Al-Qaeda (19 page)

In February 1994, as Sheikh was finishing his training at Khalid bin Waleed, Maulana Massoud Azhar, a charismatic Punjab-born Deobandi cleric and a senior figure in Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, was arrested by Indian security forces while travelling by rickshaw on a fake Portuguese passport in southern Kashmir. Sheikh was approached by the HUM leadership and asked to travel to India to seize hostages to force New Delhi to let Azhar go.

Pakistan and India fought their first war over Kashmir in late 1947. The Pakistanis, aware of their own military weakness, had tried to use irregular tribal fighters to force out the Hindu maharaja of the state during the partition of the British south Asian dominions. They had failed and, with New Delhi committed to holding on to India’s only Muslim majority state, clashes between regular forces had followed. When, on 1 January 1949, a ceasefire was declared the Pakistanis controlled the western third of the former states of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Indians controlled the rest, including the Muslim-dominated valley of Srinagar.

In 1965, the Pakistanis tried again. Hundreds of infiltrators were sent across the Line of Control (LoC, the de facto boundary that separates Indian-and Pakistani-held parts of Kashmir) in a failed bid to spark a revolt. Once again, the regular army troops were committed without success. More fighting in 1971 was similarly inconclusive.

The debacle of the war in Bangladesh of 1971 confirmed Islamabad’s
preference for proxy warfare. Along with the Afghan Islamists who had arrived in 1974, Pakistan also supported Sikh terrorists in western India, albeit intermittently, and sundry other south Asian insurgencies. A factor in Zia’s enthusiasm for the war against the Soviets was the Pakistani military’s long-term reliance on such proxies. The tactics in Afghanistan were seen as so successful that their application elsewhere, particularly in Kashmir against Pakistan’s ‘auld enemy’, became an inevitability.

The Pakistanis first turned to the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), a small group of Kashmiri academics and intellectuals who wanted independence from both Pakistan and India and were more influenced by Frantz Fanon’s radical leftist Third Worldism than by Qutb. In 1983, the ISI approached the JKLF and offered logistical support and training in return for control over military operations. By late 1987, a deal had been done, and some time in early 1988 a group of JKLF activists travelled into ‘Azad’ Jammu and Kashmir, as the semi-autonomous Pakistani parts of Kashmir are known to Islamabad, for training. The results of the ISI involvement were clear almost immediately. On 31 July 1988, a series of powerful explosions rocked Srinagar and Jammu.
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These blasts are usually taken to mark the start of the ‘Kashmir insurgency’. But there were other factors beyond Pakistani interference that precipitated the surge of anger and violence that consumed Kashmir in the late 1980s. The 1987 provincial elections in the state had been thoroughly rigged by New Delhi. Many activists were inspired by the impending Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Palestinian intifada and the fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The Indian government responded to the agitation with vicious repression.

Because the JKLF favoured independence rather than Pakistani rule, the ISI swiftly began looking for more pro-Islamabad alternatives. During the 1980s a Kashmiri version of Jamaat Islami had begun to emerge in the Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir. Its support came from largely the same social groups as its Pakistani parent body: the urban, educated middle classes, who were frustrated at the negligible economic development in the state, the lack of opportunities for social advancement for Muslims and the limited democracy.

By 1990, with peaceful demonstrators being gunned down by Indian forces in the streets, Jamaat Islami activists in Kashmir were rapidly becoming disillusioned with the traditional non-violent stance of the movement. Jamaat Islami in Kashmir formed an armed wing, known as Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, which, with its pro-Islamabad stance and obvious links to Zia’s allies in JI in Pakistan, was a natural focus for the ambitions of the ISI and the senior Pakistani military command. Supplies and training for the JKLF were cut off. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who continued to be the favourite of the ISI, provided training facilities for the new group at his camps in Afghanistan. One particularly large camp, known as the Markaz Faiz Mohammed Shaheed, was set up with ISI trainers and administrators on the road between Zhawar Khili and Khost in late 1991.
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Other militants were trained in camps set up around Muzzafarabad in ‘Azad Kashmir’, in NWFP and in the Punjab. Trainers were borrowed from Hekmatyar and the syllabus was based on that taught by the ISI to the Afghan mujahideen.

After Zia died in 1988, Pakistan returned to civilian rule, first under Benazir Bhutto, then under Nawaz Sharif. Bhutto’s party, the Pakistan People’s Party, had developed alliances with the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islami, an organization established by the Deobandi movement as a lobby group rather than as a political party. Sharif, with his Punjabi commercial and industrial support base, was far closer to the urban political Islamism personified by Zia, Hekmatyar’s Hizb and Jamaat Islami than the feudal and rural Bhutto. By 1993, when Bhutto returned to power for a second time, she felt strong enough to try to overturn Zia’s legacy and break the political Islamist nexus of the ISI, Hizb-e-Islami and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. The political Islamist project in Pakistan was, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, beginning to weaken.

Certainly Pakistan’s Zia-inspired foreign policy was failing. Much favour had been lost in the Gulf when JI had come out in noisy support of Saddam Hussein against the Saudi government in 1990. In Afghanistan, the ISI remained set on backing Hekmatyar against the Tajik-dominated faction led by Rabbani and Massoud and the Shia groups, despite his increasingly rabid anti-Americanism and willingness to kill civilians.
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Between 1989 and 1992, the internecine conflicts
among the factions had been disguised by their campaign against the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. Once in control of the capital the failure of the various political Islamist factions to successfully govern their country was manifest.

Neither could the ISI or the senior army staff point to much success in Kashmir. There, though casualties among their security personnel were high, the Indians showed no sign of weakening. Despite hundreds of militants, and civilians, dying it was clear that any concessions from New Delhi were unlikely.

So when the Pakistani military wanted a new army of proxies to revitalize the flagging guerrilla campaign in Kashmir and replenish the cadres that the Indian military had decimated, there was an obvious place to look.
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Two new groups, both Deobandi, were formed, trained and sent over the LoC.
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The two groups were Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT, ‘the army of the pure’). The LeT had its roots in the Ahl-e-Hadith movement, a relatively small Wahhabi group that had existed in Pakistan since partition but had grown swiftly, largely thanks to Saudi private funds, during the 1980s. The LeT were smaller than the HUM and focused more closely on Kashmir. By 1994, both groups had established bases in Muzzafarabad and were running overt recruiting offices throughout Pakistan, such as the one I, and Omar Saeed Sheikh, had visited in Lahore. HUM also received considerable funds from Pakistani emigrant communities and from the private and governmental sources in the Gulf.

The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the LeT subscribed to the new Jihadi doctrine that had evolved during the latter stages of the Afghan war. They had little in common with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen’s cadres, who saw themselves as fighting an Islamist political struggle for the Kashmiri people. The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and the LeT were also considerably more violent and indiscriminate in their attacks and targeted the moderate and Sufi-influenced Kashmiri Muslims, berating them for their lax practices, attacking religious shrines, demanding that videos and TVs be banned and even, in the case of some cadres from an LeT splinter group, throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women.

Tragically for the people of Kashmir, the insurgency they had started in the late 1980s had gone through a rapid process of radicalization
that was largely out of their control. When the first demonstrations had started back in 1987, the Kashmiri grievances were largely articulated within a contemporary Western human rights discourse, albeit with a religious and economic undercurrent. The only Islamic activists seriously involved believed in a gradualist political Islam. Seven years later the insurgency had become dominated by the most violent fringe of modern Islamic activism.

By the time Sheikh arrived in New Delhi in the autumn of 1994 he was very much part of that fringe. He started looking for foreigners, preferably British or American, among backpackers in the city’s Parganj quarter, attempting to strike up friendships.
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With several accomplices, he eventually managed to kidnap three Britons and an American, holding them in safe houses well away from Delhi. It was an amateurish operation with, at one point, Sheikh himself forced to deliver a ransom note to a BBC office. Police stumbled across the kidnappers close to one of the safe houses and in the gunfight that followed Sheikh was shot in the shoulder. All the hostages were freed unharmed. Sheikh was sent to prison and largely forgotten. Eight years later he would make a spectacular return to the world of international Islamic militancy when he kidnapped Daniel Pearl of the
Wall Street Journal
in Karachi. Pearl was less lucky than the Delhi hostages and was brutally killed.

7
Terror

At 12.17 and 37 seconds on 26 February 1993, a bomb exploded under the World Trade Center in New York, killing six people, injuring more than a thousand and causing $300m damage. The device, 1,200 lbs of explosives, several heavy tanks of hydrogen, a detonator of nitroglycerine and two 20-foot fuses, had been hidden in a rented yellow Ryder Econoline van that had been parked in a public car park beneath the Twin Towers twelve minutes earlier. The bomb, on level B-2 of the complex, had smashed a hole through the foyer of the Vista hotel, two floors above it, and penetrated three floors down. A 3,000 lb steel joist was ripped from its mountings and thrown 35 feet inside Tower One. That evening Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a 25-year-old Pakistani, took a $30 cab ride to JFK airport, boarded a Pakistan International Airlines plane to Karachi and disappeared.

Ramzi had arrived in America nearly six months earlier. He had been detained on arrival but released because immigration officials were too busy to deal with him. Within days he had started gathering a team around him. A group of disaffected and alienated young Muslims had congregated around the al-Farouq mosque in Brooklyn, once the Maktab al-Khidamat’s favourite recruiting ground for the Afghan jihad in New York, and there Ramzi found his first volunteers. For the next two months Ramzi recruited, surveyed his target and planned. Then he bought 1,500 lbs of urea and 130 gallons of nitric acid and, in a rented apartment, mixed them to form urea nitrate, an explosive hardly known in the USA at the time. He added aluminium azide and ferric oxide to increase its force and is said to have considered using some kind of cyanide to produce a poison gas as well as an
explosion. The preparation of the device took nearly two months. Ramzi wanted to build a bigger bomb but lacked funds. He had aimed, he later said, to topple one tower into another. He had wanted to kill 250,000 people.
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This chapter examines the careers of Ramzi, currently incarcerated in an American high-security prison, and of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, another Islamic militant who was one of the key planners of the 11 September attacks. Shaikh, who was captured in late February 2003, was considered the most dangerous of all those who escaped with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri from the American dragnet in Afghanistan.

The stories of both men are important. In addition to showing how militancy continued to flourish in Pakistan and Afghanistan between 1989 and 1996 (without bin Laden’s assistance), their activities reveal how modern Islamic militancy worked before bin Laden and his close aides were able to construct their base in Afghanistan in the latter half of the decade. They thus give a very good idea of how Islamic terrorism has been working since that base was demolished in the autumn of 2001.

What we can see clearly is how both men were able to put together the constituent elements for a terrorist attack again and again without at any stage being affiliated to any one individual or organization. Both Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef were committed to wreaking havoc on the West. For that they needed people, money, expertise and equipment. They both had, or at least swiftly developed, the contacts, the drive and the experience to be able to find those resources. They were ‘operational hubs’. Like a professional party organizer, an infelicitous but useful analogy, or an international businessman brokering deals, they drew on their contacts books, filled with numbers picked up during time in the jihad or in training camps or through family or tribal connections, to gather what they needed. Ramzi, in his short career, was involved with Arab veterans of the Afghan war of a dozen different nationalities, bankers from half the countries in the Gulf, a series of different Islamic militants, several former Afghan mujahideen leaders, Pakistani sectarian terrorists and a whole range of recruits he found in Bangkok, Manila, New York,
Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi. Bin Laden’s involvement in any of this was tangential at best.

From 1989 to 1995, Pakistan, with its own raging sectarian militancy, its proxies in Afghanistan and its state sponsorship of radical Islam in Kashmir, remained the first port of call for any aspiring Islamic terrorist. Pakistan was also home to a thriving community of foreign ‘jihadis’. Many were militants who had remained in Pakistan or Afghanistan after 1989 simply because they could not return to their own countries for fear of arrest, incarceration and execution by the governments of their various homelands. Others had married Afghan women and now had families and would not have returned even if it had been possible. Several lived in Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s compound in Peshawar’s University Town. Several hundred more, including many senior figures, lived in cheap accommodation provided by Abd al-Rab al-Rasul Sayyaf in his extensive complex at Pabbi. Other Arabs were living in Jalalabad or its environs or around Khost. Not many were actually fighting. Only a few hundred actually took part in the campaigns between 1989 and 1992 against the Afghan Communist regime left in place by the Soviets. Only around 250 Arabs were involved in the successful capture of Khost in 1991.
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Most foreigners trained for jihad elsewhere or plotted attacks in their own countries, in Kashmir, Chechnya or Bosnia, against the munafiq regimes and, increasingly, against America.