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| India-Pakistan |
| A jihad on the edge of an abyss |
| 2008-04-01 |
| When he found himself staring at the barrel of his bodyguard’s assault rifle, Nasir Ahmad Bhat realised the time had come to give up the fight. Since late last year, the Hizbul-Mujahideen’s supreme commander in Jammu and Kashmir has been living in a safehouse outside Srinagar, under the secret protection of the State government. On the eve of the next Assembly elections, the Jammu and Kashmir government hopes to use Bhat — better known as ‘Ghazi Misbahuddin,’ the alias traditionally used by the Hizb’s senior-most field commander — to demonstrate its willingness to talk to terrorists who decide to abjure violence. The Hizb supreme commander, Mohammad Yusuf Shah, has refused to meet this condition but others in the organisation seem increasingly willing to take whatever deals are on offer. Much of the Hizb’s Pakistan-based leadership feels the same way about the elections as a chicken must do about the butcher’s blade as it caresses its neck. For the first time since 1995, the Hizb and other Islamist terror groups won’t be players in influencing the outcome of the electoral process. In 1996, when Jammu and Kashmir took its first steps towards the restoration of democracy, 61 political workers were killed in terror strikes. Another 57 died in 1997. In 2001, the year before the fateful elections that brought the Congress-People’s Democratic Party alliance to power, 76 political workers were killed. One hundred party workers were butchered in 2002. Politicians were forced to cut deals with Islamist terror groups, making clear just where the real power lay. Indeed, the killing of National Conference workers was a major reason for the party’s defeat in 2002, and led it to soften its stand on terrorism thereafter. Earlier this year, the United Jihad Council announced that it would not use force to obstruct the democratic process. Few politicians take that promise on face value. Like past elections, the path to democracy will more likely than not be punctuated by assassinations and bombings. But unlike in 2002, terrorist groups just do not have the muscle to impose their will on the democratic process. Dar isn’t the only senior Hizb commander to have given up the fight in recent months. Unnoticed, over a dozen mid-ranking commanders at its camps in Pakistan have returned to India since January. Last year, for example, operative Bilal Ahmed Mir volunteered to leave Muzaffarabad and take command of a cell in Baramulla. Mir’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate handlers gave him a legitimate Pakistani passport, AH0992231, stamped with a Nepal visa issued in Islamabad. On March 3, Mir flew from Karachi to Kathmandu on Pakistan International Airways flight 268 — and promptly handed himself over to Indian intelligence agents. Most experts believe the flow home from Hizb camps would have been even higher if India had not come down hard on cross-Line of Control surrenders, after intelligence reports warned that some rehabilitated terrorists had reactivated their connections with jihadist groups. All the major political parties in Jammu and Kashmir, though, are lobbying for a proper and secure rehabilitation policy to be put in place — and one most likely will be, once a new government takes office. Even as things stand, the Hizb is desperately short on both leadership and cadre. Kulgam-born Riyaz Ahmad Bhat was scheduled to replace Nasir Ahmed Dar but he flatly refused to run the risk. His parents, family sources said, have travelled to Pakistan to secure their son’s marriage — and thus ensure that he stays on at a Hizb ul-Mujahideen camp rather than risking death at home. Muzaffar Ahmed Dar, a long-standing Hizb operative from Magam with an undistinguished record of service in the organisation, was obliged to take charge in his stead. He has little, however, to take charge of. Across the north Kashmir zone, the Hizb has just three commanders of significance: Mohammad Shafi Shah, a Papchan-Bandipora resident who uses the code-name ‘Dawood’; his old friend from the adjoining village of Chuntimulla, Ali Mohammad Lone; and Tanvir Ahmad from Baramulla’s Bagh-e-Islam neighbourhood. Together, the three are believed to have less than three dozen men under their command. In its one-time south Kashmir strongholds, the decimation of the Hizb has been even more marked. Only two commanders of consequence have survived the thoroughgoing destruction of the organisation by the Jammu and Kashmir police — Pervez Ahmad Dar, who uses the code-name ‘Pervez Musharraf,’ and Panzgam resident Raees Dar, known to his associates as ‘Kachroo’ or “brown hair.” Hunted by the police, both men have abandoned their traditional areas of operation — and neither is expected to survive long. Since the arrest of Tajamul Islam, the Karachi-bred son of one of Hizb chief Mohammad Yusuf Shah’s most trusted aides, the central division has had no leadership at all. Last month, in a desperate attempt to demonstrate its continuing presence, the Hizb carried out a bombing in Srinagar’s Jehangir Chowk. Cadre and resources for the operation had to be mobilised by Tanvir Ahmed’s north Kashmir cell — leading to a series of errors which led to its rapid unravelling by investigators. Indeed, the ease with which attempted Hizb terror operations have been stopped suggests a high degree of penetration by the police and the Intelligence Bureau — another sign of the demoralisation in its ranks. At least one ranking commander, south Kashmir-based Javed ‘Seepan’ Sheikh, is rumoured to be a police asset. This has led to mistrust and factionalism within the Hizb’s already fractured ranks. Does this mean the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir is finally dead? Not just yet: Pakistan’s covert services, and the Islamist terror groups they helped create, aren’t quite ready to give up the fight. Addressing a March 1 Lashkar-e-Taiba gathering in Muzaffarabad by telephone, its Lahore-based amir Hafiz Mohammad Saeed announced that restrictions placed on his operations in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir would soon be lifted. While the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir had suffered because of the fallout of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, he said, things were changing. Saeed also announced that the Lashkar would soon be setting up a new magazine devoted to the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. On ground, there are signs that the Lashkar war-machine is stirring. Last month, it began installing a new state-of-the-art wireless communications equipment at its control station in Kel, just across the LoC from the critical infiltration routes across the Lolab mountains. A training centre just outside of Balakote, in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir’s Muzaffarabad district, has been revived under the command of one of the Lashkar’s top irregular warfare instructors, Wagah-resident Sagir Ahmed. And, since January, a former Pakistan army officer known to his subordinates as ‘Captain Salim’ has been training cadre for combat in Jammu and Kashmir at a new camp in Lala Moosa near Gujranwala. Perhaps most important of all, the ISI has resumed direct funding of the Hizb, which was shut off under international pressure in 2006. Married cadre at the Hizb’s camps in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir are now receiving Rs.10,000 a month, up from Rs.5,200; single men Rs.8,000 against the Rs.4,200 on offer before the ISI funding was cut off. Jihadist organisations in Jammu and Kashmir have demonstrated that they can put up fight in the one area where they are still present in some strength — the dense forests above Baramulla, where the major infiltration routes across the LoC converge. Bucking the dramatic State-wide fall in violence, Baramulla saw an escalation last year with 22 Indian soldiers and policemen giving their lives in combat against 16 in 2006, while 103 terrorists were killed, up from 95. Should high levels of infiltration take place this spring and summer, jihadist groups could well try to replicate this model elsewhere. Whether that outcome is realised will depend on two factors: the competence of India’s pre-election counter-terrorism operations and the extent to which Pakistan is willing to go to revive the dying jihad. It is the second of these that could prove most important. While politicians such as Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan People’s Party chief, have laid out a brave agenda for peacemaking with India, the power to shape the strategic policy lies not with them but with the Pakistan army. General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani represents the Pakistan army’s institutional consensus — a consensus that includes among its pillars the belief that sub-conventional warfare is an integral component of national security. In recent weeks, the restraints imposed on anti-India jihadist groups such as the Lashkar and the Jaish-e-Mohammad have loosened, in an evident effort to restore the Pakistan army’s ties to the Islamists who have so spectacularly turned on it in recent months. With its forces heavily committed to the West, though, it is unclear just how far Pakistan’s military establishment can risk precipitating a potentially war-inducing crisis with India. What is clear, though, is this: the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir is hanging above the abyss by its fingernails. Unless someone throws it a rope, the chances of its surviving the 2008 elections are low. |
| Posted by:john frum |