Behind the Fence of Lies

By Amir Zia
October 2016
Monthly magazine Hilal

One obvious explanation of this increased rhetoric is that the domestic compulsions of Indian politics is forcing Modi government to heighten tensions, which suits Modi ahead of elections in a couple of crucial states. The Indian premier will be able to rally behind his party the conservative Hindu vote bank to whom he promised that he would get tough with Pakistan in response to the alleged terrorism fomented from its soil.

Plain, simple logic says that if the Indian troops carried out ‘surgical strikes’ in Azad Kashmir as claimed, Pakistan would have retaliated and immediately raised the issue internationally.

After all, how can silence over any cross-border intrusion suit Pakistan? Taking an Indian aggression lying down means encouraging an already belligerent Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to act more belligerently. It would be opening gates for other such future assaults and accepting Indian hegemony. Absence of a pro-active military, political or diplomatic stance from Pakistan in the face of Indian aggression would also damage the struggle of Kashmiris against New Delhi’s rule in the occupied valley. It is tantamount to foregoing the right to defend ourselves and surrendering the country’s sovereignty.

In a nutshell, staying silent could never be an option for Pakistan had the Indians breached the international or the disputed border as New Delhi claims that its forces did on the night of September 28-29 in four sectors of Azad Kashmir – Bhimbar, Hot Spring, Lipa and Kel. If the Indian claim had been true, Pakistan would have responded with all its might – come what may – even when its ruling elite appears fractured and divided.

Skirmishes along the Line of Control in the form of an exchange of small arms, mortar or artillery fire cannot be described as surgical strikes under any military or non-military definition. On September 29, Indians violated the ceasefire and resorted to unprovoked firing, which the Pakistani troops matched blow by blow. According to the Director General ISPR, Lt Gen Asim Saleem Bajwa, Indian troops opened fire at 2 a.m. at four locations over an area spanning 155 miles. The exchange of gunfire lasted about five hours, but the Indian troops did not cross the Line of Control,he told a group of local and foreign journalists in Baghsar, Azad Kashmir – a couple of days after the incident.

Pakistan remains justified in asking why have not the Indians produced any evidence of their much-trumpeted surgical strikes, including bodies if they took them back? Why the Indian leadership has not been able to pinpoint the places where the damage was done or the targets that were destroyed or killed?

Pakistan, according to General Bajwa, welcomes an independent inquiry to verify the authenticity of the Indian claims. “Our side remains open to the United Nations observers and journalists,” he said. This position is in contrast to that of Indians, who have barred independent journalists and observers from visiting the troubled occupied Kashmir region.

Pakistan, on its part, has so far stuck to the Ceasefire Agreement between the South Asian nuclear armed rivals 2003. Pakistan Army responds only when Indians fire on its positions. Such ceasefire violations from the Indian side have increased since Modi assumed power in May, 2014.

Many Indians may find it ironic that despite all the chest-thumping and claims of executing punishing surgical strikes on the alleged training camps of militants, Pakistan Army is asking a simple question “where did these occur and how come they have remained ignorant of the fact?”

And Pakistan is not the only one challenging the false Indian narrative. The United Nations’ Military Observer Group (UNMOGIP) also failed to find any evidence to verify the Indian claim, while no other independent source has yet managed to confirm it either.

Even India’s half-baked version is enough to torpedo its own claims. Firstly, the term ‘surgical strikes’ is generally associated with airstrikes. They are carried out with precision weapons, delivered through aircraft, helicopter, armed drones or cruise missiles. Any such strike is difficult to defend because of its speed and element of surprise. According to India’s own claim it was a ground assault.

Secondly, if it was a ground intrusion, as claimed, it is impossible for any force – small or large – to penetrate even a couple of kilometers inside Azad Kashmir, hit the targets and return undetected on foot in a matter of four to five hours in one of the world’s most sensitive and heavily deployed frontiers.

The fact is that Indians targeted Pakistani posts, as they always do, from across the border in which two Pakistani soldiers were martyred and that resulted in an exchange of fire. Nothing less and nothing more.

Perhaps it’s not even the matter of debate now whether Indians really carried out their much propagated ‘surgical strikes’ in Azad Kashmir or not.

The pertinent question, however, is then why is the Indian leadership making such false claims? Is there any design behind this madness of taking the credit of executing surgical strikes that never happened?

One obvious explanation of this increased rhetoric is that the domestic compulsions of Indian politics is forcing Modi government to heighten tensions, which suits Modi ahead of elections in a couple of crucial states. The Indian premier will be able to rally behind his party the conservative Hindu vote bank to whom he promised that he would get tough with Pakistan in response to the alleged terrorism fomented from its soil.

The second reason behind India’s white lies is that even without conducting any “surgical” or “non-surgical strikes,” it lowered the threshold for any possible conflict between the two countries. This is a dangerous development in this nuclear-armed region as New Delhi has practically war-gamed the possibility of such a strike and underlined to the world that it would like to take such a step.
Therefore, Pakistan’s Armed Forces cannot remain contended with the fact that such intrusion did not occur. The enemy has revealed its intentions in big, bold letters.

Indian security officials describe New Delhi’s aggressive posture as “defensive-offensive”, which is a stark departure from the past “defensive” one. Under this policy, being dubbed as the Doval Doctrine, New Delhi plans to build pressure on Pakistan on several fronts. And the LoC is just one of the many. Hurting Pakistan’s economy, sponsoring and fomenting terrorism in Balochistan and Karachi and pushing a diplomatic offensive to portray the country as a breeding ground of regional and international terrorism remain some of the other announced and unannounced components of this strategy.

The Indian leadership believes that their country’s growing economic clout and strategic partnership with the United States would allow them to get away with brinkmanship in order to throw Pakistan on the back foot, equate Kashmir’s indigenous freedom struggle with terrorism and even scrap the World Bank-brokered water sharing agreement between the two countries. But this is their wishful thinking as Pakistan Army troops are fully alert on Eastern borders to respond to any aggression by India.

This Indian strategy has made South Asia as the world’s most unsafe nuclear flash-point.

It would be wrong to assume that Indians started their overt diplomatic offensive and the covert efforts to destabilize Pakistan through terrorism after the September 18 attack on their Brigade Headquarters in Uri or because of the ongoing popular anti-India uprising in the occupied Kashmir following the killing of 22-year-old Kashmiri freedom fighter Burhan Muzaffar Wani on July 8. They have been working on this strategy and executing it in parts since Modi assumed power. Remember the arrest of Indian spy Kulbhushan Yadav in March 2016 from Balochistan. Yadav had been operating a network involved in terrorist activities in parts of Balochistan and Karachi.

In our case while the masses have rallied around the Pakistani Armed Forces, the political leadership has to take the initiative, show vision and go beyond offering lip-service in tackling and countering the Indian threat.

Pakistan needs a sustained multi-pronged approach on a war-footing to secure its national interests and ensure continued diplomatic and political support to Kashmir’s freedom struggle.

Firstly, it involves putting your own house in order and taking some basic steps like appointing a fulltime foreign minister to spearhead the country’s diplomatic efforts and counter the Indian moves to internationally isolate Islamabad. It also requires rejuvenating and restructuring the dormant Kashmir Committee and appointing as its head a person of diplomatic background.

Pakistan also needs to support the Kashmiri diaspora in the western countries by giving them the lead and ownership of efforts aimed at highlighting the Indian atrocities and human rights violations as well as underlining the need for a plebiscite in line with the UN resolution.

Pakistan also has to unapologetically spell out through a sustained international campaign that a genuine freedom struggle cannot be equated with terrorism. The central contradiction in Pakistan-India relations is not terrorism, but the unresolved Kashmir dispute. There should be no compromise on this position.

Experience shows that bilateralism has miserably failed between Pakistan and India in resolving the Kashmir conflict. While Pakistan should remain open to direct talks, but these should not bar it from internationalizing this issue at every available forum.

Islamabad also must reconsider its foreign policy particularly towards Afghanistan, which has joined hands with India to destabilize Pakistan. The United States and its NATO allies have been using Pakistan as a scapegoat for their policy failures in Afghanistan. They are building pressure on Islamabad by giving a free-hand to India in the war-ravaged state. Pakistan must refuse to bow to the pressure and demands of “Do More” and ask Washington to address its concerns regarding the use of Afghan soil against the country.

Resolving Pakistan’s internal challenges – no matter how small they are – should also be a priority to deny Indians from exploiting our internal vulnerabilities. This requires smart politics, some give and take and precise operations in some of the volatile parts of the country.

Pakistan Armed Forces have the capacity and ability to counter any Indian aggression, but the fourth generation warfare cannot be won until all the state institutions, including the media, are supporting this effort. Pakistan can only ensure regional peace if it is politically stable and united, economically vibrant and militarily strong.

Jamaat-ud-Dawa: Out In The Cold

Pressure on the Jamaat-ud-Dawa increases as India persuades the UNSC to impose sanctions against them for their alleged involvement in the Mumbai carnage.
By Amir Zia
Newsline - January 2009

The Jamaat-ud-Dawa leadership is in the eye of the storm once again. And this time round, the radical Wahhabi group appears to be battling for its survival. Never before has it appeared to be so isolated and under so much pressure as it does now, in the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage for which Dawa’s top leaders are being blamed by India. Islamabad has outlawed the group and detained its key leaders, including Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, following the sanctions imposed on the group by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in December 2008. But India and the western nations, including the United States, are far from satisfied and are demanding more stringent action.
Although Dawa has been quick to deny its involvement in the Mumbai incident, nobody seems to be taking its denials seriously. Even the Pakistani establishment, which at one time maintained links with the group, has been keeping a safe distance from its leaders in recent weeks, while police rounded up dozens of Dawa’s main operators, shuttered their offices and forced several others to go into hiding.
One top US publication, The Wall Street Journal, quoting anonymous Pakistani security officials, has claimed that one of the arrested members of the group – Zarrar Shah – had confessed to being involved in the Mumbai affair. The newspaper claimed that the 10 militants involved in the Mumbai attacks were trained in Azad Kashmir and Karachi.
However, there has been no official confirmation of the report from the government, which has reiterated that no Pakistani citizen will be handed over to the Indians. “It is too premature to say anything about the investigations,” said a foreign office official.
The Jamaat-ud-Dawa also rejected the report, calling it a smear campaign against the group. “This time, the pressure on us is much more,” a Jamaat-ud-Dawa leader requesting anonymity told Newsline in Islamabad. “We feel more insecure today than we did in 2002 following the crackdown by Musharraf’s government. The difference between Musharraf’s crackdown and the present one is that the communication lines with the establishment were open then, but this time round they are closed. Now our biggest concern is how to control our workers following the arrest of our front-line leaders.”
The signs of the changing times are evident from the manner in which the PPP-led government handled the issue of sanctions on Jamaat-ud-Dawa in the UNSC, where such attempts had been successfully thwarted twice in the past with China’s assistance. Beijing blocked the last such attempt in April 2006, but this time, the government ostensibly made no attempt to lobby its allies, including China, to stop the UNSC from taking action against Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The PPP’s passive approach on this issue, perhaps, stems from its desperation to address international concerns on terrorism. This, despite the fact that New Delhi has yet to provide any conclusive evidence against the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. In 2002, the former military-led government also yielded to international pressure and launched a crackdown on Hafiz Saeed and his men in the aftermath of the December 13, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. Subsequently, the armies of the two South Asian nuclear rivals remained eyeball to eyeball for weeks in one of their biggest military stand-offs. In those days, Hafiz Saeed was leading the militant Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), which has a history of battling Indians in Indian-administered Kashmir since the early 1990s. Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi was the commander of LeT and operated from a camp on the outskirts of Azad Kashmir’s capital Muzaffarabad. Sensing both the international mood and domestic pressure, Hafiz Saeed announced that he was winding up LeT operations in Pakistan on December 24, 2001 – just a day before the United States placed it on the terrorist list. However, LeT remained operational as a key guerrilla group in Indian-administered Kashmir under the leadership of Qari Abdul Wahid Kashmiri, who still heads the organisation.
Former president Musharraf formally banned Lashkar and four other militant groups on January 12, 2002, in an attempt to normalise relations with India, though his government tacitly allowed some of these groups to operate under a new name and a different mandate.
“We formally severed ties with Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in 2002. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba that is active in occupied Kashmir is working as a Kashmiri organisation,” said a group insider, challenging Indian allegations that Jamaat-ud-Dawa is, in reality, a front for the militant group.
Hafiz Saeed reorganised his men under the banner of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, focusing on welfare and relief activities (see box).
“Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s mandate is only charity and humanitarian work; it is meant to ensure that our workers do not remain idle. They need to be kept engaged so that their commitment to Islam and jihad is not misused,” he said.
Pakistani security officials claim that LeT is the only jihadi group which has not been involved in terror activities within the country. “While disgruntled elements from other militant groups such as Fazlur Rehman Khalil’s Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Maulana Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammed were found to be involved in terrorism in Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba channelised its manpower towards charity and relief work,” said an official.
LeT insiders maintain that strict organisational control, discipline and ideological training ensured that its members accepted the change from militancy to humanitarian work.
“In fact, Hafiz Saeed provoked the Taliban when he openly condemned suicide bombings and said they went against the teachings of Islam,” remarked a Jamaat-ud-Dawa official. “We have not committed any crime under any Pakistani or international law. Jamaat-ud-Dawa is not involved in militancy inside or outside Pakistan,” he insisted.
The Jamaat-ud-Dawa is considering challenging the ban placed against it both in the UN and in Pakistan. It realises that it needs the government’s support to get delisted from the terror list, “but we hardly have any expectations of this government, which is trying to appease foreign powers,” says one its representatives.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s arguments do not seem to cut any ice with Indian and western governments, which continue to remain skeptical about its welfare activities.
Political analysts maintain that the Indians want to use the Mumbai carnage as a pretext not only to isolate Pakistan but also to place curbs on those groups that have a history of providing assistance to those Kashmiris who are resisting Indian rule in the valley. New Delhi is convinced that the Jamaat-ud-Dawa is merely a front for its militant wing, the LeT, which remains active in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Jamaat-ud-Dawa – the new name of the outlawed LeT in Pakistan – has been derived from Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad, an organisation which Hafiz Saeed and his associates established in 1986 to preach Islam in line with the Wahhabi school of thought – popularly known as the Ahle-Hadith or Salafi in this region. In the early 1990s, LeT emerged as the militant wing of Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad to wage jihad. Like other Islamic militant groups, the seeds of the LeT were also sown during the days of jihad in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union. This holy war had the blessings of the US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and several western countries.
Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad itself made a humble start in 1984 with a group of madrassa students, who managed to convince a few university professors to join them in organising Quran study circles. Among them was Hafiz Saeed, who was a professor in the Islamic Learning department at the Engineering University of Lahore. Hafiz Saeed had studied in Saudi Arabia on a government scholarship and met Afghan resistance leaders, including Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, there.
“Hafiz sahib was a very simple person. He did not even mind sitting on a bicycle with us and going to the Dara-e-Quran classes,” says one of Saeed’s old colleagues.
Hafiz Saeed, whose family hails from Shimla, was born in 1946. He came into contact with radical Islamists in 1984 through Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian professor at the Islamic University in Islamabad. It was Azzam who inspired Hafiz Saeed to lead the first batch of Ahle Hadith followers into the Afghan jihad during those days. Hafiz Saeed took a 25-member group of volunteers, who were trained in an Arab-run camp called Saada in Kurram Agency.
Azzam, who was assassinated in Peshawar on November 24, 1989, was once a mentor of Osama bin Laden but later the two had a falling out.
The first batch of Ahle Hadith volunteers was followed by many other such groups, which all got a taste of war in Afghanistan against the Soviet troops. However, these operations were carried out under the banner of other organisations. In 1986, a few Ahle Hadith clerics formed the Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad, and Hafiz Saeed was handed the responsibility of leading that organisation.
According to insiders, most members of the Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad believed in jihad and were inspired by their peers who operated in Afghanistan. Their aim was to establish an organisation that focused on both preaching and jihad. Around 1988, the organisation managed to establish its own militant training centre – Maskar-e-Tayyaba – in Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Saudi and Pakistani Muslims were its main source of funding. “However, we knew from the start that the real strength of an organisation comes from domestic sources. Consequently, Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad set up an organised system of raising funds at the grassroots level,” said an insider, claiming that the collection, which is done on a zonal level, runs into billions of rupees every year.
The group’s Afghan operations were mainly focused in the Jalalabad, Nooristan and Sarobi areas under the leadership of an Afghan Ahle Hadith commander, Sheikh Jameelur Rahman, who was assassinated by two Arab militants in Bajaur.
Among the Pakistani groups, Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad joined the Afghan resistance much later than many groups belonging to the Deobandi school of thought. Insiders say around 60 of its militants were killed during the Afghan operations, but Afghanistan proved to be a real training ground for the group. Around 2,500 of its members got a practical taste of guerrilla warfare.
The group’s presence in Afghanistan ended by 1993 – at the peak of the infighting between various Afghan factions.
However, before the winding up of the Afghan operations, the group had already commenced its activities in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1989, with the help of a local Kashmiri group Al-Baraq. In the initial two years, the group operated under the cover of Al-Baraq, but in 1991 Hafiz Saeed and his associates decided to form their own militant group, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.
The Lashkar guerrillas soon earned a reputation as committed and fierce fighters who, for the first time introduced “fidayeen” attacks on Indian troops in Kashmir. “The fidayeen attacks are not suicide attacks. We go after difficult military targets, and try to get out after inflicting maximum damage on the enemy,” one Lashkar militant told this scribe in a 1999 interview. The group maintains that since 1989 nearly 3,000 of its militants have sacrificed their lives for the Kashmiri freedom struggle. Many of those killed belong to the rural areas of Pakistan, especially Punjab and the North West Frontier Province.
A 372-page book, Akhari Tehrir (The Last Writing), published by the group in 1997, lists more than 200 Pakistanis who were killed fighting Indians in Kashmir. The book comprises their last letters and wills to their families.
In LeT’s heyday, hundreds of youngsters made a beeline for its short military courses in Azad Kashmir. But in the initial phase of the training, more stress was placed on Islamic and ideological studies rather than combat training. Only the best among the lot were selected for advanced courses and only a handful among these were sent out on actual combat missions across the border.
Before Musharraf imposed a ban on LeT, it operated four militant training camps in Azad Kashmir where thousands of Pakistani youngsters – mostly hailing from rural areas and with poor backgrounds – had been given religious indoctrination and military training. All these camps were eventually shut down. However, the Markaz Dawaat-ul-Irshad and Jamaat-ud-Dawa continued to operate openly, claiming that militancy was no longer on their agenda.
The Jamaat presently owns a sprawling 65-acre centre in Muridke – around 40 kilometres from Lahore – where it runs several educational centres including an Islamic university, separate boys’ and girls’ colleges, a madrassa and hostels for students and teachers. Around 2,500 students study in Muridke, where the group also operates a hospital and agricultural farms. Pakistani security officials maintain that the Muridke centre remains one of the top potential targets of the Indians. But Jamaat-ud-Dawa insists that Murdike houses only its educational and welfare centres.
But given the present international mood, the future of the Jamaat-ud-Dawaa appears bleak in Pakistan. -- ENDS