Author: Alyssa Ayres
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: August 20, 2006
URL: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008823
An anti-Indian group arrives on our doorstep.
More than a week after the arrest of 23 would-be
airline bombers in Britain, information about their background, networks and
training continues to emerge. The common thread appears to link the plot to
Pakistan's Jama'at ud-Dawa (JUD), previously known as the Lashkar-e-Taiba
(LET). The New York Times reports that investigators are focusing on the group's
role in funding the bombers. If so, this marks a new level of ambition for
a terrorist outfit that has thus far restricted its mayhem to India. In the
past, despite well-documented evidence of JUD/LET's activities, the international
community has done little to impel Pakistan to shut it down. Now that must
change. With this globalization of regional terror, a problem far away has
made itself ours, and we must solve it.
Despite a flimsy attempt to disguise this,
Jama'at ud-Dawa is simply a new name for Lashkar-e-Taiba--which has battled
India since 1997, when it began sending suicide-jihadists into Indian Kashmir
to "free" the population. In effect this has meant butchering those
who don't subscribe to their seventh-century worldview--Hindus, Sikhs and
Muslims alike--a program to which the group brings flourishes such as slicing
off the noses and ears of those deemed insufficiently pious. Lashkar's brutality
and fervor injected a new instability into Kashmir. They also brought the
region to the brink of war by attacking India's Parliament in December 2001,
in response to which India mobilized half a million troops on its border with
Pakistan.
In 2002, Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf,
under intense pressure from the U.S., banned several terrorist groups that
had operated with impunity on Pakistani soil, including Lashkar. But the emptiness
of this gesture became obvious when the group merely changed its name to escape
arrests and asset seizure. Newly minted as the Jama'at ud-Dawa, with the same
leader--Hafiz Mohammad Saeed--it continued to churn out jihad recruitment
material, under the same titles, and to convene massive jihad jamborees to
call more of the faithful to arms.
For a brief while, two years ago, it appeared
as though the Pakistani military had finally become serious about stamping
out terrorism emanating from its territory. A peace process between India
and Pakistan moved forward bolstered by the growing confidence that this time
bombings would not derail it. But the lull was short-lived. Last year serial
bombings in a Delhi market on the eve of the Hindu new year, an attack on
a temple in the holy city of Varanasi, and the murder of a mathematician at
the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore all bore Lashkar's fingerprints.
And then, last month, came the Mumbai blasts that killed more than 200 train
commuters and injured another 700. Indian officials have implicated Lashkar
in this atrocity, and Indo-Pak relations have naturally suffered another sharp
setback.
Like Hamas and Hezbollah, Lashkar excels at
both terrorism and humanitarian relief. The funds for the airline bombers
are alleged to have been diverted from those gathered in British mosques after
last year's massive earthquake in South Asia. This combination of jihadism
with social work makes tackling such groups infinitely more tricky, but tackle
them we must, and for that Gen. Musharraf's regime must be held to account.
Five years after 9/11, Pakistan remains a
deeply problematic ally in the war on terror. Despite regular promises of
cooperation--and the occasional arrest of an al Qaeda bigwig from a safe house
in Karachi or Lahore--the country continues to draw terrorists from Birmingham
to Bangalore. Gen. Musharraf presents himself as the last line of defense
between the mullahs and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, but in fact, as has been
amply documented by the Pakistani diplomat and scholar Husain Haqqani, the
relationship between the army and the jihadists is symbiotic rather than adversarial.
The army plays up the terrorist threat in order to consolidate its position
in Western capitals, while at best turning a blind eye to the violence they
export.
All this was bad enough. But now with the
airline bombing plot implicating the LET specifically, this problem has arrived
on our doorstep. A coordinated trans-Atlantic effort must make the closure
of Lashkar--and also the resurgent Taliban, which increasingly uses Pakistani
bases to launch attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan--the highest priority.
Pakistan must take responsibility for the activities of these groups that
operate from its soil, and cosmetic gestures, such as the recent house arrest
of Saeed and the arrest of low-level Taliban in a Quetta hospital--will not
suffice. For its own sake, the sake of the neighborhood, and indeed the security
of our homeland, it is time Islamabad backed its platitudes about fighting
terror with real action.
Ms. Ayres is deputy director of the Center
for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.
