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Its a Subscription analysis by Khaled Ahmed in The Friday Times,giving reason why Pakistan is the ideal place for Al Qaeda rather than Somalia or Sudan.
Pakistan is said to be the most endangered state next to Somalia. But Somalia hardly has any Al Qaeda presence compared to Pakistan where its activists were arrested in many cities when the Pakistan government under Musharraf was willing to arrest them. But Somalia is not the kind of place where Al Qaeda would like to station itself: it is too weak as a state, lacks infrastructure, a population well enough off to yield local income through extortion, and cities big enough to hide it. Last but not least, Al Qaeda would probably prefer a state where the population is sympathetic and, unlike Sudan, the rulers are not willing to betray it.
Even Afghanistan is not such a good place for a terrorist organisation to place itself. It is not an organised state and is too decentralised and too subject to the local power of warlords to be safe for its activists. Therefore the best place for Al Qaeda to be headquartered, Al Qaeda is likely to reason, is a functioning state like Pakistan with its large population and powerful madrassa network and Middle East-assisted prosperous clergy in tune with its worldview. The big leadership, once located in the cities, could be ensconced in the ‘ungoverned spaces’ of the Tribal Areas and Balochistan.
Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s non state actors: There are other factors too. Al Qaeda has attracted to its fold various non-state actors once working for the state of Pakistan and waging jihad for maintaining the dominance of Pakistan in Afghanistan and for the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. These jihadi organisations were ‘handled’ by army officers working for ISI and significant numbers of these officers have continued to maintain their connections with the militia leaders who are now taking orders from Al Qaeda through such ancillary setups as Brigade 313 led by ‘second bin Laden’, Ilyas Kashmiri, who many think was once a commando of the Pakistan army doing “meritorious insurgent” work in Kashmir.
Therefore there is a given form of “terrorism” in the guts of the Pakistani state, thanks to this joining of ranks. But the Pakistan army says it is “India-centric” and will challenge India as its prime security risk. Normally, this would mean a special state of preparedness requiring acquisition of weapons; but, judging from past behaviour, it has also meant the use of non state actors in a proxy war in Kashmir and for attacks in Indian cities like Mumbai and other targets outside India like the Indian embassy in Kabul. The Deobandi-Wahhabi militias aligned with Al Qaeda, who are killing innocent Pakistanis through suicide bombers, are also proxy warriors because the state has not been able to bridge the Deobandi-Barelvi divide enough to use religious recruits across the Hanafi confession.
India-centrism behind disempowering the Barelvis? One reason the Barelvis have not been inducted into official jihad is the Arab connection and the hesitancy of the Arabs to link up with the mazar instead of the madrassa . The money that poured into our seminaries from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf could go only into Ahle Hadith and Deobandi hands because of the closeness of the latter to the ‘high church’ and anti-mystical faith of the Arabs. When the state of Pakistan fought its Afghan war under Gen Zia ul Haq, each American dollar in aid was matched by Saudi Arabian parallel funding. Later, this money came from all sorts of private Arab sources. Al Qaeda was a crucial link in the preparation of these proxy warriors especially as it was able to run training camps for them in Afghanistan.
Very little analysis was carried out of the options exercised in this regard by the Pakistan army. Leaving the Barelvis out of the war meant their disempowerment in the days to come. Was the army actually interested in disempowering the clergy of popular Islam? It is quite possible that its senior officers willfully said goodbye to the Barelvis because their grassroots rituals were coextensive culturally with those of the Hindus across the border in India. In other words, was it India-centrism in its first phase that decided the fate of Pakistan’s confessional canvas? Today, the disempowered Barelvi, pushed to the wall by Deobandi attacks on their shrines, are busy arming themselves a la Sunni Tehreek in Karachi as a counterforce in Punjab where the government is sensing electorally more useful power among the Deobandis as the power of the state itself declines.
Empowering Deobandis and killing Shias: Another unfortunate factor caused violence to take place because of the army’s reliance on Arab-backed seminaries where the jihadi elements used by it were taught religion. Mufti Shamzai of the Banuri mosque in Karachi got a lot of funding from Saudi Arabia because he was close to the Saudi mufti Bin Baz but was killed after Saudi money also caused the sectarian war unleashed by Khomeini’s Iran in the Gulf to be relocated to Pakistan. Also, before he turned his attention to America, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was using his nephew Ramzi Yusuf to kill innocent Shia citizens inside Iran. Did the army want the Shia in Pakistan to be roughed up? General Zia had a couple of bad meetings with Imam Khomeini after he had unleashed Zakat on the Shia in Pakistan.
Whoever took the decisions inside the army caused the Shia and the Barelvi to be killed in the country by its proxy warriors. Then after Gen Musharraf began kowtowing to the Americans, the proxy warriors attacked him in 2003 (which Khalid Sheikh Muhammad says was orchestrated by him). In the attacks on Gen Musharraf there was participation by some personnel of the armed forces. This trend of participation by the officers of the armed forces in acts of terrorism has never gone down; in fact it has increased. Major General Faisal Alvi, before he was gunned down in Islamabad in 2008 by another army officer working for Al Qaeda, had written to General Kayani saying two of his generals were actually working for Al Qaeda. Zahid Hussain in his book The Scorpion’s Tail mentions another officer who was behind the suicide-bombing of a commando unit of the Pakistan army.
Using terrorists as pawns in Afghanistan: Now an American scholar from Harvard has researched the Pakistan army’s involvement in the Taliban’s attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. It is common knowledge in Pakistan that the army is ‘looking after’ the Taliban under Mullah Umar as its leverage in the decisions to be taken about Afghanistan’s future; when one Taliban central leader showed signs of not going along he was arrested just outside Karachi. The Haqqani Group in North Waziristan is said to be another bargaining chip in the hands of the army that wants Afghanistan cleansed of Indian presence and this group is clearly subordinated to its interests. The army will not attack North Waziristan to clear it of these foreigners because it wants to protect the Haqqanis as its interlocutors with the Kabul government that is increasingly willing to negotiate.
New complications have arisen from this strategy. Daily Times reports (20 November 2010: ‘The Haqqani network, which is considered as a strategic asset by the Pakistani security establishment due to their considerable influence in Afghanistan, had first been moved to Kurram Agency where a new operation centre had been set up to intensify attacks in Afghanistan in coordination with a breakaway section of the Lashkar-e-Tayba and other groups. It is now reported that the Shia tribes that make up most of the base for the Frontier Corps, who had earlier given most of the resistance to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami in Spina Shaga, have turned against the Haqqani network, who they see as an ideological threat to their existence’.
This is a revelation of ‘safe haven’ possibly in a city provided to a terrorist connected with Al Qaeda.
Flawed military strategy for Afghanistan: In conclusion, an editorial in Express-Tribune (21 Nov 2010) encapsulates Pakistan’s strategy in these words: ‘Pakistan’s threat of power projection into Afghanistan is clearly based on its presumed capacity to manipulate the Taliban and their master, Al Qaeda. It sees a dichotomy of intent among the Taliban where there is none: the Taliban who kill Pakistanis are the very Taliban that have attacked inside Afghanistan and continue to do so. Pakistan has repeatedly demonstrated that the non state actors it uses against other states don’t necessarily take orders from it at all times. As in the case of Hekmatyar, it is also amply proved that the Afghan elements it uses to spearhead its power-projection also don’t follow its instructions when it clashes with their own objectives. There is increasing evidence that it is Pakistan, through its so-called ‘peace deals’, that actually takes instructions from its proxies.
‘Pakistan will be the most threatened state in the region after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan. Because of policies related to its military India-centrism, the state in Pakistan has become extremely weak. Its lack of writ in about 60 percent of the territory has been compounded by the rise of criminal groupings ready to align with local and foreign terrorists found in the Tribal Areas and some big cities like Karachi. Governance across the years of war in Afghanistan has become problematic, encouraging many to flee the country with their investments. The Darwinist dictum was not that the weakest will die but that the one unable to mutate will die’.
Welcome to The Friday Times
Al Qaeda's Growing 'Counter-writ': Khaled Ahmed
Pakistan is said to be the most endangered state next to Somalia. But Somalia hardly has any Al Qaeda presence compared to Pakistan where its activists were arrested in many cities when the Pakistan government under Musharraf was willing to arrest them. But Somalia is not the kind of place where Al Qaeda would like to station itself: it is too weak as a state, lacks infrastructure, a population well enough off to yield local income through extortion, and cities big enough to hide it. Last but not least, Al Qaeda would probably prefer a state where the population is sympathetic and, unlike Sudan, the rulers are not willing to betray it.
Even Afghanistan is not such a good place for a terrorist organisation to place itself. It is not an organised state and is too decentralised and too subject to the local power of warlords to be safe for its activists. Therefore the best place for Al Qaeda to be headquartered, Al Qaeda is likely to reason, is a functioning state like Pakistan with its large population and powerful madrassa network and Middle East-assisted prosperous clergy in tune with its worldview. The big leadership, once located in the cities, could be ensconced in the ‘ungoverned spaces’ of the Tribal Areas and Balochistan.
Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s non state actors: There are other factors too. Al Qaeda has attracted to its fold various non-state actors once working for the state of Pakistan and waging jihad for maintaining the dominance of Pakistan in Afghanistan and for the ‘liberation’ of Kashmir. These jihadi organisations were ‘handled’ by army officers working for ISI and significant numbers of these officers have continued to maintain their connections with the militia leaders who are now taking orders from Al Qaeda through such ancillary setups as Brigade 313 led by ‘second bin Laden’, Ilyas Kashmiri, who many think was once a commando of the Pakistan army doing “meritorious insurgent” work in Kashmir.
Therefore there is a given form of “terrorism” in the guts of the Pakistani state, thanks to this joining of ranks. But the Pakistan army says it is “India-centric” and will challenge India as its prime security risk. Normally, this would mean a special state of preparedness requiring acquisition of weapons; but, judging from past behaviour, it has also meant the use of non state actors in a proxy war in Kashmir and for attacks in Indian cities like Mumbai and other targets outside India like the Indian embassy in Kabul. The Deobandi-Wahhabi militias aligned with Al Qaeda, who are killing innocent Pakistanis through suicide bombers, are also proxy warriors because the state has not been able to bridge the Deobandi-Barelvi divide enough to use religious recruits across the Hanafi confession.
India-centrism behind disempowering the Barelvis? One reason the Barelvis have not been inducted into official jihad is the Arab connection and the hesitancy of the Arabs to link up with the mazar instead of the madrassa . The money that poured into our seminaries from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf could go only into Ahle Hadith and Deobandi hands because of the closeness of the latter to the ‘high church’ and anti-mystical faith of the Arabs. When the state of Pakistan fought its Afghan war under Gen Zia ul Haq, each American dollar in aid was matched by Saudi Arabian parallel funding. Later, this money came from all sorts of private Arab sources. Al Qaeda was a crucial link in the preparation of these proxy warriors especially as it was able to run training camps for them in Afghanistan.
Very little analysis was carried out of the options exercised in this regard by the Pakistan army. Leaving the Barelvis out of the war meant their disempowerment in the days to come. Was the army actually interested in disempowering the clergy of popular Islam? It is quite possible that its senior officers willfully said goodbye to the Barelvis because their grassroots rituals were coextensive culturally with those of the Hindus across the border in India. In other words, was it India-centrism in its first phase that decided the fate of Pakistan’s confessional canvas? Today, the disempowered Barelvi, pushed to the wall by Deobandi attacks on their shrines, are busy arming themselves a la Sunni Tehreek in Karachi as a counterforce in Punjab where the government is sensing electorally more useful power among the Deobandis as the power of the state itself declines.
Empowering Deobandis and killing Shias: Another unfortunate factor caused violence to take place because of the army’s reliance on Arab-backed seminaries where the jihadi elements used by it were taught religion. Mufti Shamzai of the Banuri mosque in Karachi got a lot of funding from Saudi Arabia because he was close to the Saudi mufti Bin Baz but was killed after Saudi money also caused the sectarian war unleashed by Khomeini’s Iran in the Gulf to be relocated to Pakistan. Also, before he turned his attention to America, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was using his nephew Ramzi Yusuf to kill innocent Shia citizens inside Iran. Did the army want the Shia in Pakistan to be roughed up? General Zia had a couple of bad meetings with Imam Khomeini after he had unleashed Zakat on the Shia in Pakistan.
Whoever took the decisions inside the army caused the Shia and the Barelvi to be killed in the country by its proxy warriors. Then after Gen Musharraf began kowtowing to the Americans, the proxy warriors attacked him in 2003 (which Khalid Sheikh Muhammad says was orchestrated by him). In the attacks on Gen Musharraf there was participation by some personnel of the armed forces. This trend of participation by the officers of the armed forces in acts of terrorism has never gone down; in fact it has increased. Major General Faisal Alvi, before he was gunned down in Islamabad in 2008 by another army officer working for Al Qaeda, had written to General Kayani saying two of his generals were actually working for Al Qaeda. Zahid Hussain in his book The Scorpion’s Tail mentions another officer who was behind the suicide-bombing of a commando unit of the Pakistan army.
Using terrorists as pawns in Afghanistan: Now an American scholar from Harvard has researched the Pakistan army’s involvement in the Taliban’s attacks on American forces in Afghanistan. It is common knowledge in Pakistan that the army is ‘looking after’ the Taliban under Mullah Umar as its leverage in the decisions to be taken about Afghanistan’s future; when one Taliban central leader showed signs of not going along he was arrested just outside Karachi. The Haqqani Group in North Waziristan is said to be another bargaining chip in the hands of the army that wants Afghanistan cleansed of Indian presence and this group is clearly subordinated to its interests. The army will not attack North Waziristan to clear it of these foreigners because it wants to protect the Haqqanis as its interlocutors with the Kabul government that is increasingly willing to negotiate.
New complications have arisen from this strategy. Daily Times reports (20 November 2010: ‘The Haqqani network, which is considered as a strategic asset by the Pakistani security establishment due to their considerable influence in Afghanistan, had first been moved to Kurram Agency where a new operation centre had been set up to intensify attacks in Afghanistan in coordination with a breakaway section of the Lashkar-e-Tayba and other groups. It is now reported that the Shia tribes that make up most of the base for the Frontier Corps, who had earlier given most of the resistance to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami in Spina Shaga, have turned against the Haqqani network, who they see as an ideological threat to their existence’.
This is a revelation of ‘safe haven’ possibly in a city provided to a terrorist connected with Al Qaeda.
Flawed military strategy for Afghanistan: In conclusion, an editorial in Express-Tribune (21 Nov 2010) encapsulates Pakistan’s strategy in these words: ‘Pakistan’s threat of power projection into Afghanistan is clearly based on its presumed capacity to manipulate the Taliban and their master, Al Qaeda. It sees a dichotomy of intent among the Taliban where there is none: the Taliban who kill Pakistanis are the very Taliban that have attacked inside Afghanistan and continue to do so. Pakistan has repeatedly demonstrated that the non state actors it uses against other states don’t necessarily take orders from it at all times. As in the case of Hekmatyar, it is also amply proved that the Afghan elements it uses to spearhead its power-projection also don’t follow its instructions when it clashes with their own objectives. There is increasing evidence that it is Pakistan, through its so-called ‘peace deals’, that actually takes instructions from its proxies.
‘Pakistan will be the most threatened state in the region after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan. Because of policies related to its military India-centrism, the state in Pakistan has become extremely weak. Its lack of writ in about 60 percent of the territory has been compounded by the rise of criminal groupings ready to align with local and foreign terrorists found in the Tribal Areas and some big cities like Karachi. Governance across the years of war in Afghanistan has become problematic, encouraging many to flee the country with their investments. The Darwinist dictum was not that the weakest will die but that the one unable to mutate will die’.
Welcome to The Friday Times
