Perhaps I should have been clearer - institutional Pakistani support for terrorism does not exist, and no evidence indicating that exists. .
I didn’t except this from a senior member like you. This is one of the latest article that contradicts your claim
Ex-major’s loyalties embody jihad woes.
Tuesday, 08 Jun, 2010
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect...e137be291/buner-taliban_ap608.jpg?MOD=AJPERES
LAHORE: A former major who trained fighters for war in Afghanistan and occupied Kashmir keeps cropping up in terrorism investigations in Pakistan. But police say the grey-haired grandfather is shielded by his links to the army and powerful intelligence agencies.
The case of Ahsanul Haq shines a light on a murky side of the militancy infecting the country: the extent to which retired members of the security agencies allegedly support or tolerate militants they once nurtured for foreign policy aims.
The recent arrest of another retired army major with alleged links to the suspect in New Yorks Times Square bomb plot rekindled these concerns. The man has since been released, but the army says he was dismissed from the force.
Speaking to The Associated Press, Mr Haq seemed to embody the contradictions of this shadowy struggle. He said he sees nothing wrong with “jihad against infidels” but strongly denies being linked to terrorism.
The most recent allegations against him appear in a report by investigators of last year’s ambush of the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.
The document claims Mr Haq gave logistical support to unspecified Taliban and other fighters. It says cellphones used by the attackers were traced to locations close to a large garment factory owned by Mr Haq and his brother.
Senior Lahore police investigator Zulfikar Hameed said the force reported its suspicions to the ISI, which told him the major was not involved.
Therefore Mr Haq was no longer wanted by the police in connection with the attack, he said, though other high-ranking officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they still harboured suspicions about him.
Otherwise calm and soft-spoken, Mr Haq grew angry as he sat in his upscale Lahore home reading the report into the cricket team attack.
“The police are doing this just to say they have completed the case, to get promotions,” he said. “This is absolutely wrong.”
Mr Haq served in the army when it and the ISI created and fostered fighters in the US-backed war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
After the Soviets were driven out, the ISI trained thousands of young Pakistanis to wage guerilla war in occupied Kashmir.
Following the 9/11 attacks in US, the government of president Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf outlawed the most notorious groups, and was believed to have purged several hundred ISI staff for being too close to the extremists.
But the crackdown was patchily enforced, and many of the militants behind the suicide attacks now rocking Pakistan are linked to the outfits created by the ISI. One such group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is accused of masterminding the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Mr Haq says he served with a Pakistani army unit close to the Afghan border during the jihad against the Soviet Union, supporting fighters there. He left the army in 1990 and says he began working for the ISI to train fighters for Kashmir.
On police radar
In 2007 Mr Haq showed up on the police radar, when a police investigation report identified him as a member of the “Mufti Sagheer” militant network which it said transported bomb-making equipment to Lahore.
Mr Haq said several of the group’s members trained under him in Azad Kashmir, but he insisted they had done no wrong.
“These men are behind bars just because they have beards and believe in jihad against infidels,” he said.
The police report calls Mr Haq “sympathetic to the core of his heart to the jihadi groups in Afghanistan and Kashmir. He supports jihadi organisations financially.”On Nov 1, 2007, came the suicide bombing of a Pakistan Air Force bus in Sargodha. Mr Haq was arrested and intelligence officials said he was suspected of being one of the masterminds behind the attack. They said he had travelled to Afghanistan and met Sirajuddin Haqqani and his father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Taliban leaders blamed by the US for much of the violence against western troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Haq says he was cleared of involvement in the bus attack and “treated like a VIP” during his detention.
Now in his 60s, he says he lives a quiet life devoted to Tableeghi Jamaat.
Authorities say the militants who raided two places of worship in Lahore 10 days ago had stayed at the Tableeghi centre in the days before the attack. — AP
DAWN.COM | National | Ex-major?s loyalties embody jihad woes
Pakistan has supported the freedom movement in kashmir against Indian occupation, but the right to struggle against occupation is internationally recognized so that cannot be considered terrorism. .
Here you go again…right to struggle against occupation is internationally recognized - Is this struggle recognized by UN?
Your country is still leaving in
denial mode. Terrorism which started in the name of Kashmir Is paying back with lot of blood . There are other peaceful ways to struggle, if you want. Follow Gandhi , Mandela ways.
If India starts sponsoring terrorism in the name of IOK, will you accept that?
Have to say it again, for the world Hamas, LET, JeM, Talliban,Pakistan-Taliban, Al Qaeda, Sipah-e-Sohaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi are all terrorist organization.
Some of the memebers of this forum are out of that denial mode and many are still acting like as if they are still leaving in that mode.
Strawman - 'tolerating' terrorist attacks is not what is being suggested - what is being pointed out is that one hundred percent assurances cannot be given by any nation, and jingoism aside, were another attack in India to occur, India would have to go through the GoP to punish the perpetrators - you simply do not have the military superiority to take punitive action against Pakistan without suffering severely in turn.
That is the reality of the situation. .
Its not about military superiority, its about being wise and concentrating on the economy. We want to grow our economy, and jump forward. We don’t that to be screwed by a war. Mark my work, India will a big economy power in our life time. Better catch up, or stay with these freedom fighters…
Also, Wondering how you are able to talk about " military superiority" after being drubbed for four times, including the latest Kargil adventure.
Since Pakistan has not directed terrorism at India in the past or present the issue of responsibility does not arise. Pakistan is responsible for acting against groups that may have operated out of Pakistani soil against India (not Kashmir), and it should, but there can be no fool proof guarantees here. .
Check my first news article…
Those citizens are so affected since the GoI chooses to deflect all blame at Pakistan (though the Mumbai attacks were obviously correctly identified as originating from Pakistan) as a means to absolve itself of ineptitude. Nothing conspiratorial about this - after all, this is the same charge of 'brainwashing the Paksitani public' levelled by Indians against the Paksitani establishment.
You can't have it both ways and claim 'conspiracy theory' when the same allegation made by Indians is directed back at you.
I think PA is the master of 'conspiracy theories'….read this. Sounds really funny
U.S. Is a Top Villain in Pakistan’s Conspiracy Talk
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/26/world/PSTAN1/PSTAN1-articleLarge.jpg
Supporters of the Islamic political party Jamaat-e-Islami at a rally in Karachi, Pakistan, in February. Pakistani suspicion of the United States is fueled by political parties and media pundits.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: May 25, 2010
No one seems to know its name, but everyone has an opinion about it. It is powerful and shadowy, and seems to control just about everything in the American government, including President Obama.
“
They have planted this character Faisal Shahzad to implement their script,” said Hashmat Ali Habib, a lawyer and a member of the bar association.
Who are they?
“You must know, you are from America,” he said smiling. “My advice for the American nation is, get free of these think tanks.”
Conspiracy theory is a national sport in Pakistan, where the main players — the United States, India and Israel — change positions depending on the ebb and flow of history. Since 2001, the United States has taken center stage, looming so large in Pakistan’s collective imagination that it sometimes seems to be responsible for everything that goes wrong here.
“
When the water stops running from the tap, people blame America,” said Shaista Sirajuddin, an English professor in Lahore.
The problem is more than a peculiar domestic phenomenon for Pakistan. It has grown into a narrative of national victimhood that is a nearly impenetrable barrier to any candid discussion of the problems here. In turn, it is one of the principal obstacles for the United States in its effort to build a stronger alliance with a country to which it gives more than a billion dollars a year in aid.
It does not help that no part of the Pakistani state — either the weak civilian government or the powerful military — is willing to risk publicly owning that relationship.
One result is that nearly all of American policy toward Pakistan is conducted in secret, a fact that serves only to further feed conspiracies. American military leaders slip quietly in and out of the capital; the Pentagon uses networks of private spies; and the main tool of American policy here, the drone program, is not even publicly acknowledged to exist.
“The linchpin of U.S. relations is security, and it’s not talked about in public,” said Adnan Rehmat, a media analyst in Islamabad.
The empty public space fills instead with hard-line pundits and loud Islamic political parties, all projected into Pakistani living rooms by the rambunctious new electronic media, dozens of satellite television networks that weave a black-and-white, prime-time narrative in which the United States is the central villain.
“People want simple explanations, like evil America, Zionist-Hindu alliance,” said a Pakistani diplomat, who asked not to be named because of the delicate nature of the topic. “It’s gone really deep into the national psyche now.”
One of those pundits is Zaid Hamid, a fast-talking, right-wing television personality who rose to fame on one of Pakistan’s 90 new private television channels.
He uses Google searches to support his theory that India, Israel and the United States — through their intelligence agencies and the company formerly known as Blackwater — are conspiring to destroy Pakistan.
For Mr. Hamid, the case of Mr. Shahzad is one piece of a larger puzzle being assembled to pressure Pakistan. Why, otherwise, the strange inconsistencies, like the bomb’s not exploding? “If you connect the dots, you have a pretty exciting story,” he said. But the media are only part of the problem. Only a third of Pakistan’s population has access to satellite channels, Mr. Rehmat said, and equally powerful are Islamic groups active at the grass roots of Pakistani society.
Though Pakistan was created as a haven for Muslims, it was secular at first, and did not harden into an Islamic state on paper until 1949. Intellectuals point to the moment as a kind of original sin, when Islam became embedded in the country’s democratic blueprint, handing immense power to Islamic hard-liners, who could claim — despite their small numbers — to be the true guardians of the state.
Together with military and political leaders, these groups wield Islamic slogans for personal gain, further shutting down discussion.
Lawyers in Pakistan have a strong streak of political Islam. Mr. Habib, who has had militants as clients, argues that Al Qaeda is an American invention. Their pronouncements are infused with anti-Semitism, standard for Islamic groups in the region.
“
The lobbies are the Jews, maybe some Indians, working in the inner core of the American administration,” said Muhammad Ikram Chaudhry, vice president of the bar association.
Liberals on Pakistan’s beleaguered left see the xenophobic patriotism and conspiracy theories as a defense mechanism that deflects all responsibility for society’s problems and protects against a reality that is too painful to face.
“It’s deny, deny, deny,” said Nadeem F. Paracha, a columnist for Dawn, an English-language daily. “It’s become second nature, like an instinct.”
Mr. Paracha argues that the denial is dangerous because it hobbles any form of public conversation — for example, about Mr. Shahzad’s upper-class background — leaving society unequipped to find remedies for its problems. “We’ve started to believe our own lies,” he said.
For those on the left, that view obscures an increasingly disappointing history.
For 62 years, Pakistan has lurched from one self-serving government to the next, with little thought given to education or the economy, said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-i-Azam University.
Now Pakistan is dependent on the West to pay its bills, a vulnerable position that breeds resentment.
“We acknowledge to ourselves privately that Pakistan is a client state of the U.S.,” Mr. Hoodbhoy said. “But on the other hand, the U.S. is acting against Muslim interests globally. A sort of self-loathing came about.”
There are very real reasons for Pakistanis to be skeptical of the United States. It encouraged — and financed — jihadis waging a religious war against the Soviets in the 1980s, while supporting the military autocrat Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who seeded Pakistan’s education system with Islamists.
But Mr. Hamid is more interested in the larger plot, like the secret ownership of the Federal Reserve, which he found on the Internet. After three years of fame, his star seems to be falling. This month his show was canceled, and he has had to rely on Facebook and audio CDs to make his points. But it is not the end of the conspiracy.
“Someone else will be front row very soon,” said Manan Ahmed, a professor of Pakistani history. “It is the mood of the country at the moment.”
(usa india israel)
. If its occupied people wont come and vote in elections..
