Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (31 page)

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait, in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride….

—RUDYARD KIPLING, 1899

CHAPTER 14
PRYING INTO PAKISTAN

I
went to Pakistan in the spring of 2006 to seek out Pakistani senator Khurshid Ahmad. An economist and renowned Muslim scholar, he is also a leader of Jama’at-e-Islami, one of the Islamic world’s oldest and most important revivalist movements. In a conversation in Italy, he had said to me that if the Hamas government were to accept a two-state solution, “with both Palestine and Israel having full economic, political, and military sovereignty over their pre-1967 territories, and with Palestinians allowed into Palestine and Jews into Israel, then I would recommend this solution to the entire Muslim Ummah [community].” I wanted to get that into the
New York Times
¹
and on the public record. Given prevailing stereotypes, it was a remarkable declaration by a self-proclaimed “Islamic fundamentalist” who once mentored Abdullah Azzam, cofounder of Al Qaeda, and shared a prison cell with Jama’at-e-Islami’s creator Abul A’ala Maududi, who, along with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, established Islamic revivalism in the twentieth century.

I took advantage of that trip to try to learn about what was happening in that country, which I hadn’t seen in thirty years. One visit to the field, nearly my last, was to the Pakistan-administered territory of Azad Kashmir. In Kashmir, as in Palestine, the British had made a mess of things when they left the Indian subcontinent in 1947, by partitioning the territory along a religious cleavage and hardening the lines of future conflict. The Hindu community had long fled or been driven out, but even the Muslim Kashmiris remembered with dread the Pathans (close cousins of Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribesmen) who had ethnically cleansed the area after partition. For many Kashmiris, today’s “Pathans” include the numerous Punjabis from Pakistan’s heartland (the region of Punjab) who populate the plentiful jihadi groups, such as Lashkar-e-Tayibah, as well as the most feared group of all, Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

RAWALAKOT. AZAD KASHMIR (PAKISTAN ADMINISTRATION), MAY 2006

I was cramped and cold, the mosque floor smelled of warm rot, and I did not feel safe or invisible.

“Darling, darling, you can dance with them but don’t kiss them! Promise me. Promise!”

From the nearby guesthouse, she said it again. Never was I so relieved to hear what would otherwise have been a noisy intrusion into my three-in-the-morning rumination. Through the floorboards of my uncertain refuge, an abandoned Lashkar-e-Tayibah mosque, I craned to get a glimpse of her through the cracks. Ridiculous I was, lying there on my stomach with my penknife, cursing myself, again: “Another nice mess you’ve gotten yourself into.” I had stumbled upon some recent killings while I was surveying the results of relief efforts for victims of what has become known as the Great Pakistan Earthquake of October 2005, which had devastated the region, and people who did not want the news out were out looking for me. I imagined the worst, then that angel and her overheard cell phone conversation chased away my demons.

By morning there was a plan by a group of independence-minded Kashmiri nationalists to get me out, with some of the documents I needed, to report events (which I later related in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).
²
My only regret was that I’d miss the meeting I had arranged with Hafiz Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Tayibah (“the Army of the Pure”). One of the largest militant groups in Pakistan, it was established in the late 1980s with the full support of the Pakistan ISI and financing from Bin Laden to wage jihad against India and regain the whole of Kashmir for Pakistan and Islam (although most of its militants aren’t from Kashmir but from Punjab). Saeed was supposed to be under house arrest in Lahore but said over the phone that he would come up to Islamabad to talk to me about why young men “choose the path to paradise rather than surrendering their hopes.” Then again, maybe it’s better I didn’t make it to that appointment.

In early May, seven months after the earthquake that killed more than 70,000 people and left 3 million homeless, the Pakistani army ejected most remaining foreign relief workers from the still-devastated region of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. Then, between May 13 and 16, a series of thirty-eight throat slittings and beheadings occurred in villages of southern Azad Kashmir. The youngest victim was four months old, the oldest over seventy. The army blamed infiltrators from India. But on the morning of May 17, two men said to be armed with Sten guns and daggers accosted and followed some girls to school in the village of Sanghola. Alerted by the girls’ screaming, villagers surrounded the school and captured the men.

The men claimed to be road workers, but a body search revealed ID cards of the kind carried by Pakistan’s ISI. Villagers identified both as Punjabi by accent. Around noon, villagers escorted the two men, on foot, to local police at Rawalakot. Whereas most local police are Kashmiri, most army personnel at the ISI headquarters down the road from Rawalakot are Punjabi. At 11:30
P.M.
, six army officers, including a colonel and a brigadier, took the captured men from the police at gunpoint. The next day, Azad Kashmir’s prime minister, Sardar Sikandar Hayat, declared his government “unable to protect you [people of Azad Kashmir].” Thousands demonstrated in Rawalakot, Kotli, Mirpur, and Bhimbar. The head of Azad Kashmir’s ruling party and its former PM, Sardar Abdul Qayyum, said, “Elections are meaningless, the actual government will be formed by ISI.” Both Hayat and Qayyum subsequently declined to participate in the July 11, 2006, elections in Azad Kashmir.

I had to cut short my sleuthing when ISI agents began following me and interrogated my hosts about any interest I might have in the
chura,
or “daggers” (meaning the recent killings) and “camps” (meaning jihadi activities). One little snake of a man, who constantly rubbed his hands like the Dickensian creep Uriah Heep and various French politicians, asked someone where I could be found late at night. That’s when I went to the mosque to lie low.

While no direct evidence links ISI to the killings, many native Kashmiris I talked to and most nationalists (banned from elections because they advocate a Kashmir independent from Pakistan
and
India) believe rogue elements of the ISI were behind them. Two troubling facts credit this argument: First, there were no reports of the incidents in the mainstream Pakistani press; second, while the army initially promised the police and people of Rawalakot an investigation, they did nothing.

Kashmiris I’ve interviewed believe the killings were intended to further a motive shared by the ISI and the jihadi groups and certain segments of the army here; namely, to stop the peace process with India by inciting the public against India. Although Pakistan’s then-president Pervez Musharraf intermittently seemed committed to a rapprochement with India, a senior army commander told me that the peace process with India was a “nonstarter, because India would only come to the negotiating table and give up Kashmir if forced to.”

In February 2006, speaking to a Pugwash conference at the presidential palace, Musharraf lauded the peace process. But he was challenged from the audience by people who had witnessed almost every officially banned jihadi group operating freely in Azad Kashmir, brandishing guns from army vehicles, promising relief only to people who understood, as Lashkar-e-Tayibah’s Hafiz Saeed put it, that “the earthquake is the result of the rulers’ sinful policies” and God’s punishment for neglecting a particular, radical view of Islam. Since this event, however, LeT and other jihadi groups have relocated away from the main roads and into more remote areas of Kotli and Trahkhil. And that’s why I had an LeT mosque all to myself.

American security forces teamed with the ISI in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden are continually stunned by the Islamist sentiments of some officers. In October 2001, Musharraf sent ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmed to Afghanistan to negotiate Bin Laden’s surrender. Instead, Ahmed openly encouraged the Taliban regime to fight the Americans. Another former head of the ISI, Hamid Gul, had been openly Islamist and anti-American, and continued to enjoy influence in the ISI. He has become somewhat marginalized, but younger officers I talked to said that they were tired of getting bloodied every time America barked and the government threw some of them into the frontier provinces as a bone. “This won’t go on forever,” said one officer. “The army must decide.” (And in 2010, things aren’t all that different.)

Most worrisome is the potential for Islamists to gain control of Pakistan’s nukes, which in conditions of high alert were placed under operational control of field commanders. It is almost inconceivable that the ISI was unaware of Abdul Qadeer Khan’s rogue nuclear operations, carried on mostly through his family and connections with old school buddies and political cronies on whom he lavished presents, and which included transnational shipments of tons of large equipment as well as information on metallization, bomb design, manufacture, and testing from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC).

Senior members of the PAEC visited Bin Laden and the Taliban in August 2001, were arrested in October 2002, then were released to stump with Lashkar-e-Tayibah.
³
Lashkar-e-Tayibah had organized a suicide attack on India’s parliament in 2001 that again brought the area close to nuclear war. LeT also provided military training to a group of American citizens (known as the Virginia Paintball Group) bent on jihad and to people caught casing Australia’s nuclear facilities, and went on to instigate devastating commando attacks in Mumbai in 2006 and 2008, which killed hundreds. To top it all off, the PAEC’s chairman, Anwar Hussain, who was engaged in construction of a new plutonium reactor that would greatly increase Pakistan’s ability to produce bombs for missile delivery, had declared, “I am proud never to have soiled my hands shaking those of Abdus Salam.” Abdus Salam, who died in 1996, was Pakistan’s greatest scientist, a Nobel Prize winner and humanist who belonged to the Ahmadiyeh sect, considered heretical by government decree.

“MAYBE IT’S A SHAME WE DON’T HAVE MORE EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMIS”

For the Kashmiri people, especially those in the hundreds of villages far from the main concentration of relief efforts in the Azad Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad, Cubans are the real heroes. Cuba sent some three thousand doctors, providing medical care in nearly every remote corner of the devastated area, earning deep admiration. Although the Cuban hospital on the road up from the Nilam River to Rawalakot now lies deserted, there is a lesson for U.S. policy makers.

Until Barack Obama’s election, U.S. relief for Indonesian victims of the December 2004 tsunami arguably was the only significant victory since 9/11 in the struggle to prevent enlistment of future terrorists for jihad, providing constructive investments of “soft power” that could generate longer-term relief from the need to use destructive and usually snowballing forms of “hard power.” According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, with the tsunami relief effort there had been improvement in favorable attitudes among Indonesians toward America and a doubling of popular support for combating terrorism (from 23 percent in 2003 to 50 percent), as Indonesians focused on dangers they faced rather than on distaste for U.S. policies. This suggests that quiet aid might best counter the growth of violent extremism.

When I brought up the example of the Cuban doctors at a briefing on the Middle East in Washington organized by the chief of naval operations, one senior officer said tongue-in-cheek: “Maybe it’s a shame we don’t have more earthquakes and tsunamis,” but, “can you imagine the doctors in this town giving up six-figure salaries for a bunch of people with no health insurance?” and then finally, “We’re just not built to help people, and maybe that should change.” (At another meeting, an Air Force general said to me: “We’re trained to do D’s: devastate, destroy, defeat, defend. Now we’re asked to go into places and do R’s—recover, reform, rebuild, renew. To do that, we’d have to know how to blow apart things in just the right way so we can later come in and rebuild them. Tell me, how the hell are we gonna do that?”)

AT THE THAI-MALAYSIAN BORDER, LATE NOVEMBER 2008

An Indian reporter tracked me down to ask who I thought might be behind the Mumbai attacks that had begun the day before on hotels, a hospital, a café, and a Jewish center. A previously unknown Muslim group called Deccan Mujahideen—a name suggesting origins inside India—claimed responsibility. But I told him, “This smells like Lashkar-e-Tayibah,” for a number for reasons: There were multiple attack units, at least some of the attackers apparently came by sea, they probably used GPS and computers to coordinate their actions, they chose targets that would kill high-profile foreigners and Jews, and (like Al Qaeda) no demands were made, and all hostages were being killed.