Author: Dileep Padgaonkar
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 16, 2002
The arrest of a senior Al Qaida
operative in Karachi on Wednesday has bolstered India's claims that the
epicentre of international terrorism lies in Pakistan and focussed attention
on Gen Pervez Musharraf's inability or unwillingness to come clean on just
how many terrorists use Pakistan as a launching pad for their activities
worldwide with the tacit complicity of at least some sections of his military
establishment.
The capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh,
a Yemeni national, who is believed to have been involved in the September
11 attacks in the US last year, and nine other suspected militants in a
shootout in the port city has been hailed here as a breakthrough in American
efforts to smash the Al Qaida network.
A report in The New York Times on
Sunday quoted a top Pakistani intelligence officer as acknowledging that
Al Qaida might be trying to re-establish Karachi as a transit point for
moving personnel, money and material. But the paper also said that Pakistani
officials tended to play down the Al Qaida threat and insisted that only
a few small groups of Al Qaida members functioned in the country.
Of particular interest to India
is the view of Western officials that the Al Qaida had helped Pakistani
militants to stage two car bombings in Karachi earlier this year-one in
which 11 French engineers were killed in May and another in which 12 Pakistanis
lost their lives at the American consulate a month later.
It is these same Pakistani militant
organisations, Indian officials believe, who are engaged in terrorist activities
in India, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, but with this crucial difference:
in this instance they receive moral and material support from the Pakistani
establishment ostensibly on the ground that they are involved in a 'liberation
struggle.'
Significant in this regard is the
view expressed here that Gen Musharraf has returned home from his visit
to the US a deeply disappointed man. There were few takers at the United
Nations for his contention that the terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir
was legitimate and that it was the handiwork of indigenous 'freedom fighters.'
The interrogation by American law
enforcers of Ramzi bin al-Shibh and other suspected militants captured
in Karachi should offer clues to the nature and extent of Al Qaida's murderous
operations, either directly or through surrogates, in Jammu and Kashmir,
South East Asia, Europe and in the US itself.
