Introduction: Three militant groups - Jaish-e-Muhammad, Harkat-ul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and some smaller ones have taken in thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers and senior operatives as well as Taliban officials who fled Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border areas to escape the US-Pakistan dragnet
With the recent detention of some Pakistani men in the US, American counter-terrorism officials feel that Islamabad has failed to dismantle “hundreds” of militant training camps, a media report said.
“US counter-terrorism authorities say that the detention of a California-based group of Pakistani men this month underscores a serious problem: the Islamabad government’s failure to dismantle hundreds of jihadi training camps,” the Los Angeles Times said in a report.
Since post-9/11 military strikes against Al Qaeda strongholds in Pakistan’s tribal territories, “the jihadi training effort has scattered and gone underground, where it is much harder to detect and destroy,,” the US daily said in a report titled “Terror Camps Scatter, Persist.”
“Instead of large and visible camps, would-be terrorists are being recruited, radicalised and trained in a vast system of smaller under-the-radar jihadist sites.”
“Many United States officials say it is not surprising that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has not cracked down harder on militant groups and what they describe as their increasingly extensive training activities,” it said.
The newspaper said “for years, the ISI itself has worked closely with the groups in training Pakistan’s own network of militants to fight on conflicts in Kashmir and elsewhere, and to protect the country’s interest in neighbouring Afghanistan.
The militant groups also derive tremendous influence from their affiliations with increasingly powerful fundamentalist political parties in Pakistan.”
Meanwhile, the daily quoted the American intelligence officials as saying that over the last two years in particular, three militant groups - Jaish-e-Muhammad, Harkat-ulMujahideen and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba - and some smaller ones have taken in thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers and senior operatives as well as Taliban officials who fled Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border areas to escape United States-Pakistan dragnet.
It said the training was now not overseen by senior AI Qaeda men but by “at least three of Pakistan’s largest militant groups, which are fuelled by a shared radical fundamentalist ideology. “The militant groups have long maintained close ties to Osama bin Laden and his global terrorist network,” it said. The paper said these groups “wield tremendous political influence, are well-funded and are said to have tens of thousands of fanatic followers, including a small but unknown number of Americans who have entered the system after first enrolling at Pakistan-based Islamic schools or madrasas.”
The US officials and experts feel
that “it has become nearly impossible to get a handle on what they fear
is a serious and growing terrorism problem in Pakistan.”