The latest “revelation” from Islamabad is that the terrorists who spilled innocent blood in Murree and Taxila this month belonged to only one organisation, the banned anti-Shia sectarian outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Earlier, the murder of Daniel Pearl was also officially pinned on the LJ. The curious thing is that only a year ago, the LJ was not officially centre-stage. It was said to be a “peripheral” organisation that allegedly focused only on sectarianism while the other well-known militias were busy fighting for Islam well beyond the neighbourhood. But now we have been informed that the LJ has been up to other kinds of terrorism too, that the LJ was closely associated with al-Qaeda and received money from OBL. The name of a new organization, al-Umar, cropped up lately but was suppressed because the policy is to dump everything on the LJ, thereby making it the fall guy for others who are not to be targeted for one reason of state or another.
The terrorist network may be much bigger and wider in Pakistan than is suggested by this focus on the LJ. But one reason why the LJ is being isolated and attacked is to create the perception that the government is winning the war against terrorism and we can relax. The LJ’s founder, Riaz Basra, has been knocked off by the police and his successor, Akram Lahori, is in custody, singing like a canary. But we can’t help wondering whether this singing is on the basis of a musical score that is intended to save the necks of a lot of people, including the “handlers” who had convinced the people of Pakistan that the Jihad was “pure and spiritual”. The LJ was “separated” from its parent organisation but two other jihadi organisations have sprung from the same parent and are now under global ban as terrorists. Are these organisations separate entities or are they the footprints of an extremely protean single entity strongly entrenched inside the organs of the Pakistani state? Here’s a frightening glimpse of the length and breadth of the interconnections.
As reported in Khabrain, “FBI and Pakistani intelligence agencies arrested an Egyptian Arab named Hisham al-Wahid from Saudi Arabia and brought him to Pakistan. He guided the agencies to Gaggar Phatak in Karachi from where, behind the police station in a garage, three activists of Jaish-e-Muhammad and two of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were arrested. These activists belonged to Sargodha and had been trained at the Akora Khattak seminary of Maulana Samiul Haq. These activists then guided the police to a bungalow in Gulshan-e-Hadeed in Steel Town from where the police arrested one Iraqi and two Yemeni Arabs. All of them belonged to Al Qaeda and were working in a poultry farm owned by a man from Nazimabad. The three Arabs spoke fluent Urdu, Balochi and Pashto. From them the police recovered three satellite mobile phones, two laptop computers, four ordinary computers, four mobile phones, four sub-machine guns and six magazines. The police also searched Mujahid Colony Nazimabad and arrested Rafeequl Islam of Sipah Sahaba. It recovered cassettes showing Mullah Umar and Osama bin Laden and books on jihad from Nazimabad. Rafeequl Islam acted as a communications man for the jihadi network in Karachi. The same day the police discovered a large cache of arms and rocket launchers of Russian make from Kachra Mandi behind UBL Sports Complex.”
Obviously, it isn’t just the LJ that is connected with OBL and al-Qaeda. All three persons freed from Indian jails after the Kandahar hijacking of an Indian airliner two years ago went on to acquire their own militias, with Umar Saeed Sheikh leading the Jaish after its leader’s arrest. Two of them are now in Pakistani jails and the third one is getting interviews published in Pakistan from somewhere in Kashmir, but his militia, al-Umar, is emerging as OBL’s fourth proxy. After the Murree carnage, one leader of a banned militia was reportedly arrested because he was found traveling in the area at the time of the terrorist strike. Whoever got the report of his arrest printed in the press also volunteered the additional information that he was being kept under house arrest. The truth of the matter is that his “handlers” had let him live in opulence with the money he got from OBL (Osama’s gift to him of a dozen double-cabin pickup trucks was reported by the press). The Murree killings were so blatant that it was decided to make a show of arresting him. No one cared to look at the contradiction that if the man was under comfortable house arrest in Islamabad, how could he be found driving in the vicinity of Murree?
This subject is not closed. A British organisation says it has proof that over US $1 billion were sent annually from the United Kingdom to the organisations led by these gentlemen. Even if a fraction of this money was sent, we have a serious problem on our hands. With judges inclined to run away from cases involving these jihadis and the state continuing to adopt a hands-off policy for dubious reasons of “national security”, the problem of terrorism in Pakistan is far from being tackled in a meaningful way.