Terrorist camps thriving

Newsday ^ | July 22, 2005 | James Rupert

[ttsmi]

The camps are used by Pakistan-based militant groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure). For more than a decade, the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate has sponsored such groups to attack India in the conflict over the territory of Kashmir, much as it nurtured the Taliban movement to pursue Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, Western intelligence sources have said.

While the government has aggressively hunted down Arab and other non-Pakistani militants identified with the al-Qaida movement, and while it formally banned Jaish and Lashkar in 2002, it has never dismantled either the Taliban or the Pakistan-based outfits. The local groups simply renamed themselves and have been spared destruction, even though some are suspected of involvement in assassination attempts against Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Pakistani and foreign analysts say the Pakistani militant groups and their training camps have survived largely because the government crackdown so far has been half-hearted. Many officers in the army, which is Pakistan's real ruling party, "don't want to eliminate these groups that have fought in Kashmir and Afghanistan, because they think they may want to use them again at some future time," said a foreign intelligence analyst who specializes in Pakistan.

The problem is, there is no clear separation between the Pakistani groups and the Taliban or al-Qaida. They are routinely seen to overlap, as when Jaish and al-Qaida militants were accused in the 2002 murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

[pepsionice]

Give Pakistan five years...and it'll be a repeat of Afghanistan. No legitimate government will exist, and the Mullahs will be running 50 percent of the country. If I were India...I'd be getting buddy-buddy with the US, and prepare for some kind of jihad war by 2015. I doubt seriously that the US will want to get into another fiasco for at least a decade. By the time we finally get out of Iraq...it'll be a long time before we commit to some kinda military action unless another 9-11 occurs.

[k2blader]

The WOT, you know, it's working.

[PeoplesRepublicOfWashington]

Sounds like a job for our special forces on the ground, and the Air Force in the air.

[etcetera]

So why aren't bombing any and all suspected training camps? We don't have to acknowledge the bombings, and if accused, we deny. Can't we make clean cruise missles? Missiles that don't have nice, neat aluminum plates in them that say "U.S. Navy"?

[Schwaeky]

i believe unlabeled or mislabeled ordinance violates the geneva accords. not that i have a problem with it...

[AngelesCrestHighway]

Sounds like a job for laser guided bombs.......