RAMAN'S TERRORISM ANALYSIS

AGENDA FOR OBAMA'S VISIT: COUNTER-TERRORISM

2010-10-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

Indo-US co-operation in counter-terrorism has the following components:
• Assistance in capacity building in traditional counter-terrorism: Started in the early 1980s during the administration of Ronald Reagan when some officers of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) were sent initially to the UK and then to the US for training in matters like dealing with hostage situations. Aviation security to prevent and deal with hijacking was an important initial area of US assistance in capacity-building. This has since expanded to cover other areas such as forensic examination of explosive devices.
• Assistance in capacity-building in non-traditional areas: Started in 2001 during the administration of George Bush at the initiative of Richard Armitage, the then US Deputy Secretary of State. Cyber security was the initial area of US assistance. This was extended to other areas such as maritime security in ports and container vessels, prevention of catastrophic acts of terrorism involving the use of weapons of mass destruction material etc.
• Assistance in strengthening the physical security of vulnerable establishments and sectors such as urban transport: Started during the administration of George Bush after the explosions in some Mumbai suburban trains in July,2006.
• Mutual legal assistance in the investigation and prosecution of terrorism cases: Started during the second term of Ronald Reagan when the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was sought by India for the investigation of the assassination of Gen.A.S.Vaidya, retired Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), by some Khalistani terrorists in Pune in 1985. The co-operation declined during the administration of Bill Clinton. The US agencies were only partly helpful when their assistance was sought in the investigation and prosecution of the Mumbai blasts of March,1993. The co-operation has improved under the George Bush and Barack Obama Administrations. Under the Obama Administration, the FBI was helpful in the forensic examination of the intercepts during the 26/11 terrorist strikes. For the first time, FBI officers testified before the trial court through video-conferencing. In the past, the FBI's policy was not to allow its officers to testify before an Indian court.
• Intelligence-sharing: This is the most unsatisfactory aspect of Indo-US counter-terrorism co-operation. Before 26/11, the US had hardly ever shared with India any worthwhile preventive intelligence. However, in 2008, during the Bush Administration, the FBI was reported to have passed on to Indian agencies three fairly specific bits of information about the plans of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) to launch a sea-borne attack on some seafront establishments in Mumbai including the Taj Mahal hotel. This information cannot by any means be described as vague or non-specific. If the Indian agencies had promptly acted in strengthening physical security as a follow-up to this, 26/11 might have been prevented. Despite this instance, intelligence-sharing from the US has generally been unsatisfactory due to the following reasons. Firstly, the large, prosperous and politically active Sikh community in the US prevented their Governments from co-operating fully with the Government of India in dealing with Khalistani terrorism. Secondly, all US administrations have as a matter of policy refrained from sharing with India intelligence relating to terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir. Thirdly, the US agencies are allowed to share with India only preventive intelligence relating to planned acts of terrorism by jihadi organisations in Indian territory outside J&K. Here too, the agencies are required to share the intelligence in such a manner as not to implicate Pakistan and not to add substance to India's case against Pakistan for the sponsorship of terrorism in Indian territory. There have been exceptions to this such as the reported US warning to India about a planned terrorist strike against the Indian Embassy in Kabul by terrorist elements instigated by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So long as the US continues to attach importance to counter-terrorism co-operation from Pakistan for dealing with the situation in Afghanistan, its intelligence-sharing with India and co-operation with India against Pakistan will be half-hearted.
• Mutual assistance in the interrogation of arrested terrorist suspects, sharing of the produce of the interrogation and opportunities for the examination of captured documents: Another highly-unsatisfactory area of co-operation due to the US keenness to protect Pakistan from the consequences of its using terrorism against India. It was reported that after the US troops entered Kabul in 2001, the US response to Indian requests for the interrogation of some suspects and for the examination of some documents relating to the Kandahar hijacking of 1999 was unsatisfactory. So was its much-delayed response to Indian requests for the prompt interrogation of David Coleman Headley of the Chicago cell of the LET who had visited India five times for collecting targeting information for the LET. While the FBI did share with India information relating to the planned terrorist strikes in Mumbai (the dates were not known), it did not share with India collateral information which might have enabled India to unearth the LET network in India. Fears that if it shared the collateral information with India, its agencies might arrest and interrogate Headley thereby exposing his links with the US agencies seem to have stood in the way of this sharing. The recently reported disclosures of two ex-wives of Headley----one living in the US and the other in Pakistan---about their alerting an FBI Task Force in New York and the US Embassy in Islamabad regarding Headley’s terrorist links with the LET could have embarrassing legal consequences for the US Government. The LET was designated by the US State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) under US laws in 2000. It is criminal for any US national to maintain contacts with an FTO or to assist it in any way. The alerts of the two ex-wives showed that Headley had violated US laws relating to contacts with an FTO. He should have been immediately detained, investigated and prosecuted. The FBI did not do so. He continued to maintain his contacts with the LET and we have an instance of an American national helping an FTO in killing some US nationals in Mumbai without the FBI taking any action to stop this. If the relatives of the Americans killed in Mumbai take the State Department, the US Embassy in Islamabad and the FBI to court for this, they could face difficulty in defending themselves.

2. Before 2000, there was no institutional mechanism for facilitating and co-ordinating Indo-US co-operation. The co-operation was handled informally at the level of the intelligence and investigative agencies of the two countries. During their meeting in London in January 2000, Jaswant Singh, the then Indian Foreign Minister, and Strobe Talbot, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, agreed to set up an institutional mechanism in the form of the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism. This was followed by the setting up of an Indo-US Cyber Security Forum as suggested by Armitage in 2002. The Forum ran into controversy following Indian suspicions that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had misused it for penetrating the National Security Council Secretariat. During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington DC in November last year, the two countries launched what was described as a Joint Counter-Terrorism Initiative to strengthen counter-terrorism co-operation in different fields such as forensics, megacity policing etc. This was formalized into a Memo of Understanding in July,2010. It is not clear which institution co-ordinates and monitors its implementation. The Headley case illustrates deficiencies in its implementation.

3. After the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, India and the UK set up what was called Indo-UK Back Channel For Counter-Terrorism Co-operation, which at that time was mainly directed against Khalistani terrorists. This consisted of hot lines connecting the chiefs of the intelligence agencies of the two countries and periodic co-ordination meetings between the counter-terrorism experts of the countries. It worked very well because the trust level between the Indian and British agencies was high.

4. The trust level between the Indian and US agencies leaves much to be desired. The US anxiety to protect Pakistan adds to the distrust. How to improve the trust level and what should be the institutional mechanism for improving co-operation are important questions which should be discussed by our Prime Minister and President Obama during their forthcoming meeting in New Delhi next month. ( 20-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

HEADLEY’S CASE: INDIAN DISTRUST OF FBI WILL INCREASE

2010-10-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--- PAPER NO.685

B.RAMAN

More disclosures relating to David Coleman Headley of the Chicago cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) embarrassing to the USA’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been brought out in two detailed investigative reports by Sebastian Rotella of ProPublica, a public service web site which specializes in investigative reporting. These two reports titled “ FBI Was Warned Years in Advance of Mumbai Attacker’s Terror Ties’ and “Feds Confirm Mumbai Plotter Trained With Terrorists While Working for DEA”, which were published on the web site on October 15 and 16,2010, have also been used by the “Washington Post”, thereby adding to their credibility.

2. About three-fourths of these reports are based on a study of the court documents filed by the prosecution against Headley. The remaining is fresh information gathered from two ex-wives of Headley ---one an American based in the US and the other a Moroccan based in Pakistan--- and serving and retired officials of the FBI and other agencies whose identities have not been revealed for valid reasons.

3. The salient points in the investigative reports are:

• “In three interviews with federal agents, Headley’s wife (based in the US) said that he was an active militant in the terrorist group Lashkar-i-Taiba, had trained extensively in its Pakistani camps, and had shopped for night vision goggles and other equipment, according to officials and sources close to the case. The wife, whom ProPublica is not identifying to protect her safety, also told agents that Headley had bragged of working as a paid U.S. informant while he trained with the terrorists in Pakistan, according to a person close to the case. Federal officials say the FBI “looked into” the tip, but they declined to say what, if any, action was taken. Headley was jailed briefly in New York on charges of domestic assault, but was not prosecuted. He wasn’t captured until 11 months after the Mumbai attack, when British intelligence alerted U.S. authorities that he was in contact with al Qaeda operatives in Europe.”
• “On Saturday (October 16), the New York Times reported that another of Headley’s wives – he apparently was married to three women at the same time – had also warned U.S. officials about his terrorism involvement. In December 2007, the Moroccan woman met with officials at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan and told them about Headley’s friendship with Lashkar members, his hatred of India and her trips with him to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a prime target of the Mumbai attacks, the Times reported. On Saturday federal officials said the women’s tips lacked specificity. “U.S. authorities took seriously what Headley's former wives said,” a senior administration official said. “Their information was of a general nature and did not suggest any particular terrorist plot."
• “Headley’s relationship with the U.S. government is especially delicate because the investigation has shown that he also had contact with suspected Pakistani intelligence officials and a Pakistani militant named Ilyas Kashmiri, who has emerged as a top operational leader of al Qaeda.”

4. The following conclusions emerge from the two investigative reports :

• Firstly, Headley was initially an informant (source) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He was being used for the collection of intelligence about the activities of the LET in Pakistan. For this purpose, he used to visit Pakistan.
• Secondly, in Auguat 2005, his US-based ex-wife had alerted an FBI task force about Headley’s links with the LET, his training by the LET in Pakistan and his helping the LET in the procurement of equipment like night-vision glasses. She had also told the FBI about his E-mail and other contacts in Pakistan. She had also complained that he was ill-treating her and beating her. The FBI questioned him about her allegations of ill-treatment, but did not seriously follow up her tips about his ties with the LET. ( My comment: The FBI probably did not question him about his links with the LET on the basis of her tips because it was already aware of the details since he was its source).
• Thirdly, in December 2007, his Moroccan ex-wife complained to the US Embassy in Islamabad about his links with the LET. (My comment: It is not clear what action the US Embassy took on her complaint )
• Fourthly, during 2008, the FBI came to know about the plans of the LET to launch a sea-borne terrorist strike on certain targets in the Mumbai sea-front, including the Taj Mahal Hotel. It promptly passed on the information to the Indian agencies. (My comment: The FBI could not have been expected to tell the Indian agencies that the information came from Headley. This was a specific piece of information complete in many respects except the date of the planned attacks. No intelligence or investigation agency would reveal the name of a source giving such specific information. )
• Fifthly, Headley had visited India five times on behalf of the LET to collect operational intelligence and to help the LET in the selection of targets and the landing point for the boat. ( My comment: Before starting his visits to India, he had taken a new passport under the name David Coleman Headley in place of his previous passport under the name Daood Gilani in order to conceal his Pakistani origin from the Indian consular and immigration authorities. The FBI would have been expected to share this information with the Indian authorities, but it did not do so. Had the FBI done so, the Indian authorities might have been able to establish the details of his Indian network, arrest and question him and pre-empt the attack ).
• Sixthly,he visited India once again after the terrorist strike under the name Headley. Even then, the FBI did not alert the Indian authorities.
• Seventhly, why did the FBI not arrest and interrogate him immediately after the Mumbai terrorist strikes? It seems to have arrested him only after it intercepted messages about his being used by the LET and Ilyas Kashmiri of the 313 Brigade for planning a terrorist strike in Copenhagen against a newspaper which had published cartoons of Prophet Mohammad in 2005. The arrest was made actually after the British intelligence came to know of his contacts with some assets of Ilyas in Europe for planning the attack in Copenhagen. The FBI moved against him seriously only after coming to know of his role in the planned attack in Copenhagen. It did not show the same seriousness in respect of his role in the Mumbai attack.

5. How helpful was the FBI in helping the Indian agencies in this case? It would be difficult to answer this question unless one knows the following details:

• When did the FBI first take the initiative in informing the Indian agencies about the arrest of Headley and the information obtained from him?
• Why did the FBI delay its response to the Indian request for permission to interrogate him?
• Why did the FBI insist on his being interrogated in US custody in the presence of FBI officers and did not allow Indian officers to question him in their custody?

6. During the visit of Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh to Washington DC, in November last year for talks with President Barack Obama, the two countries had reached what was described as a Joint Counter-Terrorism Initiative to promote counter-terrorism co-operation between the agencies of the two countries. The suspicious conduct of the FBI in keeping the Indian agencies in the dark about all relevant aspects of the involvement of Headley with the LET and his role in helping the LET in carrying out the terrorist strikes, delaying their interrogation of Headley and imposing conditions on the way he was interrogated would add to the suspicions of the Indian agencies that the Joint Counter-Terrorism Initiative was an eye-wash sold to India to cover up the sins of commission and omission of the FBI and to conceal from the American families whose members were killed by the LET in Mumbai the extent of the FBI’s knowledge which could have been used to prevent the strikes.

7.While this issue may not have any major impact on the forthcoming visit of Obama to India next month, it will definitely add to the traditional distrust nursed by the Indian agencies about their US counterparts. ( 17-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

INDIA WINS GOLD IN SECURITY, SAYS LEADING AUSTRALIAN THINK-TANK

2010-10-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

India wins gold in security

By Rory Medcalf - 15 October 2010 1:31PM

Whatever the mixed reviews of the management side of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, India's security forces deserve praise for their exceptional success in preventing terrorism there.

At the start of the Games, I published a Lowy Institute Perspective explaining the risks and the wider context of terrorism in India. My assessment was that a major attack was unlikely, but that it would very difficult to prevent small attacks on soft targets distant from the Games venues, along the lines of the shootings of two Taiwanese tourists in Old Delhi on 19 September.

Yet preventing more such attacks was precisely what the massive Indian security blanket did. Who knows what scares or near misses we may never hear about, or what plots were thwarted at an early stage. And who knows whether this confirms that, when the military and intelligence powers-that-be in Pakistan do not want to see terrorism in India, suddenly there is a miraculous absence of violence.

Still, it would seem that reform of India's internal security apparatus has come a considerable distance since the disaster of Mumbai in November 2008. In any case, I am delighted if some of the more downbeat elements of my assessment now stand corrected.

India is a prominent target of terrorism — it shares with Israel, the US and its allies the honour of being on Osama Bin Laden's hate list. And it has internal political and security challenges that no other democracy — let alone an authoritarian state — could imagine. The presence of thousands of foreigners in New Delhi for two weeks — many of them from nations previously attacked by jihadis — must have been a tempting target.

India has protected its guests and itself, and on security grounds at least deserves a gold medal.

PAKISTAN: THE DANGER SIGNALS

2010-10-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

More people were killed and more material damage was caused by the quake in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and some parts of the North-West Frontier Province ( now called Khyber Pakhtunkwa ) in 2005 than by the recent floods, but the fatalities and damages were confined to a small geographic area.Moreover, there was no long-term damage to Pakistan's economy. Gen.Pervez Musharraf, who was then in power, got over the initial bungling in disaster management and ensured that the Army and the civil administration worked together in dealing with the disaster. He did not have to worry much about the impact of the quake on the morale of the army since very few families of serving soldiers were affected.

2.The disaster caused by the recent floods in Pakistan was spread over a large geographic area extending right across Pakistan. It has caused severe damage to Pakistan's agricultural economy. Many of the strategically important and sensitive areas of Pakistan were affected----particularly in Punjab and in Khyber Pakhtunkwa. Those are the areas from which both the Pakistan Army and the so-called Pashtun and Punjabi Talibans make their recruitment.

3. The disaster has affected the Army and the Talibans in different ways. In the Army, the families of many soldiers have been affected. Their land holdings have been rendered unfit for cultivation for some months. The families need all the assistance they could get from the family members to put the land back to cultivation. Difficulties in obtaining leave have created pockets of unhappiness in the lower ranks of the Army. This unhappiness is directed against the senior military and political leadership. Fotunately, desertion rates and instances of unauthorised absence from duty have not gone up. At least, not yet, but they could as the soldiers face increasing pressure from the families to come home on leave to rapair the flood damages to the family land holdings.

4. Gen.Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), who used to be viewed as the soldiers' General has lost some of his shine. His recent stoppage of logistic supplies to the NATO troops in Afghanistan in retaliation for the deaths of two para-military soldiers in a NATO helicopter raid into Pakistani border areas was an attempt to regain his shine as the soldiers’ General. The soldiers, whose families have been affected by the floods, are unhappy with him for two reasons. Firstly, for failing to attend to their problems. Secondly, for failing to force the civil administration to help their families. The Army was active in rescue missions at the height of the floods thereby winning the praise of many civilians, but its role in rehabilitation measures has been very limited. Moreover, the Army is blamed for the inadequacies of the civilian adminstration. "Musharraf would have handled the situation differently", is the comment one often comes across among the lower ranks of the Army.

5. This seeping unhappiness is not only likely to affect its counter-insurgency performance, but it would also add to the sympathy for the Talibans in the lower ranks, thereby possibly sowing the seeds for the Talibanisation of the Army. Osama bin Laden, who has come out with an audio message on the flood situation, has sensed the jihadi opportunities in the country as a whole and in the army in particular as a result of the floods.

6. The impact of the floods on the jihadi organisations has been of a different character. They have stepped up the assistance for putting the rural economy back on its feet----- in the form of seeds and fertilisers and contribution of voluntary labour by their cadres and humanitarian workers to bring the damaged land holdings back under cultivation. They have allowed or even encouraged their trained jihadis to go back to their villages to help their families in coping with the situation. Hence, the drop in recruitment and in the number of terrorist attacks by these organisations since the floods. They are prepared to accept a slowing-down of their jihad in the interest of keeping up the morale of their cadres and winning more support from the rural areas.

7. The political leadership has failed to evaluate the strategic consequences of the floods from the point of view of damage to the rural agricultural economy and the fight against extremism and terrorism. There has been very little co-ordination between the Army and the civilian administration in dealing with the situation. The likely impact of the floods on military morale has not been properly analysed and corrective action has not been taken. The Government of Pakistan and its international backers have been behaving as if all that was needed was more and more money. Financial assistance has been plenty, but this assistance has not addressed the problems of the rural families, which are the mainstay of the Army as well as the Talibans.

8. The result: A situation which could lead to greater instability in Pakistan and provide a more fertile soil than in the past for the spread of jihadi terrorism. An unhappy soldier class could become a new factor in Pakistan's future woes. (13-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

AL QAEDA---TALIBAN IN EUROPE

2010-10-06T09:28:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO. 684

B.RAMAN

After the Arabs and the Pakistanis, the Uzbeks have come to the forefront of Al Qaeda-inspired global jihad.

---- From my article of September 6,2007, titled “Global Jihad: Uzbeks To The Fore - International Terrorism Monitor---Paper No. 273” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers24%5Cpaper2360.html
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On August 15,2007, the Pakistani authorities handed over to Germany Tolga Durbin, a German citizen of Turkish origin, who belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), an Uzbek terrorist organization, which claimed to represent the Muslims of the world and not merely the Uzbeks. It was closely aligned with Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban and drew its recruits from the non-Arab sections of the Islamic world, particularly the Uzbeks, the Turks who are ethnically close to the Uzbeks and European white converts to Islam.

2.After interrogating him, the German Police arrested on September 4, 2007, Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 28, a German convert to Islam, Daniel Martin Schneider, 21, another German convert to Islam, and Adem Yilmaz, 29 of Turkish origin on charges of their being members of the IJU. A fourth person Gofir Salimov, an Uzbek, who was also suspected to be a member of the IJU, managed to flee Germany before he could be arrested. The German authorities claimed that the arrested persons, who were led by Gelowicz, were planning to attack with massive car bombs the Ramstein military airbase, about 140 km South-West of Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt airport. The Ramstein airbase is the largest base used by the US army in Europe. The investigation brought out the name of another member of the IJU in Germany Attila Selek, also known as Muaz. He was also arrested.

3.It was reported that the objective of the planned attack on the Ramstein base was to force Germany to close down its air base in Termez, Uzbekistan, which was providing logistic support for some 3,000 German soldiers serving in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. During the searches undertaken by the German Police after the arrest of the four persons, they recovered a 35% solution of hydrogen peroxide, stored in a hideout, which could have been converted into an explosive device and 26 military detonators smuggled from Istanbul to Germany. The police filed a charge-sheet against the arrested persons on September 2,2008.

4. During the trial, Gelowicz and the three other defendants admitted that they were members of the IJU and that their planned attack, which could not be carried out due to their arrests before their plans could make progress, was timed to coincide with a vote in the German parliament on extending the country's military presence in Afghanistan. In their testimonies they also said that they went to Pakistan in 2006 to undergo training in a camp of the IJU.

5. All the four were found guilty by a Dusseldorf court on March 5,2010. Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, the two German converts to Islam, were jailed for 12 years each and the two Germans of Turkish origin, Adem Yilmaz and Aytila Selek, received 11-year and five-year prison terms respectively.

6. During the investigation of this case, the German Police reportedly found that Eric Breininger, another white convert to Islam who changed his name after conversion as Abdul Ghafar, had escaped to Pakistan via Egypt and Iran and was operating from a camp of the IJU in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He was born in Neunkirchen in the Saarland region of Germany, in 1987. His parents divorced when he was a child. In 2006, he met some members of the IJU and embraced Islam. On May 23,2008, a web site associated with the IJU posted a video interview with Eric Breininger in which he warned that "Germany - along with every other nation taking part in the occupation of Afghanistan - should expect attacks by Muslims". On September 25, 2008, the German Police issued a look-out notice for Eric Breininger, and Houssain Al Malla, who were wanted for trial in the Ramstein plot case. On October 21,2008, another video message of Breininger was posted by the IJU in which he denied any plans for a terrorist attack in Germany. Elif Medya, a Turkish-language jihadi media outlet, released a video on September 11, 2009, showing Ramadan donations being given to the German and Turkish members of the IJU in which Breininger was shown along with another person who was described as the Turkish jihadi commander Abu Zarr (Ebu Zarr). It was stated that Abu Zarr had traveled from Chechnya to Afghanistan/Pakistan. On April 15, 2010, in another video message Breininger claimed that the “German Taliban Mujahideen” had carried out an attack against an American base in Paktika, East Afghanistan, between Kabul and Kandahar. He described it as the first operation of the German Taliban in Afghanistan. Subsequently, the Pakistani authorities claimed to have killed him in an encounter on April 30,2010.

7. While the Dusseldorf trial was on, the German Police arrested in February,2010, two persons of immigrant origin with German passports, one of whom, a woman, was described by the media as the wife of Gelowicz on a charge of collecting money for the IJU from the Muslim community in Germany and sending it to the IJU through an intermediary in Turkey. They said a third person of immigrant origin wanted in this case was absconding. The police did not give the full names of the three persons. They were merely identified as 21-year-old Alican T, 31-year-old Fatih K, and a woman, 28-year-old Filiz G. They were charged in a local court in August,2010, with supporting the IJU and an organization described as the German Taliban. They were also accused of recruiting members for Al Qaeda and spreading propaganda material online.

8. In July 2010, Ahmed Sidiqi, a German citizen of Afghan origin who had disappeared from Hamburg along with 11 other Muslims including his Indonesian wife in 2009, was arrested by a group of plain-clothed US soldiers in Kabul while he was going to the German embassy. Sidiqi went to Germany from Afghanistan in the early 1990s. He became a naturalised German citizen in 2001. He worked at Hamburg's airport as a cleaner. In March,2009, he and his wife flew to Peshawar, where they joined 10 others including a German of Syrian descent, Rami Makanesi, a German of Iranian origin, Shahab Dashti and Naamen Meziche, a French citizen of Algerian origin. According to the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Sidiqi told his US interrogators that after receiving training in Pakistan, he fought in Afghanistan and met Said Bahaji, who is wanted for involvement in 9/11. Sidiqi reportedly moved to Mir Ali, a border town in North Waziristan where he met Sheikh Younis al-Mauretani, who Sidiqi said had become Al Qaeda's third most senior leader. The Sheikh told him about plans for a series of attacks in several European countries, including the UK, Germany and France, according to Der Spiegel. Sidiqi claimed that Osama bin Laden had approved the plot and also provided some funding.

9. The claims made by Sidiqi seem to have triggered concerns in US and European security agencies about the likelihood of Mumbai-26/11 style terrorist strikes in the UK, France and Germany involving commando style attacks with mixed modus operandi combining the use of hand-held weapons and explosives. The objective will be to punish EU countries playing a prominent role in the operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Madrid terrorist strikes of March 2004 and the London terrorist strikes of July 2005 were directed against the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The terrorist strikes planned now would seek to punish the West for its involvement in Afghanistan.

10 In the Madrid strikes, North African members of Al Qaeda played an active role. Pakistani suicide bombers played an active role in the London blasts. It is likely that a mix of jihadis of Pakistani (in UK), North African (in France) and Uzbek and Turkish origin (in Germany) could play a role in the Afghanistan-focused terrorist strikes now being planned. One found an Afghanistan focus even in the Mumbai—26/11 terrorist strikes by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) since many of the foreigners killed came from countries whose troops were fighting in Afghanistan.

11. Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban are looking for an Afghanistan-focused operation in Europe, but there are no indications that trained persons for such an operation might have already been dispatched to Europe. The current Drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, in which some persons of German origin had been killed, are intended to pre-empt any new terrorist strikes in Europe by killing those trained or being trained for this purpose before they could be dispatched to Europe. The security alerts and travel advisories issued by the US and others indicate that despite the success of the Drone strikes, there is a fear that some trained jihadis might have already reached Europe. Ziercke, the head of Germany's Federal Office of Criminal Investigation, reportedly said in a recent interview with the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that there was evidence that at least 70 Islamic radicals from Germany had undergone military training in Pakistan, and that 40 of them are believed to have gone on to fight coalition forces in Afghanistan ( 6-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

TERRORISM: WHY TRAVEL ADVISORIES?

2010-10-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO 683

B.RAMAN

On December 5, 1988, an unidentified man with an Arabic accent telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and warned of a plot by the Abu Nidal Organisation to blow up, within two weeks, a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the US issued a security alert the same day to all US airline companies having flights to Europe. The US State Department forwarded the same day copies of the FAA alert to all US diplomatic and consular missions in Europe. On December 13,1988, the security officer of the US Embassy in Moscow posted the security alert received from Washington DC on the bulletin board for US citizens living in Moscow in the U.S. Embassy and also mailed copies to all US citizens living in the USSR.American nationals living in the USSR reportedly cancelled or changed their travel plans after seeing the travel advisory.

2.On December 21, 1988, a Pan Am aircraft flying from London to New York was blown up in mid-air near Lockerbie in Southern Scotland killing all the 259 persons on board. Eleven villagers on the ground were killed by the falling parts of the disintegrating plane.

3. During the subsequent enquiries, inconvenient questions were raised as to why the US nationals except in the USSR were not informed of this threat and why the security advisory was circulated only to the US missions in Europe and the US airline offices and not shared with the general public. The practice of issuing in a systematic manner travel advisories cautioning US nationals about likely threats to their security when they are abroad started after this incident. Many other countries started emulating the US practice. After 9/11, many private companies in the travel industry and many banks started issuing their own travel advisories to their customers travelling abroad. This caused some confusion.

4. At the International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security held at Madrid from March 8 to 11,2005, I had raised during a panel discussion the tendency of the US and the UK to issue frequent travel advisories against travel to certain countries on the basis of weak intelligence or, in some instances, even rumours. I pointed out how this practice of these two countries often created problems for India and other countries in Asia. I also narrated an instance of November,2002, when an American private bank in Thailand issued its own terrorism alert to its customers visiting Thailand, the nervousness it caused amongst tourists of all nationalities and the strong protests it evoked from the Thai authorities.

5. While there was no response to my intervention from any of the American experts present in the Panel, a British expert clarified that following strong representations from the airline industry, the British authorities were much more careful before issuing such advisories. I also stressed that travel advisories, where really necessary, should be issued only by Governments on the basis of advice from their intelligence agencies and that the practice of private companies issuing their own advisories should be discouraged. In this connection, kindly refer to my article of April 7,2005, titled " MADRID IMPRESSIONS--II: Economic Impact of Terrorism "at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers14%5Cpaper1328.html .

6. Against this background, one cannot find fault with the travel advisories issued by the US, Japan and some other countries to their nationals after the receipt of some information regarding the alleged plans of Al Qaeda and its associates to organise Mumbai--26/11 like terrorist strikes in the UK, France and Germany and by the authorities of Australia regarding the likelihood of terrorist incidents during the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. Admittedly, the information on the basis of which they had issued their security alert is weak and uncorrobated, but their Governments have an obligation to inform their citizens that they are in receipt of such information. Otherwise, if the information proves to be correct and there is a terrorist incident, their Governments may find themselves taken to court for not cautioning the travelling public.

7.In the Western countries, victim activism in taking their Governments to task for not protecting them from terrorism is very strong after the Lockerbie incident and 9/11. The Governments have, therefore, to be very careful and keep their public informed. In India, despite the fact that it is one of the worst victims of terrorism, there is no victim activism even today. As a result, our Governments are able to get away with any sins of commission and omission.We saw it in the case of Mumbai-26/11. None of the relatives of the 141 Indian nationals killed has taken the Government to task for failing to protect them despite the availability of intelligence regarding the plans of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) to attack some hotels on the sea-front.Not even the Bharatiya Janata Parrty (BJP), which talks loudly from the roof-top about its hard stance on terrorism, has ever fought for the principle of victim activism and for victims' rights. ( 5-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

CWG SECURITY: PRECAUTIONS AGAINST MOTOR-BIKE TERRORISTS

2010-10-04T07:25:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 682

B.RAMAN

Reference is invited to my article of September 22,2010, titled "Use of Motor-Bikes for Terrorism" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers41%5Cpaper4055.html.

2. It is learnt that on the night of October 3,2010, eight unidentified persons riding four motor-cycles reached an open space adjacent to the Grand Trunk Road in Islamabad and the persons sitting on the pillion seats threw some inflammable liquid at the vehicles in a convoy hired by the NATO for carrying fuel to the NATO troops in Afghanistan and fired at the vehicles from firearms held by them. Twenty-eight vehicles were burnt to ashes and six persons were killed. The terrorists escaped on their motor-bikes. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is suspected. The convoy had halted in the open space for rest when it was attacked.

3. It may be recalled that on September 19 two persons riding a motor-bike opened fire and injured two Taiwanese tourists near the Jumma Masjid in Delhi. In a message subsequently received by some media offices, a claim of responsibility for the attack had been made on behalf of the Indian Mujahideen (IM) and a threat held out for a terrorist attack during the currently on-going Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. There has been no further claim or threat by the IM. Despite this, the need for further strengthening precautions against motor-cycle riding terrorists needs to be emphasised. ( 4-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

SECURITY FOR CWG: Q & A

2010-10-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

The following are my replies to some questions posed to me by journalists regarding possible threats to the security of the Commonwealth Games (CWG).

Question: Now that the opening function has gone off well without any security-related problems, has the security threat perception diminished?

Answer: Not necessarily. It is very gratifying that the opening function was handled very well by the organising committee and those in charge of physical security. Generally, the security arrangements are very tight on the opening and closing days because of the presence of a large number of Very Important Persons and the crowd. The alert level is also very high. Since there is only one event on the opening and closing days concentrated in a single stadium, making tight security does not pose any major difficulty. No serious co-ordination problems arise. During subsequent days, the events will be scattered in a number of stadia and venue. Co-ordination and supervision of security arrangements will be more difficult. Moreover, since very few VIPS will attend, alert levels, in the absence of effective supervision, might get lowered. This could aggravate threat perceptions.

Question: Sections of the media have claimed that there has not been much of a chatter among terrorists indicating their plans to carry out any terrorist strike during the Games. Is this reassuring?

Answer: I would not agree. The Pakistan-based terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) etc indulge in chatter, but not the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The communications security of the IM is good.It generally sends out an E-mail message just before a terrorist strike materialises or immediately thereafter. Otherwise, its members avoid any tell-tale chatter either through phone or E-mails. ( 4-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ACTION AGAINST HAQQANI & ILYAS NETWORKS: CIA CHIEF’S AGENDA

2010-09-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER No 681
B.RAMAN

Mr.Leon Panetta, the Director of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), arrived in Islamabad on September 29,2010, for talks with Lt.Gen.Shuja Pasha, the Director-General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He was also scheduled to meet President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani and Gen.Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the Chief of the Army Staff ( COAS).

2. Ever since he took over as the head of the CIA last year, Mr.Panetta had been periodically visiting Pakistan for talks with Pakistani leaders and officials on action against Al Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans and other affiliates of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistani territory. He has also been utilizing these visits for discussing with his own officers based in the Af-Pak area the operations of the Drones (pilotless planes), which are co-ordinated by the CIA.

3. His latest visit is, therefore, not a matter for surprise. However, it has assumed more than the usual significance because of indicators that the Jalaluddin Haqqani network, which has been the bete noire of the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, has been operating increasingly from new sanctuaries in the Kurram Agency of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). This area, which has seen some bloody fighting between the Shias and the Sunnis during the last two years, has not been the focus of the intensified Drone strikes, which have been confined to North Waziristan ( an estimated 64 strikes this year) and South Waziristan (an estimated six).

4.Because of the sensitive Shia-Sunni angle in the Kurram Agency, the US has till now left the responsibility for action against the Taliban sanctuaries in the Agency to the Pakistan Army, which has been claiming to have mounted ground and air strikes against them. Despite the Pakistani claims, there has been no reduction in cross-border raids into Afghanistan by well-trained elements of the Afghan Taliban, including the Haqqani network, from sanctuaries in the Kurram Agency.

5. It is dissatisfaction with the operations which the Pakistan Army claims to have launched in the Agency which has resulted in the decision of the NATO forces in Afghanistan to exercise the right of hot pursuit against the Taliban and Haqqani network elements fleeing back into the Kurram Agency after ambushing/attacking the NATO forces in Afghanistan. This hot pursuit is being exercised in helicopters and not through ground operations. In one such hot pursuit this week, a Pakistani checkpost came under fire from a NATO helicopter resulting in the alleged death of three Pakistani security personnel.

6. According to well-informed Pakistani sources, one of the purposes of the latest visit of the CIA chief is to remonstrate with the ISI and Pakistani Army officials over their failure to act against the sanctuaries in the Kurram Agency and caution them that continued inaction or inadequate action by the Pakistan army could force the US to extend its Drone strikes to the Kurram Agency.

7.According to the same sources, the US continues to be unhappy with the Pakistani inaction in North Waziristan and inadequate action in South Waziristan. The stepped-up Drone strikes have disrupted the functioning of Al Qaeda from North Waziristan, but have not had much of an impact on the operations of the so-called 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), another Uzbek group, which has been drawing followers from persons of Turkish origin, including Kurds, living in Germany.

8. Ever since the publication of some cartoons of the Prophet by a Danish paper in 2005, Al Qaeda and its associates based in Pakistan’s tribal belt have been exploring ways of mounting terrorist attacks in reprisal against Western targets in Europe. Ilyas Kashmiri has been playing an important role in this regard. Evidence of his role in looking for opportunistic attacks on behalf of Al Qaeda in Europe came from the interrogation of David Coleman Headley of the Chicago cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), who was arrested by the FBI in October last year.

9. His interrogation brought out that he had helped the LET in preparing the groundwork for the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai and was similarly helping Ilyas Kashmiri in preparing the groundwork for terrorist strikes in Denmark. In fact, Ilyas Kashmiri was reported to have told Headley that he controlled operational assets in Europe whom Headley could use without having to depend on the LET for the European operations.

10.A Press release issued on January 14,2010, by the Public Affairs Division of the US Justice Department had said as follows: “Headley allegedly traveled in January 2009, from Chicago to Copenhagen, Denmark, to conduct surveillance of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper offices in Copenhagen and Aarhus and to videotape the surrounding areas In late January 2009, Headley traveled to Pakistan and met separately to discuss the planning with Abdur Rehman and Lashkar Member A. In February 2009, Abdur Rehman allegedly took Headley to meet with Kashmiri in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. During the meeting, Kashmiri allegedly indicated that he had reviewed the surveillance videos made by Headley and suggested using a truck bomb in the operation. Kashmiri further indicated that he could provide manpower for the operation and that Lashkar’s participation was not necessary, the indictment alleges. Subsequently, in March 2009, Lashkar Member A advised Headley that Lashkar put the newspaper attack on hold because of pressure in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, according to the charges. In May 2009, Headley and Abdur Rehman met again with Kashmiri in Waziristan and Kashmiri allegedly directed Headley to meet with his European contacts who could provide Headley with money, weapons, and manpower for the newspaper attack. In late July and early August 2009, Headley traveled from Chicago to various places in Europe, including Copenhagen, attempting to obtain assistance from Kashmiri’s contacts and, while there, made approximately 13 additional surveillance videos, according to the charges.” ( My comment: Abdur Rehman is a retired Major of the Pakistan Army, who was acting as a cut-out between Headley and Ilyas Kashmiri)

11.The Islamic Jihad Union or Group (IJU), an Uzbek group based in North Waziristan and closely allied to Al Qaeda, has some followers in Germany among persons of Turkish origin as well as white German converts to Islam. Some arrests were made in Germany in August-September 2007 in connection with investigations into the activities of the IJU and its suspected plots for terrorist strikes in Germany against German as well as American targets.

12. The Norwegian police announced on July 8,2010, the arrest of three men suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda on charges of preparing terrorist attacks. One of them is a Norwegian citizen of Uighur origin. The other two are permanent residents in Norway of Uzbek and Iraqi-Kurdish origin. Two of them (the Uzbek and the Uighur) are reported to have been arrested in Norway and the third (Iraqi-Kurd with a permanent residence permit of Norway) in Germany. The Norwegian police had been keeping them under surveillance for investigation for about a year. The arrests appear to have been made even though the investigation was incomplete because of the leakage of the news about the investigation against them to the media. They apparently decided to arrest them before the media came out with the news. Media reports indicated that the arrested persons were suspected of involvement in plots for terrorist strikes in Norway and of having links with some terrorist suspects under investigation in the US and the UK.

13. The latest reports emanating from the US and the UK about the alleged plans of Al Qaeda to mount Mumbai-style terrorist strikes in the UK, France and Germany have come in the wake of these developments relating to the use of Headley by Ilyas and the arrests in Norway and Germany. The same sources as mentioned above say that the US feels that the ISI has been dragging its feet in taking action against Ilyas and his contacts in the Pakistan Army. Sections of the Pakistani media have been alleging since 2008 that Ilyas had served for some time as a commando in the Special Services Group of the Pakistan Army before drifting into the world of terrorism. He, therefore, enjoys protection from the ISI. Like the Haqqanis father and son, Ilyas is another valued operational asset of the ISI, which uses the Haqqanis in Afghanistan and Ilyas against India.

14. Growing indicators of the role which Ilyas has been playing as facilitator for the Euopean operations of Al Qaeda and its Uzbek associates have made the US step up pressure on the ISI for neutralizing Ilyas and his 313 Brigade. The sources say that this is another important reason for the visit of the CIA chief to Pakistan.

15. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier articles cited below:
(a). Article of September 18,2010, titled HAQQANI NETWORK IN PARACHINAR at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers41%5Cpaper4047.html
(b).Article of July 9,2010, titled “Al Qaeda In Norway” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers40%5Cpaper3915.html
(1-10-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

USE OF MOTOR-BIKES FOR TERRORISM

2010-09-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO 680

B.RAMAN

The use of motor-bikes for committing acts of terrorism, including suicide terrorism, is a modus-operandi that was first seen in Pakistan in the 1980s. This MO involves two terrorists sitting on a motor-bike approaching their target and the one in the pillion seat either firing at the target with a gun or throwing a hand-grenade and then getting away through small lanes where police patrol cars may not be able to enter. Targeted firing from a moving motor-bike is not easy. It requires some training and practice.

2. This MO was frequently used in Karachi in the 1980s and the early 1990s by the then Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) and its rival called the MQM (Haquiqi) against each other. It was also used by the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) to kill their Shia targets. The SSP and the LEJ continue to use this MO in addition to other MO. The Pakistani authorities have tried to deal with this by banning pillion-seat riding in some of their cities.

3.The MO varies depending on whether it is an act of non-suicide terrorism or suicide terrorism. For acts of non-suicide terrorism, two persons are used, with the person sitting at the back opening fire on the target. For acts of suicide terrorism, only one person will do. He will activate an explosive device while crossing the target.

4. The Haqqani network in Afghanistan has reportedly been using this MO.According to the “Guardian” of UK, one of the documents of 2007 recently leaked through Wikileaks claims that the Pakistani intelligence had given some motor-bikes to the Haqqani network for use in acts of terrorism.

5. From the Af-Pak region, this MO spread to Southern Thailand and Yemen. In Southern Thailand, Muslim separatists have been using this for killing government officials, security forces personnel and Muslims co-operating with the Government. In Yemen, this MO was used by Al Qaeda to kill public servants.

6. Benjamin Joffe-Walt of “The Media Line”, which disseminates news about the Middle East, had reported recently as follows: “Authorities in Yemen’s Abyan Governorate, a growing stronghold for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, have banned motorcycles from cities in the region. “Using motorbikes in terrorist operations to assassinate intelligence officers and security personnel have been massively mounted over the past nine months in the province,” a Yemeni Interior Ministry official told the Xinhua news agency. The news, first reported in the pan-Arab London-based daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, follows a series of recent assassinations by Al Qaeda militants throughout Abyan and will affect some 5,000 two-wheeled vehicles, according to local media. Militants on motorcycles have killed at least 30 Yemeni soldiers, intelligence officers and security personnel over the last three months alone, using the bikes to make a quick escape.”

7. The report added: “Motorcycles are typically used by terrorists and insurgents to deliver weapons directly if it is a suicide attack or to make a quick getaway,” Dr Theodore Karasik, director for Research and Development at the Institute for Near East Gulf Military Analysis told The Media Line. “The banning of motorcycles is indicative of how the government, with help from US officers, is trying to cut down on the movements of Al Qaeda members and tribal members who support them.”

8. It said further: “Brig Gen (Ret) Musa Qallab, the former programme manager of Gulf Defence Issues at the Gulf Research Centre, said motorcycles are the ideal tool for a terrorist attack. “They are easy to rent, easy to buy and easy to use,” he told The Media Line. “So many people drive motorcycles so it’s easy to hide, easy to cheat and more importantly very easy to escape from the scene through narrow passages. It’s very hard to stop them in a crowded area full of traffic.” Dr Stephen Steinbeiser, resident director of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in Sanaa, said the move showed that the government was taking the threat seriously. “Motorcycles and scooters are easy to manoeuvre and to get around roadblocks, so I’m surprised they didn’t think of this earlier,” he told The Media Line. “I don’t think its a sign of desperation, I see it as a sign that the government is taking this seriously, doing anything it can to protect themselves, and is taking practical and creative ways to change the way they do business and tackle a rising threat.”

9.Two as yet unidentified assailants, allegedly belonging to the Indian Mujahideen (IM), used this MO near the Jamma Masjid in Delhi on September 19, and injured two Taiwanese tourists and got away. If it is established that they are from the IM, it is the first time it has used this MO. The use of motor-bikes by the IM could enable it to target the buses carrying the participants in the forthcoming Commonwealth Games. Pillion-riding needs to be banned at least in the core areas where the venues and the Games village are located till the Games are over and the participants leave India.

10. Indian intelligence and security officials should not fight shy of consulting their US counterparts on how they counter this MO. ( 22-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (red), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

COMMONWEALTH GAMES: SPIN & SECURITY

2010-09-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

A major sports event that will be watched by million of persons provides theater for terrorist organizations. It is to be expected that many terrorist organizations would be tempted to explore the possibility of organizing terrorist strikes during the forthcoming Commonwealth Games (CWG) in New Delhi from October 3.

2. Organizations such as the Indian Mujahideen (IM), the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and others would have an anti-Indian motive. Others such as Al Qaeda, the Talibans and other affiliates of Al Qaeda would have an anti-West motive. Though the US and Germany are not participants, the UK, Canada and Australia are. They have incurred the anger of these organizations because of their role in the fighting against Al Qaeda brand terrorism and the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and would be tempting targets. Any nervousness in these countries about the state of physical security before and during the Games is natural and should be understood and appreciated by the Indian authorities.

3. What will give confidence to them is our seriousness in threat assessments, thoroughness in physical security and competence in investigation of threats. If they get an impression that we are trying to play down threats and cover up incidents which indicate security inadequacies, their confidence in us will be damaged. Keeping this in view, one has to deplore the seeming attempts of the Delhi Police to play down the seriousness of the incident of September 19,2010, in Delhi in which two Taiwanese tourists were injured by two assailants on a motor-bike. Instead of treating it as a possible terrorist incident which could have implications for physical security before and during the CWG unless and until proved otherwise, the Delhi Police have started projecting it as an ordinary criminal incident with no implications for the CWG even before any progress had been made in the investigation. This is totally unwise.

4. It is said that those in charge of physical security are fully prepared against possible acts of catastrophic or mass casualty terrorism involving weapons of great lethality, but they seem to be ill-organised to deal with small acts of terrorism where the objective is not mass casualties or catastrophic damages, but psychological consequences creating nervousness and panic. The attack on the Taiwanese tourists on September 19 has to be treated as one such incident with a psychological objective and not a catastrophic one.

5.The objective of any anti-India terrorist group targeting the CWG would be two-fold. Firstly, to embarrass the Government of India and its security agencies by disrupting the games through panic and loss of faith in the ability of the security agencies to protect the foreigners. Secondly, to highlight that the security conditions for major sports events in India are as bad as they are in Pakistan.

6. Pakistan has gone through a humiliating experience following the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team last year. The anti-India, Pakistan-aided terrorists would want to make India go through a similar humiliating experience.

7. To achieve these objectives, the terrorists do not have to organise spectacular acts of mass casualty terrorism like 9/11 in the US or 26/11 in Mumbai. A series of small incidents with limited casualties, which show the Indian security agencies in a poor light and erode the confidence of foreigners in their ability to ensure effective security, would be adequate for this purpose. If they are able to repeat small acts similar to the one staged on September 19 it would have a ripple effect on the morale of the participating teams and other foreigners. It is, therefore, important to ensure that there would be no repetition of such acts.

8. The Government should immediately hold a brain-storming session of the security agencies and senior Police officers of all States to discuss what further steps to prevent a repetition need to be taken. Examples of such steps are a ban on pillion riding and repeated appeals to the public to report cases of theft of motor vehicles and follow-up action to trace those vehicles. All hotels and guest houses should be advised to keep the police informed of all suspicious-seeming persons staying in their establishments. The police should prepare a list of suspicious indicators and circulate it to them.

9.Any comprehensive security plan for an event like the CWG has to have three components covering the core area, the peripheral areas and measures to prevent diversionary attacks such as the hijacking of planes to divert the attention of the authorities. The Munich Olympics of 1972 saw a penetration of the core area (the games village).The Atlanta Olympics in the US in 1996 saw an explosion when the games were in progress in a park in a peripheral area. The Beijing Olympics of 2008 were preceded by diversionary attacks in Chinese-controlled Xinjiang, Yunnan and Shanghai.

10. The Delhi incident of September 19 show inadequacies in the peripheral areas. The manpower available to the Delhi Police would have to remain focused on the core area. They would need additional manpower for the peripheral areas from other States. They have to be drawn from the adjoining States and deployed immediately so that they become familiar with the topography.

11. Measures to prevent diversionary attacks have to be in place all over India. Steps to prevent an act of aviation terrorism should receive high priority. All the States should be in a high state of alert with effective co-ordination.

12. One can be certain that our intelligence and security agencies would have prepared comprehensive plans covering all these components. They would have been under constant pressure from their counterparts in the participating countries to do so. These plans need to be constantly revisited to identify and remove deficiencies.

13. We should not hesitate to seek the co-operation of Pakistan to detect and pre-empt any conspiracies hatched in the Af-Pak area to disrupt the CWG. We should not stand on false prestige or prejudices against Pakistan and avoid seeking the co-operation of Pakistan. It is not too late to invite Mr.Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, for a discussion on this subject. ( 21-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

I.M.HINTS AT ACT OF SUICIDE TERRORISM

2010-09-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO. 679

B.RAMAN

The statement purporting to be from the Indian Mujahideen (IM) disseminated by E-mail on September 19,2010, is shown as having been signed by one Al Arbi the same day. It refers to certain anti-Muslim incidents which allegedly took place in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh on the day of Eid (September 11). It also refers to the day when the total number of people allegedly killed by the security forces in Jammu & Kashmir crossed 100 ( September 17). This would indicate that this message must have been drafted between September 17 and 19.

2. The statement is in good English with very few grammar or typing mistakes. It has been drafted by one well-versed in the Holy Koran. Many of the religious allusions have been taken from some past messages of Osama bin Laden, but bin Laden has not been mentioned anywhere by name. The last para of the message has been borrowed almost word for word from a message against Gen.Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani Army issued by bin Laden in September 2007 calling for the wrath of Allah on them for the raid into the Lal Masjid of Islamabad in July,2007. It reads: "O,Allah,deface them, break their backs and heads, split them up and destroy their unity; O, Allah, afflict them with the loss of their near and dear ones as they have afflicted us with the loss of our near and dear ones;O, Allah, we seek refuge in You from their evilness and we place You at their throats; O,Allah, make their plotting their destruction; O,Allah, suffice for us against them with whatever You wish; O,Allah, destroy them for they cannot escape You; O, Allah, count them, kill them and leave not even one of them. " There are only two minor changes. bin Laden had not said "deface them". He had also not said "and heads". One does not know wherefrom bin Laden had originally taken his curse against Musharraf and the Pakistani Army. bin Laden's curse against them has been converted by the IM into a curse against the Indian people and officials. I had referred to bin Laden's message of September 2007 in my book "Terrorism---Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow--Page 234.

3. The statement does not directly claim responsibility on behalf of the IM for the attack in Delhi on September 19 in which two Taiwanese tourists were injured. However, it indirectly hints at its responsibility by saying: "In the name of Allah we dedicate this attack of retribution...."

4. In its reference to the forthcoming Commonwealth Games, it says: "On the one hand Muslim blood is flowing like water, while on the other hand you are preparing for the festival of games. This is surely not a Child's play. Mind you this is the initiative from the Lions of Allah and we warn you to host the Commonwealth Games if you have a grain of salt. We know that the preparations for the Games are at its peak. Beware we too are preparing in full swing for a Great Surprise. The participants will be solely responsible for the outcome as our bands of Mujahideens love death more than you love life."

5. It has highlighted in red ink the following words: "Our bands of Mujahideen love death more than you love life." This could be a hint or threat that it is planning to commit an act of suicide or suicidal terrorism. The IM has not so far indulged in either.

6. While over 75 per cent of the statement is about alleged atrocities against Muslims in Jammu & Kashmir, there are also condemnatory references to the death of two IM suspects during a raid by the Delhi police on September 19,2008, to the arrests of some alleged members of the IM by the Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra Police in connection with the Pune Bakery blast of February 13 last and some alleged anti-Muslim incidents in Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh on Eid day. While the IM has threatened to launch a campaign of reprisals in solidarity with the Muslims of Kashmir, its initial attacks could be in Delhi, Mumbai and Ratlam. ( 20-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

CWG SECURITY: NEED TO AVOID OVER-CONFIDENCE

2010-09-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

Two Taiwanese tourists are reported to have been injured outside the Jama Masjid in New Delhi on September 19,2010, when they were attacked with a hand-held gun by two unidentified persons on a motor-cycle.

2. The British Broadcasting Corporation has quoted an eye-witness as stating as follows: "The two terrorists came on a motorcycle and the man riding pillion first fired randomly at the mosque and then fired in the air and at the people, and then he fired on the bus in which the tourists had come.After emptying his gun, the terrorist replaced the magazine and began firing again."

3. The assailants then got away.It has been reported that the assailants dropped their gun on the road before fleeing.

4.A news channel is reported to have received an E-mail purporting to be from the Indian Mujahideen (IM) claiming responsibility for the attack. The mail had reportedly been sent from the address al-arbi999123@gmail.com .The word al-arbi had figured in the E-mail sent by the IM on July 26,2008, after the terrorist attacks in Ahmedabad.

5. The attack on the Taiwanese tourists took place on the second anniversary of an incident in which two suspects of the IM were killed in an exchange of fire during a raid by the Delhi police at a hide-out of the IM. A Police Inspector too died as a result of injuries sustained during the exchange of fire.

6. The E-mail received by the news channel tried to portray the shooting incident of September 19,2010, as in memory of the two IM suspects killed during the police raid of September 19,2008.

7. While the authenticity of the E-Mail is still to be established, some of these details would lend credence to the possibility of some still absconding members of the IM having been involved in the incident. However, the past incidents organised by the IM involved the use of improvised explosive devices (IED) against soft targets and not hand-held weapons. In the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai, the LET had used explosives as well as hand-held weapons.

8. The modus operandi (MO) of two assailants approaching a target on a motor-cycle, with the man in the pillion seat opening fire is often followed by the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) of Pakistan and by jihadi terrorists in Southern Thailand. Some Khalistani terrorists in Punjab had used this MO in the 1980s. In Pakistan, there is a ban on pillion riding because of the use of this MO by the LEJ.

9. The LEJ is close to Ilyas Kashmiri of the so-called 313 Brigade based in North Waziristan in Pakistan, who had issued a threat earlier this year to disrupt the CWG (Commonwealth Games). According to the media, the E-mail warned the Government not to hold the Games and added: "We know the preparations are on in full swing. Be prepared, we are preparing a shocking event and those participating in the games will hold themselves responsible for the consequences."

10. The incident and the E-mail message should not be dismissed lightly until the assailants are arrested and interrogated. One should avoid over-confidence regarding the security arrangements and minutely re-visit the security drill to identify and remove any deficiencies. While there is no need for any panic, any casual approach to the incident would be unwise. ( 19-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MY ARTICLES IN SAAG WEBSITE: READERSHIP

2010-09-19T01:42:00.000-07:00

MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR, SOUTH ASIA ANALYSIS GROUP

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Dr. S. Chandrasekharan wrote:

Hello Raman,
Just wanted to share a few things with you.

For the last month and a half there is a sudden spurt in the number of hits. On some days, the figure goes beyond 20,000and on other days above 6to 7 thousand.

There had been an increasing attention of the Chinese- Our index page was hacked a few days ago and I managed to repair it myself.

I am looking for some technical hand to assist me in times of emergencies like these. I ahve not been successful so far.

The spurt I am told is patly due to the use by the civil service exam candidates using our site as a resource base! Most of the increase now is from India itslef!

The Pioneer regularly publishes your papers sometimes with a different heading. Have you given them the permission?

Many thanks to you and all the credit goes to you. I wish I have your stamina and the dedication.
Chandru

Chandru:

Thanks. Gratifying. Many people re-produce my articles in India & abroad. I don't object since I write to educate. Regards. Raman

HAQQANI NETWORK IN PARACHINAR

2010-09-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO. 678

B.RAMAN

According to the Ahlul Bayt News Agency of Iran, 25 Shias have been killed and 80 others injured In the Parachinar area in the Kurram Agency of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan during the last two weeks following attacks by members of the Haqqani network of the Afghan Taliban on the Kheyvas village in the Shaluzan Mountains. It claimed that the Shias put up a fierce resistance to the attack and managed to kill 10 members of the Taliban, including two commanders of the Haqqani network. The news agency has alleged that the Pakistani Army, instead of helping the Shias beat back the Taliban attack, bombed the Shia positions from the air in order to help the Taliban. All shops in the area remained closed on September 18,2010, to protest against the Pakistan Government's failure to protect the Shias of the Kurram Agency from repeated attacks by the Taliban. The news agency said: " The Kurram Agency has been virtually cut off from the rest of Pakistan for the past two years due to intense clashes between Shiite and Talibani rebels."

2. On September 18,the "News" of Pakistan reported as follows: " Clashes triggered by a dispute over the ownership of a water channel between two rival groups a month ago came to an end on Friday ( September 17) after a peace Jirga convened by the political administration succeeded in effecting a ceasefire, official sources said. The sources said the clashes had erupted between the Mangal and Turi Bangash tribes over the ownership of a watercourse in Shalozan and Khewas areas near the Pak-Afghan border. The incessant fighting left 102 people dead and over 150 injured. The fighting took a sectarian colour as the Mangal tribe belongs to the Sunni sect while Turi and Bangash are Shias. Fresh clashes erupted on Thursday (September 16) and continued on Friday (September 17), leaving 48 persons dead and 71 others wounded. Four villages — Aqal Shah Killay, Sarang Killay, Qabli and Khewas Killay — were also torched amid the exchange of heavy fire. The rival groups also took several people hostage. Alarmed by the situation, the political administration of Kurram Agency called a peace Jirga comprising Shia and Sunni elders that brought the hostilities to an end. “The Jirga was called at a checkpost on the boundary of Sadda and Kurram. The members of the peace Jirga and political administration representatives held talks with the members of the Mangal and Turi Bangash tribes. The Jirga persuaded the rival groups to agree to a ceasefire,” said Political Agent Syed Musaddiq Shah while talking to The News by telephone. He said that it was agreed to hold regular sessions of the Jirga to ensure durable peace in the area and forestall such incidents in future."

3.The Iranian news agency and the "News" are apparently referring to the same series of clashes, but the estimate of fatalities given by the "News" is much higher than that given by the Iranian agency. However, the fatalities mentioned by the Iranian agency are only of Shias, whereas those mentioned by "News" seem to include the fatalities incurred by the Shias as well as the Sunnis. If the figures given by the "News" are to be believed, the Shias seemed to have inficted more casualties on the Sunnis than vice versa. It also needs to be noted that while the Iranian news agency talks of the involvement of the Haqqani network in the clashes, with the support of the Pakistan Army, the "News" makes no reference to it.

4.In a report published on September 16, the "Dawn" of Karachi refers to the presence of the Haqqani network in the Kurram Agency, but claims that the network is actually trying to bring about a reconciliation between the Shias and the Sunnis of the area. The "Dawn" reported as follows: “A Taliban faction fighting US forces in Afghanistan is trying to end a tribal dispute which has resulted in severe clashes in Kurram Agency. According to sources, Taliban of the Jalaluddin Haqqani group are in contact with elders of rival tribes and talks between the Haqqani group and elders from Upper and Lower Kurram were held before Eidul Fitr. “Two trustworthy people of Jalaluddin Haqqani took part in the talks,” they said, adding that the next round of talks was expected soon. They said elders of Turi and Bangash tribes had said that they would attend further talks only if nine people kidnapped after an attack on two vehicles in Lower Kurram in July were freed and safety of passengers travelling between Parachinar and Peshawar was guaranteed. “These measures are necessary to build confidence among the tribes and prepare the ground for future talks,” an elder said. He said the Taliban had told them that they wanted reconciliation among the tribes and had approached all groups to start negotiations."

5. The "Dawn" report added: "The sources said the Taliban had been in contact with local tribes for some time but the talks had not produced any result so far. The first round of talks was held in Balishkhel village in March last year and was attended also by Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud. Another team of Taliban visited the area in September last year. According to the sources, a relative of a former governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and his local business partner facilitated the talks which ended without achieving anything. It may be mentioned, Nato officials and the Afghan government made similar efforts and invited elders of various tribes to Paktia province of Afghanistan in May last year to urge them to resolve their disputes. Violent clashes have been taking place in the Kurram valley since November 2007 and thousands of people have been killed or injured and hundreds of families have been displaced. The area is cut off from the rest of the country and local people travel on the Thall-Parachinar road in convoys protected by security personnel. "

6. The "Dawn" further said: "The government brokered a peace deal and an agreement to end violence was signed in Murree in October 2008, but there has been no let-up in violence in the valley. Insiders said the aim behind Taliban’s reconciliation efforts was to secure the strategic region and turn it into a safe route to Afghanistan. Kurram valley borders Afghanistan from three sides, Paktia on its west, Nangarhar on the north and Khost on the south. When militant groups signed peace deals with the government in South and North Waziristan, some armed groups tried to use Kurram for their activities in Afghanistan. Under the agreements, the militant groups operating in Waziristan were required not to infiltrate into Afghanistan. Tension flared in the area when Baitullah Mehsud, the slain chief of the banned Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, deputed Hakimullah as ‘commander’ for Kurram, Khyber and Orakzai agencies in 2008 and tribal people in Kurram opposed TTP’s activities. Local tribes blamed Taliban for violence and insecurity in their area. According to the sources, Taliban have told the elders that tension in Kurram has had an adverse effect on the ‘Jihad’ in Afghanistan and that they are interested in ending disputes among local groups. But several tribes are sceptical about the initiative and suspect that the Taliban are interested only in securing a safe passage for their cross-border movement. “Taliban are yet to show their cards, but we have already conveyed to the negotiators that people in Kurram are against the presence of outsiders in their area,” a source said. “

7. Apparently unconnected with the developments in the Kurram Agency, the "Dawn" also reported on September 16 a steep increase in US Drone (pilotless planes) strikes against the Haqqani network. It said: "“Apparently frustrated over Pakistan military’s inaction against the Haqqani network, the United States has this month unleashed a relentless wave of drone attacks in North Waziristan, hoping to downgrade the operational capabilities of the group it considers to be the most lethal militant outfit in Afghanistan. Since Sept 2, there have been 13 strikes by unmanned Predator drones in North Waziristan — the highest number in a month since the US began using them to hit targets in Pakistan in 2004. The number of drone attacks this year has already crossed 70 — the highest figure for a year. According to military sources, an operation in North Waziristan got delayed because the army was preoccupied with fighting militancy in other tribal areas and flood relief. This window was fully exploited by the group to intensify its activities, defence analysts believe.“The Americans want to check that freedom of space available to the Haqqanis through intensified drone attacks,” a source said.”

8.The “Dawn” added: “There are few takers for the Pakistani explanation in the US and many describe the delay as tactical. Besides, Pakistan had in June initiated efforts to secure a place for the Haqqanis in post-war Afghanistan by working out a rapprochement between the group and the Karzai government. US opposition to the initiative halted it. Sources suggest that Pakistan would make fresh moves to discuss peace with the Haqqanis, in the context of the overall reconciliation plan, during Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s current visit to Pakistan. The pattern of the attacks this month shows that the primary target is the Haqqani network, even though his host Hafiz Gul Bahadar and foreign militants of Al Qaeda have also been targeted.”

9.It further said: “The strikes this month have predominantly been in Miramshah sub-division, where the Haqqani network’s headquarters are based and where the group carries out its financial dealings, acquisition of weapons and strategic planning. Five of the attacks occurred in Datakhel tehsil, which is home to Gul Bahadar’s clan Uthmanzai Wazir. Dandi Derpakhel, the scene of another attack in Miramshah, is where members of Jalaluddin Haqqani’s family live. Gul Bahadar, who leads the other major militant grouping in North Waziristan, is more than a host for the Haqqanis. He not only provides them with the tribal support the Haqqanis lack, but also gives them passage to the border. The only attack this month outside Miramshah was in Shawal, where foreign fighters loyal to Al Qaeda have sanctuaries.”

10.The “Dawn” added: “The US, while targeting the Haqqanis, is pursuing the ‘hammer and anvil approach’. Alongside the spike in the drone attacks, US Special Forces have launched an intense operation against the group in eastern Afghanistan, killing a number of its ‘commanders’. The Haqqani network has been the focus of US action for the past two years. However, after the Dec 2009 suicide attack on the Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, a key facility of the CIA, the network again came under renewed focus. In this unprecedented intense bombardment by drones, military officials see a shift in US policy in Afghanistan from counter-insurgency to counter-terrorism.” (18-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

CALL TO US MUSLIMS TO RETALIATE

2010-09-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO.677

B.RAMAN

Terry Jones, the US pastor, who had threatened to organize a campaign to burn the Holy Koran starting from the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US, has since given up his plans. No Koran-burning incident took place anywhere in the world on the 9/11 anniversary.

2. Following the withdrawal of his threat, there have been no reports of an escalation of violent incidents in Afghanistan and protest demonstrations in Pakistan and other Muslim countries over his threat.

3. Normally, the Muslim anger over the pastor’s threat should subside in the wake of his withdrawal of the threat. However, attempts are being made by Muslim radical elements to keep the anger, particularly against the US, sustained even after the withdrawal of the threat by the pastor. They are trying to project the very fact that the pastor held out such a threat as an act of blasphemy and as an affront to Islam and calling for acts of retaliation by American Muslims.

4. Addressing an Eid prayer meeting in a Somali mosque on September 10,2010,Moalin Hashi, a senior Islamist cleric from the Hezbul Islam which is fighting against the Somali Government, is reported to have said: "These days senior infidels have been threatening to burn the holy Quran to mark the anniversary of the 9/11 incident, so we call on all Muslims in particular American Muslims to act against the pastor, to take tough action against the pastor."

5.After the prayer meeting, he is reported to have told local journalists as follows: "The wars going on in the world today are religious in nature but some think it is political but we can say it is religious considering what the pastors are saying and that they want to burn the Quran and that those before them used to insult our Prophet, so we want Muslims everywhere to rise up." ( 12-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MY THOUGHTS ON 9/11

2010-09-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 676

B.RAMAN

India took 19 years to prevail over the Naga and Mizo insurgents, 14 years over the Khalistani terrorists in Punjab and about 10 years plus over Al Ummah of Tamil Nadu. It has been fighting against left-wing extremists in different incarnations for nearly 40 years with no end in sight, against different terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) for 21 years and against indigenous and Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorist organizations in hinterland India outside J&K for 17 years.

2. The UK took about 35 years to prevail over terrorism in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka 26 years to vanquish the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

3. Israel has been fighting against West Asian terrorist groups for 43 years and the US against Al Qaeda for 12 years plus and against the Taliban for nine years. The Russians have been fighting against the Chechens for 15 years. Pakistan has been fighting against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) for three years now.

4. As I have been repeatedly saying, once terrorism or insurgency makes its appearance it takes years to prevail over it. One should not, therefore, be surprised that the end of the fighting against Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban is not yet in sight even nine years after the beginning of the sustained campaign against them under the US leadership in the Af-Pak region after the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US Homeland. In my assessment, it will take at least another eight to10 years for the international community to prevail over Al Qaeda and tame the Afghan Taliban.

5.The US-led campaign against the Al Qaeda brand of terrorism has had many tactical successes in eliminating a large number of its important leaders, in preventing many planned acts of terrorism and in thwarting an accretion in their capacity. It has kept Al Qaeda on the run to escape from the unrelenting drone ( unmanned planes) strikes in North and South Waziristan in Pakistan. It has prevented Al Qaeda and its affiliates from disrupting maritime trade, from threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction material and from turning the Internet into a weapon of mass disruption. These successes have come as a result of constant refining of the physical security techniques, US investments and innovations in the use of science and technology against global terrorism and making counter-terrorism an exercise in global partnership.

6. However, despite these tactical successes, Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations have maintained a capability for repeatedly taking the international community by surprise as seen since 9/11 in Bali, Mombasa, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid, London, Sharm-el-Sheikh, Jakarta, twice in Mumbai and Islamabad. Al Qaeda has become a two-headed monster--- an insurgent organizations which seeks to overthrow Governments in Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iraq, Algeria and Indonesia and a ruthless terrorist organization which seeks to keep the non-Muslim world bleeding.

7.It continues to pose a joint threat to the Islamic as well as non-Islamic countries. Unless the Islamic and non-Islamic countries join hands in countering it, a strategic neutralization of Al Qaeda will remain a distant goal. There is unfortunately an ambivalence in the attitude of the Islamic world to Al Qaeda. They want to protect themselves against it by whatever means possible, but are reluctant to co-operate sincerely with the non-Islamic world in neutralizing it. Al Qaeda is dangerous for the stability of the Islamic world, but its activities against the non-Islamic world are understandable. That seems to be their attitude, which could prove suicidal.

8.How to prevail over Al Qaeda and its affiliates-----with the co-operation of the Islamic world, if possible, and without it if the worst comes to the worst? That is the question facing all of us whether in India, the US or the rest of the world suffering the global jihadi depredations. In this endeavour, our primary aim should be the neutralization of Al Qaeda. Its neutralization will not eliminate global jihadi terrorism. It could make it less virulent and hopefully more manageable.

9. The recent indicators of the resurgence of Al Qaeda and its allied elements in Iraq show that the international community still does not have an answer as to how to deal effectively with global jihadi terrorism---- which has had a large geographical spread with the Af-Pak region, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa serving as its epi-centres. Unless there is a co-ordinated fight against the terrorists operating from all these areas, we will be fighting and fighting endlessly.

10. Al Qaeda has not only had a geographic spread. It has also had an ethnic spread by exploiting the feelings of Islamic solidarity and the victim complex of the Muslims of the world. By projecting the counter-terrorism campaigns of different countries as a war against Islam and not a fight against terrorism, it has been able to draw the support of Muslims belonging to different ethnic groups and of different nationalities. The international community has not been able to use effectively its soft power to convince the Muslim communities in different countries-----particularly the Muslim youth---- that it has been waging a counter-terrorism and not a counter-Islam campaign.

11. The over-focus on the use of hard power---- the heavily armed security forces and the civilian security agencies --- and the inability to use soft power to counter the ideological campaign of Al Qaeda, the Talibans and other allied organizations have resulted in a situation in which the word and example of the jihadists have a greater appeal in the Islamic world than the word and example of the States trying vainly till now to counter the terrorists.

12. The international community has not been able to isolate Al Qaeda and expose its pernicious ideology as likely to be detrimental to the interests of the Muslims themselves. The result: more and more jihadi organizations are joining the bandwagon of Al Qaeda and placing their cadres----many of them more volunteers to serve the perceived Islamic cause than recruits to act as Al Qaeda’s cannon-fodder---- at its disposal for being used in its fight against so-called infidels and apostates.

13. The fight against Al Qaeda and its associates has come to be seen as a war of attrition and not simultaneously as a campaign of decontamination too. The objectives of the war of attrition are the neutralization of the leadership, stopping the flow of funds and destroying their capabilities. These objectives are important, but they alone are not sufficient. Simultaneously, there has to be an intelligently waged decontamination campaign against pernicious ideas that seek to drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims.

14. In this decontamination campaign, elements of soft power such as the radio, the TV, the print media and the Internet are important. This campaign has to be waged with the help of Muslims of different ethnic groups and different nationalities. The fight against Al Qaeda and the Talibans cannot be won unless Muslims---particularly the youth---are persuaded to play a leading role in it.

15. The Muslim youth cannot be weaned away from the attraction of Al Qaeda unless and until its sense of anger over what it perceives as the injustices being committed against the Muslim community are taken note of and addressed where legitimate and possible. Closing our eyes and ears to their anger is proving counter-productive.

16. Anger is nothing unusual. It has always been there, but in the past the anger was due to feelings of poverty and deprivation and social discrimination. Now, the anger is increasingly due to the counter-terrorism methods adopted after 9/11----- profiling, special checks of Muslims, disproportionate use of force, air strikes in populated areas etc . There is a perception encouraged and exploited by Al Qaeda and its affiliates that Islam and Muslims as a religious group are targeted in the name of counter-terrorism. The feeling that what is being waged is not a counter-terrorism, but a counter-Islam campaign is spreading. Unwise measures such as banning the wearing of burqa by Muslim girls attending schools in countries such as France, not permitting the construction of minarets in some countries are strengthening this feeling.

17. How to convince the Muslim youth that we are seeking to counter terrorism and not Islam? That is a question which needs the serious attention of policy-makers and non-governmental experts.

18.In the months after 9/11, there was a recognition that the counter-terrorism campaign must be holistic paying equal attention to security measures and to rising the level of education and economic well-being of Muslims. Measures for reforming the madrasas and for making modern education easily affordable for Muslims received considerable attention.

19.Counter-terrorism as being waged today is no longer holistic. The need for the reform of the madrasas is no longer emphasized. Spread of modern education is receiving less attention and less funding than improving the communications infrastructure in areas affected by terrorism. Just because many of the cadres of Al Qaeda and its affiliates come from an affluent and educated background such measures are no longer receiving the required attention.

20.The time has come for us to go back to comprehensive counter-terrorism. ( 11-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

USE OF SRI LANKA BY LET FOR OPERATIONS AGAINST INDIA

2010-09-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 675

B.RAMAN

On September 7,2010, the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra Police arrested Mirza Himayat Baig,who allegedly is the head of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Maharashtra, on a charge of masterminding the explosion at the German Bakery in Pune on February 13 last. According to the ATS, Shaikh Lalbaba Mohammed Hussain alias Bilal of Nashik was one of his accomplices.

2. Quoting Mr. Rakesh Maria, the head of the ATS, “The Hindu” of Chennai reported as follows on September 10:”Himayat Beg received one-to-one training in bomb-making in Colombo in 2008 from an absconding LET operative…Baig was called to Colombo by Fayyaz Qazi, a wanted LET operative, in March 2008. Accordingly, he traveled from Aurangabad (in Maharashtra) to Hyderabad and then to Chennai. From Chennai, he flew to Colombo. He was trained in Colombo for 15 days by Qazi himself and another operative whom Baig didn’t know. He was also trained on how to communicate with them. After he returned from Colombo, he was sent Rs.2.5 lakhs for changing his identity.”

3. “ The Hindu” also said in its report: “ Amid speculation about the choice of Colombo as a centre for training, Mr.Maria said the Sri Lankan city was chosen only as a meeting point and there was no other significance to it. Ruling out the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or any other connection, he said: “There seems to be only two reasons for choosing Colombo—the access to the country is easy as there is a visa on arrival facility.”

4. In its report, the Press Trust of India has described Fayyaz Qazi as an activist of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who was wanted in connection with a case of 2006 involving the recovery of some arms in Aurangabad.

5.The use of Sri Lanka as a meeting point by the LET had earlier once come to notice. In December 2002, the Tamil Nadu Police claimed to have unearthed a new organisation, apparently inspired and controlled by jihadi elements in Saudi Arabia, called the Muslim Defence Force (MDF). Published reports about the Tamil Nadu Police's detection indicated as follows:
* One Abu Hamsa, alias Abdul Bari, an Indian Muslim living in Saudi Arabia and associated with the LET, and one Abu Omar, a Pakistani Muslim working there, had together formed the MDF after the Gujarat riots. They had also met a Muslim leader from Tamil Nadu who had gone to Saudi Arabia on haj pilgrimage.
* On his return to Tamil Nadu, this leader held a clandestine meeting at Tenkasi in Tiruvelveli district, which was attended by about 30 Muslims. At this meeting, plans for organising MDF activities in India were discussed.
* Subsequently, two of those, who had attended the Tenkasi meeting, went to Sri Lanka (the Eastern Province?), where they were to have another meeting with Abu Hamsa, but he did not turn up from Saudi Arabia. They, therefore, returned to Tamil Nadu without meeting him.
* Abu Hamsa alias Abdul Bari was wanted in connection with an explosion in Andhra Pradesh. He had given instructions to his contacts in Tamil Nadu to organise the activities of the MDF and also to float another organisation called New Vision to propagate Islam amongst the so-called backward classes of the Hindu community and recruit them for jihad.
* The associates of Abu Hamsa in Tamil Nadu were instructed to form an elite force to establish hide-outs and protect jihadi terrorists visiting Tamil Nadu and to recruit youth for training in jihad at an undisclosed destination in the Gulf.
* Amongst those arrested by the Tamil Nadu police during their investigation into the activities of the MDF was Noohu Thambi Hamid Bakri, described as a suspected sympathiser of the LET. He was the principal of the Ayesha Siddique Arabic College for Women at Kayalpattinam and also the President of the All-India Tauhid Jamath Federation. He also used to be associated with an organisation called the Kayal Islamic Defence Force, which is now believed to be dormant.
* It was Hamid Bakri, accompanied by one Zakkaria, who had met Abu Hamsa in Saudi Arabia and subsequently gone to Sri Lanka for another meeting, which did not materialise. In November, 2002, Zakkaria was allegedly in receipt of Rs.1,50,000 from Abu Hamsa in Saudi Arabia through hawala.

6.In my article of September 4,2007, titled JIHADI TERRORISM IN SOUTH INDIA: EXTERNAL MOTIVATORS -INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO. 271 available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers24/paper2356.html , I had written as follows: “ It should be evident that for some years now there have been indicators of the cladestine creation of a jihadi web in Mumbai, south India and possibly in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, with the SIMI and the LET playing an active role in this matter, either in tandem or separately of each other. It is also evident that much of the inspiration and financial support for this came from Indian and Pakistani jihadi activists in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Important breakthroughs in connection with identifying the various strands of this web had been made by the police of Mumbai, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but no attempt would appear to have been made for a co-ordinated effort to investigate and neutralise this web.” (10-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

BURNING OF HOLY KORAN COULD ADD TO HOME-GROWN TERRORISM IN US

2010-09-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

President Barack Obama, Gen.David Petraeus, the US Commander in Afghanistan, and other American leaders have rightly condemned the proposed burning of the Holy Koran by Pastor Terry Jones, who leads a congregation of about 50 followers in the city of Gainesville, Florida, on 9/11 coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US homeland.

2. There is still considerable anger in sizable sections of the US population over the 9/11 terrorist strikes by Al Qaeda and over the subsequent terrorist attacks on US citizens and troops in the Af-Pak region. There have also been attempts and thwarted attempts to indulge in acts of terrorism in the US itself, the latest being the unsuccessful attempt to blow up an American plane over Detroit on Christmas Day last year and in Time Square in New York on May 1 last.

3. The anti-US activities of the Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki , a US citizen of Yemeni origin, who has been described as a made-in-the-US bin Laden, have added to the concerns of Americans and their sense of unease and discomfort in their relations with Muslims. Al-Awlaki's sermons, while he was still in the US, were allegedly attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. He reportedly met secretly with at least two of the hijackers in San Diego, and one hijacker moved from there to Falls Church, Virginia, as al-Awlaki moved. His sermons were also allegedly attended by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist in the US Army, who killed 13 persons in a shooting incident on November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood— an important military base located just outside Killeen, Texas. The "Christmas Day bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had allegedly met al-Awlaki during his training by Al Qaeda in Yemen. In March 2010, al Awlaki said in a videotape reportedly delivered to CNN that jihad against the US was obligatory for all Muslims.

4. The US Homeland has been targeted not only by Al Qaeda, but also by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which is believed to have had a hand in the conspiracy to carry out the unsuccessful terrorist strike in New York in May last. It has threatened more terrorist strikes in the US Homeland.

5. One cannot, therefore, blame large sections of the US population if their distrust of the Muslims remains high. This distrust---and the resulting resentment---has been further aggravated by the ill-advised attempts to construct near Ground Zero in New York what has been called the Cordoba House project --- a 15-story community center that would include a performance-art center, gym, swimming pool, and a mosque. Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, a Muslim cleric, who inspired the project, has projected it as intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims.

6. How insensitive and uncaring Muslims can be to the feelings of others not belonging to their religion is evident from the way they are trying to go ahead with the project unmindful of the protests against it and the concerns over its implications for peace and harmony in the US.

7. For large sections of Muslims---not only in the US, but also in the rest of the world---their feelings and sensitivities have to have primacy over those of others. They have a right to feel hurt and concerned, but not others.

8. The self-centred attitude of the Muslims and their unwillingness to take note of the sensitivities of others have created a feeling of revulsion against their community all over the world. Some express it openly. Many don’t.

9. Pastor Terry Jones’ threat to burn a copy of the Holy Koran is a reflection of this revulsion and the anger against the Muslims. No right-thinking person and no Government can support his plans. It could not only act as a red rag to the Al Qaeda/Taliban bulls and result in more terrorist attacks on US nationals and troops in the Af-Pak region, but could also drive more US Muslims into the arms of these organizations and result in an aggravation of the threat of home-grown terrorism in the US.

10. The US Government should find ways of stopping his threatened act by persuasion or, if necessary, by invoking the law. At the same time, it is important to stop the Cordoba House project too, which would definitely add salt to the wounds of hundreds of thousands of non-Muslim Americans. The attempt of the Muslim sponsors of this project to project it as an initiative to heal the wounds and foster Muslim-non-Muslim harmony will not carry conviction. It will be seen as one more attempt by the Muslims to flaunt their right to do what they want unmindful of the feelings and sensitivities of others. (8-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ANOTHER DEBATE ON " SAFFRON TERROR" BY BARKHA DUTT

2010-09-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

There was another debate on the issue of "Saffron Terror" organised by Ms.Barkha Dutt on NDTV under the "We The People" programme on the evening of September 5. I liked the format of the programme, which was different from the usual format of the "We the People" programmes on Sunday. The number of patrticipants was less and the debate was well-focussed. It was more like a brain-storming on the subject than a no-holds barred debating contest.

2. I wanted to record the following observations with reference to some of the points made during the discussions. I have made these observations many times before in my books and articles and during my participation in seminars. Despite that, I thought it was worth repeating them since there seems to be a lot of inadequate knowledge and appreciation of them:

* Firstly, During the 1980s, many Muslims from all over the world were motivated by the intelligence agencies of the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to go to Afghanistan and wage a jihad against the Soviet troops there. They could not succeed in motivating members of the Indian Muslim community outside Jammu & Kashmir to go to Afghanistan and join the anti-Soviet jihad.
* Secondly, a few Indian Muslims from outside J&K motivated by the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan did go to Pakistan for being trained in camps run by the JEI with funding by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The JEI and the ISI instructed them to wage a jihad against the Government of India and to operate jointly with the Khalistanis. On their return to India, they failed to motivate the members of the Indian Muslim community to start a jihad. Their appeals for action were spurned by the Indian Muslim community in hinterland India.
* Thirdly, according to the then President Najibullah of Afghanistan, many angry Kashmiris did go to Pakistan for training in the camps set up by the JEI. From there, they were taken to Afghanistan for gaining experience in waging a jihad. Some of these motivated Kashmiris became the initial hard core of the Hizbul Mujahideen and the J&K Liberation Front.
* Fourthly, while the phenomenon of the radicalisation of some sections of the Indian Muslims had started in J&K even before the demolition of the Babri Masjid, this phenomenon started in the Muslim community outside J&K in hinterland India only after the demolition. The demolition of the masjid was the initial trigger for acts of terrorism by some indigenous Muslims belonging to organisations such as the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and Al Ummah of Tamil Nadu. Many young Indian Muslims were also driven into the arms of Dawood Ibrahim. Thus, anger among some sections of young Indian Muslims in hinterland India over the Babri Masjid demolition played an important role in the emergence of jihadi terrorism in hinterland India. This was the main motivating anger during the 1990s.Many of the major acts of terrorism during this period such as the Mumbai blasts of March 1993, the Coimbatore blasts of February 1998 and other incidents such as explosions in trains were attributable to the anger caused by the Babri Masjid demolition.
* Fifthly, after 9/11, not a single Indian Muslim living in India went to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda's jihad against the Americans. However, some Indian Muslims based abroad did join Al Qaeda, but this was not due to their anger against the Government of India, but due to their anger against the US for its invasion and occupation of Iraq. The jihad in Iraq against the Americans waged by Al Qaeda attracted a large number of foreign Muslims, but Indian Muslims kept away from Iraq's Al Qaeda.
* Sixthly, post-2000, the anger among sections of Indian Muslim youth in hinterland India over the demolition of the Babri Masjid started subsiding, but a new cause of anger made its appearance. This was due to the perception that the Indian criminal justice system--- the police, the lawyer community and the judiciary--- was unfair to the Muslims. This new anger had two consequences. It led to some of these Muslims helping Pakistani/Bangladeshi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM). At the same time it also led to the phenomenon of Indian Mujahideen.
* Seventhly, the phenomenon of some Hindus taking to anti-Muslim reprisal terrorism was the outcome of what is perceived by them as the soft policy of the Government of India towards Pakistan and towards those members of the Indian Muslim community who were indulging in terrorism. The anger over the allegedly soft policy made its appearance not only among some Hindu religious elements, but also among sections of the security bureaucracy belonging to the Hindu religion. The two felt attracted to each other and joned hands in starting reprisal terrorism against soft targets in the Muslim community.
* Eighthly, the emerging phenomenon of Hindu reprisal terrorism merits serious attention because of its negative implications for communal harmony and because of the emergence of a seeming alliance between some religious elements and some in the security bureaucracy. If we don't stop this, we may go the way of Pakistan.
* Ninthly,Counter-terrorism has two aspects----operational and psychological.The operational aspect relates to strengthening our preventive,investigative and intervention capabilities.The psychological aspect relates to prompt and effective action to identify and address causes for anger in any community. Equal attention should be paid to both these aspects. ( 6-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ATTACKS ON SHIAS IN PAKISTAN, A MESSAGE TO IRAN TOO

2010-09-03T18:51:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.674

B.RAMAN

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which is an affiliate of Al Qaeda, have both claimed responsibility for the murderous attacks through suicide bombers on Shia processions during the holy fasting period at Lahore on September 1, 2010, and Quetta on September 3,2010. The Shia procession in Lahore was a normal one with no political significance. The procession in Quetta was in observance of Al Quds Day on the last Friday of the fasting period. Al Quds is the name of the historic mosque in East Jerusalem, which is under Israeli control since 1967. Ever since Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, Muslims all over the world observe the last Friday of the fasting period as Al Quds Day to remind each other that Al Quds is still under the control of Israel.

2. The call for the observance of the last Friday of the fasting period as Al Quds Day was given by Ayatollah Khomeini in a message issued by him to all the Muslims of the world----Shias as well as Sunnis---in August 1979. He said in his message: " I invite Muslims all over the globe to consecrate the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan as Al-Quds Day and to proclaim the international solidarity of Muslims in support of the legitimate rights of the Muslim people of Palestine. For many years, I have been notifying the Muslims of the danger posed by the usurper Israel which today has intensified its savage attacks against the Palestinian brothers and sisters, and which, in the south of Lebanon in particular, is continually bombing Palestinian homes in the hope of crushing the Palestinian struggle. I ask all the Muslims of the world and the Muslim governments to join together to sever the hand of this usurper and its supporters. I call on all the Muslims of the world to select as Al-Quds Day the last Friday in the holy month of Ramadan - which is itself a determining period and can also be the determiner of the Palestinian people’s fate - and through a ceremony demonstrating the solidarity of Muslims world-wide, announce their support for the legitimate rights of the Muslim people. I ask God Almighty for the victory of the Muslims over the infidels."

3. Thirty-three people, mostly Shias, died in the explosions in Lahore and 55 in Quetta. Attacks on Shias are not unusual in Pakistan, but the attacks this year have been very virulent. In the past the Sunni extremists used to attack the Shias when they were highlighting their sectarian identity. On September 3, they attacked them even when they were highlighting their solidarity with all Muslims---Sunnis and Shias--- in renewing the pledge of the Islamic world not to rest till Al Quds was liberated from Israeli control.

4. Even though the TTP and the LEJ have projected the attacks on the processions as in reprisal for the murder of a Sunni cleric last year allegedly by the Shias, there is another angle to the anti-Shia attacks this year. The fasting period this year has coincided with the proclaimed end of the US military mission in Iraq. Sunni extremists have always held Iran and the Shias responsible for facilitating the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and accused them of collaborating with the US against Saddam Hussein.Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No 2 of Al Qaeda, had in the past accused Iran of stabbing the Ummah in the back by facilitating the US occupation of Iraq.

5. Al Qaeda, the TTP and the LEJ have a common objective in making Iran pay a price for its collaboration with the US in Iraq. In the Islamic world, anti-Shia feelings are the strongest in Pakistan. The loyalty of the Shias of Pakistan to Iran remains strong. In the past, the LEJ had attacked not only Shia targets, but also Iranian targets. It had killed Iranian diplomats and has allegedly been assisting the Jundullah, the Sunni organisation of Iranian Balochistan, which has been fighting against the Iranian regime.

6. The attacks on Shias observing Al Quds Day in Quetta were meant to punish not only the Shias of Pakistan, but also Iran. Generally, Iranian diplomats join Al Quds Day processions in different cities of Pakistan. One should not be surprised if there were some Iranian diplomats in the Quetta procession.

7. The international community has not taken note of the continuing siege of the Shias of the Kurram Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The Shias call Kurram the Pakistani Gaza and have been repeatedly appealing to the international community to end the siege by the Taliban. They accuse the Pakistan Army and its Chief of the Army Staff, Gen.Ashfaq Pervez Kayani of inaction while pretending to act against the two Talibans.

8. The mutual hostility of the Shias and Sunnis of Pakistan towards each other shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, it has been increasing as seen by recent anti-Shia attacks in Karachi, Lahore and Quetta. ( 4-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MY THOUGHTS ON THE MAOIST HOSTAGE-TAKING IN BIHAR

2010-09-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

The Maoists of Bihar kidnapped on August 29,2010, Sub-Inspectors Rupesh Kumar and Abhay Prasad Yadav, Bihar Military Police havildar Ehtesham Khan and BMP ASI Lucas Tete after an encounter in the Kajra police station area the same day, which left eight policemen dead. They reportedly demanded the release of eight Maoists who are in the custody of the local authorities for allegedly having been involved in Maoist acts of violence.

2.Following the alleged absence of any move by the Bihar Government to establish contact with them before the deadline indicated by them for talks on their demand expired, they claim to have killed Sub-Inspector Abhay Prasad Yadav. They have not yet provided proof of their claim, but have promised to return Yadav's dead body to the police. They have further extended the deadline till 10 AM on September 3 and threatened to kill the other hostages if their demand is not met,

3.There is considerable indignation and shock over the claimed execution of S.I. Yadav.All TV news channels are devoting considerable attention to a discussion of the development with the participation of representatives of political parties and some retired bureaucrats.Participating in a debate on CNN-IBN anchored by Shri Rajdeep Sardesai, a leading TV anchor, at 9 PM on September 2, I pointed out that the hostage-takers will be watching the debates on different TV channels and any impression of differences as to how to deal with the situation could make a difficult situation even more difficult. I stressed the importance of everyone talking in a single voice in condemning the hostage-takers. I also stressed the importance of the State Government remaining in touch with the families of the hostages in order to keep them in the picture on the evolving situation and reassure them that everything possible was being done to rescue the hostages.

4.We should not forget that the failure of the Government of the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in December 1999 to remain in touch with the families of the passengers in an Indian Airlines plane hijacked to Kandahar by some terrorists of the Pakistan-backed and Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Mujahideen led to a surge in protests from the relatives and their public and media supporters. This was one of the factors which forced the Government of Shri Vajpayee to concede the demand of the hijackers for the release of some Pakistani terrorists in the custody of the Government of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K).

5. The Indian TV coverage of the Kandahar hijacking and the Manila TV coverage of a recent hostage-taking incident involving a sacked Filipino police officer on August 23 showed how ill-advised coverage and comments by the participants in the TV discussions could prove counter -productive and lead to a tragedy. There has been considerable criticism in Manila of the TV coverage, with some experts holding it partly responsible for the tragic death of eight of the hostages, who were allegedly killed by the hostage-taker who was losing patience.

6. One has to emphasise the importance of balance in the TV discussions while the hostage-taking situation continues. It would be a good idea for the TV anchors to caution the participants in the beginning of the discussions that the situation is continuing and that they should keep in mind the strong possibility that the hostage-takers will be watching the TV discussions. Leaders of political parties too should caution their media persons deputed to participate in the debates. Retired bureaucrats participating in the debates should also remember that their comments will be closely watched and noted by the hostage-takers.

7. At this stage, when the hostage-taking continues, only some general observations would be in order:

* Firstly, it would be unwise to treat the present incident as an act of desperation of the Maoists. It is more an indicator of their ruthless determination to continue their fight against the Government with no holds barred.
* Secondly, the Maoists' calculation in exploiting the police officers captured during an encounter with the police as hostages has two objectives---to discredit the Government of Bihar in the eyes of the public and to try to drive a wedge between junior and senior police officers and between the police and the political leadership by projecting the senior officers and the political leaders as insensitive to the agony of the relatives.

8. It is important for the crisis managers of the Governments of Bihar and India to keep these factors constantly in view while planning and carrying out their strategy to deal with the situation. Any other comments of a specific nature relating to the handling of the situation would be unwise at this stage.The entire nation should make it clear that it is behind the brave attempts of the security agencies, including the Bihar Police, to rescue the hostages and that it shares the agony of the relatives of the hostages. ( 3-9-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

AL QAEDA: CANADIAN SUSPECT OF INDIAN ORIGIN

2010-08-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO 673

B.RAMAN

Under an operation code-named "Project Samosa", the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced on August 26,2010, the arrests of three alleged jihadi extremists--- all of them socially well-placed professionals. One of them is a doctor, the second is an x-ray technician in an Ottawa hospital and the third had studied electrical engineering

2. The police claimed that their arrests had thwarted possible terrorist attacks around Ottawa and against Canadian troops in Afghanistan. From the details given by the RCMP, it was evident that the arrested persons, who were under surveillance for about a year, were discussing and planning a conspiracy to indulge in terrorist attacks and had acquired some materials towards this objective, but were far away from being in a position to carry out these attacks. There was no apprehension of imminent terrorist attacks, but the evidence of the conspiracy in progress was strong enough to warrant the arrests before the conspiracy neared fruition.

3. Amongst the material recovered during the investigation were more than 50 circuit boards police believe were intended to remotely trigger detonators for improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and videos, drawings, instruction books and electronic components for IEDs. According to Canadian media reports, the conspiracy was initially detected by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), which then alerted the RCMP.

4.Mr.Raymond Boisvert, an Assistant Director in the CSIS, told a press conference: “There are certain individuals in Canada who have adopted an ideology inspired by international terrorist groups who promote heinous violence to achieve their goals. This case reiterates the serious nature of this threat, which can result in tragic consequences if left unchecked.” The police did not say whether the group had any links to Al-Qaeda, but the available details indicated a link to the Af-Pak region.

5. Two of the suspects ----- Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh, 30, and Misbahuddin Ahmed, 26, both of Ottawa, were arrested on August 25. The third, 28-year-old Khurram Syed Sher, was arrested in London, Ontario, the next day. All the three are Canadian citizens. Three non-Canadians, not located in Canada, were also allegedly part of the conspiracy ---- James Lara, Rizgar Alizadeh and Zakaria Mamosta, but they have not been arrested so far. The three arrested Canadians are to be charged with terrorism under the Criminal Code, including conspiring with the three non-Canadians mentioned above and other “persons unknown,” who have been at one time or another located in Canada, Iran, Afghanistan, Dubai and Pakistan, to facilitate “terrorist activity” between February 2008 and August 24.

6. Hiva Alizadeh , who studied electrical engineering, faces a separate charge of making or having an explosive substance in his possession with the intent to endanger life or cause serious damage. According to the police, he is a member of a group with links to the conflict in Afghanistan, and had received training in building and detonating IEDs. Mr.Boisvert said in his briefing that the CSIS is still enquiring to find out whether the three arrested Canadians were self-motivated, made-through-the-internet jihadis or whether they had been subject to external motivation.

7. Sher is a doctor who graduated from the McGill University medical school in 2005. According to the police, he had visited Pakistan in 2006 to participate in quake relief work. He had also participated in a TV reality show on a Canadian TV channel. In 2007, he and some other doctors had written to Mr.Stockwell Day, Minister for Public Safety, protesting against the treatment meted out to three Muslims arrested on security grounds.

8.Misbahuddin Ahmed, the x-ray technician in an Ottawa hospital, has been described by some media reports as of Indian origin who had grown up in Canada. It is not known to which part of India he belonged and when he migrated to Canada. According to the newspaper the "Ottawa Citizen", he had taken several weeks off from work about 16 months ago. He didn't say where he was going.When he returned to work, he was sporting a full beard. The "Citizen" has reported that Misbahuddin Ahmed and Sher used to play in an Islamic charity hockey tournament in Montreal that raised money for an organisation called the RS Foundation, which claimed to be engaged in humanitarian work in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

9. The RS Foundation, which actively raised funds in Canada for quake relief in Pakistan in 2005 and is presently collecting funds for flood relief in Pakistan, was founded by one Shujaat Wasty who is also an active member of an organisation called the South Asian Research Center (CERAS) and the United Muslims Students' Association (UMSA).

10.The Wikipedia says as follows: "The Muslim Students' Association, or Muslim Student Union, of the U.S. and Canada, also known as MSA National, is a religious organization dedicated to establishing and maintaining Islamic societies on college campuses in Canada and the United States. It serves to provide coordination and support for affiliated MSA chapters in colleges across North America. Established in 1963, the organization now has chapters in colleges across the continent, and is the precursor of the Islamic Society of North America and several other Islamic organizations.....The first MSA National chapter was formed in 1963 at the campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) by international students. The initial leadership came from Arabic-speaking members, with the Muslim Brotherhood help to establish the group. A Saudi Arabian charity, the Muslim World League, provided early funding for the group. Early goals for the movement included the promotion of "a self-definition [that] involves initially and fundamentally [an] Islamic identity" of its members, as well as an appropriate Islamic lifestyle while they were in the US.....Today, the organization is present in various forms on several campuses across the United States and Canada. In contrast to early membership, members are now frequently American-born Muslims....."

11.It adds: "Journalist Deborah Scroggins, in exploring how suspected al-Qaeda member Aafia Siddiqui became an Islamist extremist, wrote for Vogue that if Siddiqui "was drawn into terrorism, it may have been through the contacts and friendships she made in the early 1990s working for MIT's Muslim Students Association. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world's oldest and biggest Islamist movement, established the first MSAs in the country... and the movement's ideology continued to influence the MSA long after that. At MIT, several of the MSA's most active members had fallen under the spell of Abdullah Azzam, a Muslim Brother who was Osama bin Laden's mentor.... [Azzam] had established the Al Kifah Refugee Center to function as its worldwide recruiting post, propaganda office, and fund-raising center for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan... It would become the nucleus of the al-Qaeda organization."Rutgers MSA co-founder Ramzi Yousef, a cousin of Siddiqui's second husband, was convicted for helping perpetrate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of being an al-Qaeda member and who declared jihad against America in 2010, was President of the MSA at Colorado State University, from which he graduated in 1994. Ali Asad Chandia, who was president of the MSA at Montgomery College from 1998 to 1999, was convicted of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani terrorist organization, and assisting the Virginia Jihad Network, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The University of California Irvine Muslim Student Union is an affiliated chapter of MSA National, which was suspended for the 2010-2011 school year for organizing a conspiracy to disrupt Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren from speaking at a university sponsored event." ( My comment: al-Awlaki is now with Al Qaeda in Yemen)

12. Some sources allege that Wasty was known for his anti-Jewish views and used to describe the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US as a Jewish conspiracy. ( 29-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MANILA HOSTAGE-TAKING INCIDENT: WHAT DO THE PROFESSIONALS SAY

2010-08-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

The following comments of President Benigno Aquino, the Manila Police Commander and some non-governmental security experts on the way the Manila Police handled the hostage-taking crisis on August 23,2010, have been extracted from despatches of the Agence France Press (AFP) :

* President Aquino: The tragedy highlighted many flaws in the ability of Philippine security forces to handle hostage situations. "There are a lot of things (that) resulted in a tragedy. Obviously we should be improving." One of the problems was the way the crisis played out through the media, with the gunman being allowed to speak on radio and watch events live on the bus's television, giving him insights into police actions. Waiting more than 10 hours before storming the bus was the right course of action, because police believed until that point they could convince the gunman to stand down.
* Mr.Leocadio Santiago, Manila Police Commander: "We saw some obvious shortcomings in terms of capability and tactics used, or the procedure employed and we are now going to investigate this."
* Mr.John Harrison, Assistant Professor and homeland security analyst at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore:"The fact that there was essentially live video was mistake number one." There should have been a media blackout to deny the hijacker feedback on what was going on around him. Instead, he was able to follow events -- including frenzied speculation by serving and former police chiefs appearing on Philippine networks -- via the bus' internal TV.
* Mr.Dennis Wong Sing Wing, an Associate Professor of applied social studies at the City University in Hong Kong:The police operation was "really shocking" to watch as it unfolded live on TV. "I am very angry about their unprofessional performance.They are indirectly responsible for the deaths of the Hong Kong people." The policemen assigned to end the hostage-taking appeared to lack modern weapons and communication equipment, and as a result were hesitant to attack the gunman, who was armed with an M-16 assault rifle. The Police failed to calm the hostage-taker down and hear him out.
* An unnamed retired Philippine military official who wrote a counter-terrorism manual and now runs a security consultancy:The police had enough expertise and equipment to deal with such an incident, but they were not put to use. "We have everything, except the execution was poorly done." He was critical of the stop-go negotiations and "tentative" assault launched after gunshots rang out from inside the bus, adding that the police should have disabled the TV monitor early on."Contact (by negotiators) should have been constant. It's the talking that does a lot.When you order an assault, it has to be an assault. There is no such thing as a tentative assault.If 10 policemen have to die, they have to die in that assault." Many of the policemen on the scene, some of them seen crouching without any body armour behind patrol cars, did not appear to be fully trained Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) personnel. "They just put helmets on certain people."
* Trial judge Jaime Santiago, a former SWAT officer:The police failed to impose crowd control in the hostage site and panicked after hearing gunshots from the bus. "They should have put a tactical force, SWAT snipers and an assault team on standby during the negotiation so that if the hostage-taker started harming people, they would act."
* Mr.Lionel de Souza, a former officer of Singapore's Criminal Investigation Department, recalled a similar hijacking of a bus in Singapore.
"I think that was in 1978 in Seng Poh Road in Tiong Bahru. The police were chasing some robbers and they jumped onto an SBS bus which was (carrying) passengers. (The robbers) sort of held them hostage. At that time, hostage negotiation was not well known. Nevertheless, the retired assistant commissioner - Tan Kah Wan - I think he did a good job. There was no loss of lives but there was the arrest of the hostage takers." In the Manila hostage tragedy, one image that left many doubting was the action of armed police who had crept up around the bus."They started smashing the windows with the sledgehammer, trying to wrench open the door with a rope. That by itself is a provocation to the criminal, and because he is already agitated, adding more pressure to his already troubled mind would entail him to sort of do things that a person with a proper frame of mind would not do. He may be a decorated police officer, he may know the law, but these tensions were building within him." Negotiations could have gone on longer as it was important to wear down the hijacker in such a crisis. Singapore is well-poised to handle a similar crisis, with hostage negotiators being well-trained. (24-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt, of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MUNICH--1972; MUMBAI--26/11 AND MANILA--23/8

2010-08-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

The facts of the tragedy in Manila on August 23,2010, which led to the death of eight tourists from Hong Kong due to the irrational behaviour of a dismissed Manila police officer as reported by the Agence France Presse (AFP) are as follows: Eight Hong Kong tourists were killed when police stormed a bus that had been commandeered 12 hours earlier by a disgraced ex-police officer demanding he get his job back. Seven other Hong Kong tourists were injured. One of them is still in a critical condition more than 12 hours after the bloody rescue attempt while the others sustained only slight injuries.The ordeal began when the suspect, armed with an M-16 assault rifle and dressed in combat pants, hijacked the bus with 25 people aboard in Manila's tourist district. He later freed seven Hong Kong tourists and two Filipinos. But negotiations broke down after nightfall when the gunman, former senior police inspector Rolando Mendoza, began shooting and commandos were forced to storm the bus, firing dozens of bullets of their own into the vehicle. The Filipino driver escaped just before the shooting.

2. The incident was telecast live by many TV channels of the world. We were thus able to see what was happening.Certain important points about the incident need to be underlined:

* First, it was not an act of terrorism. It was a criminal act committed by a recently dismissed police officer who had been rendered irrational by the dismissal. He was acting alone.
* Second, his grievances were purely personal. He just wanted his job back.
* Third, he took his victims hostage in a bus which was halted in the middle of the road.He was in a position to see all that was happening around the bus through the bus windows. As a result, the advantage of stealth in operational planning and execution was denied to the police. A similar thing happened during the Munich massacre of 1972 by some Palestinian terrorists and during the 26/11 terrorist strike in Mumbai. In Munich and Mumbai, the live telecasting of the security movements by TV channels enabled the hostage-takers to see what the police and other security agencies were doing. In Manila, his location inside a bus enabled the hostage-taker to see what was happening around him. The most important requisite in an operation against hostage-taking is operational stealth. This requirement was denied to the police and other security agencies in Munich, Mumbai and Manila by circumstances beyond their control.As a result, all these three incidents resulted in tragedies of various proportions.
* Four, the fact that the hostage-taker was writing out his demands on pieces of paper and pasting them on the windows for the police outside to read indicates that the communication set of the bus driver with his control station or the mobile hand-sets of the police and the hostage-taker were not being used throghout the incident. It is not known why. When the negotiators communicate with a hostage-taker orally it has a better impact than when they communicate with written notes. Persuasion is possible. It was reported that the brother of the hostage-taker and other relatives did try to persuade him----unsuccessfully--- to surrender. One does not know how they did so--- orally throgh mobile handsets or in writing,.
* Five, it has been reported that as a result of the negotiations, the hostage-taker did release nine passengers because of their age and health. This might have enabled the police to make a forcible entry into the bus by taking advantage of the opening of the door to allow these persons come out. Why they could not use this opportunity? It is not clear.
* Six, the bus was so air tight that the police had difficulty in making an opening through a sledge-hammer. After plane hijackings started, aircraft are so designed as to enable forcible and stealth entry by the special intervention forces. Buses are not so designed.The police have no way of making a forcible entry except by breaking the glasses in the full view of the hostage-taker.
* Seven, the police apparently prolonged the negotiations till nighfall hoping this would make some stealth movement possible. But, unforunately, the bus under the control of the hostage-taker was in a brightly-lit area of Manila and the police had not got the electricity to that area switched off before launching their attack on the bus.
* Eight, a basic principle in dealing with hostage-taking situations is, do not concede the demand of the hostage-taker. This could create more such incidents. In this case, some flexibility in the adherence to this principle was called for. The police could have tactically conceded the demand of the hostage-taker by agreeing to reinstate him and then sacked him again after he had released the passengers. A rigid adherence to the principle was unwise. Why the police did not consider this alternative?

3. The Filipino authorities would be making a detailed enquiry into the deficiencies, if any, in the handling of the situation and drawing lessons for the future. To prevent such incidents during the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, the Government of India should immediately send a joint team consisting of senior officers of the Intelligence Bureau, the Research & Analysis Wing, the National Security Guards and the Delhi Police to Manila for detailed discussions with their Filipino counterparts so that the lessons drawn by them could be incorporated into the security planning for the Delhi games. One can envisage two kinds of situations:

* Firstly, hijacking a normal bus or vehicle used by the public. It will be difficult to make anti-hijacking changes in them.
* Secondly, hijacking of buses used by the participants in the Games. Would it be possible at this late stage to provide them with remote control mrchanism for opening the doors from outside?

4. The Chinese authorities, who would be organising the Asian Games in November,2010, should also draw appropriate lessons and incorporate them in their security planning. We should also have an exchange of notes with the Chinese security agencies on how to prevent such incidents during the Commonwealth and Asian Games. (24-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

INDIAN MUSLIMS IN AL QAEDA'S SOMALI AFFILIATE?

2010-08-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.672

B.RAMAN

According to Garowe Online, a Somali news web site, some members of Al-Shabaab, the Somali associate of Al Qaeda, were killed during an accidental explosion on August 20,2010, in a house in the Hawl-Wadaag district of Mogadishu, where members of Al-Shabaab were preparing two explosive-laden vehicles for use as car bombs. The news web site claimed that the house belonged to Sheikh Mukhtar Robow Abu Mansoor, the deputy leader of Al-Shabaab.It was not clear whether he was present in the house at the time of the explosion and, if so, what happened to him. It did not give details of those killed except to say that there were both foreigners and Somalis.

2. Citing “security sources”, the local Ministry of Information and Radio Mogadishu reported on August 21 that at least 10 persons were killed in the accidental explosion-----three Pakistanis, two Indians, one Afghan, one Algerian, and two Somalis including a cleric who was in charge of praying for suicide bombers before they were dispatched. They did not indicate the nationality of the 10th person.Nor did they identify the Indians and Pakistanis killed or say as to how the security sources established that they were Indians and Pakistanis. Al- Shabaab has not so far admitted that the killed persons belonged to it. The local authorities claim to have established that the cleric killed in the explosion was Awais Abu Yusuf, a local Imam.

3.The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) of Pakistan has been quite active in Somalia since the early 1990s. Despite a local ban on its activities, persons recruited by it in Pakistan have been visiting Somalia for religious preaching. The Somali authorities suspected that the TJ was in touch with local Wahabi/fundamentalist elements and that Pakistani jihadi organizations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul—Mujahideen (HUM) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) were active in the local Muslim community under the cover of TJ volunteers. Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the JEM, had spent some months in Somalia in the 1990s when he was a member of the HUM. Al-Shabaab is believed to have a small component of Pakistani volunteers.

4. No Indian Muslim component of the organization had come to notice in the past. Till 2003, there were about 200 Bohra Muslims from India working in Somalia in the business of textiles dyeing. Many of them have since re-settled in Mombasa in Kenya. They had not come to notice for any association with extremist elements. If it is established that Al-Shabaab has a component of Indian origin, its members are likely to have been recruited either from the Indian Muslim diaspora in East Africa or the UK. In the past, there were instances of individual Indian Muslims from the diaspora in the UK either gravitating towards Al Qaeda or its associates or being influenced by its ideology. So far, there has been no confirmed instance of India-based Muslims joining Al Qaeda or pro-Al Qaeda organizations such as Al-Shabaab.

5. Indian intelligence and investigative agencies should seek more information from the local authorities in Mogadishu. This may please be read in continuation of my article dated July 13,2010, titled "KAMPALA BLASTS: Indian Casualties?" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers40%5Cpaper3922.html and article of December 4,2009, titled "The Somali Front of the Global Jihad" available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers36/paper3534.html. (23-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

PAK FLOODS: IMPACT ON FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM

2010-08-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.671

B.RAMAN

It has been difficult to estimate the damage suffered by Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the various Punjabi terrorist organizations as a result of the floods in Pakistan. They must have suffered damages because many of their training camps were located in areas which are under water. North Waziristan, where the bases of Al Qaeda, the TTP, the Haqqani network, the 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) are located is one of the affected areas in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

2.One could see that the Afghan Taliban, which operates from the Quetta area of Balochistan, has not been much affected. It has maintained its operations in Afghanistan even after the deluge. The operational difficulties of the NATO forces in Afghanistan could increase because the destruction of many roads and bridges could slow down the movement of logistic supplies to the NATO forces from the Karachi port.

3.The fact that even in the midst of the floods, the Pakistan Army has maintained a high level of air activity against the TTP in the Orakzai and Khurram Agencies of the FATA in retaliation for attacks by the TTP indicates that the terrorists continue to be active in these two agencies despite the floods. According to the Associated Press of Pakistan ( August 20 ), at least seven terrorists were killed and seven others injured when the security forces retaliated after an attack on a security checkpost in the Tapoo area of the Orakzai Agency in which one officer of the security forces was killed and another injured. The Army carried out an air strike on the hideouts of terrorists in the Wasti Kurram and Chinarak areas of the Kurram Agency. The floods have not affected the operations of the Drones (pilotless strike planes) of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency. The success rate could, however, come down since the floods are likely to affect the movements of human agents and their ability to communicate with their handling officers.

4.The Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) have also joined the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) in the collection of funds for flood relief and in organizing relief. They have extended their fund collection activities to all big cities, including Karachi. Taking note of international concerns over the activities of these organizations, which are all banned in the US and under decisions of the anti-terrorism monitoring committee of the UN Security Council, Mr.Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, has ostensibly ordered the police and the security agencies to stop their activities, but his orders are not being complied with. Some of the large flow of funds for flood relief from Wahabi charity organisations in Saudi Arabia could go to these organisations and, ultimately, through them to Al Qaeda.

5.As a result of the surge in the popularity of the JUD and the LET because of their undoubtedly energetic work in the flood-affected areas, the outcome of the trial against the seven members of the LET for their participation in the conspiracy to carry out the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai has become uncertain. The sympathy of not only the public, but also sections of the judiciary will be with these organizations.

6.Will the preoccupation of these organizations with flood relief work come in the way of their operations in India? Unlikely. The similar preoccupation of these organizations with quake relief work in 2005 and the severe fatalities and damages suffered by the JUD and the LET as a result of the quake in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) and by the JEM in the Manshera area of Khyber Pakhtunkwa did not affect their ability to plan and carry out terrorist strikes in India as was seen by the suburban train explosions in Mumbai in July 2006.

7.The floods have not dampened the wave of inter-ethnic and Shia-Sunni sectarian violence that has been intermittently sweeping across Karachi since the beginning of this year. On August 19, an Awami National Party (ANP) office bearer, Ubaidullah Yousufzai, was gunned down along with a colleague near the Quaid-e-Azam International Airport. In the subsequent clashes between Mohajirs of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and Pashtuns of the ANP, 11 people were shot dead and 16 others injured. Many trucks were set on fire, including some belonging to companies engaged by the NATO to move logistic supplies to the NATO forces in Afghanistan from the Karachi port.

8.Non-Governmental organizations have been active in flood relief --- even in Khyber Pakhtunkwa--- as they were in quake relief in 2005. These organizations come under two categories---- organizations with a religious background and those with a secular background. Some Christian organizations are already active such as the World Vision and the Church World Service. Many western Christian organizations, which participated in quake relief work in Haiti, had employed media managers to publicise their contribution. In Pakistan, attempts are being made to project their assistance to the flood victims as “Christian assistance”. This is unwise and could be suicidal. Their activities are likely to be misinterpreted as an attempt to exploit the human tragedy for their conversion work. Recently, there was a massacre of about 10 Western humanitarian workers in Afghanistan by the Afghan Taliban which falsely projected them as missionaries trying to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity.

9.There is palpable concern among Western secular organizations engaged in flood relief regarding the security of their volunteers. This is reflected from the queries I have been getting for my assessment of the likely risks to their volunteers in Pakistan.

10.According to the Reuters news agency, the TTP has urged the Pakistan Government to reject Western aid for victims of the floods, saying it would only be siphoned off by corrupt officials. Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban have not yet reacted to the floods and to the flow of Western assistance. The concentration of the US aid efforts in the Swat Valley of Khyber Pakhtunkwa could cause concern to these organizations. (21-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

CHINA DOES NOT OPPOSE UN ACTION AGAINST HUJI

2010-08-17T00:34:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO 670
B.RAMAN

"According to local Police sources, the TTP ( Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) leadership also suspects Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Amir of the Pakistan branch of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who had reportedly ingratiated himself with Baitullah (Mehsud) and was collaborating with him. Last week, the Islamabad Police reported that he was found to be undergoing treatment in an Islamabad hospital for an injury suspected to have been sustained in a Drone attack and has been taken into custody. This is the fifth or sixth time Qari Saifullah has been taken into custody for questioning. Previously, he was detained for questioning in connection with a coup plot against Benazir Bhutto in 1995, the two attempts to murder Pervez Musharraf in December,2003, the attack on Benazir Bhutto in Karachi in October, 2007, and the murder of the Surgeon General of the Pakistan Army early last year. Every time he managed to come out unscathed.

"The HUJI was not banned by Musharraf as a terrorist organisation either in his notification of January 2002 or in his notification of November, 2003. No action has been taken against it by the present Government either. While the US has declared the Bangladesh branch of the HUJI as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, it has not made a similar declaration against the HUJI of Pakistan. It has not declared Saifullah as a terrorist, No action has been taken by the US to move for the declaration of the HUJI of Pakistan as a terrorist organisation by the anti-terrorism committee of the UN Security Council. All actions taken so far either by the US or the committee of the UNSC, which generally acts at the US initiative, have been against the Bangladesh branch. It is suspected that the US and Pakistani intelligence agencies have been going out of their way to protect the HUJI of Pakistan and Saifullah. Is he a double agent working for the ISI against the TTP and for the TTP against the Pakistan Army? That is the question which is reported to be troubling the new leadership of the TTP."

-----------Extract from my article of August 23,2009, titled "The Mobile Jihadi & The Double Jihadi" at
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers34%5Cpaper3370.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On January 14, 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) filed before Judge Harry D.Leinenweber of the Northern District Court of Eastern Illinois Division a charge-sheet (indictment) relating to the role of David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana of the Chicago cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in the Mumbai terrorist strikes of 26/11 of 2008 and in a planned terrorist attack on the office of a Danish newspaper in Denmark, which had published cartoons of the Holy Prophet in 2005.

2. The charge sheet projected the Mumbai attacks as a joint operation of the LET and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) involving, among others, four members of the LET and Major (retd) Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed alias Pasha, who acted as an intermediary between Headley and Rana on the one side and the Waziristan-based Ilyas Kashmiri, the head of the 313 Brigade of the HUJI on the other.

3.The charge-sheet also referred to a “Person A”, a resident of Pakistan", "who participated in planning and funding attacks carried out by the LET." It did not describe him as a member of the LET. By going through the charge-sheet, one could infer that Person A was most probably Major (retd) Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed alias Pasha. It was he who allegedly gave US $ 25,000 to Headley in July 2006 for his expenses in India, another sum of US $ 2000 in Indian rupees in September 2007 and a third amount of US $ 1500 in Indian rupees in June 2008.

4.While no Pakistani resident was cited as a co-accused in connection with the Mumbai attacks, Ilyas Kashmiri and Major Abdur Rehman were cited as co-accused in connection with the planned terrorist attack on the Danish newspaper office. The FBI had thus reserved to itself the option of demanding that Pakistan should arrest and extradite them to the US for trial. According to the charge-sheet, the Denmark attack was also envisaged as a joint LET-HUJI (313 Brigade) operation, but the LET withdrew from it in March 2009 following the action taken against some of its members by the Pakistani authorities in connection with the Mumbai attacks. Thereafter, it was planned as a purely HUJI attack.

5.Earlier in February 2009, when Headley met Ilyas Kashmiri in Waziristan along with Maj.Abdur Rehman, Ilyas Kashmiri informed him that he would arrange the manpower for the Denmark attack and that the participation of the LET was not necessary.( Please see my article of January 15,2010, at
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3607.html )

6.In the third week of April,2010, the "Dawn" of Karachi reported that five American Muslims ---- Umar Farooq, Waqar Hussain, Rami Zamzam,Ahmed Abdullah Mini and Amman Hassan Yammer---- who had been detained in Sargodha in the Punjab province in December 2009 on a charge of trying to establish contact with Al Qaeda had contacts with the HUJI and Saifullah. Pakistani police officers were quoted as saying that they had actually been recruited by Saifullah through the Internet.They have since been convicted and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

7.While there had been instances since 2003 of the LET trying to set up sleeper cells in the US, this was the first time that the HUJI had come to notice for trying to set up a cell in the US. Concerned by this, the US authorities, who had till then refrained from declaring the HUJI as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation, moved to have it so declared.

8.On May 18,2010, Mrs.Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, issued two determinations ( Public Notices 7101 and 7102) declaring the HUJI as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under section 219 of the
Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended. These two determinations had the following effect: Firstly, the HUJI was declared as an FTO because it "committed or poses a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the security of US nationals or the national security, foreign policy or economy of the US." Secondly, action was initiated in co-ordination with the US Department of Treasury to have the HUJI and its leading office-bearers declared as specially-designated global terrorists to make them ineligible for US visas and to facilitate the seizure of any assets they may have in US territory. Thirdly, action was initiated for similar declarations by the anti-terrorism committee of the UN Security Council under UNSC Resolution No.1373 passed immediately after the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US homeland.

9.On April 27, 2006, the US State Department had isssued Executive Order 13224 designating the Jammat-ud-Dawa (JUD), the front organisation of the LET, as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation and blocking property and interests in property, of the JUD and another linked organzation, Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq, that are in the United States or the under the control of U.S. persons. Earlier, in December 2001, the US had designated the LET as a terrorist organisation, but its attempt to persuade the monitoring committee of the UN Security Council to similarly designate the LET could not succeed till May 2, 2005. During this period, Pakistan was a member of the monitoring committee, which monitors the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 against terrorism. All members of the UN Security Council are members of this monitoring committee, which acts on the basis of consensus.Only after Pakistan completed its term as a temporary member of the UNSC in March 2005 was action initiated against the LET by the committee of the UNSC. But, even after Pakistan completed its term in the UNSC in March 2005, no action could be taken against the JUD by the UNSC Committee because of China's support to the Pakistani stand that the JUD was a humanitarian organisation, that had nothing to do with the LET. Only after the Mumbai terrorist strikes of 26/11 did China, with the prior clearance of Pakistan , lift its objection to the declaration of the JUD too as a terrorist organisation, but the Government of Pakistan has not yet declared the JUD as a terrorist organisation under its national laws.

10. But in the case of the HUJI, there was no opposition from China in the UN anti-terrorism committee to its being designated as a terrorist organisation. Either China did not oppose it on its own or refrained from opposing it after consulting Pakistan. As a result, things moved fast after Mrs.Clinton's two determinations of May 18,2010.

11.On August 6,2010, the State Department issued the following press release: "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has designated Harakat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as amended, and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224. These actions were taken in consultation with the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice. In tandem with the HUJI designations, the Secretary of the Treasury also designated HUJI leader Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri under E.O. 13224 on August 6. These actions will give U.S. law enforcement additional tools needed to restrict the flow of resources to both HUJI and Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri. In addition, on August 6, the United Nations took similar actions against Harakat-ul Jihad Islami and Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri. These actions require all UN member states to implement an asset freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo against this group and individual. Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, said that “the joint State and Treasury Department actions taken today, in conjunction with the United Nation’s listing, illustrates the international community’s resolve to counter the threat posed by HUJI and its leader Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri.” Ambassador Benjamin further noted that “the linkages between HUJI and al-Qa’ida are clear, and today’s designations convey the operational relationship between these organizations.”

12.A separate press releasae of the US Department of Treasury issued the same day said:"Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri is at the core of HUJI's efforts to plan and carry out attacks against U.S. forces and our allies. He is responsible for creating a cadre of militants to act on behalf of HUJI and al-Qaida," said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey. "In acting together, the United States and United Nations are today taking another important step in combating the threat that al-Qa'ida and its affiliated organizations pose to innocent people around the world." Since 2001, Kashmiri has led HUJI training camps that specialized in terrorist operations, military tactics, and cross-border operations, including a militant training center in Miram Shah, North Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. In January 2009,( My comment: should read 2010) a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Illinois indicted Kashmiri for terrorism-related offenses in connection with a terrorist attack against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark."

13. There are two significant omissions in the action against the HUJI announced by the State Department and the Department of Treasury on August 6. Firstly, there is no reference to the joint role of the HUJI (313 Brigade) in the Mumbai terrorist strikes of 26/11. This role had been mentioned by the FBI in its indictment papers of January 2010 against Headley. Why this omission? Does the FBI now feel that Ilyas and his 313 Brigade were not involved in 26/11 and that it was purely an LET operation? Secondly, the US has refrained from having Saifullah declared as a global terrorist. Why so? This omission of action against Saifullah could strengthen speculation that like Headley he too was probably a double agent of the US intelligence, who had been helping the US in the collection of intelligence about the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

14. It remains to be seen whether the US would now exercise pressure on Pakistan to have the HUJI declared as a terrorist organisation under its national laws. ( 17-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

DETROIT---DECEMBER 25,2009, NEW YORK---MAY 1,2010 & HORMUZ---JULY 28,2010

2010-08-07T21:28:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--- PAPER NO.669

B.RAMAN

Forensic experts of the United Arab Emirates are reported to have concluded that the "M Star", a fully-loaded Japanese oil tanker sailing home from Abu Dhabi through the Strait of Hormuz, which suffered easily-repaired damages in an incident of unknown origin on the night of July 28,2010, had been the target of a terrorist attack which failed to cause severe damages.

2. A local news agency, citing Coast Guard sources, has reported as follows: "An examination carried out by specialised teams had confirmed that the tanker had been the subject of a terrorist attack.UAE explosives experts who collected and examined samples found a dent on the starboard side above the water line and remains of home-made explosives on the hull. Probably the tanker had encountered a terrorist attack from a boat loaded with explosives."

3.US and Japanese officials, who are making their own investigation, have not yet come out with their finding. However, the suspicion of the UAE experts that a boat loaded with explosives had probably been involved in the attack corroborates a claim made on August 3 on behalf of a group called the Abdullah Azzam Brigades that it was responsible for the attack. The group posted a statement and a photo on an Islamist ( Al Faloja) website known to be used by pro-Al Qaeda terrorists. The statement said as follows: “Last Wednesday (July 28), after midnight, the martyrdom-seeking hero Ayyub al-Taishan blew himself up in the Japanese tanker M.Star in the Strait of Hormuz between the United Arab Emirates and Oman.” The photo posted on the web site was of the alleged suicide bomber (al- Taishan) dressed in an Arab-style white robe and cap, pointing at a picture of a supertanker on a videoscreen. The group claimed the attack was meant to be a blow to the global economy and the oil market and that those who have offered other explanations for the incident are trying to cover up the incident.

4.In 2005, a group with a similar name had claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack at the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh and for two unsuccessful rocket firings against two US warships in Jordan’s Aqaba port. The authenticity of the claims could not be established. It is not clear so far whether there is a separate pro-Al Qaeda organisation by that name or whether terrorists carrying out opportunistic attacks assume that name in homage to Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian of Jordanian origin who was among the first of the Arab volunteers to have gone to Pakistan to join the jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Many consider him to have been a mentor of Osama bin Laden.He used to live in Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber-Pakhtunkwa province of Pakistan, where he was killed under mysterious circumstances. He has many admirers in the Pashtun community in the Af-Pak region. When the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as the Pakistani Taliban is known, claimed responsibility for the attack on the Pearl Continental Hotel of Peshawar on June 9,2009, it claimed that the suicide attack was carried out by its Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade or AASB.

5. The "News" of Pakistan reported as follows on June 11,2009:

"KOHAT: An unknown al-Qaeda-linked group, Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade, claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s (June 9,2009) bombing at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar, in which 17 people were killed and around 60 were injured.

"A spokesman of the organisation, Amir Muawiya, phoned reporters in Kohat city Wednesday (June 10,2009) to claim responsibility for the attack and threaten more such bombings. He said the bombing was in retaliation to the operations by the Pakistani armed forces at the behest of the US in Swat and rest of Malakand region and also in the tribal areas of Darra Adamkhel and Orakzai Agency. He claimed that important people including foreigners were killed when the hotel was car-bombed.

"Amir Muawiya is a Pakistani Taliban commander operating in the semi-tribal area of Darra Adamkhel, located between Peshawar and Kohat. His group, led by Commander Tariq Afridi, is affiliated to the Baitullah Mahsud-led Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

"According to Amir Muawiya, until now different groups used to claim responsibility for bomb attacks but now the central shura, or council, of Taliban and also al-Qaeda had decided that only the Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade would in future do so and others would keep quiet.

"When asked about evidence that his group indeed had carried out the suicide bombing at the Pearl Continental Hotel, Peshawar, the spokesman said his group would be willing to explode a small bomb outside the BBC office in Islamabad to prove the group’s power and capability.

"The spokesman also claimed responsibility for some other recent terrorist attacks in Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar. He said his group had carried out the attack on the Police Training Academy, Manawan, Lahore, the bombing of the Nato transport terminals on the Ring Road in Peshawar and other assaults.

"By naming the group as Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade, its founders apparently wanted to honour the late Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jordan who was among the first Arab nationals who volunteered to join the Afghan jihad against the forces of the then Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He gave up his teaching job at the Islamic University in Islamabad and shifted to Peshawar to facilitate the Arab nationals who had been motivated by him to fight in Afghanistan.

"Abdullah Azzam is also credited with convincing Osama bin Laden, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sheikh Omar Abdur Rahman and others to come to Peshawar and take part in the Afghan war against the Soviet forces and Afghan communists. He was killed along with his two young sons in a bomb explosion in Peshawar in the late 1980s and all of them were buried at the Jalozai camp for Afghan refugees some 30 kilometres from Peshawar.

"Amir Muawiya did not explain the kind of links the Abdullah Azzam Shaheed Brigade had with al-Qaeda or the identity of the leader of the group. He also did not say as to how many Arab nationals were members of this group. It was not possible to confirm the claims of this largely unfamiliar group." ( End of the "News" report)

6. Did the terrorist or terrorists, who carried out the attack on the Pearl Continental Hotel and now on the Japanese tanker, come from the same organisation, namely, the TTP or were they co-ordinated by the same command and control, namely that of Al Qaeda----either from Pakistan's North Waziristan or Yemen? That is a question, which needs looking into.

7. The modus operandi of launching a suicide attack with a boat filled with explosives used against the Japanese tanker resembles the MO used earlier by Al Qaeda for attacks on US naval ship USS Cole in Aden in October 2000 and a French tanker Limberg off Aden in October 2002.An Al Qaeda suicide bomber rammed the American destroyer Cole in the port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. Limburg, was attacked in a similar manner on October 6,2002, a few miles off the coast of Aden, and one Bulgarian crewman was killed.

8.The French tanker, carrying crude oil from Iran to Malaysia, was in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen to pick up more oil. It was sailing under charter for the Malaysian oil company Petronas. An explosives-filled dinghy rammed the starboard side of the tanker and detonated. The vessel caught fire and oil leaked into the Gulf of Aden. Local forensic experts found traces of TNT on the tanker. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack. A statement attributed to bin Laden in jihadi web sites said: " By exploding the oil tanker in Yemen, the holy warriors hit the umbilical cord and lifeline of the crusader community, reminding the enemy of the heavy cost of blood and the gravity of losses they will pay as a price for their continued aggression on our community and looting of our wealth."

9. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was suspected to have been responsible for the attack. He was earlier suspected in the attack on USS Cole too.On February 3, 2006, Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeiee, who had been sentenced to death for the Limburg attack, and 22 other suspected or convicted Al Qaeda members escaped from jail in Yemen. Jamal al-Badawi, who organised the USS Cole bombing, was also among the escapees.Thirteen of the 23 escapees had been convicted for their role in the Cole and Limburg bombings. On October 1, 2006, al-Rabeiee and Mohammed Daylami were shot dead by Yemeni security forces in the capital Sanaa where they were hiding after escaping. One of the escapees was arrested. There was no information regarding the whereabouts of the remaining 20 escapees. There is a possibility that some of the escapees might have played a role in the attack on the Japanese tanker.

10. The attempt to blow up an American plane over Detroit on December 25,2009, the failed attempt to cause an explosion in Times Square in New York on May 1,2010, and the failed attack on the Japanese tanker have one common feature---- all the three were well-planned and well-strategised attacks that failed due to poor execution by the terrorists deputed and not due to the vigilance of the intelligence and security agencies. If the attacks had succeeded, the consequences might have been severe.

11. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was involved in the Detroit attempt. The TTP in the New York attempt. Who was involved in the Hormuz attempt? (8-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ARRESTS OF SOME HINDUS AS TERRORISTS: CURIOUSER & CURIOUSER

2010-08-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

Some curious and intriguing aspects of the recent allegations of our investigating agencies against some Hindus of involvement in acts of terrorism against Muslims need to be highlighted.

2. The first relates to the incendiary explosion in the Samjauta Express. The second relates to the explosions in the Mecca Masjid of Hyderabad. The "Hindu" of July 31,2010, reported as follows: " The National Investigation Agency's probe into the Samjauta Express blasts will cover links with the explosions in Malegaon, Ajmer Sharif and the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Home Minister P.Chidambaram said here on Friday ( July 30).... Asked about Hindutva organisations being suspects in the Samjauta and other three blasts, he declined to speculate."If we could do that, why would we hand it over to the NIA? Since the Haryana Police has not been able to crack the case, with their consent, the case has been handed over to the NIA."..... The CPI (M) has opposed separate investigations and called for a co-ordinated probe. It also alleged that three persons arrested for the Ajmer Sharif dargah blast (2007) were linked to the Abhinav Bharat organisation, which is said to be behind the Malegaon blast (2008). Their involvement is also suspected in the Mecca Masjid blast (2007) as the SIM card found in Ajmer belonged to the same batch used to trigger the Hyderabad blast."

3.In a press note issued on July 1, 2009, the US Department of Treasury gave the personal particulars of four persons--- a Pashtun born in Afghanistan, two Punjabis and a fourth person of unclear ethnicity originating from Karachi----associated with the Lashkare-Toiba (LET), who were designated by the Department under Executive Order 13224 “as providing direct support to Al Qaeda and the LET and as facilitating terrorist attacks, including the July 2006 train bombing in Mumbai.”

4. One Arif Qasmani of Karachi was specifically named by the Department as involed in the Mumbai suburban train blasts of July, 2006, and in the Samjautha Express blast of February, 2007. It said of him as follows: "Arif Qasmani is the chief coordinator for Lashkar-e Tayyiba's (LET) dealings with outside organizations and has provided significant support for LET terrorist operations. Qasmani has worked with LET to facilitate terrorist attacks, including the July 2006 train bombing in Mumbai, India, and the February 2007 Samjota Express bombing in Panipat, India. Qasmani conducted fundraising activities on behalf of LET in 2005 and utilized money that he received from Dawood Ibrahim, an Indian crime figure and terrorist supporter, to facilitate the July 2006 train bombing in Mumbai, India. Since 2001, Arif Qasmani has also provided financial and other support and services to al Qaida, including facilitating the movement of al Qaida leaders and personnel in and out of Afghanistan, the return of foreign fighters to their respective countries, and the provision of supplies and weapons. In return for Qasmani's support, al Qaida provided Qasmani with operatives to support the July 2006 train bombing in Mumbai, India, and the February 2007 Samjota Express bombing in Panipat, India. In 2005, Qasmani provided Taliban leaders with a safe haven and a means to smuggle personnel, equipment, and weapons into Afghanistan." ( http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers33%5Cpaper3291.html )

5.Allegations have been made in India that some Hindus, who were arrested for their suspected involvement in the Ajmer Sharif blast, are also suspected of involvement in the Mecca Masjid blast of Hyderabad. On August 6,2010, the US State Department made public notifications designating the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Pakistan as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation and Ilyas Kashmiri belonging to it as an international terrorist. Similar action has been taken on US advice by the anti-terrorism sanctions committee of the UN Security Council the same day.

6. Reporting on these notifications, Mr.Peter Fowler, an American journalist, says as follows: "HUJI has carried out a number of terrorist attacks. In March 2006, HUJI was responsible for the suicide bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, which killed four people and injured 48 others. HUJI is also responsible for terrorist attacks in India including the May 2007 Hyderabad mosque attack, which killed 16 and injured 40, and the March 2007 Varanasi attack, which killed 25 and injured 100." (http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/41551/us_targets_terrorist_organization_operating_in_india_and_pakistan.html )

7. Thus, according to American investigators the LET and Al Qaeda were responsible for the Samjauta Express blast and the HUJI for the Mecca Masjid blast.If the American investigators, who have better sources in Pakistan, are correct, how can our investigators claim that some arrested Hindus were responsible for these incidents? Justice and fairplay demand a thorough investigation into the two different versions that have emerged from Indian and American investigators. While the American investigators have blamed the LET, Al Qaeda and the HUJI, Indian investigators have blamed the Abhinav Bharat. Both cannot be correct. ( 7-8-2010)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MARITIME INCIDENT INVOLVING JAPANESE TANKER

2010-08-06T01:54:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR—PAPER NO.668

B.RAMAN

“The enormous publicity, which the LET (Lashkar-e-Toiba) got for its sea-borne attack in Mumbai (on 26/11,2008), demonstrated the propaganda value of sea-borne attacks, where the surprise element is more. It is to be expected that not only Al Qaeda, but also other Al Qaeda allied elements such as those of the Jemmah Islamiyah and the Yemeni and Somali members of Al Qaeda might once again be tempted to think in terms of acts of maritime terrorism to prove that their capabilities are intact.”

----------- From my article of March 5,2010, titled “Fresh Fears of Maritime Terrorism “ at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers38%5Cpaper3702.html

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
There was a maritime incident of unexplained origin involving a Japanese supertanker named “M.Star” near the Strait of Hormuz on July 28,2010. The M Star, which is owned by the Mitsui OSK Lines, was on its way to the port of Chiba, near Tokyo. One crew member was slightly injured. But the tanker, which was loaded with 270,204 tonnes of oil, was able to continue under its own power to a port in the United Arab Emirates, where investigations were being conducted. News agency reports quoted Japanese officials as saying that an explosion had occurred in the rear starboard area of the ship, and that it was possible that the damage had been caused by an attack from outside. According to the Reuters news agency, the incident left the hull caved in on one side, blew off a lifeboat and smashed windows and doors.

2. However, Mr. Ataollah Sadr, Managing Director of the Iranian Navigation and Ports Organization, was quoted by the semi-official Mehr news agency of Iran as ruling out the possibility of a terrorist attack. He said: "Due to the presence of some inflammable steams and gases on the oil tankers, the possibility of a blast cannot be ruled out. Based on the dialogues and messages heard from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC), there has been news about a quake occurrence. The captains of the ships which were in the area have not ruled out the possibility of an earthquake. Now, the flame has been contained in the tanker and it is moving towards one of the ports in the littoral states of the Persian Gulf. Till now no comprehensive information has been received about the incident. We will announce the details upon receiving the authentic news."

3.Mr.Ali Akbar Saffai, the head of the marine department of Iran's southern province of Hormozgan, said that the incident took place in "Oman's trivial waters," rejecting earlier reports that the incident had occurred in the Strait of Hormuz. According to him, the explosion occurred when the ship was sailing in Oman waters in the western part of the strait.

4.The Chinese Xinhua news agency quoted Mr.Kenji Yoshimura of the Mitsui OSK Lines, as saying that the explosion did not lead to an oil leakage. According to him, the tanker was heading toward Japan after loading crude oil in the port of Das Island in Abu Dhabi when the blast took place.

5. Till August 3,2010, the incident was treated by analysts as probably an accident of unexplained origin and not as a terrorist attack. However, on August 3, a group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades posted a statement and a photo on an Islamist ( Al Faloja) website known to be used by pro-Al Qaeda terrorists. The statement said as follows: “Last Wednesday, after midnight, the martyrdom-seeking hero Ayyub al-Taishan blew himself up in the Japanese tanker M.Star in the Strait of Hormuz between the United Arab Emirates and Oman.”

6. The photo posted on the web site was of the alleged suicide bomber (al- Taishan) dressed in an Arab-style white robe and cap, pointing at a picture of a supertanker on a videoscreen. The group claimed the attack was meant to be a blow to the global economy and the oil market and that those who have offered other explanations for the incident are trying to cover up the incident.

7. It would be difficult to comment on the veracity of the claim made in the message till the damage suffered by the supertanker had been examined by experts. If it was an act of suicide terrorism as claimed, the suicide terrorist might have come in a boast filled with explosives and rammed against the tanker. Examination of the point of impact would indicate whether there had been ramming and whether explosives had been used.It is not clear why the organization waited for six days after the incident before it made the claim.

8. In 2005, an organization calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades had claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack at the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh and for two unsuccessful rocket firings against two US warships in Jordan’s Aqaba port. The authenticity of the claims could not be established. It was presumed that a group of Egyptian terrorists must be operating under this name. This group had not come to notice earlier for having a capability for an act of maritime terrorism involving the ramming of a suicide boat against a ship or a tanker, but its unsuccessful firing of rockets against the two US ships in 2005 showed a capability for rocket attacks from a distance. But the organisation which claims to have attacked the Japanese tanker has projected it as an act of suicide terrorism. This would rule out the use of rockets.

9.Presuming that it was a planned attack on the tanker, one has to keep in view the possibility that pro-Al Qaeda terrorists from its branches in Yemen or Somalia might have been involved. It is going to be difficult to establish this. There is no reason to believe that the Japanese were specifically targeted. The perpetrators wanted to attack a tanker and the Japanese tanker came their way. Dangers of sporadic or opportunistic acts of maritime terrorism persist. (6-8-10)

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

OLYMPICS---2008,C'WEALTH GAMES--2010 & ASIAN GAMES---2010

2010-08-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

The Organising Committee of the 2008 Olympics at Beijing did their country proud by the exemplary manner in which they organized it. The preparations were completed ahead of time, the security arrangements were impeccable and the Olympics were conducted with clock-like precision. The entire international sports-loving community applauded the Chinese for the brilliant way they organized it. The Chinese wanted to prove that not only China can do it, but also Asia can do it.

2. The Chinese will be hosting the 16th Asian Games at Guangzhou and Dongwuan from November 11 to 27. As usual, their preparations are ahead of time. On July 27, they held a massive security drill in these two cities to fine-tune the physical security arrangements and to test the reflexes of their security personnel who will be responsible for ensuring the security of the Games. They are confident of showing the world once again that China can do it and Asia can do it.

3. India is to host the 19th C’Wealth Games in New Delhi from October 3 to 14. Can we be proud of the way the Organising Committee headed by Shri Suresh Kalmadi has been going about it? Far from it. There have been increasing chaos and confusion with serious allegations flying around---of behind-the-schedule preparations, unsatisfactory construction of the required infrastructure, financial mismanagement and even corruption. In the midst of all these allegations and complaints, neither the Government of India nor the Organising Committee has had the time to pay close attention to the physical security aspects, which would demand a high-level of co-ordination from now onwards---- co-ordination at the international level for intelligence collection and sharing and at the national level for follow-up action.

4.Since 9/11, this will be the second most threatened international sports event. The first was the Olympics of 2003 at Athens. The Organising Committee of the Athens Olympics and the local Government sought and received the co-operation of the intelligence and security agencies of the NATO countries, including the US. The Beijing Olympics did not face such serious threats. Yet, the Organising Committee and the Government of China made security arrangements on the same scale as were made at Athens--- in fact, even more.

5. The forthcoming New Delhi C’Wealth Games will be taking place in the sub-continent where all the jihadi terrorist organizations of the world, including Al Qaeda, have an active presence and are looking for the possibility of an opportunistic act of terrorism of a spectacular nature. This is the first time since 9/11 that they will have an opportunity in their home terrain for a spectacular attack on an international event which would get them publicity the like of which they could not have hoped for. The 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri, based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, has already held out the threat of an attack on the Games.

6. If we had been able to complete the infrastructure in time, we would have been able to plan better the required security arrangements and benefited from the advice of others. With the preparations still haphazard, the difficulties faced by our security agencies are bound to increase.

7. There are three serious issues involved in the run-up to the Games---- growing suspicions of financial mismanagement and corruption, behind-the-schedule preparations and the difficulties which would consequently be faced in making the security arrangements. The national and international credibility of Shri Kalmadi has been dented by the allegations and the daily focus of the TV channels on these allegations. How can he and the Organising Committee pay the required attention to completing the arrangements in time and co-ordinating with the Government agencies the physical security arrangements when they have been constrained to spend their time in countering these daily allegations?

8. Instead of continuing to dither, the Government should immediately step in and replace Shri Kalmadi and the Organising Committee. The new Organising Committee should be given the task of completing the preparations in time and making a success of the Games. It should not be burdened with countering the allegations of financial mismanagement and corruption. A separate committee should be set up to deal with these allegations.

9. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of February 17, 2010, titled “Post-Pune Blast Developments---Attempt to Intimidate Foreign Sports Teams” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3672.html and article of February 19, 2010, titled “Making a Success of Sports Events Will Contribute to Defeat of Terrorism” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers37%5Cpaper3674.html (6-8-2010)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MURDER OF SHIA MOHAJIR LEADER SPARKS FRESH CARNAGE IN KARACHI

2010-08-04T21:34:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR—PAPER NO. 667

“The increasing virulence of the Mohajir-Pashtun and Punjabi Sunni-Mohajir Shia animosities is once again making Karachi a bleeding city . Since the beginning of this year, over 50 persons are reported to have died in Mohajir-Pashtun clashes and about a hundred Shias have been killed in attacks on Shia religious gatherings by Sunni extremists. If the increasing violence in Karachi is not controlled in time, it will further damage an already weak Pakistani economy, pave the way for the ingress of the Taliban into the city and create additional problems for maintaining the logistic supplies to the NATO troops in Afghanistan. Law and order has to be maintained in Karachi and the efforts of the TTP ( Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan) to gain a foothold there thwarted. Despite the deteriorating situation in Karachi, one has the impression that neither the federal Government of President Asif Ali Zardari nor the Pakistan Army nor the US-led NATO forces is paying serious attention to the important task of restoring law and order in Karachi. One sees a disturbing policy of drift which could prove dangerous. The importance of Karachi for the success of the US "war" against the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda has hardly been given any prominence in the discussions in Washington DC on Af-Pak policy options.”

----From my article of Feb 7,2010, titled “Karachi & Af-Pak Policy Options” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers37/paper3653.html

At least 63 people were killed and more than 150 injured during two days of violence in Karachi following the assassination of Raza Haider, a member of the Sindh Provincial Assembly belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), on the evening of August 2,2010. He was a respected leader of the Shia community of Karachi.

2. Initial suspicions and allegations by the MQM that he had been assassinated by the Awami National Party (ANP), a Pashtun-dominated political party with which the MQM has serious animosities despite the two supporting the ruling coalition in Islamabad and Karachi led to widespread retaliatory attacks by the followers of the MQM on the Pashtuns living in Karachi. This predominantly Mohajir ( Muslim refugees from India) city has more Pashtuns than Peshawar, the capital of the Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa Province ( previously known as the North-West Frontier Province). Speaking in the Senate, the upper House of the Parliament, on August 3, Mr.Haji Adeel, a member of the ANP, said that on the first day of the violence as many as 38 Pashtuns from Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa and Balochistan living in Karachi had been killed and another 130 injured. Hotels and kiosks and over 30 vehicles belonging to Pashtuns were gutted.

3. Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah said at Sukkur on August 3 that the assassination of Raza Haider was not an incident of targeted killing but an act of terrorism. He reassured the Mohajirs that the ANP had nothing to do with the assassination. He claimed that a banned religious outfit was responsible for the assassination. He did not name it, but it was believed that he was referring to the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ). The Karachi police have also detained a number of suspected members of the LEJ for interrogation.

4. Mr.Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, has accused the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba, the parent unit of the LEJ, and the TTP of being responsible for the assassination of Haider. According to him, they killed him in order to drive a wedge between the ANP and the MQM. Independent police sources also suspect that Haider was assassinated by the LEJ and that the ANP had nothing to do with it. The fact that the MQM members went on a rampage against the Pashtun community underlines the continuing fragility of the relations between the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns in Karachi.

5. Even though the Sipah-e-Sahaba and the LEJ have killed more than a hundred prominent members of the Shia community in Karachi, many of them refugees from India, neither the Federal nor the provincial Government has been able to put a stop to the activities of these anti-Shia organizations. The LEJ repeatedly targets the Shias of Karachi because they are highly educated and affluent and constitute the intellectual elite of the Shia community of Pakistan whereas the Shias of Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and Khurram largely come from the land-owning and peasant communities. It kills the latter because of their devotion to their sect and the Shias of Karachi because of their intellectual attainments. (5-8-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.om )

MY THOUGHTS ON JAMMU & KASHMIR

2010-08-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

( To be read in continuation of my earlier article of July 8,2010, titled "The Shadows in J & K " available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers40%5Cpaper3913.html )

We are facing an Intifada of the Palestinian model in J & K for the first time. It is a spontaneous outburst of anger by sections of the youth over what they allege is the disproportionate use of force by the police and the CRPF ( Central Reserve Police Force).They have not raised----not yet---issues regarding the future of J&K.Pakistan is now exploiting the anger of the youth for raising the issue of the future of the State once again, but it did no create that anger.

2.Initially, we might have been able to reduce the anger if we had ordered enquiries into the allegations regarding disproportionate force and false encounters. We hesitated to order enquiries probably because of fears that the CRPF's morale might be affected. We then vaguely promised enquiries, but never carried out the promise after a lull set in.

3.The lull is now broken. The spontaneous anger is showing signs of becoming organised anger. There are fund collections in Pakistan to keep the anger sustained. Since the international community looks upon J&K as a disputed territory and understands Pakistan's interest in it, it will not exercise pressure on Pakistan in the way it did after 26/11. The UN Secretary-General has already issued a disquieting statement on the situation in the State.

4.A new generation of youth, who were not even born or who were just toddlers when the first phase of the insurgency broke out in 1989, is now in the forefront. The 1989 vintage of youth believed in the use of terrorism, involving attacks on soft targets and indiscriminate killing of civilians and driving out the Hindus. There is a new generation of youth activists which believes in street violence directed against the security forces without targeting civilians and which has seen to it that the on-going agitation does not affect the Hindus participating in the Amarnath Yatra. We are seeing a new insurgency in J&K similar to the one in Gaza.

5.When the first insurgency started in 1989, we did not have private TV channels to give a voice and photo-ops to the insurgents. The present insurgency is taking place at a time when private news channels have mushroomed and are focussing on the anger of the youth. It is a vicious circle. The security forces cannot tolerate street violence. Their legitimate use of force to protect lives and property is resulting in increasing fatalities---most of them unavoidable.

6.There have been some fatalities which are unclear. On August 3, one youth died during clashes between the security forces and the agitators. According to the security forces, he was trampled to death by the fleeing agitators. According to the agitators, he was beaten to death by the security forces. The failure of the Administration to explain such incidents in a satisfactory manner, is adding to the anger.

7.We must avoid demonisation of the youth who are participating in the agitation against the security forces. We must mobilise law-abiding youth to win over the law-breaking youth. All political parties---- in J & K as well as in New Delhi--- must activate their youth wings and give them this task.

8.The Government should actively interact with media editors---particularly those of the TV news channels-- and convince them of the need for anger-mitigating balance in their coverage---- spot reports and studio debates.Retired senior officers invited by the TV channels to comment should avoid adding to the anger of the youth by demonising them and avoid giving the impression that even in retirement they continue to bat for the security forces without consideration of its likely impact on the anger of the youth.

9.We rightly consider J & K to be an integral part of India. It will remain so only through conviction and persuasion and not through use of force. Repeated use of force against our own citizens may be tactically unavoidable and justified, but strategically counter-productive. We must be ruthless in our actions against the Pakistani infiltrators, but more nuanced and balanced in dealing with our co-citizens. ( 4-8-2010)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MY THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY ( JULY 27,2010)

2010-07-26T19:22:00.001-07:00

Even if the US wants to leave Afghanistan in a hurry, it won't be able to.Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Al Qaeda is not Vietcong.Once the US decided to quit Vietnam,. Vietcong was happy & didn't chase them. It focussed on developing Vietnam. Al Qaeda and its jihadi hordes will chase them and keep killing more.Al Qaeda is a good terrorist organisation.It is not a good insurgent organisation. It cannot fight a guerilla warfare on the ground.If the Americans want to leave Afghanistan and live in peace in their homeland, their troops should enter North Waziristan, destroy Al Qaeda to the last Arab and Salafi and then leave.In Vietnam, the US fought a wrong war.In Afghanistan, it is fighting a right war the wrong way, B.Raman

HOW LONG WILL THE US COVER UP PAKISTAN?

2010-07-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

According to Wikipedia, a 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command in May 2010. Manning was detained without charge in a military jail at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

2. To quote the Wikipedia: "In early July, he was faced with two charges of misconduct: "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorised software to a classified computer system" and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source". The maximum jail sentence is 52 years. Lieutenant Colonel Eric Bloom has said that "as part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the next step in proceedings would be an Article 32 Hearing, which is similar to a grand jury. An investigating officer will be appointed, and that officer looks into all facts of the matter, does an investigation, and upon conclusion, the findings will be presented to a convening court martial authority. The division commander will consider based on what is in that, what the next steps are. Either there is enough evidence or not enough evidence to proceed to a court-martial ... A date has not yet been set. We haven't even identified the investigating officer. We're still in the early stages of this case".

3. It added: "Manning allegedly told journalist and former hacker Adrian Lamo via instant messenging that he had leaked the "Collateral Murder" video (of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike), in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Lamo handed the instant messenger chat logs to U.S. investigators, who began searching for evidence to determine whether Manning's apparent statements to Lamo were true. The "Collateral Murder" video showed an attack by a U.S. helicopter crew on a group of men presumed to be insurgents. Two children were wounded, and several men were killed, including the father of the children and two men who were later identified as Reuters employees. Manning reportedly said that the diplomatic documents expose "almost criminal political back dealings" and that they explain "how the first world exploits the third, in detail". He said that he hoped the release of the videos and documents would lead to "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms". Manning reportedly wrote, "everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed." However, Wikileaks said "allegations that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect".

4.On June 17, 2010, Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst working for the Rand Corporation during the Vietnam war, who had similarly leaked on grounds of conscience a large number of Pentagon papers about the Vietnam war, was interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales on the Democracy Now! TV and Radio show regarding the parallels between his actions and those of Bradley Manning.Ellsberg said that he feared for Manning and another person by name Julian Assange, as he feared for himself after the initial publication of the Pentagon Papers. He called them "two new heroes of mine".

5. Though Wikileaks, the whistleblowers' web site, may not admit it, there are strong grounds for suspecting that Bradley Manning must have been the source of the nearly 90,000 classified documents, mainly relating to the war in Afghanistan, which were uploaded by Wikileaks on its web site on July 25. It had allegedly made many of them available in advance to the "New York Times", the "Guardian" of the UK and "Der Spiegal" of Germany.

6.Senator John Kerry, the Chairman of of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is close to President Barack Obama, has been quoted by the British Broadcasting Corporation as saying that the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region. He added: "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."

7.How long will the US cover up the misdeeds of Pakistan against India in order to protect American lives and interests? How long will India keep silent on the US cover-up of Pakistani misdeeds in the long-term interests of the developing strategic relations between India and the US? For an Indian, these are the two questions which assume even greater importance than in the past as a result of the leakage. The leaked documents confirm three facts which were already known---firstly, the role of Pakistan in training and arming the Taliban; secondly, the role of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban in organising a car bomb explosion through a suicide bomber outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7,2008, and thirdly, the attempts of the ISI to use the Taliban to have the Hamid Karzai Government in Afghanistan destabilised. Fifty-eight persons, including India's Defence attache Brigadier R D Mehta and Counsellor Venkateswara Rao, were killed when the suicide bomber targeted the Embassy during the morning rush hour.

8.The leaked documents also show that the Taliban has shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles which it had been using against NATO planes and helicopters. During the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had trained the Afghan Mujahideen in the use of Stinger missiles against Soviet aircraft. It had issued a large stock of these missiles to the ISI for being given to the Afghan Mujahideen. The ISI issued some to the Mujahideen, gave some to Iran and one to North Korea for re-engineering purposes and kept some for use by the Pakistan Army against India. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the CIA asked the ISI to buy back the unused Stinger missiles from the Afghan Mujahideen and return them to the CIA. The ISI evaded doing so. On coming to office in January 1993, President Bill Clinton forced Mr.Nawaz Sharif, the then Pakistani Prime Minister, to sack Lt.Gen.Javed Nasir, the then Director-General of the ISI, and some other senior officers who had avoided returning the unused Stinger missiles. Till Mr.Nawaz sacked them. Mr.Clinton had placed Pakistan on a so-called list of suspected State-sponsors of terrorism. In 1994, when the Taliban was formed by the ISI, some of the unused Stinger missiles were given to it. The leaked documents only mention in passing that the Taliban has shoulder-fired missiles without mentioning all these details as to how the Stinger missiles reached the Taliban.

9. This is one of many such instances of the ISI training and arming the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and other terrorist organisations for using them to advance its strategic agenda in Afghanistan and India. It has been brazenly doing this because of its confidence that the US would not take any punitive action against it and that the Indian leadership and bureaucracy would not have the courage to act against it----either on the diplomatic or military front or through appropriate covert actions. The ISI did have some fears when Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao were Prime Ministers, but thereafter it lost all fears because of a succession of soft Prime Ministers we have had.

10. Will the revelations about Pakistan and the ISI in the documents leaked to Wikileaks lead at long last to Pakistan and its ISI being subjected to punitive action. I have serious doubts. After some strong statements, the US will hush up the matter once again and the Govt. of India will avoid pressing the US to act against Pakistan. It is a great national shame. ( 26-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MY CANCER & I

2010-07-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

I keep getting messages enquiring about my health for which I am grateful. Following is an update on my health:

Since November 11,2009, I am under hormonal treatment for metastasised cancer of prostate origin. It seems to have started about four or five years earlier from the prostate and from there spread to the urinary bladder, a nearby bone and a lymph-node. It was detected late since the first external symptom (bleeding) appeared only on September 30,2009. The cancer is such that it cannot be cured, but can be contained. Till now, it has been responding positively to the treatment to contain it and I have learnt to peacefully co-exist with it. I have not allowed it to affect my normal life. I continue to be as active---physically and mentally--- as I have always been.

G.K.PILLAI & S.M.KRISHNA

2010-07-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

A team of investigators from the National Investigation Agency (NIA) of the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Govt. of India had been to the US in the beginning of June to question David Coleman Headley, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, who is presently awaiting sentence by a US federal court in Chicago on charges of conspiracy to blow up the office of a Danish newspaper in Copenhagen, which had published cartoons of Prophet Mohammad, and helping the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in carrying out its terrorist strikes in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008. According to the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had visited India a number of times to collect operational data such as details of the targets, possible landing points for the LET boat etc for use in the planning of the strikes. Headley had pleaded guilty to these charges and made a plea bargain with the FBI under which he admitted the charges against him in return for an assurance that he would not be sentenced to death. The court is still to pronounce its judgement on his plea bargain.

2. The NIA reportedly interrogated Headley in the presence of his lawyer and the case officer of the FBI. During his interrogation by the NIA team, he reportedly stated that Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) and Navy had assisted the LET in the planning and execution of its sea-borne raid on Mumbai. He also mentioned the names of some ISI officers who were involved.

3. Headley's admission to the NIA team called for three follow-up actions by the Govt. of India:

* Request the US to exercise pressure on Pakistan to act against the officers named by Headley and co-operate with India in the further investigation. One does not know whether this was done.
* Share the information with the Ministry of Interior of the Government of Pakistan and request for investigation and prosecution of the officers involved. It has been reported that this request was made by Mr.P.Chidambaram, our Home Minister, to Mr.Rehman Malik, the Pakistani Interior Minister, whom he met at Islamabad on June 25 and 26 during a conference of SAARC Home/Interior Ministers. The media was not told about it at that time.
* Share the information with the Governments of countries other than the US whose nationals were killed by the LET and request them to exercise pressure on Pakistan to act against the officers named by Headley. One understands that this action has not so far been taken by the Govt. of India at any level.

4. A few days before the departure of Mr.S.M.Krishna, our Minister For External Affairs, to Islamabad for his July 15 meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Mr.Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Mr.G.K.Pillai, our Home Secretary, is alleged to have told a correspondent of the "Indian Express", New Delhi, about the admission made by Headley regarding the involvement of the ISI "from the beginning till the end." His disclosure to the media reportedly vitiated the atmosphere during and after the meeting of the two Foreign Ministers and created avoidable embarrassment for Mr.Krishna, who has expressed his disapproval of the action of Mr.Pillai in two interviews to Indian media on July 21. His objection seems to be to Mr.Pillai's prematurely disclosing it to the media before the Foreign Ministers' meeting, instead of waiting till the meeting was over.

5. Mr.Pillai's action raises two issues. Firstly, the professional wisdom of his action in disclosing to the media sensitive details of the interrogation of a conspirator when the facts relating to the ISI involvement are still under investigation. Secondly, the procedural appropriateness of his action in disclosing Headley's admission to the media without examining the diplomatic implications of his action in consultation with the Foreign Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary.

6. Interrogations of sensitive suspects give rise to the question whether what they have stated should be disclosed to the media before follow-up enquiries into their disclosure have been completed. In August 1994, the MHA told the media details of the ISI involvement in the Mumbai blasts of March 1993 as disclosed to Indian interrogators by some members of the Memon family of Mumbai, who had allegedly played an active role in helping Dawood Ibrahim in carrying out the blasts. When Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister, read about it in the media, he was very unhappy. At an inter-departmental meeting at which I was present, Rao told S.B.Chavan, the then Home Minister: "Dawood Ibrahim and the ISI must be frantically trying to find out what the Memon family members are telling their interrogators. We have made their job easy and helped them by disclosing these details of the interrogation to the media."

7. By disclosing details of Headley's interrogation by the NIA, have we similarly unwittingly helped the ISI and the LET to cover up their tracks? This is a very important question, which does not appear to have been addressed.

8. The Home Secretary's disclosure also has diplomatic implications. Firstly, the US would be unhappy that the details have been disclosed to the media at a time when their court is still to pronounce judgement on the plea bargain. Secondly, since there was a danger of its vitiating the atmosphere during the Foreign Ministers' meeting, if the Home Secretary strongly felt that the media should be informed even before the meeting, he should have referred the matter to the collective wisdom of the Secretaries' Committee instead of acting on his own. If the Secretaries' Committee agreed that the media sould be informed, the follow-up action should have been taken by the Foreign Secretary.

9.Previously, national security problems used to arise due to lack of coordination at the level of intelligence and physical security agencies. In the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh, such problems are arising due to lack of co-ordination at much higher levels such as those of the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary, the Defence Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary. This dos not bode well for our national security management.

10. This episode does not speak well of the sense of propriety and professional leadership of Mr.Krishna. At the joint press conference at Islamabad, Mr.Krishna failed to rebuke the Pakistani Foreign Minister when he compared the Home Secretary's disclosure to the media to the instigatory statements of the Amir of the LET. Mr.Krishna is now trying to cover up his confused and over-awed silence on grounds of good manners. This is ridiculous.

11. His publicly blaming the Home Secretary in two media interviews is totally in violation of the rules of ministerial etiquette under which a Minister should not pull up his senior officers in public.Any rebuke must be administered in private and not in public. Mr.Krishna's unwise action mightl affect the stature of the Home Secretary in the eyes of his own staff. The correct thing for Mr.Krishna would have been to convey his unhappiness to Mr.Chidambaram and let him decide how to deal with the matter. Moreover, by publicly expressing his disapproval of the action of the Home Secretary, Mr.Krishna has enabled his Pakistani counterpart to justify his raising the issue of the Home Secretary's disclosure to the media in the obnoxious manner he did. (22-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyoine2@gmail.com )

LOCKERBIE & MUMBAI 26/11

2010-07-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

On December 21,1988,Pan Am Flight 103 flying from London to New York was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. Eleven residents of Lockerbie in southern Scotland were also killed as large sections of the plane fell in and around the town.

2.Joint investigation by the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary of Scotland and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation( FBI) established after three years that the bombing was carried out by two officers of the Libyan Intelligence, who were identified as Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was the security chief of the Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, a Libyan intelligence officer working under cover as the station manager of LAA in the Malta airport. The US demanded in the UN Security Council that the two Libyan intelligence officers should be handed over to the Scottish authorities for trial in a neutral venue. On Libya's refusal, the UN Security Council, at the instance of the US, imposed sanctions against Libya. Under sustained international pressure, the Libyan Government handed over the two Libyan intelligence officers to the Scottish Police on April 5,1999. They were tried by a neutral court in Netherlands.

3.On January 31, 2001, Megrahi was convicted of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges and sentenced to 27 years in prison, but Fhimah was acquitted. Megrahi's appeal against his conviction was rejected on March 14, 2002, and his application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible in July 2003. On September 23, 2003, he petitioned to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) for his conviction to be reviewed. On June 28, 2007 the SCCRC referred the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Edinburgh after it found he "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice". He was released from prison on compassionate grounds on August 20, 2009 . It was stated that he was suffering from an incurable ailment He was allowed to return to Libya.

4.On August 15, 2003, Libya's UN Ambassador, Mr. Ahmed Own, informed the UN Security Council that Libya formally accepted "responsibility for the actions of its officials" in relation to the Lockerbie bombing. The Libyan Government paid a compensation of US$8 million to each family which had suffered because of the death of its member or members in the bombing. A sum of US$2.5 million per family was deducted from the compensation payment to reimburse to the Governments concerned the expenditure incurred by them on the investigation and prosecution of the case. The UN and US sanctions against Libya were removed.

5. This is the first instance in the history of counter-terrorism of a State-sponsor of terrorism being held legally accountable for the involvement of its intelligence officers in an act of terrorism abroad targeting innocent civilians. The successful prosecution and the payment of compensation had a salutary effect on the Libyan Government and it stopped sponsoring acts of terrorism through its intelligence agencies to achieve its strategic objectives.

6. The successful and exemplary denouement of the case was made possible by the sustained pressure by the US bilaterally as well as through the UN Security Council, public support for the families of the victims, vigorous activism by the families which did not allow Libya to get away with its criminal act, international support for the US and thorough investigation by the Scottish Police and the FBI.

7.Between November 26 and 29,2008, ten terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a Pakistani terrorist organisation, organised a sea-borne raid on two five-star hotels, a restaurant, a Jewish cultural centre, a railway station and a hospital, among other places, in Mumbai. They brutally mowed down many passengers in the railway station, held the inmates of the hotel hostages for three days, killed innocent customers in the restaurant and brutally tortured and killed the inmates of the Jewish centre, including a pregnant Jewish woman.

8. By the time they were neutralised by the Indian security forces after three days, they had killed 166 persons--- 123 Indian civilians, 25 foreign civilians and 18 members of the security forces. Of the 25 foreign civilians, six were Israelis, three each were Americans and Germans, two each were Canadians and Australians, and one each were British, Belgian, Italian, French, Mauritian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai and Japanese.

9. The investigation by the Indian investigators revealed the involvement of officers of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and Army in helping the LET in mounting the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Independently,the FBI had arrested in the first week of October, 2009, David Coleman Headley, a US citizen of Pakistani origin, because intercepts of his telephone conversations and E-mails with persons in Pakistan showed that he was in touch with the LET and Ilyas Kashmiri of the 313 Brigade, both associates of Al Qaeda, and was trying to help them in planning and executing a terrorist strike on a Danish newspaper, which had in 2005 published some cartoons of Prophet Mohammad.

10. His interrogation after his arrest by FBI officers for eight months also revealed that he had helped the LET in mounting the sea-borne terrorist raid on Mumbai. For this purpose, he had visited India a number of times for taking video photography of suitable targets, for studying those targets, for selecting suitable landing points for the LET boat and for storing data on the glibal positioning system subsequently used by the LET. It also came out that in addition to Ilyas Kashmiri, who is a retired officer of the US-trained Special Services Group (SSG) of the Pakistan Army, which is a special force unit, Headley was in touch with other serving and retired officers of the Pakistan Army.

11. In June,2010, the FBI allowed a team of investigators of India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) to interrogate Headley in US custody in the presence of his lawyer and FBI officers. According to the NIA investigators, Headley confessed during his interrogation that the ISI and the Pakistan Navy had played an active role in helping the LET in getting its terrorists trained and in mounting the attack.

12. Thus, the Indian investigators have two types of evidence of the involvement of the ISI and the Pakistani Army----

* Evidence collected by Indian investigators in India on their own. Pakistan and the US can dismiss this evidence as not credible and as probably obtained through questionable methods such as torture of the witnesses and suspects.
* Evidence collected by the NIA team during their interrogation of Headley in the US. It has a very high value and cannot be dismissed as not credible. He was questioned in US and not Indian custody. Hence, the question of using improper methods does not arise. He was questioned in the presence of his lawyer and FBI officers. Hence, any question of the NIA team fabricating the confession does not arise.

13. If US claims of co-operating with India in counter-terrorism are correct and if its protestations of its determination to fight against terrorism wherever it takes place and whoever is involved are to be believed, one would have expected the US to initiate against the Pakistani officers involved and the Pakisani State the same action as it initiated against the Libyan intelligence officers and the State of Libya. It fought against Libya legally and in the UN Security Council for 13 years in order to have the Libyan intelligence officers convicted and to force Libya to pay compensation to the families of the victims. It imposed its own sanctions against Libya and had other sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council.

14. In a typical example of US double standards in counter-terrorism, the US, which was in the forefront of the international campaign to hold Libya accountable for the actions of its intelligence officers, has pushed the evidence against the ISI and its officers under the carpet as it had repeatedly done in the past and has been trying to see that no harm comes to Pakistan.Libya was punished----politically and economically--- for sponsoring terrorism against the US. Pakistan has been repeatedly rewarded---politically and economically despite evidence of the role of its ISI and Army in the sponsorship of terrorism against India.

15. Pakistan is able to get away with its criminal acts and the US is able to get away with its double standards, because we have a Government, which hesitates to raise vigorously such issues to protect our nationals and to maintain our national honour. Inactions by the US are shocking. Inactions by our own Government are equally shocking:

* Did we take up the case before the UN Security Council? No.
* Did we bring the evidence collected by us to the notice of the anti-terrorism committee of the UN Security Council and demand a debate and follow-up action? No.
* Did we bring the confession of Headley to the notice of the UN Security Council? No.
* Did we register an offence against the ISI and other Pakistani Army officers named by Headley and take up our own investigation? No.
* Did we convene a conference of the officials of the countries whose nationals were killed by the LET, share the evidence against the ISI with them and request them that they too should raise this matter in appropriate fora? No.
* Did we help the familes of the victims in mounting a campaign for the payment of compensation by Pakistan? No.

16. I have been saying and writing for many years that we should follow a two-pronged policy towards Pakistan---"Talk, talk, hit, hit" . Talk, if useful. Hit, if necessary. We have a Government which only wants to talk and does not want to hit.

17. The role of our opposition parties has been equally dismal. They were only interested in exploiting the terrorist strikes during the election campaign last year and for embarrassing the Congress party now. Beyond that, they have hardly done anything to see that justice was done. (21-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

SITUATION IN IRANIAN BALOCHISTAN--AN UPDATE

2010-07-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

"The Iranian authorities have been projecting the Jundallah as a surrogate of the US intelligence operating from sanctuaries in Pakistani territory. They have been alleging that the periodic terrorist strikes in Iranian Balochistan are being mounted from Pakistani territory. While they accuse the Pakistani authorities of inaction against the anti-Iranian Sunni elements operating from Pakistani territory, they have never accused the Baloch nationalist organisations of Pakistani Balochistan of backing the Jundallah. They have been suspecting the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), the anti-Shia organisation of Pakistan which is allied with Al Qaeda, to be training the suicide bombers of the Jundallah. Some of the statements attributed to the Jundallah are disseminated from London. This has created some suspicion in the minds of the Iranian authorities that the UK is also probably backing the Jundallah in its anti-Teheran activities. The capture of the Amir of the Jundallah is a major blow to this organisation. With the two brothers who were the moving spirit of this organisation now in the custody of the Iranian authorities, the organisation has definitely suffered a set-back at least temporarily. But the anti-Shia and anti-Teheran anger in Sunni Sistan-Balochistan is so intense and so widespread that it is only a question of time before a new leadership emerges. Ant-Shia organisations of Pakistan such as the LEJ would also see that the anti-Shia movement in the Sunni majority frontier areas of Iran is kept alive."

------- Extract from my article of February 24,2010, titled " Iranian Intelligence Captures Anti-Tehran Baloch Sunni Leader"available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers37/paper3690.html

---------------------------------

Iranian satisfaction over the arrest and execution of Abdolmalek Rigi, the Amir of the Iranian Jundallah, and his brother, Abdolhamid Rigi,who were in the forefront of the resistance movement in Iranian Balochistan known as Sistan Balochistan, has proved short-lived. The resistance movement was partly Sunni extremist directed against the Shias in Iranian Balochistan and partly Baloch nationalist directed against the members of the Iranian security forces deployed in the province.

2. Abdolhamid Rigi was reportedly arrested by the Pakistani authorities in 2008 and handed over to the Iranian authorities. Abdolmalek Rigi was captured by the Iranian intelligence towards the end of February last as he was travelling by air from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan. The plane was forced to land in an Iranian airport and he was taken into custody. It was reported that information about his plan to travel by this flight was passed on to the Iranian authorities by the Pakistani Government. After the capture of its Amir by the Iranian intelligence, the Jundallah announced that Muhammad Dhahir Baluch would act as the Amir in his place.

3.The Iranian authorities executed Abdolhamid Rigi in May last and Abdolmalek Rigi in June last. The two brothers were accused, inter alia, of being mercenaries of the US and Israeli intelligence. The Jundallah warned of retaliation against the Iranian and the Pakistani authorities. The retaliation came promptly---- first from the Lashksar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) in Pakistan. On the night of July 1,2010, over 40 worshippers were killed in twin suicide blasts in a highly venerated sufi shrine of Lahore popularly known as Data Darbar. While there has been no authentic claim of responsibility for these blasts, the needle of suspicion pointed to its probably being an act of reprisal against the Pakistan Government by the Jundallah of Iranian Balochistan and the anti-Shia and anti-Iran Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) of Pakistan in retaliation for the suspected collaboration of Pakistan with Iran in the arrest of Abdolmalek Rigi.

4. The retaliation against the Iranian authorities came on July 15, the birth anniversary of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad, when two suicide bombers blew themselves up at the time of the prayers in the Grand Mosque of Zahedan, the capital of the Sistan Balochistan province. Twenty-seven Shia worshippers, many of them officers of the Revolutionary Guards, were killed. A suspect dressed as a woman was stopped by the security authorities at the entrance for personal search. The person blew himself up. As people rushed to the area to help those injured, a second bomber blew himself up.

5.The Jundallah has claimed responsibility for the suicide explosions and has named the suicide bombers as Abdolbaset Rigi and Mohammad Rigi, both reportedly related to Abdolmalek Rigi. In a message sent to al-Arabiyya TV, Jundallah said it carried out the attacks to avenge the hanging of Abdolmalek Rigi. The Governor of the province, Mr. Ali Mohammad Azad, has blamed foreign intelligence services for the terrorist attack. He said in a statement: “It is obvious that the intelligence services of certain states and arrogant powers are behind the twin blasts outside the Zahedan Grand Mosque…. Enemies outside Iranian borders are making every effort to undermine Iran's security.”

6.President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reported to have alleged at a Cabinet meeting on July 18 that US forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan were backing bombings such as the two suicide attacks and that the Pakistani Government was also accountable. ISNA, the State-owned news agency, quoted him as having told the Cabinet as follows: “If (US President Barack) Obama is unaware of actions of American forces, then we tell him that American forces based in Afghanistan and Pakistan back such actions. NATO and US forces back terrorists with equipment and funds to launch such attacks in Iran.Despite this support, the US President sends a message of sympathy.Islamabad must also be held accountable for such actions. We are friends of Pakistan and we are by its side, but at any rate the Government of that country should be accountable.” Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani told the Parliament the same day that the Pakistan Government must be answerable for the presence of evil people in its territory. The Chairman of Iran's Parliament National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, Mr. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said on July 17 that Pakistan must be answerable for sheltering terrorists."Terrorism needs to be confronted more seriously.Given the fact that Pakistan is terrorists' shelter, Pakistani officials must be held accountable for the issue." Without naming Pakistan specifically, Mr.Ahmadreza Radan, Iran's deputy police chief, has issued a tough warning to “neighbors on the eastern borders” of Iran. He said: “The Islamic Republic considers it its right to deal with insurgents who disappear into the other side of the border.,”

7. From these statements and warnings, it is evident that the Iranian authorities suspect that the new leadership of the Jundallah was also operating from the Pakistani territory and that the two suicide bombers had come from Pakistani territory. They seem to suspect that the Jundallah continues to have its volunteers trained for suicide terrorism in Pakistani territory. In the past, they had accused the Jundallah of having links with Al Qaeda, without mentioning specifically the LEJ, which is an associate of Al Qaeda. It is likely that the LEJ continues to train the Jundallah in its camps in North Waziristan. The fact that the Jundallah suicide bombers, after training, are able to cross into Sistan Balochistan without being detected by the Iranian border guards speaks of some local support on both sides of the Pakistan-Iran border.Zahedan, with an estimated population of 5,80,000, is located near the border and is easily susceptible to suicide attacks and hit and run raids across the border from Pakistani territory. Iranian authorities periodically warn Islamabad they would undertake hot pursuit and cross-border raids, but avoid carrying out the threats lest it spoil their state-to-state relations with Pakistan and lead to more anti-Shia incidents in Pakistan. Sunni extremist organisations of Pakistan such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba and the LEJ tend to attack the Shias of Pakistan to express their anger against Iran. They look upon the Shias of Pakistan as the fifth columnists of Iran.

8. It is difficult to assess what support the Jundallah has inside Sistan Balochistan. However, it is evident from a study of its strikes so far that while it is in a position to indulge in sporadic acts of terrorism, it is not in a position to organise a sustained insurgency which could endanger the Iranian position in the province. ( 20-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

PAKISTAN: INDIA'S OPTIONS

2010-07-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

Remember Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, who was the Foreign Minister of Pakistan under Yahya Khan? Remember his antics, crude exhibitionism and unparliamentary remarks about Indira Gandhi in the months before the Indo-Pakistan war of December 1971? Remember the way he used to conduct himself in the UN Security Council when it debated the growing tension between India and Pakistan? Remember Benazir Bhutto, his daughter, who was the then Prime Minister,conducting herself hysterically in public in 1989? Remember her going to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, stand before a crowd near the Line of Control, face Indian territory and shout hysterically "azadi,azadi"? Remember the unparliamentary remarks which she used to make about Narasimha Rao, our then Prime Minister?

2. Indira Gandhi and Narasimha Rao ignored with contempt the behaviour of Z.A.Bhutto and Benazir and continued doing what they thought was necessary in India' national interest. We should similarly ignore with contempt the behaviour of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, and his unparliamentary remarks about Mr.S.M.Krishna, our Foreign Minister, while briefing Pakistani media personnel on July 16 about his talks with our Foreign Minister the previous day.

3. The Government of India, Mr.Krishna himself and Mrs.Nirupama Rao, our Foreign Secretary, need to be complimented for conducting themselves with great personal dignity befitting us as a responsible and mature nation with a mature political leadership in power and for refusing to let themselves be provoked and react in kind against Mr.Qureshi. One of the objectives of Mr.Qureshi was to create doubts in the minds of the Indian public about the credibility and professional competence of Mr.Krishna. Another was to create a crisis atmosphere in the hope of thereby making the West and the Islamic world exercise pressure on India. The Bharatiya Janata Party and some of its leaders and spokesmen are unwittingly walking into the Pakistani trap by their campaign against Mr.Krishna at a time when the political class should stand united behind him.

4. When Z.A.Bhutto and his daughter indulged in anti-India antics and exhibitionism there was no global TV. We had to read about them in the print media and wait for the visuals which arrived days later. There were no live transmissions, no live debates. Only we in India followed closely the antics and exhibitionism of Z.A.Bhutto and Benazir? Most of the rest of the world did not. The international community did not have an idea of the kind of Foreign Minister or Prime Minister Pakistan had.

5. Things are different today. Thanks to the global TV networks, the whole world had an opportunity of watching alive the antics and exhibitionism of Mr.Qureshi and the measured and cultured response of Mr.Krishna and Mrs.Nirupama Rao.It will redound to our credit and make the international community understand----if it has not already understood it--- the kind of Pakistani leadership and the kind of Pakistani Muslim mentality we have to contend with.

6. India's negotiating stance of "action against anti-India terrorism first, rest later" and the growing international understanding of India's stance after 26/11 have unsettled Pakistan. Mr.Qureshi's antics and exhibitionism did not reflect any embarrassment or nervousness over the reported admissions of David Coleman Headley, the head of the sleeper cell of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri in Chicago, to Indian interrogators about the role of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the command and control of the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai. Such embarrassments are flea-bites for Pakistan and its ISI.

7. Qureshi's antics and exhibitionism reflected his anger and petulance over his failure to bully Mr.Krishna and the Government of India into changing their negotiating stance and accepting the Pakistani position of "talk on all or talk on nothing" ---just as the antics and exhibitionism of Z.A.Bhutto and Benazir reflected their anger and petulance due to their failure to bully Indira Gandhi and Narasimha Rao into accepting the Pakistani viewpoint. We should ignore the antics and exhibitionism of Qureshi and look ahead.

8. What now are the options before India? The BJP has demanded that we call off the talks with Pakistan. This will be an unintelligent option. A time could come when have to act on our own against the anti-Indian terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani territory----either through direct military or through covert action. We have to convince the international community that we tried all other options to make Pakistan see reason and that only when those options failed, we were forced to resort to military or covert action. There are any number of Governmental statements and doctrines in various countries regarding the circumstances under which covert action would be justified. The most important of these are a speech given by George Shultz, the US Secretary of State under the then President Ronald Reagan, and an introduction to a report on terrorism written by Mr.George Bush, the Vice-President of Reagan and Chairman of the presidential Task Force Against Terrorism. They said that covert action against a State-sponsor of terrorism would be justified WHEN ALL OTHER OPTIONS FAIL.

9. Negotiation is one of the options that has to be tried. You cannot go straightaway into the covert action mode without trying out the negotiation mode. Negotiations could have one of two outcomes. Either Pakistan sees reason and acts against anti-India terrorism thereby obviating the need for covert action or continues to avoid action thereby justifying our resort to covert action. It is, therefore, important that we continue with our negotiations with Pakistan in the hope of establishing normal relations while at the same time reviving and strengthening our covert action capability for likely use if all other options fail.

10. Should we continue to negotiate with Qureshi as if nothing has happened after his insulting behaviour towards our Foreign Minister? Will it not be a poor reflection on us as a nation and as a people and further encourage such behaviour by Pakistan? We should not. At the same time, we cannot refuse to negotiate so long as he is the Pakistani Foreign Minister. Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani has the right to have whomever he wants as his Foreign Minister, whether we like him or not.

11. So, the only option available to us to keep the negotiations going while at the same time protecting our national dignity is by confining our future negotiations to the interactions between our Home Ministry and the Pakistani Interior Ministry. We should withdraw the invitation to Mr.Qureshi to visit New Delhi which was issued before he indulged in his antics and exhibitionism and instead invite Mr.Rehman Malik, Pakistan's Interior Minister, for continuing his talks with our Home Minister. ( 17-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

KAMPALA BLASTS: INDIAN CASUALTIES?

2010-07-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 666

B.RAMAN

Seventy-four persons, 60 of them reportedly Ugandan nationals, were killed and 70 others injured on July 11,2010, in two explosions suspected to have been carried out by Al-Shabaab, the Somali wing of Al Qaeda, at a local rugby club and an Ethiopian restaurant at Kampala, the Ugandan capital. The explosions took place near large numbers of football enthusiasts watching on TV the final match of the World Cup football in South Africa between Spain and Holland.

2. Citing local officials, the British Broadcasting Corporation has stated that among the casualties were Ethiopian, Eritrean, Indian and Congolese nationals . It has not indicated how many Indian nationals were involved and whether there were fatlities among them.

3. In a statement issued from Mogadishu, the Somali capital, a spokesman of Al- Shabaab, who gave his name as Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage claimed that his organisation had carried out the two explosions. There were some doubts whether these were timed or suicide explosions , but an Ugandan official said that the head of a person believed to be a Somali was found at the site of one of the blasts, thereby indicating that at least one, if not both the blasts, was carried out by a suicide bomber.

4. The Al-Shabaab spokesman has been quoted by news agencies as saying as follows:"Al-Shabaab was behind the two bomb blasts in Uganda.We thank the mujahideen that carried out the attack. We are sending a message to Uganda and Burundi, if they do not take out their Amisom [African Union Mission in Somalia] troops from Somalia, blasts will continue and it will happen in Bujumbura, the Burundi capital, too." These were thus reprisal attacks by Al-Shabaab against Uganda for participating in the African contingent helping the Somali authorities in their operations against Al-Shabaab and other jihadi elements in Somalia.

5. The Amir of Al-Shabaab, Mohamed Abdi Godane, had warned in an audio message earlier this month that Uganda and Burundi would be targeted. The main wing of Al Qaeda based in North Waziristan in Pakistan, the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Al-Shabaab based in Somalia have continued to maintain a capability for planning and carrying out reprisal acts of terrorism in different parts of the world despite US claims of having eliminated many senior leaders of Al Qaeda through its Drone (pilotless plane) strikes in North and South Waziristan.

6.The deaths in the Drone strikes of many Al Qaeda leaders such as its No.3 Sai’d al-Masri (al-Masri means the Egyptian) also known as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in May,2010 and Saleh-al-Somali from Somalia on December 8,2009, have not weakened the capability of Al Qaeda to plan and mount terrorist strikes---some successfuly, some unsuccessfully. The successful ones have been in the Af-Pak area, Somalia and Uganda and the unsuccessful ones in the UK, the US and Norway.

7.In supplementary indictments filed recently by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, US, they have alleged that before his death Saleh al-Somali was involved along with Rashid Rauf, a Mirpuri from Birmingham, who was also killed in a Drone strike, and Adnan El-Shukrijumah, an absconding US national of Saudi origin,in organizing a conspiracy by Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi and others to bomb New York City subways last September.

8. Along with Saudis, Egyptians and Yemenis, the Somalis have been among the important components of Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden had earlier used them for the terrorist strikes outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998,and in Mombasa in October 2002. The Somalis of Al-Shabaab have now operated successfully in Kampala. The Yemeni and Somali wing of Al Qaeda have exhibited a certain operational autonomy which enables them to mount terrorist strikes on their own without having to depend on the main wing of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. While Al-Shabaab has extended its operations to Africa, the AQAP has been trying to extend its reach to South-East Asia as indicated by the recent detentions of two Singapore nationals with suspected contacts with the AQAP.

9.This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of December 4,2009, titled "The Somali Front of the Global Jihad" available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers36/paper3534.html. It is annexed for easy reference. (13-7-10)

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd),Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ANNEXURE

THE SOMALI FRONT OF THE GLOBAL JIHAD
B.RAMAN

Al Qaeda looks upon its continuing jihad against the so-called Crusaders --- thereby meaning essentially the US, Israel and their supporters--- as a global intifada waged on many fronts and through many means. In this global jihad, Afghanistan, Somalia and Algeria are seen as battle fronts, which will determine the ultimate outcome. Afghanistan is seen as the core of the battle, Somalia as its southern front and Algeria as the Western front.

2. In a message disseminated on December 20, 2006, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 to Osama bin Laden in Al Qaeda, said: “Brothers in Islam and Jihad in Somalia: know that you are on the southern garrison of Islam, so don’t allow Islam to be attacked from your flank, and know that we are with you, and that the entire Muslim Ummah is with you. So don’t lose heart, or fall into despair, for you must dominate if you are true in faith. And know that you are fending off the same Crusade which is fighting your brothers in Islam in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. So be resolute, be patient and be optimistic, for by Allah beside whom there is no other God, even if your enemies possess thousands of tons of iron and explosives, in their chests lie the hearts of mice. So be severe against them like Muhammad was. "

3. To keep the jihad going in Somalia is one of its important objectives. For this purpose, it uses not only recruits from the impoverished local population, but also from the Somali diaspora in the West----including the US--- as well as jihad-hardened cadres sent from the battle fronts in the Af-Pak region. The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) of Pakistan has had a long history of contacts with the Muslim population in Somalia and East African countries just as it has with the Muslim population of Chechnya and Dagestan. Though the TJ itself does not indulge in acts of terrorism, it plays an important role in facilitating the ideological motivation of the population on behalf of Al Qaeda.

4. In September 2009, Al Shabaab, meaning “The Lads”, an organization of Somali youths, was reported to have disseminated through Islamic web sites usually identified with Al Qaeda a 48-minute video documentary in which it proclaimed its allegiance to Osama bin Laden. It derives its name “The Lads” from the fact that it used to be the youth wing of a fundamentalist organization called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which had established control over some parts of Somalia and was ultimately crushed by invading Ethiopian troops in 2006. While the elders of the UIC disappeared after being defeated by the better trained and better armed Ethiopian troops allegedly inspired and aided by the US, the Al Shabaab replaced the UIC as a born-again jihadi organization, which was determined to continue the jihad against the troops of the African Union, which had replaced the Ethiopian troops, and of the UN-backed local Government, which it viewed as apostate.

5. Though Somalis had participated in acts of suicide terrorism on behalf of Al Qaeda in other countries, suicide terrorism was unknown in Somalia itself till Al Shabaab made its appearance in 2006. Even though it proclaimed its loyalty to bin Laden only in September, 2009, it had carried out a number of acts of suicide terrorism against local Government targets as well as the peace-keeping troops of the African Union ever since the AU troops took over their peace-keeping responsibility in Somalia. Al Shabaab has been waging a two-front jihad---- against the AU troops and the local Government being protected by the AU troops. The first act of suicide terrorism took place on September 18, 2006. Since then, there have been 13 suicide attacks--- two in 2006, four in 2007, two in 2008 and five this year.

6. The Al Shabaab cadres, many of whom had allegedly served with the Afghan Mujahideen, the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af-Pak region, look upon their jihad as similar to the jihad waged by the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet troops and those of the Government of the then President Najibullah in the 1980s and the early 1990s.

7. In a serious attack of suicide terrorism, a male suicide bomber dressed as a woman managed to find his way into a graduation ceremony of medical students in a Mogadishu hotel on December 3, 2009, and blew himself up killing 19 persons, including three Ministers of the Cabinet of Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke of the UN-backed Government. Even though no organization has so far claimed responsibility for the attack, Al Shabaab is strongly suspected by the local authorities.

8. Though there is so far no evidence of any nexus between Al Shabaab and the Somali pirates, the dangers of money earned from piracy going to the coffers of Al Qaeda and the availability in Somalia of sea-faring people who could be used by Al Qaeda for future acts of maritime terrorism cannot be ignored.

9. A Reuters report carried on December 4, 2009, by the “Daily Times” of Lahore has quoted Bethuel Kiplagat, who used to be Kenya’s special envoy to the Somalia peace process from 2003 to 2005, as saying as follows: “Suicide bombings are a worrying trend not only for Somalia but also the region. There has been a rise in fundamentalism in Somalia coming from the Middle East and Pakistan. There’s a worry Al Qaeda may be looking at Somalia as a new sanctuary.”

10. On March 16, 2009, Mohamed Mohamed of the BBC’s Somali section, reported as follows: “As well as alleged links to al-Qaeda it is said to have Arabs, Asians, other Africans and - America's FBI believes - Westerners among its ranks. These foreigners are said to be involved in training Al Sabaab recruits in various aspects of guerrilla warfare, including suicide bombings and booby traps.”

11. On February 29, 2008, the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice designated Al Shabaab as a Foreign Terrorist Organization under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

AL QAEDA IN NORWAY

2010-07-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.665

B.RAMAN

A message of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's No. 2, broadcast by Al Jazeera on May 21, 2003, had called for reprisal attacks against the US and some of its allies for occupying Iraq.

2.The message, inter alia, said: "O Muslims, take matters firmly against the embassies of America, England, Australia, and Norway and their interests, companies, and employees. Burn the ground under their feet, as they should not enjoy your protection, safety, or security. Expel those criminals out of your countries. Do not allow the Americans, the British, the Australians, the Norwegians, and the other crusaders who killed your brothers in Iraq to live in your countries. Wreak havoc on them. "

3.While the calls for attacks on the US, the UK and Australia were not a surprise, the call for reprisals against Norway was, since Norway was not one of the allies of the US in Iraq. It was not clear why Zawahiri included Norway in the list. There was some speculation that he might have mistaken Norway for Denmark, which had a role in Iraq.

4. Islamic anger against Denmark for the publication of some cartoons of Prophet Mohammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005 extended to Norway too because some Norwegian newspapers had allegedly reproduced the cartoons. The protest demonstrations in West Asia against the cartoons were directed at some Norwegian diplomatic missions too, but there were no publicly aired threats of a terrorist attack against Norway in connection with the publication of the cartoons.

5. The terrorist threats uttered by Al Qaeda and other jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of Pakistan were against Denmark and not Norway. Available details of the US investigation into the activities of LET operative David Coleman Headley, a US citizen of Pakistani origin living in Chicago, indicated preparations during 2009 for a terrorist strike against the Danish newspaper which had published the cartoons jointly by the LET and the so-called 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri of Pakistan based in North Waziristan. Norway did not figure in the details of the plot as indicated in the various court affidavits filed against Headley by the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

6. The Islamic Jihad Union or Group (IJU), an Uzbek group based in North Waziristan and closely allied to Al Qaeda, has some followers in Germany among persons of Turkish origin as well as white German converts to Islam. Some arrests were made in Germany in August-September 2007 in connection with investigations into the activities of the IJU and its suspected plots for terrorist strikes in Germany against German as well as American targets. There were no reports of the arrest of any Uzbek in Germany in this connection. The IJU makes its recruitment from amongst Uzbeks, Uighurs and other Central Asians. In the past, most of its recruits came from the Af-Pak and the Central Asian regions. There were no reports of any recruitment by it from amongst the Uighurs and Uzbeks living in West Europe.

7. The Norwegian police announced on July 8,2010, the arrest of three men suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda on charges of preparing terrorist attacks. One of them is a Norwegian citizen of Uighur origin. The other two are permanent residents in Norway of Uzbek and Iraqi-Kurdish origin. Two of them (the Uzbek and the Uighur) are reported to have been arrested in Norway and the third (Iraqi-Kurd with a permanent residence permit of Norway) in Germany. The Norwegian police had been keeping them under surveillance for investigation for about a year. The arrests appear to have been made even though the investigation has not yet been completed because of the leakage of the news about the investigation against them to the media. They apparently decided to arrest them before the media came out with the news.

8.Media reports indicate that the arrested persons were suspected of involvement in plots for terrorist strikes in Norway and of having links with some terrorist suspects under investigation in the US and the UK. The involvement of an Uzbek and an Uighur in this plot could indicate a possible Chinese target too. There is a small, but active Uighur community in Norway, with links to the anti-Chinese World Uighur Congress (WUC) based in Munich. The Uighurs had held a demonstration against the Chinese in Oslo last year to protest against anti-Uighur violence by the Hans in Urumqi in July last .

9.Members of the Uighur and Uzbek communities in West Europe may not normally get involved in attacking Western targets. The kind of anti-Western anger one finds in the Arabs and the Pakistanis one does not find in the Uzbeks and the Uighurs living in the West, but the Uzbeks of the IJU do nurse a strong anger against the West. It is not clear whether the reported plots in Norway were the work of Al Qaeda or its associates such as the IJU, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan or the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan. It is also not clear whether the targeting of Norway had anything to do with its role in Afghanistan as a member of the NATO forces fighting against the Taliban. Were the three arrested persons already members of any of these organisations or were they merely self-radicalised Muslims looking for sponsors?(8-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

THE SHADOWS IN J & K

2010-07-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.664

B.RAMAN

In his message of February 12, 2007, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 to Osama bin Laden, has spoken of a global Jihadi Intifada. Has he spoken of any special areas of focus for this Intifada?

Whenever he talks of a global jihad or now of a global Jihadi Intifada, Zawahiri makes it clear that this has to cover all lands in the world, which rightfully belong to Islam. After saying so, he specifies certain areas, which he thinks should receive special attention first. Of these, he gives the topmost priority to Afghanistan and Iraq. He says the future of Islam and of the global Intifada itself will be decided in those countries. If they can defeat the Americans there, the jihadis' victory in the rest of the lands will be assured. After mentioning these two countries, he mentions certain other areas specifically. He believes that the victory of the jihadis in these areas would also be crucial for the ultimate victory of Islam. These areas are Palestine, including Gaza, the Lebanon, Somalia, Algeria and Chechnya in Russia. He describes Somalia as the Southern garrison of Islam and Algeria as its Western garrison.

What does he mean by Jihadi Intifada?

A kind of struggle in which the role of motivated individual Muslims will become more important than that of organisations so that the weakening or collapse of an organisation does not result in a collapse of the Intifada. He wants the Intifada to acquire a momentum of its own as a result of the sacrifices of individual Muslims...... The importance of a central command and control in keeping the Intifada going is down-played. The motivation of individual Muslims is more important than any centralised command and control. He also projects the Intifada as a mix of military and non-military struggles. He says in his message of December 20, 2006: "We must bear arms. And if we are unable to bear them, then we must support those who carry them. This support comes in many forms and guises, so we must exploit all Dawah, student and union activities to back the Jihadi resistance....... The Muslim Ummah must exploit all methods of popular protest, like demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, refusing to pay taxes, preventing cooperation with the security forces, refusing to provide the Crusaders with fuel, hitting traders who supply the Crusader forces, boycotting Crusader and Jewish products, and other ways of popular protest."

----- From my article of February 14,2007, titled JIHADI INTIFADA: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/common/uploaded_files/paper2135.html

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What we are witnessing in certain areas of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) is the beginning of an intifada of Zawahiri's conception as propounded by him in his messages of February 12,2007,and earlier addressed to the Muslims of the world. One does not know whether Al Qaeda has had any role in the current violence in J&K, but its idea that the time had come to transform the jihad characterised by acts of terrorism into an intifada on a global scale characterised by leaderless street violence and the technique of a mix of military and non-military struggles has had some impact on the thinking and behaviour of some sections of the Kashmiri youth.

2. We are confronted with a situation marked by leaders without followers and followers without leaders. The traditional political leaders of J&K have no influence over the agitating youth. The agitating youth have no identifiable leaders to whom an approach can be made by the Government for bringing down the violence. Whatever be the extent of the Pakistani role in instigating the violence, it has acquired a momentum of its own unrelated to Pakistan. Islamabad has been exploiting the violence, but does not seem to be the originator of it.

3. The root cause is the growing perception among some sections of the youth that the security forces have been insensitive in performing their counter-insurgency duties and have been adopting objectionable methods ( e.g alleged false encounters) and using disproportionate force against the people. The current street violence has had no strategic political objective relating to the future political status of J&K. It is the result of an outburst of anger against the security forces. It does not have a strategic direction as yet, but may acquire one if it continues without the anger of the participating youth being pacified by the Government.

4. The anger of the youth might have been pacified initially if the Governments at Srinagar and New Delhi had shown some understanding of the anger and initiated measures to pacify it such as enquiries into allegations of excesses by the security forces, paying greater attention to complaints of violations of the human rights of the people and better ways of dealing with street protestors without using firearms. The succes of the last general elections in which nearly two-thirds of the voters participated and the perception that the ground situation was coming under control created a feeling of over-confidence in the Government at the centre, which slowed down the efforts to find a political soplution to the demands of the people and showed an increased insensitivity towards the anger of sections of the youth against the security forces.

5. The current movement started due to some anger against the security forces. Perceptions of political indifference to that anger has led to the anger turning against the political leadership. We find ourselves caught in a vicious circle. The more the publicly expressed anger against the security forces, the more the force used against the agitators and the more the force used against the agitators, the more the anger against the security forces.

6. When there was a decline in violence and we should have been taking advantage of it to deal with strategic issues relating to the future political set-up, we did not do so. Now, when the immediate objectiove should be to reduce the anger of the moment due to the grievances against the security forces, we are talking of long-term political issues. Better methods of street control to avoid the use of firearms, prompt and satisfactory attention to the complaints of the people regarding excessive use of force and violations of human rights, greater interactions between the Government and the agitating youth, greater control over our rhetoric to avoid demonisation of the agitators and attempts to remove the impression that the Government tends to bat for the errant elements in the security forces and not for the people are some of the immediate steps required. The use of the Army against the street agitators would be unwise unless the situation turms desperate leaving no other option. ( 8-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

AL QAEDA & TERRORIST STRIKES IN INDIA

2010-07-07T01:41:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.663

B.RAMAN

“The Hindu” of July 7,2010, has carried an article by its terrorism analyst Praveen Swami titled “Pakistan’s Competing Jihadists.” The article refers to a message purported to have been issued before his death (confirmed by Al Qaeda) in a US Drone strike in May last by Sai’d al-Masri (al-Masri means the Egyptian) also known as Mustafa Abu al-Yazid. He was reputedly the No.3 in Al Qaeda and was in charge of operations in Afghanistan.

2.According to Shri Swami, an English translation of this message was made available to him “by the Washington DC based Middle East Media Research Institute”. This Institute is popularly known as MEMRI. It is alleged to have close links with the Israeli Military Intelligence and the Likud Party.

3. Wikipedia comments as follows on MEMRI: “The Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI for short, is a Middle Eastern press monitoring organization. Its headquarters is located in Washington, DC, with branch offices in Jerusalem, Berlin, London, Rome, Shanghai, Baghdad, and Tokyo. MEMRI was co-founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, and another Israeli Meyrav Wurmser. It provides a free source of English language translations of material published in Arabic and Persian script, and publishes its analyses and in-depth reports on its website - although it also offers specialized content for a fee. The organization's translations are regularly quoted by major international newspapers, and its work has generated strong criticism and praise. Some critics have accused MEMRI of selectively choosing for translation and dissemination the most extreme views from Arabic and Persian media, which portray the Arab and Muslim world in a negative light, while ignoring moderate views that are often found in the same media outlets. Other critics charge that while MEMRI does sometimes translate pro-US or pro-democracy voices in the regional media, it systematically leaves out intelligent criticism of Western-style democracy, US and Israeli policy and secularism. MEMRI's current mission statement states the organization "explores the Middle East through the region's media. MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu-Pashtun media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends in the Middle East." Until 2001, its Mission Statement stated that the institute also emphasizes "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel." MEMRI's goals and emphasis have evolved over the years; it originally translated articles in both Arabic and Hebrew. Concerning this change in their ‘mission statement,’ Political Research Associates (PRA), which studies the US political right, notes that it occurred three weeks after the September 11 attacks, and considers MEMRI "was previously more forthcoming about its political orientation in its self-description and in staff profiles on its website." PRA considers that “MEMRI's slogan, ‘Bridging the Language Gap Between the Middle East and the West,’ does not convey the institute's stridently pro-Israel and anti-Arab political bias.” It further notes, that MEMRI's founders, Wurmser and Carmon, “are both hardline pro-Israel ideologues aligned with Israel's Likud party.”

4. So far as one knows, the message of al-Masri disseminated by MEMRI has not yet been authenticated by any official Western agency or non-governmental organization studying messages purported to have been disseminated by Al Qaeda, its leaders and as-Sahab, the propaganda wing of Al Qaeda, but one is subject to correction.

5. In its intro to Shri Swami’s article, “The Hindu” says: “ For the first time, the al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for an attack in India.” “The Hindu’s” reference is to the explosion in the German bakery in Pune on February 13 last. Mr.Swami himself writes in his article as follows: “ For the first time, though, al-Masri referred to the Pakistan-based jihadist Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri as an official part of the Al Qaeda--- and made public his role in an attack on India.”

6.According to Mr.Swami, the message as supplied by MEMRI says as follows: “ I bring you the good tidings that last February’s India operation was against a Jewish locale in the West of the Indian capital in the area of the German bakeries--- a fact that the enemy tried to hide---- and close to 20 Jews were killed in the operation, a majority of them from the so-called statelet, Israel. The person who carried out this operation was a heroic soldier from the “Soldiers of the Sacrifice Brigade”, which is one of the brigades of Qaedat al-Jihad ( the al-Qaeda’s formal name) in Kashmir under the command of commander Ilyas Kashmiri, may Allah preserve him.”

7. Commenting on the claim made in the message. Mr.Swami says: “ From the text, it is clear that al-Masri had little knowledge of the bombing of the German Bakery in Pune. Pune is not to the west of New Delhi; it is not Jewish-owned; and no Israelis were killed there. There would thus be no reason to take al-Masri’s claims seriously--- if it weren’t for the testimony of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley.”

8. al-Masri was born in Egypt on December 17, 1955. Along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s No.2,he was a founding member of the Islamic Jihad of Egypt, which was alleged to have been involved in the assassination of then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was arrested by the Egyptian authorities along with Zawahiri. They managed to escape and reach Afghanistan in 1988 and join Osama bin Laden. When bin Laden went to the Sudan in 1991 after his passport was reportedly cancelled by the Saudi authorities, al-Masri joined him there and was appointed by bin Laden as an accountant of a business company started by him in the Sudan. In 1996, under US pressure, the Sudanese authorities asked bin Laden to leave the Sudan. He went to Afghanistan accompanied by al-Masri. Zawahiri joined them there. The US National Commission, which enquired into the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US homeland, described him as the Chief Financial Manager of Al Qaeda. In May 2007, bin Laden was reported to have designated him as in charge of Al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan. In that capacity, he was responsible for co-ordination of operations with the Afghan Taliban.

9. In February 2009, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had received a message purported to be from Mustafa Abu-al Yazid, warning of more Mumbai-style attacks. The message, whose authenticity could not be established, sought to create an impression as if the 28/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai were carried out by Al Qaeda.

10.I had commented as follows on that mesaage : “ His warnings of more Mumbai-style attacks should be factored into our security arrangements and that means, strengthening physical security not only for possible Indian targets, but also for possible foreign targets such as those of Israel and the US. A rule of prudence is don’t ignore a threat unless and until it is proved to be false. The message needs careful analysis in co-operation with Al Qaeda experts in the US. The message suspiciously serves the Pakistani agenda of projecting the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai as executed by an international jihadi group based in Europe and inspired by Al Qaeda. There are suspicious elements in the message. Why was it disseminated through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and not initially through Al Jazeera? Why has it not yet appeared in the web sites associated with Al Qaeda? Why there was no reference to the Mumbai attack in the one message of Osama bin Laden and two of his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri disseminated by Al Qaeda since the beginning of this year? Why the message has not been disseminated through As Sahab, the official propaganda organ of Al Qaeda.”

11. Subsequently, in April,2009, another message purporting to be from al-Masri circulated through the Internet. It read as follows: “. “We send a short and succinct message to the Indian Government. The Mujahideen will never allow you to invade the Muslims and their lands in Pakistan. If you beguile yourselves into doing this, know well that you will pay a very heavy price, which you will regret much. We will call upon our whole Muslim nation, its Mujahideen and its martyrdom squads against you. We will strike your interests and your economic lifelines wherever they may be until you are demolished and bankrupt as America is being demolished and going bankrupt today. The Islamic nation which produced the audacious and heroic martyrs of Bombay, who struck you in the midst of your homes and humiliated you, is able to produce thousands more like them. You cannot be more powerful or have more ability than the Soviet Union which was destroyed on the rocks of the Afghanistan mountains nor Americans whose nose we rubbed in the dirt of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.”

12. This message added to the suspicion that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence might be behind the dissemination of these messages in order to draw suspicion away from the LET for the terrorist strikes of 26/11 in Mumbai. After the Pune Bakery attack, Syed Saleem Shahzad , the Karachi correspondent of “Asia Times Online”, received an E-mail message purporting to be from Ilyas Kashmiri threatening terrorist strikes in India during the World Cup Hockey League and IPL cricket matches as well as during the forthcoming Commonwealth Games. In his dispatch to the Asia Times on this, Mr.Shahzad reported as follows: “ Asia Times Online has received a message from top guerrilla commander Ilyas Kashmiri, whose 313 Brigade is an operational arm of al-Qaeda. The message arrived on Monday morning (Feb.15), shortly after the deadly weekend bombing of the German Bakery in the western Indian city of Pune. The message does not specifically claim responsibility for the bombing, but implies the Brigade's involvement.”

13. Even after the July,2006, explosions in the Mumbai suburban trains, a person, who gave his name as Abu al Hadeed, had rung up the office of the Current News Service (CNS) in Srinagar claiming responsibility in the name of what he described as Al Qaeda of J&K. However, indigenous Kashmiri organisations ridiculed the claim and said that there was no such organisation in the State.

14.On June 8, 2007, the same news agency is reported to have received a statement in Urdu recorded in a CD in the name of one Abu Abdal Rehman al-Ansari, described as the Amir of Al Qaeda fil Hind (Al Qaeda in India). The statement was read out by a masked gunman, who gave his name as Abu Ibrahim al-Asim before a camera. Whereas the 2006 statement was in the name of Al Qaeda of J&K, the statement of June 8, 2007, was in the name of Al Qaeda of India. Both the statements had referred to al-Ansari as the Amir of Al Qaeda. The June 8 statement pledged to wage jihad not only on India, but also against all infidels, apostates and hypocrites and against "enemies masqueradng as friends" . It criticised both the factions of the Hurriyat Conference and the Pakistan-based United Jihad Council headed by Syed Salahuddin of the Hizbul Mujahideen.

15. There are two types of messages purporting to be from Al Qaeda relating to India. The first are video or audio messages of Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri relating to the global jihad and the global intifada in which there are references to India, including Kashmir. These have been authenticated by Western intelligence agencies on the basis of voice recognition. They are in the form of general criticism of India or general threats and not specific.

16. The second are messages claiming responsibility on behalf of Al Qaeda for specific acts of terrorism in India such as the Mumbai suburban train explosions of July 2006, the Mumbai terrorist strikes of 26/11 and the Pune German bakery explosion and warning of future acts of terrorism against global sports events in India. These are messages circulated through the Internet or through phone calls by persons whose voices could not be identified. There is no way of establishing the authenticity of these messages. We must take them seriously for further investigation and strengthening physical security. At the same time, we should take care not to walk into any trap of the ISI to divert suspicion away from the LET and other Pakistani jihadi organizations and from the ISI for serious acts of terrorism in Indian territory by creating an impression that those were carried out by Al Qaeda.

17. It is quite possible that there was an active role of Al Qaeda in acts of terrorism in Indian territory, including Jammu & Kashmir. It has been particularly keen to attack Jewish targets in India, including the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who had orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US, had admitted to have once visited India and had told US interrogators of Al Qaeda’s intention for an attack on the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi. But it is doubtful whether Al Qaeda is as yet in a position to organize a major strike in Indian territory on its own without the collaboration of the LET and other Pakistani organizations. We should not walk into any ISI trap for creating an impression that Al Qaeda has supplanted the ISI’s surrogates such as the LET. ( 7-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

SINGAPORE AND AL QAEDA

2010-07-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO.662

B.RAMAN

While the main wing of Al Qaeda based in Pakistan’s tribal areas continues to draw its recruits, volunteers and supporters from the Arabic-speaking residents of West Asia and North Africa, with little command of the English language, its branch based in Yemen known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been drawing its adherents not only from the Arabic-speaking population of the region, but also from the community of Muslims in the English-speaking world who feel more comfortable with English than with Arabic.

2. its recently started English web journal called “Inspire” is directed to the Muslims of the English-speaking world. It will serve the dual purpose of acting as the propaganda journal of AQAP and on line training facility for enabling self-radicalised jihadis in the English-speaking world to acquire expertise in the use of weapons and explosives and techniques of waging a jihad without having to visit the training camps of AQAP in Yemen.

3. The difficulties hitherto faced by self-radicalised Muslims of the English-speaking world due to their poor command of the Arabic language are sought to be removed through ideological and technical manuals and instructions in the English language.

4. The idea of propaganda, ideological indoctrination, motivation and self-acquired expertise through the medium of the English language seems to have been inspired by Anwar al- Awlaki, the ideological mentor of the AQAP, who is of US-origin and reportedly feels as comfortable with the English language as he does with Arabic unlike Osama bin Laden, his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Al Qaeda leaders based in Pakistan and Yemen who feel more comfortable with Arabic than with English. Their poor command of English comes in the way of their direct communications with their followers in the English-speaking world.

5.Under the guidance of Awlaki, the AQAP is seeking to capitalize on the interest of self-radicalised elements in the English-speaking world to take to jihad. An example of such interest has come from Singapore where the local security authorities are reported to have detained for two years under the Internal Security Act a 20-year-old Singaporean Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid, who has been described by Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) as a full-time national serviceman in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF).He was actually detained on April 4,2010, but his detention has been officially revealed only now.

6.News agency reports giving the official account of his detention have given the following details of the case: Muhammad Fadil, who was a student in a local polytechnic before joining the SAF, had been surfing the Internet for jihadist propaganda material. It is not known whether he continued his Internet search for jihadi material even after joining the SAF. Most probably, he did. It is possible his interest in jihadi material had not come to notice before he joined the SAF. Otherwise, if it had come to notice even then, he might not have been taken into the SAF on a full-time basis.

7.According to the news agency accounts, he got radicalized through the Internet, convinced himself of his religious obligation as a Muslim to join other radicalized Muslims for an armed jihad and established online contact with Awlaki and expressed his wish to join him in his jihad. He was also reported to have contacted through the Internet an Al Qaeda recruiter whose identity has not been indicated by the Singapore authorities. He collected material on bomb-making through his Internet search and produced and posted a video justifying suicide bombing.

8.According to Singapore’s MHA, as reported by the news agencies, Muhammad Fadil did not undertake nor did he have any plans to undertake jihad-related activities in Singapore. He intended to pursue such activities in places like Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

9.In response to media queries, Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has stated that Muhammad Fadil was a trainee undergoing section leader training in the Pasir Laba Camp at the time of his arrest. He attended but did not complete his polytechnic course prior to his enlistment for national service in September 2009.

10.According to the MHA, two other Singaporeans have been placed under Restriction Orders (RO) for two years from June 23, 2010. One of them is 44-year-old Muhammad Anwar Jailani, who has been described as an unaccredited religious teacher. He had distributed to his students, contacts and the general public numerous copies of CDs containing audio recordings of Anwar al-Awlaki's lectures, which called on Muslims to undertake militant jihad against non-Muslims and other "enemies" of Islam. The other is 27-year-old Muhammad Thahir Shaik Dawood. He runs a small business and is one of Muhammad Anwar's students who became radicalised mainly through his influence. Muhammad Thahir had allegedly travelled to Yemen to enrol in an educational institution run by an associate of Osama bin Laden. He also sought out Anwar al-Awlaki and other radicals with a view to participating in armed jihad overseas if the opportunity presented itself. While still in Yemen, he began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of undertaking an armed jihad, gave up his idea and returned to Singapore.

11.There are some loose-ends in the official account as given by the Singapore authorities. Some questions remain unanswered. Was Muhammad Fadil connected to these two individuals? When and how Muhammad Anwar developed interest in Awlaki? Was it also through the Internet or whether Awlaki’s men have been visiting Singapore? Did the authorities come to know of Muhammad Fadil’s self-radicalisation and interest in Awlaki independently even before Muhammad Thahir returned to Singapore and was questioned by the authorities or did Thahir tell them about Fadil during his questioning.

12.The case speaks well of the alertness of the Singapore intelligence and security authorities and their ability to detect radicalizing trends before they assume threatening proportions. At the same time, it should be a matter of concern that despite the prosperity of the Muslim community of Singapore and the interest taken by the authorities in promoting their welfare, there are elements which are amenable to extra-territorial indoctrination and inclined to take to jihad. Despite the confidence of the local authorities that Fadil wanted to wage jihad abroad and not in Singapore, one should not lose sight of attempts being made by the AQAP to recruit Muslims who can travel freely across the Western world and use them for acts of terrorism against the West similar to its attempts to blow up an American plane over Detroit in the US on Christmas Day by using a Nigerian student studying in London with a valid visa for the US.

13.Since 2001, Al Qaeda has shown an interest in organizing an act of terrorism in Singapore against a US ship touching at the local port similar to the attack on USS Cole at Aden in October 2000. Self-radicalised volunteers like Fadil would come in handy for such operations. Self-radicalised elements in the Singapore Muslim community may not have any grievance against the Singapore Government and may not let themselves be used by Al Qaeda against Singaporean targets, but they could be brain-washed by Al Qaeda to undertake operations against US or other Western targets in Singapore territory. ( 6-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

PAK LEADERS QUARREL AS LAHORE CONTINUES TO BLEED

2010-07-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR—PAPER NO. 661

B.RAMAN

An unidentified Barelvi group of Pakistan has disseminated the following through the Internet after the twin suicide explosions in the Data Darbar sufi shrine of Lahore on the evening of July 1,2010, resulting in the death of 42 worshippers, the majority of them reportedly followers of the tolerant Barelvi sect which believes in Sufism : "Extremist Deobandis of the Sipah-e-Sahaba have once again attacked the Data Di Nagri (Data’s city), Lahore. This time their target was the sacred shrine of Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh Ali Hajveri, a Persian Sufi and scholar during the 11th century who significantly contributed to the spreading of Islam in South Asia. According to puritanical beliefs of extremist Deobandis and Wahhabis of the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Taliban, ordinary Sunni Muslims of the Barelvi belief are considered as polytheists (mushrik) because of their devotion to a peace loving Sufi (mystic) tradition of Islam. Therefore, narrow minded supporters of the Taliban and Sipah-e-Sahaba consider Barelvi / Sufi Muslims as grave worshippers and inferior Muslims. In the past, the Taliban / Sipah-e-Sahaba alliance have attacked a number of shrines in various parts of Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA (Federally-Administered Tribal Areas). In March 2009, the Taliban / Sipah-e-Sahaba militants detonated the shrine of Rehman Baba, a 17th Century Sufi poet of the Pashtun language. In March 2010, terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba attacked Eid Milad-un-Nabi processions in Faisalabad and D.I. Khan killing at least seven people. Only last week, in June 2010, the Deobandi terrorists of the Taliban / Sipah-e-Sahaba attacked and blew up the shrine of Mian Umar Baba in the jurisdiction of Chamkani police station."

2.The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has strongly denied any responsibility for the attack on the Sufi shrine which has caused considerable anger among the common people of Pakistan. In the past, anger over terrorist attacks used to be largely confined to the urban elite. For the first time, there is now widespread anger among large sections of the common people in Pakistan. In view of this, no organisation in Pakistan has claimed responsibility for the suicide blasts. On the contrary, the TTP and the various jihadi organisations of Punjab, which are often referred to as the Punjabi Taliban, have taken care to deny responsibility.

3. Among the organisations which have maintained a silence are the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba (SES) and its off-shoot the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, both of which closely collaborate with the TTP, the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda and have hide-outs in South and North Waziristan. It is generally believed by Pakistani police officers that Qari Hussain Mehsud, who runs the suicide bomber training school of the TTP, started his career as a jihadi in the SES and now trains the volunteers for suicide missions belonging to the LEJ too in addition to training those of the TTP. The TTP projects the so-called martyrs of the LEJ, who die in suicide missions or in encounters with the security forces, as its own “martyrs”.

4.Qari Mohammad Zafar, described as the head of the LEJ was reported to have been killed by a US drone air strike in North Waziristan on February 24 last. He was reportedly succeeded by one Mufti Abuzar Khanjari.Zafar was wanted by US and Pakistani authorities over a March 2006 attack near the US consulate in Karachi shortly before the visit of the then US President, Mr.George Bush to Pakistan from India.The US had offered a $5m (£3.3m) reward for information leading to his arrest or capture. It was reported that he had been given shelter in South Waziristan by the TTP.

5. Even though the US authorities did not issue a statement authenticating the reports of his death in a Drone attack, a statement attributed to the TTP on this subject was disseminated in the tribal areas of Pakistan in March. The statement described him as a “martyr” of the TTP without mentioning his LEJ origin and threatened that the TTP "will soon take revenge for his killing from the Government of Pakistan anywhere in the country." The warning added: "The Government of Pakistan is responsible for the killing (of militant commanders) in Drone strikes and the arrest of Afghan Taliban leaders Mullah Baradar, Mullah Kabir, Mullah Abdul Salam, ( Iran Jundullah chief) Abdul Malik Rigi and Afia Siddiqi, a Pakistani doctor now in the custody of the US."

6. Despite the TTP’s denial of responsibility for the attacks on the Sufi shrine, reliable Barelvi sources are convinced that the LEJ carried out the recent mass casualty attacks in Lahore on Ahmedia worshippers as well as on the followers of the Sufi saint in Data Darbar and that the LEJ must have carried out the attacks with the prior knowledge and approval of the TTP.

7. There are two Deobandi-Wahabi terrorist combines operating in Pakistan---the first consisting largely of Pashtuns belonging to the TTP and the so-called Ghazi force made up of surviving ex-students and teachers of the two madrasas attached to the Lal Masjid in Islamabad which was raided by the Special Services Group (SSG) of the Pakistan Army in July 2007 and the second consisting largely of Punjabi recruits belonging to the SES, the LEJ, the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the 313 Brigade of Ilyas Kashmiri of HUJI origin, who are referred to as the Punjabi Taliban.

8.The leaders of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) of Mr.Nawaz Sharif, former Prime Minister, are not prepared to admit the presence and activities of the second combine in Punjab. In the past, many leaders of the PML (N) have had contacts with the SES and the LEJ and had taken the help of their cadres during election campaigns. They also hesitate to come out strongly against the two Wahabi-Deobandi combines in order to placate Saudi princes and charity organizations, which have been the main sources of funding for the Punjabi Taliban. The result has been a lack of effective action against the hide-outs of the jihadi organizations in Punjab---particularly in Southern Punjab---- by the Punjab Police.

9. After the suicide blasts of July 1, there has been a slanging match between Mr.Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister,of Mr.Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), who accuses the Punjabi Taliban of being responsible for the terrorism in Punjab and Mr.Shabaz Sharif, the brother of Mr.Nawaz, who is the Chief Minister of Punjab. Mr.Shabaz denies that there is any Punjabi Taliban operating from sanctuaries in southern Punjab and accuses Mr.Malik of not co-operating with the Punjab Police and of withholding intelligence from the Punjab Government.

10. The Army has maintained a studied silence on this subject and has refrained from involvement in operations in Southern Punjab---particularly against the SES and the LEJ. There have been instances in the past of deserters from the Army and para-military forces joining the TTP, the SSP and the LEJ, but there have been no confirmed instances of the Deobandi-Wahabi vs Barelvi and the Deobandi-Wahabi vs Shias viruses affecting serving personnel of the Armed Forces. The Army wants to keep the serving soldiers immunized against these sectarian viruses. It fears that its active involvement in operations against sectarian terrorists could damage the unity of the armed forces.

11. This may please be read in continuation of my earlier article of June 1,2010, titled “Bleeding Lahore” at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers39%5Cpaper3840.html .

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

DATA DARBAR BLASTS: PAKISTAN IS IMPLODING, SAY SHOCKED PAKISTANIS

2010-07-01T21:18:00.001-07:00

B.RAMAN

The death of 40 worshippers in twin suicide blasts in a highly venerated sufi shrine of Lahore popularly known as Data Darbar on the night of July 1,2010 has outraged many Pakistanis, who have started wondering whether their Government has lost control over terrorists of its own creation, whether Pakistan is imploding due to religious hatred and violence. Annexed are some of the comments taken from the web site of an organisation called All Things Pakistan (http://pakistaniat.com/2010/07/01/data-darbar-blast/ ).

2.Thursday is the congregation day in the shrine when the maximum number of worshippers gather at night (jumaraat). The shrine is considered sacred not only by all Muslims----Shias, Sunnis and Ahmadias--- but also by Hindus . In fact, before Pakistan was born in 1947 a large number of Hindus from all over India used to visit the shrine.

3.The shrine was, in fact, electrified by a Hindu landlord living near the shrine in gratitude for the recovery of his sons from a severe attack of flu. Doctors had given up hopes for their recovery. The landlord believed that it was the saint in whose honour the shrine had been built, who came to his house at night and touched his sons who were in their deathbed. They recovered the next day.

4.Data Darbar is one of the oldest Muslim shrines in the subcontinent. It houses the remains of a Sufi saint, Abul Hassan Ali Hajvery. He was of Persian origin and was born in the 11th century in Ghazni, Afghanistan. From there he migrated to Iraq and spent the last years of his life in Lahore where he died and is buried.

5.No organisation has so far claimed responsibility for the suicide blasts, but the needle of suspicion points to its probably being an act of reprisal against the Pakistan Government by the Jundullah of Iranian Balochistan and the anti-Shia and anti-Iran Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) of Pakistan in retaliation for the suspected collaboration of Pakistan with Iran in the arrest of Abdolmalek Rigi , the Amir of the Jundullah, who was captured by the Iranian intelligence as he was flying to Kyrgyzstan from Dubai and executed last month after a short trial.

6.The "Dawn" of Karachi has reported as follows on the suicide blasts:

"In the first terrorist attack of its kind in the Punjab capital, two alleged suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine on Thursday night, killing at least 40 people and injuring 170 others. The first explosion took place in the basement reserved for ablution and the second in front of the shrine’s main building where a large number of people from across the province gather for worship on Thursdays.

" At first, police announced that some crackers had exploded near the shrine. The two bombers entered the shrine and exploded themselves three minutes apart. Surveillance cameras, walkthrough gates and metal detectors turned out to be ineffective. Around 100 volunteers and several policemen were present in and around the shrine, searching visitors thoroughly.

"Senior Superintendent of Police (Operations) Chaudhry Shafiq Ahmad told Dawn that two suicide attacks had been carried out and investigators had found the bombers’ skulls and limbs. He said ball-bearings and other material used in the blasts had also been collected. Lahore Commissioner Khusro Pervaiz Bakhtiar told journalists at the spot that the bombers had blown themselves up during a large congregation. In reply to a question about involvement of a foreign hand in the attack, he said the strike was a horrible conspiracy but “our own people become instruments in the hands of others”.

" The official said an investigation had been launched about the breach in security measures. According to witnesses, the explosions were so powerful that a large number of people fell down and several of them were injured in a stampede. The shrine’s administration announced seconds after the first blast that a generator had exploded in the basement and they might continue their activities. The bomb disposal squad estimated that 10-15kgs of explosives had been used in each suicide jacket.

" Ambulances of Rescue 1122 and the Edhi Foundation took the bodies and injured people to hospitals. According to a devotee, two gates on the north and south side of the shrine, which usually remain closed, were open on Thursday. He suspected that the bombers had entered through those gates. Scores of enraged people gathered outside the shrine and protested against terror attacks. They also damaged public and private property. There were reports that a cracker was exploded before the suicide blasts to create a panic.

"Police evacuated Data Darbar to collect evidence and carry out rescue work. All commercial and residential buildings adjoining the shrine were also searched for suspects. Following the blasts, an extensive crackdown was launched across the city and several people were detained for interrogation. A suspect was also taken into custody near the Darbar. Rumours of terror attacks on other shrines in the city panicked devotees and police also launched a search operation there. Security was beefed up in and around all shrines and religious places." (2-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretarty( retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ANNEXURE

( COMMENTS FROM THE PAKISTANI WEB SITE MENTIONED IN THE FIRST PARA)

"That Lahore’s single most iconic and revered location has been attacked - and on a jumaraat, which many consider to be sacred - reeks with symbolism and speaks volumes about the depth of hatred that these murderers have for all things Pakistan. Yes, I take this personally. Just as I have taken every murder of innocent Pakistanis anywhere in Pakistan, personally. Anyone who loves Lahore cannot hear of this and not have a shiver go down the spine; as it went mine. But that shiver is now a nearly daily occurrence. Whatever the symbolism of Data Sahib may be, it is paled by the outrage at the murder - yet again - of innocent people: the begunah, the masoom!

I would like to find the words to express that outrage, to express what Data Darbar means to so many, to describe the pain that pounds me once again as it has each time these murderers have hit Pakistanis anywhere. I would like to do that but - quite literally - my hands are trembling, my eyes have swelled up, and that shiver up my spine has gripped my entire body. Maybe later I will find the words to say what I need to say, but right now I ponder only on the darkness that resides in the hearts of the men who commit these acts, those who plan them, and those who choose to justify them.

Eidee Man says:
July 1st, 2010 10:49 pm

It is often said that nations are not destroyed by outsiders; they implode. If the fact that this attack happened on a religious gathering doesn’t cause a national outrage against the terrorist groups, then I really don’t see how our society can survive.

ATP Administrator says:
July 1st, 2010 10:43 pm

Some comments from the ATP Facebook Page:

- “How inhuman these cursed Taliban are. They kill Muslims everywhere they find us.”
- “That was not done by Talibans, Its for Sure Blackwaters, American backed terrorist organization, and this bloody Govt. of Zardari is allied with it.
Can’t you ever think all these events happen within Lahore, so neatly, that non of our so called ISI, CIA or Punjab police can even trace their back. Talibans can never be so organised and so trained….
No one get captured, because these people are safely transported into Lahore by Federal Govt. and they most probably reside in Balawal house or Governor house Lahore…
Google Sirilankan team attack in Lahore you would get some pretty fine articles stating that attackers went all the way till Bilawal house In model town Lahore and then disappeared….. If your president can kill his wife for money, then who are ordinary people not to be killed for the sake of money……”
- “i dnt agre wid u all that was a revnge by the qadiani.s………”
- “[above comments] an excellent example of “Parha Likha Jahil”.”
- “it is done by Pakistani talibans which are created by CIA and RAW to give a bad name to Afghani talibans.. Pakistani talibans have nothing to do with Islam.. they are non religious people who are working for CIA and RAW and our poor puppet government is doing nothing about it.. people are dying due to poverty and inflation and our government is still fighting to gain power over judiciary..
Long live PAK Army and Intelligence.. and Long Live Pakistan”

- “For Sure it was not done by Qadiani, they were already under greaf…”
- “being muslim is a distant thing, wahabis and taliban are not even human. The extremist version of sunni islam has gotten out of hand and we need to start making amends straight away. wahabism is zaleelism. it will drag us down into oblivion.”
- “There is but only ONE solution to all the violence in Pakistan - declare it a secular state, ban all the religious parties (political or non-political), ban all the public display of any religion .. and change the education to secular thoughts .. otherwise be prepared to live in 7th century”
- “”Taliban can never be so organised or trained”..Doesnt take much organisation to use children as bombs..All you need is a good deal of brainwashing which the taliban and taliban loving madrassas r extremely good at. There might be a hidden hand but taliban is not an innocent lot. We should learn to recognize the enemy within us…”
- “They say never happened in 800 years ,,, and i am sure its a foreign hand in it ,, dumbo security”
- “and the typical rhetoric goes on - CIA, RAW, Musad, Hindu Jewish lobby, Zardari, Qadiani .. as many fingers as many directions .. cant you all open your eyes and see it is the militant religious zealots who are doing all this .. and the only way to delete the word “Islamic republic” from Pakistan and start to live in the 21st century”
- “My blood boils at all the idiots and traitors who come to defend the Taliban who are the enemies of Pakistan. ALll the people who are defending the Taliban and giving stupid conspiracy theories, how many Pakistanis do you want to kill? Why do you hate Muslims? I say anyone defending the Taliban and these killers or trying to distract attention by stupid theories about foreign hands etc., they are all traitors and enemies of Pakistan themselves because they are supporting the killers of Pakistan.
PAKISTAN ZINDABAD.”

Muhammad Usman Ghani says:
July 1st, 2010 10:15 pm

The event makes one speechless but more speechless I get over the conspiracy theorists comments we will face over this issue in days to come.

Praful Shah says:
July 1st, 2010 10:02 pm

Looking the photos, reading the news makes me angry as well as sad. These monsters were created and nurtured to kill Indians, especially Hindus. These were Pakistan army’s additional wing with blessing from Mr. Nawaz Sharif & Mrs. Bhutto. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Sadly, neither Pakistanis politicians nor Pakistani army (ISI) does not give a damn. If they stop sheltering these sobs, the war will be over in very short time.
What scares me most if they attack US as they did in 2001, I do not think US and The West will take lightly. It is matter of time they will have access to Pakistani Nukes. Than what?
God only can help. ( 2-7-10)

FRESH UNREST IN J & K: NEED FOR BALANCED RESPONSE

2010-06-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

"It should be a matter of concern---but not yet of alarm---- that the fedayeen attack by a group of two terrorists---- apparently from Pakistan --- in the Lal Chowk of Srinagar on January 6, 2010, has come at a time when emotions are once again being whipped up in Pakistan over the Kashmir issue. The fedayeen attack resulted in a 22-hour confrontation between the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the terrorists, who managed to entrench themselves in a local hotel before they were killed.

"The whipping-up of emotions has the following objectives:

* To divert attention away from the domestic challenges faced by Zardari and the PPP-led Government.
* To placate the Army due to fears that the Army might get involved in any conspiracy to force the exit of Zardari.
* To placate the Punjabi jihadi organisations, which have been itching for renewed action in J&K, in order to bring about a divide between them and the anti-Army Pakistani Taliban.

"As a result of an improvement in the ground situation during the last two years, the Government of India, with the co-operation of the Government in Srinagar, had embarked on a policy with the following components:

* A calibrated withdrawal and/or re-deployment of the Army troops in order to give the J&K Police and the CRPF a greater responsibility for maintaining peace and law and order in the State.
* Maintaining on the ground the confidence-building measures already agreed upon with Pakistan before the bilateral dialogue came to be suspended following the 26/11 terrorist strikes by the Lashkar-e-Toiba in Mumbai.
* Maintaining the momentum of the dialogue between the Government and representatives of different political formations in the State in order to work out a political solution to their demands which are considered legitimate.

"The first fedayeen attack since 2007 need not call into question the wisdom of continuing this strategy. At the same time, the danger that a besieged Zardari-led Government might try to undermine this strategy by stepping up jihadi terrorism in the State has to be constantly studied, analysed and assessed by our intelligence agencies, the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). "

--------- From my note of January 8,2010, titled " Terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers36%5Cpaper3595.html

---------------------------------------------

The latest spell of unrest in Jammu & Kashmir ( J&K) involving clashes between stone-throwing and curfew-breaking mobs and the security forces has resulted in some fatalities----many of them allegedly young people. According to available accounts, the unrest has been partly spontaneous and partly orchestrated by elements suspected to be associated with the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in the Sopore area. The exploitation of the unrest by the LET and its subsequent aggravation should not be a matter of surprise. The unrest, if it can be kept sustained, gives the LET and other Pakistan-based jihadi organizations an opportunity to turn the international focus back to J&K without incurring any international criticism. While the West has come out against jihadi terrorism of Pakistani origin in hinterland India outside J&K, it will be inclined to close its eyes to the role of the Pakistani jihadi organisations in the latest spell of unrest in J&K and focus only on the manner in which the Indian security forces have been dealing with the unrest.

2. In Mumbai and the rest of hinterland India, the focus was and continues to be largely on Pakistan, but in J&K it will be considerably on India. This makes it important for us to adopt a mix of firmness in discouraging violence and avoiding over-reaction in responding to acts of violence----particularly by young people. There is a need for a verbal restraint from all sides. Lionisation of the security forces by some political parties and praising their valour in facing the violent mobs would be as inadvisable as their demonisation by others. Similarly any attempt by the Governments in the State and at the Centre to demonise the Kashmiri youth participating in the demonstrations against the security forces would be unwise. Even if the Government has concrete evidence of the involvement of the LET in provoking and stoking the unrest, it should avoid for the time being any over-projection of the external involvement since this could further provoke the younger elements.

3. The immediate objective should be enforcement of law and order without letting ourselves be provoked into using more force than necessary and at the same time diluting the anger through interactions with the civil society and seeking its co-operation in discouraging violations of curfew and mob violence directed against the security forces. The Government has done well to advise the security forces to use restraint in dealing with stone-pelting mobs. It is an advice easily given, but difficult to carry out, but one has to find ways of doing so if there are a large number of children in the mob.

4. Remarks by political leaders on both sides of the political spectrum which lend themselves to misinterpretation by sections of the people that the political class and the security personnel are insensitive to the deaths of young people allegedly at the hands of the security forces add to the anger and tend to make the situation even more uncontrollable than it has been.

5. We cannot treat our Kashmiris as no different from the Pakistanis of the LET and other Pakistan-based organizations even if they let themselves be used by the Pakistani organizations. The Government has an obligation to ascertain their grievances and address those which seem to be legitimate. Perceptions of Government’s indifference to dialogue unless it is forced to talk through mob violence add to the violence and create fresh spells of unrest.

6. The Government of Pakistan, its Army and Inter-Services Intelligence cannot ask for anything better than a confrontational situation between the security forces and sections of the people of Kashmir. Confrontational situations play into the hands of Pakistan-sponsored terrorists and would enable them to keep J&K boiling again.

7. In the training of our security forces in mob control, we have to stress the importance of a balanced response and not getting easily provoked by a mob.

8. The coverage of the unrest in J&K by some of our TV channels has been unfortunate. This has been particularly so in the case of Shri Arnab Goswami, the Editor and Anchor of the Times Now Channel, who has converted his channel into an electronic Hyde Park. In a programme on the evening of June 30, he had invited a representative each of the Congress (I) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a former Director of the Intelligence Bureau, and two Kashmiri leaders who are not on the same wavelength as the Governments in Srinagar and New Delhi. Since the Kashmiris are the aggrieved people, one would have expected him to give adequate opportunity to the two Kashmiri leaders. Unfortunately, he allowed most of the discussion to be monopolized by the Congress (I) and BJP leaders, who fought in an unbecoming manner. The two Kashmiri leaders were hardly able to give vent to their feelings. The fact that Mr.Goswami is a man of many prejudices came out clearly. (1-7-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

SMOKING OUT BIN LADEN FROM HIS " DEEP HIDING"

2010-06-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 660
B.RAMAN

In an interview to ABC TV channel’s “This Week” Programme on June 27,2010, Mr.Leon Panetta, Director of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is reported to have stated as follows: “ Osama bin Laden remains in very deep hiding but consistent pressure will flush him out. While hard data on him has been slight since the 2001 attacks, the CIA and US forces have killed or captured at least half the leadership of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We took down the No. three in their leadership (Mustafa Abu al-Yazid) a few weeks ago. We continue to disrupt them. We continue to impact on their command and control. We continue to impact on their ability to plan attacks in this country. Al Qaeda’s depleted numbers had shrunk dramatically. The pressure is definitely on bin Laden and Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri. I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100 (Al Qaeda members), maybe less. If we keep that pressure on, we think ultimately we can flush out bin Laden and Zawahiri and get after them. President Barack Obama had made going after Al Qaeda the fundamental purpose of the Afghan military mission. We’ve got to disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda and their militant allies so they never attack this country again. bin Laden remains in very deep hiding in a tribal area in Pakistan surrounded by tremendous security. The terrain is probably the most difficult in the world. It has been years since the United States has had good intelligence on the whereabouts of bin laden, although he is thought to be in Pakistan.”

2.It is nine years since the US intelligence agencies and military forces in the Af-Pak area started their hunt for Osama bin Laden after he was believed to have escaped into Pakistan’s tribal areas through the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan. They have had no success in getting at him. At least in the case of al-Zawahiri, his No.2, there was a report in January 2006 of a near miss in the Bajaur agency, but in the case of bin Laden there have been no reports of even a near miss. Neither the periodically enhanced cash reward offers nor stepped-up attacks by the Drones (pilotless planes) of the CIA have got him. The Drone strikes---helped by improved human and technical intelligence--- have been increasingly successful against leaders and cadres of the Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan and the Punjabi Taliban organizations. There have been some successful hits against other leaders of Al Qaeda too, but not against bin Laden.

3. The Drone strikes have been largely confined to North and South Waziristan and occasionally the Bajaur agency. If bin Laden is in one of these agencies, he is most likely to be hit one of these days if the US keeps up its Drone strikes because Al Qaeda and its alles do not have a wide choice of hide-outs. The fact that there has not even been a speculation that bin Laden was anywhere near the areas which have so far been hit by the Drones would give rise to questions as to whether he could be in one of the Waziristans, where he is often placed by the US intelligence. Other likely tribal areas of his hiding are in the Chitral area of Pakistan and in the Nuristan area of Afghanistan. There has been no concrete indication from those areas either.

4. The announcements of huge cash rewards for information leading to his capture or death amounting to millions of US dollars have been widely disseminated all over the tribal areas in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan and in its Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa province (formerly known as the North_West Frontier Province ). The absence of any leads about him from the Pashtun areas could be attributed to the loyalty of large sections of Pashtuns to him and to their aversion to helping the US in getting rid of him. But not all Pashtuns like bin Laden or are loyal to him to that extent. The Shias among the Pashtuns particularly in the Kurram Agency of the FATA and in parts of Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa and the Pashtun members of the Awami National Party, which is a member of the ruling coalition in Islamabad and is the head of the coalition in Peshawar, dislike him. They have no interest in protecting him.

5. The fact that neither the interested reward-seekers nor the CIA Drones have been able to get any inkling of the whereabouts of bin Laden would once again bring to the fore the question which I had raised from time to time in the past. That is, is he really hiding in the tribal areas as assessed by the CIA or is he hiding in the non-tribal areas with the help of Pashtun migrants in those areas. The Drones cannot reach him in the non-tribal areas. There will be many non-tribals interested in the huge cash rewards, but they may not have access to information about him. It is easier to get information in the sparsely-populated tribal areas than in the densely-populated non-tribal areas. In the past, some top-guns of Al Qaeda were found hiding in the non-tribal areas---- Abu Zubaidah in Faislabad in Punjab, Ramzi Binalshibh in Karachi and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in Rawalpindi. Many Afghan Taliban leaders were found hiding in Karachi and other places and not in Balochistan as used to be assumed.

6. While continuing to maintain the present hunt for bin Laden in the tribal areas, it is, therefore, important to extend it to the non-tribal areas too. Karachi, which has more Pashtuns than even Peshawar, needs attention. So too Quetta in Balochistan, which has a large Afghan refugee population, who have given shelter to the leaders of the Afghan Taliban. The strong-holds of the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) in the Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan are other areas calling for search. Of all the Punjabi Taliban organizations, the LEJ and the JEM are the closest to Al Qaeda.

7. The question of Drone strikes in the non-tribal areas does not arise. The CIA cannot expect the Pakistani intelligence and Police to co-operate in the search in the non-tribal areas. The CIA has to organize its own search operations with the help of anti-Al Qaeda communities such as those of the Mohajirs in Karachi, the Balochs in the Quetta area and the anti-LEJ Shias in Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan. ( 28-6-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and also Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventy-one2@gmail.com )

P.CHIDAMBARAM & REHMAN MALIK

2010-06-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

Mr.P.Chidambaram, our Home Minister, has exhibited refreshing firmness during his talks with Mr.Rehman Malik, Pakistan's Interior Minister, in Islamabad on June 25 and 26,2010. He had gone to Islamabad to attend the SAARC Home Ministers' meeting, which was held after a gap of more than two years and availed of this opportunity to hold detailed bilateral discussions with Mr.Malik on terrorism-related issues.The focus of the discussions between the two and of their media briefings was on terrorism in general and Pakistani action against the Pakistan-based perpetrators of the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai in particular. He had gone to Islamabad determined to show that the willingness of the Government of India to resume the bilateral dialogue on various contentious issues would not mean a dilution of the focus on terrorism.

2. In his remarks in Islamabad, Mr.Chidambaram took care not to directly blame the State of Pakistan for the acts of terrorism in Indian territory committed by the Pakistani organisations, which are now collectively referred to even by Pakistani analysts as the Punjabi Taliban. However, he did not hesitate to highlight directly or indirectly the inaction or unsatisfactory action of the State of Pakistan against the anti-India terrorists in general and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in particular.

3. While keeping up an unrelenting pressure on Pakistan for action against the LET and its perpetrators of the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai, including Hafeez Mohammad Sayeed, the Amir of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JED), the political wing of the LET, he saw to it that his observations and pressure did not spoil the current cordial atmosphere in the bilateral relations and would not come in the way of meaningful , forward-looking discussions during the visit of Mr.S.M.Krishna, our Minister for External Affairs, to Islamabad next month.

4. Keep up the pressure on Pakistan on the issue of terrorism, but at the same time don't allow justified concerns over terrorism stunt fresh thinking on other issues. That seems to be the new motto of the Government of India. It is apparent Mr.Chidambaram shares this motto despite his ill-concealed disappointment with Pakistan for failing to do all that it can and should to bring to book the Pakistan-based perpetrators of 26/11.

5. However, despite the refreshing firmness of Mr.Chidambaram, one felt disappointed to notice an apparent lack of adequate attention to questions of importance like the establishment of a networking relationship between India's Intelligence Bureau and its Pakistani counterpart, which comes under Mr.Malik, between the National Investigation Agency (NIA) of India and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) of Pakistan both of which are the central investigation agencies for terrorism-related cases and frequent interactions between senior police officers of the two countries. Mr.Malik did speak of the FIA and India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which already interact with each other during INTERPOL meetings, jointly investigating the 26/11 case. No elucidation on this was forthcoming from Mr.Chidambaram, who appeared to be over-focussed on the 26/11 case --- rightly so--- but under-focussed on the need for a web of institutional relationships between the intelligence collection and investigating agencies of our Home Ministry and Pakistan's Interior Ministry.

6.Mr.Malik suffers from professional and political handicaps as compared to Mr.Chidambaram. de jure, Mr.Chidambaram is the political head of only the IB and the NIA, but de facto, in counter-terrorism matters, all agencies of the Indian intelligence community----whether civilian or military---- report to him, keep him informed and carry out his instructions , even if they come under the control of the Prime Minister or the Defence Minister. Mr.Malik, an ex-police officer, is the political head of only Pakistan's FIA and IB, which has only limited powers and resources as compared to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and other military intelligence agencies.

7. In India, the military intelligence agencies play a role in counter-terrorism and in counter-insurgency only in the border areas. In the rest of the country, it is Mr.Chidambaram as the Home Minister, who is the czar of counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence. In Pakistan, the ISI and other military intelligence agencies, which have more powers and resources than the institutions of the Interior Ministry, do not recognise the overlordship of Mr.Malik in counter-terrorism. They do not always keep him informed of all the intelligence coming to their notice and carry out his instructions. The heads of the military intelligence agencies avoid attending meetings convened by him.

8. Additional problems arise in Pakistan because the Army and the ISI do not look upon the LET as a terrorist organisation. The LET is the virtual covert action division of the ISI and its operations in India and Afghanistan against India are viewed as covert actions in Pakistan's national interests. If Mr.Malik wants to take effective action against the LET, he cannot do so due to the perception of the LET as the covert action wing of the ISI.

9. Despite these limitations of Mr.Malik and his Interior Ministry, we must build up our contacts with them and the Pakistani police and encourage other countries such as the US and those of the European Union to do so in order to contribute in the medium and long-term to building up the status and powers of the Interior Ministry in Pakistan's internal security management. In the years after Pakistan's independence, the Internal Security Ministry used to be the overlord of internal security management. After losing control of East Pakistan in 1971, the Army and the ISI have taken over this responsibility, reducing the Internal Security Ministry to a virtual non-entity.

10.The present civilian Government in Pakistan is trying to re-empower the Internal Security Ministry. This is a process which all democratic Governments should encourage. China has been doing so. It has given the Ministry over US $ 300 million for capacity-building. It had invited Mr.Malik twice to China to discuss counter-terrorism co-operation. It has two programmes for counter-terrorism co-operation with Pakistan---one between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Pakistan Army and the other between China’s Ministry of Public Security, which is responsible for internal security and intelligence, and Pakistan’s Interior Ministry.

11. It is hoped that Mr.Chidambaram would adopt this objective and work for it in the months to come.(27-6-2010)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

MORE ON CHINESE ALERT IN XINJIANG

2010-06-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

According to reliable sources in the Uighur diaspora in Pakistan, the authorities in some of the towns of the Xinjiang province have made it mandatory for all religious sermons to be approved in advance by the local officials of the Ministry of Public Security, which is responsible for internal intelligence and security. Prior permission of the Ministry is also required for holding any religious gathering. Members of the Communist Party of China have been banned from attending religious congregations.

2.Earlier, a directive issued by the Religious Affairs Department of Shayar county in the Aksu Prefecture of the Xinjinag province in April had stated as follows: " All religious groups must register with the village branch of the Religious Affairs Department, allow monthly inspections of religious sites and special meetings by authorities, and obtain prior approval of the content of any religious services. Before village members gather for worship, the Religious Affairs Department must review the content of the texts in question. An information officer for religious activities will verify the content of the texts and must be advised of the specific situation in which the texts will be used in worship."

3.According to the same sources in the Uighur diaspora of Pakistan, due to pressure from the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan's Ministry of the Interior has ordered the closure of the Omer Uighur Language School in Rawalpindi. The Chinese authorities have accused the school of having links with the Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC). The Chinese Embassy has advised the members of the Uighur diaspora in the Rawalpindi-Islamabad area that in future they should send their children to a school at Rawalpindi set up earlier this year by the Chinese Embassy.

4. In July 2007, the Chinese authorities had exercised pressure on the Government of Gen.Pervez Musharraf to organise a commando raid into the Lal Masjid and its two madrasas in the Islamabad area following the kidnapping of some Chinese employees of beauty parlours by the students of the madrasas. It was anger over this raid which led to the formation of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the wave of terrorist strikes by the TTP and other jihadi organisations. There were also attacks on some Chinese working in the Khyber-Pakhtoonkwa province and Balochistan.

5. In the past, the Chinese Embassy was insisting on action only against Uighurs in Pakistan suspected of supporting the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan (IMET), an associate of Al Qaeda.Now, they are insisting on action against Uighur supporters of the WUC too.

6.The Chinese Ministry of National Defence announced on June 24 that the third joint counter-terrorism exercise between the Chinese and Pakistani Armies will be held at Qingtongxia in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region from July 1 to 11. The first exercise was held in 2004, in Xinjiang's Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County bordering Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. About 200 soldiers from both countries participated. The second exercise was held in 2006 in the Abbottabad area of Pakistan. About 400 soldiers from both sides participated. The third exercise was to have been held in China in 2008, but was postponed for unexplained reasons. According to the Uighur sources, the authorities of the two countries were probably concerned that a joint exercise in the wake of the anger over the Chinese role in the Lal Masjid raid could lead to fresh attacks on Chinese nationals in Pakistan.

7.Though no joint exercise has been held since 2006, the close co-operation in counter-terrorism continues at two levels---between the two armies and between the Interior Ministry of Pakistan and the Ministry of Public Security of China. Mr.Rehman Malik, Pakistan's Interior Minister, had visited China in 2009 and again earlier this year to discuss counter-terrorism co-operation, including exchange of intelligence. China is reported to have pledged assistance amounting to more than US $ 300 million to enable Pakistan strengthen its counter-terrorism capacity.

8.The "Los Angeles Times" reported on May 25,2009, that the Obama Administration had appealed to China to provide training and even military equipment to help Pakistan counter a growing militant threat and that Mr.Richard C Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, had visited Beijing in this connection for talks with the Chinese authorities. According to unconfirmed reports, Abdul Haq Turkestani, the Amir of the IMET, was reported to have been killed in a US Drone (pilotless plane) strike in the North Waziristan area in February last. During his visit to China earlier this year, Mr.Rehman Malik claimed that this information was correct, but neither the US nor the IMET nor the Chinese have confirmed his reported death so far.

9. In December last, a mixed group of 20 Muslim and Christian Uighurs, helped by a Macau-based Christian organisation, had managed to reach Phnom-Penh in Cambodia from Xinjiang and sought political asylum from the local office of the UN High Commission For Refugees (UNHCR). Before the UNHCR office could intervene, the Cambodian authorities had them arrested and deported to China. Three Muslim members of this group have since been projected by the Chinese authorities as terrorists, who were members of the IMET.

10.Mr.Wu Heping, a spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, told a press conference at Beijing on June 24 that the authorities of the Ministry had arrested a group of over 10 Uighurs belonging to the IMET. The details of the arrested persons given at the press conference indicated that the terrorist cell which the Chinese claimed to have broken up included three Muslim members of the group which had sought political asylum from the UNHCR office in Phnom-Penh in December 2009. It is not known what happened to the other 17 handed over by the Cambodian authorities.

11. Two persons were killed in an explosion in an oil storage tank in the Midong area of Urumqi on June 22,2010. According to the local authorities, the explosion took place when some welding work was going on. However, they have stated that it has not yet been established whether the welding caused the explosion. ( 25-6-2010)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (9)

2010-06-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (8)

2010-06-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the eighth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)

Bartleman’s evidence is not essential to arrive at the conclusion that the
Government knew enough about the pre-bombing threat to make its failure to
implement responsive security measures inexcusable. However, the prominence
given to the testimony of Bartleman by the Government makes it necessary to
conduct an evaluation of his evidence. With an understanding of what was
known by the Government in the pre-bombing period, Bartleman’s evidence
can now be assessed in its proper context.

Despite the aggressive insistence of the Government to the contrary, there is
nothing implausible about the existence and subsequent disappearance of a
document referring to a threat directed against a Canadian Air India fl ight. It is
possible that the passage of over two decades may have blurred some details
in Bartleman’s recollection, but the essence of his testimony is credible. The
Commission, applying the elements of common law assessment of evidence,
fi nds him a credible witness. He had nothing to gain from coming forward
with his evidence and he was fully aware that his evidence would be vigorously
attacked.

The Commission accepts the possibility that a document such as that described
by Bartleman would have been ignored and then subsequently could have
gone missing from the Government’s documentary holdings because:

The documentary holdings for the pre-bombing period are
incomplete.

Archives have been purged with no index of destroyed
documents.

CSIS, as a matter of policy, destroyed source documentation
once it had been reviewed and any intelligence reports had
been written.

Despite statements made in documents before the
Commission and in corroborating testimony at the hearings
that asserts that in the pre-bombing period the RCMP was in
receipt of a large volume of threats to Air India forwarded by
Air India itself, the number of RCMP documents produced to
the Commission falls well short of that description.

The state of CSE documentary holdings from the pre-bombing
period is unclear and the holdings themselves almost certainly
incomplete.

Various government witnesses claimed that information about a threat against
an Air India fl ight would have made an impression on them and that they
would have raised an alarm immediately. This assertion, however, is inconsistent
with what is known about the reaction to threat information received by the
Government of Canada in the spring of 1985 for which documentary evidence
remains. Such threat information, including the June 1st Telex, received little if
any reaction.

A government witness who stated that he would have remembered and reacted
to any bomb threat concerning Air India had to be reminded of the existence
of an April 1985 threat against an inbound Air India fl ight. He defended his lack
of response in that case on the basis that there were no security precautions
necessary to deal with a threat against an inbound fl ight. Nevertheless, the
failure to raise an alarm and the absence of documentary reference to this
threat in any other material from the pre-bombing and post-bombing periods
parallels what happened to the June 1st Telex.

A CSE witness who attempted to attack Bartleman’s credibility asserted that he
would have warned the Government of any threat against an Air India fl ight, as
he had done months earlier when he saw a reference to the November Plot. He
apparently was unaware, however, of the existence of the CSE information about
security measures being mandated for Air India operations, inside and outside
of India in response to threats of sabotage by Sikh extremists and information
that Indian airports were conducting security audits in light of these threats.
This is information whose relevance to the Air India bombings the Government
disputes to this day. The very fact that the relevance of the CSE documents is
disputed is illustrative. If past and current CSE offi cials cannot, even in hindsight,make the connection between this information and the threat to Flight 182, it should hardly be surprising that its relevance was unappreciated in 1985.

It remains unknown how accurate the threat information seen by Bartleman may
have been. As he freely admitted, the information he saw merely suggested the
existence of a threat and he had no way to assess its seriousness or credibility.
The RCMP witness who testifi ed that the Force received threats to Air India before
every fl ight used that fact as justifi cation for the RCMP’s view of these threats as “fl oaters” – sent by Air India in the hopes that the Canadian Government would
provide additional security without additional cost.

This account of the RCMP’s view of the credibility of threats to Air India issued
at the time is consistent with Bartleman’s account of the dismissive and even
hostile reception he received when he sought to bring the information to the
attention of the Force. It is also consistent with notations in earlier
documentation about a seeming annoyance on the part of the RCMP with being
“second-guessed” on security decisions by a member of External Aff airs.

Even if Bartleman saw nothing more than what was contained in the CSE
information unearthed by the Commission, it is likely that it would have been
enough, given his knowledge of Sikh extremism in Canada, to convince him that
the threat needed follow-up. The fact that Canada had the largest Sikh diaspora
in the world, that June was a time when there was a very high risk that some
action would be carried out against Government of India interests and that Air
India was a possible symbolic target, all would lead anyone with his knowledge
and experience in the area to raise questions about what precautions had been
taken. This was precisely what Bartleman did. ( To be continued)

KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (7)

2010-06-20T23:12:00.000-07:00

KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (6)

2010-06-20T23:07:00.000-07:00

AFTER KANISHKA, MUMBAI 26/11----AFTER 26/11?

2010-06-19T22:49:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada.329 civilians---270 of them Canadian nationals, 27 British nationals, 22 Indian nationals and 10 other foreign nationals---- were killed. The majority of the Canadian and British nationals killed were of Indian origin. The 22 Indians killed included 20 members of the crew. The flight was operating on the Montréal-London-Delhi-Bombay route. It was blown up in midair by a bomb in Irish airspace.

2.The report of the John Major Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which was set up only in 1984, allowed the terrorist attack to take place.We have been carrying relevant extracts from the report on the web site of the South Asia Analysis Group (SAAG) at www.southasiaanalysis.org.

3.The terms of reference of the Commission were restricted to finding out whether intelligence relating to the plans of the Sikh extremists based in Canada to blow up a flight of the Air India originating from a Canadian airport existed, if so, whether the disaster could have been prevented and why it was not prevented. The Commission's enquiry did not cover the role of Pakistan in assisting the Babbar Khalsa in organising acts of terrorism against Indian targets. This was not in its terms of reference. After the explosion, Parmar fled to Pakistan, where he was given sanctuary by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He operated from Pakistan against India till 1992 ----- for seven years --- and crossed over into India from Pakistan in 1992 following Western pressure on Pakistan to have him arrested and handed over to India for investigation and trial. He was killed in an encounter by the Punjab Police in 1992. The role of Pakistan in giving shelter to the main conspirator in the plot which blew up the Kanishka and continuing to help him and sponsor his acts of terrorism was also not gone into by the Major Commission. It was not in its terms of reference either.

4. When the Kanishka aircraft was blown up, Gen.Zia-ul-Haq was in power in Pakistan and was playing an active role in assisting the Central Intelligence Agency of the US in its operations against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In gratitude for this assistance, many transgressions of Pakistan were overlooked by the Western Governments. One of these transgressions was its assistance to the Babbar Khalsa which blew up the Kanishka and not extending mutual legal assistance to India in the investigation of the case. The second transgression was its clandestine acquisition of a military nuclear capability with the collusion of China.

5. Mrs.Benazir Bhutto came to power with the reluctant approval of the Pakistani Army and the ISI, then headed by Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul, following the elections held after the death of Zia in a plane crash in August,1988. After assuming office, she started exercising pressure on the ISI to stop playing what she used to call the Sikh card against India. There was pressure on the ISI from the Western Governments too.

6. The ISI asked the Government of Mr.Nawaz Sharif, which was then in power in Punjab as the Chief Minister, to take over the responsibility for assisting the Khalistani terrorists, including Parmar, and for funding and training them. The Nawaz Government readily agreed to this and asked the Special Branch of the Punjab Police to take over from the ISI the responsibility for assisting the Khalistani terrorists. It appointed Brig.Imtiaz, who headed the political division of the ISI under Zia, as adviser to the SB to supervise this project. He had been removed from the ISI by Benazir, who intensely disliked him.

7. What happened in Pakistan after the Kanishka disaster is now being repeated after the terrorist strikes of 26/11 in Mumbai carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) with the prior knowledge and possibly tacit if not open approval of the ISI. One hundred and sixty-six persons, including 25 foreigners of different nationalities, were killed. Till the Kanishka disaster of June 1985, the repeated warnings of the Indian intelligence and security agencies about the emergence of the Babbar Khalsa as an international terrorist organisation were not treated seriously by their Western counterparts.

8. The Major Commission report clearly brings out that there was a considerable flow of intelligence and warnings from the Government of India about the plans of the Babbar Khalsa branch in Canada to blow up an Air India plane originating from Canada. There were also similar warnings and requests for physical security enhancements from Air India to Candian security offcials responsible for aviation security. The Major Commission report indicates that these warnings and intelligence, which had emanated from the Government of India and Air India, were not seriously acted upon by the Canadian authorities. The reports from the Government of India were attributed by them to the Indian tendency to "cry wolf". Air India's warnings were attributed to its alleged desire to obtain security enhancements without paying for it. The result: 329 innocent civilians perished. The disaster could have been easily prevented and their lives saved, if the warnings from the Govt. of India and Air India had been acted upon.

9. This could not be done because of the tendency of the Canadian authorities to view any intelligence warning emanating from India with a prejudiced mind through the prism of Inda's disputes with Pakistan. This prejudiced mindset is not unique to the Canadian authorities. It is shared by the authorities of other Western Governments too. Have they learnt any lessons from the Kanishka disaster?

10. No. The same prejudiced mind was seen between 9/11 and the London explosions of July,2005, in their tendency to dismiss Indian warnings of the emergence of the LET as an international terrorist organisation on par with Al Qaeda. They started paying serious attention to the LET only after the London explosions of 2005 and then after the 26/11 terrorist strikes in Mumbai.Just as they were looking at the Indian warnings regarding the Babbar Khalsa through the India-Pakistan prism, they continue to view even today the Indian warnings regarding the LET through the India-Pakistan prism.

11. In the actions taken by them after the Kanishka disaster, they made a distinction between the role of the Babbar Khalsa in indulging in terrorism and the role of the ISI in assisting it. Post-1985, they acted against the Babbar Khalsa as a terrorist organisation and co-operated with India in monitoring its activities, but they refrained from acting against the ISI. After the Kanishka explosion, it took about 10 years for the Babbar Khalsa to be brought under control. During this period, many more innocent civilians perished at its hands .

12.History has been repeating itself since 26/11. The Western Governments are now taking seriously the threat posed by the LET to them, but, at the same time, they are refraining from acting against the ISI without whose support the LET cannot survive for long. Unless there is simultaneous action against the LET and the ISI, the threat from the LET will continue for a long time.

13.After 26/11, the ISI is behaving exactly as it behaved after the Kanishka disaster. Because of the Western pressure and the close monitoring of the activities of the LET, it has asked the Special Branch of the Punjab Police to take over the responsibility for keeping the LET and its political wing the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JUD) alive and active and for funding their activities. The Punjab Government of Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif, the brother of Mr. Nawaz, is going along with this.

14. The "Dawn" of Karachi reported on June 16,2010, that according to the supplementary budget for 2009-10 recently submitted to the Punjab Provincial Assembly for post-facto approval, the Government of Mr.Shabaz Sharif gave a grant of Rs79 million to the Markaz-i-Taiba, the headquarters of the JED and the LET at Muridke in Punjab. In addition,another sum of Rs3 million was given as grants to the schools run by the JUD in different districts of Punjab.Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan, who has been accused by his critics of having contacts with the Sunni extremist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which is playing a leading role in the Punjabi Taliban, has admitted to having given the money to the JUD.

15. One does not see any sign that the West is moving to act against the continued nursing of the LET by the ISI, either directly, if possible, or through the Punjab Police. Unless this is stopped, disasters of the Kanishka and Mumbai kind will be repeated.The prejudiced view of Indian intelligence warnings and assesssments brought out in the Major Commission report continues even today 25 years after the Kanishka disaster---not only in Canada, but also in other Western countries. So long as they are not able to rid themselves of this prejudiced mindset, threats of mass casualty terrorism planned and carried out from Pakistani territory or with the assistance of its ISI will continue to confront not only India, but also the West. (20-6-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

KANISHKA DISASTER---SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (5)

2010-06-19T18:38:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the fifth instalment of relevant extracts from the report.)

The central unanswered question that Canadians, and especially the
families of the victims of the bombing of Flight 182, have hoped a Public Inquiry
might reveal is whether the Government and its institutions had information
prior to the bombing that could have allowed the authorities to prevent it.

The answer is complex. There is no evidence that the Government was aware in
advance of the details of the events of June 22, 1985. That is the basis for the oftrepeated
statement that there was no knowledge of any “specifi c threat” against
Flight 182.

To pose the issue in this form is, however, to miss the point. In 1985, “specifi c
threat” was a technical term tied to emergency protocols put into place when
the authorities received a call-in threat that identifi ed a target, in circumstances
where there was not enough time to conduct a proper investigation or
assessment of the threat. This sort of “specifi c threat” justifi ed emergency
measures because of the magnitude of potential consequences even if it wasn’t
possible to assess the likelihood of their occurrence.

It is one thing to say that, had there been such a “specifi c threat,” detailing a time,place and method of a planned attack on Flight 182, emergency measures would
have been implemented to hunt down the bomb. It is entirely something else
to suggest that, in the absence of such a detailed, precise and “specifi c” threat,
nothing further could or should have been done to prevent the bombing.

The claim that there was no “specifi c threat” to the June 22, 1985 departure of
Flight 182 is accurate only in a limited and literal sense. No one source provided
detailed information to any one agency in one place and at one time about
the plan to blow up Flight 182 on June 23, 1985. On the other hand, various
agencies of government had extremely important pieces of information that,
taken together, would have led a competent analyst to conclude that Flight 182
was in danger of being bombed by known Sikh extremists.

Prior to the bombing, CSIS, the RCMP, the Department of External Aff airs, local
police forces and Transport Canada were collectively in possession of the
following information about Sikh extremism and threats to Indian interests:

• A plot to bomb one and possibly two Air India planes was allegedly
being hatched by Sikh extremists in British Columbia in the fall
of 1984;

• In the fall of 1984, Ajaib Singh Bagri was allegedly nominated to a
committee planning the hijacking of an Air India plane;

• Talwinder Singh Parmar’s group, the Babbar Khalsa, was reportedly
working on a “highly secret project” in the spring of 1985, and
Parmar had been assessed as the greatest threat in Canada to
Indian diplomatic missions and personnel;

• In early June, Parmar and associates conducted experiments in the
woods involving a loud explosion;

• During a June 12, 1985 meeting, a prominent Sikh extremist stated
– in response to questions about the lack of attacks on Indian
offi cials - that something big would happen in two weeks; and

• In late May and early June, Air India warned that sabotage attempts
against Air India planes were likely to be made by Sikh extremists
using time-delayed devices in registered baggage, that special
vigilance was warranted on items like transistor radios, and
that police should oversee the loading of registered luggage
onto airplanes.

James Bartleman, who at the time he gave his evidence was Lieutenant Governor
of Ontario, and in 1985 was Director General (DG) of the Intelligence Analysis and
Security Bureau at External Aff airs, testifi ed that shortly prior to the bombing, he saw, as part of the material he received electronically from CSE on a daily basis,
information that indicated that Flight 182 would be targeted. He was not able to
assess the reliability of the information but thought it important to ensure that
the authorities were aware of the information and were dealing with it. When he
brought the information to the attention of an RCMP offi cial who was attending
a security meeting in the building, he was met with a hostile reception and an
indication that the RCMP was aware of the matter and had it in hand. On June
23, 1985, when he was informed of the bombing, he thought immediately that
this was the materialization of the threat, and that the authorities had been
unable to prevent it.

Counsel from the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Government and all
its agencies, approached Bartleman’s evidence as though it was the only prebombing
indication of the danger to Air India Flight 182. In an entirely misguided
approach, Bartleman was aggressively cross-examined and witnesses were
called to attempt to call into question the details of his evidence.

Intelligence specialists often observe that an item of information, although
apparently insignifi cant in itself, may in fact be the missing piece to a puzzle
that helps a foreign or hostile group or agency see a pattern or draw conclusions
that have profound intelligence value. This “mosaic eff ect” metaphor is typically
used by intelligence agencies, sometimes excessively, to describe the potentially
dangerous consequences that can result from the disclosure of their own
information and to justify the need for secrecy. It is an equally apt description of
how gathering and sharing information can help an agency’s own intelligence
eff ort.

The essence of good intelligence analysis is that it pulls together disparate
facts and information from diverse sources to assemble a pattern in which one
can have confi dence. Once enough information has been assembled, even
seemingly insignifi cant new additions can lead to new insights and deeper
understanding.

However startling and important Bartleman’s testimony may be, it is not, as
the blistering assault on his credibility by some Government witnesses and the
Attorney General of Canada’s submissions would imply, the only evidence that
suggests that the Government had enough knowledge of the threat to Flight
182 to warrant a diff erent security response.

Even without the document that Bartleman described, there was more than
enough disparate pieces of information that, had they been assembled in one
place, would have not only pointed to the nature of the threat, but would have
provided corroboration for the seriousness of that threat, thereby highlighting
the need to implement measures aimed specifi cally at responding to the
possibility of sabotage by means of explosive devices concealed in checked
baggage. Bartleman’s evidence is best understood as simply one more piece in the
mosaic.

In 1985, the institutional arrangements in place and the prevailing practices
of Canadian information-gathering agencies were wholly defi cient in terms of
allowing the mosaic of the threat of Sikh extremism to be pieced together so as
to make visible the pattern that clearly pointed to the high risk of a bombing of
The consequence of these defi cient arrangements was that CSIS, the government
agency that was given the primary responsibility for threat assessment, did
not have suffi cient access to facts about the threat of Sikh extremism. Lacking
good access to sources of its own within the Sikh community, CSIS was heavily
dependant on other agencies, both foreign and domestic, for the information it
needed to understand the threat.

CSIS had an abundance of threat information from the Indian government about the situation in India and about what was going on in the Sikh community in Canada, but it was unable to corroborate it.Without corroborating information, however, the large volume of information from the Government of India gave the impression that it was “crying wolf.”( To be continued)

KANISHKA DISASTER--SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (4)

2010-06-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

KANISHKA DISASTER: SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT (2)

2010-06-19T03:26:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.This is the second instalment of relevant extracts from the report)

Despite its awareness of the threat and of the identity of the potential
protagonists who might carry it out, CSIS appears to have obtained little
important new information of its own about the Sikh extremist threat or about
the Babbar Khalsa or about Parmar from the fall of 1984 through to March of
1985. The major reason for this gap lay in the state of the warrant approvals
process that had been put in place by the CSIS Act in June 1984.

On the ground, CSIS BC investigators were aware of the urgent nature of the
threat from Sikh extremism and of the inadequacy of their information resources
to deal with it. They simply had no information sources of their own and had
been totally unsuccessful in recruiting sources within a Sikh community that
was somewhat insular and vulnerable to intimidation by the extremists. They
soon concluded that they needed surveillance and electronic intercepts in order
to be able to understand and respond to the increasing threat.

The institutional response to the request to approve a warrant to intercept
Parmar’s communications demonstrates a fi xation with form over substance
and, despite protestations to the contrary at the time – and subsequently,
suggests a lack of appreciation of the reality of the threat.

The civilianization of CSIS was in part a reaction to RCMP Security Service
excesses in its investigation of the Front de Libération du Québec (the “FLQ”)
and extremist Quebec Separatists. Under the RCMP Security Service, while
electronic intercepts had required approval, the process was informal, simply
requiring a request to the Solicitor General, the Minister responsible for the
RCMP (and later also for CSIS). With the creation of CSIS, as one of the means to
protect civil liberties from unjustifi able intrusion by or on behalf of government,
a new system of judicial supervision of certain intelligence operations was
instituted, including a requirement for judicial approval for intercepting private
communications. This new protocol was to apply prospectively but also was
intended to cover existing intercepts that had been approved by the Minister.
There was an explicit requirement that existing intercepts had to be reviewed
internally and approved by the Solicitor General and then by a judge of the
Federal Court, all within 6 months of the coming into force of the CSIS Act, i.e. by
January 1985.

When added to the considerable stresses and strains that accompanied
the rushed transition to CSIS from the RCMP Security Service, it was entirely
foreseeable that this warrant conversion process would be the source of added
pressure and potential misadventure. The foreseeability of the problems that
might be caused by the requirement to devote considerable resources to the
conversion process should have called for added care and attention to ensure
that the process would be capable of meeting new needs that would arise and
not just of preserving existing arrangements. Instead, the response of CSIS was
to prioritize existing warrants and to defer new applications, with the exception
of only those deemed most urgent. As CSIS understandably would want to avoid
disrupting existing investigations, in theory, this process could be considered a
sensible policy; in practice, its eff ectiveness depended on the Service’s ability to
respect the new needs that were more urgent.

The evidence before the Commission indicates that, despite the priority
afforded to the warrant conversion process, it was possible to secure a warrant
in an extremely short timeline to respond to a perceived urgent priority, as
occurred in an area other than the threat of Sikh extremism. The protracted wait
for the processing of the Parmar warrant application either demonstrates an
unthinking application of the concept of priority of existing warrants or, more
likely, refl ects the lack of appreciation of the true urgency of the threat of Sikh
extremism.

Despite certifi cation by the existing chain of command in BC as well as by the
Headquarters counterterrorism hierarchy, and despite increasingly pointed
memoranda from the front lines in BC, the application for the Parmar warrant
lay dormant for months while the conversion process went forward. Then, after
proceeding through multiple steps in the complicated, and still in fl ux, approval
process, it was further delayed for an additional month by what turned out to
be an irrelevant issue raised by the Minister’s Offi ce. Although the fi nal steps
leading up to the submission of the warrant to, and approval by, the Federal
Court proceeded relatively quickly, the total time from the request for a warrant
to the date of approval was over fi ve months. This lengthy delay was entirely
disproportionate to the heightened threat and the demonstrated lack of
intelligence sources available to respond to it.

The subsequent course of the BC investigation confi rms the theme of inadequate
resourcing and indicates that execution on the ground was not suffi cient for the
seriousness of the threat being dealt with. Eventually the BC investigators did get
approval both for electronic intercepts and for physical surveillance coverage on
Parmar. As will be seen, the story of neither eff ort is particularly edifying. ( To be continued)

KANISHKA DISASTER: SALIENT POINTS OF MAJOR COMMISSION REPORT

2010-06-19T02:04:00.000-07:00

B.RAMAN

( In 2006, the Canadian Government had appointed a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major to enquire into the crash of an aircraft of Air India named Kanishka on June 23,1985. The crash was caused by an explosive device suspected to have been planted in a piece of unaccompanied baggage by Sikh extremists belonging to the Babbar Khalsa headed by the late Talwinder Singh Parmar of Vancouver, Canada. The report of the Commission was released on June 17, 2010. The Commission has found that a "cascading series of errors" by the Government of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service allowed the terrorist attack to take place.We will be carrying from today relevant extracts from the report)

The Air India Flight 182 tragedy was the result of a cascading series of
failures. The failures were widely distributed across the agencies and institutions
whose mandate it was to protect the safety and security of Canadians. There
were structural failures and operational failures; policy failures, communications
failures and human errors. Each contributed to, but none was the sole cause
for, Sikh terrorists being able to place a bomb in the checked baggage loaded
aboard Flight 182 without being detected. Some failures came to light almost
immediately, but a number have lain undetected, or at least unacknowledged,
for decades and have only come to light during the currency of this Commission
of Inquiry.

The first question posed by the Terms of Reference of this Inquiry is whether
Canadian institutions adequately understood and assessed the threat posed by
Sikh extremism.

All of the institutions and agencies were theoretically aware of the potential
threat to safety and security posed by terrorism in general. A few had some
knowledge of the dangers of its Sikh extremism version in particular. Several
were nominally aware of the threat of sabotage to passenger aircraft by means
of timed explosive devices in checked baggage, and one agency was even
aware of information indicating that Air India might be targeted by this method
in June 1985. As a practical matter however, none of the institutions or agencies
was adequately prepared for the events of June 22/23, 1985.

Indeed it is impossible to draw any conclusion other than that, almost without
exception, the agencies and institutions did not take the threat seriously, and
that the few individuals within these institutions who did, were faced with
insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to deal with the threat.

There are a number of plausible ways to break down the failures that allowed
the bombing of Flight 182 to occur. Each of the agencies and institutions that
should have had a role in preventing terrorist attacks displayed structural flaws
that impaired their performance.

CSIS only came into being as an independent civilian agency in 1984. Before
that, the national security intelligence was under the purview of the Security
Service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The circumstances surrounding
the birth of CSIS had a deep and detrimental impact on its ability to detect the
particular security threat posed by Sikh extremism and on its ability to provide
useful advice to the agencies and institutions charged with protecting Canadian
lives and property.

Although the notion that intelligence should be handled by a civilian agency
rather than the police had been widely discussed and debated in Canada for
over a decade, the CSIS Act, which brought about this transformation, was
passed hurriedly as the last legislative act of the outgoing Liberal government
in June of 1984. It was then left to be implemented in a very short time frame
by a new Progressive Conservative administration with limited accumulated
experience in the area of national security. The result was an uneven transition,
marred by scarce resources and by bruised feelings: both at the RCMP, which
felt wronged by the removal of its intelligence mandate, and at CSIS, which felt
poorly supported in its new role.

While intelligence officers were aware of the existence of the phenomenon of
Sikh extremism, the rise in the intensity, fervour and potential danger of this
phenomenon was the result of events in the Indian sub-continent that took
place in the same time frame as the transition from the Security Service to CSIS.
These events included the occupation and fortification of the Golden Temple
in Amritsar, Sikhism’s central shrine, by armed Sikh separatists, the subsequent
bloody storming of the Golden Temple by the Indian army, and the resulting
massacres and intercommunal violence in the State of Punjab, all of which
culminated in the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her
own Sikh bodyguards. This chain of events led to a rise in anti-Indian sentiment
within the Sikh diaspora, including the Sikh community in Canada.

Even in a relatively stable institutional environment, keeping up with the rapidly
changing landscape of Sikh extremism in Canada would no doubt have proved
challenging. The impact of the transition from the RCMP Security Service to CSIS
made a difficult situation that much worse.

Although CSIS personnel were dedicated and hardworking, the institutional
context was poorly geared toward dealing with terrorism in general – and with
a terrorist threat arising from Sikh extremism in particular. Canadian intelligence
gathering was stuck in a Cold War paradigm in which the primary threat to
national security was assessed as emanating from espionage by hostile foreign
governments. Most resources were allocated to counter-espionage, with
comparatively few resources devoted to counter-terrorism.

Of the resources devoted to counter-terrorism, most were concentrated on the
risks posed by Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish interests in Canada.
Even at the so-called “Sikh Desk” at CSIS headquarters, (which was a sub-unit
of the “Western Europe and Pacific Rim” unit of the Counterterrorism unit) the
arguably inadequate official complement, consisting of a unit head and four
analyst positions, was in fact only partially staffed. Only the unit head and
two analyst positions were actually filled, and that even smaller number was
further reduced by the fact that, for the better part of the year leading up to the
bombing of Flight 182, one of the incumbents was away on French language
training. In the Regions, staffing was equally thin. In BC Region, where the most
militant and most obviously dangerous elements of Sikh extremism in Canada
were to be found, two investigators were responsible for the entire investigation
of Sikh terrorism.

CSIS personnel assigned to this investigation received no additional training;
investigators and analysts were expected to learn on the job. CSIS appears
to have uncovered little, if any, information on its own, with most of
its information coming from the Government of India through the Indian High
Commission. The full extent of CSIS’s knowledge in the summer of 1984 was that
Talwinder Singh Parmar had been released from prison in Germany following a
failed extradition attempt on murder charges by the Government of India, and
had returned to Canada, where he was launching a public campaign of fiery
rhetoric and communal intimidation to radicalize gurdwaras (Sikh temples)
and to take over their direction and their revenues. CSIS was unable to provide
confirmation of its existence in Canada, let alone the actual size of the extremist
Babbar Khalsa movement that Parmar claimed to lead, and even referred to it as
the “Barbara Khalsa group.” By the fall of 1984, CSIS had pieced together enough
information to be able to identify Parmar as the most dangerous Sikh in Canada
and to opine that his associate Ajaib Singh Bagri could be manipulated to carry
out a terrorist attack. ( To be continued)

ANTI-MUSLIM REPRISAL TERRORISM---AN UPDATE

2010-06-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 659

B.RAMAN

( This may kindly be read in continuation of my earlier article of October 24,2008, on the same subject, which is available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2892.html . The earlier article is annexed for easy reference )

Rediff.com has reported as follows: "The long-pending investigations into the three-year-old Mecca Masjid blast case on Thursday (June 17,2010) moved forward with the Central Bureau of Investigation producing two suspects RSS pracharak Devender Gupta and his accomplice Lokesh Sharma in a special CBI court in Hyderabad. 14th additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate remanded the two to the judicial custody till June 30. A CBI team brought the two from Ajmer jail on a prisoner transit warrant......Devender Gupta and Lokesh Sharma, prime accused in bomb blast in Ajmer Dargah, were in Ajmer jail for the last one and a half months. CBI sources said that they will seek the custody of Gupta and Sharma to question them about their role in the bomb blast in Mecca Masjid on May 18, 2007. 15 people were killed in the blast during Friday congregation and subsequent police firing. CBI says that it was on the look out for two more suspects Sandeep Dange and Ramachandra Kalasangar alias Ramji. "

2. The investigation is still on-going and the final charge-sheet against the accused----all members of the Hindu community--- is still to be filed. The investigation made so far points in the direction of suspected targeted attacks on Muslims and their places of worship by some individual elements in the Hindu community as acts of retaliation for jihadi terrorism in different parts of India.

3.The fact that some of the arrested Hindu suspects had alleged links with the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and other allied organisations has given rise to fresh allegations regarding Hindu terrorism. Prominent office-bearers of the RSS have done well to dissociate their organisation from the alleged acts of terrorism of the arrested individuals and express their support for the investigation against them to move forward vigorously.

4. Retaliation by a State against a State sponsoring acts of terrorism through surrogate terrorist organisations and against terrorist organisations which let themselves be used by a State are permitted under many UN resolutions against State-sponsorship of terrorism against another State. Such acts by a State are categorised as amounting to indirect aggression. There are instances of States retaliating against another State or in the territory of another State in order to make the sponsorship of terrorism by a State or acts of terrorism by an organisation from the territory of another State prohibitively costly.

5.The US air strikes in Libya in 1986 were an act of State retaliation for the terrorist attack on some US soldiers in a West Berlin discotheque by suspected terrorists allegedly sponsored by Libya. The US Cruise missile attacks on suspected Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and the Sudan in 1998 were acts of State retaliation against a terrorist organisation for its suspected involvement in the explosions of August 1998 outside the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. There have been such acts of retaliation by Israel too.

6. While such acts of selective retaliation against another State and terrorist organisations in their foreign hide-outs can be justified depending on the circumstances which led to the retaliation, no law----domestic or international---permits an act of retaliation by a State or organisation or individuals in one's own territory against one's own co-citizens.

7.There has been no universally accepted definition of terrorism, but it is agreed by terrorism analysts that the indiscriminate killing of civilians by using an explosive device in a public place is an act of terrorism. Thus, the members of the Hindu community who have been arrested and are presently under investigation have indulged in acts of terrorism against Muslims if the facts alleged against them are proved in a court of law.

8. Calculations of what we call vote bank politics ---- electoral dividend or the lack of it---- should not be allowed to come in the way of the thorough investigation of the charges against the arrested persons There are two kinds of violence under the law----- violence in the heat of the moment in exercise of the right of self-defence and pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence. There is no excuse under the law for pre-meditated and pre-planned acts of violence-----whether they amount to terrorism or not.

9. Any perception that the investigation against the arrested Hindus is not being done as vigorously as the investigation against Muslims suspected of terrorism would weaken our case against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and provide an excuse to organisations such as the Indian Mujahideen (IM) for indulging in more acts of terrorism. The statement disseminated by the IM before its blasts in Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, alleged that the Indian criminal justice system is unfair to the Muslims. Any perception of a lack of thoroughness in the investigation against the arrested Hindus would add substance to this allegation of the IM.

10. It is in the interest of the RSS and allied organisations to strongly support such a thorough investigation and make it abundantly clear that they do not support acts of retaliation in our territory against our co-citizens. ( 18-6-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

ANNEXURE

Paper no. 2892 24-Oct.-2008
Anti-Muslim Reprisal Terrorism? - International Terrorism Monitor--Paper No. 460
by B. Raman

"Some sections of the Muslim community suspected that this attack ----like the other attacks targeting members of their community--- must have been the responsibility of Hindu extremist elements. There was no basis for their suspicions, but they persist. The only way of removing their suspicions is through a thorough investigation and the definitive identification of all those involved. The many missing links in the investigation of this strike as well as in the terrorist attack on the Mumbai suburban trains should be a cause for concern. Targeted attacks on innocent Muslims by Al Qaeda and other jihadi organizations is nothing new. Such attacks take place often in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. But, in those countries, the attacks on Muslim civilians are generally due to one of two factors. Either the targeted Muslims belonged to a rival sect (Sunni vs Shia or Deobandi vs Barelvi) or rival organization or were perceived as collaborators of the Government and hence apostates. None of these factors applied in the case of the Muslims----Indians and Pakistanis--- who were traveling by the Samjotha Express. The conventional wisdom was that the Muslims were now being deliberately targeted by the jihadi organizations in order to provoke them against the Government and the Hindus. I do not subscribe to this wisdom. It is important to keep an open mind while investigating these targeted attacks on Indian Muslims and one should not jump to the conclusion that the LET or the HUJI must have been involved. We owe it to our Muslims, most of whom have kept away from Al Qaeda and other pan-Islamic organizations, to see that these cases of targeted attacks on Muslims are thoroughly investigated instead of coming to a facile conclusion that jihadi organizations must be behind them."

-----My comments on the terrorist strike in the Samjotha Express in my book "Terrorism---Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" published in June, 2008, by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com)

"While there are grounds for suspecting that the blast of Delhi and those of Agartala might have been carried out by the IM ( Indian Mujahideen) and its associates from the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Delhi and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Bangladesh in Agartala, the blasts in Modasa and Malegaon seem to stand apart. Though the Gujarat Police are reported to have detained some members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) during their investigation of the Modasa blast, the Modasa and Malegaon blasts do not carry any unique signature. More evidence will be required before one could analyse as to who might have been responsible. "----From my article of October 2, 2008, titled "Mushrooming Terrorism: Now Agartala" at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers29/paper2866.html
-----------------------------

In the last three years, we have had at least seven terrorist strikes in different parts of the country in which the perpetrators seemed to have targeted innocent Muslim civilians. Those seemed to be not indiscriminate attacks on all civilians, but targeted attacks on Muslims. There were two such incidents in Malegaon in Maharashtra and one each in New Delhi, Hyderabad, in the Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, in the Samjotha Express to Pakistan and in Modasa in Gujarat.

2. On the basis of the available reports, I had myself stated after five of these strikes---- but not after the Malegaon and Modasa incidents of September 29,2008--- that they seemed to have been carried out by terrorists belonging to jihadi terrorist organisations. I had also referred to instances of jihadi terrorists deliberately targeting innocent Muslims in many countries in pursuit of their agenda.

3. Some months after the Ajmer Sharif incident, a young Muslim officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS) had met me privately and expressed his doubts as to whether Muslims would have been involved in these incidents. He strongly believed that no Muslim however extremist he might be and to whichever jihadi organisation he belonged would have planted a bomb in or near the Ajmer Sharif.

4. I did not feel convinced, but felt somewhat troubled by what he said. I felt that as a senior (though now retired) officer of the IPS, I owed it to him and other young Muslim officers of the IPS to take note of what he said and re-open my mind. It was in pursuance of this that I made the above-mentioned observations in my book.

5. Who carried out the pre-September 29, 2008, terrorist strikes, which seemed to have mainly targeted innocent Muslims? Where they the acts of the usual jihadi organisations or are they the precursor to acts of reprisal terrorism against members of the Muslim community by some irrational elements in the Hindu community? These questions, which were already being raised by sections of the public----Muslims as well as non-Muslims--- even before September 29, have re-surfaced following the publication or dissemination by some sections of the media of reports claiming that the Anti-Terrorism Cell (ATS) of the Mumbai Police have detained three Hindus in connection with their investigation into the recent Malegon blasts. The ATS itself has neither officially denied nor confirmed these reports.

6. The matter is in the initial stages of the investigation. To instill confidence in our Muslim community, the ATS should see that the investigation against these Hindus and any others associated with them is carried out thoroughly irrespective of their organisational affiliation. Religion is not a mitigating factor in deciding on the culpability of a person suspected of involvement in a criminal act. If they are proved to have participated in the acts of terrorism in Malegain and Modesa, the fact that they are Hindus would not make them any the less criminal or terrorist.

7. Indian criminal laws----the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Evidence Act and the Criminal Procedure Code--- do not talk of the majority or the minorities or even of Indian citizens or foreigners. Their provisions apply to anyone who commits an offence in Indian territory---whether he or she is an Indian national or a foreigner, whatever be his or her religion, language or ethnicity. The arrested persons must be investigated and proceeded against without worrying about their background or organisational affiliation.

8. Do these arrests strengthen the case for a ban on the Bajrang Dal or any other organisation to which they might have belonged? Or do they at least call for a characterisation of such orgainsations----even if they be of Hindus---as terrorist organisations? To characterise an organisation as a terrorist organisation and to take legal action against it ----and not merely against its members---- two types of evidence are required. Firstly, that its constitution or manifesto advocates the resort to violence amounting to terrorism for achieving its objective. Secondly, that it has been involved in repeated acts of pre-meditated violence which amount to terrorism. One has to wait and see whether such evidence surfaces during the investigation.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

LTTE: REMNANTS & SYMPATHISERS

2010-06-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 658

B.RAMAN

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a terrorist-cum-insurgent organisation is dead. So is most of its leadership at the senior levels, including Prabakaran, its head. One cannot say with equal confidence that all its trained cadres----whether in insurgency or terrorism or both----have been fully accounted for----either killed or captured. Its dead leaders have not left detailed documentation of their set-up giving details of the number trained, the number of losses, the number still alive towards the end of their fight with the Sri Lankan Army, their deployment, their capabilities, weapons-holdings etc. As a result, it is difficult to assess with some accuracy the risks of a revival of the Tamil militancy in some form or the other in Sri Lanka as well as in Tamil Nadu.

2. One can assess with some confidence that there is little likelihood of the revival of a Tamil insurgent movement. The losses in trained personnel and capabilities suffered by the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lankan Army will rule that out. The enhancement of the deployment of the Army in the Tamil areas----already under way---- will ensure that Tamil insurgency cannot stage a come-back in Sri Lanka like the Taliban did in Afghanistan.

3. However, one cannot rule out the dangers of a revival of a terrorist movement by the unaccounted for remnants of the LTTE in Sri Lanka as well as in Tamil Nadu. The LTTE had trained an unquantified number of its cadres----men and women--- in different kinds of terrorist operations, including suicide terrorism. One does not know how many were trained, how many were killed or captured by the Sri Lankan Army and how many have managed to evade capture and are biding their time in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu. They have a high level of expertise in the use of terrorism as a modus operandi as well as in the fabrication of explosive material by using substances easily available in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu.

4. So long as these remnants with the required expertise are available, a determined and motivated Tamil leader can rally them round and create sleeper cells for a new Tamil militant movement. A new generation of Tamil militant leadership is not yet on the horizon a year after the decimation of the LTTE. However, there is still anger in pockets of the Tamil communities in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu over the manner in which the Sri Lankan Army carried out its counter-insurgency operations and over what is seen as foot-dragging by President Mahinda Rajapaksa in carrying out his assurances for a fair political settlement made to the Tamils before the LTTE was crushed. Now that the LTTE has been crushed, he is no longer showing a sense of urgency and fairplay in addressing the problems and grievances of the Tamils.

5. The fact that this anger is present not only in the Tamil community of Sri Lanka, but also of Tamil Nadu became evident recently from the protests in Tamil Nadu over an Indian film festival held in Sri Lanka, which was boycotted by Tamil actors, the protest demonstrations during the recent visit of Mr.Rajapaksa to New Delhi and the unsuccessful attempt by some unidentified persons believed to be sympathisers of Prabakaran to cause a derailment with locally-procured explosives in Tamil Nadu in the early hours of June 12. The Kumbakonam-Chennai Rockfort Express escaped what could have been a tragedy when two alert drivers---one of a train which preceded the Rockfort Express and the other of the Express---- noticed a possible terrorist attempt to cause a derailment. According to media reports, pamphlets purported to have been drafted by supporters of the late Prabakaran claiming responsibility for the attempt were found on the spot. Only a police investigation can establish whether the attempt was made by supporters of Prabakaran as claimed in the pamphlets or by Maoists as a mark of solidarity with the LTTE. In the past, when Prabakaran was alive, there were unconfirmed reports of contacts between the LTTE and the Maoists.

6. Anger is often the mother of militancy and terrorism. The LTTE is dead. Most of its senior leadership is no more. But anger in sections of the Tamil community is still there. Motivated individuals, who are prepared to give vent to their anger by using terrorism, are available. Only leadership to rally them round is not there. The post 9/11 history of terrorism shows that the absence of a leadership capable of uniting the terrorists and orchestrating their activities does not mean the end of terrorism. Autonomously operating individuals itching to give vent to their anger have been behind many recent acts of terrorism. Terrorism analysts have been speaking of an emerging phenomenon of leadersless terrorism due to acts of angry individuals.

7. Till the cause of the anger of the Sri Lankan Tamils is satisfactorily addressed, the danger of a revival of terrorism in sections of the Tamil community will remain present. ( 13-6-10)

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presetly, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )