Khaled Ahmed: Pakistan's legacy of sponsored warriors
Why has Pakistan vowed
to end its “armed militias” in its National Action Plan (NAP)? In December last
year, an exiled Pakistani warlord named Fazlullah killed 132 children in an
army public school in Peshawar through his henchmen. The shock of what happened
was so great that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif called an all-party conference and
got everyone to agree to a NAP against domestic terrorism. In the past eight
months, Pakistan has pushed back the wave of terrorism thanks to the provision
of the NAP that allowed the army to intervene. And NAP ordains getting rid of
“armed militias”.
But domestic terrorism
has not died down. On August 9, a suicide-bomber killed over 70 in Quetta, many
of them lawyers visiting the hospital where their leader had been brought
earlier. Two terrorist organisations, Islamic State and
Jamaatul Ahrar, announced they had carried out the massacre but Prime Minister
Sharif thought it could be “states opposed to the Chinese Economic Corridor
being built in Pakistan”. Army chief General Raheel Sharif thought it could be
elements hurt by his ongoing dragnet operation against the Taliban.
Pakistan is realising
that its past of deniable wars — in which the world acquiesced — is catching up
with it. The world is now threatened by what it once encouraged and tells
Pakistan to get rid of its warriors. It accuses Pakistan of allowing
sanctuaries on its soil to killers who commit crossborder mayhem. Pakistan bled
too but took its time changing tack; but it finally shifted the old paradigm
and carried out the cleanup, Operation Zarb-e-Azb, under a new army chief with
pluck. The terrorists are reacting by attacking and killing innocent
Pakistanis.
Today Pakistan doesn’t
want to accept the armed militias of its past, but, not long ago, it didn’t
mind them too much. For instance, in the 1990s, Muslim states in the
Organisation of Islamic Countries interfered in Chechnya, Russia, with the
approval of the world. Warriors were supplied by most OIC states, including
Pakistan, but they came from the militias that had once the blessings of the
intelligence agencies. Muslim sympathy for terrorists in the Philippines, named
after a Wahhabi Afghan warrior Sayyaf in gratitude of the OIC funding they
received, was universal. This “interference” was not so unwelcome in Bosnia
when the Serbs were subjecting Bosnian Muslims to genocide.
In Chechnya, there
were jihadis from Pakistan too — which Pakistan denied — stewarded by the
intelligence agencies. Public acclaim followed as the militias interfered in
Central Asia and China. There was the Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami, Pakistan’s
biggest jihadi militia headquartered in Kandahar, before the Americans bombed
it for Al Qaeda’s adventure of 9/11. The Harkat boasted international linkages.
It was “the second line of defence of all Muslim states” and was active in
Arakan in Burma, and in Bangladesh, backed with manpower from Karachi,
Chechnya, Xinjiang, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
According to the then
Islamabad-based jihadi journal Al-irshad, the leader of Harkat ul-Jihad
al-Islami in Uzbekistan was Sheikh Muhammad Tahir al-Farooq. Starting in 1990,
the war against Uzbekistan was bloody and was supported by the Taliban, till in
2001, the commander had to ask the Pakistanis in Uzbekistan to return to base.
In Chechnya, the war against the Russians was carried on under the leadership
of commander Hidayatullah. Pakistan’s embassy in Moscow once denied that there
were any Pakistanis involved in the Chechen war, but Al-irshad (March 2000) declared
from Islamabad that the militia was deeply involved in the training of
guerrillas in Chechnya for which purpose commander Hidayatullah was stationed
in the region.
When the Harkat
ul-Jihad al-Islami men were seen first in Tajikistan, they were mistaken by
some observers as being fighters from Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan. In fact, they
were commanded by Khalid Irshad Tiwana of the Punjabi mujahideen helping Uzbek
rebels, Juma Namangani and Tahir Yuldashev, resist the Uzbek ruling class in
the Ferghana Valley. The anti-Uzbek warlords were being sheltered by Mullah
Umar in Afghanistan. Tahir Yuldashev moved to the “safe haven” in Waziristan.
His Uzbek warriors killed innocent Pakistanis in Swat and kidnapped Shahbaz
Taseer, the son of the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. Tahir Yuldashev was
finally killed by a drone which Pakistan pretended to oppose.
Maulana Abdul Quddus
headed the Myanmarese warriors located in Karachi and fighting mostly in
Bangladesh on the Arakanese border. Korangi was the base of the Arakanese
Muslims who fled Myanmar to fight the jihad from Pakistan. A large number of
Myanmarese were located inside Korangi and the area was sometimes called mini
Arakan. Harkat ul-Jihad al-Islami had opened 30 seminaries for them inside
Korangi, there being 18 more in the rest of Karachi. Quddus, a Burmese Muslim,
while talking to weekly, Zindagi (January 25-31, 1998), revealed that he had
run away from Myanmar via India and taken religious training in the Harkat
seminaries in Karachi and, on its invitation, had gone to Afghanistan, taken
military training there, and fought the jihad from 1982 to 1988. Through its National
Action Plan against terrorism, such is the dark legacy that Pakistan is trying
to live down.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pakistan-armed-militias-national-action-plan-fazlullah-nawaz-sharif-terrorism-3017200/