From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [L-I] Kashmir's Islamic Guerrillas See Little to Fear From U.S December 24, 2001 PAKISTAN Kashmir's Islamic Guerrillas See Little to Fear From U.S. By JOHN F. BURNS MURIDKE, Pakistan, Dec. 23 - The signboard has disappeared now, gone from the clutter of brightly painted ads for American soft drinks and tire vulcanizers and the merchants who live off the traffic that thunders down the Grand Trunk Road, which starts on the Afghan border 400 miles from here and ends 1,000 miles away, in Calcutta. The town of Muridke was never much more than a dusty way-station on the strategic highway built when Pakistan and India were part of British-ruled India. If the town has had a claim on the consciousness of 140 million Pakistanis, it lay in the missing sign, for an Islamic militant organization known in English as the Army of the Pure, in Urdu as Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose spiritual headquarters lies a mile or so off among the green rice paddies and grazing buffalo that flank the highway. The sign came down some time last week, just before President Bush announced that he was adding Lashkar-e-Taiba to the United States' official list of terrorist organizations, and asking Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to arrest Lashkar's leaders and disband it. Mr. Bush cited India's accusations that the group was behind an attack on Dec. 13 on the Indian Parliament in which 14 people died, including all 5 attackers. Lashkar has denied any involvement, and Pakistan, implying Indian mischief, has demanded that India produce its evidence. Down the dirt road leading to the compound of Lashkar's parent organization, the Center for the Call to Righteousness, Mr. Bush's action, and the possibility that General Musharraf will begin his own crackdown when he returns from an official visit to China on Monday, is greeted with studied indifference. "That's Bush's headache, and Musharraf's, not ours," said Rashid Minhas, a 28-year-old Pakistani who is rector of the 200-acre educational complex where 1,200 students are steeped in the tenets of militant Islam - and, according to Western and Indian intelligence reports, in the basics of "jihad," or holy war. "Let Bush do what he will; our duty as Muslims is to follow the teachings of the holy prophet," Mr. Minhas said during an hour-long tour of the campus in which he waved away any questions relating to the activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the attacks of Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden or the disputed territory of Kashmir, where Lashkar's Islamic fighters have been challenging Indian rule for much of the past decade. "We are not frightened of Bush, we are only fearful of God." Even if it was carefully rendered for the benefit of a Western visitor, the indifference reflected something common among Islamic militants. It is a sense that God's will, and certainly not American power, is the ultimate driving force of mankind's affairs. It also seemed to echo something of the turbulent history of the region, and the fatalism it has engendered in succeeding generations. When Britain divided its Indian Empire into two independent states in 1947, at least a million people died in rioting that followed, many of them only a short distance from here along the Grand Trunk Road and the rail line across the Punjab that carried fleeing Hindus east to India and fleeing Muslims west to Pakistan. Since 1947, the two countries have fought three wars, adding tens of thousands more victims. The wounds are kept fresh, more than 50 years later, by frequent killings in Kashmir, the one territory that remains disputed between the two countries today. For the Bush administration, naming Lashkar to a list that also contains Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist group was, in a sense, a natural step after Sept. 11. Since it first appeared in Kashmir in the early 1990's, Lashkar has been known for ambushes, bombings and assassinations that have concentrated on the Indian army and police, but also killed large numbers of civilians. With a smaller Islamic militant group, Jaish-e-Muhammad, previously named to the American terrorist list, Lashkar has been cited, over the last three years, for about three- quarters of all Pakistan-backed attacks in Indian-ruled Kashmir. For India, getting the groups declared terrorist organizations by the United States, and persuading Mr. Bush to press General Musharraf to disband them, was a strategic goal from the moment of the Sept. 11 attacks. In New Delhi, Mr. Bush's war on terrorism was greeted as a rare opportunity to accomplish what perhaps half a million Indian troops and police have been unable to achieve - to suppress, at their source in Pakistan, the groups that have kept India's rule in Kashmir violent, costly and fragile. In Pakistan, too, there were few who did not see Sept. 11 as a watershed for what are known here as "Kashmiri freedom fighters." For years, it has been an open secret among Pakistani intelligence officers that Lashkar has had links with Al Qaeda, and that Lashkar's installations were ports of call for Arab "holy warriors" heading west to Afghanistan or northeast to Indian- ruled Kashmir. Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who founded Lashkar after teaching Islamic theology in Lahore, has praised Mr. bin Laden in his speeches and on the group's Web site. But for many Pakistanis, branding Lashkar a terrorist organization is nowhere near as obvious a sequel to the events of Sept. 11 as it must have seemed to Mr. Bush. In Pakistan, the struggle for Kashmir is an epic that no Pakistani leader could abandon without risk of immediate ouster, by fellow politicians or the army. The bottom line on Kashmir, in Pakistan, is that more than 80 percent of Kashmiris, in India and Pakistan, are Muslims - and that those living in the Indian-ruled part, known as Jammu and Kashmir, were never given the right to vote on whether to join India or Pakistan that India guaranteed them in United Nations Security Council resolutions 50 years ago. Once Lashkar has been suppressed, many Pakistanis say, India will demand the proscription in Pakistan of any group that tries to join the "freedom struggle" in Kashmir - and, relieved of armed confrontation, will persist in refusing any move toward self-determination. The point is one that has been widely debated around the world: In a global war on terrorism, where is the line to be drawn between "terrorism" and legitimate armed struggle? It is a distinction that has been frequently made by General Musharraf, who has insisted that the United States draw a line between "freedom struggles" like the one in Kashmir and terrorism of the kind that occurred on Sept. 11, when the sole purpose of the attacks, the general says, was to kill innocent civilians. Mr. Saeed, the Lashkar leader, in statements on the group's Web site, has sought to differentiate the group's military activities from those of Al Qaeda. Just before Mr. Bush's announcement last week, Mr. Saeed said that "all operations by Kashmiris under Lashkar-e-Taiba's command have been carried out against the Indian Army with the sole purpose of protecting the local population from repression," and that any civilian casualties were "a regretful exception." "We may differ with U.S. policy, and that is our right, but we do not mean any harm to any U.S. citizen or property," he said. For General Musharraf, deciding what actions to take against Lashkar will be a tricky matter. On Saturday, the general's aides instructed the State Bank of Pakistan to freeze Lashkar bank accounts. Mr. Saeed, the Lashkar leader, described that action on his Web site as meaningless, since Lashkar owns no bank accounts or buildings and counts as its "only assets" the holy warriors in Kashmir. In practice, Pakistani officials say, all of the money in Mr. Saeed's Islamic empire has been vested in Lashkar's parent organization. . In the face of popular feelings and his own hard-line record, General Musharraf seems unlikely to go as far as President Bush has urged, arresting Mr. Saeed and uprooting Lashkar and its fighters. But even if he does order Lashkar closed down, senior Pakistani officials say, it is likely to be prelude to a shell game that has occurred before, in which groups that have become too contentious for Pakistan to continue supporting have "re-badged" themselves under new names, and resumed their attacks in Kashmir. "If what Bush wants is that we simply give India what it wants, he's dreaming," one official said. "Whatever we do, you can be sure that it won't be an end to the struggle for Kashmir." Macdonald Stainsby in the contradiction lies the hope --bertholt brecht _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
