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EDITORIAL: Jihad and loss of internal sovereignty

According to a Foreign Office spokesman in Islamabad, investigations show that “certain individuals might have been motivated by personal ambition or greed” in facilitating possible nuclear technology transfers from Pakistan to Iran. The government says it will take to task anyone found involved in such activity.

In another interesting report, we learn of a top Chinese ‘terrorist’ by the name of Hasan Mahsum who was shot dead in Pakistan’s South Waziristan area during a military operation last October. Mr Mahsum was supposed to have links with Al Qaeda.

Two conclusions can be immediately drawn from these news items. First, that the sale of our nuclear secrets was probably more a result of lack of state control over individuals working in our nuclear establishment than any conscious or permitted state policy. Two, the killing of Hasan Mahsum should surprises us about the extent of penetration of our country by persons accused of terrorism by the countries of their origin. Both cases point to a lack of internal state control and jurisdiction in the past decade.

Pakistanis often bemoan the lack of sovereignty in our foreign policy. For example, most opposition politicians have been lambasting governments in power for “bartering Pakistan’s external sovereignty by taking loans and accepting IMF conditionalities that bestow poverty on the masses and enslave the country to the foreign policy of great powers”. But the truth is that no foreign policy is entirely free in the world. External sovereignty is always under constraints for one reason or another. But it is internal sovereignty that a state must guard at all cost. In our case, Pakistan adopted a policy of proxy wars on two fronts at the cost of internal sovereignty. Internal control was lost after the compulsion of importing warriors led to their immunity from the law inside Pakistan. Once such immunity was granted through special agencies handling jihad, larger sections of the state began to be included in it. Jihad, when it is not declared by the Islamic state, tends to eat at the fabric of the state’s sovereignty. Just as foreign mujahideen had a free run of the country, the personnel involved in the strategy of jihad gradually assumed immunity. In this context, the nuclear programme became an integral part of the strategy of deniable proxy jihad. In 1999, for example, when scientists from our nuclear establishment were decorated on Pakistan Day, most of them were proud to sport flowing beards, overtly displaying their political and religious viewpoint!

The presence of the Chinese terrorist should also come as no surprise. But most Pakistanis are likely to express incredulity at his mention. This is a normal reaction to a decade of covert operations in which foreigners were given extraterritoriality and the people of Pakistan were kept in the dark. News always trickled in about tactful Chinese protests at the mujahideen linking up with the insurgents of Sinkiang and helping them seek refuge and training inside Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Islamabad acted slowly and with not a little confusion, given the diarchy between the ISI and the Foreign Office. But it is this year for the first time that Pakistan has clearly acknowledged what has been going on in the days of jihad. During his recent visit to Beijing, General Pervez Musharraf minced no words when he said that Pakistan would not tolerate any organisation interfering in Sinkiang or giving shelter to terrorists fleeing from there. We recall how, in 2000, Tajikistani terrorist Juma Namangani and his hundred soldiers were active in Kyrgyzstan when they took a number of Japanese nationals hostage. It was alleged that some Pakistanis too were among his fighters, but this was not proved. Nonetheless, the Japanese government did hold parleys with Namangani’s representatives in Islamabad, after which the hostages were released. But in 2001, Namangani was reported as entering Tajikistan clandestinely from Karachi on a chartered plane! In due course, the Uzbek president Karimov was to complain bitterly to Pakistan after Namangani tried to kill him.

In her second tenure, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto got the ISI to register the ‘foreign’ mujahideen in Peshawar in the wake of Egypt’s complaint that Mohammad Shawky al-Islambouli, a brother of the killer of President Anwer Sadat, was being sheltered there. The ISI came up with 5,000 names: 1,142 Egyptians, 981 Saudis, 946 Algerians, 771 Jordanians, 326 Iraqis, 292 Syrians, 234 Sudanese, 199 Libyans, 117 Libyans and 102 Moroccans. The world now knows how Pakistan became the bridge between Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the ‘takfeer’-based Algerian-FIS breakaway organisation called the GIA whose terrorists had lived in the guesthouses in Peshawar. There is also an established connection with Iraqi Mulla Krekar’s Kurdish organisation whose members also came to join the jihad in Peshawar. Krekar, originally Najmuddin Feraj Ahmad, taught at Islamabad’s Islamic University where he also met Abdallah Azzam, Osama’s man in Peshawar. The University routinely employed Egyptian fundamentalist clerics in its faculty. Ramzi Yusuf, the first bomber of the Trade Center in New York, frequented the hostel of the University and this appeared in the Pakistani press. Similarly, one can explain how the Indonesian terrorist Hambali, the Bali bomber, and his brother wound up in Karachi. There are hundreds of examples of how the country simply gave away its internal sovereignty. Pakistani scientists and doctors began going to Afghanistan and meeting Osama bin Laden in the wake of the international terrorists. Just like the jihadi leaders who vowed divine rage, most of them were in it for money. Doctors were found in Lahore with huge amounts of dollars in their possession.

If 9/11 had not happened and the UN Security Council had not forced Pakistan to reimpose internal controls, more and more Pakistanis would have found their way into the toils of global terrorism. We already have our plate full. We have to clean up and return to normalcy after years of chaos. But first we must correctly grasp the enormity of the task ahead of us. *

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