[Reader-list] Homegrown, yes, but ISI inspired - K.P.S. Gill

[Aditya Raj Kaul]

 Homegrown, yes, but ISI inspired

K.P.S. Gill

Link -
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=kpsgill%2Fkpsgill47.txt&writer=kpsgill

 Much is now being made of the 'indigenisation' of Islamist extremism and
terrorism in India as purportedly opposed to the earlier Pakistan-backed
terrorist activities. It is crucial, at this juncture, to scotch emerging
misconceptions on this count. Islamist terrorism in India has always had an
Indian face -- but has overwhelmingly been engineered and directed from
Pakistan, and nothing has changed in this scenario. Going back to the March
1993 serial explosions in Mumbai, which killed 257 people and left 713
injured, and were executed by the Dawood Ibrahim gang, for instance, it is
useful to recall that nearly 1,800 kg of RDX and a large number of
detonators and small arms had been smuggled from Pakistan through India's
west coast prior to the bombings. The operation was coordinated by
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ibrahim and a number of his gang
members have since lived under state protection in Karachi.

 Similarly, Al Ummah, which was responsible for a series of 19 explosions in
February 1998, which left 50 people dead in the Coimbatore district of Tamil
Nadu, and which had established a wide network of extremist organisations
across south India, was also aided by Pakistan, with a considerable flow of
funds from Pakistan-based terror groups, often through the Gulf. The Deendar
Anjuman, headed by Zia-ul-Hassan, which orchestrated a series of 13
explosions in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa between May and
July 2000, was, again, bankrolled by the ISI.

 The then Union Minister for Home Affairs had stated in Parliament that
investigators had established linkages between the Deendar Anjuman and
Pakistan's covert intelligence agency. Hassan himself was based at Peshawar
in Pakistan, where the sect was established under the name of Anjuman
Hizbullah, and he is said to have floated a militant group, the
Jamaat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in Pakistan, in order to 'capture India and
spread Islam'.

 It is entirely within this paradigm that the evolution of Students Islamic
Movement of India as a terrorist group is located. Absent the support and
involvement of Pakistan's covert agencies and an enduring partnership with a
range of Pakistan-based or backed terrorist groups, SIMI may have had an
amateur flirtation with terrorism, an impulse that would quickly have been
exhausted with a handful of low-grade and at least occasionally accidental
bomb blasts. Instead, its leadership and cadre have had a long
apprenticeship alongside Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Jammu &
Kashmir, and several of the more promising candidates have crossed the
border to secure 'advanced training' on Pakistani soil or in Bangladesh.

 The control centre of SIMI has, for some time now, been based in Pakistan.
Operational command in a number of major attacks, including the Samjhauta
Express bombing of February 18, 2007, and the two serial attacks in
Hyderabad in May and August 2007, was known to have been exercised by
Mohammed Shahid aka Bilal. Bilal was reported to have been shot in Karachi
in September 2007, and, while Indian intelligence sources remain sceptical,
no confirmed sighting has subsequently been reported. Operational control
thereafter has shifted to the Lahore-based second-in-command, Mohammad
Amjad.

 I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that Pakistan's ISI -- as an organ of
the country's military and political establishment -- has been, and remains,
the principal source of the impetus, the infrastructure and the
organisational networks of what is inaccurately called 'Islamist' terrorism
across the world. An overwhelming proportion of so-called 'Islamist'
terrorism is, in fact, simply 'ISI terrorism'.

 While the Indian establishment remains unusually coy about this reality --
with fitful and often quickly qualified exception -- some measure of
satisfaction may now be derived from a growing American recognition of
Pakistan's pernicious role as an abiding source of Islamist terrorism. Had
this recognition come in the first weeks after 9/11, that could have saved
thousands of lives, most significantly in Afghanistan and India, but also in
Europe and across Asia.

 Nevertheless, Western commentators and Governments are now increasingly
acknowledging Pakistan's duplicity in the 'global war on terror', the
proclivity to act as an 'on-and-off ally of Washington'. While providing
fitful cooperation in US anti-terrorism efforts, *The Washington
Times*notes, "in other ways, Pakistan aids and abets terror. US
officials say that
Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence... was behind the
recent bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul. And the Pakistani Government's
refusal to confront Al Qaeda has helped create a *de facto* safe haven for
the group and its allies in locations like the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas region of Pakistan".

 US Intelligence officials, *The Washington Times* notes further, compare
"Al Qaeda's operational and organisational advantages in the FATA to those
it enjoyed in Afghanistan prior to September 11", and warn that "Al Qaeda
was training and positioning its operatives to carry out attacks in the
West, probably including the United States".

 These disclosures coincide with reports that President George W Bush had
secretly approved orders in July 2008, allowing American Special Operations
forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior
approval of the Pakistani Government. US Forces have executed numerous
missile attacks from unmanned Predator drones on Pakistani soil in the past,
but the September 3, 2008, attack by NATO and US ground troops at a
Taliban-Al Qaeda stronghold in South Waziristan was the first instance in
which troops had participated. The incident has already been followed by
drone attacks on September 9 on a seminary run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, in
which 20 people, including some senior Al Qaeda operatives, were killed; and
on September 12 at Tul Khel in North Waziristan, in which an Al Badr
Mujahideen commander was targeted. Haqqani, it is significant, was known to
have engineered the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, using a LeT
suicide cadre Hamza Shakoor, a Pakistani from Gujranwala district, on behalf
of the ISI.

 The increasing frequency of US-NATO attacks -- manned or unmanned -- into
Pakistani territory, and the Bush Administration's approval of Special
Operations into Pakistan without prior sanction from Islamabad, has
reconfirmed the country's status as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and
an area of growing anxiety for the world. There is, however, still very
little understanding of how heavy and sustained the Pakistani footprint has
been in Islamist terrorist activities across the globe. The enormity of this
'footprint' is, for instance, reflected in the long succession of terrorist
incidents, arrests and seizures, separately, in India, the US and Europe, in
which a Pakistani link has been suspected or confirmed.