The Maulana's Intriguing Visit

The high-profile visit of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, the controversial leader of theJamiat-ul-ulema Islam (JUI) of Pakistan, to India and theattention accorded to him in governmental and non-governmental circles in New Delhi is being viewed by manyIndia-watchers in the US with a mix of bewilderment and concern.

Fazlur Rahman is a fundamentalist with a difference, known forhis proximity to Mrs.Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians (PPPP). Despite hisfundamentalist orientation, he supported her right to become the Prime Minister and opposed the campaign ofthe Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) in the 1990s against a woman heading the Government of an Islamic country.

Benazir rewarded him by making him the Chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign AffairsCommittee and allegedly asked the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to place a large amount from its secretservice fund at his disposalduring his travels abroad. He loves foreign travels and the good things of life and during her second tenure as the Prime Minister, hespent more time abroad than in Pakistan.

Creating the Taliban

In 1993-94, Pakistan’s cotton crop was practically destroyed by insects for two yearsin succession and many textile mills were threatened with closure. Asif Zirdari, her husband, through abusiness crony in Hong Kong, entered into a contract with Turkmenistan for emergency supplies of cotton.The responsibility for transporting them to Pakistan by road via Afghanistanwas given to a Hong Kong-based Pakistani businessman. His cotton convoys were attacked and the cotton looted by armed followers ofGulbuddin Heckmatyar of the Hizb-e-Islami (HEI) and Ismail Khan, the pro-Teheran warlord of Herat.

Zirdari then asked Maj. Gen.(retd) Naseerullah Babbar, Benazir’s Interior Minister, toorganize a special force to escort the cotton convoys through Afghanistan. Naseerullah, with the help ofPervez Musharraf, organized the Taliban by rallying round many of the dregs of the Afghan war of the 1980sagainst the Soviet troops under the leadership of Mulla Mohammad Omar, the Amir of the Taliban.

They were helped in this by Maulana Fazlur Rahman and his protégé, MufiShamzai of the Binori madrasa of Karachi. This is how, the Taliban came into existence in 1994.The role played by Fazlur Rahman in helping Benazir and her husband in creating the Taliban led to seriousdifferences between him and Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the JEI, who was a strong supporter of Gulbuddin. Anotherperson who was a strong critic of the Maulana’s soft corner for Benazir and Zirdari was Lt. Gen.Hamid Gul,who was the DG of the ISI during her first tenure as the Prime Minister.

The Harkat-ul-Ansar Connection

The US started viewing the Maulana with suspicion in 1995 due to the proximity of theHarkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), then headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil, to the Maulana. In March, 1995,Kamran Khan, the well-known investigative journalist, came out with a series of articles under the title"Jihad Worldwide" in the News, the prestigious daily of Pakistan.

In these articles, he exposed not only the role played by the HUA in organizing terroristoperations in India’s Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), southern Philippines, the Arakan area of Myanmar andChechnya, but also its attempts to carry its jihad to theUShomeland by recruiting and training a group of Afro-American Muslims. It was suspected that theHUA could not have been indulging in such activities without the complicity of Fazlur Rahman.

This was followed by the kidnapping of some Western tourists, including two Americans,one of whom escaped, by the HUA in J&K under the name Al Faran. The Clinton Administration in the USsought Benazir’s help in getting them released. She and Zirdari asked Fazlur Rahman to go to India topersuade the HUA to release them.

At the request of the US Embassy in New Delhi, the Narasimha Rao government, then inpower, agreed to let him come. The Rao Government was hoping that he would keep his missionunpublicized, but Fazlur Rahman, who has a weakness for publicity, made it into a high-profile visit.After reaching New Delhi, he demanded that he should be allowed to visit Srinagar to which the Indianintelligence agencies were strongly opposed.

On coming to know of his visit, circles close to the present ruling coalition in NewDelhi, which were then in opposition, strongly criticized the Rao Government for allowing the patron of theHUA to visit India. Thereupon, the Rao Government totally cut of all contacts with him and he went back toPakistan.

In October 1997, the US State Department designated the HUA as a foreign terroristorganization under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Consequently, it is acrime for anyone in the USA to be associated with it and foreigners associated with it are not entitled to USvisas. Fazlur Rahman, as the suspected supporter if not the mentor of the HUA, is covered by this ban.After the ban, the HUA ostensibly split into two organizations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and theHarkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI). The Maulana is viewed by many in Pakistan and the US as the patron ofboth.

The Osama Angle

After the explosions outside the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzaniya in August,1998, theClinton Administration exercised considerable pressure on the Nawaz Sharif Government and Lt. Gen.Ziauddin,the then DG of the ISI, to help the US Special Forces in organizing a commando raid into Kandahar to captureOsama bin Laden and take him to the US for trial.

This pressure was kept up during 1999 too. Nawaz Sharif, fearing an adverse reaction fromMusharraf, his Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), was initially hesitant to co-operate. However, after avisit to Washington DC by Ziauddin after the Kargil war, Nawaz agreed to pressurize the Taliban to hand overbin Laden to the US and, if it refused, to co-operate with the US Special Forces in their planned raid.

Ziauddin met the Amir of the Taliban at Kandahar in this connection. While stickingto his refusal to hand over bin Laden to the US, the Amir agreed to consider expelling him to another Islamiccountry. On coming to know of this, Musharraf, who was not kept in the picture by Nawaz or Ziauddin,sent Mohammad Aziz, then his Chief of the General Staff, along with Fazlur Rahman to Kandahar to tell the Amirthat he should not carry out any instructions received from Ziauddin. It was on coming to know of thisthat Nawaz decided to sack Musharraf and appoint Ziauddin as the COAS, triggering off the coup and hisoverthrow.

Following the visit of Ziauddin toKandahar, there were many speculative reports in the Pakistani media that US Special Forces had alreadyarrived in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and were about to raid Kandahar. Fazlur Rahman issueda statement warning the US that if bin Laden was killed or captured, no American national in Pakistan would besafe. A senior US diplomat posted in Islamabad thereupon visited him and reportedly warned him that ifany US national in Pakistan came to any harm, it would hold him personally responsible and act against him.Thereafter, he lowered his anti-US rhetoric.

After 9/11, Musharraf sent a delegation of Pakistani mullahs headed by Mufti Shamzai toKandahar to persuade the Taliban Amir to hand over bin Laden to the US in order to avert a war. Thedelegation was accompanied by Lt.Gen.Mehmood Ahmed, the then ISI chief.

Before going to Kandahar, the Mullas and the ISI chief had met Fazlur Rahman at Peshawar.They then met the Taliban Amir at Kandahar and came back and reported to Musharraf that the Amir had refusedto co-operate. It was said that the USA came to know from one of its sources in the mullahs’delegation that instead of pressurizing the Amir to hand over bin Laden to the US, the delegation, in thepresence of Mehmood Ahmed, congratulated the Amir for resisting US pressure and encouraged him to continue todo so.

It was after this that the US pressured Musharraf to remove Mehmood Ahmed, known to beclose to Fazlur Rahman, from his post. He did so on October 7, 2001, and appointed Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, thenCorps Commander in Peshawar and a close personal friend of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, as the new DG.

Post-9/11 Realignments

Musharraf’s decision to co-operate with the US against the Taliban led to are-alignment in Pakistan. The JEI and the JUI forgot their past differences over the role played byFazlur Rahman in helping the Benazir Government in the creation of the Taliban as a counter to Gulbuddin’sHEI and joined hands in backing the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the HEI in their joint operations against the USforces in Afghanistan.

Despite the formation of the coalition of six fundamentalist parties called the MuttahidaMajlis-e-Amal (MMA), of which the JUI and the JEI are the driving force, suspicions continue to mark therelations between the Maulana and the Qazi. Each suspects the other of continuing to maintainclandestine contacts with the military-intelligence establishment. There was also friction over the decisionof the Maulana to nominate one of the members of his party as the Chief Minister of the NWFP withoutconsulting the Qazi.

Since 9/11, US suspicions of the Maulana have worsened because of the active role playedby the HUM under the name HUM (Al Alami—International) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in theterrorist strikes against French and American nationals in Karachi and Islamabad. There were reportsbefore the US invasion of Iraq that the HUM had sent its cadres to Saudi Arabia under the cover ofhaj pilgrims and that they were to infiltrate into Iraq to start a jihad against the US troops. When aninjured bin Laden escaped into Pakistan from Afghanistan in the beginning of last year, Mufti Shamzai, theprotégé of Fazlur Rahman, gave him shelter in his madrasa in Karachi till last August.

Five Pakistani jihadi organizations are members of bin Laden’s International IslamicFront (IIF) -- the HUM, the HUJI, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and theLashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ). Of these, the HUM, the HUJI, the JEM and the LEJ are close to the Maulana.The LET, despite its strong Wahabi orientation, is not. The Maulana’s perceived hobnobbing with Indiacould act as a red rag to the bull and provoke an intensification of the terrorist strikes in Indianterritory.

The questions being asked in the US are: Did the Maulana come on his own or at theinstance of the Government of India or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? What was the motive? What would beits implications?

It is alleged by many here that the Govt. of India has been making overtures to theMaulana through PPP circles close to Benazir in the hope ofusinghis services for persuading the Deobandi leaders of India to react more positively to the proposals made byKanchi Shankaracharya for a solution to the Ayodhya issue and to pressurize the jihadi organizations close tohim to stop their terrorist activities in India.

There is concern that this exercise might prove counter-productive and lead to anaggravation of the ground situation in J&K.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd),Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, andConvenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai chapter. He is currently in the USA.