- Thanks to the controversial referendum in Pakistan giving
a five-year term to President Pervez Musharraf, and the continuing political
turmoil in India over the carnage in Gujarat, media in this country have
by and large ignored the growing tension in the ties between Pakistan and
the United States.
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- Soured over Pakistan's close links with the Taliban militia
and the Al Qaeda and its becoming the principal spawning ground of fundamentalist
Islamic terrorism in the world, these had warmed up remarkably after President
Pervez Musharraf joined the war against terrorism that the US declared
following the terrorist attacks on it on September 11, last year. Americans,
however, now seem increasingly to suspect that he is doing no more than
going through the motions of cracking down on the leaders and thousands
of supporters of the Al Qaeda and Taliban militia who have fled into Pakistan,
as well as the Pakistani fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups the Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) Directorate had spawned.
- The US Government has doubtless not publicly expressed
its misgivings. Western media reports about events in Pakistan and Afghanistan
as well as US action on the ground have, however, set several large straws
afloat in the wind. According to a report by Christina Lamb in The Sunday
Telegraph about two months ago, most fighters and leaders of Al Qaeda and
the Taliban militia were alive and well in Pakistan. Protected by the ISI,
they moved about freely in Islamabad and other cities and the public knew
the names and addresses of quite a few Taliban ministers. According to
report by Kathy Gannon of the Associated Press, datelined Peshawar, March
20, up to 1,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, protected by sympathetic
clerics, were waiting for the US to leave Afghanistan to launch a jihad
against the Afghans supporting Mr Hamid Karzai's regime.
These reports tend to be corroborated by the arrest of 65 Al Qaeda terrorists
in Faisalabad and Lahore on March 27 and 28 in joint operations conducted
by Pakistanis and US 'advisers' comprising FBI and police personnel. Among
those arrested in Faisalabad on March 27 was Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al
Qaeda leader-second only to Osama bin Laden in the organisation's hierarchy,
according to some. Further, a recent dispatch from Arnaud de Borchgrave,
a writer and editor-at-large of UPI, stated authoritatively that Osama
bin Laden was being sheltered in Peshawar by his sympathisers.
Sporadic attacks launched by Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters on US forces
in Afghanistan from Pakistan's predominantly tribal areas bordering Afghanistan,
lend credence to these reports. Besides, many see the increased mortar
and rocket attacks on the bases of the ruling coalition's forces in Kandahar
and Gardez in Afghanistan as the beginning of a fightback by the Taliban
and the Al Qaeda militia. Also, there have been four attacks on members
of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul during the
past month and a US special forces soldier was shot in the face and wounded
in Kandahar on April 20. Kabul airport was itself hit by rockets hours
before US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld arrived there on April
27 on his first visit to Afghanistan in four months.
The US is also unhappy over the scanty and unreliable intelligence inputs
Islamabad has so far provided it. Besides, Pakistan has done little to
curb its own terrorist outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Harkat-ul
Mujaheedin (HuM), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Hijb-ul Mujaheedin (HM) and others
it has created to carry on cross-border terrorism against India. Though
officially banned, most of them are active under new names. Also, the manner
in which their accounts were frozen in banks gave them enough time to withdraw
the bulk of their funds. Moreover, over two-thirds of the 2,000 or so of
the activists belonging to these outfits, arrested after President Pervez
Musharraf's January 12 address to the people of Pakistan, have since been
released. It is then hardly surprising that The Washington Post stated
recently, "Independent analysts and Pakistani officials say Musharraf's
military government is playing a double game in the crackdown on terrorists."
The report quotes experts as saying that while providing crucial assistance
to the US-led campaign to track down foreign-born terrorists in Pakistan,
the Musharraf Government was far less aggressive towards its own terrorists
active in India.
One should not be surprised if this causes serious concern to the US. The
Taliban and Al Qaeda have close links, forged by the ISI, with the JeM,
LeT, HuM and HM. They have trained large sections of these militias in
camps in Afghanistan-besides Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Pakistan-and
also armed and funded them. In fact, the different outfits have all been
parts of the same complex of terrorist organisations coordinated by the
ISI. The close links among these become clear from the fact that Ahmed
Omar Saeed Sheikh, a leading figure in the JeM, and now standing trial
in Pakistan in connection with the American journalist Daniel Pearl's murder,
had wired $ 100,000 to Mohammad Atta, identified by US authorities as one
of the leaders of the hijackers who crashed two aircraft into the twin
towers of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. The money was sent
to him prior to that day at the instance of Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmed, then Director-General
of the ISI. Since the ban on these organisations remains almost unenforced
because President Musharraf wants to keep them alive for cross-border terrorism
against India, they are in a position to give refuge to Al Qaeda and Taliban
leaders and fighters on the run-sand they are obviously doing it.
Nor can the US count on President Musharraf and Pakistan's ruling establishment,
a large segment of which is bitterly anti-American for reasons that are
easy to understand. Clients, whether individuals or governments, resent
their patrons-especially when the latter pushes them around. Pakistan has
been a client state of the US since the 1950s when it joined the South-East
Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact, which later became
Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and received huge helpings of economic
and military aid. Trouble, however, started from the beginning of the 1980s
when Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons upset the US, which also
disapproved of the way in which Pakistan was organising and guiding the
Mujaheedin groups' resistance to Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan
and channelling US military and other aid to them-favouring the fundamentalist
Islamic elements who were bitterly anti-US and neglecting the moderate
ones which Washington DC favoured. The US, however, did not make an issue
of it then. It was determined to get even with the USSR for the latter's
role in inflicting a humiliating defeat on it in Vietnam, and wanted to
defeat the Soviet forces and compel them to leave Afghanistan-for which
it needed Pakistan's cooperation.
The US, however, no longer needed Pakistan's services after the Soviets
left Afghanistan in 1989. It could therefore invoke the Pressler Amendment
to freeze economic and arms aid-and sale of military hardware-to Islamabad
for the latter's military nuclear programme. Nor did it initially provide
Islamabad the kind of assistance that would have enabled it to have a puppet,
fundamentalist Islamic government installed in Afghanistan. Later, it did
help in setting up the Taliban but refused to recognise its government
when it came to control the bulk of Afghanistan in 1997 for its reactionary
gender and other policies. A large section of the ISI and the Pakistani
military are, therefore, eager to teach the US a lesson. The US, which
has prevailed upon President Musharraf to let its 'advisers' accompany
Pakistani forces in ferreting out Al Qaeda and Taliban elements in Pakistan,
knows this. Much will depend on how it copes with the situation. Failure
to take an even firmer line with Pakistan, if necessary, can not only sabotage
its war against terrorism but also endanger its own safety.
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