been inextricably linked, especially in Afghanistan. Now that two key jihadi figures, Khalil and Akhtar, have been arrested, it can easily be deduced that the story of their involvement, and the quest to stamp out the jihadi movement at its heart, will not end with them being incarcerated: there has always been someone in the Pakistani establishment, whether active or retired, to pull the strings, as was the case with Khalil and Akhtar, and with Bakhat Zameen Khan.
Now, with the arrest of the the jihadi leaders, the "cover" has been broken and there is little place left for the "operators behind the scenes" to hide.
"The cat is cornered against the wall and the much-awaited game within the army is about to start," commented an observer based in Washington.
This also points to the unstability of Pakistanti Dictator and US ally Mushariv, who has to satisfy and mollify the ISI in order to stay alive and in power.
mm
PING - ISI links to terrorism
Bump!
For more I'd like to recomend
"Charlie Wilson's War"
George Crile
"Afghanistan..The Bear Trap"
Mohammad Yousaf & Mark Adkin
Don't forget to thank Mohammad Ali Jinnah for starting it all.
The best way to end war and ensure peace is to kill the enemy.
Clarify what time periods this covers, so the correct Presidents can be indentified, please.
You da man - glad to know at least someone knows history. But, don't forget to thank Gandhi as well.
I'm disappointed you didn't mention my book, Germs of War. If you go into my profile, you'll find quite a few book reviews.
Ronald Reagan till 1988. He was the main force behind backing Pakistan/ISI/Mujahideen. Turned a blind eye to the long term ills of his policies.
Bush Sr till 1992. Conveniently forgot about Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet Union puppet, Najibullah.
Clinton till 2000. Allowed the festering wound in Afghanistan to become gangrenous. Despite Khobar, Cole, WTCI, and the embassy bombings.
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