The Pakistani authorities have, for the first time, admitted that many of the dregs of Al Qaeda and other components of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) have been operating from the urban centres of Pakistan and not necessarily from the inaccessible tribal areas as they had been maintaining in the past and that Karachi and Quetta are the main nerve-centres of the Al Qaeda dregs in Pakistan.
This is something that we in India have been pointing out ever since the arrest of Abu Zubaidah, said to be the operational chief of Al Qaeda, from a hide-out of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Faislabad in Pakistani Punjab in March,2002. As mentioned by me many times in the past on the basis of reliable reports, an injured bin Laden himself was undergoing treatment in the Binori madrasa of Karachi till August,2002. However, his present whereabouts are not known.
Even the 9/11 Commission of the US, whose report was released last month, has drawn attention to the fact that many of the activities of Al Qaeda before 9/11 had centred round Karachi and Quetta. While bin Laden operated mostly from Kandahar in Afghanistan, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM), allegedly the master-mind of the 9/11 terrorist strikes, had most of the time operated from Karachi.
The report said: "Almost all the 9/11 attackers travelled the north-south nexus of Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi. The Balochistan region of Pakistan (KSM's ethnic home) and the sprawling city of Karachi remain centres of Islamist extremism."
During a media briefing on August 6, 2004, Faisal Saleh Hayat, the Interior Minister, admitted that there was clearly an Al Qaeda presence in Karachi and Quetta, but operatives were also hiding in obscure towns elsewhere. "In the weeks and months to come we hope to further intensify our efforts in hitting at those nerve centres and at those crucial and sensitive areas where by hitting hard, the Al Qaeda will certainly be hurt the most," he added.
Despite this, there is still an attempt by the Bush Administration to give the benefit of doubt to Pakistan and spare Gen.Pervez Musharraf and his Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) any need for accountability because of their complicity with these dregs. In an article, apparently inspired by officials of the Bush Administration, even the "Washington Post" has sought to project the Musharraf regime in a favourable light by attributing the recent arrests of some of these dregs in different urban centres of Pakistan to the combing operation launched by the Pakistan Army in the South Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Its argument is-:Thanks to the success of these operations, the dregs are moving into the urban centres, thereby enabling the Pakistani security forces to capture them one by one.
The truth of the matter is that many of these dregs had moved into the urban centres in the beginning of 2002, after the US troops went into action in Afghanistan, and had been given shelter by the ISI-supported Pakistani jihadi terrorist organisations, which are members of the IIF. The recent arrests had very little to do with the so-called success of the Pakistani military operations in South Waziristan. They had everything to do with the increasing concern of the military-dominated regime over the growing sympathy for these elements in the lower ranks of the armed forces, as evidenced by the involvement of their sympathisers in the Army and the Air Force in the two unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf in December last.
Even in respect of the recent arrests, the claims and counter-claims made by the Pakistani authorities and the conflicting explanations given by them have created a confusing picture. Is the confusion deliberate or due to their ineptitude? One finds it difficult to answer this question.
In an earlier article on the charade of a split in the Lashkar-e-Toiba, I had referred to the Pakistani habit of making tall claims of success against jihadi terrorists operating from sanctuaries in the Karachi area, which subsequently proved to be false or dubious. To quote from my earlier article: