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Kashmir Issue Complicates U.S. Alliance - As Decades-Old Conflict Divides Nations

Kashmir Issue Complicates U.S. Alliance - As Decades-Old Conflict Divides Nations

Author: Peter Fritsch
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: October 12, 2001

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan -- The most important event in Mohammed Ahsan Dar's life happened six years before he was born. One day in 1953, he says, police patrolling the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir pistol-whipped his father, rendering him "half mad until he found peace in death."

An inbred hatred of India and a fierce Islamic nationalism made a killer of Mr. Dar. First he founded a militant youth group to oppose mostly Hindu India's influence in mostly Muslim Kashmir. Landing in an Indian prison, he says he was tortured for months before escaping in 1989.

Next, parlaying the fame of his jailbreak into a recruiting tool, he assembled a band of fierce anti-India fighters. Again imprisoned by India, he says he languished in an eight-by-five-foot cell before winning release two years ago.

This week, as U.S. cruise missiles struck nearby Afghanistan, Mr. Dar was once again preparing to do guerrilla battle for his cause, Muslim control of all of Kashmir. "This fight is my unfinished agenda. And the attack of Afghanistan just made me even more of a problem for you in the U.S.," Mr. Dar said, sitting on the floor of his home near an Afghan refugee camp.

Should the U.S. distance itself from Pakistan given its links to alleged terrorists? Participate in the Question of the Day.

The existence of Muslim guerrillas inside Pakistan does indeed put the U.S. in a difficult position. The U.S. badly needs Pakistani support for its global alliance against terrorism, and has it. But while the Western world applauds Pakistan for its stance, the country remains a dangerous crucible for extremists prosecuting a jihad of their own. The decades-long struggle to control Kashmir has taken an estimated 30,000 lives.

The latest episode, an explosion in Indian-controlled Kashmir Oct. 1 that killed about 40, sent tensions even higher between Pakistan and another key U.S. ally in the anti-terror coalition, India. The Indians, increasingly angry with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue, say that if the U.S. is serious about attacking the roots of terror, it should expand its terrorism dragnet to Pakistan.

Secretary of State Colin Powell will have to walk this diplomatic high wire on a visit early next week to Pakistan and India. His mission to the two nuclear neighbors suggests a new urgency for the West in trying to resolve one of the world's most intractable territorial disputes.

Those seeking to oust India from Kashmir want to turn back the clock to before the 1947 partition of India, which created the Muslim state of Pakistan and left much of Kashmir in Indian hands despite the region's Muslim majority. Today, many of the anti-India fighters are young men who were trained in Afghanistan with U.S. weapons left over from the anti-Soviet war -- in some cases in training camps run by Osama bin Laden. A score of militant Muslim groups sponsor and carry out brutal acts of terror in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which they say is payback for decades of abuse by Indian police and military forces.

Pakistan openly gives moral support to some of these groups. Western diplomats and former Pakistani intelligence officials say Pakistan also gives financial and covert military support to a few of the groups, though Pakistan denies this. A U.S. House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism said in 1993 that Pakistan was sponsoring and promoting separatism and terrorism, "primarily in Kashmir, as a strategic and long-term program."

In Pakistan, many draw a distinction between terror and freedom fighting when it comes to Kashmir. "The Pakistani government exerts an influence on these mujahedeen groups. And why shouldn't it if they are legitimate freedom fighters?" asks Shireen Mazari, director of a Pakistan-government think tank called the Institute for Strategic Studies.

Claiming responsibility for the Oct. 1 explosion in Indian-controlled Kashmir, in the city of Srinagar, was a Pakistan-based group called Jaish-e-Mohammed. Some of its fighters have been trained in Afghan camps linked to al Qaeda, the Afghan-based network run by Osama bin Laden. A relative newcomer to the Kashmiri war theater, Jaish-e-Mohammed is fed by Islamic schools in Pakistan, where its leader, Masood Azhar, is a hero to many of the nation's idle disaffected.

Pakistan's Foreign Office condemned the Srinagar bombing, yet did so with an edge: "This act of terrorism is especially reprehensible," it said, "as it appears to be aimed at maligning the legitimate struggle of the Kashmiri people for their self-determination." Such varnish, in the view of India and others, suggests an implicit support for brutal methods in a forgotten region at a time when all eyes are trained westward on Afghanistan.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, responded angrily Monday to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's allegations that Pakistan continues to sponsor terrorism in Kashmir. India responded coolly to a subsequent phone call from Mr. Musharraf to Mr. Vajpayee inviting fresh talks on the Kashmir conflict. Indeed, Indian officials suggested that another attack such as that in Srinagar could, in certain circumstances, lead India to launch military strikes against camps in Pakistan where Kashmiri militants train.

Such a bellicose exchange between two heavily armed powers has the U.S. on edge and is quickly moving Kashmir back onto the West's radar screen. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has pleaded for cool heads on the Kashmir issue and said the conflict should be addressed by the West as part of the long-term campaign against terrorism.

While Pakistan denies that Muslim Kashmiri militants thrive on its soil, that's not the story suggested by visits to the poor neighborhoods of Rawalpindi. A rundown hotel restaurant, advertising Pepsi in giant block letters, is one of many local rallying points for mujahedeen fighting in Kashmir.

Donation boxes, though recently declared illegal here, are stuffed with five-rupee notes worth about eight cents each. The boxes belong to Jaish-e-Mohammed and to Lashkar-i-Tayyba. The second group, whose name means "Army of the Pure," is a Kashmir group that claims to have sent thousands of fighters to help the Taliban resist the U.S.

"Look around," says the restaurant's cashier. "These boxes are full all over town. Ask a Pakistani to contribute five rupees for the struggle in Kashmir and he will give you 10."

Nearby, a safe house for the group Harkatul Mujahedeen functions openly, although visitors are discouraged. "It is wise for you to go quickly," says a guard. The U.S. branded Harkatul a terrorist organization in 1995 after it kidnapped five Western tourists in Kashmir, beheading a Norwegian. In 1998, several Harkatul militants died in U.S. missile attacks on Mr. bin Laden's Afghan hideouts.

A man named Pervez Ahmad freely discusses Pakistan government support for his own organization, the Kashmir Liberation Cell, whose activities, he says, are limited to pamphleteering and organizing street protests. "We are like an NGO [nongovernmental organization] like any other, supported by the government of Pakistan-administered Kashmir," Mr. Ahmad says in clean English, flashing a diamond-encrusted gold watch. Two former high-ranking Pakistan government officials say the Kashmir Liberation Cell is supported by Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI.

While Mr. Ahmad says his group does no fighting, he adds that he counts among his friends men he describes as "mujahedeen warlords," among them Mr. Dar. Mr. Ahmad reaches a few warlords on their cell phones, trying to arrange a meeting with outsiders, but apologizes that "the jihad council has decided it does not wish to speak at this time."

Government support for the Kashmir struggle is suggested, too, on the so-called Line of Control separating the parts of Kashmir administered separately by Pakistan and India. A doctor who works with the Pakistan army there says that he sometimes treats wounded mujahedeen and that the army provides covering fire for incursions into India launched by militant groups. "It would be inhumane not to provide such cover when the mujahedeen are attacked by India," he says.

The ties among Pakistani, Kashmiri and Afghan militants trace back to the early 1980s, when Pakistan allowed entry to anyone arriving to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan's ISI intelligence service and a radical Islamic political party called Jamaat-e-Islami organized reception committees, receiving funds from Saudi Arabia to funnel fighters to the Afghan resistance. An estimated 35,000 Muslim fighters from 43 countries arrived under that covert program between 1982 and 1992. Many of their weapons were made in the U.S.

When the Soviets turned tail in 1989, some of these fighters trained their sights on Kashmir, where simmering discontent with India's sometimes-harsh rule erupted into full-scale rebellion. As men like Mr. Dar took up arms, many Kashmiri fighters crossed into Pakistan for more succor and more sophisticated military training.

"We lacked experience and technical support," says Mr. Dar, who in 1989 founded a group called Hizbul Mujahedeen. "But what we needed even more was an umbrella group to support us."

He found that in Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's oldest and best-connected Islamic political party, known as JI. But gradually, what for Mr. Dar and his 20,000 followers began as a purely Kashmiri movement for independence was taken over by Pakistan and used as a political bludgeon to check India.

When the U.S. a decade ago considered branding Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, say military analysts, Pakistan's government moved Kashmir militant groups to eastern Afghanistan. It shifted responsibility for their training to the JI. Then in 1996, when Mr. bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, the suspected terror leader established training camps for Kashmir fighters in the Afghan city of Khost. This move, say analysts, cemented Pakistan's support for Mr. bin Laden's hosts, the fundamentalist Taliban rulers of most of Afghanistan.

Pakistan's JI party has been particularly vocal since the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., hanging shrill anti-Semitic banners around Pakistan's major cities. Other propaganda blasts the U.S. as "unrighteous, seditious, arrogant." JI spiritual leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad recently made the chilling statement that if U.S. ground forces enter Afghanistan, Pakistan's nuclear program "cannot remain safe."

Although Pakistani President Musharraf banned radical organizations months ago and recently placed a virulent pro-Taliban religious leader under house arrest, Western diplomats say his government has been reluctant to crack down on groups supporting the Kashmir cause or to attack their sources of funding.

To Mr. Dar's way of thinking, it is time for those fighting for the independence of Kashmir to emerge from the shadow of Pakistan's influence and get back to their roots. "Our cause wasn't created in Pakistan," he says. "It's created from our own soil."

Mr. Dar, now 42, says he wants to return to his family's fruit orchards in Kashmir's lush valleys, resuming the schoolteacher career he abandoned long ago. But until Kashmir is free of Indian control, he plans to train his four sons in the life and tactics of the mujahedeen. "I will do this for my father," he says, jabbing the air with an angry finger. "You in America will call me a terrorist, but I am a freedom fighter. You will pay for forgetting me."

Write to Peter Fritsch at peter.fritsch@wsj.com
 


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