INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.564
B.RAMAN
This is only a tentative assessment on the daring commando-style attack on the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Pakistan Army at Rawalpindi for which responsibility has been claimed on behalf of a so-called Amjad Farooqi detachmentof the Pakistani Taliban known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Sixteen hours after the attack started around mid-day on October 10,2009, the Pakistani Army,
including its Special Services Group (SSG), are still engaged in an attempt to flush out at least two to four terrorists, who managed to gain entry into the premises and take at least 20 to 30 inmates of the premises as hostages to negotiate their demands. An Army spokesman has claimed that 22 of these hostages have since been got released and that the operation is coming to a successful conclusion, but this is not
confirmed by independent sources so far.
2.It is understood that the terrorists have put forward a number of demands such as the release of all those captured by the Army during the operations in the Swat Valley and the rest of the Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the calling-off of the reported plans to start a military offensive in South Waziristan,immediate stoppage of aerial strikes by the Pakistani Army in the tribal areas and of the Drone strikes by the US intelligence, the termination of all counter-terrorism co-operation with the US and the trial of Pervez Musharraf on a charge of treason. The terrorists have reportedly been projecting their successful attack as in reprisal for the death of Baitullah Mehsud, the then Amir of the TTP, in a US drone attack in South Waziristan on August 5,2009.
3.The facts are still sketchy and confusing. From the available facts, one could attempt the following reconstruction. A group of at least four terrorists, wearing the uniform of SSG commandoes, drove up to the Security Gate No.1 of the GHQ premises. There was an exchange of fire lasting about 45 minutes between them and the security picket at Gate No.1. During the exchange, a Brigadier, who was in charge of the physical security of the premises, a Lt.Col assisting him and four other military personnel and all the four terrorists who came by the vehicle
were killed.
4. As the exchange of firing was going on in Gate No.1, the members of the security picket guarding Gate No.2 rushed to Gate No. 1 to help the security picket there. Taking advantage of the unmanned Gate No.2, two to four other terrorists----also wearing the SSG uniform---- managed to enter the premises, rush to the Army library and take hostage a number of persons who were there. It is not known whether they have been kept by the terrorists in the library itself or whether they have been taken to some other building. It is also not known whether the terrorists have captured any other person in the GHQ premises.Also not clear is whether this second group came by the same vehicle or reached the GHQ independently.
5. The identities of the hostages have not been revealed by the Army. The commando-style attack on the GHQ---like the commando-style terrorist attack in Mumbai in November last year--- has the imprint of the operational methods of the SSG. The terrorists in the GHQ have had the benefit of the kind of training and expertise, which is available in the SSG. The reported death of Ilyas Kashmiri of the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in a recent Drone strike brought out in Pakistani media accounts the fact that he was a trained officer of the SSG, who had gravitated to the world of jihadi terrorism and joined the HUJI.
6. There are possibly other SSG officers---serving and retired---- who have similarly gravitated to the world of terrorism. As a result of this,knowledge of commando-style operations seems to be widespread in Pakistan's jihadi world. Till now, the international focus has been on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as the sponsor and trainer of jihadi groups. Indications of a similar role being played by at least some elements in or of the the SSG---- possibly in tandem with the ISI --- are coming to the fore now. ( 11-10-09)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: sevenbtyone2@gmail.com )
Saturday, October 10, 2009
WHO WAS AMJAD FAROOQI IN WHOSE NAME PAK GHQ HAS BEEN RAIDED?
INTERNATIONaL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.563
B.RAMAN
A news agency report says as follows: "The Tehreek-e-Taliban has claimed responsibility for the brazen attack on the Pakistan Army's Headquarters in Rawalpindi on Saturday, which left four of its militants and eight soldiers dead. The outfit has again demanded a halt in the ongoing military campaign in the NWFP. The Amjad Farooqi group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella grouping claimed that it was behind the audacious attack and demanded that former President Pervez Musharraf be put on trial. The group took the responsibility in a telephone call made to Geo News. They also asked for closure of all Western NGOs and expulsion of US private security firm Blackwater."
2. Who was Amjad Farooqi? Reproduced below is an article dated September 29,2004, under the title "AMJAD FAROOQI: THE UNTOLD STORY" written by me which is available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers12%5Cpaper1129.html .
( 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 )
AMJAD FAROOQI: THE UNTOLD STORY
The Pakistani security agencies claimed to have killed on September 26, 2004, Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder, alias Doctor who, according to them, was the mastermind behind the two abortive attempts to kill Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December last year. According to them, he was killed during an encounter with the para-military forces who had surrounded a rented house in Nawabshah in Sindh, where he along with some others had been living for the last two months.
2. On August 20, 2004, the Pakistani authorities had announced cash rewards amounting to Rs.20 million each (US $ 344800) to anyone who would give information leading to the capture of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a Pakistani national, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, said to be belonging to Al Qaeda.Amjad Hussain Farooqi was accused of acting at the instance of the Libyan in his attempts to kill Musharraf.
3. Talking to the media at The Hague on September 27,2004, Musharraf was reported to have stated as follows:" We eliminated one of the very major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only involved on attacks on me, but also on attacks elsewhere in the country. So a very big terrorist has been eliminated."
4.All accounts from Nawabshah indicate that if the Pakistani authorities had wanted they could have caught him alive and questioned him about the role of Pakistani civilian and military officials in the various terrorist incidents of the last three years, including the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, the attempts to kill Musharraf himself and Shaukat Aziz, the Prime Minister, and the attacks directed against American and French targets. But, they did not want him alive.
5.In a report under the heading "Real conspirators in Musharraf case may never be exposed", Kamran Khan, the Pakistani investigative journalist, stated as follows in the "News" of September 28, 2004: "Senior lawyers say that the killing of Amjad Farooqi, the main accused in President Musharraf and Daniel Pearl cases, may also influence the final outcome of the two most important cases. A nationwide military
investigation launched after two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf last year had unveiled that some civilian and low level military individuals were the field operatives while Amjad Farooqi played an anchor in the abortive bids on Gen Musharraf’s life.Because of the most sensitive nature of the probe the principal investigative work was carried out under the supervision of the Commander Corps 10, who received inputs from all federal and provincial law enforcement agencies in the most extensive investigation of a crime case in Pakistan. "It was very important to catch Amjad Farooqi alive," said a senior law-enforcement official. "Farooqi was the key link between the foot soldiers and those who ordered the murder." "Amjad Farooqi is now dead with the most important secret and we still don’t know for sure the real identity of the Pakistani or al-Qaeda or any other foreign elements who had launched Farooqi into action to remove General
Musharraf from the scene," said a second senior law-enforcement official. Some circumstantial evidence collected during the investigation of President Musharraf case had cited some connection between Abu Feraj, an al-Qaeda operative of Libyan origin, and Amjad Farooqi,hence the suspicion that al-Qaeda could be behind the murder attempts through Amjad Farooqi.The military investigators had found solid
evidence to connect Amjad Farooqi with the suicide bombers involved in December 25 attacks on President Musharraf. Farooqi’s connections were also established with the group of low level Pakistan Air Force technicians who had planted bombs under Lai Bridge for the December 11 bid on the President’s life. The military investigators were also baffled how come the Air Intelligence, the intelligence wing
of the PAF, detected no signs that about two dozen PAF men posted at the Chaklala airbase had been attending meetings with religious extremists and in the first week of December were making active preparations at the heart of the PAF base to bomb the presidential motorcade. Pakistani officials, worried that Farooqi’s killing would prevent them from getting the full knowledge about Farooqi’s connections and his actions, said that if captured alive Farooqi could have provided crucial information on the plot to kidnap and murder the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.Pakistani officials believed that, like in the murder attempts against the President, Farooqi was an anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for the world was the work of Amjad Farooqi- Khalid Sheikh Muhammad combine," said a senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified.
6. The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligence-police establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were his links with the Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organisation he belonged? Read the following.
7.In April,1992, the coalition of Afghan Mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek Commander, against Najibullah, the then President of Afghanistan, managed to invade and capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from power, was taken by the United Nations into its protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The efforts of the UN to persuade the Mujahideen to allow Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living, failed.
8. The Mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible by the assistance of a large number of jihadis from the Pakistani madrasas, who had been trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen. The Pakistani contingents, which participated in the invasion of Kabul, belonged to the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Amjad Farooqi, then an 18-year-old youth, entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
9. In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari,the husband of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, flew into Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmenistan authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from there ship it to Karachi.
10.Zardari did not agree to it. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. The first two cotton convoys from Turkmenistan were looted by Mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
11. Zardari thereupon sent Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's Interior Minister, and Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan to provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mulla Mohammad Omar, who subsequently became the Amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from the madrasas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton convoys.
Thus, was the Taliban born.
12.Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Amjad Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to help Mulla Omar in organising this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar himself travelled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Amjad Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
13. A few months later, Mulla Omar deputed Amjad Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so without difficulty,to the pleasant surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton convoy protection force, the Taliban became the ruler of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Amjad Farooqi and his associates, it started gradually extending its administrative control to other areas.
14. In the beginning of 1995, Amjad Farooqi left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent him along with some others into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known till today. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
15. In October,1995, Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of Army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the Army were arrested. They were found to have been
plotting in tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and the Qari were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates were court-martialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the Qari was released without any action being taken against him.
16.Before 1990, there were two jihadi organisations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form the HUA, with Maulana Khalil as the Amir and Qari Akhtar as the Deputy Amir. Amjad Farooqi used to work closely with the Qari.
17. In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a Brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India.The Government of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister, Abbasi organised a raid on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian Army with heavy casualties.Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had been nursing an anger against the Pakistan Army's senior leadership and hobnobbing with the Qari. A few months after capturing power on October 12,1999, Musharraf had Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US
organisation called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem with the HUJI.
18. In September,1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi students from the Pakistani madrasas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Amjad Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After capturing Kabul,Amjad Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him and hung him from a lamp-post.
19. When the Taliban, with the help of the madrasa students from Pakistan, captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, which was in power in Kabul till September,1996,to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of the Benazir Bhutto Government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden shifted to Kandahar by Amjad Farooqi and his men.
20.In October,1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed their original existence under their previous names. Qari Saifullah Akhtar took over as the Amir of the HUJI and made Amjad Farooqi his deputy.
21. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladesh branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI ( B ). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Amjad Farooqi used to represent the Qari at the meetings of the shoora (consultative council )of the IIF.
22. In December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to be belonging to the HUM, hijacked an aircraft of the Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The Government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the hijacking.
23. Amongst the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by name Mansur Hasnain. Sections of the Pakistani media reported that this hijacker was none other than Amjad Farooqi. After their release from detention by the Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers formed a new organisation called the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrasa, Karachi, who used to be looked upon as the mentor of bin Laden, Mulla Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
24. Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was made in charge of an office run by Al Qaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden to procure medicines and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to
meet bin Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar,
25. When the USA launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October,2001, the Pakistani components of the IIF called upon their members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the US. Over 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Amjad Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the survivors, including Amjad Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori madrasa of Karachi where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the madrasa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with Ramzi Binalshibh.
26. On January 12,2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist strike on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi in December,2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under house-arrest.The whole thing was a farce as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in
the Army and did not take any action against Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Amjad Farooqi.
27. In January,2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the USA's "Wall Street Journal" in Mumbai (Bombay) in India, along with his wife Marianne went to Karachi to enquire into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house of an American free-lance journalist of sub-continental origin, who had worked for some time as a free-lancer for the WSJ, where she had come to know Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing on the sub-continent.
28. Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the USA in order to get introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might be knowing about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought were James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin, who often used to write articles for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
29. Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist organisation based in the USA and the Caribbean with a large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM
camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
30. Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in E-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late 1980s and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the
Karachi Police, Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
31.On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of Katrachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out of it. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then went away from there. Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
32. Subsequently, E-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife
and young child in order to force him to surrender. On February 5, 2002,he urrendered to Brig (retd) Ejaz Shah, the Home Secretary of Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its custody till February 12,2002, and then handed him over to the Karachi Police for interrogation. The public announcement about his arrest claimed he was arrested on February 12 and did not refer to the fact that he was in the ISI's custody since February 5, 2002.
33.Omar Sheikh told the Police that the kidnappers operated in three groups. Omar himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the confidence of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting. They kidnapped him and handed him over to Amjad Hussain Farooqui for keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh , with the help of Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the Special Branch of the Sindh Police, and his cousins Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim arranged for taking the photograph of Pearl in custody, having it scanned and sending the E-Mail with his photograph to the media and others making their demands. According to the Police, Saquib and Nasim belonged to the JEM, thereby indicating the possibility that the kidnapping might have been jointly planned and carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
34. A few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing of Pearl, along with pictures showing his throat being slit. However, his dead body was not recovered. On May 16, 2002, the Karachi Police claimed to have recovered the remains of an unidentified dead body cut into 10 pieces, which were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot of land in the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of Karachi. They further claimed that the remains were recovered following a tip-off from a human source and that, according to the source, the remains were of Pearl. The local media also reported that there was an improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to have been held in captivity before his murder and that the plot belonged to Al Rashid Trust of Karachi. DNA tests and other forensic examination determined that the remains were of Pearl.
35.The Al-Rashid Trust, whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 because of its suspected links with Al Qaeda, is also closely linked with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the offices of the two used to be located in the same buildings in different cities of Pakistan. The two also had common cadres to undertake fund-raising activities for both
the organizations.
36.Initially, it was not clear as to who gave the information to the Karachi Police about the burial of these remains in a plot of land belonging to the Al Rashid Trust----a human source as claimed by the Police or by some new suspects who had been picked up by the Police, but whose arrest had not been shown in Police records, lest the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted to interrogate them or
sought their extradition to the US?
37.The answer came in a report carried by the "News" (May 23, 2002), the prestigious daily of Pakistan, which revealed that the information
about the remains was given to the Karachi Police by one Fazal Karim -- a resident of Rahim Yar Khan and a father of five-- who was in Police custody, but had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper,Fazal Karim had identified Lashkar-e- Jhangvi's Naeem Bukhari as the ring leader of the group that also included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and mother Baloch) who took part in Pearl's
kidnapping, his murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a dozen cases of anti-Shia killings. Fazal Karim reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning Pearl's kidnapping.
37.According to Karachi Police sources, Amjad Farooqi was also taken into custody on the basis of the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI ordered them to release him and let him go. Fazal Karim reportedly named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the beheading of Pearl as KSM, but the military regime did not admit this. On the basis of his information, the Police also rounded up some others involved in the
kidnapping and murder.
38.Intriguingly, on May 14, 2002, two days before the recovery of the remains of the dead body of Pearl by the Karachi Police, the Punjab Police claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding leader of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which Amjad Farooqi had started his career as a terrorist, and three of his associates were killed in an encounter in a Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a Shia leader. Sections of the Pakistani media expressed doubts over the Police version and alleged that Riaz Basra was in the informal custody of the ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January, 2002, without it taking any action against him and that the Police, for reasons not clear, had shown him as having been killed in an encounter.
39. During the trial of Omar Sheikh and his associates, the defence lawyers drew the attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports about the arrest of Fazal Karim and others and urged that the court should order a re-investigation of the case in order to determine their responsibility for the offence. The prosecution described the media reports as baseless and opposed any re-investigation. The court
rejected the defence plea.
40. The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to death and others to various terms of imprisonment. The appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh has not been disposed of by the court so far under some pretext or the other. In the meanwhile, KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi by the Pakistani authorities in March, 2003,and handed over to the FBI, which had him flown out of the country. In an article
written in the "Salon", an online journal, in October,2003,the free-lance journalist in whose Karachi house Pearl and his wife had stayed said that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence that KSM had admitted having personally killed Pearl. The defence lawyers of Omar Sheikh again raised the question of a re-investigation, but their plea was again opposed by the prosecution and rejected by the court.
41. In December, 2003, there were two unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf in Rawalpindi with explosives. In the second incident,suicide bombers were involved. There were strong indications of the involvement of insiders from the Pakistani Army and Police in both the incidents. Till June,2004, Musharraf blamed the JEM for the attempts just as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for the kidnapping and murder
of Pearl. Subsequent investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not the JEM, which was involved. Of all the pro-bin Laden jihadi organisations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the largest following in the Army. The investigation into Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the Air Force.
42. By the end of January,2004, the investigators had started gathering evidence of the involvement of junior officials of the Army and the Air Force belonging to the HUJI and the Hizbut Tahreer in the two assassination attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated by Amjad Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan.However, Musharraf did not openly admit this.
43. On June 10, 2004, the Corps Commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Karachi. With the help of a mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at the scene, the Karachi Police established that the attempt was jointly organised by the HUJI and a new organisation called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had been trained by the Uzbecks and Chechens in the South Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The Police managed to identify and round up the Jundullah members involved in the incident.
44. During their interrogation, they reportedly admitted their involvement and said that they were acting under the leadership of Amjad Farooqi. The Police had kept the arrest and interrogation of the Jundullah members a secret lest Amjad Farooqi be alerted before they got him. But, Sheikh Rashid, the Information Minister, prematurely announced it to the media, thereby alerting Amjad Farooqi before the Police could arrest him. He managed to escape from his Karachi hide-out and fled to Nawabshah.
45. For the first time, Musharraf admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June, 2004, the involvement of junior officers of the Army and the Air Force in the plot against him and the role of Amjad Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
46. A man-hunt for Farooqi and the Libyan was launched by the Police. Before they could get Farooqi alive, someone in the military-intelligence establishment would seem to have ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of the Police. Who is that somebody?
47.Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Amir of the HUJI, was picked up by the Dubai authorities on August 6, 2004, and handed over to the Pakistani authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the next day. The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
48.One of the most mysterious aspects of the activities of the jihadi organisations in Pakistan is why Musharraf has always been reluctant to or even afraid of taking action against the HUJI. He has avoided banning it even after evidence of its penetration into the Army and the Air Force and its involvement in the plots against him.
B.RAMAN
A news agency report says as follows: "The Tehreek-e-Taliban has claimed responsibility for the brazen attack on the Pakistan Army's Headquarters in Rawalpindi on Saturday, which left four of its militants and eight soldiers dead. The outfit has again demanded a halt in the ongoing military campaign in the NWFP. The Amjad Farooqi group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) umbrella grouping claimed that it was behind the audacious attack and demanded that former President Pervez Musharraf be put on trial. The group took the responsibility in a telephone call made to Geo News. They also asked for closure of all Western NGOs and expulsion of US private security firm Blackwater."
2. Who was Amjad Farooqi? Reproduced below is an article dated September 29,2004, under the title "AMJAD FAROOQI: THE UNTOLD STORY" written by me which is available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/%5Cpapers12%5Cpaper1129.html .
( 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 )
AMJAD FAROOQI: THE UNTOLD STORY
The Pakistani security agencies claimed to have killed on September 26, 2004, Amjad Hussain Farooqi alias Mansur Hasnain alias Imtiaz Siddiqui alias Hyder, alias Doctor who, according to them, was the mastermind behind the two abortive attempts to kill Gen.Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi in December last year. According to them, he was killed during an encounter with the para-military forces who had surrounded a rented house in Nawabshah in Sindh, where he along with some others had been living for the last two months.
2. On August 20, 2004, the Pakistani authorities had announced cash rewards amounting to Rs.20 million each (US $ 344800) to anyone who would give information leading to the capture of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a Pakistani national, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, said to be belonging to Al Qaeda.Amjad Hussain Farooqi was accused of acting at the instance of the Libyan in his attempts to kill Musharraf.
3. Talking to the media at The Hague on September 27,2004, Musharraf was reported to have stated as follows:" We eliminated one of the very major sources of terrorist attacks. He was not only involved on attacks on me, but also on attacks elsewhere in the country. So a very big terrorist has been eliminated."
4.All accounts from Nawabshah indicate that if the Pakistani authorities had wanted they could have caught him alive and questioned him about the role of Pakistani civilian and military officials in the various terrorist incidents of the last three years, including the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, the attempts to kill Musharraf himself and Shaukat Aziz, the Prime Minister, and the attacks directed against American and French targets. But, they did not want him alive.
5.In a report under the heading "Real conspirators in Musharraf case may never be exposed", Kamran Khan, the Pakistani investigative journalist, stated as follows in the "News" of September 28, 2004: "Senior lawyers say that the killing of Amjad Farooqi, the main accused in President Musharraf and Daniel Pearl cases, may also influence the final outcome of the two most important cases. A nationwide military
investigation launched after two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf last year had unveiled that some civilian and low level military individuals were the field operatives while Amjad Farooqi played an anchor in the abortive bids on Gen Musharraf’s life.Because of the most sensitive nature of the probe the principal investigative work was carried out under the supervision of the Commander Corps 10, who received inputs from all federal and provincial law enforcement agencies in the most extensive investigation of a crime case in Pakistan. "It was very important to catch Amjad Farooqi alive," said a senior law-enforcement official. "Farooqi was the key link between the foot soldiers and those who ordered the murder." "Amjad Farooqi is now dead with the most important secret and we still don’t know for sure the real identity of the Pakistani or al-Qaeda or any other foreign elements who had launched Farooqi into action to remove General
Musharraf from the scene," said a second senior law-enforcement official. Some circumstantial evidence collected during the investigation of President Musharraf case had cited some connection between Abu Feraj, an al-Qaeda operative of Libyan origin, and Amjad Farooqi,hence the suspicion that al-Qaeda could be behind the murder attempts through Amjad Farooqi.The military investigators had found solid
evidence to connect Amjad Farooqi with the suicide bombers involved in December 25 attacks on President Musharraf. Farooqi’s connections were also established with the group of low level Pakistan Air Force technicians who had planted bombs under Lai Bridge for the December 11 bid on the President’s life. The military investigators were also baffled how come the Air Intelligence, the intelligence wing
of the PAF, detected no signs that about two dozen PAF men posted at the Chaklala airbase had been attending meetings with religious extremists and in the first week of December were making active preparations at the heart of the PAF base to bomb the presidential motorcade. Pakistani officials, worried that Farooqi’s killing would prevent them from getting the full knowledge about Farooqi’s connections and his actions, said that if captured alive Farooqi could have provided crucial information on the plot to kidnap and murder the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.Pakistani officials believed that, like in the murder attempts against the President, Farooqi was an anchor in the Pearl case. "The gruesome murder of Pearl and its video filming for the world was the work of Amjad Farooqi- Khalid Sheikh Muhammad combine," said a senior intelligence official who did not want to be identified.
6. The truth will now never be known. Somebody in the Pakistani military-intelligence-police establishment did not want the truth to be known. Why? Who was Farooqi? What were his links with the Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and others in Pakistan? To which organisation he belonged? Read the following.
7.In April,1992, the coalition of Afghan Mujahideen groups, taking advantage of the revolt of Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek Commander, against Najibullah, the then President of Afghanistan, managed to invade and capture Kabul. Najibullah, who was overthrown from power, was taken by the United Nations into its protective custody and kept in its office in Kabul. The efforts of the UN to persuade the Mujahideen to allow Najibullah to go to India, where his family was living, failed.
8. The Mujahideen's success in capturing power was made possible by the assistance of a large number of jihadis from the Pakistani madrasas, who had been trained and armed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan to help the Mujahideen. The Pakistani contingents, which participated in the invasion of Kabul, belonged to the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA), as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) was then known, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET). Amjad Farooqi, then an 18-year-old youth, entered Kabul as a member of the contingent of the SSP.
9. In 1994, there was a serious failure of the Pakistani cotton crop, which threatened to bring its textile industry to a standstill. Asif Zardari,the husband of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, flew into Turkmenistan and entered into a contract for the purchase of a large quantity of cotton. The Turkmenistan authorities wanted to send the cotton to Iran and from there ship it to Karachi.
10.Zardari did not agree to it. Instead, he asked them to send the cotton by road via Afghanistan. He had the contract for the road transport of the cotton awarded to a Pakistani crony of his based in Hong Kong. The first two cotton convoys from Turkmenistan were looted by Mujahideen groups operating in the Herat area of Afghanistan.
11. Zardari thereupon sent Maj.Gen. (retd) Nasirullah Babbar, Benazir Bhutto's Interior Minister, and Pervez Musharraf to Afghanistan to provide protection to the cotton convoys. They asked Mulla Mohammad Omar, who subsequently became the Amir of the Taliban, to collect a large number of students (Talibs) from the madrasas of Pakistan and constitute them into a force for the protection of the cotton convoys.
Thus, was the Taliban born.
12.Babbar and Musharraf, who had heard of the exploits of Amjad Farooqi in Kabul in 1992, asked him to help Mulla Omar in organising this convoy protection force. He did so. Babbar himself travelled with the first convoy after this arrangement came into force and Amjad Farooqi and his boys escorted it.
13. A few months later, Mulla Omar deputed Amjad Farooqi to raid Herat and capture it with the help of his boys. He did so without difficulty,to the pleasant surprise of many, including the ISI. Thus, from a cotton convoy protection force, the Taliban became the ruler of Kandahar and Herat and other areas. Assisted by Amjad Farooqi and his associates, it started gradually extending its administrative control to other areas.
14. In the beginning of 1995, Amjad Farooqi left the SSP and joined the HUA. The HUA sent him along with some others into India's Jammu & Kashmir, where they, under the name Al Faran, kidnapped a group of Western tourists. One of the tourists was beheaded and another managed to escape. The fate of the remaining is not known till today. They are believed to have been beheaded and buried, but this has not been confirmed.
15. In October,1995, Gen.Abdul Waheed Kakkar, the then Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Benazir Bhutto, discovered a plot by a group of Army officers headed by Maj.Gen.Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi to have him and Benazir assassinated, capture power and proclaim the formation of an Islamic Caliphate in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Abbasi and his associates in the Army were arrested. They were found to have been
plotting in tandem with a group in the HUA led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Abbasi, his associates and the Qari were arrested during the investigation. While Abbasi and his associates were court-martialled and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment, the Qari was released without any action being taken against him.
16.Before 1990, there were two jihadi organisations called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI). The HUM was headed by Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil and the HUJI by Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Around 1990, the two merged to form the HUA, with Maulana Khalil as the Amir and Qari Akhtar as the Deputy Amir. Amjad Farooqi used to work closely with the Qari.
17. In the late 1980s, Abbasi as a Brigadier was posted in the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi as the head of the ISI station in India.The Government of India had him expelled. On his return to Pakistan, he was posted to the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan). In the beginning of the 1990s, without the clearance of the late Gen.Asif Nawaz Janjua, the then COAS under Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister, Abbasi organised a raid on an Indian Army post in the Siachen area and was beaten back by the Indian Army with heavy casualties.Janjua had him transferred out and censured. Since then, he had been nursing an anger against the Pakistan Army's senior leadership and hobnobbing with the Qari. A few months after capturing power on October 12,1999, Musharraf had Abbasi released from jail. He formed an anti-US
organisation called Hizbollah, which acted in tandem with the HUJI.
18. In September,1996, the Taliban captured Jalalabad and Kabul. A large number of jihadi students from the Pakistani madrasas joined the Taliban unit which invaded and captured Kabul. Amjad Farooqi joined the unit at the head of a contingent of the HUA. After capturing Kabul,Amjad Farooqi and his boys raided the UN office, where Najibullah was living, lynched him and hung him from a lamp-post.
19. When the Taliban, with the help of the madrasa students from Pakistan, captured Jalalabad, Osama bin Laden was living there. He had been permitted by the Burhanuddin Rabbani Government, which was in power in Kabul till September,1996,to enter Afghanistan and take up residence in Jalalabad. It had taken the clearance of the Benazir Bhutto Government to do so. After capturing Jalalabad, the Taliban had bin Laden shifted to Kandahar by Amjad Farooqi and his men.
20.In October,1997, after establishing the involvement of the HUA in the 1995 kidnapping, the US State Department designated it as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 US law. The HUA thereupon dissolved itself and the pre-1990 HUM and HUJI resumed their original existence under their previous names. Qari Saifullah Akhtar took over as the Amir of the HUJI and made Amjad Farooqi his deputy.
21. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden announced the formation of his International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. Among those who joined it at its inception were the HUM and a Bangladesh branch of the HUJI, identified as HUJI ( B ). The Pakistani branch of the HUJI, the LET and the SSP joined it in 1999. Amjad Farooqi used to represent the Qari at the meetings of the shoora (consultative council )of the IIF.
22. In December 1999, a group of Pakistani hijackers, said to be belonging to the HUM, hijacked an aircraft of the Indian Airlines, which had taken off from Kathmandu, and forced the pilot to fly it to Kandahar. They demanded, inter alia, the release of Omar Sheikh, a British Muslim of Pakistani origin, and Maulana Masood Azhar, a Pakistani Punjabi belonging to the HUM. The Government of India conceded their demands in order to terminate the hijacking.
23. Amongst the hijackers was a Pakistani Punjabi by name Mansur Hasnain. Sections of the Pakistani media reported that this hijacker was none other than Amjad Farooqi. After their release from detention by the Indian authorities, Maulana Azhar and Omar Sheikh went to Pakistan. The return of Azhar led to a split in the HUM. Azhar and his followers formed a new organisation called the Jaish-e-Mohammad
(JEM), which joined bin Laden's IIF. The formation of the JEM was blessed by the late Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, of the Binori madrasa, Karachi, who used to be looked upon as the mentor of bin Laden, Mulla Omar and the Pakistani jihadi leaders.
24. Omar Sheikh took up residence in Lahore and was made in charge of an office run by Al Qaeda in that city. Among other tasks, he was made responsible by bin Laden to procure medicines and other humanitarian relief for the jihadis of the IIF. Azhar and Omar Sheikh, who were working for the ISI before their arrest in India, resumed their contacts with the ISI. Omar Sheikh used to visit Kandahar periodically to
meet bin Laden. During one of those visits, he claimed to have come to know of Al Qaeda's plans for the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US and passed on the information to Lt.Gen.Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then posted as the Corps Commander in Peshawar,
25. When the USA launched its military operations in Afghanistan in October,2001, the Pakistani components of the IIF called upon their members to proceed to Afghanistan to join in the jihad against the US. Over 30,000 Pakistani volunteers were estimated to have gone into Afghanistan. The largest number of them belonged to the HUJI and were led by Amjad Farooqi. The US air strikes inflicted heavy casualties on them and the survivors, including Amjad Farooqi, fled back into Pakistan. Farooqi took up residence in the Binori madrasa of Karachi where he was sheltered by the late Mufti Shamzai. From his sanctuary in the madrasa, he established contact with Omar Sheikh, who was living in Lahore, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), who was living in Karachi along with Ramzi Binalshibh.
26. On January 12,2002, under pressure from the US in the wake of the attempted terrorist strike on the Indian Parliament at New Delhi in December,2001, Musharraf announced a ban on the LET, the JEM and the SSP and had their leaders arrested or placed under house-arrest.The whole thing was a farce as was seen subsequently. Intriguingly, he did not ban the HUM and the HUJI, which had many supporters in
the Army and did not take any action against Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Amjad Farooqi.
27. In January,2002, Daniel Pearl, the correspondent of the USA's "Wall Street Journal" in Mumbai (Bombay) in India, along with his wife Marianne went to Karachi to enquire into the Pakistani links of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. They reportedly stayed at Karachi in the house of an American free-lance journalist of sub-continental origin, who had worked for some time as a free-lancer for the WSJ, where she had come to know Pearl and Marianne. She had gone to Karachi in connection with a book she was writing on the sub-continent.
28. Before going to Karachi, Pearl had contacted many people in Pakistan and the USA in order to get introductions to knowledgeable people in Karachi and elsewhere who might be knowing about the local contacts of Reid. It was alleged that among those whose help he sought were James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Mansoor Ijaz, an American lobbyist of Pakistani origin, who often used to write articles for the US media jointly with Woolsey.
29. Pearl was particularly keen to meet Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, leader of the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), a terrorist organisation based in the USA and the Caribbean with a large following among Afro-Americans. Two of Gilani's four wives are stated to be Afro-Americans. Pearl wanted to talk to him about Richard Reid, since he had reportedly heard that Reid was a member of the JUF and had been trained in a HUM
camp in Pakistan in the 1990s.
30. Even before coming to Karachi, Pearl was reportedly in E-mail contact with one Khalid Khwaja, a retired officer of the Pakistani Air Force who had served in the ISI in the late 1980s and one Mohammad Bashir, who later turned out to be none other than Omar Sheikh. It was alleged that Mansoor Ijaz had given Pearl an introduction to Khwaja. It is not known how he came to know of Bashir. According to the
Karachi Police, Pearl was keen to meet Gilani and Omar Sheikh. Bashir promised to help him.
31.On January 23, 2002, Pearl went by a taxi driven by one Nasir to the Metropole Hotel of Katrachi. He asked the taxi to stop near the hotel and got out of it. He then went to a car parked nearby in which four persons were waiting. One of them got out, introduced himself and invited Pearl to get in. He willingly did so. The car then went away from there. Subsequently, after the arrest of Omar Sheikh, Nasir identified him as the man who got out of the parked car and invited Pearl to get in. The driver testified during the trial of Omar Sheikh that from the willing manner in which Pearl got in it was apparent that he did not suspect a trap.
32. Subsequently, E-mail messages announcing the kidnapping of Pearl with his photographs started arriving in newspaper offices in Karachi. The Pakistani authorities launched a drive for the recovery of Pearl. There was no success. They started searching for Omar Sheikh after finding out that it was he who, under an assumed name, had laid the trap for Pearl. They took into custody Omar Sheikh's wife
and young child in order to force him to surrender. On February 5, 2002,he urrendered to Brig (retd) Ejaz Shah, the Home Secretary of Punjab, who had previously worked in the ISI and was the handling officer of Omar Sheikh. The ISI kept him in its custody till February 12,2002, and then handed him over to the Karachi Police for interrogation. The public announcement about his arrest claimed he was arrested on February 12 and did not refer to the fact that he was in the ISI's custody since February 5, 2002.
33.Omar Sheikh told the Police that the kidnappers operated in three groups. Omar himself and Muhammad Hashim Qadir alias Arif, a resident of Bhawalpur, won the confidence of Pearl and made him come to the hotel for a meeting. They kidnapped him and handed him over to Amjad Hussain Farooqui for keeping him in custody. Omar Sheikh , with the help of Adil Mohammad Sheikh, a member of the staff of the Special Branch of the Sindh Police, and his cousins Suleman Saquib and Fahad Nasim arranged for taking the photograph of Pearl in custody, having it scanned and sending the E-Mail with his photograph to the media and others making their demands. According to the Police, Saquib and Nasim belonged to the JEM, thereby indicating the possibility that the kidnapping might have been jointly planned and carried out by the HUJI, the HUM and the JEM.
34. A few days later, messages arrived announcing the killing of Pearl, along with pictures showing his throat being slit. However, his dead body was not recovered. On May 16, 2002, the Karachi Police claimed to have recovered the remains of an unidentified dead body cut into 10 pieces, which were found buried in a nursery (Gulzare Hijri) on a plot of land in the outlying Gulshan-e-Maymar area of Karachi. They further claimed that the remains were recovered following a tip-off from a human source and that, according to the source, the remains were of Pearl. The local media also reported that there was an improvised shed on the plot where Pearl was suspected to have been held in captivity before his murder and that the plot belonged to Al Rashid Trust of Karachi. DNA tests and other forensic examination determined that the remains were of Pearl.
35.The Al-Rashid Trust, whose accounts were ordered to be frozen under the UN Security Council Resolution No.1373 because of its suspected links with Al Qaeda, is also closely linked with the JEM. Before Musharraf's ban on the JEM, the offices of the two used to be located in the same buildings in different cities of Pakistan. The two also had common cadres to undertake fund-raising activities for both
the organizations.
36.Initially, it was not clear as to who gave the information to the Karachi Police about the burial of these remains in a plot of land belonging to the Al Rashid Trust----a human source as claimed by the Police or by some new suspects who had been picked up by the Police, but whose arrest had not been shown in Police records, lest the USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted to interrogate them or
sought their extradition to the US?
37.The answer came in a report carried by the "News" (May 23, 2002), the prestigious daily of Pakistan, which revealed that the information
about the remains was given to the Karachi Police by one Fazal Karim -- a resident of Rahim Yar Khan and a father of five-- who was in Police custody, but had not been shown as arrested. According to the paper,Fazal Karim had identified Lashkar-e- Jhangvi's Naeem Bukhari as the ring leader of the group that also included "three Yemeni-Balochs" (father Yemeni and mother Baloch) who took part in Pearl's
kidnapping, his murder and disposal of his body parts. Naeem Bukhari was wanted by police in Punjab and Karachi in more than a dozen cases of anti-Shia killings. Fazal Karim reportedly confirmed Omar Sheikh's role in planning Pearl's kidnapping.
37.According to Karachi Police sources, Amjad Farooqi was also taken into custody on the basis of the tip-off from Fazal Karim, but the ISI ordered them to release him and let him go. Fazal Karim reportedly named one of the Yemeni-Balochs involved in the beheading of Pearl as KSM, but the military regime did not admit this. On the basis of his information, the Police also rounded up some others involved in the
kidnapping and murder.
38.Intriguingly, on May 14, 2002, two days before the recovery of the remains of the dead body of Pearl by the Karachi Police, the Punjab Police claimed that Riaz Basra, a long absconding leader of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the SSP in which Amjad Farooqi had started his career as a terrorist, and three of his associates were killed in an encounter in a Punjab village when they had gone there to kill a Shia leader. Sections of the Pakistani media expressed doubts over the Police version and alleged that Riaz Basra was in the informal custody of the ISI since Pearl's kidnapping in January, 2002, without it taking any action against him and that the Police, for reasons not clear, had shown him as having been killed in an encounter.
39. During the trial of Omar Sheikh and his associates, the defence lawyers drew the attention of the anti-terrorism court to media reports about the arrest of Fazal Karim and others and urged that the court should order a re-investigation of the case in order to determine their responsibility for the offence. The prosecution described the media reports as baseless and opposed any re-investigation. The court
rejected the defence plea.
40. The court sentenced Omar Sheikh to death and others to various terms of imprisonment. The appeal against the death sentence filed by Omar Sheikh has not been disposed of by the court so far under some pretext or the other. In the meanwhile, KSM was arrested in Rawalpindi by the Pakistani authorities in March, 2003,and handed over to the FBI, which had him flown out of the country. In an article
written in the "Salon", an online journal, in October,2003,the free-lance journalist in whose Karachi house Pearl and his wife had stayed said that Marianne had been informed by the US intelligence that KSM had admitted having personally killed Pearl. The defence lawyers of Omar Sheikh again raised the question of a re-investigation, but their plea was again opposed by the prosecution and rejected by the court.
41. In December, 2003, there were two unsuccessful attempts to kill Musharraf in Rawalpindi with explosives. In the second incident,suicide bombers were involved. There were strong indications of the involvement of insiders from the Pakistani Army and Police in both the incidents. Till June,2004, Musharraf blamed the JEM for the attempts just as he had initially blamed it in 2002 for the kidnapping and murder
of Pearl. Subsequent investigation brought out that it was the HUJI and not the JEM, which was involved. Of all the pro-bin Laden jihadi organisations of Pakistan, the HUJI has the largest following in the Army. The investigation into Pearl's kidnapping and murder had also brought out indicators of a possible HUJI penetration into the Air Force.
42. By the end of January,2004, the investigators had started gathering evidence of the involvement of junior officials of the Army and the Air Force belonging to the HUJI and the Hizbut Tahreer in the two assassination attempts, which, according to them, were orchestrated by Amjad Farooqi at the instance of the Libyan.However, Musharraf did not openly admit this.
43. On June 10, 2004, the Corps Commander of Karachi narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Karachi. With the help of a mobile phone, which the terrorists had left behind at the scene, the Karachi Police established that the attempt was jointly organised by the HUJI and a new organisation called Jundullah (Army of Allah), which had been trained by the Uzbecks and Chechens in the South Waziristan area of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. The Police managed to identify and round up the Jundullah members involved in the incident.
44. During their interrogation, they reportedly admitted their involvement and said that they were acting under the leadership of Amjad Farooqi. The Police had kept the arrest and interrogation of the Jundullah members a secret lest Amjad Farooqi be alerted before they got him. But, Sheikh Rashid, the Information Minister, prematurely announced it to the media, thereby alerting Amjad Farooqi before the Police could arrest him. He managed to escape from his Karachi hide-out and fled to Nawabshah.
45. For the first time, Musharraf admitted in an interview to a private TV channel in June, 2004, the involvement of junior officers of the Army and the Air Force in the plot against him and the role of Amjad Farooqi and the Libyan in the plot.
46. A man-hunt for Farooqi and the Libyan was launched by the Police. Before they could get Farooqi alive, someone in the military-intelligence establishment would seem to have ensured that he would not fall alive into the hands of the Police. Who is that somebody?
47.Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the Amir of the HUJI, was picked up by the Dubai authorities on August 6, 2004, and handed over to the Pakistani authorities, who had him flown to Pakistan the next day. The results of his interrogation are not known so far.
48.One of the most mysterious aspects of the activities of the jihadi organisations in Pakistan is why Musharraf has always been reluctant to or even afraid of taking action against the HUJI. He has avoided banning it even after evidence of its penetration into the Army and the Air Force and its involvement in the plots against him.
Friday, October 9, 2009
DEAR ALL
I will be entering hospital later next week to undergo a cystoscopy to remove a small wart-like growth in my urinary bladder, which was detected on October 5,2009According to my doctor, I will have to stay in the hospital for four days followed by five or six days of rest at home. He has advised me to postpone all activities and travels till October 31. He says I should be able to resume my normal activities and travels from November 1, provided the removed wart does not turn out to be malignant.Keeping my fingers crossed.I may not be writing regularly during this period.Warm regards. B.Raman
INDIA'S OPTIONS VIS-A-VIS AFGHANISTAN
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.562
B.RAMAN
Fifteen civilians and two Afghan policemen deployed outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul are reported to have been killed on October 8,2009, when an explosive-laden vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded outside the Embassy. A claim of responsibility was subsequently made through a web site linked with the Neo Taliban (Afghan) stating that the blast was carried out by the Taliban.
2. This was the second blast directed at the Indian Embassy. The first one in July,2008, was more deadly killing about 60 persons ----two of them senior diplomats of the Embassy, one a civilian and the other an officer of the Indian Army. The blast of July,2008, indicated inadequacies in the physical security of the Embassy premises and its ability to withstand the impact of a severe explosion. These deficiencies have since been removed. The fact that the blast of October 8----- though reportedly as powerful as last year's--- could not cause major damages in the Embassy premises and resulted only in injuries to three Indian personnel shows that the fortified Embassy premises was well able to withstand the force of the blast.
3. The blast of last year as well as the latest one indicate weaknesses in access control. The Taliban and its associates such as Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizbe Islami have been targeting for months not only the Indian Embassy, but also the Embassies of Western countries, particularly the US. The fact that the terrorists---whoever they might be--- have so far not been able to get as close to the US and other Western Embassies as they have been able to reach in the case of the Indian Embassy indicates gaps in access control. This has to be discussed by Indian security with their Afghan counterparts, who are responsible for access control and the gaps identified and removed.
4. The Indian Embassy has been twice targeted by Taliban elements because it is viewed as the co-ordinator of the various projects undertaken with Indian assistance for the economic development of Afghanistan and for the promotion of democracy. Though the Indian-aided projects have no military significance, Pakistan views these projects, the resulting increase in the Indian presence for the execution of these projects and the developing relations between India and Afghanistan at the Governmental level as detrimental to its interests.
5. There is a convergence of objectives between Pakistan and the Taliban on the need to force India to reverse its policies towards Afghanistan and reduce its presence and activities to a level, which would be acceptable to Pakistan. For more than a year now, Pakistan has mounted a campaign against the Indian presence and activities------ through diplomatic means as well as through its surrogates in Afghanistan such as the Taliban.
6. The objective of the diplomatic campaign is to make the US to bring about a dilution of the Indian role through pressures on the Government of India as well as that of Hamid Karzai. The objective of the use of the surrogates in Afghan territory is to make India pay a bloody price for its presence and intimidate it into re-considering its Afghan presence even if the pressure through the US does not work.
7. The intimidatory attacks on Indian nationals and presence and on Indian establishments in Afghanistan are likely to continue. The Government of India is determined not to be intimidated and this determination has to continue. One could be certain that the Government of India would have evaluated the risks involved by undertaking development and democracy-promotion projects in Afghanistan. One must be prepared to face more such attacks and not to let these attacks come in the way of the implementation of the Indian projects.
8, At the same time, one has to repeatedly make a vulnerabilitry assessment of the Indian projects and the Indian diplomatic and consular missions and constantly upgrade their physical security. Sitting tight, going ahead with our projects whatever be the threats and constantly identifying and removing gaps in physical security, with the co-operation of the Afghan Government, is one of the two options available to India in Afghan territory. The other option is to mobilise the support of the traditionally pro-Indian sections of the Afghan civil society and the pro-India Pashtun elements in Pakistan for the continuance of the Indian projects through various instruments of soft power such as radio, TV, personal interactions etc.
9. There is another dimension----that is, identifying and neutalising the terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistani territory from where these attacks are mounted, with the connivance of the Pakistani agencies. This calls for a proactive counter-sanctuaries policy. What are the options available to India to target the sanctuaries and how to implement the ultimately adopted option have to be examined at a high level and necessary directives given to all those who will be invlolved in counter-sanctuaries actions. Until and unless this is done, periodic attacks on Indian nationals and interests in Afghanistan will continue. The primary decision that the time has come for a counter-sanctuaries strategy has to come from the political leadership, which has till now been reluctant to go into the activist mode. ( 10-10-09)
( 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
Fifteen civilians and two Afghan policemen deployed outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul are reported to have been killed on October 8,2009, when an explosive-laden vehicle driven by a suicide bomber exploded outside the Embassy. A claim of responsibility was subsequently made through a web site linked with the Neo Taliban (Afghan) stating that the blast was carried out by the Taliban.
2. This was the second blast directed at the Indian Embassy. The first one in July,2008, was more deadly killing about 60 persons ----two of them senior diplomats of the Embassy, one a civilian and the other an officer of the Indian Army. The blast of July,2008, indicated inadequacies in the physical security of the Embassy premises and its ability to withstand the impact of a severe explosion. These deficiencies have since been removed. The fact that the blast of October 8----- though reportedly as powerful as last year's--- could not cause major damages in the Embassy premises and resulted only in injuries to three Indian personnel shows that the fortified Embassy premises was well able to withstand the force of the blast.
3. The blast of last year as well as the latest one indicate weaknesses in access control. The Taliban and its associates such as Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizbe Islami have been targeting for months not only the Indian Embassy, but also the Embassies of Western countries, particularly the US. The fact that the terrorists---whoever they might be--- have so far not been able to get as close to the US and other Western Embassies as they have been able to reach in the case of the Indian Embassy indicates gaps in access control. This has to be discussed by Indian security with their Afghan counterparts, who are responsible for access control and the gaps identified and removed.
4. The Indian Embassy has been twice targeted by Taliban elements because it is viewed as the co-ordinator of the various projects undertaken with Indian assistance for the economic development of Afghanistan and for the promotion of democracy. Though the Indian-aided projects have no military significance, Pakistan views these projects, the resulting increase in the Indian presence for the execution of these projects and the developing relations between India and Afghanistan at the Governmental level as detrimental to its interests.
5. There is a convergence of objectives between Pakistan and the Taliban on the need to force India to reverse its policies towards Afghanistan and reduce its presence and activities to a level, which would be acceptable to Pakistan. For more than a year now, Pakistan has mounted a campaign against the Indian presence and activities------ through diplomatic means as well as through its surrogates in Afghanistan such as the Taliban.
6. The objective of the diplomatic campaign is to make the US to bring about a dilution of the Indian role through pressures on the Government of India as well as that of Hamid Karzai. The objective of the use of the surrogates in Afghan territory is to make India pay a bloody price for its presence and intimidate it into re-considering its Afghan presence even if the pressure through the US does not work.
7. The intimidatory attacks on Indian nationals and presence and on Indian establishments in Afghanistan are likely to continue. The Government of India is determined not to be intimidated and this determination has to continue. One could be certain that the Government of India would have evaluated the risks involved by undertaking development and democracy-promotion projects in Afghanistan. One must be prepared to face more such attacks and not to let these attacks come in the way of the implementation of the Indian projects.
8, At the same time, one has to repeatedly make a vulnerabilitry assessment of the Indian projects and the Indian diplomatic and consular missions and constantly upgrade their physical security. Sitting tight, going ahead with our projects whatever be the threats and constantly identifying and removing gaps in physical security, with the co-operation of the Afghan Government, is one of the two options available to India in Afghan territory. The other option is to mobilise the support of the traditionally pro-Indian sections of the Afghan civil society and the pro-India Pashtun elements in Pakistan for the continuance of the Indian projects through various instruments of soft power such as radio, TV, personal interactions etc.
9. There is another dimension----that is, identifying and neutalising the terrorist sanctuaries in Pakistani territory from where these attacks are mounted, with the connivance of the Pakistani agencies. This calls for a proactive counter-sanctuaries policy. What are the options available to India to target the sanctuaries and how to implement the ultimately adopted option have to be examined at a high level and necessary directives given to all those who will be invlolved in counter-sanctuaries actions. Until and unless this is done, periodic attacks on Indian nationals and interests in Afghanistan will continue. The primary decision that the time has come for a counter-sanctuaries strategy has to come from the political leadership, which has till now been reluctant to go into the activist mode. ( 10-10-09)
( 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, October 6, 2009
SECURITY OF PAK'S NUCLEAR ESTABLISHMENTS: A WAKE-UP CALL
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR: PAPER NO. 561
B.RAMAN
On April 1,2009, a pilotless plane (Drone) of the USA's Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) attacked with a missile the house of Hakimullah Mehsud in the Khadezai area of the Orakzai Agency in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. Twelve persons were killed. Hakimullah himself, who was apparently one of the targets, escaped unhurt and warned of a retaliatory strike by the Pakistani
Taliban in Islamabad.
2. The retaliation through a suicide bomber came within three days. Late on the evening of April 4,2009, a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of the barracks of a company of the Frontier Constabulary (FC) from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which was deployed in Islamabad on VIP security duties. At least eight members of the FC were killed by the explosion.The FC consists almost entirely of Pashtuns recruited in the NWFP, the FATA and the Pashtun majority areas of Balochistan. The FC has been in the forefront of the operations against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the Pashtun belt.
3.On October 4,2009, Hakimullah Mehsud, who has taken over as the Amir of the TTP after the death of Baitullah Mehsud in a Drone strike on August 5,2009, invited five Pashtun journalists to a hide-out in South Waziristan to dispel rumours spread by the Pakistani authorities after the death of Baitullah that at a shoora of the TTP held to choose the successor to Baitullah, fighting broke out between his followers and those of Waliur Rehman and that Hakimullah was killed in the exchange of fire. These rumours persisted even after two persons claiming to be Hakimullah and Waliur Rehman had rung up some journalists to repudiate these rumours and announce jointly that the TTP had elected Hakimullah as its Amir and Waliur as its Amir for the South Waziristan area. These rumours revived again recently through reports circulating
in Pakistan as well as orininating from the US.
4 Talking to these journalists, Hakimullah reportedly pledged to take revenge against the US for the Drone attacks and reiterated the previous TTP claim that the Pakistani Government was cooperating with the US for carrying out the missile strikes by Predators. However, he added that the TTP wasn’t against Pakistan or its people as its fight was with the pro-US rulers of the country.
5.On October 5,2009, at least five UN officials, a foreigner and two women among them, were killed and eight others injured when a suicide bomber dressed as a Frontier Constabulary soldier managed to enter the Islamabad office of the World Food Programme without being checked by security guards from a private company as well as an FC unit deployed in Islamabad to provide security to VIPs and important
establishments and blew himself up. The FC personnel guarding the building reportedly came from the same unit which was attacked by a suicide bomber of the TTP on April 4,2009.
6. The "Dawn" of Karachi reported as follows on October 6,2009: "Senior investigation officers said they had not ruled out the possibility that
the bomber was an FC man.The investigators detained an FC man on duty and a private security guard posted at the office’s gate. An official said it was premature to say anything about the bomber’s identity, but the possibility that he was a serving or ex-member of the paramilitary force could not be ruled out. Another top security official said if it was established that the attacker belonged to the FC, it might change the entire dynamics of not just the investigation, but the counter-terror operation."
7. If it is established that the suicide bomber was in fact a serving member of the FC, it would be an indicatior of the success of the TTP in penetrating FC units deployed outside the Pashtun tribal belt. In the past, there had been many instances of the TTP penetrating FC units deployed in the tribal belt and winning over its personnel. There had also been instances of FC personnel deployed in the tribal areas deserting from their units and joining the TTP.
8. If the TTP has succeeded in penetrating FC units deployed in Islamabad and other places, it should set an alarm bell ringing because the Pakistan Army uses FC units for physical security duties at nuclear establishments. This could provide an opportunity for the TTP and Al Qaeda to penetrate these establishments with the help of their moles. ( 6-10-09)
( 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
On April 1,2009, a pilotless plane (Drone) of the USA's Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) attacked with a missile the house of Hakimullah Mehsud in the Khadezai area of the Orakzai Agency in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. Twelve persons were killed. Hakimullah himself, who was apparently one of the targets, escaped unhurt and warned of a retaliatory strike by the Pakistani
Taliban in Islamabad.
2. The retaliation through a suicide bomber came within three days. Late on the evening of April 4,2009, a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of the barracks of a company of the Frontier Constabulary (FC) from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which was deployed in Islamabad on VIP security duties. At least eight members of the FC were killed by the explosion.The FC consists almost entirely of Pashtuns recruited in the NWFP, the FATA and the Pashtun majority areas of Balochistan. The FC has been in the forefront of the operations against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in the Pashtun belt.
3.On October 4,2009, Hakimullah Mehsud, who has taken over as the Amir of the TTP after the death of Baitullah Mehsud in a Drone strike on August 5,2009, invited five Pashtun journalists to a hide-out in South Waziristan to dispel rumours spread by the Pakistani authorities after the death of Baitullah that at a shoora of the TTP held to choose the successor to Baitullah, fighting broke out between his followers and those of Waliur Rehman and that Hakimullah was killed in the exchange of fire. These rumours persisted even after two persons claiming to be Hakimullah and Waliur Rehman had rung up some journalists to repudiate these rumours and announce jointly that the TTP had elected Hakimullah as its Amir and Waliur as its Amir for the South Waziristan area. These rumours revived again recently through reports circulating
in Pakistan as well as orininating from the US.
4 Talking to these journalists, Hakimullah reportedly pledged to take revenge against the US for the Drone attacks and reiterated the previous TTP claim that the Pakistani Government was cooperating with the US for carrying out the missile strikes by Predators. However, he added that the TTP wasn’t against Pakistan or its people as its fight was with the pro-US rulers of the country.
5.On October 5,2009, at least five UN officials, a foreigner and two women among them, were killed and eight others injured when a suicide bomber dressed as a Frontier Constabulary soldier managed to enter the Islamabad office of the World Food Programme without being checked by security guards from a private company as well as an FC unit deployed in Islamabad to provide security to VIPs and important
establishments and blew himself up. The FC personnel guarding the building reportedly came from the same unit which was attacked by a suicide bomber of the TTP on April 4,2009.
6. The "Dawn" of Karachi reported as follows on October 6,2009: "Senior investigation officers said they had not ruled out the possibility that
the bomber was an FC man.The investigators detained an FC man on duty and a private security guard posted at the office’s gate. An official said it was premature to say anything about the bomber’s identity, but the possibility that he was a serving or ex-member of the paramilitary force could not be ruled out. Another top security official said if it was established that the attacker belonged to the FC, it might change the entire dynamics of not just the investigation, but the counter-terror operation."
7. If it is established that the suicide bomber was in fact a serving member of the FC, it would be an indicatior of the success of the TTP in penetrating FC units deployed outside the Pashtun tribal belt. In the past, there had been many instances of the TTP penetrating FC units deployed in the tribal belt and winning over its personnel. There had also been instances of FC personnel deployed in the tribal areas deserting from their units and joining the TTP.
8. If the TTP has succeeded in penetrating FC units deployed in Islamabad and other places, it should set an alarm bell ringing because the Pakistan Army uses FC units for physical security duties at nuclear establishments. This could provide an opportunity for the TTP and Al Qaeda to penetrate these establishments with the help of their moles. ( 6-10-09)
( 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 )
Monday, October 5, 2009
OBAMA VEERING TOWARDS NEUTRALITY ON ARUNACHAL PRADESH?
B.RAMAN
In my article of September 16,2009, titled "Obama Ducks Dalai Lama" available at
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers35/paper3418.html , I had reported as follows: "His Holiness is going ahead with his plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh in November, which could more or less coincide with Obama's visit to China. The US officials were reported to be worried that the Chinese anger over the Dalai Lama's visit to Arunachal Pradesh might come in the way of the success of Obama's promised efforts to persuade Beijing to resume its dialogue with His Holiness. It is not clear whether they gave any advice to His Holiness in this matter."
2. It is learnt that officials of the Obama Administration have stepped up pressure on the advisers of His Holiness to persuade the Dalai Lama not to raise any controversy over Arunachal Pradesh for the time being till he succeeds in persuading the Chinese to resume their dialogue with the representatives of His Holiness.
3. The Obama Administration is showing signs of greater sensitivity to the concerns and interests of China than those of India. Reliable reports indicate that it is veering towards a policy of neutrality on the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, which has been a major bone of contention between India and China. It is believed to be dragging its feet on the implementation of the understanding reached between the
preceding Bush Administration and the Govt. of India for the US Air Force to undertake searches in Arunachal Pradesh territory for US Air Force personnel, who were missing in action during the Second World War.
4. It is learnt that the formats of the joint exercices between the three wings of the Armed Forces of the two countries, which were agreed upon during the Bush Administration, are being reviewed in order to delete elements, which could cause concern to not only China, but also Pakistan--- such as joint exercises between the two armies in the Siachen area to enable US Army personnel to get exposed to high altitude conditions, joint naval exercises in the seas to the east of India etc.
5. While the Obama Administration wants to go ahead with the over-all format of the strategic relationship with India as laid down by the Bush Administration, it wants to have a second look at those aspects, which could cause concern to China.
6. There was one joint naval exercise off Japan involving ships of the navies of India, the US and Japan after Obama assumed office. Such exercises are likely to be avoided in future.
7. There is also a possibility of the US abstaining when the specific proposal for assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a flood control project in Arunachal Pradesh comes up for approval before the ADB.The ADB's Board of Governors had earlier this year, after Obama came to office, approved a basket of projects proposed by India despite opposition ftrom China. It is learnt that ADB officials have been saying that approval for the package as a whole did not mean approval of each individual item in the package and that each individual item has to be approved separately. Efforts are being made to scuttle ADB support for the individual proposal relating to Arunachal Pradesh.
8. The Obama Administration seems to be thinking that all that it needs to do to humour India and soften the blow due to its steady reversal of the pro-India policies initiated by the Bush Administration is to accord the honours of a State visit to Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh in November and play up the ceremonial honours accorded to him. In the last few days, officials of the US State Department have been briefing the media about the kind of honours which will be accorded to Dr.Manmohan Singh when he visits Washington. These are meant to show that there has been no change in the US policies towards India under the Obama Administration. The reality is that on every matter, which is of concern to India, greater attention is being paid to China's sensitivities and concerns. ( 5-10-09)
( 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 )
In my article of September 16,2009, titled "Obama Ducks Dalai Lama" available at
http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers35/paper3418.html , I had reported as follows: "His Holiness is going ahead with his plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh in November, which could more or less coincide with Obama's visit to China. The US officials were reported to be worried that the Chinese anger over the Dalai Lama's visit to Arunachal Pradesh might come in the way of the success of Obama's promised efforts to persuade Beijing to resume its dialogue with His Holiness. It is not clear whether they gave any advice to His Holiness in this matter."
2. It is learnt that officials of the Obama Administration have stepped up pressure on the advisers of His Holiness to persuade the Dalai Lama not to raise any controversy over Arunachal Pradesh for the time being till he succeeds in persuading the Chinese to resume their dialogue with the representatives of His Holiness.
3. The Obama Administration is showing signs of greater sensitivity to the concerns and interests of China than those of India. Reliable reports indicate that it is veering towards a policy of neutrality on the issue of Arunachal Pradesh, which has been a major bone of contention between India and China. It is believed to be dragging its feet on the implementation of the understanding reached between the
preceding Bush Administration and the Govt. of India for the US Air Force to undertake searches in Arunachal Pradesh territory for US Air Force personnel, who were missing in action during the Second World War.
4. It is learnt that the formats of the joint exercices between the three wings of the Armed Forces of the two countries, which were agreed upon during the Bush Administration, are being reviewed in order to delete elements, which could cause concern to not only China, but also Pakistan--- such as joint exercises between the two armies in the Siachen area to enable US Army personnel to get exposed to high altitude conditions, joint naval exercises in the seas to the east of India etc.
5. While the Obama Administration wants to go ahead with the over-all format of the strategic relationship with India as laid down by the Bush Administration, it wants to have a second look at those aspects, which could cause concern to China.
6. There was one joint naval exercise off Japan involving ships of the navies of India, the US and Japan after Obama assumed office. Such exercises are likely to be avoided in future.
7. There is also a possibility of the US abstaining when the specific proposal for assistance from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a flood control project in Arunachal Pradesh comes up for approval before the ADB.The ADB's Board of Governors had earlier this year, after Obama came to office, approved a basket of projects proposed by India despite opposition ftrom China. It is learnt that ADB officials have been saying that approval for the package as a whole did not mean approval of each individual item in the package and that each individual item has to be approved separately. Efforts are being made to scuttle ADB support for the individual proposal relating to Arunachal Pradesh.
8. The Obama Administration seems to be thinking that all that it needs to do to humour India and soften the blow due to its steady reversal of the pro-India policies initiated by the Bush Administration is to accord the honours of a State visit to Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh in November and play up the ceremonial honours accorded to him. In the last few days, officials of the US State Department have been briefing the media about the kind of honours which will be accorded to Dr.Manmohan Singh when he visits Washington. These are meant to show that there has been no change in the US policies towards India under the Obama Administration. The reality is that on every matter, which is of concern to India, greater attention is being paid to China's sensitivities and concerns. ( 5-10-09)
( 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 )
Sunday, October 4, 2009
OCTOBER 1: DAY OF MOURNING IN XINJIANG & TIBET
B.RAMAN
According to reliable source reports from Tibet and Xinjiang, October 1, 2009, which marked the 60the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, was observed as a day of mourning by the Uighurs and the Tibetans in Xinjiang and Tibet.
2. Despite the strong security measures taken by the Public Security Bureau of Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, pamphlets purported to have been issued by the Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC) calling upon the Uighurs not to celebrate the day managed to circulate in the Uighur-majority areas of the city. The pamphlet said: "On October 1st, 1949 Mao proclaimed the People's
Republic of China and incorporated East Turkestan into its territory. Since the land had been conquered by the non-Chinese Manchu emperors of China in the later part of the 19th century and renamed 'Xinjiang' or 'New Dominion', the people of East Turkestan had tried more than three times to throw off the yoke of the foreign invaders. Replacing the rule of the Manchu emperor with Nationalist Chinese or
Communist Chinese did little to help the people of East Turkestan.On this 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China,the World Uyghur Congress does not celebrate the yoke of oppression or the 'dictatorship of the people.' This date conjures feelings of anguish and misery for the people who have endured the takeover and transformation of their homeland into another Chinese province."
3. The local authorities had made it a criminal offence to disseminate anything, which could weaken national unity and ethnic harmony.They were taken by surprise that despite the stepped-up vigilance some local sympathisers of the WUC managed to circulate these pamphlets. Some arrests have been made in this connection. SMS messages on mobile phone networks were ordered to be suspended during the whole of the week, apparently due to an apprehension that these messages could be used to organise a public demonstration on October 1 against Beijing's rule.
4. While the Chinese authorities denied any ban on the visits of foreign tourists to Urumqi and Lhasa, they had reportedly advised the travel agencies, which organise tours to these areas, to ensure that no foreign tourists would be present in Urumqi and Lhasa for a week from September 28.
5. As part of the security measures, kite-flying and sale of items which could be used by terrorists such as knives, syringe needles,fertilisers, certain women's cosmetics items etc were banned. A ban was also imposed on women carrying their cosmetic bags in public transport.
6. Worried over the non-participation of Uighurs and Tibetans in the celebration of the 60 th anniversary, the Public Security Bureau issued warnings that any Tibetan and Uighur public servant , who did not attend the celebrations, would be liable for disciplinary action.
7. A week before October 1, the Xinjiang's People's Congress Standing Committee passed a so-called "Information Promotion Bill" banning people in the region from using the Internet in any way that undermines national unity, incites ethnic separatism or harms social stability. (4-10-09)
( 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 )
According to reliable source reports from Tibet and Xinjiang, October 1, 2009, which marked the 60the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, was observed as a day of mourning by the Uighurs and the Tibetans in Xinjiang and Tibet.
2. Despite the strong security measures taken by the Public Security Bureau of Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, pamphlets purported to have been issued by the Munich-based World Uighur Congress (WUC) calling upon the Uighurs not to celebrate the day managed to circulate in the Uighur-majority areas of the city. The pamphlet said: "On October 1st, 1949 Mao proclaimed the People's
Republic of China and incorporated East Turkestan into its territory. Since the land had been conquered by the non-Chinese Manchu emperors of China in the later part of the 19th century and renamed 'Xinjiang' or 'New Dominion', the people of East Turkestan had tried more than three times to throw off the yoke of the foreign invaders. Replacing the rule of the Manchu emperor with Nationalist Chinese or
Communist Chinese did little to help the people of East Turkestan.On this 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China,the World Uyghur Congress does not celebrate the yoke of oppression or the 'dictatorship of the people.' This date conjures feelings of anguish and misery for the people who have endured the takeover and transformation of their homeland into another Chinese province."
3. The local authorities had made it a criminal offence to disseminate anything, which could weaken national unity and ethnic harmony.They were taken by surprise that despite the stepped-up vigilance some local sympathisers of the WUC managed to circulate these pamphlets. Some arrests have been made in this connection. SMS messages on mobile phone networks were ordered to be suspended during the whole of the week, apparently due to an apprehension that these messages could be used to organise a public demonstration on October 1 against Beijing's rule.
4. While the Chinese authorities denied any ban on the visits of foreign tourists to Urumqi and Lhasa, they had reportedly advised the travel agencies, which organise tours to these areas, to ensure that no foreign tourists would be present in Urumqi and Lhasa for a week from September 28.
5. As part of the security measures, kite-flying and sale of items which could be used by terrorists such as knives, syringe needles,fertilisers, certain women's cosmetics items etc were banned. A ban was also imposed on women carrying their cosmetic bags in public transport.
6. Worried over the non-participation of Uighurs and Tibetans in the celebration of the 60 th anniversary, the Public Security Bureau issued warnings that any Tibetan and Uighur public servant , who did not attend the celebrations, would be liable for disciplinary action.
7. A week before October 1, the Xinjiang's People's Congress Standing Committee passed a so-called "Information Promotion Bill" banning people in the region from using the Internet in any way that undermines national unity, incites ethnic separatism or harms social stability. (4-10-09)
( 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 )
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