Written evidence submitted by Dr Ajai
Sahni, Institute for Conflict Management
THE CORE
OF ISLAMIST
TERROR
1. Of the various ideological streams that
currently inspire and provoke political violence and terrorism
in South Asia,1 the most destabilizing and lethal,2 and the one
with the greatest extra-regional impact, is Islamist terrorism.
A multiplicity of sub-sets and a complex, sometimes conflicting
scheme of inter-linkages, has been documented in connection with
the extended range of Islamist terrorist groups operating in the
region.3 However, an inordinate focus on particular groups, on
operational parameters, and a proclivity to reinterpret, if not
distort, the realities of the ground in terms of narrow perceptions
of divergent interests of state by various global powers, have
tended to obscure certain core aspects of Islamist terror and
its structures of support in the region. Particularly, while the
evolution of contemporary Islamist terrorism in South Asia, including
its roots in the anti-Soviet Afghan campaign in Afghanistan, are
reasonably well known, there is an abiding confusion regarding
the dynamics of its persistence and continued expansion in and
from this region.
2. What is little understood is that extremist
Islamism has long flourished in South Asia, and it is here that
the world's first global Islamist terrorist movement was bred
and nurtured, and from where it was exported—first into
the immediate neighbourhood, and then across the continents, into
the heart of "fortress America" on 9/11, and into nation
after nation thereafter. Crucially, the footprint of every major
act of international Islamist terrorism, for some time before
9/11 and continuously thereafter, invariably passes through Pakistan.4
After 9/11, the US campaign in Afghanistan, and the stark choice
given to the Pakistani leadership,5 the dynamics of the Islamist
terrorist enterprise in South Asia have undergone dramatic adaptive
adjustments and modifications. Essentially, however, this dynamic,
its underlying ideologies, and its motivational and institutional
structures, remain intact.
3. This submission argues that:
3.1 Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI) is the principal terrorist organisation in South Asia, and
all the other major entities6 that are often named in the context
of ongoing terrorism in and from this region—particularly
in Afghanistan, and in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and other
parts of India—are essentially its agents and instrumentalities.
A minority among these has now become renegade, while elements
within other "loyal" groups have shown occasional signs
of restiveness and rebellion. Within this context, it is impossible
to maintain a legitimate distinction between domestic/regional
groups and the global jihad, as cadres, infrastructure
and, crucially, ideology, overlap. The spaces created by the Pakistani
establishment for "loyal" terrorist groups are exploited
and make possible the operation of renegade and global groups
as well.
3.2 In this, the ISI functions as an integral
element of the Pakistan Army and establishment, "as a disciplined
army unit that does what it is told",7 and not as a "rogue
organisation" or through some rogue or "retired"
elements, as Pakistan seeks to encourage the world to believe.
3.3 During the 1980s and 1990s, Pakistan
was the most active and aggressive player in the South Asian region,
defining for itself a role that substantially shaped the foreign
policy priorities and security concerns of all its neighbours
to an extent far in excess of its size and strategic strengths.
Islamist extremism and terror were the primary instruments of
motivation, mobilization and execution of its policies of strategic
extension. Covert asymmetric warfare and terrorism in Afghanistan
and Kashmir were the manifestations of this politics of violent
disruption, and they remain central to the Pakistani vision.
3.4 Pakistan's project of strategic overextension
seeks a prominent role in Central and West Asia as well, and its
only instrumentalities to secure influence in these regions remain
Islamist extremism and terrorism.
3.5 These instrumentalities are also integral
to the ruling establishment's strategies of domestic political
management, as well as of international resource mobilisation.
In the latter context, Pakistan presents itself as part of the
solution to the problems it creates, combining manipulation, intimidation,
and blackmail—including nuclear blackmail—often mimicking
the conduct of a suicide bomber to secure its ends,8 and is then
handsomely rewarded for its "cooperation". Pakistan
will not and cannot abandon these instrumentalities or discontinue
the ISI's support to terrorism because, in doing so, it would
have to discard the only mechanisms it possesses to secure and
retain an influence, both within the region and globally, that
is grossly out of proportion to its natural and national endowments.
3.6 The idea that the Pakistan problem can
be "solved" by liberal developmental financing from
the international community is fallacious. Each dollar of development
aid or financial relief provided to Pakistan releases a dollar
of domestic resources for further militarization, radicalization
and extremist religious mobilization.9 Structural elements also
conspire to prevent any substantial proportion of such aid from
achieving its intended objectives or reaching intended beneficiaries.10
3.7 Meanwhile, the Pakistani strategy has
yielded enormous rewards in foreign assistance as well as great
latitude in conduct that would otherwise be construed as unquestionably
criminal and as appropriate grounds for international sanctions.
It is under this benign dispensation that Pakistan has consistently
remained a "minimal satisfier", doing as little as is
possible to secure itself against punitive action, but preserving
its instrumentalities and networks of terrorism, sustaining its
campaigns of terrorism at currently available levels of deniability
and the international "tolerance of terrorism".
3.8 The effort to orchestrate a transition
to democracy through a controlled military regime in Pakistan
is fundamentally flawed, and has, in fact, immensely weakened
democratic and secular forces, even as it has further entrenched
revanchist elements within the country.11
4. The problem lies at the very foundation
of the Pakistani state and the ideology of political Islam that
led to its creation: the theory that people of different religious
communities cannot coexist. The seeds of the terrorist threats
confronting us today were sown decades ago, in the radical Islamist
ideologies of the early 20 Century. The history of these movements
and ideologies is much too long to consider here. But it is useful
to recall that, in the mid-1920s, Maulana Sayyid Abu A'la Maududi,
the founder and head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, began to articulate
an ideology of political Islam that gave primacy to jihad
over and above all the other "duties" imposed by the
Faith.12 Islam was, in this conception, in irreducible conflict
with all nationalisms, as well as with every form of governance
other than Sharia (Islamic law).13
5. This ideological core has been overlaid
by cynical processes of the instrumentalisation of Islam by all
political forces in Pakistan, including the military and the supposedly
secular. This tradition was firmly established by the professedly
secular and reputedly atheistic "founder" of the country,
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who repeatedly and without scruple exploited
the Muslim identity for violent political mobilisation14 and specifically
for jihad when these suited his transient political objectives.15
The instrumentalisation of Islam and jihad have remained
an integral element of the political and strategic ambitions and
outlook of the military-feudal-fundamentalist bloc that has ruled
Pakistan since its creation.
6.1 The rationale and continuance of this
strategy is now increasingly visible in Pakistan's proxy "re-conquest"
of extended areas of Afghanistan through the Taliban.16 After
9/11, and under US threat, Pakistan apparently disowned the Taliban
and claimed to be enthusiastically "hunting" the Al
Qaeda. In reality, a duplicitous policy helping relocate these
organisations and allowing them significant operational space
on Pakistani soil, was combined by a pretended participation in
the "global war against terrorism". Pakistan's "cooperation"
in the war on terrorism has been, and remains, entirely coerced,
except in the case of a handful of domestic sectarian terrorist
groups and a few "renegades" who turned against the
establishment in Pakistan. At the same time, the Taliban has been
actively supported to recover from the reverses of Operation Enduring
Freedom, and has carried out a campaign of escalating terrorism
in Afghanistan from bases and widely known operational headquarters
in Pakistan. Over the past five years, they have successfully
disrupted Kabul's influence in a widening area that now covers
more than a third of the country's territory on conservative estimates.
Today, exhausted and desperate Western Forces are striking deals
with local Taliban commanders, and the idea of accommodating an
oxymoronic "moderate Taliban" in Kabul is finding increasing
support in Washington. Pakistan has managed to wait out the storm,
with its strategic tool, the Taliban, substantially intact.17
The calculation has always been that the US and Western powers
will eventually lose patience in Afghanistan and return, in desperation,
to the earlier "franchise" arrangement, restoring Pakistan
and its Taliban proxies to influence over Afghanistan.
6.2 A comparable calculation dominates Pakistan's
terrorist enterprise in India as well. Gradually, it is expected,
the permitted space for terrorism will expand under the umbrella
of Western indifference, exhaustion or preoccupation elsewhere—in
Iraq, West Asia, concerns on "homeland" security, the
management of rising terrorism in Europe and the possibility of
war in Iran—allowing Pakistan to restore its campaigns of
terrorism in India to pre-9/11 levels, or to escalate these well
beyond, given the capacities that have now been consolidated across
much wider areas outside J&K.
7. The arrests of Islamist terror cells
across Europe, America, South-, Southeast and Central Asia, Australia
and Africa have shed light on Pakistan's ongoing role as an incubator
of global Islamist terror and subversion. A far more insidious
danger also continues to be nurtured in, and exported from, Pakistan—the
propagation of the ideology of jihad, of communal polarization
and hatred, and of the demonization of all other faiths in the
eyes of Muslims. It is not only the madrassahs and radical Islamist
groups that are involved in this enterprise, but the entire state
system, including the public educational infrastructure created
and supported by the Government.18
8. Islamist terrorists do not recognise
international boundaries, though state responses in target societies
continue to be tied down by irrational and self-imposed constraints,
and on the presumed barriers of the state's territorial frontiers,
its presumed interests and "sovereignty". Vast spaces
for free terrorist operation and consolidation have also been
created by the international community's "tolerance of terrorism",
particularly where terrorism appears to have a "domestic"
profile, as against a purported "international" mandate
and objectives.
9. An ideology exists wherever it has believers;
a method will be employed wherever it has calculable likelihood
of success. Unless the sources of Islamist ideological mobilisation
and the possibility of terrorist "successes" do not
become the principal and relentless targets of international and
non-discriminatory counter-terrorism efforts, the dangers of international
Islamist terrorism will only continue to escalate.
10. Attempts at "incremental reform"
of various component systems within the broad dynamic of the Islamist
extremist and militarized politics of Pakistan fail to accommodate
the sheer size and complexity of the system, and the impossibility
of monitoring compliance.19 Specifically, there is little possibility
of "incremental reform" of the Islamist extremist and
terrorist forces in Pakistan. Any effort to absorb them into the
"mainstream" political system results in an increasing
radicalization of that system, and an undermining of democratic
structures and formations, rather than a moderation of the radical
elements. International compellent strategies for Pakistan must
target the "enduring strengths and weaknesses" of the
larger system, to secure clearly defined objectives that comprehend
the fullest restoration of democracy; complete military subordination
to civil authority; constitutional government and rule of law;
and the dismantling of the Islamist terrorist infrastructure and
its feeder mechanisms—the madrassahs, components of the
school and university curricula, the wider network of radicalized
social and cultural institutions, laws and practices that have
systematically promoted religious fanaticism and hatred.
11. If these ends are to be secured, this
will require an immediate end to the system of concessions and
aid that has unintentionally but systematically rewarded predatory
and irresponsible policies on the part of successive Pakistani
regimes and particularly the current regime headed by President
Pervez Musharraf. It will require, further, the imposition of
unbearable costs on Pakistan—and particularly targeting
its power elite—for policies and practices that fail to
adhere to norms of civilized governance, that encourage or support
terrorism and extremism, and that lead to the expansion of the
sphere of authoritarian and unaccountable governance.
References
1 The various ideological streams that have,
in varying measures, employed terrorist tactics in South Asia
principally include, but are not exhausted by, Islamism, Maoist
or Left Wing Extremism, and Ethnicity-based exclusionary and separatist
movements.
2 At least 4,299 persons (civilians, security
force personnel and terrorists) have been killed in connection
with Islamist terrorism just over the period 2005-06 (up to 8
October 2006), in India (2,950), Pakistan (1,302) and Bangladesh
(47). Data compiled from the South Asia Terrorism Portal at www.satp.org,
and based on open-source monitoring.
3 The most widely known are, of course, the
Al Qaeda and the Taliban, located in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and
the array of Pakistan-based Islamist groups prominently including
the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-Mumhammad, the Harkat-ul-Mujahiddeen,
the Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen, the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami, among others.
For a detailed listing, see "Terrorist and Extremist Groups
of Pakistan", South Asia Terrorism Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/pakistan/terroristoutfits/group_list.htm
4 For an exhaustive and updated listing, see
K P S Gill, "Pakistan: The Footprints of Terror," in
Islamist Extremism and Terrorism in South Asia, South Asia Terrorism
Portal, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/kpsgill/2003/chapter2.htm.
The 9/11 attacks themselves were a culmination of this process,
and virtually all the perpetrators and conspirators had trained,
resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from
or through Pakistan. More specifically, the then-serving Chief
of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter Services
Intelligence (ISI), was directly implicated in a transfer of US$
100,000 to the principal architect of the 9/11 bombings, Mohammad
Atta. See, for instance, Ahmed Rashid, "Musharraf is Untouchable",
The Telegraph, 6 October 2006.
5 General Pervez Musharraf acknowledges the
harsh existential choice he was offered and his decision after
he "war gamed" the US, in his In the Line of Fire, New
York: Free Press, 2006. See pp 199-203, particularly his claim
on Richard Armitage's alleged threat to "be prepared to be
bombed back to the Stone Age", p 201. Armitage subsequently
denied the statement; see "Armitage Refutes Musharraf's Claim",
CBS News, 22 September 2006.
6 See n 3 above.
7 William Milam in Eben Kaplan, "Backgrounder—The
ISI and Terrorism: Behind the Accusations", Council on Foreign
Relations, 10 October 2006, http://www.cfr.org/publication/11644/isi_terrorism.html
8 Ajai Sahni, "Pakistan-USA: The State
as Suicide Bomber", South Asia Intelligence Review, Volume
1, No 49, 23 June 2003, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/1_49.htm
9 At least some aid funds flow directly to the
terrorist groups, as was recently illustrated in revelations linked
to the multiple hijack conspiracy in the UK. See "15 held
in Pakistan as scale and intricacy of threat is revealed",
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,1844769,00.html; "Investigators
believe alleged plot tied to Asian quake relief", http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe_08/15/terror.plot/index.html
10 See Ajai Sahni, "The Dynamics of Islamist
Terror in South Asia", Journal of International Security
Affairs, Fall 2005, No 9.
11 Ibid.
12 Maulana Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi, Fundamentals
of Islam, (Ed Khurram Murad), New Delhi: Markazi Maktaba Islami
Publishers, 2002, p 285.
13 Ibid. pp 296-302.
14 As in the calls for "Direct Action"
on 16 August 1946, which resulted in the slaughters that came
to be known as the "Great Calcutta Killings", as well
as further riots and killings across Bengal and Bihar. See, for
instance, Rafiq Zakaria, The Man Who Divided India, p 109, 119-125.
15 The banner of "Jihad" was raised
by Jinnah himself in the North West Frontier Province. Jinnah
has often been projected as being extraordinarily secular in his
perspectives, and his last speech in the Pakistani Parliament
is cited as testimony to his vision of a Pakistan where religion,
caste, creed and other differences would not matter. Wali Khan,
however, describes Jinnah's conspiracy with Iskandar Mirza, to
foment a jihad in the NWFP, when the province, under the
leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, sought to distance itself
from the demand for Partition. Quoted in L C Jain, The City of
Hope—The Faridabad Story, New Delhi: Concept Publishing,
1998, pp 2-4, citing Wali Khan, Facts are Facts, Vikas Publishers,
New Delhi.
16 Ajai Sahni, "The Stupidity in Afghanistan",
South Asia Intelligence Review, Vol 5, No 15, 23 October 2006,
www.satp.org
17 See, Ahmed Rashid, "NATO's Top Brass
Accuse Pakistan over Taliban Aid", Telegraph.co.uk, 6 October
2006, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/06/wafghan06.xml&
DCMP=EMC-new_06102006; Tunku Varadarajan, "An `Ally' with
his own Agenda", The Wall Street Journal, 19 October
2006; G Parthasarathy, "Re-emergence of Taliban: Towards
Waziristan-style deal in Afghanistan." The Tribune,
19 October 2006; Barnett R Rubin and Abubakar Siddique, Resolving
the Pakistan Afghanistan Stalemate, Special Report, Washington:
United States Institute of Peace, esp pp 11 and 14.
18 See, for instance, Ajai Sahni, "Why
do they hate us?" South Asia Intelligence Review,
Volume 2, No 38, 5 April 2004, http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/sair/Archives/2_38.htm;
The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in
Pakistan, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad,
www.sdpi.org; Yvette Claire Rosser, Islamisation of Pakistani
Social Studies Textbooks, New Delhi: Rupa, 2003.
19 Several commentators have noted "compelling
reasons" why Pakistan's "comprehensive strategic makeover
will not happen". See, Hussain Haqqani, "The Role of
Islam in Pakistan's Future", The Washington Quarterly,
28:1, pp 85-96; Robert Wirsing. "Pakistan's Transformation:
Why it will not (and need not) happen", Asia-Pacific Center
for Security Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, January 2005, http://www.apcss.org/Publications/APSSS/Pakistans%20Transformation.pdf;
Christine Fair, "The Counterterror Coalitions: Cooperation
with India and Pakistan", Rand Corporation Monograph, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2004/RAND—MG141.pdf,
2004; Ashley Tellis, "US Strategy: Assisting Pakistan's Transformation",
The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2004-05.
Dr Ajai Sahni
29 October 2006
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