INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.407
B.RAMAN
Is Osama bin Laden dying again?
2. That is the headline under which many skeptic online journals of the world have carried a story of the Time magazine that some CIAanalysts believe that bin Laden is finally in his death bed due to a progressive deterioration of his kidneys. How did they come to thisconclusion? On the basis of source reports regarding the kind of medicines he is taking. It is said that these medicines can help him forsome time, but cannot prevent his death. If this report is to be believed, the count-down for his death has already started. At the same time,the magazine has added in its report that other CIA officials deny that any such report had been prepared in the CIA.
3. This report reminds one of a report carried by a French regional newspaper on September 23,2006, that according to the Frenchintelligence, bin Laden had died after a severe attack of typhoid. According to the newspaper, the French intelligence got the information ofbin Laden's death from its Saudi counterpart. Some weeks later, to the consternation of everybody, bin Laden came out with new audiomessages, which tended to prove that he was definitely alive, though he may not be quite that kicking.
4. His earlier imminent death was reported by the CNN on October 26,2002, when it carried the following report: "- The editor-in-chief of aLondon-based Arab news magazine said a purported will it published Saturday was written late last year by Osama bin Laden, and shows"he's dying or he's going to die soon." U.S. intelligence officials say they have the purported will, but are not able to say if it is genuine. CNNhas not been able to verify that the document is bin Laden's will. "He did write the will as someone saying good-bye," Hani Nakshabandi ofthe Arab news magazine Al Majalla told CNN. He said one of the magazine's reporters obtained the four-page document, said to be signed bythe leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network and dated December 14, 2001, in Afghanistan. In the document, which was translated for CNN,the writer expresses disappointment with the Taliban, who harbored him in Afghanistan, speaks of betrayal, and urges his children to shunal Qaeda. "Even amongst the students of religion, only few stood their ground and fought, and the rest either surrendered or fled," thedocument says, referring to the Taliban, according to a translation for CNN. Despite the setbacks, the purported will says, "We will bevictorious against the U.S. and the infidel West even if it takes tens of years." "My last advice is to the mujahedeen everywhere," thedocument says. "Take a breather and put aside for the time being, fighting the Jews and the Crusaders, and instead devote your efforts topurifying your groups from the agents and the cowards and those impostors who claim to be scholars amongst you."
5.It was apparent to anyone that this was a psywar operation carried out by the CIA in the hope of creating a divide between Al Qaeda andthe Taliban and confusion in their ranks. This was such a crude attempt that nobody took it seriously.
6. It has been reported since the middle 1990s that bin Laden was suffering from a kidney deficiency, which he developed when he was living in Khartoum before 1996 and that he required periodic dialysis. There were even reports that he was undergoing the dialysis in amilitary hospital in Peshawar. The Saudi media had even quoted one of his wives living in Saudi Arabia as saying that he was suffering froma kidney deficiency.
7. There has been speculation from time to time as to how he is getting his dialysis done now. Police sources in Pakistan discount American claims that he is in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) because, according to them, he would not be able to get his dialysis done regularly in the FATA. They, therefore, surmise that if he has been managing to get his dialysis done, he must be in one of the cities of Pakistan such as Peshawar or Quetta and not in the remote tribal areas.
8. What is the present state of his kidneys? Is his death approaching? Only the doctors treating him will know the answers to thesequestions. If the CIA really has access to these doctors or their staff, why is it not using them to catch him or kill him by administering wrongmedicines to him?
9. It is said that when he was the Prime Minister before October, 1999, Nawaz Sharif used to say that it would be in the interest of theinternational community that bin Laden died at the hands of his doctor rather than at the hands of the Americans. If he died at the hands ofthe Americans, he would become even a greater hero in the eyes of the Muslims. If he died at the hands of a doctor, the Ummah would forget him shortly thereafter.
10. Will bin Laden die definitively at least now---- to prove the CIA right?
11. Annexed is an article written by me on September 24,2006 on this subject..
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
ANNEXURE
HOW WORLD WILL KNOW OF BIN LADEN'S END? (http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers20/paper1964.html)
By B.Raman
The ultimate denouement in the Osama bin Laden saga will come about in one of the following ways:
He wins the jihadi war against the US-led coalition and is proclaimed either the Amir of the global Islamic Caliphate or at least of Saudi Arabia.
He is captured by the security forces of the US-led coalition or Pakistan or both acting together.
He is killed in a ground encounter or in an air strike by the US-led coalition or Pakistan or both.
He dies a natural death, without his adversaries being aware of it.
2. The first possibility can be ruled out as of today. In the eventuality of his capture, the security forces responsible for his capture wouldknow for certain. In the eventuality of his death in a ground encounter or an air strike, the proof will come in the form of the recovery of thedead body or from the interrogation of anyone of his associates captured during the encounter or by monitoring the communications of thesurvivors of the encounter or air strike. Where the dead body is not recovered, the intelligence agencies will be able to establish his deaththrough the other means (interrogation of associates or communications interception ) with two-thirds certainty, but not a hundred per centcertainty.
3.If he dies a natural death, the indicators would come either from the doctor or doctors, who had treated him or from one of his associates,who was with him at the time of his death---if any of them could be captured by the security forces--- or from his relatives in Saudi Arabia.
4. One had seen in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), where many Pakistani and other foreign jihadi terrorists operate, that the first indicator of thedeath of any foreign terrorist due to natural causes came from his home country when the local intelligence received information about therelatives holding a religious function to mark the death of the terrorist. Generally, reliable information about such religious functions beingheld in the home country are an important indicator of the death of the terrorist in a foreign land. Instances, where the relatives are told by aterrorist organisation to hold false religious functions to mislead the intelligence agencies and security forces are rare, but cannot be ruledout.
5. Bin Laden's health had been fragile for some years. He suffered from a kidney infection while he was living in Khartoum before 1996. Thisultimately affected the performance of his kidneys after he shifted to Afghanistan in 1996. Though it was not life-threatening, he had toundergo periodic dialysis in a Pakistani military hospital at Peshawar.
6. He suffered a splinter injury at the Tora Bora encounter in Afghanistan with the US security forces. This affected his speech and partiallyparalysed one of his limbs. In the beginning of 2002, after he had escaped into Pakistan from Afghanistan, the late Mufti NizamuddinShamzai of the Binori madrasa of Karachi, who was very close to bin Laden and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had him shiftedto the Binori complex with the permission of the ISI. He was being treated there till August 2002. He recovered his speech and the paralysiscaused by the splinter was reportedly cured.
7. When bin Laden was in the Binori complex, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who had orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US, andRamzi Binalshibh of Al Qaeda were also living clandestinely in Karachi, but at different places with the knowledge and connivance of the ISI.The US intelligence, which apparently came to know about the presence of Ramzi and KSM in Karachi, stepped up its search for them. Thisled to the capture of Ramzi, but KSM managed to escape to Quetta and from there he went to Rawalpindi where he was finally arrested inMarch, 2003, in the house of a woman functionary of the Jamaat-e-Islami.
8. In August, 2002, reports about the presence of OBL in Binori and his medical treatment there stopped coming. Subsequent enquiriesindicated that he had moved back to the tribal areas of Pakistan. He became active again recording many video and audio messages fortelecast by Al Jazeera and other TV channels and radio stations. He remained active till the eve of the US Presidential elections inNovember,2004, and then became incommunicado. There were no video or audio messages for 13 months.
9. There were reports of a deterioration in his health due to the kidney condition in 2005. During the Friday prayers in some of the mosquesof the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Mullas started reciting prayers for the good health of Osama's son. This gave rise tostrong speculation that bin Laden had died of a multiple organ failure arising from his renal problem.
10. Then suddenly, his audio messages started surfacing again since January 19,2006, but there were no video messages.Thus, his voicebecame the only indicator of his being alive. Since July, there has been no audio message either of current origin. Old pre-July messages ofhis continue circulating. Cut and paste versions of his pre-November,2004 video messages also continue circulating.
11.The speculation about his being alive or dead has again revived following the publication by L'Est Republicain, a French regionalnewspaper, on September 23,2006, of extracts from a document dated September 21,2006, of the French external intelligence agencystating that bin Laden died in Pakistani territory on August 23,2006, due to complications, including a paralysis, arising after a severe attackof typhoid. The information has been attributed to the Saudi intelligence sources, who reportedly came to know of it on September 4,2006.The Saudi services are reportedly trying to verify the information.
12. The fact that the French Government has reportedly ordered an enquiry into how the newspaper came into possession of a classifieddocument indicates that the document is probably genuine, but not necessarily the information contained in the document. One does notknow how the Saudi services came to know of this information.
13. If bin Laden had died in Pakistani territory while undergoing medical treatment there should be doctors in Pakistan who must havetreated him. In the past, the Pakistani authorities had detained a doctor of Lahore, who had returned from the US after working for someyears there, on a charge of providing medical assistance to Al Qaeda cadres injured in Afghanistan. He was ultimately released for want ofprosecutable evidence against him. The questioning of this doctor and other doctors, who were in the past suspected or known to havetreated ill or injured Al Qaeda and Taliban cadres might provide a useful lead.
14. It is possible that the Saudi intelligence services picked up the information from bin Laden's relatives in Saudi Arabia, who would know ifhe is dead. If the Saudi intelligence services had told the French about it, they would have definitely alerted the ISI and the US intelligencetoo.
15.The policy of the Western intelligence agencies has been to presume that bin Laden is alive and kicking, until he is proved to be dead.That proof is yet to come. Any evidence coming from his relatives in Saudi Arabia or from the doctors or others in Pakistan will be tentative.The only conclusive evidence will be a statement from Al Qaeda admitting his death.
16.If the report about his death is incorrect, one can shortly expect another audio message from him to prove to his followers that he isalive.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi,and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies,Chennai. )
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
MAOISTS SURPRISE GREYHOUNDS
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--- PAPER NO.406
B.RAMAN
Only twenty-nine members of the highly-reputed Greyhounds counter-insurgency action force of the Andhra Pradesh Police managed to escape a well-organised ambush in water laid on June 29,2008, by a group of Maoist terrorists as a party of 65 Greyhounds was returning to Andhra Pradesh by a boat after an unsuccessful combing operation for Maoists in the territory of Orissa. Thirty-four Greyhounds are missing and two others are reported to have been killed. It is not yet known whether the 34 missing were also killed or whether some of them had been captured by the Maoists, who have not made any claim so far.
2. The Greyhounds party, which had entered the territory of Orissa reportedly on information received by them about the plans of the Maoists to hold a meeting, was returning to Andhra Pradesh in a single motorised boat belonging to the Balimela hydel project. They were returning by the Sileru river. As the boat entered the Balimela reservoir in the territory of Orissa created by the hydel project, it was attacked by an unknown number of Maoists, who had taken up position on the surrounding hills. The Greyhounds, who were taken by surprise, tried to retaliate, but their return fire against the Maoists located on the hills above the reservoir was ineffective. The boat kept moving despite initially being hit by some bullets, but capsized after having been hit by one or more grenades thrown or fired from a launcher by the Maoists. All on board jumped into the water. While some swam to safety, others were not lucky. Their final fate is not yet known.
3. The boat had a three-member crew one of whom fell into the hands of the Maoists, but they released him unharmed.His interview by Suryanarayan Pattnaik of the "Times of India" ( July 1,2008) gives the most authentic account of the ambush. He is quoted as saying in the interview: " We were three staff in the boat that belongs to the Balimela hydro project. On Saturday (June 28) evening, we were just told to be ready to leave for some place the next day. We did not know the destination. Around 4 AM on Sunday, two policemen from Chiltrakonda police station came and we five left for Janbai to bring Greyhound personnel of AP. We came to know that they had gone to Papermetla in Orissa three days ago on an anti-Maoist operation. We reached Janbai where the Greyhounds policemen boarded the boat. We were 65 people on board then and left Janbai. The boat had hardly gone about 5 to 7 Kms when the Maoists started firing on the boat. While the boat was crossing a narrow waterway, one bullet hit it. Before the Greyhounds could act, the Maoists from the hills rained bullets on the boat. Though a few policemen retaliated, it bore little fruit.The Maoists then hurled grenades on the boat. A part of the vessel was damaged. The boat started sinking. We were helpless and all of us started jumping into the water to save our lives. I also jumped out of the boat. While I was swimming towards the bank, I desperately shouted that I was a civilian. My screaming worked. The extremists stopped firing at me, but they asked me to swim towards them. They were six in number, including two women. All were heavily armed. They took me into the deep forests of Gunupur hill. They grilled me for a few hours. After some time, they told me they would release me on condition that I should never help policemen in future."
4. From his account, the following facts emerge:
The Greyhounds party had gone into Orissa three days before the ambush. It is not clear how they went---by another boat or by road Three days of combing in Orissa territory did not lead to any Maoists. They decided to return to Andhra Pradesh. A request for a boat of the hydel project was made the previous night through the Orissa Police, but the project authorities were not told that the boat was for the Greyhounds. But since the request came through the Orissa Police,anyone aware of this should not have had any difficulty in guessing that the boat was being requisitioned for the travel of a police party.
The number of Maoists who successfully laid the ambush was small. They were not in their hundreds as reported by sections of the media.
The boatman did not find any Greyhounds personnel in the custody of the team of six Maoists, who captured and released him after interrogation. It is possible there were other Maoist groups in the area, which had also participated in the ambush of which the boatman was not aware.
5. Another "Times of India" report had stated that the Greyhounds had gone into Orissa on receiving information that the Maoists were to hold a meeting in Orissa territory. It is not clear whether the Greyhounds received this information from one of their sources or from the Orissa police.
6. Whatever be the case, it is evident that certain omissions of securitry precautions by the Greyhounds enabled the Maoists to mount this successful ambush. Since the Greyhounds were on an unsuccessful combing operation in Orissa territory for three days, while planning for their return to their base in Andhra Pradesh they should have taken into account the possibility that the Maoists would have come to know of their presence in Orissa territory and would be waiting for their return in order to mount an ambush. There was also a possibility of a leak of their return plans the previous night when the boatmen were alerted to be ready to take a party to Andhra Pradesh early in the morning.
7.These factors necessitated two precautions: Stationing of police parties on land on the surrounding hill tops as the boat was moving to prevent any ambush and avoiding the entire party of about 65 travelling by one boat at the same time. In an ambush on land, a police party, if its reflexes are good, has a reasonable chance of re-grouping and retaliating when ambushed. When ambushed on water particularly from a height, the chances of re-grouping and retaliating are low and nil if the boat is hit and capzises.
8. This ambush is definitely a set-back for the Greyhounds, but this need not dent their reputation as one of the best counter-insurgency police forces in India.Set-backs cannot always be avoided. The difference between a good force and a not so good force is that a good force learns from its mistakes and avoids repeating them. A not so good force does not. Being a good force, one can expect that the Greyhounds will draw the right lessons for their future operations.
9. The audacious manner in which the Maoists successfully mounted this ambush of a water-borne police party speaks of their continuing motivation, excellent reflexes and ability to plan and execute operations at short notice. The jihadi terrorism outside Kashmir is mainly urban terrorism.The Maoist terrorism is mainly rural terrorism. The jihadis attack hard and soft targets, the security forces as well as innocent civilians. Their attacks on civilians are indiscriminate. The Maoists focus on hard targets from the security forces and their perceived class enemies.Their terrorism is well-calibrated and selective in order not to create feelings of revulsion against them in the minds of the public. The muted public reaction to the Maoist ambush is indicative of the success of their methods.
10. The Greyhounds have become a legend with the police forces in the States affected by Maoist insurgency. There has been a lot of public adulation of the Greyhounds. As a result, the Andhra Pradesh Police have acquired the conviction that such forces are the real answer to terrorism. After a number of jihadi acts of terrorism in Hyderabad last year, the Andhra Pradesh police decided to raise a separate, but similar force tailor-made to deal with the urban jihadi terrorism. It has been named the Octopus.
11. The AP Police seem to have a fascination for such esoteric names for their special forces. Such forces alone cannot effectively deal with terrorism unless complemented by skillful political handling of the public grievances that give rise to terrorism and strengthening traditional policing in matters like urban and rural patrolling, police-community relations and successful investigation and prosecution of terrorism-related cases. The record of the AP Police in the investigation and prosecution of terrorism-related cases is quite poor.Unless their traditional policing improves, forces such as the Greyhounds and the Octopus alone cannot neutralise terrorism.
12. Annexed are some extracts from the chapter on Maoist terrorism in my book titled "Terrorism: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" published this month by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com ) (2-7-08)
(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 )
ANNEXURE ( Extracts from the chapter on Maoist terrorism in my book )
Our Intelligence Bureau (IB), which is largely an urban-based organisation, has very little capability for preventive intelligence collection in the rural areas. We have to depend on the rural police for this purpose. The ability of the rural police to collect intelligence depends to a considerable extent on its mobility (patrolling) and its relationship with the village communities in the affected areas. Fears caused by the frequent use of landmines with devastating effect by the Maoists and the failure of the States to provide the police with adequate mine detection and clearing capability have affected the mobility and rural patrolling. This has also an impact on police-community relationship. A police force, which is not able to remain in regular touch with the villagers, cannot collect much worthwhile intelligence.
The inability of the State to deal with the Maoist insurgency-cum-terrorism effectively so far can be attributed to the absence of a mix of political and operational strategies. The political strategy has to identify and address the root causes of the spreading Maoism. While the spread is alarming, it is not yet out of control. There are still large areas in the tribal belt where the people are not supporting the Maoists and are observing law and order. The State has so far failed to undertake a crash development of these areas, which have not yet been infected by Maoism, in order to prove to the people that they can achieve their justified economic and social objectives through peaceful means, without having to take up arms against the State. Simultaneously, there has to be an improvement in rural policing and intelligencecollection in order to thwart the efforts of the Maoists to bring these areas too under their sway.
The areas, which have already come under the effective control of the Maoists, need a different strategy, with the emphasis more on the professional and operational aspects of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency than on the political and economic. The objective is to wrest control of these areas from the Maoists. This would be possible only through expanding and strengthening the police presence in the areas, creating in the IB and the intelligence wings of the Police an improved capability for intelligence collection in the rural areas and strengthening the capability of the police and the para-military forces to counter the modus operandi of the Maoists such as their devastating use of landmines.
Concerned over the spread of Maoist terrorism and insurgency, suggestions are increasingly being made for giving the police a military edge through training in jungle warfare techniques etc. We should definitely improve the technical capabilities of the police in matters such as mine-detection and neutralisation, but we should not militarise the methods of operation of the police.
The growing interest in some of our officers----serving and retired---in the highly militarized British and American methods of dealing with insurgency and terrorism needs to be curbed. The former British occupying power in Malaya used and the current American occupying power in Iraq uses highly militarised methods. They were/are operating against foreign nationals in foreign territory and had/have, therefore, no qualms about the kind of methods they were/are using to suppress the insurgency-cum-terrorism.
Our Police and para-military forces are operating in our own territory against our own people. We have to temper effectiveness with self-restraint. We had to use the jungle warfare methods in Mizoram and certain areas of the North-East in the 1960s and the 1970s because of the involvement of Pakistan and China in keeping the insurgency sustained in those areas. We cannot unintelligently use those methods in our tribal heartland in Central India. Modernisation of the police forces' rural counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capability, yes;but, militarisation, no.
While dealing with the Maoist insurgency, we have to make a distinction between the poor people who have legitimate causes for anger against the State and against those whom they perceive as the exploiting classes of society and the Maoist ideologues, who are trying to exploit this anger to achieve political power through the barrel of the gun. The ideologues must be made to realise that they cannot achieve their objective by using the rural poor as their cannon fodder. The State has to act firmly against them. At the same time, it is important toprevent the rural poor from letting themselves be used as the cannon fodder of the Maoist ideologues. This is only possible through appropriate anger containment and reduction measures. Unless they perceive the State as the protector of the poor and exploited classes and not of the exploiting classes, it would not be possible to wean them away from the Maoist ideologues.
A comprehensive strategy of anger containment and reduction on the one side and better counter-insurgency and security in the rural areas on the other is required. This strategy has to be worked out centrally with inputs from the affected States and co-ordinated in its implementation from the Centre. Such a comprehensive strategy is presently lacking.
B.RAMAN
Only twenty-nine members of the highly-reputed Greyhounds counter-insurgency action force of the Andhra Pradesh Police managed to escape a well-organised ambush in water laid on June 29,2008, by a group of Maoist terrorists as a party of 65 Greyhounds was returning to Andhra Pradesh by a boat after an unsuccessful combing operation for Maoists in the territory of Orissa. Thirty-four Greyhounds are missing and two others are reported to have been killed. It is not yet known whether the 34 missing were also killed or whether some of them had been captured by the Maoists, who have not made any claim so far.
2. The Greyhounds party, which had entered the territory of Orissa reportedly on information received by them about the plans of the Maoists to hold a meeting, was returning to Andhra Pradesh in a single motorised boat belonging to the Balimela hydel project. They were returning by the Sileru river. As the boat entered the Balimela reservoir in the territory of Orissa created by the hydel project, it was attacked by an unknown number of Maoists, who had taken up position on the surrounding hills. The Greyhounds, who were taken by surprise, tried to retaliate, but their return fire against the Maoists located on the hills above the reservoir was ineffective. The boat kept moving despite initially being hit by some bullets, but capsized after having been hit by one or more grenades thrown or fired from a launcher by the Maoists. All on board jumped into the water. While some swam to safety, others were not lucky. Their final fate is not yet known.
3. The boat had a three-member crew one of whom fell into the hands of the Maoists, but they released him unharmed.His interview by Suryanarayan Pattnaik of the "Times of India" ( July 1,2008) gives the most authentic account of the ambush. He is quoted as saying in the interview: " We were three staff in the boat that belongs to the Balimela hydro project. On Saturday (June 28) evening, we were just told to be ready to leave for some place the next day. We did not know the destination. Around 4 AM on Sunday, two policemen from Chiltrakonda police station came and we five left for Janbai to bring Greyhound personnel of AP. We came to know that they had gone to Papermetla in Orissa three days ago on an anti-Maoist operation. We reached Janbai where the Greyhounds policemen boarded the boat. We were 65 people on board then and left Janbai. The boat had hardly gone about 5 to 7 Kms when the Maoists started firing on the boat. While the boat was crossing a narrow waterway, one bullet hit it. Before the Greyhounds could act, the Maoists from the hills rained bullets on the boat. Though a few policemen retaliated, it bore little fruit.The Maoists then hurled grenades on the boat. A part of the vessel was damaged. The boat started sinking. We were helpless and all of us started jumping into the water to save our lives. I also jumped out of the boat. While I was swimming towards the bank, I desperately shouted that I was a civilian. My screaming worked. The extremists stopped firing at me, but they asked me to swim towards them. They were six in number, including two women. All were heavily armed. They took me into the deep forests of Gunupur hill. They grilled me for a few hours. After some time, they told me they would release me on condition that I should never help policemen in future."
4. From his account, the following facts emerge:
The Greyhounds party had gone into Orissa three days before the ambush. It is not clear how they went---by another boat or by road Three days of combing in Orissa territory did not lead to any Maoists. They decided to return to Andhra Pradesh. A request for a boat of the hydel project was made the previous night through the Orissa Police, but the project authorities were not told that the boat was for the Greyhounds. But since the request came through the Orissa Police,anyone aware of this should not have had any difficulty in guessing that the boat was being requisitioned for the travel of a police party.
The number of Maoists who successfully laid the ambush was small. They were not in their hundreds as reported by sections of the media.
The boatman did not find any Greyhounds personnel in the custody of the team of six Maoists, who captured and released him after interrogation. It is possible there were other Maoist groups in the area, which had also participated in the ambush of which the boatman was not aware.
5. Another "Times of India" report had stated that the Greyhounds had gone into Orissa on receiving information that the Maoists were to hold a meeting in Orissa territory. It is not clear whether the Greyhounds received this information from one of their sources or from the Orissa police.
6. Whatever be the case, it is evident that certain omissions of securitry precautions by the Greyhounds enabled the Maoists to mount this successful ambush. Since the Greyhounds were on an unsuccessful combing operation in Orissa territory for three days, while planning for their return to their base in Andhra Pradesh they should have taken into account the possibility that the Maoists would have come to know of their presence in Orissa territory and would be waiting for their return in order to mount an ambush. There was also a possibility of a leak of their return plans the previous night when the boatmen were alerted to be ready to take a party to Andhra Pradesh early in the morning.
7.These factors necessitated two precautions: Stationing of police parties on land on the surrounding hill tops as the boat was moving to prevent any ambush and avoiding the entire party of about 65 travelling by one boat at the same time. In an ambush on land, a police party, if its reflexes are good, has a reasonable chance of re-grouping and retaliating when ambushed. When ambushed on water particularly from a height, the chances of re-grouping and retaliating are low and nil if the boat is hit and capzises.
8. This ambush is definitely a set-back for the Greyhounds, but this need not dent their reputation as one of the best counter-insurgency police forces in India.Set-backs cannot always be avoided. The difference between a good force and a not so good force is that a good force learns from its mistakes and avoids repeating them. A not so good force does not. Being a good force, one can expect that the Greyhounds will draw the right lessons for their future operations.
9. The audacious manner in which the Maoists successfully mounted this ambush of a water-borne police party speaks of their continuing motivation, excellent reflexes and ability to plan and execute operations at short notice. The jihadi terrorism outside Kashmir is mainly urban terrorism.The Maoist terrorism is mainly rural terrorism. The jihadis attack hard and soft targets, the security forces as well as innocent civilians. Their attacks on civilians are indiscriminate. The Maoists focus on hard targets from the security forces and their perceived class enemies.Their terrorism is well-calibrated and selective in order not to create feelings of revulsion against them in the minds of the public. The muted public reaction to the Maoist ambush is indicative of the success of their methods.
10. The Greyhounds have become a legend with the police forces in the States affected by Maoist insurgency. There has been a lot of public adulation of the Greyhounds. As a result, the Andhra Pradesh Police have acquired the conviction that such forces are the real answer to terrorism. After a number of jihadi acts of terrorism in Hyderabad last year, the Andhra Pradesh police decided to raise a separate, but similar force tailor-made to deal with the urban jihadi terrorism. It has been named the Octopus.
11. The AP Police seem to have a fascination for such esoteric names for their special forces. Such forces alone cannot effectively deal with terrorism unless complemented by skillful political handling of the public grievances that give rise to terrorism and strengthening traditional policing in matters like urban and rural patrolling, police-community relations and successful investigation and prosecution of terrorism-related cases. The record of the AP Police in the investigation and prosecution of terrorism-related cases is quite poor.Unless their traditional policing improves, forces such as the Greyhounds and the Octopus alone cannot neutralise terrorism.
12. Annexed are some extracts from the chapter on Maoist terrorism in my book titled "Terrorism: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow" published this month by the Lancer Publishers of New Delhi (www.lancerpublishers.com ) (2-7-08)
(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 )
ANNEXURE ( Extracts from the chapter on Maoist terrorism in my book )
Our Intelligence Bureau (IB), which is largely an urban-based organisation, has very little capability for preventive intelligence collection in the rural areas. We have to depend on the rural police for this purpose. The ability of the rural police to collect intelligence depends to a considerable extent on its mobility (patrolling) and its relationship with the village communities in the affected areas. Fears caused by the frequent use of landmines with devastating effect by the Maoists and the failure of the States to provide the police with adequate mine detection and clearing capability have affected the mobility and rural patrolling. This has also an impact on police-community relationship. A police force, which is not able to remain in regular touch with the villagers, cannot collect much worthwhile intelligence.
The inability of the State to deal with the Maoist insurgency-cum-terrorism effectively so far can be attributed to the absence of a mix of political and operational strategies. The political strategy has to identify and address the root causes of the spreading Maoism. While the spread is alarming, it is not yet out of control. There are still large areas in the tribal belt where the people are not supporting the Maoists and are observing law and order. The State has so far failed to undertake a crash development of these areas, which have not yet been infected by Maoism, in order to prove to the people that they can achieve their justified economic and social objectives through peaceful means, without having to take up arms against the State. Simultaneously, there has to be an improvement in rural policing and intelligencecollection in order to thwart the efforts of the Maoists to bring these areas too under their sway.
The areas, which have already come under the effective control of the Maoists, need a different strategy, with the emphasis more on the professional and operational aspects of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency than on the political and economic. The objective is to wrest control of these areas from the Maoists. This would be possible only through expanding and strengthening the police presence in the areas, creating in the IB and the intelligence wings of the Police an improved capability for intelligence collection in the rural areas and strengthening the capability of the police and the para-military forces to counter the modus operandi of the Maoists such as their devastating use of landmines.
Concerned over the spread of Maoist terrorism and insurgency, suggestions are increasingly being made for giving the police a military edge through training in jungle warfare techniques etc. We should definitely improve the technical capabilities of the police in matters such as mine-detection and neutralisation, but we should not militarise the methods of operation of the police.
The growing interest in some of our officers----serving and retired---in the highly militarized British and American methods of dealing with insurgency and terrorism needs to be curbed. The former British occupying power in Malaya used and the current American occupying power in Iraq uses highly militarised methods. They were/are operating against foreign nationals in foreign territory and had/have, therefore, no qualms about the kind of methods they were/are using to suppress the insurgency-cum-terrorism.
Our Police and para-military forces are operating in our own territory against our own people. We have to temper effectiveness with self-restraint. We had to use the jungle warfare methods in Mizoram and certain areas of the North-East in the 1960s and the 1970s because of the involvement of Pakistan and China in keeping the insurgency sustained in those areas. We cannot unintelligently use those methods in our tribal heartland in Central India. Modernisation of the police forces' rural counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capability, yes;but, militarisation, no.
While dealing with the Maoist insurgency, we have to make a distinction between the poor people who have legitimate causes for anger against the State and against those whom they perceive as the exploiting classes of society and the Maoist ideologues, who are trying to exploit this anger to achieve political power through the barrel of the gun. The ideologues must be made to realise that they cannot achieve their objective by using the rural poor as their cannon fodder. The State has to act firmly against them. At the same time, it is important toprevent the rural poor from letting themselves be used as the cannon fodder of the Maoist ideologues. This is only possible through appropriate anger containment and reduction measures. Unless they perceive the State as the protector of the poor and exploited classes and not of the exploiting classes, it would not be possible to wean them away from the Maoist ideologues.
A comprehensive strategy of anger containment and reduction on the one side and better counter-insurgency and security in the rural areas on the other is required. This strategy has to be worked out centrally with inputs from the affected States and co-ordinated in its implementation from the Centre. Such a comprehensive strategy is presently lacking.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
COUNT-DOWN TO BEIJING OLYMPICS
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.405
B.RAMAN
While the Falun Gong has kept up its public campaign against the Beijing Olympics due in August, the Tibetan supporters of the Dalai Lama have toned down their campaign. There has been pressure on His Holiness from the Western Governments not to create difficulties for the Chinese before and during the Olympics.
2. Not only officials connected with the so-called Government-in-exile of his Holiness based in Dharmsala in India, but even the radical Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), whose radicalism has increased since September last year due to the role played by some American citizens of Tibetan origin, who had migrated to the US from India, have been avoiding any anti-Olympics statements. The Chinese as well as the Dalai Lama's followers have toned their rhetoric against each other. Though the rhetoric has not completely disappeared from their propaganda against each other, the harsh words of the past have been toned down.
3. The Chinese have toned down their demonisation of His Holiness, but they continue to demonise the TYC by projecting it as a terrorist organisation, which allegedly advocates suicide terrorism. Lodi Gyari, the Washington DC based representative of the Dalai Lama, who leads the two-member team of the Dalai Lama in the on-again, off-again dialogue with Chinese officials, has become a new target of attack.Some Chinese columnists have been projecting him as a founding-leader of the TYC and hence as radical as the TYC.
4. Some Chinese columnists have expressed the view that the only way of making His Holiness give up what they see as his present policy of confrontation with Beijing is by having pressure exercised on him through his external supporters. By external supporters,they mean the US and the non-Governmental organisations and Congressmen in the US, who have been supporting him.
5. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the US continues to be an important target of attack. Its denial of any responsibility for the March,2008, uprising in the Tibetan-inhabited areas of China has not been accepted by the Chinese. They have a strong suspicion that the NED is behind the radicalisation of the TYC and that funds flow to the TYC from the NED through Lodi Gyari. The NED makes no secret of its financial contributions to various Tibetan organisations. Details of these contributions are available in its web site. Uncorroborated reports that the NED had organised a training camp for Buddhist monks from Myanmar and Tibet in techniques of political agitation in a camp in South Africa are bound to add to this suspicion.
6. While the Chinese authorities and columnists avoid any negative or critical references to India with reference to the activities of the Dalai Lama and his supporters, their concern and suspicions over the activities of the TYC could become a contentious issue if the involvement of American citizens of Tibetan origin in its activities in Indian territory increases.
7.The State-owned Xinhua news agency reported on June 30,2008, as follows: "The authorities announced Sunday that relevant central government departments will meet personal representatives of the Dalai Lama at his request in early July.The central authorities have kept a constant and clear policy towards the Dalai Lama, a government spokesman said. "Our door is always open for the dialogue with the Dalai Lama," he said, "(We) hope that the Dalai Lama would treasure this opportunity and give positive response to the requirements of the central authorities." This would be the second meeting since the March uprising. The first one was held in China on May 4,2008.
8. While the announcement on the second meeting was expected for some time, interestingly it coincided with the visit of Ms.Condoleezza Rice , the US Secretary of State, to Beijing and the quake-hit areas of the Sichuan province. During her stay in Beijing, she met President Hu Jintao on June 30,2008. She had also met Prime Minister Wen Jiabo. Her visit had nothing to do with the announcement since the Chinese had agreed to this second meeting even earlier. And yet, the fact that the Chinese chose to make the announcement during her visit is interesting.
9. The Chinese media reported that during her meeting with Hu, she told him that President George Bush was looking forward to his meeting with him during the forthcoming G-8 summit in Japan. She apparently did not refer to Bush's planned visit to Beijing to attend the inaugural function of the Olympics. One would have expected her to say that Bush was looking forward to meeting Hu in the G-8 summit and to participating in the Olympics inaugural ceremony. However, she confined her remarks only to the summit. From this, one should not jump to the interpretation that Bush may be having second thoughts on his participation in the inaugural function.. All it shows is that he is keeping his options open .
10. Despite the toning down of the war of words between Beijing and the followers of the Dalai Lama, Chinese concerns over the possibility of violent attacks by Tibetan youth to embarrass the Chinese have not subsided. While they do not anticipate any acts of violence by the Tibetans in Beijing itself, they do apprehend diversionary acts of violence not only in Lhasa, but also in New Delhi and Western cities where there is a strong Tibetan presence.A question often posed by them is: Can the Tibetan youth kidnap a Chinese diplomat and hold him hostage during the Olympics to draw attention to their cause? Such acts will not be in the interest of the Tibetan cause and will prove counter-productive.
11. The Chinese have worked out a comprehensive physical security plan for the Olympics and the implementation of this plan has already started. This plan covers all important aspects such as civil aviation security, other public transport security, security in the venues of the games and the places of stay of the teams and public security in all important places which are likely to be visited by the teams, journalists and foreign spectators. They are also exercising caution while processing the visa applications of all intending visitors to China till the Olympics are over.
12. Of all the Muslim groups, only the Uighurs of Xinjiang origin living in the West and Turkey have kept up their campaign against Beijing. Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda organisations, including those of Pakistan, which are members of the International Islamic Front of bin Laden, have been silent on the Beijing Olympics. Their silence need not necessarily mean that they have no plans to disrupt the Olympics at Beijing or create diversionary attacks against the Chinese in Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics, which have a strong Uighur diaspora with religious and ethnic links to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) or Group, which is also an Uzbek organisation, and the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan. All the three of them have their headquarters in North Waziristan in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. If there is an act of jihadi disruption during the Olympics---either in Beijing or in Shanghai, where the football matches are to be held, or in Hong Kong where the equitation events are to be held--- it will most probably emanate from North Waziristan. The Chinese are depending on the goodwill and co-operation of the Pakistani authorities to prevent any incident plotted from Pakistani territory.
13. One does not know whether a contingent from Denmark is participating in the Olympics. If it does, its security should be of the greatest concern to the Chinese security agencies---- particularly after the recent Al Qaeda-owned attempt to blow up the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, in which eight Muslims---mostly Pakistanis---were killed. Al Qaeda organised the suicide explosion to protest against the publication and re-publication of cartoons by the Danish media on the Holy Prophet. The anger against the Danish cartoons persists---in the minds of jihadi organisations as well as individual Muslims right across the Ummah. If the Danish contingent participates, its members will be interacting with Muslim athletes from all over the Ummah. Even if no jihadi organisation mounts an attack on the Danes, the possibility of anger-of-the-moment attacks on the Danes by individual Muslims has to be factored into in any plan for the protection of the Danes.
14. While the Chinese physical security is tight, one is not certain whether their preventive intelligence capabilities have been revamped and strengthened after the March uprising in Lhasa when they were taken completely by surprise. China has a large number of Muslim students from the Ummah. Those of them, who had left China in the months before the Olympics ostensibly to visit their relatives and returned just before the Olympics, would need special attention. (1-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
While the Falun Gong has kept up its public campaign against the Beijing Olympics due in August, the Tibetan supporters of the Dalai Lama have toned down their campaign. There has been pressure on His Holiness from the Western Governments not to create difficulties for the Chinese before and during the Olympics.
2. Not only officials connected with the so-called Government-in-exile of his Holiness based in Dharmsala in India, but even the radical Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), whose radicalism has increased since September last year due to the role played by some American citizens of Tibetan origin, who had migrated to the US from India, have been avoiding any anti-Olympics statements. The Chinese as well as the Dalai Lama's followers have toned their rhetoric against each other. Though the rhetoric has not completely disappeared from their propaganda against each other, the harsh words of the past have been toned down.
3. The Chinese have toned down their demonisation of His Holiness, but they continue to demonise the TYC by projecting it as a terrorist organisation, which allegedly advocates suicide terrorism. Lodi Gyari, the Washington DC based representative of the Dalai Lama, who leads the two-member team of the Dalai Lama in the on-again, off-again dialogue with Chinese officials, has become a new target of attack.Some Chinese columnists have been projecting him as a founding-leader of the TYC and hence as radical as the TYC.
4. Some Chinese columnists have expressed the view that the only way of making His Holiness give up what they see as his present policy of confrontation with Beijing is by having pressure exercised on him through his external supporters. By external supporters,they mean the US and the non-Governmental organisations and Congressmen in the US, who have been supporting him.
5. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the US continues to be an important target of attack. Its denial of any responsibility for the March,2008, uprising in the Tibetan-inhabited areas of China has not been accepted by the Chinese. They have a strong suspicion that the NED is behind the radicalisation of the TYC and that funds flow to the TYC from the NED through Lodi Gyari. The NED makes no secret of its financial contributions to various Tibetan organisations. Details of these contributions are available in its web site. Uncorroborated reports that the NED had organised a training camp for Buddhist monks from Myanmar and Tibet in techniques of political agitation in a camp in South Africa are bound to add to this suspicion.
6. While the Chinese authorities and columnists avoid any negative or critical references to India with reference to the activities of the Dalai Lama and his supporters, their concern and suspicions over the activities of the TYC could become a contentious issue if the involvement of American citizens of Tibetan origin in its activities in Indian territory increases.
7.The State-owned Xinhua news agency reported on June 30,2008, as follows: "The authorities announced Sunday that relevant central government departments will meet personal representatives of the Dalai Lama at his request in early July.The central authorities have kept a constant and clear policy towards the Dalai Lama, a government spokesman said. "Our door is always open for the dialogue with the Dalai Lama," he said, "(We) hope that the Dalai Lama would treasure this opportunity and give positive response to the requirements of the central authorities." This would be the second meeting since the March uprising. The first one was held in China on May 4,2008.
8. While the announcement on the second meeting was expected for some time, interestingly it coincided with the visit of Ms.Condoleezza Rice , the US Secretary of State, to Beijing and the quake-hit areas of the Sichuan province. During her stay in Beijing, she met President Hu Jintao on June 30,2008. She had also met Prime Minister Wen Jiabo. Her visit had nothing to do with the announcement since the Chinese had agreed to this second meeting even earlier. And yet, the fact that the Chinese chose to make the announcement during her visit is interesting.
9. The Chinese media reported that during her meeting with Hu, she told him that President George Bush was looking forward to his meeting with him during the forthcoming G-8 summit in Japan. She apparently did not refer to Bush's planned visit to Beijing to attend the inaugural function of the Olympics. One would have expected her to say that Bush was looking forward to meeting Hu in the G-8 summit and to participating in the Olympics inaugural ceremony. However, she confined her remarks only to the summit. From this, one should not jump to the interpretation that Bush may be having second thoughts on his participation in the inaugural function.. All it shows is that he is keeping his options open .
10. Despite the toning down of the war of words between Beijing and the followers of the Dalai Lama, Chinese concerns over the possibility of violent attacks by Tibetan youth to embarrass the Chinese have not subsided. While they do not anticipate any acts of violence by the Tibetans in Beijing itself, they do apprehend diversionary acts of violence not only in Lhasa, but also in New Delhi and Western cities where there is a strong Tibetan presence.A question often posed by them is: Can the Tibetan youth kidnap a Chinese diplomat and hold him hostage during the Olympics to draw attention to their cause? Such acts will not be in the interest of the Tibetan cause and will prove counter-productive.
11. The Chinese have worked out a comprehensive physical security plan for the Olympics and the implementation of this plan has already started. This plan covers all important aspects such as civil aviation security, other public transport security, security in the venues of the games and the places of stay of the teams and public security in all important places which are likely to be visited by the teams, journalists and foreign spectators. They are also exercising caution while processing the visa applications of all intending visitors to China till the Olympics are over.
12. Of all the Muslim groups, only the Uighurs of Xinjiang origin living in the West and Turkey have kept up their campaign against Beijing. Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda organisations, including those of Pakistan, which are members of the International Islamic Front of bin Laden, have been silent on the Beijing Olympics. Their silence need not necessarily mean that they have no plans to disrupt the Olympics at Beijing or create diversionary attacks against the Chinese in Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics, which have a strong Uighur diaspora with religious and ethnic links to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) or Group, which is also an Uzbek organisation, and the Islamic Movement of Eastern Turkestan. All the three of them have their headquarters in North Waziristan in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. If there is an act of jihadi disruption during the Olympics---either in Beijing or in Shanghai, where the football matches are to be held, or in Hong Kong where the equitation events are to be held--- it will most probably emanate from North Waziristan. The Chinese are depending on the goodwill and co-operation of the Pakistani authorities to prevent any incident plotted from Pakistani territory.
13. One does not know whether a contingent from Denmark is participating in the Olympics. If it does, its security should be of the greatest concern to the Chinese security agencies---- particularly after the recent Al Qaeda-owned attempt to blow up the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, in which eight Muslims---mostly Pakistanis---were killed. Al Qaeda organised the suicide explosion to protest against the publication and re-publication of cartoons by the Danish media on the Holy Prophet. The anger against the Danish cartoons persists---in the minds of jihadi organisations as well as individual Muslims right across the Ummah. If the Danish contingent participates, its members will be interacting with Muslim athletes from all over the Ummah. Even if no jihadi organisation mounts an attack on the Danes, the possibility of anger-of-the-moment attacks on the Danes by individual Muslims has to be factored into in any plan for the protection of the Danes.
14. While the Chinese physical security is tight, one is not certain whether their preventive intelligence capabilities have been revamped and strengthened after the March uprising in Lhasa when they were taken completely by surprise. China has a large number of Muslim students from the Ummah. Those of them, who had left China in the months before the Olympics ostensibly to visit their relatives and returned just before the Olympics, would need special attention. (1-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Saturday, June 28, 2008
JIHADI ANARCHY IN PAKISTAN: THE FREE FOR ALL TRIBAL BELT
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.404
B.RAMAN
After a three-month futile courtship with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan ( TTP) headed by Baitullah Mehsud of South Waziristan, the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) headed by Maulana Fazlullah of the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and other jihadi organisations, the Pakistani Government headed by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani has ordered a clean-up operation in the Khyber Agency and South Waziristan of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Swat Valley. The operation started on June 28,2008, in the Khyber Agency.
2. While the resumed clean-up operation in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley is meant to put down recrudescence of jihadi terrorism by the TTP and the TNSM, which is a member of the TTP, the new clean-up operation in the Khyber Agency is designed to put down inter-sectarian, inter-tribal and inter-Mullah clashes, which have already caused a large number of deaths in the Khyber Agency and are threatening to spread to Peshawar, the capital of the NWFP. The Khyber Agency, which is adjoining Peshawar, has been seeing increasing attacks by local tribal jihadi groups on convoys carrying oil and other essential supplies for the NATO forces in Afghanistan from the Karachi port.
3. The courtship with the TTP, which was accompanied by a suspension of operations by the security forces and the TTP against each other and peace talks , has reportedly seen a 40 per cent increase in the infiltration of Taliban terrorists from the FATA and other areas into Eastern Afghanistan, thereby enabling the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, headed by Mulla Mohammad Omar, to step up its attacks on the NATO forces. A wave of panic in Peshawar in the wake of forays by Khyber-based jihadis into the city for intimidating sections of the local population, including some Christians working in a local hospital, growing resentment in the Shia community of Pakistan over continuing attacks on Shias in the Kurram Agency of the FATA allegedly by Khyber-based Sunni terrorists and repeated expressions of serious concern by US commanders in Afghanistan over the casualties inflicted on NATO forces and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) by infiltrators from Pakistani territory made the Government sit up and take notice of the deterioration in the situation right across the tribal belt and order action by the security forces even at the risk of a collapse of the peace talks, which could lead to a revival of acts of suicide terrorism in the non-tribal areas, including Islamabad, Rawalpindi and other cantonment towns and even in Punjab. While the courtship and the peace talks did not lead to real peace in the tribal belt, they did lead to a steep fall in acts of suicide terrorism in the non-tribal areas.
4. The decision to order the clean-up operation was taken after a meeting of some members of the Cabinet on June 25,2008, which was briefed on the deteriorating situation by Gen.Pervez Ashfaq Kiyani, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS). Normally, the alarming situation should have been discussed by the National Security Council (NSC), which is chaired by President Pervez Musharraf. The Gilani Government avoided requesting for a meeting of the NSC. Nor did it brief Musharraf about the decision to order a clean-up operation. However, Gen.Kiyani, at his own initiative, called on Musharraf on June 27,2008, briefed him on the proposed course of action and took his clearance before implementing the decision of the Cabinet.
5. Well-informed sources say that he has been finding himself in a difficult situation with the Cabinet giving instructions in national security matters without consulting Musharraf or even keeping him in the picture. However, Gen.Kiyani has been trying to be correct by frequently meeting Musharraf, who continues to be his direct boss as the President and the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The decision to relax restrictions on the movements of Dr.A.Q.Khan, the nuclear scientist, and on his interactions with the media also appears to have been taken by the Cabinet despite cautionary advice by Musharraf not to do so lest it add to US concerns over Pakistan.
6. The entire decision-making process in national security matters is in a mess, with too many cooks adding to the potency of the jihadi broth. While Gilani is the de jure Prime Minister, in matters relating to action against terrorism it is Rehman Malick, a close confidante of Asif Ali Zardari,the co-chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), who has been issuing confusing and contradictory instructions----sometimes to the Army, sometimes to the para-military forces such as the Frontier Corps (FC), sometimes to the Police and sometimes to the provincial Government of the NWFP. He is designated as the Adviser on Internal Security with the status of a Cabinet Minister. It is alleged by well-informed police sources that he takes his orders directly from Zardari without keeping Gilani in the picture. Thus, one has a strange situation with Gilani giving instructions without consulting Musharraf and with Malick issuing instructions at the instance of Zardari without consulting Gilani.
7.The NWFP Government was extremely unhappy over the manner in which Malick----on his own without consulting either Gilani or the provincial Government of the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP)--- announced the suspension of the peace deal negotiated by the provincial Government with the TNSM. When this caused friction in the ruling coalition at Islamabad of which the ANP is a member, he denied having issued any such order.
8. This growing confusion in the action against terrorism has resulted in a situation in which the Cabinet has reportedly ordered Gen.Kiyani to undertake the clean-op operation, but at the same time, instructed that he should use only the Frontier Corps (FC), which is increasingly infiltrated by pro-Taliban tribals, for this operation and should not use regular army troops. One does not know whether Musharraf approved of this or whether he instructed the COAS not to hesitate to use the Army if he considered it necessary to do so.
9. During his negotiations with the Government, Baitullah was demanding that the Army should be withdrawn from the FATA and that the responsibility for maintaining internal security should be re-entrusted to the FC. Even while ordering the clean-up operation, the Gilani Government has taken care not to hurt the sensitivities of Baitullah by ordering that the FC should be in the forefront of the clean-up operations and not the Army.
10. Last year,Musharraf inducted the Army in large numbers into South Waziristan and ordered it to act against the TTP because of reports of collusion between FC personnel and the TTP and the surrender of a large number of FC personnel including officers with their arms and ammunition to the TTP without putting up a fight. US commanders in Afghanistan make no secret of their doubts about the dependability of the FC, which they look upon as the secret protector of the Talibans of various hues, which have come up in the tribal belt.
11. There are Talibans and Talibans in the tribal belt-----some accepting the leadership of Baitullah and others not; some claiming to fight against the Americans and not against the Pakistan Army and others fighting against both; some consisting largely of Punjabis such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which is active in parts of the Swat Valley, and known locally as the Punjabi Taliban and others consisting largely of Pashtuns and hence locally known as the Pashtun Taliban; some such as the Pashtun Taliban claiming to be waging a jihad purely for local objectives such as the enforcement of the Sharia in the tribal belt and others such as the Punabi Taliban claiming to be fighting for the pan-Islamic objectives of Al Qaeda; some virulently anti-Shia and others not.
12. Whenever they are not operating against the Pakistani security forces and the Americans, they keep operating against each other, dubbing and killing each other as American agents. The tribal belt on the Pakistani side of the border is ablaze with inter-sectarian, inter-tribal and inter-Mullah clashes over who is a better Muslim and who is closer to Allah. Disputes over the distribution of the growing narcotics money from Afghanistan among themselves are adding to the gravity of the situation. It is jihadi anarchy of the worst kind, the like of which the history of Pakistan has not seen. Every Mullah, who is some Mullah, has his own FM Radio station through which he keeps instigating his followers to attack rivals and the security forces. To keep the FC inactive, these Mullahs allegedly give its officers a share of the narcotics money.
13. These radio stations have been instigating the Pakistani Taliban---Punjabi as well as Pashtun--- to attack American military and intelligence officers and NATO supply convoys in Pakistani territory. They have been calling for attacks on ships bringing NATO supplies to the Karachi port and on the Karachi offices of truck companies whose trucks are used by the NATO. They have been calling upon the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Islamic Jihad Group (IJG) and the Chechens to step up their jihad in Russian and Central Asian territories to disrupt the movement of NATO supplies through this route.
14.The Khyber Agency, better developed than the other Agencies of the FATA,is inhabited mainly by the Afridi and Shinwari tribes. Like the Swat Valley, it used to attract a large number of domestic and foreign tourists. The Agency was relatively peaceful till 2003. Trouble broke out in 2003, when a a local tribesman by name Haji Namdar returned from Saudi Arabia after performing Haj and set up an organization called Amr bil maroof wa nahi anil munkir, meaning the organisation for the “Suppression of Vice and Promotion of Virtue” . He started a campaign against music, dance, films and the TV and started punishing Muslims who did not regularly attend prayers in the mosques He started an FM radio station on which Mufti Munir Shakir, a virulently anti-Shia Mullah from the Kurram Tribal Agency, used to make anti-Shia broadcasts.
15.Mufti Shakir formed an organisation of his own called the Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) with its headquarters in the Bara town of the Khyber Agency. To counter the activities of the Wahabi-Deobandi LI, Pir Saif-ur-Rahman, a Mullah from Afghanistan who had settled down in the Agency and who belonged to the more tolerant Barelvi sect with its advocacy of Sufi traditions, started his own organisation called the Ansar-ul-Islam (AI). The AI also started making FM broadcasts against the LI and its Wahabi-Deobandi followers. In 2006, the two organisations came to frequent clashes. Following this, a jirga of the local Afridi tribes was held and the two were forced to leave the Agency by the local tribesmen in February 2006.
16.Following their expulsion, one Mangal Bagh Afridi, a 35-year-old local tribal, who had fought in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen against the Soviet troops, took over the leadership of the LI, which established its control over the whole of the Bara sub-division of the Agency.In April 2008, the LI extended its control to the Jamrud region of the Bara sub-division after a series of bloody clashes with the local Kukikhel sub-tribes of the Afridi tribe.The main artery connecting Peshawar to Kabul goes via the Khyber Pass. The Agency has two sib-divisions called Bara and Landikotal. Bara borders Peshawar.
17. The leadership of the Ansar-ul-Islam was taken over by one Maulana Mehboobul Haq. It is not known whether he too is a Barelvi or a Deobandi. However, under his leadership, the AI continued with its policy of resisting the activities of the LI. This resulted in many clashes with a large number of fatalities in the Teerah Valley of the Agency. The Pakistani security forces, which were preoccupied with their operations against the Taliban in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley, did not intervene in the Khyber Agency. Taking advantage of this, the LI consolidated its hold in the Khyber Agency and started enforcing its ban on music etc and punishing Muslims not attending prayers in the neighbouring areas of Peshawar too. It kidnapped 16 Christians, but released them later without harming them. It claimed that it mistook them for Muslims indulging in unislamic way of life, but released them on coming to know that they were Christians.
18. Mangal Bagh denies any links with Al Qaeda or the TTP. He does not accept the leadership of Baitullah. He says his fight is not against the Pakistani authorities, but against Muslims who are not living the life of true Muslims. While supporting the Taliban's jihad against the NATO forces in Afghanistan, he denies that his men are involved in the jihad against the NATO forces. Following a scare in Peshawar that the LI was about to attack Peshawar and capture it, he said in an interview on June 26,2008: “I am not about to attack Hayatabad or any other part of Peshawar.Ours is a reformist organization trying to promote virtue and prevent vice. We have rid Bara of drug-traffickers, gamblers, kidnappers, car-snatchers and other criminals and we want to cleanse Jamrud as well of those selling drugs and liquor and running gambling dens. That was the reason for us to send our mujahideen to Jamrud to accomplish the job. Lashkar-e-Islam is now able to enforce its code of conduct in almost the whole of Khyber Agency except parts of Jamrud inhabited by Kukikhels and a two-kilometre stretch of territory in Maidan area of Tirah valley. We have 120,000 men under arms who at a short notice would be able to assemble in case of need. All I have to do is to make an announcement on our FM radio channel and my mujahideen volunteers would be ready to fight for the Lashkar-e-Islam. I have no links with Al Qaeda or Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. I didn’t send my fighters to fight on the side of Taliban in Waziristan, Swat and Darra Adamkhel. The Taliban (of Mullah Mohammad Omar) are waging a jihad in Afghanistan for a just cause against foreign forces in their homeland. However, there are so many Taliban groups (in Pakistan) that it is difficult to tell as to which one is genuine."
19. Peshawar has on three sides areas over which the Pakistani security forces have no effective control. The Khyber Agency is under the effective control of the LI, which does not form part of the TTP. The Darra Adamkhel and Mohmand areas are largely under the control of the TTP. This situation has caused alarm not only to the non-religious political parties and the administration, but also to the traditional religious parties of the pre-9/11 vintage, who find a new generation of Mullahs of different hues supplanting them and making them increasingly irrelevant. Compared to the newly-emerging Mullahs of today, the pre-9/11 vintage appears rather moderate.The Reuters has quoted the Jamiat -ul-Ulema-Islam chief Fazlur Rehman, a member of the ruling coalition, who used to support Al Qaeda and the Neo Taliban in the past, as warning as follows: " “It’s just a matter of months before news comes that the entire NWFP has slipped out of control.”
20. Nobody seems to be in effective control in the free-for-all tribal belt of Pakistan---- neither Musharraf nor Gilani nor Zardari nor Gen.Kiyani nor the provincial Government of the NWFP. It has to be seen to what extent, under these circumstances, the clean-up operation succeeds. ( 29-6-08)
(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 )
B.RAMAN
After a three-month futile courtship with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan ( TTP) headed by Baitullah Mehsud of South Waziristan, the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) headed by Maulana Fazlullah of the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and other jihadi organisations, the Pakistani Government headed by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani has ordered a clean-up operation in the Khyber Agency and South Waziristan of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Swat Valley. The operation started on June 28,2008, in the Khyber Agency.
2. While the resumed clean-up operation in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley is meant to put down recrudescence of jihadi terrorism by the TTP and the TNSM, which is a member of the TTP, the new clean-up operation in the Khyber Agency is designed to put down inter-sectarian, inter-tribal and inter-Mullah clashes, which have already caused a large number of deaths in the Khyber Agency and are threatening to spread to Peshawar, the capital of the NWFP. The Khyber Agency, which is adjoining Peshawar, has been seeing increasing attacks by local tribal jihadi groups on convoys carrying oil and other essential supplies for the NATO forces in Afghanistan from the Karachi port.
3. The courtship with the TTP, which was accompanied by a suspension of operations by the security forces and the TTP against each other and peace talks , has reportedly seen a 40 per cent increase in the infiltration of Taliban terrorists from the FATA and other areas into Eastern Afghanistan, thereby enabling the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, headed by Mulla Mohammad Omar, to step up its attacks on the NATO forces. A wave of panic in Peshawar in the wake of forays by Khyber-based jihadis into the city for intimidating sections of the local population, including some Christians working in a local hospital, growing resentment in the Shia community of Pakistan over continuing attacks on Shias in the Kurram Agency of the FATA allegedly by Khyber-based Sunni terrorists and repeated expressions of serious concern by US commanders in Afghanistan over the casualties inflicted on NATO forces and members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) by infiltrators from Pakistani territory made the Government sit up and take notice of the deterioration in the situation right across the tribal belt and order action by the security forces even at the risk of a collapse of the peace talks, which could lead to a revival of acts of suicide terrorism in the non-tribal areas, including Islamabad, Rawalpindi and other cantonment towns and even in Punjab. While the courtship and the peace talks did not lead to real peace in the tribal belt, they did lead to a steep fall in acts of suicide terrorism in the non-tribal areas.
4. The decision to order the clean-up operation was taken after a meeting of some members of the Cabinet on June 25,2008, which was briefed on the deteriorating situation by Gen.Pervez Ashfaq Kiyani, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS). Normally, the alarming situation should have been discussed by the National Security Council (NSC), which is chaired by President Pervez Musharraf. The Gilani Government avoided requesting for a meeting of the NSC. Nor did it brief Musharraf about the decision to order a clean-up operation. However, Gen.Kiyani, at his own initiative, called on Musharraf on June 27,2008, briefed him on the proposed course of action and took his clearance before implementing the decision of the Cabinet.
5. Well-informed sources say that he has been finding himself in a difficult situation with the Cabinet giving instructions in national security matters without consulting Musharraf or even keeping him in the picture. However, Gen.Kiyani has been trying to be correct by frequently meeting Musharraf, who continues to be his direct boss as the President and the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The decision to relax restrictions on the movements of Dr.A.Q.Khan, the nuclear scientist, and on his interactions with the media also appears to have been taken by the Cabinet despite cautionary advice by Musharraf not to do so lest it add to US concerns over Pakistan.
6. The entire decision-making process in national security matters is in a mess, with too many cooks adding to the potency of the jihadi broth. While Gilani is the de jure Prime Minister, in matters relating to action against terrorism it is Rehman Malick, a close confidante of Asif Ali Zardari,the co-chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), who has been issuing confusing and contradictory instructions----sometimes to the Army, sometimes to the para-military forces such as the Frontier Corps (FC), sometimes to the Police and sometimes to the provincial Government of the NWFP. He is designated as the Adviser on Internal Security with the status of a Cabinet Minister. It is alleged by well-informed police sources that he takes his orders directly from Zardari without keeping Gilani in the picture. Thus, one has a strange situation with Gilani giving instructions without consulting Musharraf and with Malick issuing instructions at the instance of Zardari without consulting Gilani.
7.The NWFP Government was extremely unhappy over the manner in which Malick----on his own without consulting either Gilani or the provincial Government of the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP)--- announced the suspension of the peace deal negotiated by the provincial Government with the TNSM. When this caused friction in the ruling coalition at Islamabad of which the ANP is a member, he denied having issued any such order.
8. This growing confusion in the action against terrorism has resulted in a situation in which the Cabinet has reportedly ordered Gen.Kiyani to undertake the clean-op operation, but at the same time, instructed that he should use only the Frontier Corps (FC), which is increasingly infiltrated by pro-Taliban tribals, for this operation and should not use regular army troops. One does not know whether Musharraf approved of this or whether he instructed the COAS not to hesitate to use the Army if he considered it necessary to do so.
9. During his negotiations with the Government, Baitullah was demanding that the Army should be withdrawn from the FATA and that the responsibility for maintaining internal security should be re-entrusted to the FC. Even while ordering the clean-up operation, the Gilani Government has taken care not to hurt the sensitivities of Baitullah by ordering that the FC should be in the forefront of the clean-up operations and not the Army.
10. Last year,Musharraf inducted the Army in large numbers into South Waziristan and ordered it to act against the TTP because of reports of collusion between FC personnel and the TTP and the surrender of a large number of FC personnel including officers with their arms and ammunition to the TTP without putting up a fight. US commanders in Afghanistan make no secret of their doubts about the dependability of the FC, which they look upon as the secret protector of the Talibans of various hues, which have come up in the tribal belt.
11. There are Talibans and Talibans in the tribal belt-----some accepting the leadership of Baitullah and others not; some claiming to fight against the Americans and not against the Pakistan Army and others fighting against both; some consisting largely of Punjabis such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), which is active in parts of the Swat Valley, and known locally as the Punjabi Taliban and others consisting largely of Pashtuns and hence locally known as the Pashtun Taliban; some such as the Pashtun Taliban claiming to be waging a jihad purely for local objectives such as the enforcement of the Sharia in the tribal belt and others such as the Punabi Taliban claiming to be fighting for the pan-Islamic objectives of Al Qaeda; some virulently anti-Shia and others not.
12. Whenever they are not operating against the Pakistani security forces and the Americans, they keep operating against each other, dubbing and killing each other as American agents. The tribal belt on the Pakistani side of the border is ablaze with inter-sectarian, inter-tribal and inter-Mullah clashes over who is a better Muslim and who is closer to Allah. Disputes over the distribution of the growing narcotics money from Afghanistan among themselves are adding to the gravity of the situation. It is jihadi anarchy of the worst kind, the like of which the history of Pakistan has not seen. Every Mullah, who is some Mullah, has his own FM Radio station through which he keeps instigating his followers to attack rivals and the security forces. To keep the FC inactive, these Mullahs allegedly give its officers a share of the narcotics money.
13. These radio stations have been instigating the Pakistani Taliban---Punjabi as well as Pashtun--- to attack American military and intelligence officers and NATO supply convoys in Pakistani territory. They have been calling for attacks on ships bringing NATO supplies to the Karachi port and on the Karachi offices of truck companies whose trucks are used by the NATO. They have been calling upon the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the Islamic Jihad Group (IJG) and the Chechens to step up their jihad in Russian and Central Asian territories to disrupt the movement of NATO supplies through this route.
14.The Khyber Agency, better developed than the other Agencies of the FATA,is inhabited mainly by the Afridi and Shinwari tribes. Like the Swat Valley, it used to attract a large number of domestic and foreign tourists. The Agency was relatively peaceful till 2003. Trouble broke out in 2003, when a a local tribesman by name Haji Namdar returned from Saudi Arabia after performing Haj and set up an organization called Amr bil maroof wa nahi anil munkir, meaning the organisation for the “Suppression of Vice and Promotion of Virtue” . He started a campaign against music, dance, films and the TV and started punishing Muslims who did not regularly attend prayers in the mosques He started an FM radio station on which Mufti Munir Shakir, a virulently anti-Shia Mullah from the Kurram Tribal Agency, used to make anti-Shia broadcasts.
15.Mufti Shakir formed an organisation of his own called the Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) with its headquarters in the Bara town of the Khyber Agency. To counter the activities of the Wahabi-Deobandi LI, Pir Saif-ur-Rahman, a Mullah from Afghanistan who had settled down in the Agency and who belonged to the more tolerant Barelvi sect with its advocacy of Sufi traditions, started his own organisation called the Ansar-ul-Islam (AI). The AI also started making FM broadcasts against the LI and its Wahabi-Deobandi followers. In 2006, the two organisations came to frequent clashes. Following this, a jirga of the local Afridi tribes was held and the two were forced to leave the Agency by the local tribesmen in February 2006.
16.Following their expulsion, one Mangal Bagh Afridi, a 35-year-old local tribal, who had fought in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen against the Soviet troops, took over the leadership of the LI, which established its control over the whole of the Bara sub-division of the Agency.In April 2008, the LI extended its control to the Jamrud region of the Bara sub-division after a series of bloody clashes with the local Kukikhel sub-tribes of the Afridi tribe.The main artery connecting Peshawar to Kabul goes via the Khyber Pass. The Agency has two sib-divisions called Bara and Landikotal. Bara borders Peshawar.
17. The leadership of the Ansar-ul-Islam was taken over by one Maulana Mehboobul Haq. It is not known whether he too is a Barelvi or a Deobandi. However, under his leadership, the AI continued with its policy of resisting the activities of the LI. This resulted in many clashes with a large number of fatalities in the Teerah Valley of the Agency. The Pakistani security forces, which were preoccupied with their operations against the Taliban in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley, did not intervene in the Khyber Agency. Taking advantage of this, the LI consolidated its hold in the Khyber Agency and started enforcing its ban on music etc and punishing Muslims not attending prayers in the neighbouring areas of Peshawar too. It kidnapped 16 Christians, but released them later without harming them. It claimed that it mistook them for Muslims indulging in unislamic way of life, but released them on coming to know that they were Christians.
18. Mangal Bagh denies any links with Al Qaeda or the TTP. He does not accept the leadership of Baitullah. He says his fight is not against the Pakistani authorities, but against Muslims who are not living the life of true Muslims. While supporting the Taliban's jihad against the NATO forces in Afghanistan, he denies that his men are involved in the jihad against the NATO forces. Following a scare in Peshawar that the LI was about to attack Peshawar and capture it, he said in an interview on June 26,2008: “I am not about to attack Hayatabad or any other part of Peshawar.Ours is a reformist organization trying to promote virtue and prevent vice. We have rid Bara of drug-traffickers, gamblers, kidnappers, car-snatchers and other criminals and we want to cleanse Jamrud as well of those selling drugs and liquor and running gambling dens. That was the reason for us to send our mujahideen to Jamrud to accomplish the job. Lashkar-e-Islam is now able to enforce its code of conduct in almost the whole of Khyber Agency except parts of Jamrud inhabited by Kukikhels and a two-kilometre stretch of territory in Maidan area of Tirah valley. We have 120,000 men under arms who at a short notice would be able to assemble in case of need. All I have to do is to make an announcement on our FM radio channel and my mujahideen volunteers would be ready to fight for the Lashkar-e-Islam. I have no links with Al Qaeda or Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. I didn’t send my fighters to fight on the side of Taliban in Waziristan, Swat and Darra Adamkhel. The Taliban (of Mullah Mohammad Omar) are waging a jihad in Afghanistan for a just cause against foreign forces in their homeland. However, there are so many Taliban groups (in Pakistan) that it is difficult to tell as to which one is genuine."
19. Peshawar has on three sides areas over which the Pakistani security forces have no effective control. The Khyber Agency is under the effective control of the LI, which does not form part of the TTP. The Darra Adamkhel and Mohmand areas are largely under the control of the TTP. This situation has caused alarm not only to the non-religious political parties and the administration, but also to the traditional religious parties of the pre-9/11 vintage, who find a new generation of Mullahs of different hues supplanting them and making them increasingly irrelevant. Compared to the newly-emerging Mullahs of today, the pre-9/11 vintage appears rather moderate.The Reuters has quoted the Jamiat -ul-Ulema-Islam chief Fazlur Rehman, a member of the ruling coalition, who used to support Al Qaeda and the Neo Taliban in the past, as warning as follows: " “It’s just a matter of months before news comes that the entire NWFP has slipped out of control.”
20. Nobody seems to be in effective control in the free-for-all tribal belt of Pakistan---- neither Musharraf nor Gilani nor Zardari nor Gen.Kiyani nor the provincial Government of the NWFP. It has to be seen to what extent, under these circumstances, the clean-up operation succeeds. ( 29-6-08)
(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 )
Sunday, June 22, 2008
BENAZIR BHUTTO'S ASSASSINATION CASE IN COLD STORAGE
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO. 403
B.RAMAN
As Pakistan observed on June 21 the 55th birth anniversary of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at Rawalpindi on December 27,2007, there has been an intriguing reluctance on the part of the ruling coalition led by the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to pursue the investigation into her assassination vigorously and to prosecute those already arrested.
2.While Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the former Amir of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who had been named by her as a principal suspect in the failed attempt to kill her at Karachi on October 18,2007, has been quietly released after being in police custody for some time, the police investigation into her assassination on December 27,2007, has been discontinued. While legal proceedings have been delayed against those who have already been arrested and who have confessed about their role in the assassination, no action to arrest others, who had been declared as proclaimed offenders in the case by a court, has been taken.
3. Among those declared as proclaimed offenders in the case is Baitullah Mehsud, the Amir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Instead of taking action to have him arrested and prosecuted, the Government has been negotiating a peace deal with him under which in return for his releasing Pakistani security forces personnel in the custody of the TTP and calling off all acts of suicide terrorism, the Government has offered to withdraw the Army from South Waziristan and make the Frontier Corps, a para-military force consisting largely of local Pashtun tribals, many of them sympathetic to the Taliban,responsible for internal security in South Waziristan.
4. The Government was embarrassed when US spokesmen repeatedly expressed their surprise over the Pakistani Government holding talks with the principal suspect in the assassination of Benazir and when Baitullah addressed a press conference in which he said that any peace deal will apply only to Pakistani territory and not to the operations of his men in the Afghan territory against the NATO forces and the Afghan National Army. Following these developments, the Govt. has suspended the peace talks with him, but has not asked the security forces to go after him in order to arrest him in the Benazir Bhutto case.
5. The case against those already arrested is being adjourned frequently under some pretext or the other on petitions filed by the defence counsels without the Government opposing these adjournments, which are against the provisions of the Anti-Terrroism Act, which clearly stipulate that the legal proceedings in terrorism-related cases should be held on a day-to-day basis without adjournments.
6. Anti Terrorism Court (ATC) No I of Rawalpindi once again adjourned on June 21,2008, the hearing into the Benazir murder case till July 14, 2008.
7.Critics of Asif Ali Zardari and Rehman Mallick, his confidante, who is the Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior with the status of a Cabinet Minister, have been alleging that neither of them seems to be interested in pursuing the case in order to bring to justice those responsible for her assassination. Rehman Mallick was a senior official of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) during the second tenure of Benazir as the Prime Minister (1993-96) and became a close confidante of Zardari. When former President Farooq Leghari dismissed her in 1996, he also suspended Rehman Mallick and ordered an investigation into charges of corruption against him. He escaped to the UK, from where he was co-ordinating the personal security of Benazir during her travels while she was in political exile.When she returned to Pakistan on October 18,2007, he returned before her and was looking after her physical security. There was considerable criticism of his absence from the vicinity of Benazir on December 27,2007, when she was assassinated.
8. Despite his alleged failure to protect her, he continues to enjoy the trust of Zardari who got him appointed as the Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior.
9.Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir, was killed in a police encounter outside his Karachi residence in September,1996, after he had returned to Karachi from a visit to Islamabad where he allegedly had a quarrel with Zardari, who reportedly opposed his demand that he should be designated as the Vice-Chairman of the PPP. The failure of the Karachi Police to vigorously pursue the investigation was one of the reasons used by Farooq Leghari to dismiss Benazir shortly after the murder of her brother. Zardari was among those arrested and prosecuted by the police after her dismissal in connection with the murder of her brother. He was got discharged honourably from the case by the PPP-led coalition after it assumed office in the last week of March,2008.
10. Till today, the full facts relating to the murder of Murtaza and the identities of those responsible are not known to the public. The whole case has been covered up. There seems to be a similar attempt to cover up the case relating to the the assassination of Benazir despite the Government ostensibly moving the UN for an international investigation under the supervision of the UN Security Council. After her assassination, President Pervez Musharraf, in response to allegations of a cover-up by PPP leaders including Zardari, had requested the British Government to depute a team from the Scotland Yard to help in the forensic investigation. A team visited Pakistan and did a thorough forensic investigation. No action has been taken by the Government to follow up on their forensic investigation either. ( 22-6-08)
(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 )
B.RAMAN
As Pakistan observed on June 21 the 55th birth anniversary of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated at Rawalpindi on December 27,2007, there has been an intriguing reluctance on the part of the ruling coalition led by the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to pursue the investigation into her assassination vigorously and to prosecute those already arrested.
2.While Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the former Amir of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who had been named by her as a principal suspect in the failed attempt to kill her at Karachi on October 18,2007, has been quietly released after being in police custody for some time, the police investigation into her assassination on December 27,2007, has been discontinued. While legal proceedings have been delayed against those who have already been arrested and who have confessed about their role in the assassination, no action to arrest others, who had been declared as proclaimed offenders in the case by a court, has been taken.
3. Among those declared as proclaimed offenders in the case is Baitullah Mehsud, the Amir of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Instead of taking action to have him arrested and prosecuted, the Government has been negotiating a peace deal with him under which in return for his releasing Pakistani security forces personnel in the custody of the TTP and calling off all acts of suicide terrorism, the Government has offered to withdraw the Army from South Waziristan and make the Frontier Corps, a para-military force consisting largely of local Pashtun tribals, many of them sympathetic to the Taliban,responsible for internal security in South Waziristan.
4. The Government was embarrassed when US spokesmen repeatedly expressed their surprise over the Pakistani Government holding talks with the principal suspect in the assassination of Benazir and when Baitullah addressed a press conference in which he said that any peace deal will apply only to Pakistani territory and not to the operations of his men in the Afghan territory against the NATO forces and the Afghan National Army. Following these developments, the Govt. has suspended the peace talks with him, but has not asked the security forces to go after him in order to arrest him in the Benazir Bhutto case.
5. The case against those already arrested is being adjourned frequently under some pretext or the other on petitions filed by the defence counsels without the Government opposing these adjournments, which are against the provisions of the Anti-Terrroism Act, which clearly stipulate that the legal proceedings in terrorism-related cases should be held on a day-to-day basis without adjournments.
6. Anti Terrorism Court (ATC) No I of Rawalpindi once again adjourned on June 21,2008, the hearing into the Benazir murder case till July 14, 2008.
7.Critics of Asif Ali Zardari and Rehman Mallick, his confidante, who is the Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior with the status of a Cabinet Minister, have been alleging that neither of them seems to be interested in pursuing the case in order to bring to justice those responsible for her assassination. Rehman Mallick was a senior official of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) during the second tenure of Benazir as the Prime Minister (1993-96) and became a close confidante of Zardari. When former President Farooq Leghari dismissed her in 1996, he also suspended Rehman Mallick and ordered an investigation into charges of corruption against him. He escaped to the UK, from where he was co-ordinating the personal security of Benazir during her travels while she was in political exile.When she returned to Pakistan on October 18,2007, he returned before her and was looking after her physical security. There was considerable criticism of his absence from the vicinity of Benazir on December 27,2007, when she was assassinated.
8. Despite his alleged failure to protect her, he continues to enjoy the trust of Zardari who got him appointed as the Advisor to the Ministry of the Interior.
9.Murtaza Ali Bhutto, the younger brother of Benazir, was killed in a police encounter outside his Karachi residence in September,1996, after he had returned to Karachi from a visit to Islamabad where he allegedly had a quarrel with Zardari, who reportedly opposed his demand that he should be designated as the Vice-Chairman of the PPP. The failure of the Karachi Police to vigorously pursue the investigation was one of the reasons used by Farooq Leghari to dismiss Benazir shortly after the murder of her brother. Zardari was among those arrested and prosecuted by the police after her dismissal in connection with the murder of her brother. He was got discharged honourably from the case by the PPP-led coalition after it assumed office in the last week of March,2008.
10. Till today, the full facts relating to the murder of Murtaza and the identities of those responsible are not known to the public. The whole case has been covered up. There seems to be a similar attempt to cover up the case relating to the the assassination of Benazir despite the Government ostensibly moving the UN for an international investigation under the supervision of the UN Security Council. After her assassination, President Pervez Musharraf, in response to allegations of a cover-up by PPP leaders including Zardari, had requested the British Government to depute a team from the Scotland Yard to help in the forensic investigation. A team visited Pakistan and did a thorough forensic investigation. No action has been taken by the Government to follow up on their forensic investigation either. ( 22-6-08)
(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 )
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
THE JIHADI VIETCONG---AN UPDATE OF MY ARTICLE OF JUNE 25,2006
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO.402
By B.Raman
On June 25,2006, I wrote as follows ( http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers19/paper1858.html )
Quote We saw in Vietnam a clash of wills between a low-tech Vietcong and hi-tech Americans.
Low-tech ultimately prevailed over hi-tech.
Hi-tech taught the Americans how to kill----more and more.
One lost count of the body-counts projected by the US Army officers in South Vietnam and by Mr.Robert McNamara, the then US Defence Secretary, in Washington DC as indicators that the US was winning the war.
If body-counts alone could win a war, the Americans should have won in Vietnam. They did not.
There is something more to battles than body-counts-----morale,motivation, determination, ability to improvise and faith in oneself. The Vietcong had them in plenty.
In addition, the Vietcong had something more, which ultimately made the difference-----the ability to recover and fight again and again undeterred by all the losses suffered by them at the hands of the American troops, artillery and air force.
The Vietcong were like ants. They kept coming more and more. The more the Americans killed, the more they came. They kept coming out of dozens of ant holes located in foreign territory----in North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.
You cannot destroy ants unless you locate and destroy the ant holes. The American air strikes could not destroy all the ant holes in foreign territory.
They did not even try to destroy those in China lest they provoke Beijing. Their air strikes against those in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were ineffective due to the complicity of the local authorities with the Vietcong.
Ultimately, the hi-tech Americans were overwhelmed by the low-tech ants. They called it quits.
We are seeing in Afghanistan a clash of wills between a low-tech Taliban and the hi-tech forces of the US-led coalition.
The hi-tech of the US-led forces is enabling them to kill more and more.
Body-counts reminiscent of the Vietnam days are back in vogue.
20 Taliban killed, 40 killed, 65 killed, 149 killed......
It goes on and on.
Every time you watch the TV, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, you see or hear only body-counts.
To whom did those bodies belong?
To the Taliban as claimed by the US-led forces? Or
To innocent civilians as alleged by the Taliban?
Definitely both.
The more the civilians you kill, the more the alienation.
The more the civilians you kill, the more the anger against you.
It is a vicious circle.
The Taliban are like ants. They keep coming more and more. The more the Americans kill, the more they come. They keep coming out of ant holes located in the Waziristan and Balochistan areas of Pakistan.
Instead of focussing on the ant holes from which the ants are entering Afghanistan, the Americans are focussing on the places in Afghanistan which are being invaded by the ants----killing many innocent civilians and driving others to join the ants.
This is like damaging or destroying your house because it is invaded by ants instead of locating the ant holes and destroying them first.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is right.
The US-led forces have to change their methods. They have to attack the sources of terrorism.
They have to destroy the ant holes instead of keeping themselves confined to chasing the ants after they enter Afghanistan.
The American-led forces cannot be successful, despite all their resources and fire power, in destroying the ant holes unless they have the genuine co-operation of the military-dominated Government in Pakistan.
Expectations of such genuine co-operation have proved themselves to be illusory.
The Americans have only one option. Facilitate the coming into power of a genuinely democratic Government, which might co-operate sincerely.
It is better to have a sincere ally, even if it be only half effective, than to have an insincere ally, who feeds the ants while pretending to destroy them. Unquote
2. Hopes and expectations that a democratic Government in Pakistan will be more sincere in co-operating with the international community in destroying the jihadi ant holes in Pakistani territory are being belied. The democratically-elected leaders are showing themselves to be as insincere as the military leadership was. Instead of destroying the ant holes, they have made deals with the ants and are encouraging them to go to India and Afghanistan and do whatever they want. They pretend as if there are no ant holes in Pakistani territory. They pretend as if they see no ants entering Afghanistan and India.
3.Now that winter is over and the spring too is about to end, thousands of jihadi ants---old and new--- have started moving across Afghanistan. They nearly killed Mr.Karzai during a national day parade in Kabul on April 27,2008. They launched a spectacular attack on the Kandahar prison on June 13,2008, and freed all the about 1000 prisoners---400 of them jihad-hardened members of the Taliban. They forced open the gates of the prison with the help of a suicide truck. A group with hand-held weapons rushed into the prison, killed the guards and freed the prisoners. They identified those who were from the Taliban and spirited them out in 25 motor vehicles, which they had brought with them.
4. The entire operation took about an hour. About 40 minutes' drive from Kandahar was a post of the Canadian Army. It was supposed to protect Kandahar from the Taliban. The Canadians had no inkling of what the hell was going on till the Taliban had left with their vehicles transporting the freed Taliban prisoners.
5. Neither the US intelligence agencies nor those of other NATO countries and Afghanistan had noticed the Taliban vehicular armada driving into Kandahar. No helicopter took off from any of the NATO bases in the vicinity of Kandahar to make an air strike on the invading Taliban.
6. They came, they conquered and left triumphantly. Nobody knows where are the ants which attacked the prison. Nobody knows how the invading and freed ants have managed to disappear without trace. Nobody knows where the ants will strike next.
7. Are you as old as I am to remember the days of Vietnam? Remember the Tet (New Year---January 31,1968) offensive of the Vietcong, which totally took the Americans by surprise and proved all their assessments based on body-counts about a weakening Vietcong disastrously wrong?
8. Remember April 29, 1975, when the Vietcong attacked American positions in Saigon? The Americans and the South Vietnamese political and military rulers supporting them ran away from Vietnam---- some on foot, some in motor vehicles and some clinging pathetically to helicopters which took off from the roof of the US diplomatic mission.
9. If the US and other NATO forces do not draw the right lessons from the ants' raid on the Kandahar prison and act energetically and effectively against the ant holes in Pakistani territory, the day is not far off when April 29, 1975, in Vietnam will be repeated in Afghanistan.
10.The Taliban and Al Qaeda--- and the Pakistanis supporting them--- are waiting for that day. They are determined to re-create history. (17-6-08)
( 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 )
By B.Raman
On June 25,2006, I wrote as follows ( http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers19/paper1858.html )
Quote We saw in Vietnam a clash of wills between a low-tech Vietcong and hi-tech Americans.
Low-tech ultimately prevailed over hi-tech.
Hi-tech taught the Americans how to kill----more and more.
One lost count of the body-counts projected by the US Army officers in South Vietnam and by Mr.Robert McNamara, the then US Defence Secretary, in Washington DC as indicators that the US was winning the war.
If body-counts alone could win a war, the Americans should have won in Vietnam. They did not.
There is something more to battles than body-counts-----morale,motivation, determination, ability to improvise and faith in oneself. The Vietcong had them in plenty.
In addition, the Vietcong had something more, which ultimately made the difference-----the ability to recover and fight again and again undeterred by all the losses suffered by them at the hands of the American troops, artillery and air force.
The Vietcong were like ants. They kept coming more and more. The more the Americans killed, the more they came. They kept coming out of dozens of ant holes located in foreign territory----in North Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China.
You cannot destroy ants unless you locate and destroy the ant holes. The American air strikes could not destroy all the ant holes in foreign territory.
They did not even try to destroy those in China lest they provoke Beijing. Their air strikes against those in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were ineffective due to the complicity of the local authorities with the Vietcong.
Ultimately, the hi-tech Americans were overwhelmed by the low-tech ants. They called it quits.
We are seeing in Afghanistan a clash of wills between a low-tech Taliban and the hi-tech forces of the US-led coalition.
The hi-tech of the US-led forces is enabling them to kill more and more.
Body-counts reminiscent of the Vietnam days are back in vogue.
20 Taliban killed, 40 killed, 65 killed, 149 killed......
It goes on and on.
Every time you watch the TV, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, you see or hear only body-counts.
To whom did those bodies belong?
To the Taliban as claimed by the US-led forces? Or
To innocent civilians as alleged by the Taliban?
Definitely both.
The more the civilians you kill, the more the alienation.
The more the civilians you kill, the more the anger against you.
It is a vicious circle.
The Taliban are like ants. They keep coming more and more. The more the Americans kill, the more they come. They keep coming out of ant holes located in the Waziristan and Balochistan areas of Pakistan.
Instead of focussing on the ant holes from which the ants are entering Afghanistan, the Americans are focussing on the places in Afghanistan which are being invaded by the ants----killing many innocent civilians and driving others to join the ants.
This is like damaging or destroying your house because it is invaded by ants instead of locating the ant holes and destroying them first.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is right.
The US-led forces have to change their methods. They have to attack the sources of terrorism.
They have to destroy the ant holes instead of keeping themselves confined to chasing the ants after they enter Afghanistan.
The American-led forces cannot be successful, despite all their resources and fire power, in destroying the ant holes unless they have the genuine co-operation of the military-dominated Government in Pakistan.
Expectations of such genuine co-operation have proved themselves to be illusory.
The Americans have only one option. Facilitate the coming into power of a genuinely democratic Government, which might co-operate sincerely.
It is better to have a sincere ally, even if it be only half effective, than to have an insincere ally, who feeds the ants while pretending to destroy them. Unquote
2. Hopes and expectations that a democratic Government in Pakistan will be more sincere in co-operating with the international community in destroying the jihadi ant holes in Pakistani territory are being belied. The democratically-elected leaders are showing themselves to be as insincere as the military leadership was. Instead of destroying the ant holes, they have made deals with the ants and are encouraging them to go to India and Afghanistan and do whatever they want. They pretend as if there are no ant holes in Pakistani territory. They pretend as if they see no ants entering Afghanistan and India.
3.Now that winter is over and the spring too is about to end, thousands of jihadi ants---old and new--- have started moving across Afghanistan. They nearly killed Mr.Karzai during a national day parade in Kabul on April 27,2008. They launched a spectacular attack on the Kandahar prison on June 13,2008, and freed all the about 1000 prisoners---400 of them jihad-hardened members of the Taliban. They forced open the gates of the prison with the help of a suicide truck. A group with hand-held weapons rushed into the prison, killed the guards and freed the prisoners. They identified those who were from the Taliban and spirited them out in 25 motor vehicles, which they had brought with them.
4. The entire operation took about an hour. About 40 minutes' drive from Kandahar was a post of the Canadian Army. It was supposed to protect Kandahar from the Taliban. The Canadians had no inkling of what the hell was going on till the Taliban had left with their vehicles transporting the freed Taliban prisoners.
5. Neither the US intelligence agencies nor those of other NATO countries and Afghanistan had noticed the Taliban vehicular armada driving into Kandahar. No helicopter took off from any of the NATO bases in the vicinity of Kandahar to make an air strike on the invading Taliban.
6. They came, they conquered and left triumphantly. Nobody knows where are the ants which attacked the prison. Nobody knows how the invading and freed ants have managed to disappear without trace. Nobody knows where the ants will strike next.
7. Are you as old as I am to remember the days of Vietnam? Remember the Tet (New Year---January 31,1968) offensive of the Vietcong, which totally took the Americans by surprise and proved all their assessments based on body-counts about a weakening Vietcong disastrously wrong?
8. Remember April 29, 1975, when the Vietcong attacked American positions in Saigon? The Americans and the South Vietnamese political and military rulers supporting them ran away from Vietnam---- some on foot, some in motor vehicles and some clinging pathetically to helicopters which took off from the roof of the US diplomatic mission.
9. If the US and other NATO forces do not draw the right lessons from the ants' raid on the Kandahar prison and act energetically and effectively against the ant holes in Pakistani territory, the day is not far off when April 29, 1975, in Vietnam will be repeated in Afghanistan.
10.The Taliban and Al Qaeda--- and the Pakistanis supporting them--- are waiting for that day. They are determined to re-create history. (17-6-08)
( 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 )
Friday, June 13, 2008
MYSTERY SURROUNDING ADAM GADAHN
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.401
B.RAMAN
A missile suspected to have been fired by an unmanned US aircraft early on the morning of January 29, 2008, had destroyed a house, owned by Madad Khan, a local leader of the Taliban at a village called Khushali Torikhel, 12 kilometres south of Mir Ali town, in North Waziristan, where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Group, another Uzbek jihadi organisation, are based. While Madad Khan reportedly survived the attack, his 10 guests----all believed to be Uzbeks and Arabs---were killed. Two wives of Madad Khan and three of their children were also killed.
2. While the Pakistani authorities did not confirm the identities of those killed, local tribals suspected that one of those killed must have been Abu Laith al-Libi, a Libyan national and an important Al Qaeda leader, whose martyrdom, meaning death while waging jihad, was announced by a web site (ekhlas.org) associated with Al Qaeda, on January 31,2008. His so-called martyrdom has since been confirmed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 to bin Laden, in an audio message disseminated on February 27, 2008.
3.The nine-minute, 59-second message titled "An Elegy to the Martyred Commander Abu Laith al-Libi," was issued by As-Sahab, the group's PSYWAR branch.It described al-Libi as a "knight" of Al Qaeda's holy war. He was "a mountain of Jihad and a lion." It added: "You Americans and you the agents of the Americans: (al-Libi and others) are the pioneers of the march and the good omen of a new dawn.Every time a martyr falls, another martyr grabs the banner from him, and every time a chief goes down in blood, another chief completes the march after him."
4. Immediately after the missile strike, there was speculation in the area targeted by the US that Adam Gadhan, the American convert to Islam, who headed As-Sahab, was also with Abu Laith at the time of the attack and was also killed, but this has not been confirmed so far.
5.Three mysteries continue to surround this incident giving rise to interesting speculation in the global community of terrorism analysts. First, what happened to Madad Khan, the owner of the house attacked? Many members of his family were reportedly killed, but there is so far no confimed information regarding his fate. There has been speculation in the tribal belt of Pakistan that he must have been the man who tipped off the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about the expected presence of Abu Laith in his house and that is how he escaped the missile attack of which he must have been aware.
6. The second mystery surrounds the fate of Adam Gadahn.According to Pakistani sources, he was also expected in the house along with Abu Laith. Did he come? If so, was he among those killed? If not, did he not keep his appointment with Abu Laith? If he had absented himself, did he also play a role in facilitating the missile strike? Did he know in advance about the impending strike and thus escape? Was he a mole of the CIA in Al Qaeda? Did he know that Madad Khan was also in touch with the CIA? Or were the two working independently of each other?
7. According to some sources in the tribal areas, Gadahn was not a mole of the CIA. He was present in the house of Madad Khan along with Abu Laith, but survived the missile attack with minor injuries. He was picked up by the Americans and flown to Morocco, where he is being interrogated by the US intelligence. It is also claimed by these sources that the US has not admitted this lest US legal rights experts raise the matter in US courts.
8. The third mystery surrounds the absence of Gadahn's translations in American English from the propaganda pieces produced by As-Sahab since the missile attack. He used to translate the messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and provide English sub-titles. Since the missile attack, either the English sub-titles are missing or when they are given they are of a different quality----either Pakistani or Arab English and not American English.
9.Is Gadahn alive or dead? If alive, where is he? If dead, why Al Qaeda has not admitted his death as it admitted the death of Abu Laith? Why the CIA, whose Director Lt.Gen.Michael Hyden claimed credit for the death of Abu Laith in a recent interview with the "Washington Post" remained silent on Gadahn?
10. Well-informed police sources in the Pashtun belt assert that both Al Qaeda and the CIA know what happened to Gadahn, but neither of them wants to say anything on the subject. There is speculation galore.
11. Only four people must be knowing the truth---Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Lt.Gen.Michael Hayden and Gadhan himself, if still alive.Will one of them clear the mystery?
(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 )
B.RAMAN
A missile suspected to have been fired by an unmanned US aircraft early on the morning of January 29, 2008, had destroyed a house, owned by Madad Khan, a local leader of the Taliban at a village called Khushali Torikhel, 12 kilometres south of Mir Ali town, in North Waziristan, where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Group, another Uzbek jihadi organisation, are based. While Madad Khan reportedly survived the attack, his 10 guests----all believed to be Uzbeks and Arabs---were killed. Two wives of Madad Khan and three of their children were also killed.
2. While the Pakistani authorities did not confirm the identities of those killed, local tribals suspected that one of those killed must have been Abu Laith al-Libi, a Libyan national and an important Al Qaeda leader, whose martyrdom, meaning death while waging jihad, was announced by a web site (ekhlas.org) associated with Al Qaeda, on January 31,2008. His so-called martyrdom has since been confirmed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No.2 to bin Laden, in an audio message disseminated on February 27, 2008.
3.The nine-minute, 59-second message titled "An Elegy to the Martyred Commander Abu Laith al-Libi," was issued by As-Sahab, the group's PSYWAR branch.It described al-Libi as a "knight" of Al Qaeda's holy war. He was "a mountain of Jihad and a lion." It added: "You Americans and you the agents of the Americans: (al-Libi and others) are the pioneers of the march and the good omen of a new dawn.Every time a martyr falls, another martyr grabs the banner from him, and every time a chief goes down in blood, another chief completes the march after him."
4. Immediately after the missile strike, there was speculation in the area targeted by the US that Adam Gadhan, the American convert to Islam, who headed As-Sahab, was also with Abu Laith at the time of the attack and was also killed, but this has not been confirmed so far.
5.Three mysteries continue to surround this incident giving rise to interesting speculation in the global community of terrorism analysts. First, what happened to Madad Khan, the owner of the house attacked? Many members of his family were reportedly killed, but there is so far no confimed information regarding his fate. There has been speculation in the tribal belt of Pakistan that he must have been the man who tipped off the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about the expected presence of Abu Laith in his house and that is how he escaped the missile attack of which he must have been aware.
6. The second mystery surrounds the fate of Adam Gadahn.According to Pakistani sources, he was also expected in the house along with Abu Laith. Did he come? If so, was he among those killed? If not, did he not keep his appointment with Abu Laith? If he had absented himself, did he also play a role in facilitating the missile strike? Did he know in advance about the impending strike and thus escape? Was he a mole of the CIA in Al Qaeda? Did he know that Madad Khan was also in touch with the CIA? Or were the two working independently of each other?
7. According to some sources in the tribal areas, Gadahn was not a mole of the CIA. He was present in the house of Madad Khan along with Abu Laith, but survived the missile attack with minor injuries. He was picked up by the Americans and flown to Morocco, where he is being interrogated by the US intelligence. It is also claimed by these sources that the US has not admitted this lest US legal rights experts raise the matter in US courts.
8. The third mystery surrounds the absence of Gadahn's translations in American English from the propaganda pieces produced by As-Sahab since the missile attack. He used to translate the messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and provide English sub-titles. Since the missile attack, either the English sub-titles are missing or when they are given they are of a different quality----either Pakistani or Arab English and not American English.
9.Is Gadahn alive or dead? If alive, where is he? If dead, why Al Qaeda has not admitted his death as it admitted the death of Abu Laith? Why the CIA, whose Director Lt.Gen.Michael Hyden claimed credit for the death of Abu Laith in a recent interview with the "Washington Post" remained silent on Gadahn?
10. Well-informed police sources in the Pashtun belt assert that both Al Qaeda and the CIA know what happened to Gadahn, but neither of them wants to say anything on the subject. There is speculation galore.
11. Only four people must be knowing the truth---Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, Lt.Gen.Michael Hayden and Gadhan himself, if still alive.Will one of them clear the mystery?
(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 )
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