The 9/11 Wars (60 page)

The second change – though obscured by the timeless sight of peasants tilling crops by hand, of children scribbling on slates in open-air schools, of the shrines of local saints festooned with silver ribbons and offerings of sweetmeats and fruit – was less tangible but as profound. This was the rapid shift in attitudes and behaviours, particularly towards those to whom once the poor would have owed absolute obedience. Many of the peasants in the fields had worked in Karachi or even in Saudi Arabia or Dubai, where a boom in construction sites provided vastly expanded opportunities for relatively well-paid and steady work. The money they earned for their families meant a new freedom from the crushing physical work of farming and, often for the first time, disposable incomes. The spread of mobile phones meant teachers at the local schools kept in touch with relatives living elsewhere in the country with half-hour calls for a few rupees, further enlarging perspectives and encouraging a comparison between what was happening in different parts of the country.
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Literacy had risen, albeit from the appallingly low level of 44 per cent in 1998 to 56 per cent ten years later.
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If they weren’t watching the television, people were reading the Urdu- or Sindhi-language papers or having them read to them if still incapable of deciphering the text themselves. Where the newspapers went so did conspiracy theories – that a picture of Mecca had been printed on footballs in international tournaments so it would be repeatedly kicked, that Indian troops had landed in Afghanistan, that Zionist spies were behind kidnappings in Karachi – and the same brand of angry, unbridled commentary as was carried by the new TV channels. Together, all the various developments worked to rapidly erode long-established customs, norms and, crucially, deference. It was not for nothing that landowning families in Sindh such as the Jatois were known as ‘feudals’. They, like other local families including the Bhuttos, were benefactors, protectors, dispensers of justice and, often, of religious blessings too.
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But Masroor Ahmed Jatoi, leaving the sprawling family home for a day on the stump as a provincial MP for the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2008, said he no longer expected to win elections ‘just because the village is named after my family’. Both Masroor and his younger brother Arif, a minister in the provincial government, had had to become, like all local politicians, masters of working the system to obtain maximum development grants to bring electricity, roads, sanitation and jobs to their constituents. Such work, which had become the basis of politics in Pakistan as across much of the region, still did not guarantee victory, however. ‘[The people] have become highly politicized in their way,’ Jatoi said. ‘You can take nothing for granted.’
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MILITANTS AND
MEDRESSAS

Bahawalpur lay 500 miles to the north of Jatoi village, a ten-hour drive across dusty but fertile fields, along roads lined with mills, sugar refineries and dozens of scruffy small towns. A city of around 800,000 in 2007, Bahawalpur, along with nearby Rahim Yar Khan and the much bigger city of Multan further to the north, constituted one of the biggest single centres of radical Islamic militancy in the world and one of the least known.
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The core of jihadi activism in Pakistan at the time was usually thought to be the zones along the frontier with Afghanistan, but the towns of southern Punjab were equally significant locally and regionally.
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It was in these towns that many of the best-known and best-established Pakistani militant outfits were based and from these towns that Western and regional security services feared a new international threat might eventually evolve.

The Western interest in Pakistan in the 2002–7 period was largely and understandably focused on the large numbers of violent militant organizations based in the country. These had naturally attracted attention during the war of 2001, when they had launched the spectacular attack on the Indian parliament at the end of that year, as peace talks between India and Pakistan stumbled along through the middle of the decade and after each of the successive attempts to assassinate Musharraf himself. The interest spiked whenever Western concerns mounted over the policy of the Pakistani security establishment in Afghanistan and whenever such groups were found to be playing a role as intermediaries for Western – particularly British – Muslim extremists hoping to contact al-Qaeda. Many blamed the ISI and other Pakistani intelligence agencies for the groups’ existence and apparent health.

The use of irregular proxies by the Pakistani military and civilian leaders was almost as old as Pakistan itself. Just months after gaining independence, the Pakistanis had sent a column of armed Pashtun tribesmen from high on the Afghan border towards Srinagar, the capital of the mountain state of Kashmir, to ‘liberate’ their coreligionists from their Hindu maharajah. The move prompted the maharajah to call for Indian military aid, and the months of scrappy fighting which followed only ended with a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations which left almost all the most important and most populous parts of Muslim-majority Kashmir, including the famously beautiful Vale or Valley, under Indian control. A second war was fought between India and Pakistan in 1965, again following the operations of Pakistani-backed irregulars. A third conflict with India occurred in 1971, prompted by political unrest in the then eastern wing of Pakistan. It ended too in a crushing Indian victory on two fronts and the creation of Bangladesh despite the horrific violence directed by local Islamists armed, organized and assisted by the Pakistani army against pro-independence activists and intellectuals.
³⁸
These successive disasters paradoxically reinforced the use of proxies as a fundamental of Pakistani strategic thinking as it was broadly believed that only the use of such forces could offset the clear conventional superiority that the Indians had repeatedly demonstrated. The use of such forces was both defensive and offensive. Defensively, they constituted a ‘strategic reserve’, furnishing an irregular auxiliary force several hundred thousand strong in the event of an Indian attack and providing a harassing guerrilla capability if such an attack had been successful and a significant part of Pakistan occupied. Offensively, the militants could also be used in pursuit of key foreign policy objectives.
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One strategy was to continually destabilize Kashmir to prevent the status quo of Indian control over most of the state hardening into an unchangeable geopolitical reality. A second was to secure a favourable government in Kabul, a long-term aim of Pakistani – and indeed Raj – diplomacy. For the Pakistanis this was in part because of a desire to secure rear areas west of the Indus river to have ‘strategic depth’ in the event of an Indian attack from the east but was also about projecting their national interests in what was, given the size of their other immediate neighbours, the only direction that it was feasible to do so. South-west Asia is, like the Middle East, a tough neighbourhood where the strong bully the weak and the weak bully the weaker. Pakistan, though one of the biggest countries in the world, is nonetheless dwarfed by India and China, and inevitably saw in Afghanistan an opportunity for strategic gain that was denied elsewhere.

The 1970s, 1980s and 1990s thus saw the systematic use of irregulars sponsored and often trained and funded by Pakistani security agencies, particularly in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The Pakistani role in Afghanistan is covered in more detail in the following chapter. The Pakistani involvement in Kashmir, which had a more direct importance for many of the Punjabi groups, was re-energized in 1989, as local Muslims in the state, in part inspired by events in eastern Europe, rose against the discriminatory and often brutal rule that had been imposed by New Delhi. Early armed Kashmiri groups were relatively moderate and favoured independence from both India and Pakistan but the ISI, looking to exploit the uprising to pressurize and weaken India, marginalized these and instead backed more compliant proxies. These organizations included one composed of fighters linked to the Islamists of the Kashmiri branch of Jamaat Islami, groups which had sprung up during the previous decade to fight the Soviets and were now at something of a loose end, and finally a new and extremely violent outfit called Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT, The War Party of the Pure), which was based just south of Lahore but recruited heavily throughout the Punjab and provided the most fanatical and dedicated
mujahideen
.

Throughout the 1990s, these various organizations would send tens of thousands of young Kashmiri, Pashtun and increasingly Punjabi men (and even some Britons) to fight Indian security forces across the Line of Control (LoC), the ceasefire line agreed in Kashmir after the first Indo-Pakistani war.
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By the mid 1990s, they dominated the insurgency in the disputed state. Progressively, the role of the Kashmiris themselves fell away. In 1999, it was militants from Pakistan-based groups including Lashkar-e-Toiba who, on the orders of senior army generals including Musharraf, had provided the bulk of the fighting force which occupied key heights across the LoC, thus provoking a limited conflict that, once again, was disastrous for Pakistan.
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In the weeks after 9/11, with the acquiescence and often assistance of the ISI, thousands of fighters from these groups, including a newly formed organization called Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), travelled to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.
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Such fighters had a new global perspective which was very different from the Kashmiri militants of a decade or so previously. They included young men like Asim, Jamal and ‘Abu Turab’, who, while waiting for transport into Afghanistan from Peshawar in October 2001, told the author: ‘We were in India fighting the Indians. Now we are coming to Afghanistan. America, Israel and India are our enemies. Bush will die like a dog.’ In the end it was such militants themselves who were killed in large numbers by coalition air strikes, special forces or the Northern Alliance.

The advent of the 9/11 Wars changed much for Pakistan’s militants. Positive developments for groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba included the increase in the relative level of radicalization of much of the Pakistani population in the early years of the decade and a consequent surge in popular support, recruits and funds.
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The downside of the conflict was that, under pressure from the international community, Musharraf banned dozens of extremist organizations. Though many in the Pakistani security establishment saw this as a betrayal of national interests, of national duty and of coreligionists in need, the crackdown, patchy though it might have been as a result, nonetheless had some effect.
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The groups were not disbanded, but funds were restricted, recruitment cut back, propaganda operations forced underground and a proportion of the training facilities were shut. They continued to exist in a form which would allow them to be mobilized once again should need arise but were ‘run down’. Successive attempts by different militant factions to kill Musharraf led to further repression and with thousands of young fighters idling in camps and with funds running short, many groups began to fragment, fusing with the sectarian groups long active in Karachi, the frontier and the Punjab and increasingly building connections with international militants. Before 2001, none of the groups active in Kashmir sought active involvement in the broader international jihad though they were aware – and often approved – of the pronouncements and views of men like bin Laden.
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But the 9/11 Wars had seen the links between such groups and al-Qaeda figures active in Pakistan strengthen. The process had started as early as December 2001 with the abduction and killing of Daniel Pearl and then the capture of Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden’s key logistics operator, three months later in a LeT safehouse. A year later, a pair of LeT militants had surfaced in Iraq. Then there was the growing role that individuals within Pakistani groups played as intermediaries for young British Muslims hoping to access al-Qaeda.
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The burgeoning links with international activism were ad hoc and based on personal connections. One of the best examples of such links came with the exposure of the plot in the UK to bring down airliners flying across the Atlantic to the USA in 2006. A central figure in the conspiracy was a British citizen originally from the Midlands city of Birmingham called Rashid Rauf, who had been detained in Pakistan at the same time as the plot was rolled up in the UK and who was alleged to have played a key role in coordinating plotters in his native land and liaising with the al-Qaeda senior leadership.
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Though family members and his lawyers denied it, Rauf was almost certainly a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammed group. Pakistani militant organizations were following, albeit with a lag of almost a decade, the trend towards a greater degree of globalization seen elsewhere in the Islamic world over previous years. This too was something that the Pakistani intelligence services believed they could manage.

In the West, in addition to being seen as sponsored by Pakistani security agencies, the activism of Rauf and people like him was often seen as linked to the existence and expansion of the network of religious schools in Pakistan. In October 2003, Donald Rumsfeld had asked in a note: ‘Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the
medressas
and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?’
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The then defense secretary was only reflecting a generally held view that the religious schools contained a huge reservoir of militants waiting to be unleashed. Rauf’s connection to a radical
medressa
seemed further evidence that this was the case. The first problem with this analysis, as with so many others during the course of the 9/11 Wars, was not just that it was too simplistic but that, in simplifying, the genuinely worrying elements had been missed. First of all, there was considerable variety among the
medressas
. Three broad categories existed. The first included the village schools. They were often small, miserably poor, of the local folksy Barelvi School of Islam still dominant in rural communities. It was difficult to argue that they posed much threat to anyone. The second category, which included the vast bulk of the
medressas
founded in recent decades, were Deobandi or Ahl-e-Hadith, the two most rigorous local strands of Islam, and were more problematic. Overall in Pakistan their numbers, though notoriously difficult to estimate, had gone from around 1,000 in 1967 to somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 in forty years. Though many were located in the North West Frontier province, their numbers had increased exponentially in the Punjab too. In the town of Bahawalpur alone there had been only 278 religious schools in 1975 but approaching 1,000 by 2008, local officials said. But though these institutions propagated conservative values and an appallingly distorted vision of the world, there was little evidence to link them directly to violence. Mohammed Chugti, who ran scores of
medressas
in Bahawalpur and was also a senior local politician with the Jamaat Ulema Islami (JUI), the political vehicle that had represented the interests of the Deobandi clergy and community in Pakistan for decades, told the author that students in the
medressas
he oversaw learned Arabic, Islamic law as well as English, science, Urdu, maths and ‘arts subjects’ and, though his charges were also, somewhat inevitably, taught that ‘to fight in Afghanistan or Kashmir is a religious duty as part of the struggle with any forces that are against the religion of Islam’ they were discouraged from actually doing so, at least until they had finished their education.
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Chugti’s
medressas
were not linked to local militant groups, he said, a claim backed up by local officials. It was a third category of
medressa
– those clearly associated with violent groups – that was the immediate problem. These were a minority but sufficiently numerous to be very worrying nonetheless. One high-profile example was the mosque and
medressa
complex in the centre of Islamabad that Pakistani security forces stormed in July 2007. The ‘Red Mosque’, as it was known, had been a centre of militancy for at least two decades, though after 9/11, following the more general evolution, it had shifted from activism focused almost exclusively on Kashmir to a more internationalized agenda. Maulana Abdul Aziz and his younger brother Abdur Rasheed Ghazi, the leaders of the group and both killed in the fighting, saw Musharraf and all who supported him as complicit in the campaign of the West to divide, humiliate and dominate the world’s Muslim community and exhorted their followers to fight against the ‘hypocrite
jahiliya
’ regime in power in Pakistan as a first step to liberating all Muslim lands.
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The ‘Red Mosque’ was a particularly extreme example, but there were others. The alumni of the vast Binoria
medressa
in Karachi included many involved in local sectarian or other violence. Rashid Rauf had often been seen at the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina in Bahawalpur, a large complex that had been repeatedly extended over the forty years since its foundation as donations from the Gulf had flowed in. There a twenty-two-year-old student at the school told the author: ‘Jihad is our religion. It is the order of God. When I finish here I will go to fight like many of my friends.’
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According to local officials, the Jaish-e-Mohammed group not only ran the Dar-ul-Uloom Medina, where 700 teenagers and young adults lived and studied, but also a second, larger, semi-fortified complex in the centre of the city.
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Though there was no ‘production line’, such institutions undoubtedly allowed militant groups to select likely recruits from among the students and then cultivate those receptive to their approach.
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Such institutions evidently constituted a serious threat in the region and to the West but the idea that
medressas
were the root of the problem of militancy inside Pakistan was mistaken. For this was the second element that the reductivist analysis of Rumsfeld missed. The
medressas
did not exist in a vacuum.