After years of bungling, prevarication and indecision in J&K, we finally shot ourselves in the foot over the Rubaiyya Saiyed kidnapping incident. The speed with which we capitulated at that time, set forth a chain reaction that has grown in ferocity and reach all these 15 years and more. Even when the Afghan jehad was on, the Amir of Jamiat Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmed addressed a Hijri Conference of the Islami Jamiat Tuleba in September 1981. At this conference the Qazi called for a jehad in Kashmir on the Afghan pattern. In 1984, the Amir of POK JI, Col (retd) Rashid Abbasi added that the Kashmir issue could only be solved through jehad. But by 1987 it seems that the Jamiat Islami had convinced itself that if guerrilla tactics could succeed against a superpower then India would be a picnic. Jehad was the answer.
The Pakistani puppeteers had also convinced themselves by the end of the 1980s that the coalition government of the day in India being weak and indecisive would cave in easily. They had only to escalate the level of violence and they could now use the Afghan jehad veterans for this purpose. That the Pakistan Army was going to lock itself in a long drawn out undeclared war with India perhaps appears illogical but for the Pakistan Army this has certain amount inevitability. Jehad is the fodder that the Pak Army feeds itself on, be it in India, Afghanistan or elsewhere. And it is more or less semi-privatised like a public sector undertaking. Groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba have, over time, become one of the jewels in the Islamabad crown.
Any discussion about Pak-sponsored jehad has necessarily to take into account the role of the Army and how it has grown and jehad has gown along with this. The Pakistan Army today has a vast corporate interest in sustaining the status quo; where it enjoys all the power and the glory, while in service and post-retirement. Only a threat from India and the need to continue the jehad and the maintenance of the two-nation theory provides the reason for the Army’s self-declared pre-eminence and indispensability for the stability and unity of the country. It would therefore want to continue the present state of affairs where enemy India is left to fight an invisible force, whose members are expendable to the Pak establishment so long as they fight in the name of Islam, Pakistan and Kashmir. The Pak Army thus keeps its hands clean and India is on the back foot.
The Pakistan Army thus has a good deal at stake in continuing the jehad. It not gets them to rule over Pakistan, the nuisance value that these sometimes seemingly out of control jehadis generate from their nurseries in the country, gets them the Army its ‘haftas’ from their American friends. An idea can be had from what is financially at stake inside Pakistan from this business of trying to bleed India. The Pak Army is now spread into all walks of life in Pakistan; it is “engaged in political and economic predation” as Dr Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha describes these activities in an interview in January this year.
Dr Siddiqa Agha also says that a politically strong predatory Army had to become financially or economically independent. The establishment of a Fauji Foundation for the welfare of war veterans with Rs 18 million in 1953 was the beginning of an enterprise that has become a behemoth in Pakistan and is worth Rs **** million and controls diverse activities. These include fertiliser, transport and chemical industries. Along with the establishment of the Foundation, Gen. Ayub had begun to shore the fortunes of his sons and establish them in business by 1953. Those were early days and the trend only strengthened.
A major general today is assessed to be worth Rs. 300 million while a full General is worth Rs. 500 million. Assuming that there are 100 Majors-General in the Pak Army, their total worth works out to about Rs. 30,000 million. Then there is land allocation; it is estimated that land worth billions of rupees is now with Armed Forces officers and men. They own between 7 to 9 million acres in the Punjab alone. There are some holdings in Sindh also but restricted to the canal areas. The latest land grab is in Gwadar much to the resentment of the Baloch. The Army can hold 10% of the land in Pakistan and they would be incredibly foolish given the power they have to acquire barren land. And this land is acquired at Rs. 30-60 per acre regardless of the market value, even in prime areas like Defence Housing Society in Karachi. In Lahore about 8000 to 10000 acres of land grabbed by the Army is worth Rs. 700 billion today but acquired at the special Army rate.
Add to this the perks of heading corporations like the water authority, airlines, railways, power and electricity, which are not covered by the Fauji Foundation. Governors, cabinet posts, Ambassadorial assignments, sports bodies are for other favourites and loyalists while lesser mortals get to head district administrations. Besides real power is wielded by the Corps Commanders and the National Security Council. In this wonderfully cosy arrangement, the Army gets all the goodies and the jehadis get to die to fight the Pakistan Arms cause to keep India on the back foot and dream of a divided India. It is difficult to imagine that the Army can ever seriously consider giving up all this wealth and power. This would surely happen if there were a truly democratic election in Pakistan in 2007. The Army would lose further if the jehadis had to be demobilised should by some fluke peace prevail between India and Pakistan.
The growth of the Pak Army’s control and the jehadis has been more or simultaneous over the past few decades. Pakistan’s slide into extremism has been gradual and has grown with each reversal of the Pak Army’s designs against India and today it may well have become irreversible. Political expediency in the early years after independence and the commitment to prove the two-nation theory was an essential ingredient of governance and unity. The Pakistanis who did not have to migrate to the new country were feudal to the core and rich but also broadminded and prepared to be secular. Now that religion had served its purpose to get them into positions of power, it could be safely kept in the background while they went out to their soirees in Karachi and Lahore. The feudals remained as they were and they made their bureaucrats, politicians and armed forces equally feudal. Now they are all feudals together and the low life from Jhang and Multan goes to die for Kashmir.
Even in the early days there were Islamic rumblings from those who felt that Pakistan, having been created in the name of Islam, had to abide with its rigours, especially when the leader of the Jamaat Islami, Maulana Maudoodi was now in Pakistan. Apart from early agitations against the Ahmediyas in 1953 or Gen. Ayub taking the help of the ulemas against his opponent Fatima Jinnah in the elections on the ground that a woman could not rule, the country remained largely liberal. India’s debacle in 1962 gave the average Pakistani some satisfaction but only encouraged adventurism against India among the Generals. But the plans misfired and eventually led to Ayub’s replacement by another general, Yahya Khan who would later preside over the dismemberment of his country in 1971.
A shocked nation promptly blamed the debauchery of its generals for this debacle. And this was the Islamists’ hour. They blamed Yahya and his clique for this debacle and Allah’s punishment for deviating from the true path. A beleaguered Army had to be shored up by Bhutto who had to make his peace with the mullahs also. Domestic opinion had to be shored up. Concessions to them were inevitable; Islam became the state religion in the 1973 Constitution, he agreed to declare the Ahmediyas non-Muslim and used the Lahore Islamic Summit to portray himself as a prominent leader among the Islamic nations. These concessions came in the midst of Soviet moves around Pakistan – the Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971, another one with Vietnam, and a similar one with President Daood of Afghanistan sent shivers down the collective Pakistani spine. The ruthless quelling of the Baloch insurgency of 1974-77 restored the Army’s primacy and this time they were not going to lose it. Agitation against Bhutto in 1977 took on a religious fervour when calls by the opposition conglomerate, the PNA, for a ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ became the clarion call to which the people responded. Bhutto kept conceding ground to the agitators but the pressure did not ease. Bhutto’s protégé, General Zia-ul Haq, eventually hanged his benefactor in 1979.
Zia’s zeal to Islamise his country is now well-known to need repetition. He used the Shia revolution in Iran and the Soviet Union’s disastrous tour into Afghanistan to shore his position with the Americans and domestically. But there were problems. The more he Sunni-ised and Wahhabised his country the more the Shias revolted. This was in the 1980s when hordes of jehadis were being churned out of the madrassas on Pakistan’s western frontier and inspired for duty against the Godless Evil Empire. The Pakistani rulers thought they were going to acquire strategic depth against India, the jehadis thought they were doing Allah’s duty, the Americans knew they were only fighting their Cold War with proxy soldiers and recovering from Vietnam the Chinese pitched in to cut the Soviets to size and the British joined in, any how. It was a happy multinational jehad -- the first of its kind. Abdullah Azzem, Osama bin Laden’s mentor set up camp in Peshawar as did other Afghan leaders and their followers.
All was not well with the Zia regime. Anti-women, anti-Hindu, teaching hatred in schools, Zia’s decision to introduce strictly Sunni-Hanafi procedures, frightened and angered the Shias. And their show of strength frightened Zia. The Iranians were upset with Zia and the Saudis were upset with the Shias. The spiral had started because the Shias launched their Tehrik-i-Nifas-i-Fiiqah-i-Jafaria and the Sunnis responded with Sipah Sahaba Pakistan. The Shias formed their armed battalions with Sipah-e- Mohammed and the Sunnis had their Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jhangvi Tigers and others. The sectarian battle lines drawn that remain intact and violently active today. As the Afghan jehad was winding down, Shia-Sunni violence reached its peak in the 1988-99 period which also saw the assassination of Zia felled probably by his own legacy.
The ‘victorious’ jehadis returning from the western front now felt obliged to take control of all Sunni affairs inside Pakistan. They were either Deobandhis, Wahhabis or Ahle Hadiths. As victors, with tremendous influence in the ministry of religious affairs they felt they could take over the Bareilvi mosques as well. The schism between the Sunnis deepened and the Bareilvis established their own militant outfit, the Sunni Tehrik in 1990. Pakistan was becoming more Islamic at one level but there were cleavages within this vociferous and energetic Islamic society.
More frustrations were to follow. The jehadis had to be accommodated somewhere and Afghanistan had not fallen into the lap of Gulbedin Hikmetyar, ISI’s protégé. In Jammu and Kashmir, although the movement had begun it was spearheaded by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front who were fighting for an independent Kashmir. This was neither the Pakistani nor the ISI agenda. Pakistan was soon carrying a two-front proxy war. The Taliban in Afghanistan and the various terrorist organisations that had grown with ISI assistance. The first one to be created was the Hizbul Mujahedeen, followed by the Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen and its re-incarnations and then we had the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and then the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami. This would be between the period 1989 to 1998. While the JKLF and the HM had a Kashmir specific agenda, the others, like the LeT, JM, HuM and the HUJI have had a pan-Islamic and pan-India agenda.
These organisations, encouraged by the ISI, signed an agreement in Kandahar in early 1998, with Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jehad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People, extendable by ISI interpretation and the occasional Osama pronouncements to include Hindus. Not so long ago, Osama was shown on AL Jazeera TV exhorting jehad against enemies of Islam which included Hindus. For the ISI, the arrangement was very simple and useful. It could now extend its activities inside the rest of India under the cover of Al Qaeda and the Al Qaeda would use Pakistani territory to extend its activities elsewhere. Pakistan would have perfect deniability as we saw in the Mumbai bomb blasts case recently. Yet if the Al Qaeda is given credit for these attacks, it would arouse considerable interest in the US who would then want to stress that the ‘root cause’ – Kashmir be sorted out by India and Pakistan.
The spearhead for this campaign, which began in 1999, has been the LeT, the one organisation known to be totally under the control of the ISI. The aim is to weaken the solidarity that the Muslims of India have had with the rest of the inhabitants. Pakistan has been and will continue to use not only neighbouring Bangladesh and Nepal for launching operations, the danger is that they will use disgruntled and vulnerable sections of the Muslim community to create dissension and use them. There is no escaping the fact that there are large pockets of unhappy people in India of all religions which can be exploited. A foreign terrorist organisation finds it easier to find shelter and support in such communities and this sets forth a chain reaction of suspicion and deprivation leading to a further sense of alienation.
The Mumbai bomb blasts have sent out storm signals that we did not catch when the Parliament attack took place, or at Ayodhya or in Bangalore. It is well-known that LeT cells have been in operation in India for some time now and the Ministry of Home Affairs had proudly announced some years ago that they ‘busted’ 130-odd cells. We forgot that for every cell ‘bust’ there are easily five others that have got away.
Source : Hindustan Times
The Pakistani puppeteers had also convinced themselves by the end of the 1980s that the coalition government of the day in India being weak and indecisive would cave in easily. They had only to escalate the level of violence and they could now use the Afghan jehad veterans for this purpose. That the Pakistan Army was going to lock itself in a long drawn out undeclared war with India perhaps appears illogical but for the Pakistan Army this has certain amount inevitability. Jehad is the fodder that the Pak Army feeds itself on, be it in India, Afghanistan or elsewhere. And it is more or less semi-privatised like a public sector undertaking. Groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba have, over time, become one of the jewels in the Islamabad crown.
Any discussion about Pak-sponsored jehad has necessarily to take into account the role of the Army and how it has grown and jehad has gown along with this. The Pakistan Army today has a vast corporate interest in sustaining the status quo; where it enjoys all the power and the glory, while in service and post-retirement. Only a threat from India and the need to continue the jehad and the maintenance of the two-nation theory provides the reason for the Army’s self-declared pre-eminence and indispensability for the stability and unity of the country. It would therefore want to continue the present state of affairs where enemy India is left to fight an invisible force, whose members are expendable to the Pak establishment so long as they fight in the name of Islam, Pakistan and Kashmir. The Pak Army thus keeps its hands clean and India is on the back foot.
The Pakistan Army thus has a good deal at stake in continuing the jehad. It not gets them to rule over Pakistan, the nuisance value that these sometimes seemingly out of control jehadis generate from their nurseries in the country, gets them the Army its ‘haftas’ from their American friends. An idea can be had from what is financially at stake inside Pakistan from this business of trying to bleed India. The Pak Army is now spread into all walks of life in Pakistan; it is “engaged in political and economic predation” as Dr Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha describes these activities in an interview in January this year.
Dr Siddiqa Agha also says that a politically strong predatory Army had to become financially or economically independent. The establishment of a Fauji Foundation for the welfare of war veterans with Rs 18 million in 1953 was the beginning of an enterprise that has become a behemoth in Pakistan and is worth Rs **** million and controls diverse activities. These include fertiliser, transport and chemical industries. Along with the establishment of the Foundation, Gen. Ayub had begun to shore the fortunes of his sons and establish them in business by 1953. Those were early days and the trend only strengthened.
A major general today is assessed to be worth Rs. 300 million while a full General is worth Rs. 500 million. Assuming that there are 100 Majors-General in the Pak Army, their total worth works out to about Rs. 30,000 million. Then there is land allocation; it is estimated that land worth billions of rupees is now with Armed Forces officers and men. They own between 7 to 9 million acres in the Punjab alone. There are some holdings in Sindh also but restricted to the canal areas. The latest land grab is in Gwadar much to the resentment of the Baloch. The Army can hold 10% of the land in Pakistan and they would be incredibly foolish given the power they have to acquire barren land. And this land is acquired at Rs. 30-60 per acre regardless of the market value, even in prime areas like Defence Housing Society in Karachi. In Lahore about 8000 to 10000 acres of land grabbed by the Army is worth Rs. 700 billion today but acquired at the special Army rate.
Add to this the perks of heading corporations like the water authority, airlines, railways, power and electricity, which are not covered by the Fauji Foundation. Governors, cabinet posts, Ambassadorial assignments, sports bodies are for other favourites and loyalists while lesser mortals get to head district administrations. Besides real power is wielded by the Corps Commanders and the National Security Council. In this wonderfully cosy arrangement, the Army gets all the goodies and the jehadis get to die to fight the Pakistan Arms cause to keep India on the back foot and dream of a divided India. It is difficult to imagine that the Army can ever seriously consider giving up all this wealth and power. This would surely happen if there were a truly democratic election in Pakistan in 2007. The Army would lose further if the jehadis had to be demobilised should by some fluke peace prevail between India and Pakistan.
The growth of the Pak Army’s control and the jehadis has been more or simultaneous over the past few decades. Pakistan’s slide into extremism has been gradual and has grown with each reversal of the Pak Army’s designs against India and today it may well have become irreversible. Political expediency in the early years after independence and the commitment to prove the two-nation theory was an essential ingredient of governance and unity. The Pakistanis who did not have to migrate to the new country were feudal to the core and rich but also broadminded and prepared to be secular. Now that religion had served its purpose to get them into positions of power, it could be safely kept in the background while they went out to their soirees in Karachi and Lahore. The feudals remained as they were and they made their bureaucrats, politicians and armed forces equally feudal. Now they are all feudals together and the low life from Jhang and Multan goes to die for Kashmir.
Even in the early days there were Islamic rumblings from those who felt that Pakistan, having been created in the name of Islam, had to abide with its rigours, especially when the leader of the Jamaat Islami, Maulana Maudoodi was now in Pakistan. Apart from early agitations against the Ahmediyas in 1953 or Gen. Ayub taking the help of the ulemas against his opponent Fatima Jinnah in the elections on the ground that a woman could not rule, the country remained largely liberal. India’s debacle in 1962 gave the average Pakistani some satisfaction but only encouraged adventurism against India among the Generals. But the plans misfired and eventually led to Ayub’s replacement by another general, Yahya Khan who would later preside over the dismemberment of his country in 1971.
A shocked nation promptly blamed the debauchery of its generals for this debacle. And this was the Islamists’ hour. They blamed Yahya and his clique for this debacle and Allah’s punishment for deviating from the true path. A beleaguered Army had to be shored up by Bhutto who had to make his peace with the mullahs also. Domestic opinion had to be shored up. Concessions to them were inevitable; Islam became the state religion in the 1973 Constitution, he agreed to declare the Ahmediyas non-Muslim and used the Lahore Islamic Summit to portray himself as a prominent leader among the Islamic nations. These concessions came in the midst of Soviet moves around Pakistan – the Indo-Soviet Treaty of 1971, another one with Vietnam, and a similar one with President Daood of Afghanistan sent shivers down the collective Pakistani spine. The ruthless quelling of the Baloch insurgency of 1974-77 restored the Army’s primacy and this time they were not going to lose it. Agitation against Bhutto in 1977 took on a religious fervour when calls by the opposition conglomerate, the PNA, for a ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ became the clarion call to which the people responded. Bhutto kept conceding ground to the agitators but the pressure did not ease. Bhutto’s protégé, General Zia-ul Haq, eventually hanged his benefactor in 1979.
Zia’s zeal to Islamise his country is now well-known to need repetition. He used the Shia revolution in Iran and the Soviet Union’s disastrous tour into Afghanistan to shore his position with the Americans and domestically. But there were problems. The more he Sunni-ised and Wahhabised his country the more the Shias revolted. This was in the 1980s when hordes of jehadis were being churned out of the madrassas on Pakistan’s western frontier and inspired for duty against the Godless Evil Empire. The Pakistani rulers thought they were going to acquire strategic depth against India, the jehadis thought they were doing Allah’s duty, the Americans knew they were only fighting their Cold War with proxy soldiers and recovering from Vietnam the Chinese pitched in to cut the Soviets to size and the British joined in, any how. It was a happy multinational jehad -- the first of its kind. Abdullah Azzem, Osama bin Laden’s mentor set up camp in Peshawar as did other Afghan leaders and their followers.
All was not well with the Zia regime. Anti-women, anti-Hindu, teaching hatred in schools, Zia’s decision to introduce strictly Sunni-Hanafi procedures, frightened and angered the Shias. And their show of strength frightened Zia. The Iranians were upset with Zia and the Saudis were upset with the Shias. The spiral had started because the Shias launched their Tehrik-i-Nifas-i-Fiiqah-i-Jafaria and the Sunnis responded with Sipah Sahaba Pakistan. The Shias formed their armed battalions with Sipah-e- Mohammed and the Sunnis had their Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jhangvi Tigers and others. The sectarian battle lines drawn that remain intact and violently active today. As the Afghan jehad was winding down, Shia-Sunni violence reached its peak in the 1988-99 period which also saw the assassination of Zia felled probably by his own legacy.
The ‘victorious’ jehadis returning from the western front now felt obliged to take control of all Sunni affairs inside Pakistan. They were either Deobandhis, Wahhabis or Ahle Hadiths. As victors, with tremendous influence in the ministry of religious affairs they felt they could take over the Bareilvi mosques as well. The schism between the Sunnis deepened and the Bareilvis established their own militant outfit, the Sunni Tehrik in 1990. Pakistan was becoming more Islamic at one level but there were cleavages within this vociferous and energetic Islamic society.
More frustrations were to follow. The jehadis had to be accommodated somewhere and Afghanistan had not fallen into the lap of Gulbedin Hikmetyar, ISI’s protégé. In Jammu and Kashmir, although the movement had begun it was spearheaded by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front who were fighting for an independent Kashmir. This was neither the Pakistani nor the ISI agenda. Pakistan was soon carrying a two-front proxy war. The Taliban in Afghanistan and the various terrorist organisations that had grown with ISI assistance. The first one to be created was the Hizbul Mujahedeen, followed by the Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen and its re-incarnations and then we had the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and then the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami. This would be between the period 1989 to 1998. While the JKLF and the HM had a Kashmir specific agenda, the others, like the LeT, JM, HuM and the HUJI have had a pan-Islamic and pan-India agenda.
These organisations, encouraged by the ISI, signed an agreement in Kandahar in early 1998, with Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jehad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People, extendable by ISI interpretation and the occasional Osama pronouncements to include Hindus. Not so long ago, Osama was shown on AL Jazeera TV exhorting jehad against enemies of Islam which included Hindus. For the ISI, the arrangement was very simple and useful. It could now extend its activities inside the rest of India under the cover of Al Qaeda and the Al Qaeda would use Pakistani territory to extend its activities elsewhere. Pakistan would have perfect deniability as we saw in the Mumbai bomb blasts case recently. Yet if the Al Qaeda is given credit for these attacks, it would arouse considerable interest in the US who would then want to stress that the ‘root cause’ – Kashmir be sorted out by India and Pakistan.
The spearhead for this campaign, which began in 1999, has been the LeT, the one organisation known to be totally under the control of the ISI. The aim is to weaken the solidarity that the Muslims of India have had with the rest of the inhabitants. Pakistan has been and will continue to use not only neighbouring Bangladesh and Nepal for launching operations, the danger is that they will use disgruntled and vulnerable sections of the Muslim community to create dissension and use them. There is no escaping the fact that there are large pockets of unhappy people in India of all religions which can be exploited. A foreign terrorist organisation finds it easier to find shelter and support in such communities and this sets forth a chain reaction of suspicion and deprivation leading to a further sense of alienation.
The Mumbai bomb blasts have sent out storm signals that we did not catch when the Parliament attack took place, or at Ayodhya or in Bangalore. It is well-known that LeT cells have been in operation in India for some time now and the Ministry of Home Affairs had proudly announced some years ago that they ‘busted’ 130-odd cells. We forgot that for every cell ‘bust’ there are easily five others that have got away.
Source : Hindustan Times
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