Author: Jay Solomon, Zahid Hussain,
and Keith Johnson
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: July 22, 2005
Islamist Militias Still Operate
After Ban by Musharraf; Some Havens for al Qaeda.
In March 2004, al Qaeda leaders
gathered at a mud hut in Pakistan's remote tribal regions for a summit
meeting. Among those who attended, according to senior Pakistani intelligence
officials, was a Libyan operative described as Osama bin Laden's top operational
planner. Another attendee, Abu Issa al Hindi, now faces terrorism-related
charges in the U.S.
On the agenda that day were plans
to carry out attacks in Britain, say Pakistani officials involved in the
capture of al Qaeda members in recent months. British and Pakistani intelligence
officials are now exploring whether there's a link to the July 7 London
bombings.
Yesterday, explosions shut down
three London subway stations and blew out the windows of a double-decker
bus. One casualty was reported. The bombs appeared to be weaker than those
used two weeks earlier.
Al Qaeda's possible role in the
July 7 bombings and the latest attacks remains murky, but one thing is
clear to South Asia analysts and Western intelligence officials: Pakistan
continues to be a principal recruiting ground and logistical center for
global terrorists. This is despite three years of military operations by
the U.S. and Pakistan to root out al Qaeda and Taliban members in the remote
tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf,
a U.S. ally, has banned many militant Islamic organizations and tightened
regulations on religious seminaries, or madrassas, that have provided recruits
to al Qaeda and the Taliban. Yesterday, Gen. Musharraf, in a televised
speech to the country, issued a fresh ban against militant Islamic groups
and their fund-raising activities. He gave madrassas a December deadline
to register with the government.
Gen. Musharraf's moves to date have
had little effect, say South Asian and Western officials. Among the reasons:
Pakistan's armed forces have been reluctant to crack down on militias that
have helped Pakistan defend its claim on Kashmir, a territory it disputes
with India, even though those militias also may be connected with terrorist
elements. Also, Gen. Musharraf's government relies on support from political
parties that are often sympathetic to the aspirations of Islamic militants.
These militants hold influence within the Pakistani army, making it hard
for the president to implement a thorough crackdown.
Pakistan emerges as a common thread
in recent terrorism investigations. Three of the four suspected London
suicide bombers apparently traveled to Pakistan within the past year, where
they are believed to have met militant groups and possibly trained with
them, Pakistani officials say. Last September, Spanish police broke up
a cell of Pakistani nationals in Barcelona who police say had sent at least
$18,000 to al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan -- among them a man who is a
chief suspect in the plot to kidnap and murder Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl.
Another al Qaeda operative, computer
expert Naeem Noor Khan, was arrested in July 2004 in Lahore, Pakistan.
He had with him photos and contact lists detailing a terrorism campaign
targeted at London's Heathrow Airport, the World Bank building in Washington
and other places.
Some of Pakistan's most active Islamist
militias, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, continue to operate openly
in parts of Pakistan, even though Gen. Musharraf banned their activities
in 2002. U.S. and British authorities are concerned that Lashkar is allying
itself with al Qaeda and recruiting members from the Pakistani diaspora.
"Since 9/11, there are only really
two prominent places in the world where you can train for jihad: Iraq and
Pakistan," says Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at the United States
Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan federal think tank in Washington. "If
you're a young Muslim male looking for training, Pakistan is where you're
likely to find the opportunity, particularly if you have family and ethnic
ties there."
In his speech yesterday, Gen. Musharraf
expressed displeasure with the criticism of Pakistan following the July
7 London bombing. While three of the bombers' parents are of Pakistani
descent, he said, the men were products of Britain, not Pakistan. "We certainly
have a problem here which we are trying to address very strongly. May I
say England also has a problem that needs to be addressed," Gen. Musharraf
said. Extremist groups "operate with full impunity" in Britain including
ones that "had the audacity to pass an edict against my life," said the
Pakistani president, who has been the target of assassination attempts.
The arrest last year of Mr. Khan,
the computer expert, was critical in helping authorities link al Qaeda's
senior commanders in Pakistan to terrorist cells in Europe and the U.S.
Mr. Khan, then 28, is the son of a Pakistan International Airlines pilot
and traveled often to Europe and the Middle East when he was young.
According to multiple officials
involved in the investigation, Pakistani agents traced Mr. Khan's emails
and found he was communicating both with suspected al Qaeda operatives
in the U.K. and with commanders in the South Waziristan district of Pakistan's
tribal areas. In interrogations, Mr. Khan said he sent encrypted messages
of terrorist plots, sometimes by couriers on mules, to operations commanders
based in caves, according to these officials.
U.S. and British authorities ultimately
were forced to cut short a surveillance operation on the British cell after
concerns mounted that an attack could be imminent. Investigators in Pakistan
had found specific "targeting sites" on Mr. Khan's computer, including
pictures of London's Heathrow Airport and British mass transit systems.
In London, British authorities, using leads from Mr. Kahn's arrest, found
photos on suspects' computers of the World Bank headquarters in Washington
and the Prudential Corporate Plaza building in Newark, N.J.
That caused the U.S. Department
of Homeland Security to raise its terror alert to orange in August 2004.
While some experts at the time played down the likelihood that these U.S.
buildings could be targets, it remains unclear what the users of these
computers were planning.
Among those arrested in sweeps inside
Pakistan and Britain following Mr. Khan's arrest were Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani,
a Tanzanian al Qaeda member indicted by the U.S. for the bombings of two
U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. The most prized catch for the U.S. was
Mr. Hindi, the man reported to have been an attendee at the March 2004
summit meeting. He is believed to have been a senior al Qaeda operative
in Europe and is linked to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Mr. Hindi was indicted by the U.S. in April on charges of conspiring to
use weapons of mass destruction and conspiring to destroy buildings.
The young computer expert, Mr. Khan,
was also connected to the cell of Pakistani nationals in Barcelona. He
was one of the recipients of the money the Spanish cell sent to Pakistan.
In April of this year a Spanish investigating magistrate described the
11-man cell in a writ seeking to keep the men imprisoned until trial. The
writ says the cell provided funding and a possible escape plan to one of
the alleged masterminds of the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid, Rabei
Osman Said Ahmed, a k a Mohamed the Egyptian, who is now facing trial in
Italy over separate terrorism charges. Another member of the cell was allegedly
in charge of establishing sleeper cells in Scandinavia.
To raise funds for a "global jihad,"
the cell got involved in drug trafficking, credit-card fraud and extortion,
the writ says. Police found 141 grams of heroin, precision scales and machines
used in making fake credit cards in one of the houses used as a meeting
place by cell members, in addition to the equivalent of $22,000 in cash.
European law-enforcement agencies
are taking a harder look at Pakistani militant groups that traditionally
were thought to have at most loose ties to al Qaeda. One of these groups
is Lashkar-e-Taiba, or "Army of the Pure," an Islamist militia that has
long trained Pakistani recruits for fighting in Kashmir. It also has a
long relationship with the Pakistani military and intelligence services.
In March of this year, British police
arrested Palvinder Singh, a 29-year-old British national of Pakistani descent,
in Coventry for alleged links to Lashkar. The group is outlawed in Britain.
Mr. Singh and two others were charged with conspiracy to fund terrorism
and conspiracy to acquire equipment for terrorism. Law-enforcement officials
say the arrests are part of a major, previously undisclosed operation by
Scotland Yard to roll up Lashkar's British cells.
Some officials say Gen. Musharraf
has put less emphasis on dismantling home-grown Pakistani militant groups,
even though he banned many of them in 2002. On one subject the government
and the militants have traditionally been in full agreement: Kashmir, control
of which is split between India and Pakistan. Pakistani government propaganda
distributed at some overseas embassies depicts the Indian-controlled part
of Kashmir as a horror zone in which Indian-sponsored terrorists rape and
kill Muslims.
Western experts say that if Gen.
Musharraf is taking a soft line toward domestic militant groups because
he wants their help in Kashmir or Afghanistan, it is a flawed strategy
because the line between al Qaeda and these groups has increasingly blurred.
Pakistan "cooperated rigorously
in going after al Qaeda, but went very slow in going after Taliban and
groups operating inside Kashmir," says Ashley Tellis, who was senior director
for Southwest Asia at the National Security Council during President Bush's
first term and now is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington. "This works in theory but not in practice."
A visit to an Islamic center just
outside Lahore, called Marzak-Dawa-al-Rasad, or MDI, is indicative of how
Pakistan's militant culture continues to thrive. MDI is the parent organization
of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and its founder, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, was previously
the militia's chief before it was banned in 2002. Today, Mr. Saeed and
his religious colleagues actively preach the necessity for jihad.
Mr. Saeed, a 60-year-old former
university professor, proudly recounts attacks his army led on India as
recently as 2001. The killing of "infidels" and the destruction of the
forces of "evil and disbelief" is the obligation of every pious Muslim,
says Mr. Saeed. He calls Mr. bin Laden "a man of extraordinary qualities,"
but Lashkar leaders have denied that the group is part of the al Qaeda
network.
The compound houses an Islamic university,
a farm, a clothing factory and a carpentry workshop. The university promotes
the austere Wahabi version of Islam and offers students boot-camp-like
physical training, according to university officials.
Meanwhile, Lashkar has changed its
name to Jammat-ul-Dawa, or Islamic "Preaching Core," and solicits new recruits
for the Kashmir conflict in Lahore and other cities. The group continues
to publish magazines and operate a Web site. Currently there is an official
cease-fire in Kashmir as the Indian and Pakistani governments conducts
peace talks, but Indian officials claim that recent attacks in Kashmir
have been supported by militant groups inside Pakistan.
In Pakistan's tribal areas of Baluchistan
and the Northwest Frontier Province, the Taliban still train and recruit
without government interference. In the Baluch cities of Quetta and Chaman,
the Taliban's presence is particularly strong, and U.S. and Afghan military
commanders complain that Pakistan is providing sanctuary and aid to the
militias they're fighting. Pashtunabad, a congested slum district in Quetta,
is a hotbed of former Taliban activists. Several exiled former Taliban
leaders are believed to have taken refuge there.
The main madrassa in the neighborhood
is run by Maulana Noor Mohammed, a member of Pakistan's national assembly,
who belongs to an alliance of conservative Islamic parties allied with
Gen. Musharraf's government. Mr. Mohammed believes the Taliban's version
of political Islam will flourish again someday across South Asia. "The
Taliban will ultimately triumph," he said in an interview at the madrassa,
the majority of whose students are Afghan refugees.
Efforts by Gen. Musharraf's government
to regulate the more than 10,000 madrassas in Pakistan have stalled in
part because they continue to get support from Pakistanis overseas and
foreign Islamic charities. A report by the Brussels-based International
Crisis Group says that Pakistan's madrassas and mosques receive $1.1 billion
dollars in domestic donations every year, but the number is believed to
be significantly higher when foreign contributions are included.
Since the July 7 London bombings,
Pakistani security forces have rounded up nearly 300 suspected militants
in raids on homes and madrassas. The government has pledged again to weed
out the militancy taught in the madrassas. Gen. Musharraf, in his speech
yesterday, said he would act against newspapers that spread hatred and
told the nation it was at a crossroads in choosing between progressive
or "retrogressive" Islam.
--David Crawford in Berlin contributed
to this article.
