The 9/11 Wars (80 page)

KASHMIR AND A GENERATIONAL STRUGGLE

In the spring of 2010, as the snow melted from the lower slopes of the foothills of the Himalayas and buds began to appear on the apple trees, violence in the Indian part of the long-disputed state of Kashmir, having touched a twenty-year low the year before, began to rise once again.
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Day after day, young men, often teenagers, took to the streets to hurl stones at ill-trained ill-equipped security forces. The police and paramilitaries often countered the stones with bullets.
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In the narrow streets of the centre of Srinagar, the summer capital of the state, and in small, hardscrabble towns like Sopore or Anantnag, choking tear gas filled the air as the wounded and sometimes the dying were carried away. In the rural areas, moving from house to house, were the armed militants, less numerous than for many years but nonetheless hopeful of exploiting the renewed mobilization that accompanied the street violence to gain recruits among a new generation of Kashmiri youths.

One of longest conflicts involving radical Islam in the world, predating the 9/11 Wars by a decade or more, violence in Kashmir had followed a trajectory familiar from previous pages. After an initial explosion of violence between 1988 and 1991, there had been a steady intensification through the early 1990s. As elsewhere, a clumsy reaction on the part of security services had led to appalling violence, continuing abuses by all sides, a collapsing local economy and terrible suffering among civilians. By the end of the decade, it was clear that the population was slowly but steadily turning away from militancy. Combined with geopolitical shifts, particularly the post-9/11 pressure on Pakistan to reduce support to Kashmiri militants and to stop Lashkar-e-Toiba and other Pakistan-based groups sending fighters across the Line of Control to attack Indian security forces, this had meant a significant decline in violence from around 2002. By 2010, the local militants of early 1990s were dead or in their forties, married and drinking coffee in newly opened Srinagar cafés. Active fighters, once more than 1,500 strong in ‘the Valley’, as the principal and most prized part of Kashmir was known, probably numbered no more than around 250.
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Kashmir had been a sideshow of the 9/11 Wars, caught in their backwash, drawn into the complex of conflicts they constituted, without ever really being a key theatre. Nonetheless, Kashmir indicated many of the qualities of the conflict as a whole – and indicated its possible evolution.

Various short-term factors had sparked the resurgence of violence in Kashmir in the spring of 2010. There was local anger at stalled political processes, possibly a degree of interference from across the border as Pakistan’s intelligence services carefully ramped up their involvement and, in particular, the presence of large numbers of frustrated and under-employed youth.
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These young men – though bored – were not poor. Kashmir is one of the richest parts of India and, though good jobs are rare, no one is starving. Nor were they ill-educated. Almost all were literate, most were articulate, and many had university degrees. The key factor in the violence was instead the age of the teenagers out throwing stones at security forces week after week. For all of them the dark days of the 1990s, when tens of thousands died in militant attacks, in crossfire, in torture chambers run by the army and the police, were little more than a childhood memory. They were prepared to contemplate a return to violence because they had forgotten what taking up arms had brought and because, they said, they felt the weight of expectations on their generation. ‘I grew up listening to stories of the struggle, of the heroes, of the
mujahideen
. Now I am old enough. I do not want to show myself less committed or less brave or less strong than they were before,’ said Mehboob Lone, nineteen. The repeated shootings – each death led to a funeral and a demonstration where another youth was killed which thus meant another funeral – had created a momentum that was hard to stop. Mehraan, a twenty-two-year-old shopkeeper and veteran of the protests, said he had started attacking security forces when his cousin was shot dead. Since then, he said, he had wanted two things:
azadi
(freedom) and revenge, or ‘blood for blood’. ‘These things happen, and nothing is changed, and then they happen again,’ he commented and shrugged. He and his friends spent many hours in internet cafés surfing Kashmir protest websites, watching videos of protests shot on mobile phones, on social networking sites or in groups that the police were unable to access. Though few visited radical jihadi sites, those celebrating Palestinian protests or the words and works of the most well-known contemporary Islamic clerics were popular. For feeding the resentment was the same new social conservatism and interest in pan-Islamic identities seen elsewhere. The old, traditional Sufi-influenced strands of Islam in Kashmir had been ceding ground to newer, harsher, more rigorous, more intolerant and more politicized styles for many years. Though a broad rejection of global al-Qaeda-inspired militancy was evident, the hero of the stone throwers was eighty-one-year-old Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a reactionary political Islamist and the most uncompromising of the local leaders.

Through the spring and into the summer of 2010, the demonstrations continued with a steady toll of a death or two every week. Under the hail of broken bricks, the police retreated behind their barbed-wire barricades and the concrete blast walls which had, over the previous years, replaced the ramshackle defences around their bunkers. Though the vast bulk of their activity was still limited to hurling stones, the step to using more lethal arms would clearly not be a difficult one for the young Kashmiri men to take. When interviewed, they all echoed the implicit threats made by their political leaders, saying that they did not want to resort to armed violence, but that the possibility was always there if their demands, inchoate as they might have been, were not met. Officials recognized the rhetoric for what it was but were alarmed nonetheless. ‘If there were weapons we’d have ten thousand militants,’ one senior police officer said.
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Intelligence reports described dozens of teenagers known for their involvement in demonstrations going underground to join the militants as the months passed.
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In one village, as Indian army soldiers searched houses in a bid to catch a fugitive senior militant commander responsible for a series of local shootings, men told the author of the six or eight teenagers who had recently left their homes for the hills where the militants were thought to be based and of the ‘informers’ who had recently been executed by their neighbours.

No one needed to be reminded what such volunteers could end up doing. In January, a series of suicidal attacks, the first for two years, had shaken Kashmir.
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They underlined three key lessons of the 9/11 Wars: how one generation can bequeath violence to another, how routes into activism vary and how militancy so often remains very localized indeed. One of the militants who died was Mansoor Ahmed Bhat, a nineteen-year-old house painter. Bhat came from a modest farming family in the small village of Pett Sirr, an hour’s drive north of Srinagar and flanked in February by barren wheat fields and acres of orchards. His home lay down a muddy path between barn-like farmhouses. It was hard to imagine the village as lying in ‘the epicentre of regional violence’, as described by Indian officials. However, over the previous twenty years of the conflict at least two dozen men from Pett Sirr had joined militant groups. Bhat, his parents said, had never indicated any interest in following them, however. ‘We are just farmers,’ said Ghulam, the dead man’s forty-five-year-old father. ‘We are never involved in politics. Our only interest has been our livestock and our orchards.’

As ever, it is almost impossible to find any one moment when Bhat, who his parents and friends said was a ‘quiet young man’ who had left school at thirteen to work in the fields, began the journey that led to his violent death. He had grown up, after all, steeped in the ambient violence. His father believes the critical moment came in the summer of 2008, when Bhat participated in a demonstration during which six people were shot dead by local police. ‘That changed him,’ Bhat senior said. A few months later, his son told his parents he had got a job in Srinagar as a house painter and disappeared. The months passed, and his worried father reported the teenager missing. ‘The police came and raided us and searched everything and told us to call them if we had news,’ he said. Another six months went by. On January 3, 2010, his son walked through the door. He stayed a few hours, said little, ate and left again. ‘He told us nothing,’ Bhat’s mother remembered. Four days later, local police rang the family’s single mobile phone to say that their son was one of two armed militants who had attacked security forces in the centre of Srinagar with grenades and were now firing at anyone who approached from the upper storeys of a hotel. They asked Ghulam Bhat to call his son on his mobile phone and talk him into surrender, but he refused, fearing some kind of trap. After a twenty-two-hour siege, during which two policemen and a bystander were killed, Mansoor Bhat was shot dead.
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A month after the attack, in the bare living room of the home in Pett Sirr, a picture of Bhat lay wrapped in a green cloth on a shelf next to the Koran.

17
The End of the First Decade

AL-QAEDA

On May 1, 2010, as the Marjah operation in Afghanistan was drawing to a close, as fighting continued in the FATA and as militants attacked with ever-greater frequency across swathes of eastern Pakistan, police in Times Square in the centre of New York discovered a large bomb in a Nissan Pathfinder parked on the corner of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue. The man who had prepared the device and placed it there was Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-one-year-old Pakistani who had become an American citizen the year before. The bomb was made of petrol, propane, fireworks and fertilizer and failed to ignite because Shahzad, in an amateurish error typical of many attempted attacks by Islamic militants over the previous ten years, had set the timer wrongly. However, if such an elementary mistake had not been made, the bomb could have killed scores, possibly hundreds of people, injuring many times that number, in the centre of Manhattan.

Though the plot was clearly nowhere near the scale or professionalism of the 9/11 attacks, it was at least very close to one of their main targets and as such was the nearest radical militants had come to repeating the earlier strikes.
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Two weeks later, in the UK, a twenty-one-year-old student called Roshonara Choudhry used a kitchen knife to stab a member of parliament, Stephen Timms, who had supported the war in Iraq. Timms survived the attack, and Choudhry was arrested. In early interviews with police she said she had acted entirely alone after viewing scores of hours of lectures by radical American-born Yemen-based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. ‘I told no one. No one else would have understood,’ she said.
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Newspapers described Choudhry nonetheless as a ‘remote-controlled Al Qaeda assassin’ who had been ‘brainwashed’.
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Through the summer of 2010 and into the autumn, a series of scares reminded publics across the world of the threat that Islamic militancy still posed. In July, a plot was uncovered in Norway involving recent immigrants – a Chinese Uighur, an ethnic Uzbek and an Iraqi Kurd.
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In October came warnings, transmitted to US intelligence by German counterparts, of a series of ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks in Europe. Then in November came a new scare when a tip-off led security services to parcel bombs sent from the Yemen to Jewish targets in Chicago on cargo planes. Yemen had been in the spotlight since the last week of 2009, when a young Nigerian from an elite family was arrested on a plane flying into Detroit after he tried and failed to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear. It had soon emerged that Umar Faroul Abdultalleb, the would-be bomber, had, after a period in the UK where he joined Islamic societies at London University, started his journey across the world from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital. The exact provenance of the new threat emanating from the Yemen was unclear. Many threads ran back to Anwar al-Awlaki, the extremist cleric.

One element that all these various plots had in common was the tenuous nature of their links to the al-Qaeda hardcore. Faisal Shahzad, the aspirant bomber of Times Square, had been trained and partly funded by the Pakistani Taliban, a group which shared the views of al-Qaeda but was certainly not part of bin Laden’s organization, on a winter trip a few months before to his home country. Neither he nor Choudhry, the putative assassin, nor Abdultalleb had ever met anyone from the al-Qaeda hardcore.
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Even the links of FATA-based Ilyas Kashmiri, the veteran Pakistani now emerging as a major figure in global Islamic militancy and thought to be behind the ‘Mumbai-style’ attacks plan, to the al-Qaeda hardcore were uncertain. Al-Awlaki’s own relationship with bin Laden and al-Zawahiri was subject to debate. The opacity surrounding the origins of the evident threat inevitably fuelled further debate on one question: ‘what is al-Qaeda?’

The answer had been simpler back in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Then, analysis was fairly straightforward. Al-Qaeda was the best-known and most significant amid the hundreds of organizations involved in radical Sunni militancy. It comprised three clear elements. There was the hardcore leadership of the group, the network of other entities with formal affiliation to it and the ideology, the uniquely effective mix of modern and ancient historical references, filled out with selective quotations from scriptures and from other Muslim revivalist and reformist thinkers, that comprised the narrative, the language and the doctrines that underpinned the group’s particular worldview. Al-Qaeda was certainly not without its challengers, competitors and rivals within the broad movement of radical Islam, but the group had been able to establish a centrality, real and virtual, in the global landscape of radical militancy in the late 1990s which, in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, was undisputed.