FROM THE TELEGRAPH OF 25 OCTOBER 2006
The freedom
fighter state
In the 1971 war,
India deprived Pakistan of its eastern wing and took 100,000 prisoners. Zulfiqar
Ali Khan Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, had to go to Simla and sign a peace
treaty before he got them back. It was a terrible humiliation, made worse by
the fact that till the last moment, the Pakistani public had been told that
Pakistan was winning the war. So the knives came out.
Bhutto was of
the view that the incompetence of the army command was responsible for the
defeat. The army’s view, on the other hand, was that it was Bhutto’s greed for
power that deprived the elected Prime Minister, Mujibur Rehman, of power and
precipitated the crisis. The generals tended to forget their own complicity in
the imprisonment of Mujibur Rehman, but that is quite natural; everyone is
inclined to forget one’s own mistakes and remember everyone else’s. Anyway, this
difference of opinion led to a military coup in 1977. Yahya Khan unseated
Bhutto and hanged him.
Just two years
later, two events occurred that changed Pakistan’s fortunes. The first was the
Islamic – read Shia – revolution in Iran which ended the reign of the Shah. The
Shah was a friend of the US; the rebels made an enemy of the US by confining
its embassy personnel. The revolution opened a gap in the wall that surrounded
the USSR to the south. The USSR saw an opportunity and promoted a coup by
friendly forces in Afghanistan.
In the cold war,
every opportunity for the USSR was a threat to the US. The loss of Iran was bad
enough; but just across the gulf from Iran was Saudi Arabia, America’s most
important supplier of oil. A threat to it could not be countenanced. The US
tried to rebuild the wall. It tried to organize insurgencies, and asked Saudi
Arabia, which had become obscenely rich on account of the oil boom of the
1970s, to fund them. Nothing came of its attempts in Iran. Many Iranians had
escaped to the west, but they were moneybags who had no popular support, and
none of them could cause much worry to the regime in Iran.
But Afghanistan was
different. The USSR tried to create a unitary state out of what had always been
a loose federation of tribes. Its friends were the northern tribes; their military
intrusion to the south did nothing to make them friends. So there was civil war,
from which somewhere between three and five million Afghans escaped to
Pakistan.
In this mass of
refugees, the CIA saw an opportunity. Since the border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan was long, mountainous and sparsely populated, it was impossible to
police, and people could slip across it easily. Amongst the emigrants, it
should be possible to find enough sufferers to form a terrorist force. What
they needed was arms, which the CIA could supply in abundance. But they had to
be equipped, trained and controlled; for this the CIA enlisted Pakistan’s ISI.
And they had to be financed; for this the CIA enlisted Saudi Arabia.
ISI had a
problem. It had to organize clandestine attacks on Russians and their Afghan
allies. But it could not enter Afghanistan, and hence could not monitor the
effectiveness of the attacks. Everyone loved ISI’s money, but few relished the
thought of creeping into Afghanistan and attacking the communists. So it was
difficult to prevent impostors from pocketing ISI’s assistance and
disappearing. The incentive system was adverse. So the ISI used motivation
instead – the motivation of religious fanaticism. And since the money came from
Saudi Arabia, the fanaticism had to be a Wahabi Sunni. So the ISI channeled the
money and the arms through Sunni organizations – varying combinations of
mosques, schools (Madrasas), and charities. And it used competition. It funded
many organizations, and showered or withdrew its favours from time to time.
This capricious patronage caused jealousy amongst the clients; organizations
split and split again. This is why Pakistani terrorist organizations present
such a welter of names.
Amongst the organizations
was Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), which had a branch in Kashmir. The latter’s Amir, Maulana
Saad-ud-Din, went from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan in 1983 and persuaded JI to
apply the terror export model to Kashmir. With technical and material
assistance from Harkat al-Jihad al-Islami, a Deobandi mercenary group operating
in Afghanistan, training camps were organized in Occupied Kashmir. They were
placed under the control of a new organization called Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin.
Despite splits and internal squabbles, HM remains the largest terrorist
organization operating in Kashmir. It claimed to have engaged the Indian army
in 314 encounters in 2003 and killed 770 soldiers at the loss of 232 of its own
terrorists. It is the principal handmaiden of ISI. Most of its commanders are
Kashmiri. Its Amir, Syed Salahuddin, declared a ceasefire in 2000 and
negotiated briefly with the Indian government; but he retreated when he was not
supported by ISI. After 9/11, an offshoot of HM was suspected of having made
two attempts on the life of Musharraf as well as a number of bomb attacks in
Karachi. Pakistan banned it on 29 September 2001. The ban does not affect its
members. But Indian army and police killed a number of its commanders in 2004.
As a result, HM has recently been quiescent.
