usenet

Facts about terrorist Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate

TERRORISM IN INDIA

By B. Raman
Paper no. 738
South Asia Analysis Group
July 17, 2003

(Points made during a talk delivered by the writer at a
panel discussion on Terrorism in the Indian sub-
continent, organized by the US-India Political Action
Committee and the US-India Institute for Strategic Policy
at Washington DC on July 16,2003)

The terrorism situation not only in India, but also in
the rest of the world, including the US and Israel, is
inextricably linked with the ground situation in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The recent unearthing of a cell
of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a member of
Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front (IIF), in
the US and reports in the US media on the terrorism-
related activities of the Pakistani branch of the
Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) indicate that one cannot correctly
assess the continuing threats to international peace and
security from jihadi terrorists without an assessment of
the continuing terrorism infrastructure in Afghanistan
and Pakistan nearly two years after the international
coalition led by the US launched its war on jihadi
terrorism euphemistically called international terrorism
under an operation code-named Operation Enduring Freedom.

2. What does this infrastructure consist of?

o Al Qaeda: About 400 survivors of the 500-strong
hardcore of Al Qaeda who had crossed over into Pakistan
from Afghanistan giving a slip to the US security forces
in the beginning of last year. Of these, about 75 are
estimated to have since moved over to Yemen and Saudi
Arabia and 30 are estimated to have crossed over into
Iran via Pakistan’s Balochistan. Of the remaining, about
75 took shelter in Karachi and 220 in Punjab, the North-
West Frontier Province (NWFP), Balochistan, the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and the Pakistan-
Occupied Kashmir (POK). Of the 75, who took shelter in
Karachi, about 50 are still holed up in various hide-
outs there with the assistance of their Pakistani
sympathizers and the mafia gang led by Dawood Ibrahim,
who is wanted by the Indian authorities for prosecution
in connection with the Mumbai (Bombay) blasts of
March,1993, a precursor of mass-casualty or catastrophic
terrorism. Pakistan claims to have arrested and handed
over about 400 Al Qaeda members to the US. It is not
clear how many of them were hard-core members, how many
just sympathizers and how many Arab residents of
Pakistan, who were merely suspected of being associated
with Al Qaeda.

o The Taliban: About 5000 survivors of the Taliban,
including its Amir Mulla Mohammad Omar and other senior
leaders, out of the pre-October 7,2001, strength of
20,000 of the militia. Out of this, about 5,000 are
estimated to have perished during the US air strikes and
10,000 to have dispersed to their respective villages in
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The 5,000, who have taken
shelter in Pakistan, have been operating against the US
and allied troops in Afghanistan from their safehavens in
the NWFP and Balochistan, in concert with the Hizb-e-
Islami (HEI) of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar and the survivors of
the Uzbeck and Chechen components of the IIF.

o The survivors of the Pakistani components of the
IIF: Before October 7,2001, the five Pakistani components
of the IIF---namely, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the
Harkat-ul-Jihad al Islami (HUJI), the LET, the Jaish-e-
Mohammad (JEM), and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ)-- had a
total estimated strength of about 35,000 members deployed
in Afghanistan to help the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their
fight against the Northern Alliance (NA). Of these, about
30,000, who managed to survive the US strikes, crossed
over into Pakistan and moved over to Karachi, Pakistani
Punjab and the POK.

o The survivors of the Uzbeck and Chechen components
of the IIF: About 300 have been operating from the FATA.

o The survivors of the South-East Asian (SEA)
component: About 200, who had originally crossed over
into Pakistan, have since gone back to their respective
countries.

o The HEI: About 400 of its cadres have been
operating against the Afghan and allied troops in
Afghanistan from sanctuaries in the NWFP and Balochistan

3. The Al Qaeda has suffered severe damages to its
command and control system due to the US air strikes, the
death of Mohammad Atef and the capture of Abu Zubaidah (
at Faislabad in Punjab in March,2002), Ramzi Binalshibh
(in Karachi in September,2002), Khalid Sheikh Mohammad
(in Rawalpindi in March,2003) and Waleed bin Attash (in
Karachi in April,2003). The captured have been handed
over to the USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
for interrogation. Of these, Khalid was suspected to have
masterminded the 9/11 strikes in the US with the help of
Ramzi and Waleed was one of the suspects in the attack on
the US naval ship USS Cole off Aden in October, 2000.
Zubaidah, reportedly a computer expert, was billed as the
No. 3 of Al Qaeda before his arrest.

4. Till August,2002, positive, direct evidence was
available from Karachi-based sources about the survival
of bin Laden and about his undergoing treatment for a
sharpnel injury in the Binori madrasa of Karachi. Since
then, there have been no direct reports of his being
sighted anywhere. All reports since September about his
continuing to be alive provide more indirect than direct
evidence. The indirect evidence is such as the following:
If he is dead, the news of his death would have spread
like wildfire in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal belt; if
he is dead, the place where his body is buried would have
become a place of pilgrimage etc.

5. However, since November,2002, a number of taped
messages purported to be his have been circulating, with
some of them broadcast by the Al Jazeera TV station. A
message, purported to be of Ayman-al-Zawahiri, bin
Laden’s No.2, was also broadcast after the US invasion
and occupation of Iraq. Intriguingly, Ayman’s message
contained a serious factual mistake in that Norway was
included amongst the countries alleged to have helped the
US in the invasion of Iraq whereas it was not so. Such
factual mistakes had not occurred in the past.

6. The frequency with which such messages have been
circulating and the factual mistake raise the suspicion
whether these messages are really of bin Laden and Ayman
or whether their followers in Pakistan have been
circulating well-fabricated messages in an attempt to
convince their followers that they are alive and leading.

7. Presuming he is alive, bin Laden is a relentlessly
hunted fugitive and his powers of co-ordination, command
and control have been considerably weakened and his
ability to communicate with his followers dispersed in
Pakistan and elsewhere has been impaired.

8. The responsibility for the co-ordination, command and
control of the terrorists operating against the US and
other allied troops in Afghanistan has been taken over by
Gulbuddin. Though there have been very few fatal
casualties suffered by the allied and Afghan forces, the
persistence of the hit and run attacks, with some of them
taking place even in Kabul, the capital, speak
disturbingly of the unimpaired morale of the dregs and
the local support enjoyed by them.

9. The responsibility for the co-ordination, command and
control of the terrorist operations in Pakistan itself
against American and other Western targets and in Jammu &
Kashmir (J&K) and other parts of India against Indian
targets has been taken over by the LET due to the damage
suffered by the HUM and the LEJ after the arrest of many
of their cadres by the Pakistani authorities following
the terrorist incidents of last year in Karachi and
Islamabad.

10. There has been no evidence of the involvement of any
of the Arab survivors of Al Qaeda in the incidents in
Afghanistan except in one near Kandahar, in which a
Yemeni transporting explosives, along with some Taliban
cadres, was reported to have been killed in an accidental
explosion.

11.Similarly, there has been no evidence of the
involvement of any of the Arab survivors of Al Qaeda in
the incidents inside Pakistan itself. Those were carried
out mainly by the survivors of the Pakistani components
of the IIF. Some Yemeni-Balochis were involved, but they
participated as members of the Pakistani components and
not of Al Qaeda.

12. Of all the terrorist strikes which have taken place
after 9/11 ( in J&K, New Delhi,Gandhinagar and Mumbai in
India,Bali in Indonesia, Mombasa in Kenya, Moscow and
Chechnya in Russia, Yemen, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and
Casablanca in Morocco), the direct involvement of the
Arab survivors of the Al Qaeda is suspected only in the
Riyadh incident. It is assessed that the remaining
strikes were carried out by the Pakistani components of
bin Laden’s IIF in India and by local elments operating
autonomously in other countries, with the surviving Al
Qaeda leadership itself playing very little leadership
role.

13. The Al Qaeda survivors scattered in Pakistan have
been focussing on training the fresh recruits of the
Pakistani components of the IIF in their training camps
in Punjab, the NWFP, Balochistan and the POK and guiding
them in their operations, without actually participating
in them.

14. Of the Pakistani components, the LET’s infrastructure
in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has remained largely intact
and it is playing an increasingly active role as the
standard-bearer of the IIF. It has also been in the
forefront of the moves to spread the jihad to Iraq and
to intensify it there.

15. The presence of these elements in Pakistani territory
and their activities from there continue to pose a
serious threat not only to Indian nationals and
interests, but also to the nationals and interests of the
US and other members of the international community.
While Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment has
definitely helped the US intelligence community in some
of its operations against leading Al Qaeda survivors in
Pakistan, it has avoided action against the survivors of
the Taliban, the Uzbeck and Chechen components, the HEI
and the Pakistani components.

16. In its calculation, it would need the Taliban, the
HEI and the Uzbeck and Chechen elements for retrieving
the ground lost by it in Afghanistan and the Pakistani
components to keep the Indian security forces bleeding.
These elements have, at the same time, an agenda
extending beyond Afghanistan and India, which includes
intensifying the jihad against the US not only in Iraq,
but also wherever possible, including in US territory, as
evidenced by the arrest of the LET cell in the US.

17. The successes of the US intelligence community in its
hunt for the survivors of the Al Qaeda have thus far been
limited to the non-tribal areas of Pakistan such as
Punjab and Sindh. There has been hardly any success in
the tribal belt and in the POK. This has been partly due
to the complicity of the local adminstration with the
survivors and partly due to the iron curtain imposed by
the military-intelligence establishment in these areas to
conceal the continued existence of the terrorist
infrastructure there, which is meant to serve Pakistan’s
strategic objectives against India and the Northern
Alliance in Afghanistan.

18. The main focus of the UN Security Council’s
resolution No. 1373 was on the need for and urgency of
effective action against terrorist funding and
sanctuaries. While there has been some action against
funding, even if not totally effective, there has been
practically no action against the sanctuaries. Presently,
the jihadi terrorist groups operating against India, the
USA, Israel, the South-East Asian countries and elsewhere
in the region have almost all been using sanctuaries in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. The concerns of
the international community relating to the
nuclearisation of terrorism also arise from the possible
dangers of weapons of mass destruction and related
technology getting into the hands of jihadi terrorists
from the already declared or yet to be declared state-
sponsors of international terrorism. Unless effective
action is taken to end these sanctuaries and to make
these states accountable for their actions, there will be
no respite from terrorism in the Indian sub-continent,
the US, Israel and other affected regions.

19. India, the US and Israel, as democracies and as the
greatest victims of jihadi terrorists, have to play the
leadership role in this connection through discreet
trilateral co-operation, initially at the intelligence
level, extending subsequently to the policy-making level.
There is also a need for a trilateral eminent persons
group, well-versed in counter-terrorism, to guide and
help in putting such co-operation through its paces

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retiredd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director,
Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor,
Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai chapter. E-
mail: corde@vsnl.com )

Source - http://www.saag.org/paper8/paper738.html

Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti

Panchaang for 9 Shravan 5104, Wednesday, August 6, 2003:

Shubhanu Nama Samvatsare Dakshinaya Nartana Ritau
Kark Mase Shukl Pakshe Buddh Vasara Yuktayam
Anuradha Nakshatr Brahm-Indr Yog
Kaulav-Gar Karan Navami-Dashami Yam Tithau

Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust

Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org

The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate

o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the
educational purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of
this post may not have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent
the opinion of the poster. The contents are protected by copyright law
and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name,
current e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others
are not necessarily those of the poster.