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| India-Pakistan |
| Financing terror |
| 2015-01-08 |
| This week we heard our interior minister duck a question in the Senate about what is being done to trace the funds coming into madressahs from abroad. "Some madressahs are receiving financial support from Moslem countries. However, it's easy to be generous with someone else's money... it is often difficult to trace the transaction of such money," he is reported to have replied. The law provides "sufficient control and vigilance" to monitor the working of seminaries, he said, but the responsibility to carry out this monitoring now rests with the provincial governments, he added. Frankly, I don't buy this answer. Last week, we saw our finance minister host a meeting on terror financing, in which they found that police, FIA or prosecutors "rarely invoked specific provisions relating to funding of terrorism as contained in the Anti-Terrorism Act and anti-money laundering laws". Given the inability of our legal system and network of regulators to properly curb the 'pump and dump' schemes that have turned our capital markets into a casino, I'm not surprised at the level of helplessness displayed by them before the more sophisticated monster of terror financing. What's amazing is that all the elements of power -- the technology, legislation and institutions -- needed to track these funds and locate their beneficial owners exist. What is missing is the will to go after them, the ability to properly analyse the information, the discipline to sustain an investigation of this sort. But nobody seems properly willing to pull them together and really create a picture of where the money to pay for terrorist activities is coming from and to whom it's going. Much like the 'pump and dump' schemes in the stock markets, these activities use the formal system of payments in substantial measure so they must be leaving a trace. The meeting also noted that "focus of the security agencies was in nabbing forces of Evil rather than looking for their sponsors". It's astonishing that this would be the case a full five years after the emergence of mass casualty terrorism on Pak soil, and more than a decade after the start of the war against terrorism. Clearly, much needs to be done to trace terror financing. But the track record of successive attempts to uproot 'pump and dump' rackets from the capital markets inspires little confidence that our security agencies can muster the brains needed to prevail in this war. Without ending the financing behind it, the fight against militancy will remain an exercise of whack-a-mole. |
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