India wants "terrorism infrastructure" dismantled

By Rina Chandran

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Wednesday "the infrastructure of terrorism" must be dismantled, remarks clearly directed at rival Pakistan.

Singh is to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani on Thursday on the sidelines of a summit in Egypt of the Non-Aligned Movement, the latest high-level bilateral talks between the two nations that are aimed at defusing tension.

New Delhi has long called on Pakistan to disarm Pakistan-based militant groups, including one it blames for last year's attack on Mumbai, although Singh did not mention Islamabad in his address.

"The infrastructure of terrorism must be dismantled and there should be no safe haven for terrorists because they do not represent any cause, group or religion," Singh said in his speech in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

"Terrorists and those who aid and abet them must be brought to justice," he told presidents and others top officials from the 118-member Non-Aligned Movement.

The two states' foreign secretaries, India's Shivshankar Menon and Pakistan's Salman Bashir, met late on Tuesday.

"They had good, detailed discussions," said one source with knowledge of the talks.

Thursday's meeting will be the third high-level meeting between the two countries since last year's Mumbai attacks derailed any rapprochement, which could improve stability across the region as far as Afghanistan. 

But hopes for a thaw have been overshadowed by a row over what India sees as Pakistan's failure to take action against the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group blamed for last year's attacks on Mumbai.

DIALOGUE

India said the Mumbai assault was carried out by Pakistani militants who must have had help from Pakistani security agents. Pakistan has denied any involvement by state agencies and says it will prosecute militants suspected of involvement.

Pakistan is keen to revive the five-year-old "composite dialogue" covering all disputes between the two countries.

But Singh has insisted it must first show it is serious about taking action against Lashkar-e-Taiba, as well as against other militant groups that launch attacks in the Indian part of the disputed Kashmir region and elsewhere in the country.

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik said at the weekend Pakistan had completed its investigation into five suspects accused of links to the Mumbai attack, and they were expected to be put on trial this week.

Pakistan handed a fresh dossier on its probe into the attack to India on Saturday. The suspects include Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Singh, who has said he was willing to meet Pakistan "more than half way" if it cracked down on militants, may be prompted to make a conciliatory gesture ahead of a visit to India by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The United States is keenly interested in resumption of talks between the two countries to ease tensions on Pakistan's eastern border with India, so it can focus on fighting Taliban militants on its western border with Afghanistan.

(Additional reporting by Cynthia Johnston and Alastair Sharp)

Mumbai: The Uneducable Indian
Ajai Sahni
Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management

A long derided Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil has been forced out; Maharashtra State Home Minister, R.R. Patil has succumbed to public and media pressure and resigned after a crass comment that "such things keep happening in big cities"; the Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, is tottering on the verge of resignation after engaging in some heedless ‘disaster tourism’ at the devastated Taj Mahal Hotel; other heads are poised to roll. Has the latest Mumbai carnage pushed India beyond the ‘tipping point’ in its responses to terrorism? Is it now possible to expect a radical break with past patterns, where each major incident has been followed – to borrow a phrase applied to the Left parties during the nuclear debate, but which accurately describes the entire political class in this country – by some "running around like headless chickens", to lapse quickly into a habitual torpor? And can India’s polarized and unprincipled political parties come to a consensual understanding and strategy on counter-terrorism, instead of subordinating the national interest to partisan electoral calculations and the politics of ‘vote banks’?

Regrettably, there are already too many signs that it is going to be ‘business as usual’ in India.

At the height of the confrontation in Mumbai, L.K. Advani, the Leader of the Opposition and the man projected as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Prime Ministerial candidate in the coming elections next year, kindled a spark of hope, calling for an all-party consensus on counter-terrorism, and declaring, "at this juncture, the country needs to fight the terrorist menace resolutely and stand together". However, even before the fighting had ended, partisan political sniping had commenced on the round-the-clock television coverage and debates, and this has escalated to a point of viciousness even while the debris of the attacks is being cleared out. Crucially, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh convened an all-party meeting at Delhi on December 1, 2008, Advani and BJP President, Rajnath Singh, chose to absent themselves, though V.K. Malhotra, Deputy Leader of the BJP Parliamentary Party, did attend.

Governmental responses, moreover, show little sign of coming to terms with the enormity of the issue. The Prime Minister has chosen to emphasise amendments to the prevailing laws on terrorism – currently a set of toothless provisions inserted in 2005 into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 – and the mirage of a Federal Investigation Agency that is intended to make all terrorism in the country miraculously vanish, simply because it pretends to imitate the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in nomenclature and intent. Neither of these initiatives, however, has any potential whatsoever to contain the rampage of terrorism across a country that remains pitifully under-policed, with a paper thin intelligence cover concentrated in a few urban centres and strategic locations. There has also been a reiteration of assurances that ‘maritime security’ will be beefed up, with more power and resources to the Coast Guard and Coastal Police Stations, and better coordination between these Forces, and with the Navy. But this is all tired old stuff and has been articulated ad nauseum, since 2001, with little evidence of change in capacities on the ground. Indeed, the critical capacities – those for policing – are actually undergoing continuing erosion, with the latest National Crime Records Bureau Report indicating that the police – population ratio for the country at large actually declined from an abysmal 126/100,000 in 2006 to 125/100,000 in 2007.

Of course, a few random sanctions for augmentation of capacities have been announced in the wake of past attacks – including the sanction of 6,000 additional personnel for the Intelligence Bureau (IB), immediately after the serial blasts in Delhi on September 13, 2008. Given the country’s turgid and obstructive bureaucracy, however, there are no signs of these sanctions resulting in an augmentation of capacities on the ground any time soon. The very idea of responding on a war footing, cutting through red tape and existing institutional limitations, does not appear to exist in any aspect of the country’s counter-terrorism responses.

And then, of course, there is a question of response to the very obvious role of Pakistan – and this is a palpable dead end. Even preliminary investigations have thrown up overwhelming evidence that every string of control in the multiple terrorist strikes in Mumbai leads back to Pakistan and to the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) – an organization that, under its new identity as the Jamaat-ud-Dawa continues to enjoy direct state support in Pakistan. In a rare outburst, Prime Minister Singh warned unnamed "neighbours" that "the use of their territory for launching attacks on us will not be tolerated, and that there would be a cost if suitable measures are not taken by them." His Government is now reportedly "under pressure" to act against Pakistan, and a range of hair-brained responses are doing the rounds in official circles, including massive troop mobilization along the border, mimicking the purposeless massing of troops under Operation Parakram, launched on December 16, 2001, after the terrorist attack on India’s Parliament. 680 soldiers were killed, without a single shot being fired, by the time Operation Parakram was, inexplicably, called off on October 16, 2002, with the unsupported claim that its undefined "objectives" had been achieved. If this worthless and counter-productive exercise is the model to be replicated in the present case, it would be no less than tragic. If, on the other hand, it is not, then there is little capacity – at this juncture – to design effective alternatives, in the foreseeable future, to impose any "cost" on Pakistan, and such capacities can only be constructed, gradually and systematically, over time, and with a clear strategy in mind – and there is little evidence of the latter at this juncture.

Indeed, the overwhelming focus of the Indian response to Pakistan’s role – either as the source of these attacks, or more direct involvement of the state’s agencies in engineering or facilitating them – appears to be concentrated on diplomatic efforts to bring international pressure to bear on Pakistan. This has been an apparently successful initiative, with world leaders coming out with some of the most unambiguous condemnations of the incident and commitments to support India’s efforts to address the problem in all its dimensions. Crucially, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive at Delhi on December 3, on a visit that many expect (or, more likely, hope) will produce more than just a very strong ‘message’ to Islamabad. While all this will certainly make the powers that be in Pakistan squirm a bit, there is little reason to believe that the dynamic that has protected them in past and even greater transgressions, both in the region and well beyond, will not, once again, reassert itself. The truth is, it is not just India that is powerless to impose any unbearable pain on the basket case that is Pakistan – the ‘international community’, particularly including USA – are no better positioned. It is useful to recall, here, that US intelligence agencies concurred with Afghan and Indian agencies, that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) had engineered the terrorist bombing of the Indian Embassy on July 7, 2008, and there had been great expectations, at that juncture as well, that this would result in stronger action against Islamabad. Pakistan, however, has weathered many such storms and its diplomats and proxies are quick to range across the world peddling their theories of root causes and Muslim grievance to ever-willing audiences in the West and, indeed, even in victim countries such as India.

In the meanwhile, the attack in Mumbai has done what may well be irreparable damage to the "shining" image of the "emerging global power". The utter incapacity and incompetence of India’s security apparatus has been incontrovertibly demonstrated in what may be an audacious attack by as few as 10 terrorists (nine have been confirmed killed and one is currently in custody, singing like a canary). It is crucial, here, to notice the exemplary courage, exemplary leadership and exemplary dedication to duty, among those who responded from the security forces, who were given virtually nothing to fight with, and who still put everything they had into the fight, with many losing their lives. Their personal commitment and attainment notwithstanding, the reality of the institutional and structural responses is disgraceful. While a detailed analysis of the counter-terrorism (CT) operation must wait till far more information is available, a few aspects are already evident.

The most significant of these is the sheer tardiness and inadequacy of response. The first shots in the multiple attacks in Mumbai were fired at about 21:40 in the evening of November 26, and the incident was already on national television by 22:00 (all timings are approximate and based on available open source reportage). Local Police contingents – including the Anti-terrorism Squad (ATS) headed by Hemant Karkare, who lost his life in the encounter – responded fairly quickly, but, lacking protective equipment, firepower and even the most rudimentary CT training, with tragic consequences, losing top line Police leaders in the very first engagements. After that, the world witnessed the most astonishing paralysis, as the locations of attack were loosely cordoned off by variously armed Police contingents, but no forces appeared equipped or willing to enter and engage for hours following. It was evident that even the most basic of response protocols had not been established, and the word repeatedly occurring in every live report in these long initial hours was "chaotic". As one commentator in the New York Times noted, "The grainy television imagery suggested not so much a terrorist attack as the shapeless, omnidirectional chaos of Iraq." Local contingents of the Army – arriving at about 02:50, more than five hours after the incident commenced – brought some semblance of order to the incident environments, but still did not enter the major sites of ongoing terrorist carnage. The first ‘special response team’ to arrive was a small group of Marine Commandos (Marcos), who actually sought engagement with the terrorists – but their own accounts suggest that they were not able to neutralize a singly terrorist before they were pulled out. Eventually, a 200-strong contingent of the ‘elite’ National Security Guard (NSG) was deployed at 08:05, in the morning of November 27, and this is the point at which the terrorists can seriously be considered to have been engaged. But the NSG went into the locations blind – with no maps of the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Oberoi-Trident complex initially available – and were extraordinarily tentative, unsure weather they were dealing with a hostage situation, and transfixed by their fear of inflicting civilian casualties – the reality eventually disclosed was that the massacres in the three principal sites, the two hotels and Nariman House, where a Jewish family was trapped, were over long before the NSG engaged. The result was a stand-off that lasted all of 62 hours.

There is also, of course, the long succession of intelligence warnings that were given to the State Government, and that were also passed on to the security establishments of the hotels under threat, but even the limited security measures that were implemented by both local Police and the hotel security apparatus were, as Praveen Swami notes, "lifted a week before the attacks, after businesses and residents complained of inconvenience." Swami, quotes an unnamed Police source, further, as stating, "We also removed additional security… because our manpower was stretched to the limit and the personnel we had did not, in any case, have the specially-trained personnel needed to avert a suicide-squad attack."

The Maharashtra State Government has tried to package this operation as a grand success, arguing that the terrorists had "come to kill 5,000 people" and to "blow up the Taj" (both pieces of unmitigated nonsense), and that, consequently, the eventual loss of life and damage to various structure, was not ‘as high as it could have been’. The reality, however, is that the multiple attacks – at 11 different locations – by a tiny contingent of terrorists, inflicting 195 fatalities (the figure is tentative, with numbers still rising, and pending official confirmation) and leaving over 300 injured, and virtually devastating two major locations (the Taj and the Oberoi-Trident), fully achieved their attainable potential and were complete successes from the point of view of their planners. They cannot, consequently, be thought of as anything but comprehensive failures from the point of view of India’s security establishment. Indeed, the Mumbai carnage shows every mark of a botched operation from the security point of view. If anything, security forces’ (SF) action appears to have trapped the terrorists in the locations, blocking off their avenues of planned escape – even as it gave them significant freedom of operation within them – instead of quickly neutralizing them, and protracting the carnage for an incredible 62 hours.

Despite the extraordinary courage and evident commitment of SF personnel and leaders, the reality is that there was a comprehensive structural failure in Mumbai. Any terrorist operation can only be contained, in terms of its potential, in the first few minutes. Which means that the "first responders" – invariably the local Police – have to be equipped, trained and capable of, if not neutralising, then, at least, containing the terrorists. If the first batches of Police personnel had arrived in sufficient strength at each of the locations of terrorist attack in Mumbai, with appropriate weaponry, communications, transport and other technological force multipliers (such as, for instance, night vision goggles and thermal imaging systems for the major standoffs in the Taj, Oberoi-Trident and Nariman House) and immediately engaged with the terrorists, they probably would have been able, in at least these three locations, to isolate the terrorists in small corners of the target structures and would have been able to minimise the loss of life, the material damage, and the operational time.

Many journalists ask the routine question after each of the increasingly frequent major terrorist strikes across India: why did this happen again? The more rational question, given India’s capacities for intelligence, enforcement and CT response, is: why does this not happen more often?

Imitative mantras, such as "strong laws" and "federal agency" will not diminish the threat of terrorism that confronts India. It is only the hard slog of building effective capacities – not incrementally, in terms of what we already have, but radically, in terms of what we need – on a war footing, that will help diminish the enveloping and, progressively, crippling, threat of terrorism confronting India. Only this can help the Government recover from the loss of public confidence and of international prestige that this devastating attack has inflicted on the nation. Regrettably, a national leadership – across party lines – that has repeatedly betrayed the national security interest for partisan political gains, does not demonstrate the necessary capacities for learning that can create defences within any time frame that could be immediately relevant to the trajectory of terrorism in the country.

Pakistan's Role in the Emergence and Radicalization of the Jihadist Movement

By Ely Karmon

November 2008

This is the draft of an article forthcoming in the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR)Paper Series

Pakistan's political instability and the ever-increasing worry about violence and terrorism inside the second largest Muslim country in the world, its influence on the Islamist activities in bordering countries (Afghanistan, India, China, Iran, Uzbekistan) and well beyond in the streets of the West, has stimulated the publication of hundreds of articles on this subject.

This paper will give a short comprehensive overview of Pakistan's historical role in the emergence, development and radicalization of jihadist movements since the 1980s, not only locally and regionally, but worldwide too. This role is multi-faceted;ideological, strategic, operational and a result of direct or indirect support by the various Pakistani governments. The paper will not touch on other important historical, ethnical, socio-psychological and economic aspects of the problem that could provide an alternative understanding of Pakistan's riddle.

An Indian researcher, P.B. Sihna, described Pakistan as "the chief patron-promoter of Islamic militancy and terrorism." Although an Indian observer can be suspected in this case as sharing a of lack of objectivity, the facts presented by many other experts tend to support his view.

Ideological roots and strategic circumstances

Political Islam has always been a reality in Pakistan since its birth in 1947. It is likely that Political Islam exhibits greater influence on the country’s overall Muslim population than the myriad of extremist groups combined. The clearest manifestation of Political Islam is within the creation of the Jama’at al-Islami (JI), Pakistan’s first and largest political party founded by the late Maulana Mawdudi (1903-79), a Sunni Pakistani theologian, political philosopher, and influential 20th century Islamic revivalistwhose work on Islamic resurgence and doctrine defines the group’s activities and membership.

When he speaks of "Islamic nationality", Mawdudi means allegiance to the umma, which he envisaged as a sort of Islamic super-nation uniting all Muslims in the world into a single, indivisible community. He asserted a bi-polar worldview that juxtaposed the Islamic sphere with all else and insisted that Muslims should completely isolate themselves from those he deemed not to be Muslims. The struggle to make this change is known as jihad.

Mawdudi emphasized the importance and centrality of jihad – which is defined as a military act: "So go ahead and fight, and remove the rebels of God from the government and take over the powers of caliphate." Jihad means to struggle to the utmost of one’s capacity. In one arresting passage, Mawdudi praised the inculcation in Islamic soldiers of "an impulsive longing to sacrifice themselves" and claims that this originates within Islam itself: For Mawdudi, who campaigned for Pakistan’s independence from India, jihad was akin to a war of liberation for the establishment of  politically independent Muslim states. He significantly changed the concept of jihad in Islam and began its association with anticolonialism and “national liberation movements.”

His many writings, translated into every major language spoken by Muslims, provide a panoramic view of the ideal fundamentalist state. In this state, sovereignty would belong to God alone, and would be exercised on his behalf by a just ruler, himself guided by a reading of God's law in its entirety. As an ideological state, it would be administered for God solely by Muslims who adhered to its ideology, and "whose whole life is devoted to the observance and enforcement" of Islamic law. Mawdudi was certain that the Islamic state would be "the very antithesis of secular Western democracy." He himself never had a sufficient following to make a concerted bid for power in Pakistan.

Mawdudi's ideas were carried to their ultimate conclusion by an Egyptian Muslim Brother, Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). Qutb borrowed heavily from Mawdudi's vision of an Islamic state, but he broke new ground in his analysis of how to realize it. Mawdudi had written about the need for a "revolution" to create an Islamic state, but he believed this revolution had to be prepared by a long campaign of persuasion. Qutb helped shape the consciousness of many politically active Muslims, and like Mawdudi, produced a discourse that created an identity, provided a world-view, and presented a critique of modernity and a polemic against the West, transforming him into the spiritual father of al-Qaeda.

Mawdudi's ideas set the agenda for Islamic movements from Morocco to Malaysia. From his revivalist efforts came the inspiration to re-achieve the glory that is Islam. The Iranian revolution of 1979 had its roots in this thought. Maulana Syed Sulaiman Nadvi once called Maududi “Islam’s Spokesman.”

Zia-ul-Haq, the military ruler who came to power in Pakistan through a coup d’état in 1977, strengthened the Islamic Ideology Council, revitalized the religious ministry, appointed the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) as his advisors in 1978 and declared himself the "soldier of Islam." Many aspects of Islamic militancy were introduced during General Zia-ul-Haq's rule.

Therefore, the legacy left by Zia-ul-Haq during the late 1970s and through to the early 1990s further solidified the government’s ties to extremist groups. A senior Pakistani editor defined the 1980’s as a period when Pakistan’s intelligentsia “exploited the fanaticism of the jihadi warriors to fight Pakistan's proxy wars for it in Afghanistan, and later in Kashmir. In pursuing this strategy, the military acted as a midwife, giving birth to a murderous jihadi culture which went on to consume it.”

Radical madrasas in Pakistan

Madrasas are Islamic religious seminaries, usually established by a cleric of some importance. Madrasas owe their allegiance to various Sunni and Shia Islamic schools. Sunni madrasas adhere to different doctrines, such as those of the Deobandi, Ahle Hadith and Brelvi schools of thought. Depending on their doctrinal leanings, individual madrasas are aligned with different federations, the most prominent of which are Wafaq-ul-Madaris al-Arabia, Tanzeem-ul-Madaris Ahle Sunnat, Wafaq-ul-Madaris Shia, and Rabiat-ul-Madaris al-Islamia. Wafaq-ul-Madaris represents the Deobandi school of thought, and has the largest number of followers.

The vast majority of madrasas pursue highly political activities that set them apart from non-religious schools. The madrasas' role in issuing Darul Iftas – religious edicts for individuals and organizations seeking legal opinion or Islamic legitimacy for their actions – also fuels sectarian tension. The poisonous material published by different sectarian organizations such as books, pamphlets, audio and videocassettes is widely distributed in madrasas and many madrasas have developed their own print and electronic media outlets. Examining the roots of sectarianism in Karachi, a report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan describes this material as “the single major source of increasing sectarianism in the country”.

Pakistan has seen a phenomenal 2745 % increase in Islamic madrasas since its independence in 1947 until 2001. In 2002, the International Crisis Group (ICG) estimated that 10,000 private madrasas with 1.5 million students representing 33 percent of total enrolment in Pakistan operated with very little monitoring by the government.

According to Ali Riaz, Associate Professor at the Illinois State University, the transformation of madrasas into schools of militancy and a recruiting ground of "global Jihadists" is intrinsically linked to the sectarianism encouraged by various regimes over the last three decades. The convergence of the Iranian revolution, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the CIA-ISI(the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) nexus to create a band of militant Islamists, the Islamisation program of the military regime of Zia-ul-Haq and the unremitting flow of external funding for ideology-based religious education, mainly from Saudi Arabia, have accelerated the process.

General Naseerullah Babar, Benazir Bhutto's interior minister (1993-1996), cultivated the young Afghans, mostly religious teachers (ustaad), who led the anti-Soviet resistance. As a result of Bhutto's policies, the early prototypes of the militant madrasa emerged in Pakistan.

The message of jihad in the madrasas was originally targeted against communism, to ensure a continued supply of recruits for the Afghan resistance and the holy war against the Soviet Union. International patrons supplied arms and religious literature that flooded Pakistani madrasas, including special textbooks in Dari and Pashtu designed by the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska-Omaha under a USAID grant. Over 13 million copies were distributed at Afghan refugee camps and Pakistani madrasas "where students learnt basic math by counting dead Russians and Kalashnikov rifles".

The end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan "removed the cause célèbre," but by then the Pakistani political system "had become hostage to this tendency." Not only have these organizations survived; but since then they flourished.

The major radicalization success of madrasa education, combined with the use of violence and terrorism, came from the Taliban, who were the products of this type of Islamic education during and after the civil war in Afghanistan. By 1996, when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, the Islamist Pakistani organizations with the active support of the Pakistani government became the warehouse of militant supplies for the Kashmir conflict.

In 2000, the Khudamudeen madrasa trained students from Burma, Nepal, Chechnya, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Yemen, Mongolia, and Kuwait. Out of the 700 students at the madrasa, 127 were foreigners. Nearly half the student body at Darul Uloom Haqqania, the madrasa that created the Taliban, were from Afghanistan. It also trained students from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia, and Turkey. According to the U.S. State Department, Pakistani groups and individuals help finance and train the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist organization that aims to overthrow secular governments in Central Asia.

Since 9/11, the role of Pakistani madrasas has come under international criticism, especially for the way they enroll foreign Muslim students and for the training of a new breed of Taliban that is destabilizing the new democratic government in Afghanistan and providing safe havens to Islamist militants.

The Bush administration identified Islamic educational institutions in general and madrasas in particular as one of the principal battlegrounds in the war in Afghanistan. George Tenet, then Director of the CIA, commented on March 9, 2002 before the Senate Armed Services Committee that, "[p]rimary and secondary education in parts of the Muslim world is often dominated by an interpretation of Islam that teaches intolerance and hatred. The graduates of these schools provide the foot soldiers for many of the Islamic militant groups that operate throughout the Muslim world.”

More than five years after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared his intention to crack down on violent sectarian and jihadi groups and to regulate the network of madrasas, his government’s reform program is in shambles. Banned sectarian and jihadi groups, supported by networks of mosques and madrasas, continue to operate openly.

The madrasas' ideological role in producing extremist worldviews in Pakistan has been highlighted after the suicide bombers in the July 2005 London bombing were reported to have attended Pakistani madrasas. Their role was highlighted again in July 2007, after the female students of Jamia Hafsa and male students of Jamia Faridia madrasas – both controlled by Islamabad's Red Mosque clerics Maulana Abdul Aziz and Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi – occupied a government building for several months in Islamabad, directly challenging the authority of the Pakistani government. The stand-off led to a military operation in which Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and dozens of madrasa students were killed.

The madrasas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the tribal districts, or the federally administered tribal areas (FATAs) have been blamed also for the growth of Taliban-led militancy and a series of suicide attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last year.

Recently, there has been growing concern over the Talibanization of Karachi, the capital of the Sindh province. In an address to a conference of madrasa students and ulema in Karachi, a prominent Sunni scholar and leader of Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat Allama, Ali Sher Haideri, underlined the role of ulema, saying: ''It is the duty of the ulema to put their lives in danger in order to preach and propagate Islam.''

The 21 July 2006 suicide attack, which killed Allama Hasan Turabi, President of the Pakistan Islami Tehreek, the country’s largest Shia political party, was the latest in a long series of assassinations of prominent Shia leaders in Karachi, and sparked two days of violent protests which virtually shut down the metropolis. Bloody clashes between Sunni Deobandi and Barelvi activists for control of Sunni mosques occur regularly. On 11 April, 2007, in one of the worst massacre of its kind in Pakistan’s history, 47 people were killed and over 100 injured when a suicide bomber attacked an outdoor religious gathering held by Sunni Barelvi groups in Nishtar Park. Those killed included the three main leaders of Sunni Tehrik (ST), Deobandi's fiercest rival, and the most prominent Sunni Barelvi militant group.

JI madrasas, organized under the Tanzim Rabita al-Madaris, have long maintained links with jihadi organizations. There are 97 Rabita madrasas with over 8,000 students in Karachi who provided recruits for the Hizbul Mujahidin and boast of their “mujahid” students martyred in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bosnia.

The government of the Punjab province declared in July 2008 that 80 madrasas in the province are dangerous and ordered regular monitoring of their extremist activities. In the NWFP's Swat district, at least 26 madrasa students disappeared recently, and are believed to have been taken by the Taliban to train as suicide bombers.

Taliban - creature of Pakistan

During the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia poured $7.2 billion of covert aid into the jihad against the Soviets, the vast majority of which was channeled by the ISI to the most radical religious elements. After the Soviets withdrew, returning commanders and fighters (who set themselves up in many cases as warlords outside the authority of the tribal elders), mujahideen groups and common criminals fought over the carcass of Afghanistan.

When it became evident to Islamabad and the ISI that the anarchy in Afghanistan was counter-productive to a policy of strategic depth as well as potentially destabilizing for Pakistan, they formed the Taliban. Beginning from a minor local movement in Kandahar Province in 1994 with few weapons and money, with massive covert Pakistani financial and military support, the Taliban rose to power and took over Kabul in 1996.

Pakistan provided in the 1990s millions of dollars, arms, and "buses full of adolescent mujahid," to the Taliban according to declassified State Department documents. For example, in a meeting between the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission Alan Eastham and a source who appears to be the Pakistan Foreign Ministry official Iftikhar Murshed, the latter admitted that Pakistan provided arms supplies to the Taliban. (March 9, 1998 cable - Document 6) Another document indicated that the Pakistani Prime Minister had signed off on a 300 million rupee (approximately $6.5 million) payment to Taliban officials and military commanders (July 1, 1998 cable - Document 8).

In July 2001, the Bush administration decided to further isolate the Taliban leadership, eliminate the threat of their guest, Osama bin Laden, and put pressure on Pakistan to stop military and financial support. According to a U.S. counter-terrorism official "Arab and Pakistani Islamists are now part of the Taliban's decision making process" and the United States couldn't accept that. In a 50-page report on foreign arms supplies to all the Afghan factions, Human Rights Watch concluded that despite all the pressure, Pakistan was continuing to provide arms and ammunition to the Taliban in defiance to United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions.

Charles Santos, former Special Assistant to The Undersecretary for Political Military Affairs at the UN described in clear terms the Taliban-al-Qaeda nexus. International Islamists considered the Taliban the true representative of a pure Islamic State built upon Islam's victory over the Communist infidels. The Taliban thus became an integral part of Sunni fundamentalist mythology and its international networks, connecting them to Islamists all over the world. Afghanistan became not only a place where extremists from around the world could meet safely, share ideas, develop strategies, and receive training - a physical base of terror - it also became a symbol to extremists of the possibilities of their mission.

Pakistani support of the Taliban also allowed them to strengthen their control and expand their influence into the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan. It enabled Pakistan to relocate its training camps for Kashmiri separatists to Afghanistan, providing Pakistan with plausible deniability. Moreover, Pakistani extremist groups have functioned as umbrella organizations for other international terror groups that sought shelter in Afghanistan. "The ugly truth is that the Pakistani supported Taliban-Bin Laden extremist alliance was built on religious, cultural and ethnic domination in Afghanistan," declared Santos.

Pakistan’s ambivalence became evident in the "neutralization" of three senior Islamist Army commanders reportedly sympathetic to the Taliban who were superseded or sidelined with great publicity. The most significant of these changes was the removal of Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmad, Director General of the ISI, who had extensive linkages with the Taliban regime. Gen. Ahmad, who was in the U.S. during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also led a delegation of Pakistani mullahs (clerics) to Afghanistan apparently to negotiate Osama bin Laden’s surrender. It seems that instead of asking for bin Laden to be handed over unconditionally, Gen. Ahmed praised the efforts of Taliban Chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, in his fight against the "Great Satan", and advised him on ways to counter Washington’s planned offensive. After his dismissal, Ahmad is said to have crossed over into Afghanistan to continue to advise the Taliban regime on the course of the war.

After the demise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the world was made to believe that the movement ceased to exist. In fact, an accommodative approach towards the Taliban was adopted soon after U.S. victory in Afghanistan. President Musharraf, addressing a news conference in October 2001 in Islamabad, said that "moderate Taliban" should be part of any coalition government in Afghanistan in order to achieve "national integration." Addressing the same press conference Colin Powell also echoed the same opinion.

Pakistan’s Army, being focused against India in its operational strategy and doctrine, does not prefer any direct involvement in the military operations being undertaken against the radical elements inside the FATA. Its personnel are neither adequately trained nor equipped for counter-insurgency operations; it does not want to become embroiled in a civil war situation in the country since a substantial portion of its active-duty personnel hail from the NWFP and it has a sizeable number of religiously inclined individuals who would be unwilling to use weapons against fellow co-religionists and countrymen.

The current pro-India Karzai government is not acceptable to the Pakistan Army, which sees in Afghanistan an element of geographic strategic depth to Pakistan and strives for the presence of a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul. It can be expected, therefore, that the Pakistan Army and ISI would continue to maintain links with the Taliban while simultaneously contesting the rising Indian influence in Kabul. Such a posture might go against the policy of supporting Coalition forces fighting inside Afghanistan. The alleged involvement of the ISI in the recent terrorist attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul is a case in point

Western officials suspect that, having helped to create Afghanistan's hard-line Taliban regime, the ISI is still playing a double game in the war on terror. The NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. General David McKiernan, declared in August 2008 that there is ISI complicity in Taliban militancy along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Terrorist activities

The Jammu & Kashmir conflict

This paper will not look at the 60 years old conflict between Pakistan and India. There is already a huge amount of information and analysis by Indian, Pakistani and Western researchers, on this subject.

However, it should be stressed that various Pakistani governments have used the Kashmir issue for populist ends. The Pakistani state, artificial and disparate in its origin and traumatized by the loss of Bangladesh in the 1971 secessionist war, saw the benefit of its Muslim solidarity with Kashmir. General Zia-ul-Haq's efforts to Islamize the Pakistani state in the 1980s, by providing a religious basis for opposition to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, and for his personal rule in the country, later found his expression in support for the Islamist insurgency against Indian rule in Kashmir. India claims that Pakistan has sponsored the insurgency, and in particular its transformation in recent years from a local separatist movement to one dominated by a religious ideology.

Pakistan's insistence that it is not associated with insurgency is contradicted by a large amount of international evidence linking sections of its government - in particular the Inter Services Intelligence Bureau - with training camps and supply depots along the border. There is circumstantial evidence that links Pakistani operations in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s (during the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq) to covert operations in Kashmir after the ending of the Afghan civil war.

The Sunni - Shia divide

Pakistan had a precursor and leading role in the modern Sunni-Shia violent conflicts.

The Pakistani Shia community representing 15 to 20 % of the population, (about 25 millions) and traditionally linked to the ulema of Najaf, stayed away from politics till the mid-1970s. The Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the transposition on Pakistani soil of the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the Islamization policy launched by general Zia-ul-Haq since 1979 with the aim of transforming Pakistan into a Sunni state, have contributed to both a religious and political mobilization of the Shia community. The Tehrik-e Nifaz-e Fiqh-e Jaafria (TNFJ) later renamed Tehrik-e Jaafria (TEJ) Pakistan, a religious movement founded in 1980, became more radical from 1985 under the leadership of Allama Arif Hussein al Husseini and transformed itself into a political party in 1987. His assassination in 1988 marked the start of widespread sectarian violence which has continued since the early 1990s. To counter the growing political assertiveness of the Shias and their political party, Zia-ul-Haq encouraged and assisted Sunni extremist organizations such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP).

The anti-Shia campaign and violence in Pakistan has largely been the work of the militant Deobandi-Wahabi, a minority in Pakistan, but enjoy tremendous influence because of the support of the military-intelligence establishment and the seemingly inexhaustible flow of funds from Saudi Arabia.

The bloody sectarian war between Pakistan's Shiites and Sunnis caused a total of 1,784 Pakistanis casualties and another 4,279 injured persons across the country between January 1989 and May 31, 2005. And has continued to worsen.

An aggravating feature of this sectarian violence has been the growing number of suicide bombings in or near mosques or holy shrines and mutual assassinations of major religious leaders. Thus, on March 19, 2005, 50 people were killed and over 100 others injured during a bomb explosion near the shrine of a Shi’a saint at Fatehpur village in the Balochistan province; on May 27, 2005, at least 25 people were killed and approximately 100 injured during a suicide bombing at the Bari Imam Shia shrine in Islamabad; on February 9, 2006, 40 people were killed and 50 others wounded in a suspected suicide attack on a Muharram procession of Shia Muslims in the Hangu town of NWFP.

Al-Qaeda groups and affiliates were directly involved in this sectarian conflict. Pakistani Sunni, Taliban, and al-Qaeda combatants fought together in military campaigns in Afghanistan, most notably in the capture of Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan in 1997, which involved the wide-scale massacre of Shiites. Pakistani Sipah-i Sahabah fighters did most of the killing, and nearly precipitated a war with Iran when they captured the Iranian consulate and killed 11 Iranian diplomats.

Ramzi Yousef, now in jail in the U.S. for his involvement in the New York World Trade Centre explosion of February 1993, Maulana Masood Azhar of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), Fazlur Rahman Khalil of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, started their career as terrorists as members of the SSP and participated in many of its anti-Shia massacres in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.  The suspicion that the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) by the Pakistani authorities in Rawalpindi in March 2003 and his handing over to the FBI was a result of the betrayal of the Hazaras (Shias) of Balouchistan provoked several deadly attacks against Shias. The massacre of the Shias in Quetta in March 2004 was in reprisal partly for their suspected collaboration with the Americans in their hunt for bin Laden and partly for the murder of Maulana Azam Tariq, the leader of the SSP, allegedly by Shia extremists.

The al-Qaeda pre-9/11 terrorist activities

The thesis here is that the main reason for the success and spread of international terrorism since the end of the 1960s has been the sponsorship and support it has received from states. It began with support from most Arab states to the Palestinian terrorism in Europe, South America and SE Asia and the support given by Iran to Hizballah, Shia terrorist groups in the Gulf and a wide range of Sunni terrorist groups in Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria. Although no theoretical framework has been developed to demonstrate this paradigm there is a host of empirical information which supports the thesis.

It should be stressed that contrary to the impression given by the media and some analysts in the West concerning its so called diffuse independent networking character, al-Qaeda began life and continued its operations with the support of states:

During the 1980s it began its activity against the Soviets in Afghanistan as the Mujahedeen movement with support from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the US.

From 1990 to 1996 it worked alongside the Islamist revolutionary regime in Sudan to export revolution to Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea.

The last phase of state support, 1996-2001, was an ally of the Taliban government and Afghanistan and Pakistan were used as a base, this was successful operationally and culminated in the 9/11 attacks.

Thus, Pakistan was involved directly or indirectly for two decades in the emergence and spread of global jihadist terrorism, including during the critical years for the preparation and execution of the 9/11 attacks on U.S. soil.

Pakistan has been host to thousands of foreign jihadis since the 1980s. In most cases, their home countries were not willing to take them back, and these jihadis feared persecution if they returned to Egypt, Jordan, Yemen or Algeria. Those who did not participate in the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan moved to Pakistan and also fought alongside the Taliban. The inflow of Arabs continued even during the 1990s with an estimated 35,000 foreign students in Pakistani seminaries or working with Islamic charities or NGOs. Half were Arabs, 16,000 were Afghans and the rest came from Central Asia, Burma, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

Under pressure from Egypt (whose embassy was to be bombed in Islamabad), Algeria, and others, including Yasser Arafat (who was to be unsuccessfully targeted in Pakistan for assassination), Pakistan deported the Arab mujahedeen from Peshawar in 1991. Osama bin Laden financed the travel and false passports of 300 of them and shifted them to Sudan to continue their guerrilla training.

On January 25 1993, Mir Amal Kansi, an Islamic extremist from Pakistan, shot and killed two CIA employees at the main highway entrance to CIA headquarters in Virginia, USKansi drove off and was later captured in Pakistan.

During the FBI investigation of the February 26, 1993 bomb beneath the two towers of the World Trade Center (WTC), evidence was put forward showing that the plot was hatched at or near the Khaldan camp, a terrorist training camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. One of the conspirators, Ahmad Ajaj, had left Texas April 1992 to go there to learn how to construct bombs. He also met the mastermind of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, in Pakistan, where they discussed bombing targets in the US and assembled a “terrorist kit” that included bomb-making manuals, operations guidance, videotapes advocating terrorist action against the US, and false identification documents.

Ramzi had resided in the bin-Laden-funded Bayt al-Shuhada hostel in Peshawar for the majority of the three years before his arrest. One of his subordinates was asked to pilot a plane into CIA headquarters. Ramzi Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1995.

The investigation of the 1993 WTC bombing also discovered that the jihadist cell planned attacks against the Lincoln-Holland Tunnels, George Washington Bridge and other sites in New York. The participants actually contemplated and tried to locate radiological materials to spike the bomb so that the scene of the devastation would be contaminated and rescue operations and even a return use would be very difficult.

On 22 February 1998 Osama bin Laden announced in Pakistan the creation of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders(WIF), in association with radical groups from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Two main signatories of the statement were Mir Hamza, secretary-general of Pakistan's Ulema Society(Jamaat-ul-Ulema-i-Pakistan) and Fazlur Rahman Khalil, chief of Harkat-ul-Ansar (HuA) in Pakistan. The establishment of WIF was accompanied by two Islamic decrees (fatwas) by bin Laden and ‘The Association of Islamic Clerics in Afghanistan’ (Ittihad al-Ulama’ fi Afghanistan), declaring a religious war against the US. Critical to the formation of the coalition and its subsequent terrorist activity was the moral, political and logistical support provided by the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as Islamist movements in Pakistan.

The simultaneous truck bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998, which killed some 250 people and injured thousands, the great majority of them Africans, was the first attack by al-Qaeda after the formation of the WIF and the major one before 9/11.

After these bombings US Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea fired cruise missiles on Afghanistan on August 20, 1998. Though most of them hit the intended targets neither bin Laden nor was any other terrorist leader killed.

In October 1998, a U.S. National Security Council (NSC) counterterrorism official noted that Pakistan’s pro-Taliban military intelligence service had been training Kashmiri jihadists in one of the camps hit by US missiles, leading to the death of Pakistanis. CIA Director George Tenet concluded that the strikes had killed 20–30 people in the camps but probably missed bin Laden by a few hours. Since the missiles headed for Afghanistan had to cross Pakistan, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was sent to meet with Pakistan’s army Chief of Staff to assure him the missiles were not coming from India. Officials in Washington speculated that Pakistani officials might have sent a warning to the Taliban or bin Laden.

In the summer before the embassy bombings, the State Department’s acting counterterrorism coordinator advised State Secretary Madeleine Albright to designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, noting that despite high-level Pakistani assurances, the country’s military intelligence service continued “activities in support of international terrorism” by supporting attacks on civilian targets in Kashmir. Albright rejected the recommendation on August 5, 1998, just two days before the embassy bombings. She claimed that putting the Pakistanis on the terrorist list would eliminate any influence the US States had over them.

In May 1999, Pakistani troops were discovered to have infiltrated into an especially mountainous area of Kashmir. A limited war began between India and Pakistan, euphemistically called the “Kargil crisis,” as India tried to drive the Pakistani forces out. Bruce Riedel, the NSC staff member responsible for Pakistan, wrote to his boss Samuel Berger that Islamabad was “behaving as a rogue state in two areas - backing Taliban/UBL [bin Laden] terror and provoking war with India.”

Bin Laden and terrorism proliferation issues had become an important benchmark in US-Pakistan relations. Pakistan strengthened its co-operation with the US through the arrest and extradition to the US of Mir Aimal Kansi, Ramzi Yousef, and an Arab follower of Osama bin Laden allegedly involved in the Nairobi blasts of 1998.

However, this cooperation came quite late and under serious American pressure. As the Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Washington in December 1998, a Pakistani columnist wrote that "for Pakistan, jihadi Islam has become a double-edged sword…Beyond Kashmir, some of the battle-cries of this jihadi Islam against the selective morality of the West do strike a resonance in Pakistani hearts. Caught in this paradoxical bind, the Nawaz Sharif Government will extend Washington no support to extradite Osama...There appears to be a total unanimity among the Pakistanis…no institution - including the Foreign Office, the political leadership and the military - wants to have anything to do with Washington's anti-Osama crusade."

In October 1999, Sharif was deposed by General Pervez Musharraf. The Clinton administration hoped that Musharraf’s coup might create an opening for action on bin Laden. A career military officer, Musharraf was thought to have the political strength to confront and influence the Pakistani military intelligence service, which supported the Taliban. By late 1999, more than a year after the embassy bombings, diplomacy with Pakistan, like the efforts with the Taliban, had, according to Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, "borne little fruit.”

Terrorism in Europe and beyond

The UK - Pakistani radical platform? James Brandon claims that the Pakistan-UK axis has long been central to jihadist movements worldwide. The UK is home to at least 600,000 people of Pakistani origin, many of whom come from areas like Kashmir which have played a central role in Islamic militancy. During the 1990s, the entrenchment of Jamaat-e-Islami in mosques and Islamic organizations was one of the factors which created a radical pan-Islamist identity among British Muslims. The idea of a “covenant of security” that radical Islamist preachers said existed between them and the British government initially prevented attacks against the UK but compelled British jihadis to export their violence abroad - often in the direction of Pakistan.

In the mid-1990s, Mohammed Sohail, a Pakistani, created the Global Jihad Fund to channel donations from British Muslims to jihadis in South Asia. In the late 1990s, Babar Ahmad, used the Azzam.com website to spread pro-jihadist propaganda and to channel money, equipment and volunteers to the Taliban through Pakistan. In 1994, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a middle-class Pakistani living in the UK, traveled to Pakistan where he attended a training camp run by Harkat ul-Mujaheddin. In 2002, he kidnapped and killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

In some cases, Islamist groups had well-developed networks. During the late 1990s, al-Muhajiroun, a British radical Islamist group whose members were predominantly South Asians, sent several hundred British citizens to train in Pakistan. Following 9/11, the group openly arranged for several dozen British Muslims to travel via Pakistan to fight U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In 2004, a major police action halted plans by a local group to use fertilizer bombs to attack nightclubs in London. This plot centered around four men of Pakistani origin and one Algerian. Omar Khyam, from Crawley near London, the group’s leader, first traveled to Pakistan in January 2000 for military training in the al-Badr Mujahideen camp, a militant group in Muzaffarabad, close to Indian-controlled Kashmir. Later in 2001, after briefly returning to the UK, he attended another training camp in NWFP. Among the other targets discussed by the group were soccer matches and airliners.

In July 2004, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer technician and communications chief for al-Qaeda with ties to ethnic Pakistanis in Britain, was secretly arrested in Pakistan in a joint operation with Britain. The Pakistani authorities found a computerized archive of surveillance information on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, the Citigroup tower in Manhattan, the New York Stock Exchange and the Prudential Building in NewarkIn August several other ethnic Pakistanis allied with Khan were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder, and use "radioactive materials, toxic gases, chemicals and explosives" to cause fear, panic and disruption against unspecified targets.

The July 7 2005 bombings in the London underground in which four bombers killed 52 people marked the moment at which the idea of the “covenant” between the UK and its radical Islamists broke down. Three of the four bombers were of Pakistani origin and at least two of them had traveled to Pakistan shortly before the bombings. There they apparently met senior al-Qaeda figures, recorded their political testaments and received instructions in bomb-making. In a video released after the bombings, Ayman al-Zawahiri said that the two visited al-Qaeda camps while in Pakistan.

Two weeks after July 7, four men - this time of East African origin -attempted to carry out more suicide attacks on the London transport system. Again, there were clear links to Pakistan. In December 2004, the leader of the group, Muktar Ibrahim, an Eritrean, travelled to Pakistan where it was likely he received explosives training in a camp run by Harkat ul-Mujaheddin in Mirpur, an area of Pakistani Kashmir where many British Pakistanis originate. Ibrahim returned to the UK in March 2005, assembled the bombs and distributed them to the other three would-be bombers he had met in London.

In August 10 2006, the British security services scored an impressive tactical counter-terrorism victory with the arrest of 24 British subjects - most of Pakistani ethnicity or origin - who had planned to destroy 10 airliners in flight over the Atlantic. The would-be suicide attackers had resurrected the use of an ingenuous liquid explosive device that had been designed in the early 1990s by Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who were, respectively, the operational planners for the first and second WTC bombings. The 2006 Heathrow plot bears the strongest resemblance to Operation Bojinka, which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef helped to plan in Manila in the mid-1990s.

At least one of the suspects is said to have attended meetings of the Tablighi Jamaat, a non-violent but highly conservative Islamic group whose followers in Pakistan are believed to be seen by al-Qaeda as ripe for radicalization. Other arrests were made in Pakistan. One of those detained was Rashid Rauf, who was accused by the authorities of being linked to al-Qaeda and possessing bomb-making equipment. Rauf, who has dual UK-Pakistani nationality, escaped in December 2007 and remains on the run.

In January 2007, police broke up a plan by several Pakistani men in Birmingham to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier in the city. The group had planned to videotape the execution and post it online. The planned murder fitted into the long-standing takfiri strategy of attempting to deter Muslims from assisting non-Muslim governments. Significantly, between 2004 and 2006 members of the group also shipped military equipment to jihadis in Pakistan, including tents, outdoor clothing, night-vision binoculars, range finders, walkie-talkies, electronic bug detectors and split-finger gloves, which were useful for snipers.

The arrests in London signal the continued proliferation of what Western authorities call "home-grown terrorists"; that is, Muslim individuals who were born in the country where planning to attack and where they were arrested, and came to know each other through school, work or social-religious activities.

There is substantial evidence that the connections between UK-based jihadis and their counterparts in Pakistan remain of importance to both groups. Funds from British-Pakistanis play an important role in sustaining a number of jihadist movements in South Asia. Ideological and military training in Pakistan is an important stepping stone toward violence for British radicals. It seems, however, that the primary radicalization generally occurs in the UK; in mosques, social clubs, gyms and universities. In almost all known cases, British militants appear to have absorbed radical ideas in the UK before travelling to Pakistan to seek out relevant military training and carry out attacks there or in Afghanistan.  

A Tel Aviv suicide bombing at the height of the Palestinian intifada, also had connections with Pakistani radicals in the UK. On April 30 2003, a suicide terrorist blew himself up at the entrance to Mike's Place, a pub/cafe on the Tel Aviv promenade. Three civilians were murdered, and over 50 were wounded. The attack was perpetrated by Asif Muhammad Hanif, 22, a second generation British citizen of Pakistani origin.  A second British citizen, Omar Khan Sharif, 27, married a resident of Derby also of Pakistani origin, who was also due to have perpetrated a suicide attack, fled the scene as his bomb failed to explode. During the investigation it appeared that Parveen Sharif, a supply teacher from Derby, Omar's sister, encouraged her brother to take part in the suicide bombing in Israel. Interestingly, Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the al-Qaeda cell which perpetrated the July 7 2005 bombings, visited Israel and probably the Gaza Strip before the bombing at Mike's Place.

Spain begun to confront Pakistani-born radicals after the terrorist train bombings in Madrid, on March 11 2004. One plot uncovered in September 2004 involved a cell of Pakistanis in Barcelona whom police suspected of planning to destroy landmark buildings in the city. The Spanish police discovered a video showing details of a number of buildings in Barcelona, including the 40-story Mapfre Tower and the 44-story Hotel Arts, which are known as Spain's "twin towers".

In November 2004, two more Pakistanis were arrested, and on April 11th 2005 were indicted on charges of raising money and recruiting for terrorist cells in Pakistan loyal to al-Qaeda and of conspiring to commit terrorist acts in Spain. According to the indictment, the suspected leader of the Barcelona cell, Muhammad Afzaal, a Pakistani, was assigned in early 2004 by top al-Qaeda leaders to create a cell in Spain as well as Norway or Denmark.

On January 19 2008, Spanish police arrested 14 Pakistani and Indian individuals purportedly belonging to the conservative Islamist movement Jamaat al-Tabligh (JaT) for allegedly planning to carry out suicide bomb attacks in Barcelona and other European cities. According to Spanish security sources, the suicide attacks were planned to occur in the run-up to the March 9th parliamentary elections and the March 11th anniversary of the Madrid commuter train bombings. The terrorist cell had ties to Pakistan's tribal areas. Significantly; US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared on February 11 that the Barcelona jihadist cell "appears to have ties to Baitullah Mehsud’s (the emir of the Tehrek-e-Taliban-Pakistan) network in Waziristan, which is linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda".

Spanish security sources believe that the cell was a highly specialized jihadi unit divided into three functional areas: a group focused on planning the attacks, an explosives group and a suicide group composed of three members from Pakistan. In addition, there were two spiritual leaders whose role was to provide religious indoctrination to the suicide bombers. The ideological leader of the cell was Maroof Ahmed Mirza, originally from Punjab and a legal Spanish resident; the majority of the Pakistanis had Spanish work permits. At the time of their arrest, cell members had in their possession four temporizers, small amounts of nitrocellulose, 1.1 lbs of lead pellets, mobile phones, laptops and CDs. According to the High Court's indictments of 10 of the cell members, their target was likely to be Barcelona's Metro system. The suspects could be affiliated with a group of five Pakistanis arrested in Catalonia in 2004 for planning to bomb various buildings in Barcelona.

EU - Pakistan/Afghanistan

According to the last Europol report for 2008, al-Qaeda’s remaining core leadership in the tribal areas of Pakistan is exercising command and control and inspiring attacks in the EU. A number of EU-nationals who attended training in Pakistan were later involved in terrorist offences in the EU.

Al-Qaeda and affiliated pro-Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan are increasingly recognized as one of the main drivers of Islamist extremism and terrorism in the EU. In the past, terrorist links between Pakistan and the EU were almost exclusively focused on the UK. In 2007, terrorism investigations in at least three countries showed links to groups in this region. Both Germany and Denmark reported that several suspects in the attempted terrorist attacks in 2007 had received training in Pakistan.

In Germanythreemen — a 28-year-old Turkish national and two German nationals aged 22 and 28 — were arrested on 4 September 2007, suspected of planning several coordinated bomb attacks with the aim to cause mass casualties with highly powerful explosives using hydrogen peroxide and military detonators. The suspects had acquired the know-how to build the bombs mainly through specialised explosives training courses in camps in Pakistan, run by the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU).

In Denmark, on 4 September 2007 the Danish police arrested eight people between 19 to 29 years of age on suspicion of planning an attack. A Pakistani-born Danish citizen and an Afghan citizen living in Denmark were charged with planning the attack. The Pakistani-born main suspect is alleged to have gone through training in Pakistan. After his return to Denmark, he manufactured and tested tricycloacetone triperoxide (TATP).

Romania also reported an increase in the number of individuals attempting to enter the country illegally from Pakistan with the aim of continuing to other member states of the EU. Pakistani individuals in Romania with links to Islamist extremism were involved in such activities.

Terrorism in Pakistan  after 9/11

According to Ashley Tellis, among other analysts, Osama bin Laden and "his crew" are most likely today in the NFAT, in what is called the Bajaur agency.

In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's chief of operations, was arrested at the home of Ahmed Abdul Quboos, a member of Jammat-e-Islami. In August 2003, three Pakistani army officers, including Assistant Adjutant-General and Quartermaster-General, Lt. Col. Khalid Abbassi and one Major Atta, were arrested in Pakistan on charges of helping Khalid Mohammed.

The Pakistan government has, however, handed over al-Qaeda leaders like Abu Zabaydah (March 2002), Ramzi Binalahibh (September 2002), Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (March 2003) and Walid B’Attash (April 2003). Pakistan is careful to distinguish the Taliban from al-Qaeda.

The al-Qaeda strategist Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar (aka. Abu Mus‘Ab Al-Suri) first became widely known in late 2004 when Spanish investigations into the Madrid train bombings pointed to his role as the mastermind of the attacks. The US administration considered him among the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists. He played an important role in international jihadist terrorism providing practical training, and theoretical and intellectual foundation for the violent campaigns. Al-Suri was reportedly arrested in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, near the southern Afghan border in late October or early November 2005.

Tellis evaluates that the Taliban leadership (the "Kandahari clique") led by Mullah Omarfor several years resides in the city of Quetta. It is almost certain that the Pakistani intelligence agencies know the location of these individuals and actually has some kind of a liaisons with them. But the Pakistani state has consistently refused to go after them.They look at the Taliban leadership as a sort of reliable backup force in Afghanistan. These are the leaders who are directing the attacks against the NATO coalition forces in southern Afghanistan.

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A new development has been the creation of the so-called Pakistani Taliban, the tribal groups that exist in the FATA who have become extremely radicalized, and have created new alliances under the name Tehrik-i-Taliban. Their best known leader is Baitullah Mehsud. They target the Pakistani state in very dramatic ways often using suicide attacks as modus operandi. Baitullah Mehsud was probably responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto on 27 December 2007.

Many Americans blame the regime of Pervez Musharraf for not delivering on its commitment to root out terrorist operatives from its territory despite receiving massive U.S. aid for that purpose. Tellis claims that the reality is more complex. Islamabad’s failures in this regard are not simply due to a lack of motivation. Instead, the convulsive political deterioration in the NWFP in Pakistan, the military's ineptitude in counterterrorism operations, and the political failures of the Karzai government in Afghanistan have all exacerbated the problem.

In response to U.S. pressure, Musharraf adopted a two-sided, and sometimes two-faced, counterterrorism strategy. The Pakistani regime systematically suppressed domestic terrorist groups like the Sunni Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Shia Tehrik-e-Jafria that had engaged in bloody internal sectarian violence and subverted critical state objectives. By contrast, the regime largely ignored the terrorist outfits operating against India in Kashmir that were supported by the Pakistan Army and the ISI.

Pakistan’s counterterrorism effort thus remains intense but unfortunately selective - with significant consequences for the overall success of the war on terror. The core members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership have survived and remain active antagonists in the war against Afghanistan and the United States. Also surviving is the terrorist infrastructure supporting violence in Kashmir, which increasingly assists the Taliban and al-Qaeda in operations against Afghanistan, the United States, and even Pakistan itself.

The greatest challenge to Pakistan is arguably the rise of local militant Islam, both as an ideology and political force. The number of organized and ad hoc groups in Pakistan today that represent a radical form of “political Islam” is unknown, but arguably have a mass following from various quarters of society, including some elites, members of the armed forces, a booming madrasa population, and women. The latter group is new and is represented by right-wing women’s groups, either as members of extremist organizations or leaders of a new educational class that has emerged in the last five years.

Comparative Levels of Violence in Pakistan, 2003-2007

Pakistan’s Taliban made outstanding progress in 2008 by controlling the tribal areas and undermining America’s strongest ally in the region, former President Pervez Musharaff. Al-Qaeda expects improved relations with Pakistani authorities now that military command has been separated from the presidency.

It is hard to overstate the importance of Pakistan in the struggle against Islamist terrorism. Within Pakistan’s borders are 150 million Muslims, scores of al-Qaeda terrorists, many Taliban fighters, and – probably - Osama bin Laden. Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons and has come frighteningly close to war with nuclear-armed India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. A political battle among anti-American Islamic fundamentalists, the Pakistani military, and more moderate mainstream political forces has already turned violent.

According to the US NIE for 2007, al-Qaeda is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. The group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan FATA, operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. The NIE states that al-Qaeda, with uninterrupted funding from radical Saudi Arabian Wahabist sources, not only has rebuilt its command structure in the border region, but has continued to recruit and train operatives to infiltrate the United States and other Western countries.

The ultimate threat: nuclear proliferation to terrorist organizations

Pakistan is the original birth place of the concept of the nuclear jihad, which highlighted the need for an Islamic atomic bomb and advocated the right and the religious obligation of the Muslims to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and use them, if necessary, to protect their religion. The jihadi terrorists and their ideologues in Pakistan perceived the nuclear weapon as the ultimate weapon of retribution against states which they viewed as enemies of Islam, particularly the US and Israel. 

It was the late Prime Minister Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, a Western-influenced liberal and not a religious fundamentalist, who first projected Pakistan’s clandestine quest for an atomic bomb as the quest for an Islamic bomb to counter what he described as the Christian, Jewish and Hindu atomic bombs.  He used this depiction in order to convince other Islamic states such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iran to fund Pakistan’s clandestine military nuclear program.  

Subsequently Pakistani jihadi organizations such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and fundamentalist organizations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) and the Jamiat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI) adopted Bhutto’s depiction of the Islamic bomb and projected it as belonging to the Islamic umma.  In 2000, when Abdul Sattar, Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s then Foreign Minister, advocated Pakistan’s signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the fundamentalist and jihadi organizations started a public campaign against him and projected him as a traitor and as anti-Islam. 

After he shifted to Afghanistan from the Sudan in 1996, Osama bin Laden started speaking of the right and religious obligation of the Muslims to acquire WMD’s and use them, if necessary, to protect Islam. He initiated a project for the acquisition/development of WMD under the leadership of Abu Khabab in his training complex in Afghanistan including the recruitment of students and scientists already working in the scientific establishments of Islamic countries. 

Just before the U.S. decided to attack Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, serious concerns were raised about Pakistan's stability and the security of its nuclear facilities and weapons.

Observers feared that US intervention against the Taliban with the Pakistani government's support could trigger further political instability in Pakistan. The instability could result from opposition by Islamic groups sympathetic to the Taliban and bin Laden. There were also concerns that in the long term, the Islamic political groups could form alliances with radicals in the Pakistani army, who then might try and dislodge General Musharraf from power. Factional infighting within the Pakistani Army could put a dangerous question mark over the command and control of Islamabad's nuclear forces. Similarly, a wider civil war in Pakistan could jeopardize the safety and security of its fissile material stocks and nuclear installations.

In November 2001, Pakistani authorities detained two retired nuclear scientists after discovery in offices they had used in Afghanistan of documents describing ways to use anthrax as a weapon. Documents described the history of anthrax, a Pentagon program to immunize all members of the United States military against anthrax attacks, and a diagram of weather balloons which seemed to show a possible method for dispersing a biological or chemical agent from the air.

The scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, were questioned after American intelligence officers expressed concern that Pakistan's nuclear weapons technology could have found its way into the hands of bin Laden or the Taliban. The two scientists reportedly admitted visiting Kandahar and meeting bin Laden, but maintained that the visit was in connection with the work of a humanitarian relief organization for helping the Afghan people. Since no evidence linking them to al-Qaeda’s Abu Khabab project could be found, neither of the Pakistani scientists have been charged with any wrongdoing.

Another worrying incident was the arrest of a U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla, who researched how to build a "dirty bomb" at an al-Qaeda facility in Pakistan, according to court documents. Padilla was arrested on May 8 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport after traveling from Pakistan via Switzerland. While in Afghanistan in 2001, Padilla met with Abu Zubaydah, a senior lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, to propose a plan to conduct terrorist operations within the United States. Zubaydah then directed Padilla and his associate to travel to Pakistan for training. Padilla conducted research in the construction of a "uranium-enhanced" explosive device. In particular, they engaged in research on this topic at one of the al-Qaeda safe houses in Lahore, Pakistan. The plan included stealing radioactive material for the bomb within the United States.

According to a senior Pakistani scientist, "[ten years after the bomb], Pakistan has turned out to be a country that is badly insecure and frightened of its future." For diplomats and politicians, the bomb was a guarantee that the world would bring India to the negotiating table [on the Kashmir issue]. With regards to this the Pakistani leadership adopted a strategy of confrontation vis-à-vis India, i.e. jihad [in India], by means of Islamic fighters who had the protection of Pakistan's nuclear weapons."

What followed was the Kargil war. But the Kargil war was just one consequence of the bomb. "The most significant reality was that the bomb promoted a culture of violence which, in those circumstances, acquired the form of a monster with innumerable heads of terror; and today Pakistan is badly in its grip…In the near future, Pakistan faces real danger, not from India but from terrorism and fundamentalism. The rule of the state has already disappeared from some regions of the country."

Conclusion

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, this author, referring to the possible state sponsorship for the al-Qaeda attacks and its aftermath, affirmed that "Pakistan is the main supporter of the Taliban, and helped them to power in war-torn Afghanistan. The Pakistani intelligence services probably do not support bin Laden, but they do, without a doubt, have updated information on his movements and activities, and it is not clear how much they share it with the US. In spite of the assurances of its military leaders, it is also not clear if the large Pakistani Islamist radical movements active in the country - and which exert a powerful influence on military circles - will allow any real cooperation with the gathering coalition against the Taliban and bin Laden."

A month later I wrote: Pakistan is a key country for any present or future coalition, not only because of its essential part in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but also because what happens there influences terrorism in Kashmir and India, China and the Central Asian Muslim republics, as well as the Philippines and Indonesia. There is also the danger of an attempt to take control of - or at least to blackmail - the regime on the very sensitive issue of nuclear facilities, Pakistan being the only Muslim country possessing nuclear weapons. How much longer can Pakistani ruler Musharraf resist these pressures, and can he survive if he responds with force to the more radical elements? At this stage, his chances of political survival are unclear.

Musharrraf resisted indeed for seven years, but is the US coalition with Pakistan or Pakistan's support to the war on Islamist terrorism in a better condition?

When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11 2001, the first logical step was to take out al Qaeda’s state sponsors. Going to war in Afghanistan to deprive al Qaeda of the Taliban regime, its primary state sponsor, was a relatively easy political decision for the United States. However, things got complicated since Pakistan’s security apparatus had deep relations with the very jihadists the United States was fighting But "carrying the war to a nuclear-armed Pakistan was a less attractive option than entering into a tenuous security alliance with Islamabad in hopes of eroding the jihadists’ support base."

The near-term policy consequences of the ongoing radicalization in Pakistan today, and the failure of the Pakistani government to prohibit refuge for the Taliban as well as foreign jihadis in the FATA, are the continued destabilization of southern Afghanistan, the spread of the Taliban insurgency, and the further subversion of democracy in Pakistan. This has contributed to Washington’s growing criticism of Pakistan’s policies since mid-2007 and a slow but discernable drift of US-Pakistani relations at the strategic level.

The War on Terrorism consists of two separate battles: the first being waged by the United States and Coalition forces against the Taliban inside Afghanistan and the second being waged by the Pakistan military against the extremist militants who have made FATA their base of operations. Some observers think that in order to bring this war to a successful end, these two battles need to be coordinated and integrated, taking into consideration the apprehensions of both Pakistan and the United States while satisfying their respective policy objectives.

Globally, there are fears that the collapse of the current Pakistani regime could lead to an implosion of the state itself, with grave repercussions on regional and international security. Pakistanis themselves are very much concerned about a disaster of national proportions

Since the formation of the "World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders", the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998 and the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan has been considered by this author a major threat in the spread of Islamist international terrorism, and potentially the first Islamist nuclear power or a proliferator of nuclear know-how to terrorist Islamist organizations. 

It is very difficult for academic researchers or political observers alike, to evaluate what is the part of the historical ideological background, the direct sponsorship by the various Pakistani governments, or the failed ungovernable situation in great chunks of Pakistan's territory, in the radicalization, endemic violence and terrorism of its political and social system.

It is evident however, that the situation in Pakistan as described above, is a clear, present and future threat to its own people, neighboring countries, regional stability and the world at large.