Terror case raises fears of sleeper cells (of Pakistanis)

Washington, DC, Jun. 8 (UPI) -- The arrest of two Pakistani-Americans on charges that they lied to federal agents about undergoing terror training in Pakistan has highlighted the threat posed by "second generation" Islamic militants and the persistent presence of terrorist bases in a country that says it is an ally in the U.S. war on terror.

An FBI affidavit says that Hamid Hayat, 22, told agents he had spent six months in 2003-2004 at a camp near Rawalpindi in Pakistan, where he received paramilitary training and anti-American religious indoctrination.

"Hamid further stated," the affidavit goes on, "that he and others at the camp were being trained on how to kill Americans."

Hayat and his father Umer Hayat, 47, both from Lodi near Sacramento, Calif., face charges of lying to federal agents about the training.

The admissions allegedly made by the Hayats will undoubtedly raise questions about the status of Pakistan as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, especially given the location of the camp -- just a few miles from the capital, Islamabad.

"That's a bit like having a terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.," said Richard Clarke, former White House counter-terror czar.

"The closer to the capital (these facilities are) the more obvious it is that the (Pakistani) authorities are turning a blind eye," Hassan Abbas, a former senior Pakistani law enforcement official told United Press International.

According to the affidavit, "hundreds of attendees from various parts of the world" were trained at the camp and then sent to "carry out their jihadi mission" to countries "including the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq, (and) Kashmir."

U.S. authorities have long been aware of the danger posed by these camps, and of the possibility that U.S. citizens might be trained in them.

In June 2004, a special alert from the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland security warned of the danger posed by "individuals traveling to train at terrorist camps in Pakistan."

The bulletin -- obtained by journalist Paul Sperry and reported in his book "Infiltration" -- enjoined agents at several airports to "increase scrutiny of passengers who are naturalized citizens or legal permanent residents of Pakistani descent," especially those who had made "trips to regions of Pakistan not normally associated with business activity or tourism," or who might have rope burns or other unusual bruising or injuries resulting from paramilitary training.

So-called second generation jihadis -- the grown children of Muslim immigrants who turn to extremism or follow their parents into it -- have been identified as a threat by authorities in Europe and Canada, but U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have not hitherto publicly warned about the phenomenon.

"This is the first time that a second generation Muslim-American in the post-Sept. 11 era has been accused of receiving this kind of training," said terrorism expert and analyst Peter Bergen.

In spring 2003, six Yemeni-Americans from the town of Lackawanna in upstate New York pleaded guilty to having visited an al-Qaida camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, but that visit happened months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Second generation jihadis "represent a clear and present danger to Canada and its allies," according to a recently declassified report from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, "and are a particularly valuable resource for the international Islamic terrorist community in view of their language skills and familiarity with Western culture and infrastructure."

Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish investigating magistrate who heads that country's effort to prosecute Islamic terrorists, told a conference in Florence, Italy, last month that second generation extremists, some of them as young as 16, pose a serious threat in Europe.

The Hayats, according to the complaint, were related by marriage to an Islamic religious leader and notorious militant Qazi Saeed Ur Rehman. According to the affidavit, Rehman ran an Islamic school, or madrasa, that funneled would-be jihadis to the training camp.

The declassified Canadian report notes that Islamic culture places a premium on "obedience to parental figures," adding that, "The duty to obey also explains why some youth have agreed to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan for terrorist training."

Noting that Hayat might well be a Pashto name from Pakistan's lawless North-West Frontier Province, Abbas told UPI, "The nature of the family structure in that part of the world is so close-knit... that it is very likely that, if a father or other older relative is involved (in Islamic extremism) the younger generation will be, too."

The situation is complicated -- and made more dangerous -- by the fact that the training camp attended by Hayat was apparently overseen by a Pakistani militant leader long associated with the activities of jihadi groups in Kashmir -- the Muslim-majority region divided and disputed between Pakistan and majority-Hindu India.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil is leader of the jihadi group once known as Harkat-ul-Mujahedin -- set up with the support of Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus to wage a low-intensity war against the Indian authorities in their part of Kashmir.

According to Abbas, who profiled the militant leader in his recent book "Pakistan's Drift into Extremism," Khalil "has been closely aligned to Pakistan's intelligence services."

Abbas said that despite several requests from the United States very little action was ever taken against him. He was briefly detained and questioned last year and has been under house arrest, but was released earlier this year and has now vanished.

"He still has acquiescence (in his activities) and sympathy, if not outright support, from the intelligence agencies," said Abbas.

Talat Waseem, spokeswoman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington, told UPI that she had "never heard of" Khalil and couldn't answer any questions about him. "There are no terrorist training camps in Pakistan," she asserted.

Khalil was the only prominent Pakistani jihadist to sign al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa, urging Muslims everywhere to kill Israelis and Americans. Later that year, when the United States retaliated for the al-Qaida truck bomb attacks on its East African embassies with cruise missile strikes against the group's camps in Afghanistan, Khalil denounced the move, and pledged revenge against America.

According to Abbas, "many security people I've spoken to in Pakistan say he is exactly the kind of person who should have been in (the U.S. detention center in) Guantanamo Bay."

More worryingly still, according to Roger Cressey, the former deputy White House counter-terrorism adviser, "You have a network of people here in the United States who are at least sympathetic to -- and perhaps actually supportive of -- the Kashmiri jihadists."

As recently as the late 1990's there was an active network in many U.S. Muslim communities raising money for the Kashmir cause, according to one expert who has studied the global jihadist movement. "There are still elements in some mosques that are supportive," said the expert, who asked for anonymity.

The vision of a U.S.-based support network for Islamic terrorists is the nightmare that haunts counter-terrorism specialists. "It's one of the things that still keeps me awake at nights," Sept. 11 Commission member Tim Roemer told UPI, explaining that he believed law enforcement agencies had never entirely settled the question of whether the 19 suicide hijackers had witting help from other Muslims in the United States.

The arrest of the Hayats and two other Lodi Muslims -- being held by immigration authorities for allegedly violating the terms of their religious worker visas -- are part of an "ongoing, long-term inquiry," according to Dean Boyd of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Although some law enforcement officials have been anonymously hinting that more arrests might be in the pipeline, Boyd was non-committal. "It's ongoing, that's all I can say," he said.

Bergen is skeptical that the investigation will reveal any kind of extensive Fifth Column. "I doubt that this will be the tip of an iceberg," he said. "I don't think that suddenly there will be dozens of other people in the Sacramento area who turn out to be involved in this conspiracy."

Former CIA and State Department counter-terror chief Cofer Black agreed, telling UPI the arrests were "not so much the tip of an iceberg we can't see, but rather a measure of the increasing capability of our law enforcement agencies to conduct effective counterterrorism and to utilize intelligence to identify and arrest terrorists."

Nonetheless, the case is likely to re-ignite fears of a network of Islamic sleeper cells in the United States.

"Assuming these allegations (against the Hayats) are all true," said Cressey, "this is a very disturbing picture... You have an al-Qaida (training) infrastructure in Pakistan into which recruits are funneled from all over the world, and you have al-Qaida operatives then able to come to the United States to prepare."

Although Cressey said that as far as he knew the Kashmiri jihadis had "never looked at the United States as a target."

There is a significant degree of cross-over between those groups and al-Qaida, according to Husain Haqqani, a former senior Pakistani government official, now based in Washington.

Haqqani, who examines the issue in his forthcoming book "Pakistan: Between the Mosque and the Military," says that represents a serious problem for the United States because Pakistan has never been able to sever the link between its military and intelligence apparatus and the militant jihadists that they supported in both Kashmir and Afghanistan.

"That relationship is so deep-rooted that it is not easy to break ... people don't change their beliefs, their ideology overnight," Haqqani said.

He added that one of the reasons the link was so hard to break is that "the military-intelligence apparatus has never admitted that ... the creation of these irregular armies imbued with the spirit of jihad was a mistake." Even Pakistan's military leader and enthusiastic U.S. ally Gen. Pervez Musharraf still defends Pakistan's support to the Taliban, says Haqqani.

"There may be a short term impact from these arrests," he said, "but then it'll be back to business as usual. The government is in a state of denial about this."

" ........while Musharraf gives us the Arab terrorists he has hardly laid a finger on the Paskistani jihadists who form Al Qaeda's support structure."

There is a lot of disenchantment and animosity between the local terror groups and the more rabid foreign jihadis (mostly Arabs, Chechens, Afgans, North Africans) who are running amuck and trying to run things their way. There is a two fold advantage for Musharraf in going after the foreign ones :

1. Local groups wont mind if Musharraf goes after the foreign ones and leaves the local groups alone. That way Mushy wont have to incur the wrath of the local groups who have more popular support and support within the ISI , the Military and religious parties.

2. US will be happy to get hold of the members of foreign terrorists who form the bulk of the Al Quaida. So that way Mushy will gain favour with the Americans. He can show that he is cooperating and thereby ask for more aid from the US. US will be happy to get the members of Al Quaida and as far as the local groups are concerned the US wont mind looking the other way.

Its win-win for everybody! The only loser here is the imaginary war called GWOT.

When Musharraf seized power in October 1999, he faced a formidable foe: well-armed, well-trained and well-financed Islamist-sectarian organisations, with a huge resource pool of recruits in thousands of religious madrassas in the country. Dealing with such a foe was never going to be easy for an isolated military dictator. Yet his task was made somewhat easier by the 9/11 terror attacks and the worldwide backlash against extremist Islam that it unleashed. Islamabad's decision to cut down support to the Kashmiri militants also boosted its drive against sectarianism.

Once Islamabad decided to put the Kashmir issue on the back burner for the sake of better ties with New Delhi, it no longer had to put up with the jehadi groups operating in J&K, or the sectarian outfits within Pakistan. The first clear sign of a shift in the Pakistan Government's attitude came in a televised speech by Musharraf to the nation on January 12, 2002. While announcing a massive campaign to eradicate the sectarian menace, the General banned three sectarian groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Tehreek-e-Jafria Pakistan (TJP) and the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi (TNSM) and put the Sunni Tehrik on notice. Another two sectarian groups - Sipah-e-Mohammad Pakistan (SMP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) had been banned earlier, on August 14, 2001.

Despite the Government ban, however, almost all these sectarian groups continue to operate freely under changed names without much difficulty. Contrary to Musharraf's much-trumpeted claims of having dismantled the sectarian mafia in Pakistan, the hard fact remains that his administration has hardly taken any concrete measures to implement the ban in letter and spirit, except in arresting and later releasing some of the cadres of these groups. Enforcement agencies arrest some of these cadres every time there is an escalation in sectarian conflict, but they are released shortly after the wave of violence subsides. The organisational infrastructures of the banned sectarian groups has essentially remained intact, with most of the groups retaining the same office bearers who refused to go underground even after the January 2002 ban. Most of the banned groups continue to operate out of their old office premises, though some have shifted to new premises. They are still bringing out their periodical publications, in most cases under the old names, besides raising funds and holding congregations without any check or fear. And the sectarian tensions refuse to die down, given the fact that the contending groups are well organised and well armed. Their ability to maintain effectiveness and to elude enforcement agencies also has to do with an extensive support network that includes madrassas, political parties, bases across the border in Afghanistan, and financial support from foreign countries, if not foreign Governments. The International Crisis Group has noted, in its April 2005 report, The State of Sectarianism in Pakistan:

Sectarian terrorists in Pakistan are thriving in an atmosphere of religious intolerance for which its military government is largely to blame. General Musharraf has repeatedly pledged that he would eradicate religious extremism and sectarianism and transform Pakistan into a moderate Muslim state. In the interests of retaining power, he has done the opposite.

The report notes, further, that as Musharraf is praised by the international community for his role in the war against terrorism, the frequency and viciousness of sectarian terrorism continues to increase in his country. Regulating madaris, reforming the public education sector, invoking constitutional restrictions against private armies and hate speech, and removing all laws and state policies of religious discrimination are essential and overdue steps to stem the tide of religious extremism. The choice that Pakistan faces is not between the military and the mullahs, as is generally believed in the West; it is between genuine democracy and a military-mullah alliance that is responsible for producing and sustaining religious extremism of different hues. The report recommends to the Pakistan Government that it recognise the diversity of Islam in Pakistan, reaffirm the constitutional principle of equality for all citizens regardless of religion or sect, and give meaning to this by repealing all laws, penal codes and official procedures that reinforce sectarian identities and cause discrimination on the basis of faith.

according to SOUTH ASIA INTELLIGENCE REVIEW Weekly Assessments & Briefings Volume 3, No. 47, June 6, 2005

link http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/index.htm

and on Monday this link will work
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/3_47.htm

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