India and Pakistani terror Tinderbox

ENARADA, New Delhi

By Ajay N Jha

Repeated instances of LOC violations by Pakistan clearly underscore the fact that the change of guard does not make much difference.

It was expected that the Nawaz Sharif government would usher in an era of peace and bilateral cooperation and that infiltrations across the Indo-Pak borders would stop.  However, the optimism and euphoria in New Delhi appears to have been short- lived and what has happened during last month demonstrates that Nawaz Sharif has no control over these non-state actors who have been dictating the agenda of Pakistan since last few years.

Statistically, more than half of the world’s Muslims live in South and South East Asia and both regions have experienced an upsurge in terrorist violence and religious conservatism. But it is the South Asia which has emerged as the tinderbox while the situation is South East Asia is less volatile. Pakistan is serving as a major hub for ideological and material support to South Asian radical Islamic groups. The continuing political conflict in neighboring Afghanistan and a well- organized opposition to the global war against terrorism have served to crystalize anti- Americanism and even as Pakistani military officially joined campaign against Al-Qaida, serious questions remained on the depth of support in military circles for the offensive. Some of the armed Islamic groups active in Pakistan were trained by Pakistan’s ISI and it is widely believed that some in the Pakistani security establishment still have ties to those hardline outfits.

In addition, many groups started operating across national borders and they have achieved impressive degree of cross-border co-ordination. By now, several of these militant and extremist outfits have ties with international Jehadi organizations based in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan. Several anti- India and anti- Hindu Islamic groups fighting in Kashmir are based in Pakistan or Bangladesh.

A closer look at the modus operandi of these outfits gives the impression that they have been fighting on two different fronts and yet they are together when it comes to fomenting anti- India crusade. Although many groups have recently decentralized and are operating independently by holding swaths of specific territories, others have formed an umbrella group to primarily fight Pakistan and US led security forces. There again, the war has spilled over between Shia and Sunni militias. There have been cases of clash among themselves as well. Behtullah mesud led Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan(TTP) to Maulana Fazullah led Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariyat-e Mohammadi(TNSM)  have been running parallel government in the swat region of Pakistan and many military campaigns  against them by Pakistani government have yielded little success.

What has been all the worrisome for the Pakistani establishment over the last 7 years is the war of these radical groups moving towards Pakistan’s lawless tribal region, especially after the fall of pro-Taliban  Lal Masjid, the assassination of  Benazir Bhutto and the  appeasement of  Pervaiz Musharraf government towards these Islamic groups. Musharaf’s effort to regulate and reform age-old Mosque-Madarsa networks and to crack down upon the jehadi and sectarian groups backfired, triggering large scale militant collaborations and caused the beginning of a new wave of radical Islamic resurgence in Pakistan.

On the other hand, the Kashmir centric cross border terrorism fueled by Islamabad’s territorial ambition and proxy war strategy continued to enable Islamic extremists to spread their tentacles beyond Jammu and Kashmir. Terror groups such as  HUJI, LET, JEM and Hizb-Ul Mujahideen(HM), continue to focus on India while receiving support from Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence(ISI) and its Bangladeshi counterpart Director General  Field Intelligence(DGFI).  Terrorist leaders like Maulana Masood Azhar(JEM), haiz saeed(LET) and Syed Saladuddin(HM) have led   many terrorist operations and acts in India  and dominated the radical Islamic landscape for over a decade. These terrorist groups and their leaders are members of Osama Bin Laden’s IIF and the Pakistani based United Jihad Council (UJC) and they have vowed to fight against the Muslim Ummah.

Among kashmir- centre- Groups, HM is a highly organized outfit and it has spread its tentacles from Jammu and Kashmir right up to eastern and southern parts of India. It has strong links with Students Islamic Movement India(SIMI) and the Tabligh-i- Jamat(TJ) and is largely supported by Pakistan’s ISI and JI.

JEM, on the other hand, was able to penetrate Indian establishment  and perpetrated a series of dastardly attacks within a span of 13 years. Having direct affiliations with Al-Qaida and Taliban militants, JEM became the first terrorist group to adopt suicide terror tactics by targeting J&K State Assembly building and Indian Parliament in December 2001.

LET which is the military wing of Haifiz Saeed led Jamat-Ud-Dawa, has a pan Islamic Wahabi ideology and has been closely associated with Al-Qaida. It was responsible for masterminding the 2005 Delhi market blasts, the 2006 Mumbai train blasts and 26/11 Mumbai attack.

HUJI considers itself as the second line of defense for all Muslim States as its motto suggests. It has existed in the subcontinent since 1980s with active support from Pakistan based Deobandi religious bodies including Jamat-ul-Ulema-e Islami(JUI). In last few years, it has set up its units in various towns of Uttar Pradesh and some parts of Karnataka as well.

Indian Mujahideen(IM) is the  latest home grown terrorist module which came into prominence in 2008  through a multiple terror attacks across several states including  may 13, 2008 Jaipur bombing that killed 80 civilians and injured 200 people. The Ahmadabad bombing of July 26,2008 which killed 45  and wounded 60 civilians, Delhi bombings of September 13, 2008 which killed 30 and injured 90 civilians and  October 30, 2008 Guwahati blast which killed 83 civilians and injured 300 people. It was for the first time that IM claimed responsibility. According to Indian intelligence agencies, IM is not a well-knit organization like JEM or LET with a hierarchical structure but a loose network of Islamic organizations including HUJI and SIMI. The leadership of IM is traced to a man from Mumbai named Abdul Subhan Qureshi, code named  “Kasim” or “Al-Arabi” who had sent emails and IM manifestos of IM before and after multiple blasts in 2008.

India has also been experiencing cross border terrorism from its eastern frontier. Bangladesh territory has been used as a safe heaven for various militant groups operating in India’s north eastern states and elsewhere. With political uncertainty continuing in Bangladesh and the active support of ISI, militant Islamic penetration has been increasing in States like Meghalaya, Assam and Tripura and even a few pockets of West Bengal. The most lethal ULFA and Islamic MULTA are not in the firm grips of both ISI and DGFI.

Now, Pakistan’s ISI has already roped in many separatist leaders and their sympathizers to make inroads in to Naxal ranks in its anti- India strategy after making a failed attempt to enlist the support of Maoists. Some of the arrested Naxals and arrested militants have confessed before security agencies that Isi has been trying this for the last 4 years, albeit with marginal success.

Senior officials in intelligence agencies admit that the ISI had roped in underworld cadres of D company, designated by the US as a global terrorist, to woo the naxals and an attempt in this regards was foiled in 2011 when security agencies led an operation in which six people in Bangalore and Hyderabad were arrested. The ISI had also made contacts with Chhota shakeel to seek his help in carrying out subversive activities in India. The agencies had arrested four persons from AP and two from Bangalore. A sum of Rs 25 lakh for distribution to naxals mainly in AP was also seized from them.

The ISI through Chhota shakeel had succeeded in contacting a person named Altaf in Bangalore for establishing contacts with Andhra Pradesh wing of  naxals. Altaf in turn, got in touch with Vinay who had received Rs 25 lakh through Hawala channels from Altaf in Dubai as a token amount to forge long term relationship. Karnataka police had also arrested another person named Shreedhar and his three associates from AP while Vinay along with one of his accomplishes were arrested from Karnataka.

In this context, it is important to keep in mind the ISI’s Nepal desk which has been coordinating naxal and IM operations against security forces in India. Nepal desk is headed by a Brigadier rank official to channelize the support into the red corridor. The ISI operatives have been working through Madhubani and Darbhanga route right up to Jharkhand and they have also been giving a lot of financial and explosive support to the IM operatives in Darbhanga, Supaul, Araria and adjoining areas.

On the other hand LET had already instructed its cadre to focus on linking Naxals from Bihar in the same way as they done in the past with SIMI. Their first attempt to channelize funds and weapons was made way back in February 2011. Umer Madani, a Lashkar operative arrested in October 2011 had even confirmed this during his interrogation. He had confessed that he had been sent to open talks with naxals and offer them support financially and logistically. He was arrested before he could open talks. Despite that Laskhar had sent some more people from different places to operate out of Nepal and are in regular touch with red forces.

Recent intercepts indicate that the war of the naxals could propel into another league as they have been acquiring sophisticated weapons into anti-armoured vehicle bazookas, sophisticated weapons and improvising on communication technology. Even some of the recent literature that had been seized from Naxals in Jharkhand show that their weapons have been upgraded. Timer devices, RDX are not easily accessible locally and they are being supplied to them through Nepal office of ISI.

The most bizarre part is that in its bid to inflict damage to India, Pakistan has itself been the worst suffer of sectarian violence and internecine bloodletting. According to international watch bodies which have been monitoring Pakistan and its trail of terrorism, the Pakistani military establishment’s decision to join hands with the US in its war against terror has made the country suffer 896 deadly incidents of suicide bombings in the past 11 years which have killed 5,243 innocent people and injured 11,221 others between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2012.

Statistically speaking, the staggering death toll (of 5,243) means that the human bombs were able to kill 476 people every year on average and 40 people each month since 2002. Likewise, Pakistan suffered an average 81 suicide bombings every year and seven attacks a month over the past eleven years.

Pakistan had experienced only one suicide bombing before 9/11 when the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad was targeted. However, over the next 11 years between January 2002 and December 2012, the human bombs let loose a reign of terror in almost every nook and cranny of the country, killing over 5,000 people in almost 900 suicide attacks.

In a twisty path that leads from the Pakistani establishment’s switch to Western allegiance to the 2007 Lal Masjid operation in Islamabad, Pakistan has literally been turned into the suicide bombing capital of the world, with the security forces and the intelligence agencies often being targeted by lethal human bombs. As a result, Pakistan’s overall security situation seems to be in absolute turmoil. The highly-secured headquarters of the Pakistan Army, Navy and the Air Force, the offices of the ISI, police stations, military training academies, check posts, government buildings (particularly state symbols) and mosques, imambaras, churches, hospitals, schools and markets have all become targets of the ruthless suicide bombers.

Suicide bombers in fact came to Pakistan in 2002 in the wake of the Musharraf regime’s decision to become a US ally in the terror war by reversing the previous decade’s policy of influencing Afghan politics through the Taliban militia. The reversal brought the Pakistani military establishment into conflict with jehadi organisations active in Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir.  The idea was to make the intensively Islamised military rank and file realise that the army was making a mistake by following the American dictates under the leadership of a “ faithless” Musharraf and his fellow generals.

Of the 39 incidents of suicide bombings in 2012 which killed 394 people, 21 were carried out in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, nine in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), four in Punjab, three in Sindh and one in Baluchistan. Peshawar suffered a record number of 14 suicide bombings. On average, 33 people were killed every month by human bombs in 2012. Almost 90 percent of these suicide bombings were claimed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan.

During this year, already there have been 13 major suicide attacks killing more than 119 people and the deadly trend of death and gore still rages on. Just three days ago, an attack on a Sunni Muslim mosque in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta has left at least 10 people dead and another 30 wounded, just one day after a suicide bomber killed at least 37 people in the same city. Friday’s attack in the capital of Balochistan province came as most Pakistanis celebrated Eid al-Fitr, and was followed by another blast in Islamabad which saw a guard shoot dead a would-be suicide bomber forcing his way into a mosque.

Yet Pakistan government is not prepared to accept the fact that many terrorist outfits are active across LOC. Whenever India brought in diplomatic pressure, Pakistan always claimed that it had dismantled the terror infrastructure on its soil. The fact remains that Pakistan is still running 22 training camps to train terrorists for India-centric operations and most of these terror camps are in and around Manshera of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Some of them are in neighbouring Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pak-occupied-Kashmir (PoK).Though most of these camps are run by terror outfits; they are under tight control of the ISI. The ISI helps the terror outfits to run these camps by providing them former army or ISI officials as trainers.

The Americans, on the other hand find themselves in a catch 22 situation. They are neither able to contain the attacks on their convoys by these militant islamist groups operating from the Pakistani territory nor they are in a position to squeeze the neck of Nawaz Sharif.