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Jihadi training camps become smaller, less public
U.S. counter-terrorism authorities say that the detention of a Lodi, Calif.-based group of Pakistani men this month underscores a serious problem: the Islamabad government's failure to dismantle hundreds of jihadist training camps. Long before the FBI arrested Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer Hayat, and accused the son of attending one of the camps, law enforcement and intelligence officials were watching the Pakistan-based training sites with increasing anxiety. Technically, they say, the Pakistani government was probably right when it declared this month that the younger Hayat could not have received training at a "jihadist" camp near Rawalpindi since that is the home to Pakistan's military and its feared intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. But that's because the Pakistani officials were referring to the "old" kind of Al Qaeda camp shown endlessly on TV, in which masked jihadists run around in broad daylight, detonating explosives, firing automatic weapons and practicing kidnappings, these officials say.Instead of large and visible camps, would-be terrorists are being recruited, radicalized and trained in a vast system of smaller, under-the-radar jihadist sites. And the effort is no longer overseen by senior Al Qaeda operatives as it was in Afghanistan, but by at least three of Pakistan's largest militant groups, which are fueled by a shared radical fundamentalist Islamic ideology. The militant groups have long maintained close ties to Osama bin Laden and his global terrorist network, according to those officials and several unpublicized U.S. government reports. The groups themselves - Harkat-ul-Mujahedin, or HuM; Jaish-e-Mohammed; and Lashkar-e-Taiba - have officially been banned in Pakistan since 2002 and have been formally designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. That has prompted occasional crackdowns by Islamabad, but the groups merely change their names and occasionally their leadership and resume operations, authorities say. The groups wield tremendous political influence, are well-funded and are said to have tens of thousands of fanatical followers, including a small but unknown number of Americans who have entered the system after first enrolling at Pakistan-based Islamic schools, or madrasas. U.S. officials also accuse them of complicity in many of the terrorist attacks against American and allied interests in Pakistan and other assaults in the disputed Kashmir region. For years, the ISI itself has worked closely with the groups in training Pakistan's own network of militants to fight ongoing conflicts in Kashmir and elsewhere, and to protect the country's interests in neighboring Afghanistan. The militant groups also derive tremendous influence from their affiliations with increasingly powerful fundamentalist political parties in Pakistan. Until recently, the United States did not press the issue with its ally, believing that those trained in the Pakistani camps would be sent only to fight in Kashmir and other regional conflicts. But that's not the case anymore, according to U.S. and South Asian intelligence agencies. The U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Bin Laden's campaign to forge a global jihad have caused many of the Pakistan-based terrorists to redirect their rage toward U.S. targets, both abroad and perhaps even on American soil, according to the intelligence cited by numerous U.S. One of the men believed most responsible for this shift is Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a former leader of HuM, who has been connected to some of the detained men in the Lodi case. The group previously known as HuM is now called Jamiat-ul-Ansar, and Khalil continues to play an important but less public role in it, U.S. officials said. They also believe Khalil remains closely aligned with Pakistani intelligence services and senior Al Qaeda leaders. U.S. intelligence officials believe that over the last two years in particular, the three militant groups and some smaller ones have taken in thousands of Al Qaeda soldiers and senior operatives as well as Taliban officials who fled Afghanistan and Pakistan's border areas to escape the U.S.-Pakistani dragnet. During that time, the camps have also become magnets for would-be terrorists aspiring to commit attacks against U.S. interests, the American officials and other experts say. The result, they say, is that it has become nearly impossible to get a handle on what they fear is a serious and growing terrorism problem in Pakistan. "We once knew who the enemy was and what groups were the enemy. And it's become much more difficult to discern that now," said Bruce Hoffman, a chairman of the Rand Corp. and a counter-terrorism consultant to the U.S. government. "There is tremendous overlap, and that is the problem, between Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Pakistani authorities and the Kashmiri groups," said Hoffman, who has observed the Pakistani militant groups for decades. "The overt connections may have been broken but there are wheels within wheels, and who the group actually is affiliated with is hard to tell." The existence of the camps and their ties to Pakistan's militant organizations pose delicate diplomatic problems for the Bush administration. Publicly, the administration has praised Musharraf for his help in the U.S.-led fight against terrorism, particularly for helping to apprehend more than 700 suspected Al Qaeda members, including some of the group's most senior leaders. But privately, some U.S. officials and counter-terrorism experts say Musharraf has not done enough to clamp down on militant organizations and that his government's reliance on those groups for support has allowed the camps to flourish as never before. "The Pakistan military and intelligence [agency] are well-aligned with the radical fundamentalists," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official. "Musharraf, he's in [a] pickle, he's trying to play it at both ends." One Washington-based senior Pakistani official complained about such criticism. "We've lost more people in the war on terrorism than anybody. We've suffered badly in taking these people on and continue to do so," the official said. "So why would we play a double game?" Posted by: Omoluger Ebbatle8086 2005-06-22 |
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