The Useful Vested Interest?

US intelligence officers posted in Pakistan have reportedly been making detailed enquiries into the likelylinks of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan, headed by Qazi Hussain Ahmed, with Al Qaeda of Osama binLaden.  These enquiries are reported to have been started following the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,supposedly No. 3 in Al Qaeda, in March from the house of a women's wing leader of the JEI at Rawalpindi in anarea where many serving and retired officers of the Pakistan Army live.

Earlier this year, two other suspected cadres of Al Qaeda were arrested from the house of another JEImember in Karachi.  These arrests have given rise to a suspicion that JEI office-bearers and cadres notonly in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan, but also in other parts of Pakistan have beenhelping the surviving members of Al Qaeda who crossed over into Pakistan from Afghanistan in the beginning oflast year.

After the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his handing over to the USA's Federal Bureau ofInvestigation (FBI), Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had organised separate briefings for foreignand Pakistani journalists at the ISI headquarters.  At those briefings, in response to questions aboutany links between the JEI and Al Qaeda, Maj. Gen.Rashid Quereshi, who was then the media spokesman ofPresident Pervez Musharraf, had claimed that the fact that some Al Qaeda members were arrested from the housesof individual JEI members did not mean that the JEI as an organisation had links with Al Qaeda.

However, the US intelligence officers, who have been interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammad at a placeoutside Pakistan, do not appear to be convinced that this was just the rogue actions of some individualmembers of the JEI, of which the JEI leaders were not aware.  Their concerns over possible links betweenthe JEI and Al Qaeda have been heightened by the newly-established links of the Hizbe Islami (HI) of GulbuddinHeckmatyar with Al Qaeda and the Taliban to harass the American troops in Afghanistan.

Of all the Islamic fundamentalist parties of Pakistan, the JEI had been the closest to the HI and hadmaintained contacts with Gulbuddin even when he and his associates were living in Iran with the knowledge of the Iranian Government.  After 9/11, Teheran, under pressure from the US, expelled them from Iranianterritory. They were welcomed in Pakistani territory by the JEI and sympathetic serving and retired officersof the ISI and given shelter in the border areas.

The Khabrain, an Urdu journal published from Lahore, has reported as follows:

"If during the interrogation of Khalid by the FBI it is proved that the jihadi wing of the JEI hasbeen co-operating with Al Qaeda and providing finance to them, then the US Government's special department"Office of the Co-Ordinator For Counter-Terrorism" may recommend to the Department of Justice aswell as the US State Department  to include the JEI in the list of terrorist organisations of the world. Reliable sources have revealed that the Co-ordinator For Counter-Terrorism Department has already startedcollecting information regarding the JEI's activities after Khalid's arrest."

It is learnt that, simultaneously, US intelligence officers in Pakistan have also been making enquiriesabout the links of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) of Jammu & Kashmir with the JEI of Pakistan as well as withthe HI of Gulbuddin and Al Qaeda.   The HM was formed in 1990 at the initiative of the ISI and the JEI bymerging nearly a dozen small terrorist organisations of J&K and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK).  Itsleader Syed Salahuddin lives partly in Rawalpindi and partly in the POK.  Its offices in Pakistan,including the POK, are generally located in the offices of the JEI, which looks after the financial needs ofthe HM.

Before the Taliban captured power in Kabul in September, 1996, the recruits of the HM used to be trained intraining camps in Afghan territory by instructors of Gulbuddin.  The Taliban, which was then opposed tothe HI, ordered the HM to close down its training camps and expelled all HM office-bearers based in Afghanterritory.  Since then, the HM recruits are trained in the POK by the ex-servicemen in the JEI and armedby the ISI.

Concerned over the links of the HM with the JEI and the HI, the Counter-Terrorism Division of the US StateDepartment in its report on the Patterns of Global Terrorism during 2002 released last month has placed notonly the HM, but also the Al Badr and the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, both associated with the JEI and the HI, inthe list of "other terrorist organisations". 

This list includes the names of those organisations which, in the US judgement, have also been indulging interrorist activities, but the evidence against them regarding their likely involvement in terrorism directedagainst the US is not strong enough to warrant their being declared as Foreign Terrorist Organisations under a1996 law, which entails some punitive consequences such as freezing of funds etc.

The US action to categorise the HM, the Al Badr and the Jamiat-ul-Mujashideen as terrorist organisationswas triggered off not so much by their activities in J&K, as by their links with the JEI, the HI andpossibly Al Qaeda too.  The US State Department report states as follows on the HM:

"The group is the militant wing of Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami.It currently is focused on Indian security forces and politicians in Kashmir and has conducted operationsjointly with other Kashmiri militants.  It reportedly operated in Afghanistan through the mid-1990s andtrained alongside the Afghan Hizb-I-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) in Afghanistan until the Taliban takeover. Thegroup, led by Syed Salahuddin, is made up primarily of ethnic Kashmiris.  Currently, there are visiblesplits between Pakistan-based commanders and several commanders in Indian-occupied Kashmir."

The recently-announced curbs  by the Pakistan Government on fund collection and other similaractivities by the HM in Pakistani territory would seem to be more in response to US concerns over itsactivities and its links with the JEI and the  HI than in response to Indian demands for action againstit.  It remains to be seen how far the Musharraf regime vigorously enforces these curbs, of which thereis little evidence so far.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed has, in the meanwhile, denounced attempts to link the JEI with Al Qaeda as a conspiracyand denied any such links.  At the same time, the JEI has reportedly asked the HM offices located in itsbuildings to shift elsewhere. It has disputed  the US State Department's description of the HM as itsmilitant wing.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and,presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Advisory Committee, ObserverResearch Foundation, Chennai Chapter)