[NYTr] Pakistan: Islamic militants have the run of unstable, nuclear-armed nation

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

newsweek - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.newsweek.com/id/57485/output/print

Where the Jihad Lives Now

Islamic militants have spread beyond their tribal bases, and have the
run of an unstable, nuclear-armed nation. 

By Ron Moreau

Benazir Bhutto was worried she would not survive the day. It was, for
her, to be a moment of joyous return after eight years of exile, but
also an hour of great peril. Just before she left Dubai for Pakistan on
Thursday, Oct. 18, Bhutto directed that a letter be hand-delivered to
Pervez Musharraf, the embattled Pakistani autocrat with whom she had
negotiated a tenuous political alliance. If anything happens to me,
please investigate the following individuals in your government, she
wrote, according to an account given to NEWSWEEK by her husband, Asif
Ali Zardari. Bhutto, Pakistan's former prime minister, then proceeded
to name several senior security officials she considered to be enemies,
Zardari said. Principal among those she identified, according to
another supporter who works for her Pakistan People's Party, was Ejaz
Shah, the head of Pakistan's shadowy Intelligence Bureau, which runs
domestic surveillance in somewhat the way M.I.5 does in Britain. Shah,
a longtime associate of Musharraf's, is believed by Bhutto supporters
to have Islamist sympathies. And Bhutto had boldly challenged
Pakistan's Muslim extremists, declaring before her arrival that "the
terrorists are trying to take over my country, and we have to stop
them."

Bhutto was certainly prescient about the threat. On Thursday, as her
motorcade inched along a parade route guarded by roughly 20,000
Pakistani security forces, one or more suicide bombers set off twin
explosions that killed at least 134 bystanders and police, and injured
450 others. The bombs narrowly missed Bhutto, who had ducked into her
armored truck minutes before. Shaken but uninjured, she was rushed to
safety. Musharraf's government quickly fingered Baitullah Mehsud, a
longtime Taliban supporter and director of some of the most lethal
training facilities for suicide bombers in the far-off mountains of
Waziristan. Mehsud had reportedly threatened Bhutto. She and her
husband, however, pointed much closer to home. "We do not buy that it
was Mehsud," Zardari told NEWSWEEK. There was no immediate evidence
that Shah was connected to the bombing. At a news conference the next
day, though, Bhutto noted that the streetlights had mysteriously been
turned off on her parade route and said: "I am not accusing the
government. I am accusing people, certain individuals who abuse their
positions. Who abuse their powers."

Whoever the real culprits turn out to be, the truth is that Pakistan's
government has only itself to blame for the carnage in Karachi.
Pakistani leaders created the Islamist monster that now operates with
near impunity throughout the country. Militant Islamist groups that
were originally recruited, trained and armed by Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) have since become Islamabad's
deadliest enemies. Twice they have nearly succeeded in assassinating
Musharraf, who was once among their strongest supporters. In the last
six years extremists have killed more than 1,000 Pakistani troops.

Today no other country on earth is arguably more dangerous than
Pakistan. It has everything Osama bin Laden could ask for: political
instability, a trusted network of radical Islamists, an abundance of
angry young anti-Western recruits, secluded training areas, access to
state-of-the-art electronic technology, regular air service to the West
and security services that don't always do what they're supposed to do.
(Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, there also aren't thousands of American
troops hunting down would-be terrorists.) Then there's the country's
large and growing nuclear program. "If you were to look around the
world for where Al Qaeda is going to find its bomb, it's right in their
backyard," says Bruce Riedel, the former senior director for South Asia
on the National Security Council.

The conventional story about Pakistan has been that it is an unstable
nuclear power, with distant tribal areas in terrorist hands. What is
new, and more frightening, is the extent to which Taliban and Qaeda
elements have now turned much of the country, including some cities,
into a base that gives jihadists more room to maneuver, both in
Pakistan and beyond.

In recent months, as Musharraf has grown more and more unpopular after
eight years of rule, Islamists have been emboldened. The homegrown
militants who have hidden Al Qaeda's leaders since the end of 2001 are
no longer restricted to untamed mountain villages along the border.
These Islamist fighters now operate relatively freely in cities like
Karachi—a process the U.S. and Pakistani governments call
"Talibanization." Hammered by suicide bombers and Iraq-style IEDs and
reluctant to make war on its countrymen, Pakistan's demoralized
military seems incapable of stopping the jihadists even in the cities.
"Until I return to fight, I'll feel safe and relaxed here," Abdul
Majadd, a Taliban commander who was badly wounded this summer during a
fire fight against British troops in Afghanistan, told NEWSWEEK
recently after he was evacuated to Karachi for emergency care.

Militancy is woven into the fabric of Pakistani society. At
independence in 1947, the country's whisky-swilling founder, Mohammed
Ali Jinnah, used Islam to forge a sense of national identity. Since
then the various military dictators who have periodically ruled the
country have found jihad to be a convenient means of distracting their
citizens and furthering their foreign-policy aims. Gen. Zia ul-Haq
turned Pakistan into a base for the mujahedin waging war on the Soviets
in Afghanistan—and won billions in American aid in the process. In the
1990s, after the Soviet defeat, generals like Musharraf dispatched
thousands of those fighters to wage a guerrilla campaign in Kashmir.
Many trained across the border in Afghanistan, in the same camps that
Al Qaeda had set up under the Taliban.

After 9/11 Musharraf promised Washington that he would cut off support
for such groups, including the Taliban. Early on, he authorized the
arrests of several top Qaeda leaders in Pakistani cities, including
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu
Zubaydah, a top Qaeda organizer. But Musharraf's efforts have always
been somewhat halfhearted, constrained by the deep sympathies that many
of his countrymen have for jihadists. For decades Pakistanis were
taught that the guerrillas were Muslim heroes, fighting for national
honor and security. Such loyalties cannot be turned off like a tap.
Several of the militants' onetime spymasters, both inside and outside
the government, maintain links to their former charges. The security
services will go after certain figures—particularly foreign Qaeda
fighters—but ask others simply to lie low. Many officials—even many
ordinary citizens—still think the jihadists should be preserved for
future use as a strategic weapon, especially against India, long after
America's War on Terror is over.

The safe haven provided by Pakistan has already had dire effects on
U.S. and NATO efforts to fight the resurgent Taliban next door in
Afghanistan. Taliban fighters now pretty much come and go as they
please inside Pakistan. Their sick and injured get patched up in
private hospitals there. Guns and supplies are readily available, and
in the winter, when fighting traditionally dies down in Afghanistan,
thousands retire to the country's thriving madrassas to study the
Qur'an. Some of the brainier operatives attend courses in computer
technology, video production and even English. Far from keeping a low
profile, the visiting fighters attend services at local mosques, where
after prayers they speak to the congregation, soliciting donations to
support the war against the West. "Pakistan is like your shoulder that
supports your RPG," Taliban commander Mullah Momin Ahmed told NEWSWEEK,
barely a month before a U.S. airstrike killed him last September in
Afghanistan's eastern Ghazni province. "Without it you couldn't fight.
Thank God Pakistan is not against us."

Dozens of Taliban commanders have moved their wives and children to
Pakistan, where they live in the suburbs of cities like Peshawar and
Islamabad. This keeps them out of the reach of Afghan authorities, who
have been known to arrest relatives in order to track down guerrilla
fighters. Mullah Shabir Ahmad is a member of the Taliban's 30-man
ruling council, or shura. He's moved his family to a modest
neighborhood of nearly identical brick and mud-brick houses in Quetta.
Inside his home he shows a visiting NEWSWEEK reporter a room filled
with new bolts of cloth, Ramadan gifts from the city's Taliban
sympathizers. He spends roughly half the year inside Pakistan,
shuttling between Quetta, Karachi, Peshawar and the tribal belt to
raise funds, recruit new fighters and plot strategy with other
commanders.

The insurgents have no centralized supply system. Instead, each senior
provincial commander operates his own network. Din Mohammad, a tall,
portly man in his mid-30s, looks after the needs of insurgents who
fight for commander Gul Agha in southern Helmand province. With cash
from Afghanistan and from his own fund-raising efforts he buys shoes
and warm clothes for Taliban fighters, walkie-talkies and satellite
phones—even weapons, explosives and remote-control devices. The benign
stuff he trucks into Afghanistan openly. The lethal items are hidden in
shipments of clothes and food or under the baggage of Afghan refugees
on their way home. Some Taliban chiefs prefer to shop for themselves.
Earlier this month Mullah Rehmat, a Taliban commander, rested at a
youth hostel in Peshawar while he waited for the master gunsmiths of
Dera Adam Khel village to finish a $750 sniper rifle he'd ordered.

The contrast to 2002 is striking. Back then, in the first flush of
Musharraf's crackdown on extremists, a NEWSWEEK reporter met Agha Jan,
a former senior Taliban Defense Ministry official, in an orchard
outside the city of Quetta. A nervous Jan recounted how he had to
change homes every two nights for fear of capture, and he fled when
some local villagers approached. Jan now has a house outside Quetta,
where he lives when he's not fighting with Taliban forces across the
border in his native Zabul province. Reporters in Peshawar, a strategic
Pakistani border city some 50 miles east of the historic Khyber Pass
and the Afghan border, say it's not unusual these days to receive phone
calls from visiting Taliban commanders offering interviews, or asking
where to find a cheap hotel, a good restaurant or a new cell phone.

Last August, a NEWSWEEK reporter received a phone call from the
spokesman for a senior Taliban leader, inviting him for dinner at a
popular restaurant in Peshawar. The reporter replied that he was
already there. As he looked around, he saw the smiling jihadist sitting
a few tables away. They shared a kilo of Afghan barbecue as the
spokesman confidently talked about the Taliban's resurgence in
Afghanistan and how comfortable they felt operating inside Pakistani
cities and in the frontier tribal area. "The biggest chink in
Musharraf's armor is his failure to move against the Taliban,
particularly in the cities," says Samina Ahmed, the South Asia director
of the International Crisis Group in Islamabad. "The brains, the ones
who plan the operations, are not necessarily in the boonies or in the
sticks, they're in cities like Quetta. Can he pick them up? Easily."

Taliban fighters say they are careful not to antagonize their hosts;
the attacks against Pakistani troops have generally been conducted by
Pakistani tribals, sometimes with the support of Qaeda operatives. But
that's a fine distinction. "If you take away that support the Taliban
are getting from across the border in Pakistan, it would be much easier
for U.S., NATO and Afghan government forces to confront the Taliban
inside Afghanistan," says Ahmed. Each group may have its own agenda,
but they all share a visceral hatred of America and its regional
allies—including Musharraf. The Taliban also work closely with Qaeda
leaders in the tribal regions, planning attacks together and pooling
their skills.

The Taliban presence began to grow out of control after Musharraf, his
Army bloodied by incursions into South Wa-ziristan, cut a peace deal
with the tribal region's Mehsud clan in 2005. He made another such
truce with tribal militants in North Waziristan in 2006. The ceasefire
agreements were publicly announced as treaties with tribal elders.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deals were made directly
with the militant leaders, their frontmen or terrified tribal elders
who did the militants' bidding. As a result they were worthless: the
militants had no intention of keeping their promise to stop the passage
of arms and fighters across the Afghan border. While the Army halted
offensive operations and dismantled checkpoints, the militants helped
the Taliban and Al Qaeda regroup and reinfiltrate back into Afghanistan.

Those forces, all working together, have brought the Afghan jihad home
to Pakistan. Within the tribes' ancient mud-walled fortresses they run
training courses for insurgent recruits and suicide bombers. Some
graduates travel to Afghanistan to fight beside the Taliban. Others
will stay in the tribal area to fight the Pakistani Army, while others
are sent out to hit targets in places like Karachi. Several terrorist
plots in Britain have been traced back to the tribal areas.

Now the Pakistani government is bearing the brunt of the attacks. The
threat turned critical in July, when more than 100 militants died in a
weeklong shoot-out with government forces at Islamabad's Red Mosque. In
retaliation, tribal suicide bombers have managed to penetrate highly
guarded military facilities in the capital, the Army headquarters at
Rawalpindi and elsewhere, killing scores. Authorities say that until
the showdown, the Red Mosque had served as a way station and munitions
depot for hundreds of fighters shuttling between Pakistan's cities and
the tribal areas. It reopened Oct. 3, and preachers there are once
again denouncing Musharraf and his partnership with the West. A similar
message was delivered to Bhutto before she came home. Last week,
speaking by satellite phone from the South Waziristan tribal area, a
senior militant commander named Haji Muhamad Omar called Bhutto an
agent of Washington. "She doesn't come back by her own choice. The
United States and Britain are bringing her back to fight against the
mujahedin," he said.

The militants dominate in areas beyond the tribal areas as well. Armed
groups have effectively seized control in places like the picturesque
Swat Valley, where a jihadi leader named Mullah Fazlullah rides a black
horse and commands hundreds of men under the noses of a nearby
Pakistani Army division that seldom leaves its barracks. Peshawar is
perhaps the most important production and distribution center for
Taliban and other Islamist material. Jihadi CD and DVD shops abound.
One small shop features large posters of the notorious Taliban
commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who was killed in Helmand earlier
this year, and pictures of Guant?namo inmates in their orange jumpsuits
behind barbed wire.

The Afghan refugee camps around Peshawar, meanwhile, have become vast
jihadist sanctuaries. The Jalozai and Shamshatu camps, each housing
some 100,000 Afghan refugees, date back to the war against the Soviets.
Complaints from the Afghan government have forced Islamabad and the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to begin the long process of
emptying Jalozai, a job that's supposed to be completed by next spring.
Many of the camp's high-walled compounds are already abandoned. But few
Jalozai residents are returning to Afghanistan when they leave the
camps. Most are settling in Peshawar or other towns in the vicinity,
which will allow the Taliban more space to operate in. A local mullah
was arrested in Jalozai earlier this year after three Pakistani
militants blew themselves up while using his house as a bomb factory.

The Shamshatu camp, just south of Peshawar, is the personal fiefdom of
the notorious Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His guerrillas, the
Hizb-i-Islami ("Party of Islam"), operate mainly in Afghanistan's Kunar
province, but Shamshatu is their power base, in effect an autonomous
enclave within Pakistan. Like Jalozai, the place resembles a sprawling,
labyrinthine Afghan village of mud-brick houses surrounded by high mud
walls, and it's ruled by strict, Taliban-style Islamic law. Music is
forbidden—even musical ringtones on cell phones. So is tobacco. Women
are banned from venturing outside except in the company of a male
relative. (There are girls' schools, though: unlike his Taliban allies,
Hekmatyar believes in women's education.)

Shamshatu contains high-security areas that are out of bounds even to
camp residents. Camp residents say Hekmatyar's men run private jails in
these off- limits areas. Recently a woman who lived in the camp dared
to go shopping alone. When she entered a small electronics shop, gunmen
followed her. They forced the shopkeeper to close his store, detained
the woman and telephoned her husband. "If you won't kill her, we will,"
they told him, before handing her over with a warning that if they
caught her again without an escort, they would kill her. Then they
confiscated the shopkeeper's goods and threw him out of the camp.

Musharraf says his forces are doing everything possible to halt the
jihadists' spread. Pakistan's president has shown he can deliver when
he must. Late last February, just as Vice President Dick Cheney arrived
in Islamabad to pressure Musharraf to fight harder against the
Islamists, Pakistani military-intelligence agents in Quetta suddenly
captured Mullah Obaidullah Akhund. As the Taliban's Defense minister
and one of Mullah Omar's key deputies, he was the highest-ranking
Taliban official the Pakistanis had ever taken into custody. A couple
of months earlier, Pakistan reportedly informed U.S. forces in
Afghanistan that another senior Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad
Osmani, was heading into Afghanistan from Quetta. A U.S. airstrike
promptly killed him, just inside Afghanistan. But those cases remain
exceptional.

U.S. government officials say that Musharraf's government still has
tight control over the nation's nuclear-weapons program. Still,
radicals would not need to steal a whole bomb in order to create havoc.
Pakistan has never made a public accounting of its nuclear materials,
and last year its Atomic Energy Agency began publishing ads in
newspapers instructing the public about how to recognize radioactive
materials and their symbols. The ads were quickly withdrawn after they
incited fears that fissile material had gone missing. But Pervez
Hoodbhoy, a noted nuclear physicist at Quaid-i-Azam University in
Islamabad, says outside experts don't really know how much highly
enriched uranium Pakistan has produced in the past and how much remains
in existing stocks. "No one has a real idea about that," he says. "That
means that stuff could have gotten out. Little bits here or there. But
we really don't know."

In Washington, a senior administration official involved in
counterterrorism said U.S. intelligence is chronically fearful that
Islamists might get hold of nuclear material, equipment or know-how in
Pakistan. He recalled that after 9/11, a group of rogue Pakistani
nuclear scientists met with Osama bin Laden. "Given that history, we
continue to look at this issue very closely," he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

It's not surprising that Pakistani authorities might give the Taliban
special treatment. The country's intelligence officers and military men
have maintained close personal relations with senior Taliban leaders
ever since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Western
military and diplomatic officials say they doubt that Pakistan is still
actively assisting Afghan insurgents—but they don't think it's trying
very hard to stop them, either. "I'm not delusional," says a Western
military official in Islamabad, not wishing to be quoted by name on
such a sensitive topic. "Their [the Pakistani government's] guys are in
contact with the Talibs. They may not be assisting them, but they
aren't busting them, either." A Western diplomat, speaking off the
record because he is not authorized to represent his government's views
to the media, says, "I'm sure there are intelligence officials, active
and retired, who have dealt with the Taliban in the past and still
support their cause. That's the power of personal relationships over
time. You don't cut those off abruptly."

The Taliban war effort is also greatly aided by dozens of "retired"
former officials in Mullah Omar's defunct Taliban government who now
reside in Pakistan, some armed with Pakistani national identity cards.
The Taliban don't think they're putting anything past the ISI—"the
black snake," as they call the agency. Mullah Shabir Ahmad, a
provincial commander, spends upwards of six months of the year inside
Pakistan. "The Pakistanis know what we eat for lunch and dinner," he
says. Mullah Momin Ahmed, visiting his family in Quetta shortly before
his death in September, agreed: "Pakistan knows everything about us,
but it seems to ignore us." Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the military's
chief spokesman, says that Pakistani forces have arrested and deported
1,500 Taliban to Afghanistan, "but many somehow return."

Until now, most Pakistanis seem to have remained impervious to the
jihadist threat, despite the evidence around them. Musharraf himself
has seemed preoccupied with other matters. "He has failed to understand
the danger of insurgency on both sides of the border, and how to bring
the Pakistani people along with him to counter that threat," says
retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood. "He has been too obsessed
with perpetuating his power." Instead, according to Masood and other
observers, the president has allowed Pakistanis to lull themselves into
thinking that the battle against the jihadists is Musharraf's and
America's problem, not theirs. "The greatest danger is that the whole
Pakistani nation, including senior politicians, seems to be saying that
this is not our watch, this is not our war," says Masood. "Even the
Taliban presence in the cities seems to have an acceptance."

Few Pakistanis have any desire to live under the militants' rule. The
trouble is, the country's moderate alternatives have become almost as
unpopular. Musharraf won a third term as president by a unanimous
Electoral Assembly vote on Oct. 6 (heavily boycotted by the
opposition). In a recent nationwide poll by the International
Republican Institute, however, he earned a dismal 21 percent approval
rating. Bhutto fared little better, scoring a pitiful 28 percent. Many
Pakistanis were appalled by her willingness to cut a deal with
Musharraf so that he would allow her to return from exile.

True, the survey was taken before last week's attack. In the wake of
the deadliest terrorist bombing in Pakistan's history, the public might
rally once again to her support. "She won't be deterred," her husband
told NEWSWEEK, describing Bhutto as "composed" in a phone call after
the attack. "She won't be taken hostage by a small minority of people."
But that minority of Islamists isn't so small any longer—and it's ready
for a long war.