General Pervez Musharraf is obviously stung by international allegations that Pakistan remains a breeding ground for Islamic extremists with global objectives. The latest affront follows the bombings in London and Egypt. Three of the London bombers, despite their ‘British’ nationality but because of their Pakistani origins, had clear connections with Pakistan-based ‘native’ extremists in some hard line jihadi lashkars , fundamentalist religious parties and notorious seminaries, much like Omar Sayeed Sheikh earlier. Equally, circumstantial evidence of Pakistani nationals in Egypt on or about the scene of the latest Sharm-el-Sheikh bombings cannot be shrugged away. It is also obvious that the British and Egyptian governments would dearly love to shift the blame for their own policy failures to preclude or anticipate, uncover and crush extremism among their own citizens and nationals. But the facts speak for themselves.
Afghanistan was the original breeding ground for Islamic jihad in the 1980s when the ‘international community’ led by the United States, and aided by Saudi Arabia, paid Pakistan’s military establishment to conduct the war against communist USSR and its protégés in Kabul. Osama bin Ladin was then the favoured son of all the key players. He funded the destabilisation of the Benazir Bhutto government in 1989 because it was inimical to the military establishment’s strategic goals in India and Afghanistan. It was also during the time of Gen Javed Nasir as DG-ISI that Egyptian Islamists on the run from President Hosni Mobarak’s security agencies descended in droves on Peshawar and began to organise terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani intelligence agencies wanted to use radical Islamists to fulfil their own strategic objectives in Kabul and India while the Islamists saw this as an opportunity to establish a sovereign base area for jihad on a world scale. Egypt’s blind orator Omar Abdul Rehman of the Gama’a Islamiyya party planned the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York through Ramzi Yusuf of Pakistan while Omar Abdur Rehman’s son organised the murder of Hazara Shias in Quetta on behalf of Osama bin Laden, who in turn was supporting his son’s father-in-law, Mulla Umar of Afghanistan. It was upon Mulla Umar’s seizure of Kabul in 1997 that the dye was cast for the formation of OBL’s coveted base area of radical Islam.
In due course, the Taliban, the Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir jihad and the OBL-sponsored world jihad all gelled into one great pan-Islamic jihad. In 1997, 62 people were killed by terrorists at Luxor in Egypt, after which President Mobarak moved to suppress radical Islamists in his country, with the main Islamist organisation Ikhwan al-Muslimoon publicly abjuring terrorism. The resort attack, it may be recalled, was carried out by three suicide bombers who were quickly owned by an organisation calling itself Al Qaeda, “as response to the global evil powers which are spilling the blood of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Chechnya” In 1998, the US rained dozens of cruise missiles over training camps in Afghanistan in search of OBL but failed to get him. OBL hit back on 9/11 in New York and Washington. When the Taliban refused to hand over OBL to Washington, Afghanistan was bombed, the Taliban were sent packing and OBL disappeared into thin air. Following the American invasion of Iraq, a global Islamic resistance movement was born transcending nationality, ethnicity, class and gender, which has come to be labelled Al-Qaeda.
Radical Islamic Pakistanis, Egyptians, Britons, Indonesians, Malaysians, Algerians, Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks, Afghans, Turks, etc have all joined hands to avenge injustice against Muslim ‘nations’ and ‘peoples’ by non-Muslim nations and their Muslim allies. From the assassination of Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat by Egyptian Islamists in 1981 to the 2002-03 assassination attempts on Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, on the orders of Al-Qaeda, the journey of radical Islam from a national political base in Egypt to an international globalised movement is complete. That is why it is not useful for London and Washington and Cairo and Islamabad to point fingers at each another and try and pass the buck. If Arabs can bomb Washington and Britons can bomb Britain and Egyptians/Pakistanis can attack General Musharraf, it is likely that future Al-Qaeda attacks will be carried out by pan-Islamists who do not recognise national identities or national borders or national headquarters.
General Musharraf is therefore right when he says “it is a misconception that Pakistan is Al Qaeda’s headquarters” He is also right when he says that the causes that sustain it like injustice and oppression have to be removed for it to be uprooted. But he is wrong when he insists that “Osama bin Laden’s network does not exist in Pakistan anymore because its command structure in Pakistan has been destroyed”. The fact is that OBL’s network exists in Pakistan and in every country that allows radical Islamic groups and political parties and jihadi lashkars and sectarians to flourish in one form or another. Al Qaeda cannot be eliminated as long as such non-state actors are allowed to breed and sustain the movement. This will become evident when retreating Islamic radicals all over the world determine to fight their final battles in their original base areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.