Pakistan: A Hard Country (34 page)
Final y – though it is not clear if this was real y a departure from the script, as ISI officers claim in private, or was planned by the ISI as the Indian government believes – the militants began to carry out terrorist attacks on Indian targets outside Kashmir (starting with an attack on Indian soldiers at the Red Fort in Delhi in December 2000). This last development in particular ensured that in the wake of 9/11 Pakistan would come under irresistible US pressure to abandon its active support for the Kashmiri jihad and crack down on its militant al ies.
In January 2002, Musharraf formal y banned Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, and ordered an end to militant infiltration into Indian Kashmir from Pakistan. From mid-2003 this ban on infiltration has largely been enforced, leading to a steep reduction in violence in Kashmir. As a result, in November 2003 India and Pakistan agreed a ceasefire along the Line of Control in Kashmir, and initiated a dialogue on a possible settlement over Kashmir, which wil be discussed further in the Conclusions.
The Pakistani military remained firmly convinced that India would never agree to terms even minimal y acceptable to Pakistan unless at least the threat of future guerril a and terrorist action remained present.
Meanwhile, their continued hostility to India was also fuel ed by attacks on Muslims in India, and especial y the infamous Gujarat massacres of 2002, which were orchestrated by the BJP state government (and which claimed, it should be pointed out, at least ten times as many victims as the Mumbai terrorist attacks, while receiving perhaps one-tenth of Western media notice).
By 2008, as the Taleban insurgency against Pakistan itself gathered pace and an increasing number of ISI officers and informants fel victim to it, the ISI itself had also begun to see the need for a new approach to some of its militant al ies within Pakistan. In the meantime, however, various developments had made it far more difficult for the Pakistani military to take effective action.
The military had helped the militant groups root themselves more deeply in Pakistani society, especial y in parts of Punjab, exploiting not just the military’s financial assistance but the prestige of taking part in a jihad which most Punjabis saw (and were encouraged by the military to see) as legitimate. The extensive charitable and educational network developed by Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa with military encouragement also served as a way of employing fighters withdrawn from the Kashmir battle. By 2009, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s own resources had made it independent of ISI financial support.
The military is genuinely concerned that if it attacks these groups it wil drive more and more of them into joining the Pakistani Taleban – as has already occurred with Sipah-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and some sections of Jaish-e-Mohammed. According to Stephen Tankel, some members of Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa did press the organization to revolt against the Pakistani government when Musharraf sided with America after 9/11, but their demands were rejected by the leadership and they left the organization. Since Lashkar-e-Taiba remained focused on Kashmir (and, after 2006, on Afghanistan), and did not attack Pakistan, the ISI did not move against it.27
On 14 January 2010, Jamaat-ud-Dawa condemned the kil ing of Muslims by suicide bombing as unIslamic and said that such attacks ‘played into the hands of the US, Israel and India’. It is important to note that LeT and JuD’s hatred and fear of India may act as a deterrent against their joining in revolution in Pakistan – at least, a JuD
spokesman w
Edited by Foxit Reader hom I interviewed in January 2009 stressed repeatedly his organization’s loyalty to Pakistan as the state t Copyright(C) by Foxit Software Company,2005-2008hat ‘defends Muslims of South Asia against Indian Hindu conquest and oppression’.
For Evaluation Only.
He promised therefore that the JuD would do nothing to destroy Pakistan.
Pakistani officials have told me that their greatest fears of mass revolt in Punjab concern what would happen if Lashkar-e-Taiba/Jamaat-ud-Dawa were to swing against the state and use their extensive network to mobilize and organize unrest. This they say is one key reason (along with their anti-Indian agenda, which they do not mention) for not taking the sweeping measures against the organisation that the US is demanding. As the commissioner of one of Punjab’s administrative divisions said to me in January 2009: We have to worry that if we do what you say and crack down on them that some of them at least wil turn to terrorism against Pakistan in al iance with the Taleban. After al , they have the ideology and the training. The last thing we need now is yet another extremist threat. And, after al , is it real y in your interest either to cause revolt in Punjab? This province alone has three times the population of the whole of Afghanistan, and don’t forget that the army too is recruited from here.
These officials also do not add that one way of keeping LeT quiet in Pakistan is to al ow (or even encourage) its activists to join the Afghan Taleban to fight against Western forces on the other side of the Durand Line.
In Jaish-e-Mohammed, by contrast, militants pressing for a jihad against the ‘slave’ government of Pakistan prevailed against the counsel of the group’s leadership. The suspected involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) activists in the attempt to assassinate Musharraf in December 2003 (apparently with low-level help from within the armed forces) led to a harsh crackdown on parts of the group by Pakistani intel igence. On the other hand, ISI links with the group meant that other parts remained loyal to the Pakistani state – though only, perhaps, because they were al owed to help the Taleban in Afghanistan and to retain at least their potential to attack India.
Moreover, their long association with the militants, first in Afghanistan and then in Kashmir, had led some ISI officers into a close personal identification with the forces that they were supposed to be control ing. This leads to a whole set of interlocking questions: how far the Pakistani high command continues to back certain militant groups; how far the command of the ISI may be fol owing a strategy in this regard independent from that of the military; and how far individual ISI officers may have escaped from the control of their superiors and be supporting and planning terrorist actions on their own. This in turn leads to the even more vital question of how far the Pakistani military is penetrated by Islamist extremist elements, and whether there is any possibility of these carrying out a successful military coup from below, against their own high command.
Since this whole field is obviously kept very secret by the institutions concerned (including Military Intel igence, which monitors the political and ideological al egiances of officers), there are no definitive answers to these questions. What fol ows is informed guesswork based on numerous discussions with experts and off-the-record talks with Pakistani officers including retired ISI officers. It is also worth remembering that even in Western democracies (notably France and the US) intel igence services have had a tendency to develop both institutional cultures and institutional strategies of their own; and also that the nature of their work can make it extremely difficult to control the activities of individual agents – especial y of course after they retire. A number of retired middle-ranking ISI officers are reported to have openly joined LeT and other militant groups.
Concerning the ISI, the consensus of my informants is as fol ows.
There is considerable resentment of the ISI in the rest of the military, owing to their perceived arrogance and suspected corruption. This sentiment was crystal ized by a notorious case in 2006 when ISI officers harassed the family of a highly decorated retired brigadier after a clash between his grandchildren and the children of the head of the ISI’s political wing. However, when it comes to overal strategy, the ISI fol ows the line of the high command. It is after al always headed by a senior regular general, not a professional intel igence officer, and a majority of its officers are also seconded regulars. The present chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, was director-general of the ISI from 2004 to 2007, and ordered a limited crackdown on jihadi groups that the ISI had previously supported. Nonetheless, ever since the Afghan war the ISI has been building up a separate corporate identity and ethos, which has bred a wil ingness to pursue separate tactics and individual actions without consulting the high command.
Concerning the Afghan Taleban, the military and the ISI are at one, and the evidence is unequivocal: the military and ISI continue to give them shelter (though not much actual support, or the Taleban would be far more effective than they are). There is deep unwil ingness to take serious action against them on America’s behalf, both because it is feared that this would increase Pathan insurgency in Pakistan, and because they are seen as the only assets Pakistan possesses in Afghanistan. The conviction in the Pakistani security establishment is that the West wil quit Afghanistan leaving civil war behind, and that India wil then throw its weight behind the non-Pathan forces of the former Northern Al iance in order to encircle Pakistan strategical y.
In these circumstances, ‘It’s not that we like the Taleban, but they are al we’ve got,’ as Mr Hamid told me, reflecting the private statements of several officers. As these words suggest, in the great majority of Pakistani officers a wil ingness to shelter the Afghan Taleban does not indicate any affection for them – while on the Taleban side, the memoirs of the former Taleban official and ambassador to Pakistan, Mul ah Abdul Salam Zaeef, are fil ed with the most virulent hatred for Pakistan in general and the ISI in particular.
Concerning the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies, however, like the military as a whole, the ISI is now committed to the struggle against them, and by the end of 2009 had lost more than seventy of its officers in this fight – some ten times the number of CIA officers kil ed since 9/11, just as Pakistani military casualties fighting the Pakistani Taleban have been more than double those of the US in Afghanistan.
Equal y, however, in 2007 – 8 there were a great many stories of ISI officers intervening to rescue individual Taleban commanders from arrest by the police or the army – too many, and too circumstantial, for these al to have been invented. A senior civilian counter-terrorism officer told me that his agency has repeatedly arrested members of terrorist groups who have turned out to have ISI links. He also said that his counter-terrorism operations have received very little cooperation from the ISI – though that, he said, was often in his view more from institutional rivalry (so familiar from relations between the CIA and FBI in the US) than from a deliberate desire to protect terrorists.
It seems clear, therefore, that whether because individual ISI officers felt a personal commitment to these men, or because the institution as a whole stil regarded them as potential y useful, actions were taking place that were against overal military policy – let alone that of the Pakistani government. Moreover, some of these men had at least indirect links to Al Qaeda. This does not mean that the ISI knows where Osama bin Laden (if he is indeed stil alive), Aiman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders are hiding. It does, however, suggest that they could probably do a good deal more to find out.
Concerning the threat of terrorism against the West (as opposed to attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan), the Pakistani military and civilian intel igence services have been extremely helpful to Britain in particular, as British intel igence officers testify. Problems in this cooperation appear to be due to lack of co-ordination between Pakistan’s different agencies, and the lack of an overal counter-terrorism strategy by the Pakistani state, rather than to any il -wil towards Britain or sympathy for the terrorists.
However, on the question of support for terrorism against India, it is obvious that not just the ISI but the military as a whole is committed to keeping Lashkar-e-Taiba (under its cover as Jamaat-ud-Dawa) at least in existence ‘on the shelf’. Reflecting these continuing links, up to 2010 Lashkar-e-Taiba has been careful to oppose militant actions in Pakistan itself, arguing that ‘the struggle in Pakistan is not a struggle between Islam and disbelief’, that the Pakistani state is not committing Indian-style atrocities against its own people, and that true Islam should be spread in Pakistan by missionary and charitable work (dawa) not jihad. Echoing statements by Mul ah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taleban, LeT/JuD leaders have also argued that fighting fel ow Muslims in Pakistan is a distraction from the true jihads in Kashmir and Afghanistan. The group has also taken a strong line against sectarian violence within Pakistan.28
As part of its programme of missionary and charitable work, and of spreading its influence by these means, the group has built up an impressive network of schools, hospitals and social welfare organizations in northern Pakistan. In 2005, it played an important part in relief work after the Kashmir earthquake, and the efficiency and honesty of its officials won praise from doctors and aid workers despite their lack of sympathy for the group’s ideology. Evidence is contradictory on whether the 2010 floods have al owed JuD to build up their prestige in the same way. Some accounts claim that this is so, but others say that the sheer scale of the catastrophe swamped their efforts, and that any boost to their popularity was local and limited.