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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. 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.
Three fifths of Pakistan — i.e., most of Baluchistan, most of NWFP, all of the FATA — loudly proclaims its autonomy, to the extent that government writ doesn't extend to its territory. Allegiances through all of the country extend to religion first, tribe second, and the nation a remote third. What the hell did they expect?
Pakistanis often bemoan the lack of sovereignty in our foreign policy. 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.
Members of the Arab Master Race aren't subject to the same laws applying to mere mortals, even the rickety laws of 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.
The fact that the jihadis deny the legitimacy of the state doesn't help, does it?
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!
They were regular guests of the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s mammoth annual conventions, alongside Hamid Gul and Islamists from all over the world. These conventions have been toned down a lot since 9/11, but prior to it, it was probably the biggest annual terrorist convention in the world.
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.
Actually, I think he was an Uzbek, but go on...
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.
This was back in the day when Pakistan had managed to alienate every country in her region, except for Afghanistan, and was on the edge of bankruptcy, kept affloat only by charity from Saudi Arabia.
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 Anwar 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 ‘takfir’-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.
In ’Who Killed Daniel Pearl’, a Saudi businessmen in Dubai told the author that most of the financiers and leaders of the Jihadi movement don’t give a damn about Islam, and are simply in it for the money, in Pakistan above all else. But there are enough true believers around to be highly dangerous.
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.
I doubt it'll happen. The words "secular state" are enough to set off rounds of explosions throughout Pakistan, while Qazi and his fellow travellers go into orbit.

Posted by: Paul Moloney 2003-12-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=23367