Pakistan - Trains for terror

Dr Mohammad Taqi

A dual national Pakistani cannot get in or out of Pakistan without appropriate travel documents but international terrorists breeze through layers of security

It is like clockwork: with an uptick
in relations between the US and the Pakistani military, an al Qaeda member is either apprehended or killed in Pakistan. Almost all al Qaeda men captured in Pakistan thus far were nabbed in ostensibly joint Pak-US operations but the information invariably had come from the US side. Similarly, almost all the al Qaeda men killed on Pakistani soil were taken out by US drones or, in the case of their head honcho Osama bin Laden, by US special forces. In a first, the Pakistan military recently killed a major al Qaeda figure, Adnan el Shukrijumah, in an airborne raid at his hideout in Shinwarsak, South Waziristan. Shukrijumah was al Qaeda’s external operations chief and was wanted by the US for plotting to blow up the New York subway system in 2009. Apparently, Shukrijumah had been in and out of North and South Waziristan at least since March 2004.

The US may be delighted to have one less terrorist to worry about but the key question remains how it is possible that terrorist legions from around the world zip in and out of Pakistan without any problem. Dozens of them have lived in Pakistani cities like Karachi, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi and even the outskirts of the capital Islamabad. A dual national Pakistani cannot get in or out of Pakistan without appropriate travel documents but international terrorists like Shukrijumah, who apparently had dual nationality, breeze through layers of security. He, after all, would not have airdropped into Waziristan but, in all probability, was given a visa by some Pakistani embassy and entered through one of the country’s airports. And it is not like his presence was unknown to Pakistani authorities. The Pakistan military ruler at the time of the March 2004 ‘terrorist summit’ in Waziristan, General Pervez Musharraf, had conceded to Time magazine: “The personalities involved, the operations, the fact that a major explosives expert came here and went back was extremely significant.”

Shukrijumah was the explosives expert that Musharraf was alluding to. But did he ever go back as Musharraf implied? We may never know. Musharraf, incidentally, had also repeatedly denied bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan. Thankfully, Shukrijumah was not able to attack the US again. It is highly likely though that Shukrijumah’s Taliban cohorts used his expertise to unleash havoc on both sides of the Durand Line. Better 10 years late than never to begin, but is Shukrijumah’s killing really a paradigm shift in the Pakistani establishment’s thinking? Happenings inside Pakistan suggest otherwise.

The Pakistani national monument Minar-e-Pakistan and Iqbal Park (formerly Minto Park) were turned into a terrorist Hyde Park Corner for the last couple of weeks. First, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) conducted its national convention at the monument where its ex-emir, Munawwar Hassan, called not just for jihad and qitaal (armed slaughter) outside Pakistan but also inside the country. On the heels of the JI’s convention came the congregation of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), the parent outfit of the banned terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The Pakistan Railways ran two special trains to ferry the JuD men to the terror playground.

Thousands of police and security personnel were deployed by the administration to protect the mammoth JuD gathering. But that was not all of it. Hundreds of JuD men in military-style camouflage spread around their ijtima (convention) to provide security. The chief of the JuD, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, then made a dramatic entrance mounted on a horse. One did not know whether to laugh or cry seeing the jihadist ‘knight’ perched on his noble steed right in front of the Minar-e-Pakistan, where the Pakistan Declaration was adopted in 1940 by a session of the All India Muslim League (AIML). Perhaps even AIML leaders had not envisaged such a dreadful culmination of communal politics. Hafiz Saeed declared that Ghazwa-e-Hind (holy war against India) was “inevitable”, justified jihadist infiltration into Indian-administered Kashmir and called to take up arms against India there for “Kashmir’s independence”.

Chances are slim to none that an outfit openly calling for cross-border terrorism could have pulled off a show at a national monument in the heart of Lahore without a nod from some elements of the security establishment. Ironically, both the JI and JuD remain the organisations blamed widely for harbouring al Qaeda operatives. The 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was arrested from the Rawalpindi house of ex-Major Adil Abdul Qudoos, a local JI man. Major Qudoos was killed last month in a US drone strike. Another Osama bin Laden confidant Abd-ur-Rehman Sareehi was a brother-in-law of the LeT’s operational chief, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi. The al Qaeda ringleader, Abu Zubaydah, who conceived the so-called millennium bombing plan, was captured from a LeT safe house in Faisalabad in 2002. The just-released US Senate report on the CIA torturing its captives mentions both Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah having been interrogated brutally. The report not only raises serious human rights and ethical issues but also puts a big question mark on the US’s policy and strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Global jihadists have not been hiding in plain sight. In fact, they are not hiding at all but rather yelling their intentions out loud from national monuments. Still, the US has consistently chosen to ignore these outfits — the rap on the knuckle bounties notwithstanding — and the elements that protect and nurture them. The handing over of the Tehreek-e-Taliban man Lateef Mehsud to Pakistan’s security agencies without Afghan officials knowing is the latest in a series of actions that the US administration seems to have taken, bypassing both the Afghan and Pakistani civilian leadership, in its dealings with the Pakistani military. According to the author Arif Jamal, after the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker asked India not to blame Pakistan and to solve the issue through direct contact. A similar pressure appears to be being applied on the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani. Both current and former Afghan officials have expressed deep resentment over these US actions and have termed them “appeasement, waste of time and futile”. So far, there is no sign that the US will induce Pakistan to handover Taliban leader Mullah Ghani Baradar, who is in its custody, and Mullah Omar, who by most accounts has sanctuary in southern Pakistan. The US has to introspect whether torturing terrorist pawns and night raids on Afghan villages is the solution to global jihadism. The US can feel happy about the Shukrijumah-style lollypops sent its way but there cannot be lasting peace in the region without addressing the gloating global jihadists who harbour such characters and have national railways running trains for their terror galas.