Making A Difference

Attack Of The Mutants

Making Pakistan its base, Al Qaeda aligns with regrouped jehadi outfits and continues its war

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Attack Of The Mutants
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Last week's bomb attack on the US consulate in Karachi is a bloody message to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf—and President George Bush—about the protean nature of the menace called terrorism. Militants are regrouping, floating new outfits, assuming new identities, and emerging from their hideouts to launch devastating attacks on foreigners and American interests.

A hitherto unknown outfit, Al Qanoon, claimed responsibility for the attack in Karachi. But security agencies here suspect Al Qanoon to be a red herring Al Qaeda has deliberately planted to confuse and throw its investigators off-track, consequently enabling militants to attack what Osama bin Laden would call hostile targets—the Americans, other westerners and those in Pakistan who support them.

Investigations into the Karachi blast indeed reveal the complexity of the challenge facing Pakistan and the US. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), for instance, suspects the Karachi attack was carried out by a freshly-minted coalition of militant organisations that were thrown into disarray after the Musharraf regime decided to crack down on them earlier this year. Called Lashkar-e-Omar (LeO), this coalition group was floated in January and its members comprise largely the survivors of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM, led by Maulana Masood Azhar) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ, led by Riaz Basra who was killed last month by the Punjab police). Named after Sheikh Omar, the prime accused in the Daniel Pearl execution, its activists share a doctrinaire vision of Islam, a hatred for the West and the bond forged during their training in Afghanistan.

But even the LeO could have the guidance and patronage of Al Qaeda. Interior ministry sources say a team of FBI and Karachi Police in a joint operation on June 18 arrested two activists of Al Qaeda. They recovered two satellite phones and explosive material from them. During subsequent FBI interrogations, they revealed that Commander Akram Lahori and Ataur Rehman alias Naeem Bukhari, two senior members of the LeJ, which was banned early this year, had planned the consulate blast. These Al Qaeda operatives, whose identity has been kept secret, further confirmed the deepest fears of the government: the spate of terrorist attacks in Karachi is a coordinated effort of Al Qaeda, LeJ and JeM activists.

Intelligence sources say there's anyway a thin line dividing Al Qaeda activists from those who're members of Pakistani jehadi outfits. For one, the association between them dates to the Afghan war when they fought together in a jehad against the former USSR. Besides, Pakistani jehadis have been trained by Al Qaeda militants and share their worldview.

No wonder, the FBI has reported to the Bush administration that Pakistan has replaced Afghanistan as the command-and-control centre for Osama's terrorist network. A recent FBI communique states that hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives are hiding in major cities of Pakistan after forming or renewing alliances with local extremist outfits providing them shelter, communication facilities and other logistical support. In some cases, the FBI believes, renegades from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have also been assisting Al Qaeda, in defiance of the new policy of the Musharraf regime.

That Pakistan has become the base of Al Qaeda has been borne out by the arrest of Abdullah al-Muhajir, a US national and Muslim convert, in Chicago. Abdullah was returning from Pakistan and reportedly planning to set off a radiological, or dirty, bomb in the US. His interrogation enabled the FBI to ferret out vital information that led to a fresh round of raids in Pakistan. His accomplice, Mohammed Banjuman, a Muslim convert whose nationality is still unknown, was arrested from Lahore.

A senior security official says that at least seven more American nationals, believed to have links with Al Qaeda, have been picked up from various parts of Pakistan. "Most of them had been nabbed along with other suspected Al Qaeda operatives in joint Pak-US raids. Those picked up form a disjointed network of disaffected westerners who converted to Islam and have been drawn fighting alongside Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

A senior interior ministry official says the attack on the US consulate is testimony to both the ingenuity of militants and the lackadaisical attitude of Pakistani intelligence. He says following the attack on French naval personnel in Karachi in May, there was ample evidence warning the Pakistan government to expect yet another suicide bomber's assault.

The failure to pre-empt last week's strike has goaded the Bush administration to intensify pressure on Musharraf to allow the FBI absolute powers for conducting search and arrest operations in Pakistan against the Al Qaeda network. No decision has yet been taken on this contentious issue, but a special FBI team has already reached Pakistan to investigate the car bomb explosion at the US consulate.

The demand to allow Americans operational powers in Pakistan was first mooted after Fazal Karim, who confessed to his role in murdering and decapitating journalist Daniel Pearl, confirmed intelligence reports during FBI interrogation about the presence of hundreds of Arabs in Pakistan wanting to settle scores with the US. Fazal was reported to have told his interrogators, "There will be so many attacks against western targets that you would lose count." Musharraf's nightmare, it seems, has just begun.

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