Taliban chief hides in Pakistan - Washington Times

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Eli Lake, Sara A. Carter and Barbara Slavin THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban, has fled a Pakistani city on the border with Afghanistan and found refuge from potential U.S. attacks in the teeming Pakistani port city of Karachi with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service, three current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

Mullah Omar, who hosted Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders when they plotted the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, had been residing in Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban shura -- or council -- had moved from Kandahar after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Two senior U.S. intelligence officials and one former senior CIA officer told The Washington Times that Mullah Omar traveled to Karachi last month after the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He inaugurated a new senior leadership council in Karachi, a city that so far has escaped U.S. and Pakistani counterterrorism campaigns, the officials said.

The officials, two of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, helped the Taliban leaders move from Quetta, where they were exposed to attacks by unmanned U.S. drones.

The development reinforces suspicions that the ISI, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s to expand Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, is working against U.S. interests in Afghanistan as the Obama administration prepares to send more U.S. troops to fight there.

Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran and analyst on al Qaeda and the Taliban, confirmed that Mullah Omar had been spotted in Karachi recently.

"Some sources claim the ISI decided to move him further from the battlefield to keep him safe" from U.S. drone attacks, said Mr. Riedel, who headed the Obama administration's review of policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan last spring. "There are huge madrassas in Karachi where Mullah Omar could easily be kept."

Mr. Riedel also noted that there had been few suicide bombings in Karachi, which he attributed to the Taliban and al Qaeda not wanting to "foul their own nest."

A U.S. counterterrorism official said, "There are indications of some kind of bleed-out of Taliban types from Quetta to Karachi, but no one should assume at this point that the entire Afghan Taliban leadership has packed up its bags and headed for another Pakistani city."

A second senior intelligence officer who specializes in monitoring al Qaeda said U.S. intelligence had confirmed Mullah Omar's move through both electronic and human sources as well as intelligence from an unnamed allied service.

The official said that neither Osama bin Laden nor al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri has been spotted in Karachi. The official said the top two al Qaeda figures are still thought to be in the tribal region of Pakistan on Afghanistan's border.

But, the official said, other midlevel al Qaeda operatives who facilitate the travel and training of foreign fighters have moved to the Karachi metropolitan area, which with 18 million people is Pakistan's most populous city.

"One reason, [al Qaeda] and Taliban leaders are relocating to Karachi is because they believe U.S. drones do not strike there," the official said. "It is a densely populated urban area."

Al Qaeda has had a presence in Karachi since at least 2001.

In late 2001, a cell likely commanded by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed -- the admitted operational planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- abducted and killed journalist Daniel Pearl.

Mohammed, who was captured by the CIA with ISI help in Pakistan in 2003, was sent to the detention facility at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is now set to go on trial in New York. In 2007, at a closed military hearing at Guantanamo, he confessed that he personally beheaded Mr. Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter.

Pakistani officials said they were perplexed by the U.S. reports regarding Mullah Omar and denied that the ISI had facilitated a move by the Quetta shura to Karachi.

Nadeem Kiani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said the U.S. has not provided Pakistan with any credible intelligence regarding Mullah Omar's whereabouts.

"We have no evidence of his presence in Pakistan," Mr. Kiani said. "If anybody in the U.S. government knows of any Quetta shura or Karachi shura, why don't they share that intelligence with Pakistan so we can take care of the issue ourselves? We have not been made aware of any presence of Mullah Omar in the region."

He said the ISI and Pakistani military have "suffered a lot of losses fighting the terrorists" and that "people who are making these accusations have their own agendas."

"Our forces are fighting the Taliban in Waziristan and other areas," he said. "The terrorists are now killing and targeting innocent people in Pakistani cities. ISI is a very professional intelligence agency and these allegations are baseless."

Mr. Kiani added that the U.S. and Pakistan have "24-hour intelligence sharing."

Another Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work, told The Times, "If Pakistan is made aware of the allegations and we do nothing, then the U.S. will know who to blame. Pakistan can take action with credible information.

"But to shift the blame on Pakistan and the security forces because Afghanistan is becoming more of a problem is not going to be helpful but have a demoralizing effect on the situation both here and there," he said.

Mary Habeck, a professor and analyst on radical Islam at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, said the reported move "suggests the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban are one and the same thing."

She said that it also "shows the Taliban are not the marginalized group we have been saying they are. They can move into a major city in Pakistan and believe they are safe there."

Terror Ties Run Deep in Pakistan, Mumbai Case Shows

By JANE PERLEZ and SALMAN MASOOD

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — In a high-security jail here, five men — all members of the Islamic militant group described by the United States and India as the organizers of the terrorist rampage in Mumbai last year — were brought before a makeshift court in Pakistan’s first steps to bring them to justice.

The brief appearances, described by a defense lawyer, were held in secret for security reasons on Saturday in a case that Pakistan says shows its willingness to prosecute the group, Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan also says that the case will demonstrate that its military, which once backed the group as a surrogate force against India, has severed all ties.

But behind the first glimmerings of the case, sympathies for Lashkar-e-Taiba and its jihadist and anti-Indian culture run deep in this country, raising a serious challenge to any long-lasting moves to dismantle the network.

The membership of Lashkar-e-Taiba extends to about 150,000 people, according to a midlevel officer in Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. Together with another jihadi group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Lashkar loyalists could put Pakistan “up in flames,” the officer admitted.

Despite that risk, the jihadis “were good people” and could be controlled, the officer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s custom.

Obama administration officials say they continue to press the Pakistanis to guarantee prevention of a sequel to November’s Mumbai attacks, in which more than 160 people were killed in a rampage across two five-star hotels, a Jewish center and a busy train station.

A surprise confession last week of the sole surviving attacker made clear that Lashkar-e-Taiba has the capacity to quickly and inexpensively train young men from villages into intensely driven, proficient killers, a senior Obama administration official said.

The attacker, Ajmal Kasab, 21, has described receiving training in camps in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir, and in Manshera, a northwest town.

His account has been largely discounted in Pakistan as being forced by Indian investigators, but many details conform to descriptions of Lashkar operations offered by two former members. The members, who said they had friendly relations with Lashkar-e-Taiba, said that at least one Lashkar training camp was still operating in the hills around Muzaffarabad.

Pakistan said it had severed ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, under pressure from the Bush administration to join its campaign against terrorism. The interior minister, Rehman Malik, said in an interview that the group’s infrastructure was “no more intact.”

But Obama administration officials say they are still trying to understand the state of relations between Pakistan and the group. Among the most likely versions, they say, none would tamp down hostilities between Pakistan and India.

The possibilities include that Lashkar-e-Taiba remains a lever of the Pakistani state; that the group and others have realigned themselves quietly behind the interests of Pakistan and could be used covertly; and that the groups have broken away from the official security apparatus and are running independently.

A senior Pakistani official reinforced the last option, saying the connections between Pakistan’s spy agency and Lashkar-e-Taiba were so sundered that it was a matter of regret that the military could no longer control them.

A lack of control could have as devastating consequences as if the Pakistani Army was still supporting the groups, two senior American officials said. “My guess is, the army did not have command knowledge” of the Mumbai attacks, one of the American officials said. “Was there a lack of discipline? It’s a very, very serious issue whichever way it is.”

The commander of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has said in conversations with the Obama administration that he was trying to control Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“They say, ‘We are being more vigilant,’ but add, ‘By the way, India has to stop messing around in Baluchistan,’ ” an American official familiar with the conversations said of the Pakistanis, referring to a province that has been torn by a brutal sectarian struggle, in which Pakistan has accused India of financing insurgents.

The overarching goal of Lashkar-e-Taiba, which operates under the front of a charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, is the defeat of India. It also embraces a strong anti-Israeli platform and adheres to Ahl-i-Hadith, a strain of the Wahabi sect of Islam.

On those doctrinal grounds, Lashkar-e-Taiba has much in common with the goals of Al Qaeda, terrorism experts say.

“Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda are allies in the global Islamic jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, who led President Obama’s review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy this year. “They share the same target list, and their operatives often work and hide together.”

Among the evidence of Lashkar’s sophistication in the Mumbai attacks is the voice of one of the attackers’ handlers, speaking fluently in English, on what seem to be tapes of telephone intercepts provided to Channel 4 in Britain for a documentary shown this month.

Mr. Malik, the Pakistani interior minister, said he had asked India for the telephone numbers of the calls.

It seemed unlikely that the handler was the man accused of masterminding the attacks, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who was one of the five men who appeared in court on Saturday. Mr. Lakhvi, about 55 years old, does not speak English, according to the two former Lashkar members.

On the tape, the handler speaks in chilling tones as he advises the gunmen on targets at which to aim, weapons to use and what to say to hostages and the Indian authorities while staying calm under pressure.

“Lashkar-e-Taiba was definitely involved, but they had outside help and assistance,” said Sajjan M. Gohel, a terrorism expert in Britain. “The tape suggests that the handler had military training which went beyond basic terrorist preparation.”

Vikas Bajaj contributed reporting from Mumbai, India.

Pakistan Objects to U.S. Plan for Afghan War

By ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.

The Pakistani officials gave views starkly different from those of American officials regarding the threat presented by top Taliban commanders, some of whom the Americans say have long taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.

Recent Pakistani military operations against Taliban in the Swat Valley and parts of the tribal areas have done little to close the gap in perceptions.

Even as Obama administration officials praise the operations, they express frustration that Pakistan is failing to act against the full array of Islamic militants using the country as a base.

Instead, they say, Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India.

Such tensions have mounted despite a steady rotation of American officials through the region. They were on display last weekend when, during a visit to India, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those who had planned the Sept. 11 attacks were now sheltering in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued an immediate rebuttal.

Pakistan’s critical assessment was provided as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday night.

The country’s perspective was given in a nearly two-hour briefing on Friday for The New York Times by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. They spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The main themes of the briefing were echoed in conversations with several military officers over the past few days.

One of the first briefing slides read, in part: “The surge in Afghanistan will further reinforce the perception of a foreign occupation of Afghanistan. It will result in more civilian casualties; further alienate local population. Thus more local resistance to foreign troops.”

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

A spokesman for the American and NATO commands in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail message on Monday that there was no significant movement of insurgents out of Afghanistan, and no indication of foreign fighters moving into Afghanistan through Baluchistan or Iran, another concern of the Pakistanis.

Pakistani and American officials also cited some positive signs for the alliance. Increased sharing of information has sharpened the accuracy of strikes against militant hide-outs by Pakistani F-16 warplanes and drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. And Pakistani and American intelligence operatives are fighting together in dangerous missions to hunt down fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province.

But the intelligence briefing clearly illuminated the differences between the two countries over how, in the American view, Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

American officials say this Taliban council, known as the Quetta shura, is sheltered by Pakistani authorities, who may yet want to employ the Taliban as future allies in Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, the new leader of American and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, paused when asked whether he was getting the cooperation he wanted from Pakistani forces in combating the Quetta shura. “What I would love is for the government of Pakistan to have the ability to completely eliminate the safe havens that the Afghan Taliban enjoy,” he said.

The Pakistani intelligence officials denied that Mullah Omar was even in Pakistan, insisting that he was in Afghanistan.

The United States asked Pakistan in recent years to round up 10 Taliban leaders in Quetta, the Pakistani officials said. Of those 10, 6 were killed by the Pakistanis, 2 were probably in Afghanistan, and the remaining 2 presented no threat to the Marines in Afghanistan, the officials said.

They also said no threat was posed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader who American military commanders say operates with Pakistani protection out of North Waziristan and equips and trains Taliban fighters for Afghanistan.

Last year, Washington presented evidence to Pakistani leaders that Mr. Haqqani, working with Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for the bombing last summer of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 54 people.

Pakistani officials insisted that Mr. Haqqani spent most of his time in Afghanistan, suggesting that the American complaints about him being provided sanctuary were invalid.

Another militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also a source of deep disagreement.

India and the United States have criticized Pakistan for allowing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to be freed from jail last month.

The Pakistani officials said Mr. Saeed deserved to be freed because the government had failed to convince the courts that he should be kept in custody. There would be no effort to imprison Mr. Saeed again, in part because he was just an ideologue who did not have an anti-Pakistan agenda, the officials said.

The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan

Graham Usher

(Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.)

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons protesting in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 soldiers battling 5,000 guerrillas; and more than a thousand dead, mainly militants according to available counts but also soldiers and of course civilians.

The war has not been confined to Swat. In revenge for losses there, the Pakistan Taliban has unleashed a torrent of attacks in Peshawar, Lahore, Islamabad and other cities, killing scores. “You know it’s serious this time: the scale of the army’s campaign confirms it. You fear the war is at your door,” said Sajjad Ali from Mardan, a city adjacent to Swat.

The war is the fruit of a failed peace process, denounced by the United States as an “abdication” that had allowed the Taliban to within 60 miles of Islamabad. In February, the provincial government had proffered a localized form of Islamic law in Swat in return for the Taliban disarming and recognizing “the writ of the state.” The insurgents observed their commitments only in the breach, which included the slaughter of their opponents. In May the army “reinvaded” Swat.

Pakistanis historically have been hostile to campaigns against the Taliban, casting them as “America’s war.” But not this time: The army, the civilian government and most Pakistanis, including the largest opposition party, support the Swat offensive. “The atrocities of the Swat Taliban galvanized public opinion,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador to the US. “It produced a coincidence of military resolve, political consensus and strong public support. And because the US was not seen as calling the shots in any pronounced way, this helped the government pursue a very aggressive policy.”

The public support manifests as a spontaneous, generous solidarity. In cities like Mardan, Peshawar and Swabi, people have literally opened their homes to the refugees. In vast tent cities near the banks of the Indus, volunteers deliver food, clothes, utensils and shelter. The relief work, involving all parts of Pakistani civil society, is led by the Islamic charities.

One such charity is Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Last December the Pakistani government banned JuD and arrested its amir, Hafiz Saeed, following the JuD’s designation as a terrorist group by the United Nations. Saeed founded Lashkar-e-Tayaba (LeT), the Pakistani jihadi group that India alleges was behind the attack in Mumbai in November 2008. In Pakistan, it is widely assumed that JuD and LeT are one and the same organization. On June 2, the Lahore High Court ordered Saeed’s release on the grounds that the state had supplied “insufficient” evidence to warrant his detention. India responded by saying that the decision raised “serious doubts over Pakistan’s sincerity in acting with determination against terrorist groups and individuals operating from its territory.” India has since conditioned any return to peace negotiations with Pakistan on the latter taking action against LeT and other jihadi groups.

For the Obama administration—which has cast Taliban and al-Qaeda “sanctuaries” in Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan as the “single greatest threat” to America—the enigma is whether Pakistan’s military establishment is friend or foe in America’s war against Islamic militancy. “I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials,” ceded Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s point man for “Af-Pak,” when asked that question in February.

The dispute in Washington about how to perceive the Pakistani army runs along two colliding tracks. Track one says the army is a friend. Even before Swat, the Pakistani army had lost 1,000 men to Taliban and al-Qaeda guerillas in the tribal areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had “rendered” more than 600 al-Qaeda suspects into CIA hands, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. Currently the Pakistani army is fighting the Taliban not only in Swat but also the tribal areas of Bajaur, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber and South Waziristan.

Kashmiri children watching cricket near an excavation site in Budgam, near Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

Track two says the army-ISI combination is a foe. It allows Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his Shura council free run in Pakistan’s Balochistan province from where they direct the insurgency in Afghanistan. It shelters Afghan Taliban commanders like Jalaluddin and Sirjuddin Haqqani in North Waziristan. And it supplies money, arms and training to jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in Indian-occupied Kashmir, including the “banned” LeT.

The two tracks collide because both, in part, are true. The army is combating the Pakistan Taliban and its jihadi allies in Swat and elsewhere, seeing their spread as a danger to Pakistan’s integrity as a state. One hundred and twenty thousand soldiers have been mobilized to fight them. But 250,000 remain rooted on the eastern border facing the Indian army, and primed by organizational formation, weaponry, ideology and ethos to a vision that defines India, not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, as the “strategic enemy.” That vision must change if Pakistan is to defeat the enemy at home.

Jockeying for Kashmir

For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.

Of all the jihadi groups the ISI nurtured in IoK, the LeT was the deadliest, but there were others. Their collective purpose was to “bleed India” until Delhi surrendered IoK to Islamabad. Pre-9/11, the collaboration was overt. LeT and other jihadi groups recruited fighters throughout Pakistan, but particularly from southern Punjab. They launched hundreds of guerilla attacks on Indian soldiers and civilians and fought alongside the Pakistani army in the 1999 invasion of Kargil, the last time the two armies went head to head inside Indian Kashmir.

In December 2001, India charged LeT with attacking its parliament in Delhi, bringing the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. Under American pressure, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s then-military dictator, banned the LeT and other jihadi groups. Moves against the militants in 2002 seemed like bluffs at the time. In fact, they were the beginning of a slow change. Steered by Washington, Islamabad and Delhi went from nuclear brinkmanship to a truce across the armistice line in Kashmir. In 2004, Musharraf began a peace process or “composite dialogue” with India predicated on the oath “not to permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner.” What had commenced as a feint by Pakistan’s military establishment was hardening into policy.

The ISI demobilized thousands of jihadi fighters in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Some of their camps were moved inland, including, ironically, to the Swat Valley. Six army divisions (about 80,000 to 100,000 men) were repositioned from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan, where the army was becoming embroiled in its first clashes with the Pakistan Taliban. Under the command of General Ashfaq Kayani (now army chief of staff), the ISI was reformed, with the more Indo-phobic and jihadi officers purged. Guerilla infiltration into IoK slowed to a trickle.

Some of the army’s senior officers believed that because both Pakistan and India had become nuclear powers, hot war was no longer an option. More importantly, many generals were convinced that the army would not be able to preserve its preeminent position in the Pakistani state or defend its enormous corporate interests in the economy without sustained growth which would require peace with India. Musharraf was the leading proponent of this new thinking. In 2004, he authorized Khurshid Kasuri, the civilian foreign minister at the time, to open “back-channel” negotiations with India on a possible settlement for Kashmir, one that would in essence give Islamabad an honorable exit from what had become an unwinnable war.

Over the next three years a deal took shape: Demilitarization would neutralize the two Kashmirs, open borders would unite them, and a form of self-government or autonomy would partly satisfy the Kashmiri aspiration to self-determination. The army agreed to the nucleus of this draft agreement with the proviso that the Kashmiris vote on it. “This was to allow the army to give up historic positions without appearing to,” said Hasan Rizvi Ashkari, a military historian.

The back channel ran aground in the storm that wrecked Musharraf after his illegal sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007. Many fear that the attacks in Mumbai may have sunk prospects for a Kashmir agreement forever. But the progress of the discussions had suggested that the military was open to a resolution and had taken steps in that direction. “When the Kashmir camps were initially dispersed, the boys [fighters] were told that it was just a temporary measure because of 9/11,” a senior jihadi leader told the BBC in 2008. “Then the arrests and disappearances started. The boys realized fundamental changes were underway and quietly slipped away beyond the control of the Pakistani authorities.” This is what happened in the Swat Valley where jihadi cells joined forces and lent enormous firepower to local Islamist groups demanding shari‘a law. The pattern was repeated in the southern Punjab and Islamabad.

Police paramilitaries in downtown Srinagar during a city shutdown called by separatists. (Liz Harris)

Deprived of support from their old (state) godfathers, the “youngest and most radicalized members” were drawn to new groups, says historian Ahmed Rashid. They “joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistan and Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later attacked the Pakistan government.” Rashid believes this al-Qaeda, Taliban and jihadi nexus is the motor driving much of the violence that has rocked Pakistan, Afghanistan and India in recent years, including Mumbai, the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and the recent wave of attacks in Pakistani cities.

In other words, after 2004 many LeT and other jihadi cadres ceased focusing their militancy exclusively on India or Kashmir. They fragmented and morphed into multiple cells with ties to al-Qaeda and other Pakistani Sunni sectarian groups, sometimes acting in alliance, sometimes autonomously, but together having an outreach that included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Iraq, Europe and beyond. The ISI was loath to cut ties with groups over which it did maintain some sway, like the old LeT-JuD nexus. Nor was the ISI inclined to abandon entirely the proxy war strategy in IoK before a settlement had been reached. “If we did that, Kashmir would go cold and India would bury it forever,” said a senior army general in 2005.

IoK has warmed. In 2008 there were 41 militant infractions across the armistice line, double the 2007 total. The upward curve has continued in 2009, with several skirmishes between the two armies. For the first time since 2004, LeT cadres have publicly surfaced in the southern Punjab, proselytizing for jihad. Seminaries and schools are acting as recruiting centers, with the traffic in students moving in both directions between the Punjab and the tribal areas. Funerals in both provinces eulogize “martyrs” in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

None of this could happen without the knowledge of the ISI. Militant activity increased in the twilight between the end of Musharraf’s military rule and Pakistan’s new civilian government. Yet the new militancy seems to have little to do with the mass demonstrations for independence that shook IoK in the summer of 2008, or with insurgent violence there, which remains low. It has more to do with Afghanistan or, more precisely, with India in Afghanistan.

India’s Regional Dominance

Pakistan has been worried by India’s widening footprint in Afghanistan since the Bonn conference in November 2001, where Afghan factions came together to determine their country’s post-Taliban future. The Afghan Taliban was purged from any interim government headed by Hamid Karzai, and replaced by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance (NA). The NA had opposed the Taliban regime before 9/11 and fought with US troops to topple it. India, Iran and Russia were its main sponsors; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban. Neither the Taliban nor Islamabad was invited to Bonn. “This was our original sin,” said Lakdar Brahimi, the UN’s envoy in Afghanistan, who chaired the conference.

India remains one of Karzai’s few champions. And Afghanistan is seen to be very much within Delhi’s sphere of regional influence. India has four consulates and has given the Afghan government $1.2 billion in aid: a huge investment for a country that is 99 percent Muslim and with which India shares no border. Delhi has built the new national parliament in Kabul, runs the Afghan electricity and satellite systems and has helped train its army and intelligence forces, the latter staffed by many ex-NA commanders.

India’s most ambitious Afghan project is a new highway, routed across the western border to the Iranian port of Chabahar, that circumvents landlocked Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports to the Gulf; Islamabad deems these trade and energy corridors vital to its economic future. For the Pakistan army, the highway’s importance is clear: India seeks to consolidate an alliance with Iran in western Afghanistan to counter Pakistan’s influence in eastern Afghanistan. This is a continuation of the pre-9/11 war in a post-9/11 infrastructure, with India, Iran and the Karzai government on the one side, and Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban on the other. “The army feels under siege,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst.

In 2004, the Bush administration tilted US South Asia policy toward Delhi, lured by the size of India’s markets and its potential role as a strategic “counterweight” to China, Pakistan’s closest regional ally. In 2008, the US signed an agreement that allows India to buy civilian atomic technology, including nuclear fuel, from American firms, even though Delhi is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. Pakistan was granted no such privilege; on the contrary, it is denounced as a rogue for developing the bomb by stealth and for the proliferation activities of its former top nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan. Some in Congress want aid to Pakistan tied to US access to Khan for questioning.

For all the fabled “chemistry” between Bush and Musharraf, since 9/11 Washington has treated Islamabad as a gun for hire, providing certain weaponry and around $2 billion a year in exchange for securing supply lines for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and for fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. By cooperating in these ways, the army may have hoped that its interests would be taken into account in the post-invasion reconstruction. Yet unlike Iran or India—and despite the services or sacrifices rendered—Islamabad was given no say in the formation of the Afghan government or in its nascent military forces. This strengthened Pakistani perceptions that Musharraf and his army were mercenaries fighting “America’s war.” The Taliban, by contrast, were deemed Afghan or at least Pashtun nationalists resisting a foreign, colonial and anti-Muslim occupation.

These realities help explain the army’s selective counterinsurgency in the tribal areas. In Bajaur, Mahmond and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, the army has often been ruthless in campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban. This is partly revenge for the killing of Pakistani soldiers. But there is also the perception (and, the army insists, evidence) that “Pakistan’s enemies” are fomenting the militancy. A commander in Bajaur says many of those captured or killed by the army are Afghans, including Tajiks or Uzbeks, while the tribal areas are almost exclusively Pashtun. The inference is obvious. Some “insurgents” are “agents” working for Afghan intelligence and/or India.

In North Waziristan, on the other hand, the preferred policy is to negotiate ceasefires with tribal militants who openly provide fighters and arms to Afghan Taliban commanders like the Haqqanis. Unlike the Pakistan Taliban, these tribal militants do not attack the Pakistani army other than to avenge US drone attacks. “They’re our people; they’re not our enemies,” says an ISI officer.

A Pakistani analyst—who declined attribution—says these dual policies explain the enigma of the Pakistan army. It will act against those who threaten the state, such as the Taliban in Swat and al-Qaeda-linked militants elsewhere. But it will not act against those who, like the Afghan Taliban, seek only a haven from which to fight American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In fact, “The ISI has retained its links to the Afghan Taliban because it wants to use them as a bargaining chip in Afghanistan,” says the analyst. “The Pakistan army wants to have a bigger say in whatever new regional dispensation America is planning. The view within the army and ISI is if the Afghan Taliban is abandoned, this would strengthen the Afghan government, as well as India in Afghanistan, at Pakistan’s expense.”

A Fork in the Road

Prior to his election, Barack Obama was clear on the link between peace in Kashmir and war in Afghanistan. “If Pakistan can look towards to the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007. Ensconced in the Oval Office, the president now dismisses Islamabad’s focus on Delhi as paranoia. “The obsession with India as a mortal threat to Pakistan is misguided [because] their biggest threat right now comes internally,” he said in April 2009.

The shift seals a “new” American policy toward Pakistan that marks more continuity than change with Bush’s second term. Under Obama, US drone attacks into the tribal areas—inaugurated by Bush—have continued and may be extended to other areas of Pakistan. Whatever good will Obama hoped to generate through increases in civilian aid has been wiped out by the increase in Pakistani deaths by American rockets.

The Pakistan aid bill before Congress, although promising a “deeper, broader, long-term engagement with the [Pakistani] people,” could be as conditional as anything tendered by Bush. Military aid is not to be tied only to fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda but may require Pakistan’s pledge not to support “any person or group that conducts violence, sabotage or other activities meant to instill fear or terror in India.” Some members of Congress want aid to Pakistan linked to moving troops from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan.

American policy towards Kashmir also reveals India’s widening influence in Washington. In an intensive lobbying effort, Delhi made clear to Obama that his envoy would be shunned if any link were made between Kashmir and Af-Pak. It worked. In a trip to Islamabad in April, Holbrooke refused to even say “Kashmir.” And while in Delhi, he was effusive about India’s “critical role” in the region without which “we cannot settle Afghanistan and many other world problems.” The implication was that Kashmir, clearly, is not among them.

This Indian-American axis presents Islamabad with a fork in the road. One way goes back. The ISI again could try to bleed India via surrogates in Afghanistan and Kashmir in the hope that its regional concerns will be addressed, above all a final status for Kashmir and recognition of its western border with Afghanistan. But such a strategy would likely fail; pursuing foreign policy objectives through guerilla violence rarely worked in the past. It simply creates conditions of friction that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and jihadi groups can exploit to keep 80 percent of Pakistan’s military manpower and hardware pinned down on India rather than on them or the tribal areas. Mumbai and the Taliban’s conquest of Swat are two examples of just how useful a diversion this can be.

The alternative is to go forward and insist that Kashmir, Afghanistan and Islamic militancy are regional problems requiring regional solutions. India is right to insist that Pakistan go after those nationals and groups implicated in Mumbai and other attacks in India with the same vigor as it is currently going after the Pakistan Taliban in Swat. But equally Delhi must recommence serious negotiations to resolve Kashmir and other outstanding water and land disputes with Islamabad.

On such bases Pakistan and India could come together to agree to terms for coexistence in a neutral and neutralized Afghanistan. For economic, energy and geopolitical reasons, both nations have an interest in their roads crossing in Kabul. But the road must start in Kashmir.