Author: KPS Gill
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: September 26, 2008
Much is now being made of the 'indigenisation'
of Islamist extremism and terrorism in India as purportedly opposed to the
earlier Pakistan-backed terrorist activities. It is crucial, at this juncture,
to scotch emerging misconceptions on this count. Islamist terrorism in India
has always had an Indian face -- but has overwhelmingly been engineered and
directed from Pakistan, and nothing has changed in this scenario. Going back
to the March 1993 serial explosions in Mumbai, which killed 257 people and
left 713 injured, and were executed by the Dawood Ibrahim gang, for instance,
it is useful to recall that nearly 1,800 kg of RDX and a large number of detonators
and small arms had been smuggled from Pakistan through India's west coast
prior to the bombings. The operation was coordinated by Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence, and Ibrahim and a number of his gang members have since lived
under state protection in Karachi.
Similarly, Al Ummah, which was responsible
for a series of 19 explosions in February 1998, which left 50 people dead
in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, and which had established a wide
network of extremist organisations across south India, was also aided by Pakistan,
with a considerable flow of funds from Pakistan-based terror groups, often
through the Gulf. The Deendar Anjuman, headed by Zia-ul-Hassan, which orchestrated
a series of 13 explosions in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa
between May and July 2000, was, again, bankrolled by the ISI.
The then Union Minister for Home Affairs had
stated in Parliament that investigators had established linkages between the
Deendar Anjuman and Pakistan's covert intelligence agency. Hassan himself
was based at Peshawar in Pakistan, where the sect was established under the
name of Anjuman Hizbullah, and he is said to have floated a militant group,
the Jamaat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in Pakistan, in order to 'capture India and
spread Islam'.
It is entirely within this paradigm that the
evolution of Students Islamic Movement of India as a terrorist group is located.
Absent the support and involvement of Pakistan's covert agencies and an enduring
partnership with a range of Pakistan-based or backed terrorist groups, SIMI
may have had an amateur flirtation with terrorism, an impulse that would quickly
have been exhausted with a handful of low-grade and at least occasionally
accidental bomb blasts. Instead, its leadership and cadre have had a long
apprenticeship alongside Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Jammu &
Kashmir, and several of the more promising candidates have crossed the border
to secure 'advanced training' on Pakistani soil or in Bangladesh.
The control centre of SIMI has, for some time
now, been based in Pakistan. Operational command in a number of major attacks,
including the Samjhauta Express bombing of February 18, 2007, and the two
serial attacks in Hyderabad in May and August 2007, was known to have been
exercised by Mohammed Shahid aka Bilal. Bilal was reported to have been shot
in Karachi in September 2007, and, while Indian intelligence sources remain
sceptical, no confirmed sighting has subsequently been reported. Operational
control thereafter has shifted to the Lahore-based second-in-command, Mohammad
Amjad.
I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that
Pakistan's ISI -- as an organ of the country's military and political establishment
-- has been, and remains, the principal source of the impetus, the infrastructure
and the organisational networks of what is inaccurately called 'Islamist'
terrorism across the world. An overwhelming proportion of so-called 'Islamist'
terrorism is, in fact, simply 'ISI terrorism'.
While the Indian establishment remains unusually
coy about this reality -- with fitful and often quickly qualified exception
-- some measure of satisfaction may now be derived from a growing American
recognition of Pakistan's pernicious role as an abiding source of Islamist
terrorism. Had this recognition come in the first weeks after 9/11, that could
have saved thousands of lives, most significantly in Afghanistan and India,
but also in Europe and across Asia.
Nevertheless, Western commentators and Governments
are now increasingly acknowledging Pakistan's duplicity in the 'global war
on terror', the proclivity to act as an 'on-and-off ally of Washington'. While
providing fitful cooperation in US anti-terrorism efforts, The Washington
Times notes, "in other ways, Pakistan aids and abets terror. US officials
say that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence... was behind
the recent bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul. And the Pakistani Government's
refusal to confront Al Qaeda has helped create a de facto safe haven for the
group and its allies in locations like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
region of Pakistan".
US Intelligence officials, The Washington
Times notes further, compare "Al Qaeda's operational and organisational
advantages in the FATA to those it enjoyed in Afghanistan prior to September
11", and warn that "Al Qaeda was training and positioning its operatives
to carry out attacks in the West, probably including the United States".
These disclosures coincide with reports that
President George W Bush had secretly approved orders in July 2008, allowing
American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan
without the prior approval of the Pakistani Government. US Forces have executed
numerous missile attacks from unmanned Predator drones on Pakistani soil in
the past, but the September 3, 2008, attack by NATO and US ground troops at
a Taliban-Al Qaeda stronghold in South Waziristan was the first instance in
which troops had participated. The incident has already been followed by drone
attacks on September 9 on a seminary run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, in which 20
people, including some senior Al Qaeda operatives, were killed; and on September
12 at Tul Khel in North Waziristan, in which an Al Badr Mujahideen commander
was targeted. Haqqani, it is significant, was known to have engineered the
attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, using a LeT suicide cadre Hamza Shakoor,
a Pakistani from Gujranwala district, on behalf of the ISI.
The increasing frequency of US-NATO attacks
-- manned or unmanned -- into Pakistani territory, and the Bush Administration's
approval of Special Operations into Pakistan without prior sanction from Islamabad,
has reconfirmed the country's status as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists
and an area of growing anxiety for the world. There is, however, still very
little understanding of how heavy and sustained the Pakistani footprint has
been in Islamist terrorist activities across the globe. The enormity of this
'footprint' is, for instance, reflected in the long succession of terrorist
incidents, arrests and seizures, separately, in India, the US and Europe,
in which a Pakistani link has been suspected or confirmed.
