Date: 4/28/2002
......THE MOHAMMEDAN (ISLAMIC) STATE OF PAKISTAN
BORN IN BLOODSHED, IMMORALITY, HIGH TREASON & HATRED OF SECULARISM, FOUNDED ON THE BLOOD, BONES AND FLESH OF THOSE KILLED (OVER ONE MILLION IN NUMBER) AND AMIDST WAILS AND CRIES OF HAPLESS GIRLS AND WOMEN ABDUCTED AND GANG RAPED (TENS OF THOUSANDS OF THEM) BY THOSE SHOUTING "ALLAH HU AKBAR", THE DEGRADED IDEOLOGICAL SLAVE AND COOLIE OF HER ARAB MASTERS, THE STATE OF PAKISTAN WILL, FOR EVER, REMAIN IN CHAOS, CORRUPTION AND DRUG CULTURE, FINALLY PERISHING IN BLOODSHED IN THE MANNER OF HER VIOLENT BIRTH IN 1947.
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WHAT THE INDIANS KNEW OVER HALF A CENTURY AGO, THE AMERICANS AND THE REST OF THE WORLD ARE FINDING OUT ONLY NOW.
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.....Skeptics Question Sincerity of Pakistani Crackdown
...Militant Groups Continue to Operate, but in the Shadows
....................By Karl Vick
............Washington Post Foreign Service
................The Washington Post
..........Sunday, April 28, 2002; Page A15
Rawalpindi, Pakistan - Located down a steep flight of stairs off the main road through this teeming city, the Jaish-i-Muhammad Bookstore was literally underground long before becoming politically so. But when President Pervez Musharraf banned the Islamic militant organization for which it was named, the newsstand donned a bit of camouflage, renaming itself the Reformatory Library.
The gaudy militaristic publications on its simple wooden shelves made cosmetic changes as well. The magazine formerly called Jaish-i-Muhammad, or Soldiers of Muhammad, now goes by al-Islah, or Reform. Weekly Jihad, or Holy War, is now published as Ghazwa, or Battle, a rhetorical scaling back matched by the militant group that publishes it, Lashkar-i-Taiba, or Army of the Righteous, which now goes by Jamaat-ad Dawa, the Party of Preachers, since being listed as a terrorist organization by the United States. Its Web site changed names, too, but maintained the same mix of piety, instruction and cries against India, Jews and the United States.
So the shadows shift in the twilight world of Islamic militancy in Pakistan. More than three months after Musharraf drew applause from the West by banning religious extremist groups and announcing firm measures to curb Muslim militancy, independent observers wonder whether it is a crackdown in name only.
"I don't see any kind of a crackdown on the jihadis," said Arif Jamal, an Islamabad journalist and author who follows Pakistan's radical Islamic community closely. "They are operating the way they used to. The only difference is they are not visible."
Skeptics cite the highly publicized roundup of 2,000 militants in the days following Musharraf's Jan. 12 national address on terrorism. So far, no charges has been brought against a Pakistani militant, and three- quarters of those rounded up have been released, fueling perceptions that a government that historically encouraged Islamic militancy is unable to change its ways.
"If you pick up people and then release them, the signal you then send is, 'This is a public relations exercise,' " said Samina Ahmed, a researcher in Islamabad for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization.
Among those freed was Hafiz Sayeed, leader of Lashkar-i- Taiba, considered the largest of Pakistan's jihadi groups. He did his time in a government guesthouse with access to a mobile phone.
"His release speaks to the establishment being very weak in its resolve," said Zafarullah Khan, who studies religious extremism at the Islamabad office of Friedrich Naumann, a German foundation.
Pakistani officials dispute such assessments as premature, noting that several hundred militants remain behind bars.
"We haven't released the real extremists," said Brig. Javed Iqbal Cheema, head of the Interior Ministry's crisis management group. "And the operation's not over yet."
Interior Minister Moeenuddin Haider, a leading voice against extremism even before Sept. 11, insisted that the crackdown is "sincere." He said some reforms promised by Musharraf are in the pipeline, such as regulations aimed at damping militancy in Pakistan's 7,000 madrassas, or religious schools, a primary engine of radical Islam in Central Asia.
"It's our duty to turn the president's vision into a viable action plan," Haider said. "But we have our limitations."
Independent analysts and some Pakistani officials say Musharraf's military government is playing a double game. While providing key assistance in the U.S.-led campaign to track down foreign-born terrorists in Pakistan, the Musharraf government has been far less aggressive against Pakistan's own militants, experts here say.
The reason, it is widely believed, is that Pakistan has a use for its militants: fighting a proxy war in Kashmir. The region at the edge of the Himalayas has been the scene of two wars a skirmish between Pakistan and India, both of which claim it. But even when the armies don't cross the line dividing Kashmir, Islamic separatists from the Pakistani side carry out attacks on the Indian side in the name of the Muslim population there.
India accuses Pakistan of arming and supporting the insurgent groups and their campaign of what Indian officials call "cross-border terrorism." Pakistan's government insists the separatist movements are "indigenous" rather than state-supported, but links between the guerrillas and the army are well established, according to Jamal and many other researchers. Some Pakistani officials acknowledge privately that the militants serve as surrogates that the army is loath to do away with.
"There may not be any other country in the world which has at least 50,000 non-military personnel ready to [give] their lives for the state," said one senior Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Analysts say the arrangement explains the apparent ambivalence in Musharraf's actions since his Jan. 12 speech.
Tahir Amin, a professor of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University, said the government's "shuttling between two positions" illustrates competing pressures. As a participant in the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, Pakistan wants to appear tough on extremists, yet there is domestic pressure to continue "bleeding India" for its presence in Kashmir.
"Musharraf is actually in a deep dilemma in how he should actually go in controlling the militants in Kashmir," Amin said.
But can militants be controlled?
Nine days after Musharraf's speech, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital. A videotape documenting the mutilation of his slain body was delivered a month later.
Sheik Omar Saeed, the man charged with plotting the kidnapping, was a prominent member of Jaish-i-Muhammad. The group was founded as a Kashmiri separatist organization in January 2000, just days after Masood Azhar, its founder, and Omar were ransomed from an Indian prison in response to demands by hijackers of an Air India jetliner.
Until it was banned in January, the group enjoyed close relations with the Pakistani army, chiefly through ties with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Last year, when Musharraf was campaigning to rid Pakistan of the weapons that are ubiquitous here, Azhar's entourage openly brandished Kalashnikovs and Uzis. Pakistani government sources said Jaish-i-Muhammad was allowed to set up paramilitary training camps in Kashmir and send recruits to al Qaeda camps in eastern Afghanistan.
When a bomb exploded in the state assembly for the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir in October, Azhar telephoned a Pakistani newspaper to claim credit. Saeed, after surrendering to investigators in the Pearl case, told his questioners he knew the men who attacked India's national Parliament's complex in New Delhi in December, an incident that brought the two nuclear-armed neighbors to the brink of war.
"If you sponsor crazies, the crazies will come back to haunt you," said Ahmed, the researcher.
For the United States, the implications of Musharraf's ambiguity may reach far.
Most immediately, Pakistani officials acknowledge that Pakistani militants have provided shelter and logistical help to al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan. An Iraqi recently arrested in the western Pakistani province of Baluchistan carried papers from Harkat-ul-Jihad, another Pakistani militant group.
"We are hunting down the supporters, the sympathizers," Cheema said.
But beyond aiding the escape of existing militants, analysts warn, radical Pakistani groups have been allowed to leave in place the machinery that produces extremists.
Though the branch of Islam long predominant in South Asia has its roots in Sufism, a mystical strain that emphasizes tolerance, the severe Wahhabi theology that promotes militancy spread here from the Persian Gulf in the 1980s. Taught in scores of madrassas, or Islamic schools, that were founded to teach it, Wahhabism was funded by Saudi Arabia and promoted by a CIA eager to marshal jihad as a weapon against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"It was a gift from America," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist active in peace causes.
Radical Islam also took deep root in Pakistan's army, already a bastion of relative piety. And when paramilitary volunteers returned from victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan and set their sights on Kashmir, a close relationship was forged.
"I, myself, was a jihadi," said Hamid Gul, a retired general who headed the Inter-Services Intelligence agency in the late 1980s. "If America really wants this militancy to be stopped, they have got to solve the Kashmir dispute."
Yet even if the issue is resolved, the militants may remain if given nothing better to do. In Pakistan, a country with slow economic growth, Khan, a researcher, estimated that "the jihadi industry" employs 600,000 to 800,000 people. The figure includes publishing, paramilitaries, madrassas and the armed men who roll into villages in expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles during Muslim holidays, demanding donations.
For the most recent holiday, donations fell by two- thirds, said Mohammed Anwar, another Friedrich Naumann foundation analyst. In another sign that some of the government's efforts are bearing fruit, residents note that the collection boxes once found on almost every shop counter, bidding contributions for jihad, are also gone.
Given time, officials said, Musharraf's government will remove what he calls "root causes" of religious militancy that, after a quarter-century in the making, cannot be undone overnight.
But few expect Musharraf to act fast, even if he could. Beyond the institutional and financial constraints, any reformer must think twice before heedlessly provoking armed groups that Jamal, the author, said already find the rhetoric leveled against them "confusing and distracting."
"In the back of everyone's mind is, if you push too hard, they'll take Musharraf with them," said Ahmed, of International Crisis Group.
It is no empty threat. Long before Sept. 11, Interior Minister Haider led a campaign against sectarian extremists, identifying Sunni Muslim militants who have killed scores of Shiite doctors. In December, Haider's older brother was gunned down.
"I lost my brother; I lost my real brother," Haider said. "It was a message."
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Did YOU lose any near and dear one in that frenzied beastly and savage attack by MOHAMMED on our LAND, PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CIVILISATION in 1947?
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