Pakistan : Terrorist Wahabi Islamic Rep Pakistan 7

[Naresh]

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[url="http://www.thefridaytimes.com/27052011/page4.shtml"]Al Qaeda and Pakistan Army[/url]



Khaled Ahmed



It is more satisfying to fire a Hatf-10 tactical-nuclear missile to set the dovecots of Hindu India aflutter than to persuade a heavily Islamist army to fight Al Qaeda



Is Al Qaeda too strong for the Pakistan Army to fight? Since Al Qaeda is linked to the Taliban and Pakistan’s own jihadi militias and the vast madrassa network, would it be wise for the Pakistan Army to fight Al Qaeda without unleashing desertions within it and facing a civil war like situation and thus ignoring its mandated task of fighting India? More objectively, is the internal challenge more insurmountable than the external one against India and the US where its nuclear assets come into play effectively?



Opinion surveys say Pakistanis don’t think ill of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The politicians say war against terrorism is not Pakistan’s war and fighting it will serve the strategic objectives of the US in the region without advancing Pakistan’s cause against India. Why should the army fight an enemy not recognised as such by Pakistan’s parliament which agrees completely with the view that CIA drones targeting Al Qaeda should be shot down and NATO supplies - going to Afghanistan for troops fighting Al Qaeda and Pakistan-based Taliban – should be blocked to teach the US a lesson for killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad?



Fighting India is the primary task given to the Pakistan Army by Pakistani nationalism. It would be dereliction on the part of the Pakistani generals to deflect attention from this primary task to fighting elements who cannot be defeated and a clash with whom may actually cause defections and civil war. The mental grooves created by textbooks and years of indoctrination incline the army to fighting India. It is more satisfying to fire a Hatf-10 tactical-nuclear missile to set the dovecots of Hindu India aflutter than to persuade a heavily Islamist army to fight Al Qaeda. Anatol Lieven in his book Pakistan a Hard Country (Allen Lane 1011) describes this mind:



‘A common definition of tragedy is that of a noble figure betrayed and destroyed by some inner flaw. The Pakistani military is in some ways an admirable institution, but it suffers from one tragic feature which has been with it from the beginning, which has defined its whole character and world view, which has done terrible damage to Pakistan and which could in some circumstances destroy Pakistan and its armed forces altogether. This is the military’s obsession with India in general, and Kashmir in particular…both the military’s prestige and the personal experiences of its men have become especially focused on Kashmir’ (p. 185).



Another recent book edited by Pakistan’s most effective ambassador to the US Maleeha Lodhi - Pakistan beyond the ‘Crisis State’ (OUP 2011) – has historian Ayesha Jalal depict the scene in Pakistan like this: ‘Besieged by enemies within and without, television’s spin-doctors, impelled by the state’s intelligence agencies, attribute Pakistan’s multifaceted problems to the machinations of invisible external hands, as opposed to historically verifiable causes of internal decline and decay. If India’s hegemonic designs are not hindering Pakistan at every step, America and Israel are believed to be hatching plots to break up the world’s only Muslim nuclear state. Call it paranoia, denial or intellectual paralysis, but Pakistan’s deeply divided and traumatised people are groping for a magical formula to evade collective responsibility for their failure to gel as a nation’.



She refers to collective ‘denial’ which will not allow Pakistan to take on Al Qaeda: ‘Forced to imbibe official truths, the vast majority of literate Pakistanis take comfort in ignorance, scepticism and, most disconcertingly, in a contagion of belief in conspiracy theories. The self-glorification of an imagined past matched by habits of national denial have assumed crisis proportions today when Pakistan’s existence is under far more serious threat from fellow Muslims than it was in 1947 from rival non-Muslim communities’ (p. 10).



Writing for Asia Times on Line in 2008, Syed Saleem Shahzad warned about the ‘moulding’ of the Pakistan Army’s mind by Al Qaeda: ‘The crux is, while America was playing its game, so too was Al Qaeda. Through terror attacks, Al Qaeda was able to disrupt the economy, and by targeting the security forces, Al Qaeda created splits and fear in the armed forces, to the extent that they thought twice about dancing to the US’s tune. Unlike Musharraf, when he wore two hats, of the president and of army chief, the new head of the military, professional soldier General Ashfaq Kayani, had to listen to the chatter of his men and the intelligence community at grand dinners. What he heard was disturbing. Soldiers from the North-West Frontier Province region were completely in favour of the Taliban, while those from the countryside of Punjab - the decisive majority in the armed forces - felt guilty about fighting the Taliban and reckoned it was the wrong war’.



The ‘moulding’ function goes back to the early years of Al Qaeda’s activity in Pakistan. As recorded in Gerald Posner’s Why America Slept (Random House 2003) Abu Zubayda, the first big fish caught in Faisalabad in 2002, said: ‘Osama bin Laden had “personally” told him of a 1991 meeting at which Prince Turki of Saudi Arabia agreed to let bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as Al Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. The Pakistani contact, high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir, entered the equation, Zubayda said, at a 1996 meeting in Pakistan also attended by Zubayda. Bin Laden struck a deal with Mir, then in the military but tied closely to Islamists in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to get protection, arms and supplies for Al Qaeda. Abu Zubayda told interrogators bin Laden said the arrangement was blessed by the Saudis’.



Four top functionaries involved in this secret deal died mysteriously in 2002, including Mushaf Ali Mir, ‘by then Pakistan’s Air Marshal, who perished in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants’. The following year an assassination attempt was made on General Musharraf by a group of Air Force employees in Rawalpindi. After the mastermind was caught, the Air Force let him escape through a bathroom window! (He was caught later from Karachi.) One Air Force officer Khalid Khwaja, while an officer of the ISI, became Osama’s pointman and got him to fund Nawaz Sharif.



If Osama can be in Abbottabad, the other Al Qaeda leaders could be in Karachi. There was a time Al Zawahiri used to be in Bajaur for R&R with his local wives; he could have more of them in other ‘safe’ cities today, surrounded by local state functionaries who believe Al Qaeda is fighting for Islam, a belief much strengthened if dollars are forthcoming from the Arab coffers. In 2010, those caught in Karachi included:



1) Ameer Muawiya, an associate of Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden who was in charge of foreign Al Qaeda militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal regions near Afghanistan. 2) Akhunzada Popalzai, also known as Mohammad Younis, a one-time Taliban shadow governor in Zabul province and former police chief in Kabul when the repressive regime ruled Afghanistan. 3) Hamza, who served as a former Afghan army commander in Helmand province, during the Taliban rule. 4) Abu Riyan al Zarqawi, also known as Abu Musa, and his local facilitator, Mufti Kifayatullah. Zarqawi was involved in dealing with Chechen and Tajik militants operating in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt on the border with Afghanistan.



Doctors and scientists in Pakistan tend to be men of faith rather than reason. When the nuclear scientists were given state awards for their 1998 nuclear tests, the TV captured them mostly sporting flowing beards. Reported by The Nation (24 July 2009) enrichment expert Sultan Bashir Mahmood opened his NGO Umma Tameer-e-Nau in Kabul soon after 9/11 with ‘the prime objective of reconstruction work in the war-ravaged Afghanistan’. Soon however instead of reconstruction he met Osama bin Laden who contributed financially to his NGO. Later when the FBI tried to give him a lie-detector test in Islamabad - on the basis of evidence found in his NGO’s Kabul office - he fainted every time and avoided taking it.



Cheers