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Pakistan is not Al Qaeda headquarters, but...
Talking to journalists in Lahore on Monday, President Pervez Musharraf said that Pakistan was not the headquarters of Al Qaeda because most of the linkages between Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts in Pakistan had either been broken or weakened. A Foreign Office spokesman said the same day that Pakistanis could not be involved in the latest Red Sea bombings in Egypt. What can we say about these remarks?

We can understand Islamabad’s reaction. The Egyptian government has not approached Pakistan to investigate the Pakistani passports found at Sharm al-Sheikh. If it had, the police in Pakistan could have confirmed in a matter of hours whether they were fake or not after checking out the home addresses listed in them. Indeed, the fact is that Pakistani passports can be easily obtained in the global terrorist underworld and Pakistan has been reporting a record number of “lost passports” at home and from its diplomatic missions abroad. So the passports do not prove much. The names are all Pakistani-sounding but they could be names assumed by the suicide-bombers.

The hunt for the “Pakistanis” is on and the initial findings have been inconclusive. The Bedouin camp supposed to be hiding two Pakistanis finally yielded nothing, and now the Egyptian authorities are less certain about the involvement of the Pakistanis and don’t wish to give the impression that Pakistanis are involved in terrorism outside Pakistan. The truth is that the banned jihadi militias with links to Al Qaeda have been used so far inside Pakistan and Pakistan’s neighbourhood. The killing fields of Afghanistan and Kashmir are a bit fuzzy as far as the planning behind the scenes is concerned, but attacks inside Pakistan — which nearly killed the president and the prime minister — were Al Qaeda-related and carried its suicide-bombing stamp. Pakistan has been known more for training foreign terrorists than for sending its own terrorists to distant lands.

Pakistan has done its bit to roll back the empire of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, but terrorism is still continuing in the guise of sectarianism. Suicide bombing is being used frequently by sectarian terrorists with known links to Al Qaeda. Al Zawahiri is an Egyptian and virtually running whatever is left of Al Qaeda. His speeches are still being broadcast by Al Jazeera, and the world knows that he never stopped believing that Al Qaeda should attack Egypt as the “enemy nearer home”. After 1997 he was not happy with Ikhwan’s decision to abandon the violence in Egypt. Has he attacked Egypt finally? Is he using Pakistanis? Thus far the truth is Pakistanis don’t go to Egypt often. Even the radical ones have stayed away from Cairo because President Mubarak’s Egypt has been a tough place to visit. If the Sharm al-Sheikh bombing is compared to the Taba attack of last November, the difference must be noted. Taba was a part of the anti-Israel hits of a piece with the blast at an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa in 2002. The latest attack is not against Israel. It is against Egypt.

Al Qaeda style has changed too. Its central command has weakened but groups swearing loyalty to it are operating all over the world. The Taba bombing was owned by Al Azzam Brigade, named after the radical Palestinian thinker who taught at Islamabad’s Islamic University and was killed in Peshawar after he fell out with Al Zawahiri. This time in Sharm al-Sheikh the stamp of Al Qaeda is clear, but the group responsible for the act could be Egyptian — signalling a revival of violence that had declined after the Luxor attack. Pakistan has no Egyptian connection, although after 1981 many radical Egyptians had come to Peshawar. Al Zawahiri himself is alienated from the radical organisations in Egypt. Did he use Pakistanis because of that? This mystery will not take long to unveil.
Posted by: Fred 2005-07-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=125124