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| The search for the puppet-masters | | |
Indian investigators know the marionettes who enact the Lashkar-e-Taiba's jihad — but the men who hold the strings are out of reach.
EVEN AS Pakistan's armed forces massed the formations that would spearhead the Kargil war, the Lashkar-e-Taiba's overall military commander proclaimed the opening of a second front. "To set up mujahideen networks across India is our one target," Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi told The Nation on April 9, 1999. "We are preparing the Muslims of India," he said, "and when they are ready, it will be the start of the disintegration of India."
Six years after Lakhvi delivered this open threat, India is finally waking up to its seriousness. While a mass of evidence has emerged on the Lashkar role in the July 11 Mumbai serial bombings, Indian investigators continue to search for clear answers to the two most important questions. Just what strategic purpose was the bombing intended to serve? And is the regime of President Pervez Musharraf an enemy of the Lashkar's jihad — or, in fact, its author?
When Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon meets his Pakistani counterpart Riaz Mohammad Khan next month, he will seek to put together the foundations for the joint counter-terror mechanism India hopes will help address those questions. When — if — the body meets, India's covert services will ask for information on the stocky, middle-aged Bahawalpur resident who is perhaps the most important custodian of the secrets of the Lashkar's jihad in India.
"Baba," his students — among them the men who bombed Mumbai — have long called Mohammad Azam Cheema. Born to a lower-middle class Punjabi family in 1953, Cheema went on to teach Islamic religious studies at the Government Municipal Degree College in Faislabad. During his tenure there, Cheema came into contact with a circle of theologians at the Department of Islamiat in Lahore's Engineering University.
Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, Hafiz Abdul Rehman Makki, and other scholars linked to the ultra-conservative Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis sect were engaged in setting up what was then called the Markaz Dawa wal'Irshad. Sited on a 160-acre campus near Lahore donated by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Markaz was a platform to draw recruits for the anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan. Aided by generous contributions from the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Osama bin-Laden's close aide, Abdullah Azam, the Markaz soon set up the foundations of its new armed wing — the Lashkar.
After 1989, and the Islamist triumph in Afghanistan, the Lashkar's energies turned eastwards. From the outset, its objectives were clear. The Lashkar's strategic goal, the scholar Yoginder Sikand has observed, was "to extend Muslim control over what is seen as having once been Muslim land, and, hence, to be brought back under Muslim domination."
By 1993, the Lashkar had put in place the infrastructure needed to realise this ideological project. Even as it carried out its first major military operations in Jammu and Kashmir, the terrorist group demonstrated its desire to act on a larger stage. On the first anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Lashkar operatives Jalees Ansari, Azam Ghauri, and Abdul Karim `Tunda' carried out a series of bombings across north and west India.
Working under the command of Lakhvi, Cheema is believed to have been assigned charge of enhancing the capabilities of these networks. His efforts, however, came to little. In July 1998, the Delhi Police arrested Abdul Sattar, a resident of Pakistan's Faislabad district who had set up a covert terror cell in the town of Khurja. A year later, the Jammu and Kashmir Police broke up a Mumbai-centred cell run by another Pakistani, Amir Khan. Mohammad Ishtiaq, the son of a shopkeeper from Kala Gujran in Pakistan's Jhelum district who had risen to become one of the Lashkar's top field operatives, was also arrested.
Despite its grand polemic, then, the Lashkar's jihad came to little. After 1999, the pressures on the organisation became intense. The newly formed Jaish-e-Mohammad, with which the Lashkar competed for both cadre and resources, won applause among Islamists with a series of increasingly spectacular strikes, culminating in the December 13, 2001, attack on Parliament House. Put simply, Cheema had expended the enormous assets at the Lashkar's command — and failed.
Pakistan proscribed the Lashkar-e-Taiba in the wake of the military crisis of 2001-2002. It wasn't, however, the end of the road. Its patrons in the ISI ensured that the organisation's assets and infrastructure were untouched. Within six months of the ban — which did not, in any case, apply to Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir — the Lashkar was up and running again. The Markaz renamed itself the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which was advertised as an organisation for charity and proselytisation, but continued to raise funds for the Lashkar.
From the interrogation records of Abdullah Mujahid, a terrorist arrested from Afghanistan in July 2003 and now held in Guantanamo Bay, we know that the Lashkar reached out to its old friends in Al-Qaeda for help. At a February 2003 meeting in the Lashkar's Muridke headquarters, Mujahid was appointed chief of operations against India. However, he was held by the United States before he could take up this new assignment.
The Lashkar had to look elsewhere for renewal. Mohammad Muzammil, if that is indeed his real name, and Abu Alqama, who is still known only by his chosen alias — both battle-hardened veterans of the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir — were chosen to spearhead the new phase of the jihad promised by Cheema.
Muzammil and Abu Alqama had, unlike Cheema, seen real fighting in Jammu and Kashmir. More important, they had demonstrated their ability to work in an environment where the Lashkar had no overground network or mass support — the real problem that had confronted Cheema, and led to the failure of his project. In Pakistan, the Lashkar had drawn on the resources of the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis clerical order. But while the Jamaat's presence in Jammu and Kashmir dated back to at least 1923, the ultra-conservative organisation had few followers. Its assaults on traditional religious practices even provoked a hostile backlash. "Several Ahl-e-Hadis activists were physically attacked," Sikand has recorded, "a social boycott was instituted against them; they were turned out of their localities; and, being branded as apostates, they were refused entry into the mosques."
Despite this considerable handicap, both commanders proved able to leverage the Lashkar's military resources in Jammu and Kashmir to consolidate and accelerate its pan-India jihad. In September 2002, Muzammil supervised the storming of the Akshardham Temple in Gandhinagar. Among Muzammil's best-known ambitious operations was a June 2004 plot to assassinate Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani. Investigations into last year's serial bombings in New Delhi demonstrated similar networks at work. Abu Alqama tasked a Bandipora-based commander code-named Abu Huzaifa and his immediate subordinate, Abdul Rehman `Mota' to execute the strike. Tariq Ahmad Dar, a Srinagar-based pharmaceuticals salesman, was then charged with its physical execution.
But Cheema, it is now clear, kept alive his Students Islamic Movement of India-linked networks in India. Members of the Mumbai cell, investigators have been able to establish, began to train in Bahawalpur from as early as 2001, slowly acquiring the multiple skills that were demonstrated in the July bombings. For his part, Cheema built up bases in Bangladesh and Nepal, using them as launch pads for major actions in much the same fashion as Muzammil and Abu Alqama had done from Jammu and Kashmir.
Core questions
Were the Mumbai serial bombings Cheema's effort to demonstrate that he could do better than Abu Alqama or Muzammil? And did the ISI initiate the enterprise or just turn a blind eye to it?
Unless the proposed India-Pakistan joint counter-terrorism mechanism succeeds in placing pressure on Pakistan, credible answers may never emerge. The probabilities are, sadly, poor. Earlier this year, a confidential research paper prepared by the United Kingdom's Defence Academy asserted that "Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism — whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq."
Pakistan's covert services could help fill in the blanks — if they choose to do so. In mid-October, Pakistan's Additional Advocate General, Muhammad Hanif Khatana, unsuccessfully attempted to defend the continued detention of Lashkar chief Saeed in the Lahore High Court. Mr. Khatana refused to present in open court the facts that led to Saeed's detention soon after the London Underground bombings, saying "it is not in the public interest." Saeed was released on October 19, and promptly described India as "an eternal enemy of Pakistan."
What lies ahead? Last month's issue of the Markaz magazine Majallat al-Dawa threatened to "butcher every Hindu." Behind such hate polemic, though, lie both demonstrated hostile intent and capabilities.
Like audiences of the Indonesian Wayang Kulit theatre, we have so far been able to follow the story of the Lashkar's jihad in India only through the shadows its puppets have cast. Last week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called on Pakistan to "walk the talk on terror." What remains unclear, though, is if the joint mechanism will prod Pakistan to take that first step towards casting light on the truth.
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