Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (32 page)

Lashkar-e-Tayibah had been training people with the Taliban in Afghanistan and also on the Pakistani side of the border in the Mohmand region of the Tribal Areas near Peshawar, I told the reporter, and may have set up a hybrid operation with local sympathizers in India. They’d done a dry run from Karachi to Bombay by sea in March 2007.
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I also told him that as long as Pakistan was unstable and unable or unwilling to control jihadi groups like LeT, the whole region could blow up.
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India showed remarkable restraint in the attack’s aftermath, as Pakistan first denied, then admitted LeT involvement and invited, then disinvited Indian representatives to help conduct the investigation. As one senior member of the U.S. National Security Council staff told me, “One of our biggest worries is that LeT will do something else and goad the Indians to take an irreversible step toward a cataclysmic confrontation.” They were patient this time but likely to be less so the next time. In 2010, Hafiz Saeed was still publicly promoting anti-Indian actions with impunity.
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Of all the Al Qaeda affiliates operating out of Pakistan, LeT is the most ambitious and dangerous. LeT was founded in 1987 by Zafar Iqbal and Hafiz Saeed, both professors from the Lahore University of Engineering and Technology. Saeed, as smart and wily a character as they come, has advocated using weapons of mass destruction against Western interests and has made greater efforts to enlist physics students than the rural poor in his cause.

LeT was probably responsible (along with Jaish-e-Mohammed) for the attack on India’s parliament in December 2001 that brought Pakistan and India to the brink of massive war (millions of soldiers were mobilized and both countries were put on nuclear alert) and also for the November 2008 attack in Mumbai that killed 164 and badly rattled India’s government and people. Although primarily concerned with “liberating” Kashmir from India, LeT has been implicated in far-ranging shenanigans, including training members of the Virginia Paintball group (who wanted to fight with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but were arrested before they could do anything) and the Pendennis case in Australia (a bomb plot that perhaps also involved casing nuclear facilities).

The group’s public face, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, is a “charitable organization” that runs Islamic schools. But these also tend to put a greater stress on scientific and technical education than just parroting the Koran. LeT operations require sophistication that is not typically taught in Pakistani madrassahs:
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how to blend into foreign environments; intense training and instruction on how to master electronic circuitry and chemistry for manufacturing explosives; how to interpret complex architectural plans in order to set up barricades and defenses on the fly (and so easily outmaneuver Indian security forces in their own territory); and how to commandeer and navigate ships at sea and coordinate operations across international frontiers with video, telephone, and global positioning systems (GPS) run from laptops. (In Pakistan, there may be as many as one hundred jihadi-producing madrassahs out of twenty to forty thousand, well below 1 percent of the total [comparable to what we found in Indonesia; see chapter 10]. These few mostly support the Taliban and the purist Deoband version of Islam that the Taliban practice. But the Taliban and their madrassah support are more local expressions of religious and tribal affinity than of global jihad.)

In 2002, LeT was officially banned by Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf, under strong U.S. pressure to join the United States-led “war on terror.” The ban simply prompted LeT to shift bank accounts to its “charity” outlet and move some operations and offices from the Punjab to Azad Kashmir and the Afghan border regions. (In December 2008, just after Mumbai, over a hundred Jamaat-ud-Dawa militants were arrested in the North-West Frontier Province alone.)
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More recently, LeT has been using camps in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan’s tribal areas to train for global jihad. It is present in at least seventeen countries and has operations in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan’s tribal areas, and Baluchistan, and some of its fighters have even turned up in Iraq.

Like other militant groups in Pakistan, LeT sees an antiMuslim conspiracy among Indians, Americans, and Israelis. And so all are enemies and fair game. But unlike other jihadi groups in Pakistan, LeT doesn’t attack the Pakistani army and state and still cooperates closely with the ISI. A number of retired Pakistani Army officers impressed by LeT’s ideology have joined its ranks as volunteers.
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But despite its formidable organizational infrastructure, LeT, like Jemaah Islamiyah, appears to have a fluid membership based extensively on social networks of family and friends. No evidence directly implicates LeT’s spiritual guide Saeed in terrorist operations. He may be involved, but as we’ve seen with JI, there’s no need of that for complex, coordinated attacks to be successful.

What makes LeT so much more dangerous than JI is not its organization, financing, or even global networking, but its avowed interest in obtaining access to nuclear weapons in a country where significantly many who have access to that technology have militant Islamist sympathies. In April 2004, Hafiz Saeed declared that “mass killing of nonbelievers is the only solution to international conflicts in the Muslims’ favor.” To which Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy said, “I am more worried about extremists having access to nuclear materials, particularly highly enriched uranium-235 (HEU), rather than a completed weapon. Because of secrecy requirements, it is very difficult for outsiders to monitor the output of uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing plants.”
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Hoodbhoy, who blames the rise of jihadi activity in Pakistan in part on the Reagan administration’s support for Pakistan’s militant Muslim dictator Zia ul-Haq, told me: “I truly hope this is the one time the CIA is doing its job.”
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NUCLEAR FIZZLE

Pakistan is a nuclear weapons state that is politically very unstable. It now produces fissile material at a faster rate than any other country, the number of its plutonium reactors has increased from one to three in a few years,
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and jihadis are increasingly challenging the government and trying to attack the country’s nuclear installations (which were located in the west, near areas where the Taliban now operate, to be as far as possible from the Indian border in the east).
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The main power that keeps the country together is the army, which is still deciding who the real enemy is. Tens of millions of Pakistan’s youth see no justice on the horizon and, were they to totally lose hope and radicalize, would end up a threat not just to India, but to the whole world.

But despite the increasing danger posed by conditions in Pakistan to regional and world stability, as matters now stand, material threats from nonstate terrorists in general, and religious terrorists in particular, are much more limited than our public usually assumes. A generation ago, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that could annihilate much of the adversary’s population in ninety minutes or so.
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Today’s terrorists do not remotely pose such a threat (nuclear scientists who give expert advice to the government on terrorist threats too often assume that it’s just as easy for terrorists to make bombs as it is for trained nuclear scientists). Even our darkest present fear and the Department of Homeland Security’s “worse case scenario”—the explosion of one or two 1-to 10-kiloton nuclear bombs by terrorists—pales by comparison.

I posed the following question to native Pakistanis knowledgeable about the country’s nuclear industry: Suppose, for whatever reason, a group of mujahedin and their supporters wanted to be able to place a workable nuclear device (or several devices) that could be exploded in a foreign country on another continent (that could only be reached by sea or air), even if only to scare that country into changing its foreign policy. What’s the best way you think they might go about doing this so that it would not really be possible to trace where the materials came from or to identify the group or country responsible?”
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Responses ruled out:

Manufacturing a plutonium device like the one North Korea now says it has (which can only be used in an implosion mode that is hard for those operating outside of the government to engineer because it requires highly sophisticated technology to achieve exact spherical symmetry and extremely precise timing).

Stealing a HEU device from existing stockpiles (because of sophisticated locks that render the weapon useless if tampered with).

Smuggling in a ready-made bomb by ship under the control of others.

Building a gun-type device, weighing 500–1,000 kg, would require a bit of room (at least a large apartment) and engineering four elements: a “gun” that shoots a “uranium bullet” from one end of a “rail” to a “uranium target” at the other end. Neither the bullet nor target has enough uranium-235 to generate a chain reaction, but when slammed together, they acquire critical mass sufficient for a nuclear explosion. According to respondents, Pakistan has about eighty “grapefruits,” HEU (U-235) cores that could be used for an atomic weapon (in addition to weapons-grade plutonium). Respondents also indicated that Islamist sympathy within the Pakistani security forces has declined through purging, but militant Islamist support in atomic energy circles remains “at about 20 percent.” They noted that to make a bomb, one might infiltrate the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, in particular the grapefruit-storage facilities, partially irradiate two U-238 “dummy” grapefruits, and substitute these for U-235 grapefruits.

The whole gambit would require fifteen to twenty people, handling or fabricating 1,500–2,000 parts over two to three years, and ideally, two completely independent teams (minimally related on a “need to know” basis) that would each include:

Nuclear engineers (1 designer, 1 backup)

Technical engineers (machine precision, rail, bullet, target)

Procurement team

Transportation team (perhaps redundant with procurement team)

Assembly team (in countryside)—keep to minimum number

Delivery, pickup truck to target in the city

Detonation, suicide bomber (more reliable than remote detonation)

Experts at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security judged the outcome of this exercise plausible, except for the ability or necessity of irradiating U-238 to exactly the level of U-235.

According to physicist Richard Garwin, who helped design the world’s first hydrogen bomb, the blast of a gun-type “nuclear fizzle bomb” would immediately kill hundreds of thousands of people in a densely populated area like Manhattan. As Garwin notes, “Although a country would not be destroyed by such an explosion, it could ruin itself by its reaction.”
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It is a remarkable fact that there is almost no national public discussion or international planning for such an event. The response after a terrorist nuclear attack would be a watershed event in human history, and very likely would cause vastly greater casualties, social dislocation, and economic disruption than the attack itself.
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So that is the darkest fear, although no terrorist group has ever come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon on its own. From its inception, Al Qaeda has tried. In its pre-9/11-heyday endeavors to do so, amateurish and almost comical, it failed. (Bioterrorism is perhaps a more plausible fear; all it would take is someone ingesting anthrax and sitting for a spell in an airport to cause death and mayhem.) Now, Al Qaeda has too little infrastructure left to attempt much of anything. But since 2007, with the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban and its embrace of Al Qaeda to help it fight the Pakistani state, including attacks on nuclear facilities, the nuclear danger has increased beyond the threat posed by LeT. A key to defusing this new danger, as well as whatever global threat still remains from Al Qaeda, is Afghanistan.

CHAPTER 15
A QUESTION OF HONOR: WHY THE TALIBAN FIGHT AND
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

No one loves armed missionaries, and the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.

—MAXI MILIEN ROBESPIERRE,
SUR LA GUERRE (ON WAR)
, 1792

LANDI KOTAL, KHYBER PASS, JULY 1976

“Tat, tat, tat, tat, tat, bad position, bad position,” the old Afridi tribesman sputtered as he pointed an invisible rifle at the rugged and barren hills of the Khyber Pass.