Author: V. Sudarshan
Publication: Outlook
Date: October 22, 2001
The fig leaf presented as proof
against Al Qaeda only exposes the West's double standards
The published evidence on which
the US is pursuing its war on Osama bin Laden and his associates wouldn't
stand up to legal scrutiny. This became obvious from the howls of disbelief
of the British media when Prime Minister Tony Blair made public a document,
"Responsibility For the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States, 11 September
2001", which was based on evidence supplied by the US. The Blair government
categorically states in the document that "Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda,
the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities
on 11 September 2001".
The document consists of 70 paragraphs
but most of these pertain to the Al Qaeda and bin Laden's previous strikes
and activities. On the September 11 attacks, the document offers the following
as evidence:
* That three of the 19 hijackers
have been identified as associates of Al Qaeda;
* Intelligence sources have
been cited to claim that bin Laden himself asserted that he was preparing
for a major attack on the US;
* That Al Qaeda's associates
were asked to return to Afghanistan by September 10.
No wonder The Guardian in its editorial,
Still No Smoking Gun, thought the case against bin Laden as published by
the British government "would be almost worthless from a legal point of
view". Similarly, the foreign editor of The Times, London, Bronwen Maddox,
described the document as a "puzzling and worrying piece of work" and proferred
the opinion that "only if it is read as a political text does it seem shrewd".
Pointing out that the commentary
extensively catalogues the involvement of Saudis in attacks on the US embassy
in Nairobi and on the uss Cole, Maddox wondered why no link at all to Saudi
Arabia has been drawn in the September 11 attacks, though "some of the
hijackers were said to have been recruited in Saudi Arabia". More importantly,
she wrote, "We should perhaps think of it (the document) as a paper shield
for President Musharraf of Pakistan and the royalty of Saudi Arabia to
hold between them and their angry people."
Indeed, the omissions from the document
are probably more significant than the submissions. These omissions are
palpably political in nature. Though the document points out that "Al Qaeda
and the Taliban regime have a close and mutually dependent alliance", it
fails to mention Pakistan's role in incubating, rearing, nurturing as well
as providing tactical, strategic and other logistical support to the Taliban.
In short, nothing the Taliban did could have been possible without Pakistan's
active support.
There have been reports of Pakistani
uniformed personnel in custody of the Northern Alliance. "What were Pakistani
army officers doing in Afghanistan? Surely they didn't go there on picnic?"
remarks a government official. Indian government sources say as many as
200 Pakistanis are in the custody of the Northern Alliance.
Besides providing the Taliban with
logistical support, Pakistan also gave them money. Ahmed Rashid provides
some figures in his authoritative book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia: "In 1997/8, Pakistan provided Taliban with
an estimated US $30 million in aid. This included 600,000 tonnes of wheat,
diesel, petroleum and kerosene fuel, which were partly paid for by Saudi
Arabia, arms and munitions, aerial bombs, maintenance and spare parts for
its Soviet-era military equipment such as tanks and heavy artillery, repairs
and maintenance of Taliban's air force and airport, road-building, electricity
supply in Kandahar and salaries.Officially, Pakistan denied it was supporting
the Taliban."
But if one were to go strictly by
the document Blair made public before he went on to embrace Gen Pervez
Musharraf in Islamabad last week, it would give rise to the misleading
impression that bin Laden and the Taliban have no connections whatsoever.
As a senior government official puts it, "What the US has done in Afghanistan
is set a thief to catch a thief but without any mention of his thieving
ways."
Officials also point out that specific
evidence of bin Laden's guilt and that of Al Qaeda's "associates" has not
been provided on the plea of protecting intelligence sources. In any case,
the so-called evidence is of a very presumptive nature. Like Point 69 of
the document, which says, "No other organisation has both the motivation
and the capability to carry out attacks like those of September 11-only
the Al Qaeda network and Osama bin Laden." Although Point 33 makes a less
than fleeting mention of Al Qaeda operating "guest houses and training
camps" in Pakistan, it fails to point out whether or not Islamabad knew
of it.
No wonder Indian officials stress
that their evidence of Pakistan's organic links with terrorism in Afghanistan
and Jammu and Kashmir are far more compelling than what the British document
has put out connecting bin Laden to the wtc.
Officials say the incidence of Pakistanis
coming into j&k is extensively documented in hundreds of interrogation
reports of those nabbed by the security forces. This is further testified
by the 60 Pakistani prisoners languishing in jails in Jammu and Kashmir.
It is well evidenced from intercepts in form of "voice logs" of Pakistani
terrorists from across the border giving directions and receiving requests
for arms and ammunition from their operatives.
Terrorist publications like Al Dawa
of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) regularly provide details of those killed
during skirmishes with security forces in j&k. The Al Dawa diary published
last year listed 1,100 names of those who died the previous year, the names
of their parents, the date and place they died and other such details,
including code names. A senior official says that from published details,
it is evident that 70 per cent of these come from Punjab in Pakistan, about
10 to 12 per cent from nwfp, three per cent each from tribal areas and
Sindh. Those from PoK, ironically, are a mere three per cent.
So far as the Taliban is concerned,
the Pakistani magazine The Herald in its January 2000 issue on the IC-814
hijack says that Taliban foreign minister Mullah Abdul Wakil Muttawakil
revealed the identity of one of the hijackers when nothing was known about
them. The writer, Zafar Abbas, said: "The day the Indian aircraft arrived
in Kandahar, Muttawakil told the bbc's Pashto service that one of the hijackers
was Maulana Masood Azhar's brother (Athar) Ibrahim. Understandably, Pakistan's
initial response to the revelation was complete silence; given the situation,
Pakistan would have found it highly problematic to challenge the Taliban
foreign minister." The obvious question: how could the Taliban know about
the identity of the hijackers before anyone had a clue about them?
Indian officials who flew to Kandahar
to negotiate during the crisis remember the fond way Masood Azhar was greeted
by the Taliban corps commander of Kandahar, Gen Usmani, as if "they were
long-lost brothers".
In terms of Pakistan-sponsored activities
in j&k, government sources cite the case of the January 26, 1995, blasts
at Jammu's Maulana Azad Memorial Stadium, where Governor Krishna Rao was
addressing a gathering.The interrogation of the culprit, Mohammed Irfan
alias Anwar, son of Mohammed Ayub Khan, a resident of Tanda in Pakistan,
revealed that the attack had been planned by the Sialkot unit of the isi
and Hizbul Mujahideen leaders. In this terrorist operation, six people
died and another 40 suffered splinter injuries.
In the Chitsinghpura massacre of
March 20, 2000, in which 36 Sikhs were shot dead, the LeT's involvement
was conclusively proved when Mohammed Suhail alias Aamir alias Abu Saharia,
a resident of Sialkot, was arrested on August 16, 2000. The accused, who
had been trained at the LeT's Umal Qura training camp in 1997-98, admitted
to having participated in the massacre on the direction of the Lashkar's
central leadership. He is now in the capital's Tihar jail.
Whenever such evidence was presented
to western nations, they expressed reluctance to accept interrogation reports
as proof. Now to put things in perspective: US deputy secretary of state
Richard Armitage told cnn on October 3 that part of the evidence against
bin Laden constitute evidence "gleaned from interrogations of people who
have been picked up, as they say, busted".
