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While the international Jihadi brigades were regrouping in Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the 1980s, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate was staffed by religiosity-enthused personnel who were the direct handlers of the Afghan Jihad and no different in their thinking from the international Jihadis. When they launched the forward strategy in the Central Asian regions of the Soviet Union to orchestrate the defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan in 1986, the centrifugal force was again this saying of the Prophet Muhammad, with the strategy underscored that Afghanistan was to be the main battlefield and Pakistan’s tribal areas the strategic backyard of the Muslim resistance. From there the theatre of war was to branch out into Central Asia, India, and Bangladesh. The ISI moulded the whole theatre of war and oriented volunteer groups accordingly. The organisation known as Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami came into existence with the help of the Pakistani military apparatus. Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami was the first Pakistani Jihadi organisation, and was formed in 1984. It hailed from the Deobandi school of thought. It used to recruit youths for the Jihad against the Soviets. The premier Islamic party of the country, Jamaat-e-Islami, was already very active in the recruitment of Pakistani volunteers and sending them for the Jihad. Actually, the raising of human resources was not an issue for the Jihad against the Soviets, as there was already a very powerful indigenous Afghan resistance movement which did not really require any external fighters to assist it. The real motivation behind the formation of Harkat-ul Jihad- i-Islami was to draw out the boundaries of the theatres of war—beyond Afghanistan—in the Central Asian Republics and in India. It was pure coincidence that after 9/11, first the Pakistani military establishment’s ‘strategic depth’ pattern in Afghanistan and then the whole Jihadi network which the Pakistani intelligence apparatus had set up through the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami slipped from the ISI’s hands and fell into the lap of Al-Qaeda. From then on Al-Qaeda used both the Afghan theatre and the Jihadi network to define the boundaries of the theatres of war according to its own perspective and strategic direction.
The network of Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami had emerged from Deobandi Islamic seminaries. Its commanders were educated in different Deobandi schools, which were also their main recruitment grounds. The Deobandi school of thought has always been the most influential political, religious, and Sufi school of South and the Central Asia. Although the Darul Uloom Deoband (an Islamic school) was founded in 1879 by Maulana Qasim Nanoonthvi in the district of Saharanpur Uttar Pradesh (India), it was actually a deep-rooted religious, Sufi, and political legacy of Central Asian Naqhsbandi Sufi order adopted by various South Asian Muslim reformists. These included Mujadid Alf Sani (1564-1624), Shah Waliullah 1703-1762), and Shah Waliullah's grandson, Shah Ismail (1779-1831). Sheikh Ahmed Sarhendi, better known as Mujadid Alf Sani—which means a reformist for next ten centuries-inspired strict monotheist Islamic values against the Mughal emperor Akbar’s secular order of Din-e-Ilahi, to force the Mughal dynasty to revert back to the Islamic system. The hardline Sunni orthodox Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb Alamgir, is said to be the byproduct of Sarhendi’s teachings. Similarly, with the rise of the Hindu Marathas and the decline of the Mughal Empire, Shah Waliullah appeared on the horizon. Shah Waliullah, a Naqshbandi Sufi like Sarhendi, continued the legacy of Sheikh Ahmad and through his writings, pointed out the faultlines in the social, political, educational, economic, and spiritual orders which had caused of the decline of Muslim rule in India. Shah Waliullah’s influence ran through the whole region from Central Asia to South Asia, and that is why when he wrote a very detailed letter to Ahmad Shah Abdali (a warlord from Kandahar) asking him to give up his life of ease and fight against the Maratha dynasty, Abdali invaded India and ransacked the Maratha dynasty.
Shah Waliullah’s teachings were carried forward by his son Shah Abdul Aziz and grandson, Shah Ismail, the ideologue of the pioneering Jihadi movement in South Asia in the beginning of the 19th century. This influence of the Shah Wali Ullahi family thus laid the foundation of the Darul Uloom Deoband. The Darul Uloom Deoband was a trustee of Shah Waliullah and his family's legacy and promoted madrassas (schools of Islamic learning) across the whole of South Asia. It also promoted the different Sufi orders of Qadri, Chushti, Suharwardi, and Naqshabandi. The majority of Sufi Khaneka in the extended South and Central Asian region are affiliated with the Deoband School of thought. Last but not the least, this school of thought was the flag bearer of all the Jihadi movements from the19th century onwards, such as the Syed Ahmed Brelvi, the Faraizi movement, and the Reshmi Romal movement (the twentieth-century silk handkerchief movement), leading into the 21st century Taliban movement. The Darul Uloom Deoband launched the movement of religious education through a trained faculty, and promotes a network of Islamic seminaries from the Northern Caucasus and Central Asia to Bengal and Myanmar. The political map of the whole region changed in the twentieth century as the Caucasus and Central Asian areas were occupied by the former Soviet Union, while some areas were captured by communist China, both of which banned religious education. However, the migrant Central Asian Muslims in northern Afghanistan, including Badakshah, Balkh, Maza-e-Shareef, and Takhar, retained their old religious linkages. The Darul Uloom Deoband school of thought was the major academic influence under which scattered Central Asian religious and Sufi orders were united. It also trained Muslim academics in India and sent Muslim scholars back to Afghanistan, where they built large and small madrassas to revive old religious values, Sufism, and politics.
After the partition of British India, several leading religious scholars of the Darul Uloom Deoband came to Pakistan and established Islamic seminaries there, such as the Jamiatul-Uloomul Islamia in Binori Town, the Darul Uloom in Karachi, and the Jamia Ashrafia in Lahore. The International Islamic University founded in the late 1970s in Islamabad was also influenced by the Deobandi school of thought. These religious schools became centers of learning for the whole region, and Muslims of Uzbek, Tajik, and Turkoman origin who had fled the Soviet Union because of its religious restrictions, as well as Muslims from the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and from Myanmar and Bangladesh, migrated to the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Some of them sent their children to the Islamic seminaries of the Deobandi schools where they were provided with free board and lodging, food, clothing, and education. Pakistan's intelligence apparatus tapped this network to extend its reach from Central Asia to Bangladesh through the formation of the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami of Pakistan. They then tapped these schools as the major source of recruiting Central Asians to pitch them into proxy wars against the Soviet Union in the Central Asian Republics and the Caucasus. The Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami simultaneously recruited Pakistanis, Kashmiris, and Bengalis (Bangladeshis) trained in Afghanistan for ‘bleed India’ operations after the Soviets had been defeated. However, they soon became too big to be controlled by Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus. Meanwhile, a network of Muslim students from Central Asia was being trained for guerrilla operations around the world. These students were first sent to training camps of organizations which had Tajik and Uzbek roots, then transferred to Afghanistan for further training in the camps of Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan led by Gulbaddin Hikmatyar, and Jamaat-e-Islami led by Afghanistan's Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Masoud. These two major Mujahideen organisations had a sizeable number of commanders in northern Afghanistan, where a number of students from Pakistani seminaries were also being prepared by them to mount an insurgency against the Soviets in Central Asia. Both the Hizb and the Jamaat were ideologically close to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. They had not only read the revolutionary teachings of Syed Qutb and Hasan Al-Banna but were also under the influence of ultra-radical Arab fighters, as most of these Arabs had fought against the Soviets under the banner of the two Afghan organisations. Muslim Central Asian fighters were earlier orientated to Deobandi Sufi religious values. Their subsequent inclusion in Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizb-e-Islami's training camps, and their interaction with Arab militant camps, familiarized them with Muslim Brotherhood literature. Those connections actually laid down Al-Qaeda's roots in Central Asia.
The ISI’s initial target was to tap into the underground Naqshbandi Sufi movements in then Soviet Muslim territories, and these students infiltrated Central Asia through Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan, Jamaat-e-Islami Afghanistan, and Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami, with the dual tasks of cultivating the Sufi orders, as well as ordinary Muslims who had continued practicing Islam despite the repressive Soviet political system. Trained in the Afghan Jihadi camps, the Central Asian youths connected with the underground Sufis and prompted them to revolt against the Soviet system for the restoration of Muslim values. Thousands of Holy Qurans were smuggled into the Central Asian Republics, together with the literature of the Muslim Brotherhood. These efforts bore fruit in Central Asia's political arena when the foundations of the Islamic Renaissance Party were laid in Tajikistan in 1990, and then later in Uzbekistan and other parts of Central Asia. The establishment of the Islamic Renaissance Party was a proxy operation against the Soviet Union, backed by the CIA and perpetuated on the ground by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies with the help of Afghan Mujahideen and the Pakistani Jihadi organisations. But with the seeds of radical Islam planted, matters began to spin out of the control of these agencies.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and this further emboldened the Islamic Jihadi movements in Central Asia. The Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turks, and Chechens who had participated in the Afghan Jihad went home after the liberation of their territories in September 1991. There was then a US campaign to promote democracy in the Central Asia Republics, but the Jihadis rejected the idea of democracy and established underground Islamic cells aiming to promote Islamic revolution throughout Central Asia. These Islamic cells were ideologically motivated by Muslim Brotherhood teachings and initially supported the ideology of Hizbut Tahrir, a non-militant Islamic revolutionary group which stood for the establishment of a caliphate but through a demonstration of street power rather than armed militancy. But they later turned to Akramia, a breakaway faction of Hizbut Tahrir, which believed in militancy. A sizeable number of Islamic Renaissance Party members also joined the underground Islamic militant movements. During the Tajikistan civil war in the early 1990s, underground cells played a significant role. At the height of hostilities in 1992 most of the people owning allegiance to the Islamic Renaissance Party and other underground Islamic cells fled to Afghanistan. Jamaat-e-Islami Afghanistan's commander Ahmad Shah Masoud brought these Islamic groups into his fold and organized them under the banner of the United Tajik Opposition, which had regrouped in northern Afghanistan. The husband, of the chief of Hizb-e-Islami Afghanistan, Gulbaddin Hikmatyar's niece, Humanyun Jarir, played a major role in sending these volunteers from northern Afghanistan into the Central Asian Republics to fuel the unrest.
Meanwhile, Central Asian Islamic militants needed financial backing, which nobody offered except the Arab camps in Afghanistan. The ideological connection was the persuasion that Osama bin Laden used, and this was strengthened by the financial support he provided to the Uzbek, Chechen, Chinese (eastern Turkestani), and Tajik fighters. As a result, all these factions moved from northern Afghanistan to Kabul and Kandahar under the Pashtun-dominated Taliban government in Afghanistan. After the US invasion of Afghanistan, this Central Asian diaspora moved to the Pakistani tribal areas, mostly to North and South Waziristan. Interestingly, except during the initial fight after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Chechen, Uzbek, and Chinese fighters were mostly not used in the Afghan battle. Al-Qaeda deliberately held them in reserve. The ultimate purpose was to eventually send them back to the Farghana Valley (the boundaries of which touch almost all of the Muslim republics of Central Asia, as well as Chechnya and the Chinese province of Xingjian), and from there expand the war to encompass the whole region.
GHAZWA-E-HIND
By the early 1980s Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al-Badr camp came under the command of Bakht Zameen Khan, who organised a network of thousands of Pakistani volunteers to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Their main training camps were established in the Afghan province of Paktia near the Pakistani regions of Parachanar, Khost, and Nangarhar. Initially the ISI used Al-Badr’s camps to train Kashmiri separatists, and the largest indigenous Kashmiri organisation, Hizbul Mujahadeen, was raised in Al-Badr’s Afghanistan camps. However, ISI strategists felt that for the Ghazwa-e-Hind (the promised ‘Battle for India’) there was the need for a structure which stood on more solid foundations. Al-Badr camps were run by the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose men came from a middle-class urban background. They had been educated in secular schools. They were committed to the cause of Jihad, but their commitments were unlikely to be lifelong (no more than five years at best) because of their background, which was part of their being. ISI’s Ghazwa-e-Hind project required networking not only in Jammu & Kashmir (J & K) but in the whole of India—and in India’s neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh. There was a need for people who came from simple rural backgrounds with no leanings towards a middle-class ‘upward mobility’ structure. The Harkat-ul Mujahadeen, whose network was governed by the Deobandi school of thought—from Central Asia to Bangladesh—was therefore thought more suitable for the Ghazwa-e-Hind operations.
The ISI almost simultaneously opened theatres of war in Central Asian regions and in J & K in the late 1980s, when various newly organised Kashmiri organizations including Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami and Hizbul Mujahadeen confronted Indian security forces in J & K. Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami applied the same strategy in India as it had earlier applied in Central Asia. India was a far easier place to lay down networks. Initially the Qadri Sufi order was used as a cover for ISI activities. One of the top Sufi clerics in Pakistan, Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, cooperated with the ISI on that front, and soon an underground network was laid in India with the help of Sufis, especially in Hyderabad. While Kashmiri militants escalated hostilities, the Indian underground network was asked to keep a very low profile. The network was to enhance its activities on the recruitment front only. Soon the Ghazwa-e-Hind project had reached Uttar Pradesh, where its target was youths being educated in secular schools. By the late 1990s, Aligarh University became a hotbed of underground militant intrigues, but there was not as yet any plan for the launch of real Jihadi activities in India. Meanwhile, Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami had firmly established itself in Bangladesh through networks of Deobandi Islamic seminaries. The purpose, however, was not to disturb the social and political structure of the country, but to facilitate the future Ghazwa-e-Hind project for a steady supply line of Muslim fighters from Bangladesh once Jihadi activities had begun in India. The timeframe was closely linked with the hype on the Kashmiri separatist movement.
After the death in a C-130 aircraft crash of Gen Zia-ul-Haq in August 1988 and the formation of a new government led by the Pakistan Peoples’ Party, the era of Jihadist Generals such as Lt Gen Hamid Gul in Pakistani military headquarters came towards an end, and strategies such as Ghazwa-e-Hind transformed into ‘bleed India’ projects became more of a purely functional proxy operation rather than a deep-rooted Jihadi perception. Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami was still the favoured network, but in the late 1990s the Pakistani establishment suddenly stopped pushing Ghazwa-e-Hind. Instead it dreamed of the creation of a greater Pakistan stretching from Afghanistan (from a strategic depth angle) to Bangladesh. The Central Asian module of the military establishment was shelved in the late 1990s. This was the time when theJihadi elements started looking in another direction, although still cooperating with the Pakistani military establishment. A hardline Deobandi Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the great morale booster for Jihadis reared by Pakistan’s military establishment. But the Jihadis were also closely monitoring newly emerging equations. The events of 9/1 1 changed the world, as well as the Jihadi mindset. The ISI’s forward strategyin the 1980s against the Soviet Union (and against India) was ready to deliver the desired national goals on the regional strategic front when 9/11 happened in 2001. But, by that time so many events had taken place that it was Al-Qaeda which benefited from the harvest.
Earlier, thousands of Farghana Valley fighters of ethnic Uzbek, Tajik, and Turkish origin, along with fighters from the Chinese province of Xinjiang and the Republic of Chechnya, gathered in an Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The diaspora from Central Asia and North Caucasus badly needed money, arms, and training to fuel insurgencies in their home regions. The Taliban provided them with sanctuaries, but it did not have enough money to keep its own movement afloat, leave alone fund insurgencies elsewhere. As a result, dozens of Chechens, Uzbeks, and the Chinese left Afghanistan and settled in Turkey. Turkey provided them with housing and money, and encouraged their struggle, although under the strict vigilance of the state’s intelligence apparatus. That situation was unacceptable to commanders such as Juma Namangani and Tahir Yaldochiv of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hassan Mahsum of the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Party (China), who had progressively lost control over their men living in Turkey. But they did not have alternative sources of funding. Al-Qaeda took advantage of this and developed close contact with these groups. It provided them with money and training. Although there is no proof of the organisational attachments of these groups with Al-Qaeda, there is no denying Al Qaeda’s ideological and financial influence over them in the late 1990s. That was the time when the Pakistani Jihadi organisations reared by ISI became a serious threat to India. According to one estimate, between 1980 and 2000 approximately 60,000 Pakistanis and had been trained in different Afghan militant camps, and at the time of 9/11, at least 10,000 Jihadis were active inside J & K (they used to be launched from Pakistan on a rotational basis). These insurgents not only troubled the 400,000 Indian security forces (including Indian Army and police forces) but emboldened the Pakistan Army to orchestrate military adventures like the Kargil Operation in 1999. Militants also dared to hijack IC-814, took it to Kandahar, and then exchanged the passengers with their prisoners who were languishing in Indian jails. The Jihadis also carried out an attack on the Red Fort in Delhi in December 2000 and even planned an attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. Simultaneously, the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami was gaining a firm foothold in Bangladesh at the instigation of the ISI to pave the way for the rout of the pro-India elements there. Harkat carried out an assassination attempt on Sheikh Hasina Wajid and many of her supporters in 2000. This brought India under so much pressure that an alliance that supported a coalition with Pakistan won the Bangladeshi elections in 2001. By the year 2001, strategically speaking, Pakistan had become the most influential country from Central Asia to Bangladesh. It was about to translate that for a better bargain with India as well as Iran and the United States when 9/11 occurred. The entire world changed, and so did Pakistan's strategic objectives.
On December 23, 2005, retired Captain Khurram wrote in an e-mail message to me: Dear Dr. Sahib [the Taliban refer to any person who is reasonably familiar with the English language as Dr, so Khurram and his friends used to call me Dr because I was an English-language journalist], Assalam o alaikum. I started reading your articles a couple of months back and concluded that you are probably amongst those very few analysts who have real insight into the Pakistani Jihadi cadres. I read your last article ‘Armed and dangerous: Taliban Gear Up’, and before making any comment. I would now like to introduce myself. In 2001, I was serving as an assault commander of the elite anti-terrorist Zarrar Coy from Pakistan’s Special Service Group (SSG). 9/11 was a strange volcano. It divided people on strong ideological lines. I was also struck by the Jihadi waves and joined the LeT, whose training in 1998-1999 was revolutionised by a former Zarrar Coy NCO, who on retirement, joined this outfit. His specialised urban assault training proved to be the most important element in the series of fearful LeT Fedayeen attacks on Indian Army installations. The culmination of those attacks came with the deadly attack of the Kalu Chak which brought a furious Indian PM Vajpayee to Jammu beating the war-drum. Shamshad, known as Abu Fahad Ullah, was martyred in 2000, and suddenly there was a lull and stagnancy in the training of the LeT. My brother, a former Army Major, hung up his boots right after 9/11. On his release from service, he joined the LeT. One of my unit officers also followed suit. I joined the outfit soon after, without caring for the consequences. After one year all three of us came out of the LeT, dejected after facing the conspiracies of their leadership. There is enough to say about the extreme hypocrisy, luxuries, and evils of these so called Pakistani Mujahideen leaders, but that isn’t the objective of my e-mail to you. The aim of my writing to you is linked with your article above. Once inside the LeT cadres, I came to know about their tactics, logistics, and black-market activities. Moreover, I learned about the difference in the ideologies and tactics of the different groups, namely Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and the Pakistani Jihadi groups. Terrorism is my favorite topic. The last time I wrote a feature article on this was in The Nation on October 31, 2004. It was about the desperate demonstration of the Chinese hostage rescue. With this background and having studied the tactics of the Tamil Tigers in depth, I would like to make the following comments: You have quoted senior Pakistani security officials, on the condition of anonymity, as saying the Al-Qaeda and Taliban are developing new links with the Tamil Tigers for logistics support. I would like to add that most of the security officials in Pakistan do not have any real insight or understanding on/of these cadres. After 9/11 they have re-moulded the pan-Islamist view of world domination by the Pakistani Mujahideen organisations into a nationalist outlook i.e. liberating Kashmir only. The Pakistani organisations were probably the largest in the world in terms of cadres, logistics, and support base to stop [Mujahideen] from attacking the US interests, against which they had been raising slogans for years. To break this tide from joining Al-Qaeda and Taliban inside Afghanistan was a huge task. The officials can claim some success for this but the real credit goes more to the corrupt leadership inside organisations, rather than the security and the intelligence hierarchy. So, at least I do not believe all they claim. Most of what they say is based on some internet story or book which they have read about insurgency, or a presentation given by them in the past to earn an A grade in a compulsory course. Two Tamil Tigers headed the group responsible for all their big deals—shipments of explosives from Rubizone Chemicals Ukraine, shipments of LMGs, rounds and guns from Russia, SAMS [missiles] from Thailand and Burma. They chartered ships in the corrupt PAN HO LIB [Panama, Honduras and Liberia] territories. They even bribed an Israeli weapons dealer and diverted a shipment of mortar rounds to their bastion of Jaffna. They forged end-user certificates and in many cases used the end-user certificates of third-world armies, e.g. Bangladesh. But all these are memories of the pre-9/1 1 world, when the US counter-terrorist forces had their eyes closed. Where have those happy times disappeared after 2001? What to talk of moving across borders? I know how many obstacles these cadres faced just moving things from city to city. In the given situation, only the Iraqi Al-Qaeda had the ability to operate across borders. Taliban, I really doubt. The sudden upsurge in the Afghan resistance, I feel, is due to the changed policy of Al-Qaeda to exploit Iranian channels from Iraq. If we look at the chronology of attacks in Afghanistan, it doesn’t seem that any kind of advanced weaponry is used anywhere. The changed trend is the adoption of the suicide bombings by the Taliban. The downing of Chinook and other gunships may be attributed to the RPG fire, since it has a history. The only possibility of logistically supporting the Taliban/Al-Qaeda with SAMs is from Iraq via Iran, with Pakistan out, because of the infiltration of the security agents into these organisations, a fact the Al-Qaeda has only lately understood. The Tamil Tigers themselves have been searching hard for the latest weaponry, since the time they were black-listed by Scandinavia, from the Far East, Central America, West Africa to the jungles of Jaffna in the post 9/1 1 scenario. The Al-Qaeda/Taliban can do anything—from killing people to stoning to death, but the one thing they are very strict about is no hashish, no marijuana! I noticed in my one year with them that printing fake money and smuggling was their favourite all-time pastime, but drug-dealing is strictly prohibited through all kinds of ‘Sbaree Fatwas’ issued by the respected Arab Ulema. Anyhow sir, this e-mail is for the sole purpose of letting you know that I am a fan of your articles and wanted to give you my views and bit of personal experience on the topic! I am in the Great Lakes region and importing rice. But I have learned how the Europeans, Americans, and the Israelis are robbing the Congo out of its huge mineral wealth including uranium, which is also an interesting topic! I also lived from 2001 to 2002 in Sierra Leone, West Africa, as a peacekeeper. Once we entered its diamond-rich eastern Kono province to find it was completely out of the control of the capital and the world. How we got weapons back from the rebels, held the elections, made the government, and finally sent the diamond-rich country back into the lap of England. This is also an interesting story which demands your attention.
Thanks and wishing you great writings.
Khurram
D R Congo
Captain Khurram came from a Kashmiri family of the Salafi dispensation. His story is a telling account of how the infusion of Al-Qaeda’s ideology and Islamic ideas convinced some middle-ranking officers in the Pakistan Army to become ‘blood brothers’ and adopt successful war strategies in the South Asian theatre of war. Ritualistically and otherwise, Khurram was a practicing Muslim. He was clear in explaining his religious viewpoints and political convictions on contemporary national issues. This made him particularly popular among his SSG colleagues. When he was deployed to Sierra Leone in 2001 and 2002 as part of the UN peacekeeping mission, he was extremely disturbed about the confusion of the local Muslims there. They were clearly identifiable as Muslims by their names, but they were totally unfamiliar with the details of their faith and obligations as Muslims. Khurram built a mosque and a madrassa in Sierra Leone, despite the opposition of his commander, Brigadier Ahmad Shuja Pasha. (who later became a Lieutenant-General and the Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI). Pakistan’s policy turnaround on the Taliban after the US invasion of Afghanistan had disillusioned the whole of the middle cadre of the country’s armed forces. But unlike his other colleagues, who remained silent critics of the policy, Khurram and his elder brother Major Haroon Aashik decided to take practical steps to rectify this. Haroon, an equally competent officer, took early retirement from the Pakistan Army in 2001 after Pakistan had decided to support the US-led War on Terror. Khurram left the Army in 2003 on his return from Sierra Leone. Both brothers then joined the LeT, but soon realised that the LeT was only a civilian extension of Pakistan’s armed forces.
The events of 9/11 also brought a change in LeT policies concerning Afghanistan. The LeT advised its cadre to stay away from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Haroon and Khurram were not only excellent Army officers, but also concerned Muslims. Thus this became a bone of contention. Haroon’s inspiration came from the Salafi school of thought, and was the result of his reading habits. He extensively read classical Muslim academics like Imam Ibn-e-Tamiyyah, Ibn-e-Khaldoun, and Muhammad Bin Abdul Wahhab. Among modern-day Islamic scholars, he studied the works of the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Syed Qutb, as well as the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Syed Abul Ala Maududi. Additionally, and even after retirement from the Army, Haroon continued to read up on military strategies in military journals and through extensive internet surfing. Haroon never kept his criticism of the Pakistan Army a secret. He was a vocal critic of the country’s armed forces. He visited his old military comrades frequently and taunted them on their weak Islamic beliefs, and for serving in Pakistan’s armed forces, which he considered a continuation of the old British colonial army. He often cited the example of how the Frontier Corps still showcases its wars against ‘tribal insurgents’ like Haji Saheb Taragzai and the Faqir of Ipi, who had fought against the British Indian forces before independence. Haroon motivated his former colleagues to leave the Army, referring to it as a purely mercenary force. He advised them to do something else for a living. Several of his colleagues took his advice seriously and left the Pakistan Army. In the meantime, Haroon had found a new comrade in Commander Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri, a veteran Kashmiri fighter, who had been roughed up by Pakistan’s armed forces time and again. He decided to sever his ties with the Kashmiri struggle and move to North Waziristan with his family.
Major Abdul Rahman was another officer who resigned from Pakistan’s armed forces and joined Maj Haroon. Their first and foremost aim at the time was to go to Afghanistan to fight against the NATO troops there. Khurram and Rahman then went to the Afghan province of Helmand and fought against the British troops. Khurram died in the battle in Helmand province in 2007. Rahman came back alive, but alone. Khurram’s death became a source of inspiration for both Haroon and Rahman. Haroon was by now seriously involved in Afghanistan. He saw the death of his brother as martyrdom and dedicated his life to the Afghan resistance against the NATO forces. By 2006, Kashmiri was part of Al-Qaeda’s Shura and his 313 Brigade came under Al-Qaeda's discipline. Soon after, Haroon reduced his business engagements and frequently journeyed to South and North Waziristan to take part in guerrilla operations against NATO forces in Afghanistan. Haroon had fought in the Kargil war in 1999 and often cited the cowardice of the Pakistani officers. He was convinced that the Pakistan Army was incapable of fighting any major battle. Haroon’s exposure to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda had fired his imagination. The ‘soldier with a mission’ stood up in him. He engaged in extensive physical training and made himself super-fit. His relations with Al-Qaeda grew and he soon became part of its inner circle. The fusion of Al-Qaeda’s ideology and his own commitment and capabilities as a professionally trained army officer saw him loom large in the South Asian theatre of war. Haroon began evaluating the Afghan war theatre from a new perspective. Thousands of brave Taliban, ready to kill or to be killed, stood before him, but their obsolete guerrilla tactics prevented them from emerging on top. The Taliban made a successful comeback in 2006 in Afghanistan, but their casualty rate was very high. At least 2,000 Taliban fighters were killed in the spring offensive of that year, while NATO’s casualties were less than 200. Haroon was convinced that if the Taliban clung to old war techniques, the aerial firepower and military machine of the US would eliminate them by 2008. There was a need to develop novel guerrilla tactics through new schools of thought with the fighters oriented to new disciplines. Haroon felt that the Arab guerrilla fighters had a better sense of war than the Taliban but their ideas were limited. They did not have the capacity to strategise the war to advantage the Taliban. Rahman and Haroon jointly worked on this. They went to libraries and studied the most successful guerrilla battles against the United States in Vietnam. After extensive reading, both concluded that without more advanced weapons and improved strategy, success in Afghanistan could not be achieved. Haroon then went to North Waziristan and gave his presentation to senior Al-Qaeda commanders. He laid out two models of insurgencies, one related to Vietnamese guerillas operating against the US, and the other to the Tamil Tigers operating against the government of Sri Lanka.
He advocated that a start be made in the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika, with a three-pronged Tet-type offensive strategy, similar to the one that Gen Giap had used in North Vietnam in the 1960s to defeat the US. He proposed that the first phase of operations involve armed opposition to the NATO forces in these provinces. In the second phase, the militants would target isolated security posts and military personnel. Militants would capture and hold these isolated posts for 24 to 48 hours and then melt away. In the third phase, they would spread the insurgency to urban areas and the federal capital. Haroon emphasized that the central idea of Gen Giap’s strategy was to catch the enemy by surprise, and he placed emphasis on the training of select warriors for special operations. They were to use sophisticated arms acquired by insiders. The Arab militants paid close attention to Haroon’s presentation and discussed it with regional commanders such as Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Nazir. (The strategy was later successfully employed in Pakistan’s tribal areas against Pakistan’s armed forces.) Haroon developed a ‘guerrilla’ mortar gun of a type available only to some of the world’s more advanced military forces. The gun was so small it could be hidden in a medium-sized luggage bag. Unlike the normal mortar gun, the length of which makes it difficult to hide, this gun could be transported easily. Haroon also developed a silencer for the AK-47, hitherto available only to a select few internationally. This became an essential component of Al-Qaeda’s special guerrilla operations. He then visited China to procure night-vision devices (NVD). The biggest task was to clear them through the Customs in Pakistan. Haroon called on his friend Captain Farooq, who was President Musharraf’s security officer. Farooq went to the airport in the President’s official car and received Haroon at the immigration counter. In the presence of Farooq, nobody dared touch Haroon’s luggage, and the NVDs arrived in Pakistan without any hassle. (Farooq was a member of the Hizbut Tahrir, a fact discovered by the military intelligence as late as nine months after his posting as Musharraf’s security officer. After being spotted, he was briefly arrested and then retired from the Pakistan Army.) Once a level of sophistication had been reached, the Mujahideen prepared for special operations. The combatants for these operations all emanated from North Waziristan. An attack on the Serena Hotel Kabul in January 2008, a Taliban strike on the national day parade in April 2008 in Kabul, multiple bombing attacks in Khost in May 2009, and an attack on the Kamdesh US base in Kunar in September 2009, are just a few examples of the successful guerrilla operations they launched. In most cases, the Taliban donned Afghan armed forces or Afghan Police uniforms, and in almost every attack they had insiders providing them with information on the targetted complexes’ entry and exit points.
Neither Haroon nor Kashmiri favoured gathering adherents randomly for these special operations. They recruited the best and most ideologically motivated youths to their 313 Brigade. These youths were given special guerrilla training, including swimming and karate lessons, shooting and ambush techniques, and were familiarised with explosive devises as well as reconnaissance. The 313 Brigade fell strictly under Kashmiri’s control. The role of Al-Qaeda's Laskhar al-Zil (Shadow Army) was to coordinate with other groups. Several different groups of the Mujabideen were then inducted into the Laskhar al-Zil. Haroon had the Taliban widen their war perspectives. He then presented his most important assessment of future operational procedures to Kashmiri and Al-Qaeda’s other leaders. This was a comprehensive plan to sever the NATO supply line of containers from the port of Karachi to Afghanistan. Of these shipments, 80% go through Pakistan’s tribal area to the Khyber Agency and 20% use the Chaman-Kandahar route. Haroon next planned a masterstroke to organise attacks on NATO supplies running through Pakistan into Afghanistan in January 2008. The focal point was the Khyber Agency. This key transit point accounted for most of the NATO supplies needed to battle the Afghan insurgency. Laskhar al-Zil was assigned to execute the plan. Ustad Yasir, an Afghan, was appointed in the Khyber Agency as the project head. The chief of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Hakeemullah Mehsud, although then only an ordinary foot solider, was sent from South Waziristan to coordinate the action. Al-Qaeda knew that Laskhar al-Zil operations in the Khyber Agency would not receive any support from the locals as the majority of the population of the Khyber Agency belongs to the anti-Taliban Barelvi school of thought, which believes in Sufism. There were several local groups from the Deobandi School (a pro-Taliban Muslim sect in Pakistan), but they had good relations with the Pakistan Army and local tribes who stood against creating a law-and-order situation. Haroon suggested that Laskhar al-Zil establish its sanctuaries in the neighbouring Orakzai Agency and make Dara Adam Khail its base. His strategy aimed at pressurising the local tribesmen to remain neutral in the Taliban attacks on NATO convoys. Future Taliban attacks were then launched from the Orakzai Agency on a daily basis. Later militants succeeded in establishing their own strong pockets in the Khyber Agency in 2009-10. Suicide attacks followed. In one, the warlord Haji Namdar, who had initially been the local facilitator for attacking the NATO supply line, and who had supported the Pakistan Army against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the Khyber Agency, was killed. The other powerful warlord of the area, Mangal Bagh, learned from this lesson and remained neutral. The Taliban attacks rose to the point of Pakistan having to close its borders several times in December 2008. Haroon next contemplated widening the attacks on NATO supplies. He was convinced that this would be the key to NATO’s defeat in Afghanistan. He visited Karachi several times, and set up efficient teams there to monitor the movement of NATO’s shipments arriving at the port. These teams were to study how the NATO shipments were passed on to the various contractors. Each and every detail was closely examined, including the companies which had the contracts for the shipments. Several contractors were abducted in Karachi and the rest given warnings to break with NATO, or suffer the consequences. NATO commanders were taken aback by these new developments, and more so when in the last months of 2008, the Taliban virtually stopped their attacks across Pakistan and Afghanistan and shifted their entire focus towards blowing up NATO supply arteries. In Karachi, most of the contractors had been abducted, or were on the run. At the Peshawar terminal, almost every other day the Taliban suddenly appeared, carried out rocket attacks on NATO convoys, and disappeared into the Khyber Agency. Almost every day 20 to 40 NATO convoys were set on fire or looted.
The Pakistani Taliban released a picture to the Pakistani press of a US Humvee being used by the Taliban in the Orakzai Agency. This sent shock waves through Western capitals. The stories published in the international press of missing NATO aircraft engines said to be in the possession of the Taliban added to Westerners' concerns. The NATO command wondered who was guiding the Taliban. The immediate suspect was the Pakistani military establishment, but there was no hard evidence of this. Western intelligence fully examined the profiles of all the leading Arab commanders in North Waziristan and those who had been commanding the Taliban in Afghanistan, but was unable to track anyone with the required knowledge or skill to successfully pursue this strategy. The rising shortage of supplies in the provinces of Helmand, Ghazni, and Wardak seriously affected the patrol capabilities of NATO forces during the latter months of 2008. In April 2008, NATO struck a deal with Russia in Bucharest to send its supplies through Russia and Central Asia. On the sidelines of the 45th Munich Summit in February 2009, an agreement was simultaneously reached between Iran and United States for Iran to allow some non-military NATO shipments through the port of Chabahar. Permission for supplies through Iran, however, was given only to individual countries like Italy, France, and the United Kingdom - not NATO as a whole. But neither of these routes proved an economically viable alternative to the Khyber Agency route, through which 70 percent of NATO supplies still moved.
Haroon wrote me an e-mail after the Bucharest conference in April 2008, citing Wikipedia. He also sent a map in another e=mail: A landlocked country, surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries, may be called a ‘doubly landlocked’ country. A person in such a country has to cross at least two borders to reach a coastline. There are only two such countries in the world: Liechtenstein in Central Europe. Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Uzbekistan has borders with four countries—Turkmenistan to the southwest, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south and east, with Kazakhstan and the Aral Sea to the north—that border the landlocked salt-water Caspian Sea, from which ships can reach the Sea of Azov by using the Volga-Don Canal, and thus the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the oceans. There was no doubly landlocked country in the world after the 1871 Unification of Germany until the end of World War-I. This was because Uzbekistan was part of the then Soviet Union; while Liechtenstein borders Austria, which had an Adriatic coast until 1918. Haroon’s assessment was correct. NATO tried to move its supplies on the Central Asian routes to northern Afghanistan, but was not able to transport more than 10 to 15% of its requirements because of the much higher cost of transportation cost through the ‘doubly landlocked’ region. Pakistan remained the main supply route.
Maj Haroon was elated. He was playing the role of a General. This was something he could never have achieved in the regular Army, given his time of service. He bought a non-custom Pajero off-road vehicle from North Waziristan at the dirt-cheap price of PKR 125,000 and used it to travel through North Waziristan to Karachi. When night fell, he stayed in Army messes in the countryside. Being an ex-Army officer, he was allowed that facility. He always kept his Army-issued revolver on him with lots of bullets in case he was obstructed at any checkpoint, but his imposing bearing and unmistakable military accent in both English and Urdu always prevented this from happening. With his success in evading identification and capture, he looked forward to broadening both his, and through him Al-Qaeda’s, network. Every visit brought forward new comrades. Most of them were from the LeT, a few from other Jihadi outfits, but there were a number from the Pakistan Army as well. Through his close connections in the Pakistan Army, Haroon was able to develop an effective intelligence network. In 2007 he became aware that the US had taken a new view on the South Asian terror war, and had arrived at the conclusion that the problem lay in Pakistan. The US did not want a partnership with the Pakistan Army to defeat the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, it wanted to place US personnel inside the Pakistan Army to fight it. In 2008 the US took over some bases in Pakistan in order to launch Predator drone attacks against Al-Qaeda in Pakistani tribal areas. The same year the US bought land in Tarbela, 20km from Islamabad, and allocated US$1 billion for the extension of the US embassy in Pakistan’s capital. Earlier, in 2007, US war contractors had arrived in Pakistan. They interviewed and selected a group of Frontier Corps personnel to be trained as a counter-insurgency force. In Pakistan’s ISI, a counter-terrorism cell was established, with the officers to be trained in the US. They were to visit the US at regular intervals to allow the US administration to assess them and their conviction about fighting the War on Terror. The US establishment focused on making personal contacts at all levels in the Pakistan Army to set the stage for a conclusive war effort against Al-Qaeda. Haroon was privy to all of this, and busied himself working on a strategy to generate a crisis in the Pakistan Army. His avowed aim was to have the Pakistan Army sever all ties with the US. Using terror tactics was the only way Haroon knew to jolt the conscience of his former comrades-in-arms. He made a list of the senior ranking Army officers involved in anti-terror activities, and decided to make a horrible example of them to deter others from joining the US. The name of retired Maj Gen Ameer Faisal Alvi came to mind. Faisal had commanded SSG operations in Angor Ada on October 2, 2003 when 2,500 commandos had been airlifted into the village of Baghar, located near Angor Ada, with aerial support from 12 helicopter gunships. According to local residents, some of the helicopters flew from the Machdad Kot US air base from across the border in Afghanistan. Witnesses reported that 31 Pakistani soldiers and 13 foreign fighters and local tribesmen were killed in the action. A large number of Taliban combatants fled. In that operation several high-profile Al-Qaeda commanders, including Abdul Rahman Kennedy, were killed. Several others were arrested and transported to Guantanamo Bay. The attack was burned into the mind of Al-Qaeda and it mulled over the setback, especially since as, at that time, there had been no open hostility between it and Pakistan. Tracing the address of Alvi, who was British-born, was not a problem. After developing personal differences with the then Chief of the Army Staff, Gen Musharraf, Alvi had been forcibly retired from the Pakistan Army. After his retirement he worked as the CEO and Executive Director of Redtone Telecommunication Pakistan Ltd, a private telecommunications company in Pakistan. On November 19, 2008 while he was on his way to work, Haroon followed him. His plan was to waylay the retired General when he slowed down at a speed breaker near the PWD colony in Islamabad, where the General’s passage would be obstructed by two accomplices. Everything went according to plan. Haroon jumped out of his car and killed Alvi with his Army revolver. The murder sent shock-waves through the military rank and file. Intelligence outfits could read the fine print: both former and serving Army personnel were to be future targets. But they remained tight-lipped. The murder of Alvi was not Haroon’s sole mission, he was on the lookout for similar targets. The killing of the retired Army official was not purely an act of vengeance, it was to serve as a reminder to the serving military cadre that one day they too would retire and could suffer a similar fate. However, there was more to Haroon than being just an assassin. He was rapidly re-organising the aft cadre of the Jihadis and changing their mindset to fight a more disciplined war against the US.
The first time I met Maj Haroon was at his Lahore residence in September 2007. He was clearly a religious person from his appearance. He had a long beard and wore a prayer cap and the traditional Pakistani shalwar-qameez (a unisex form of dress similar in manner to the shirt and pants worn by Westerners). When I met with him later, I found a different person. He had trimmed his beard, shed some weight, and wore Western attire. But in his private life Haroon was a devout Muslim. At one time he came to visit me at the Avari Towers Hotel in Lahore and said his prayers in my room. There were pictures on one wall of the room, and he covered them all with a sheet as he considered them prohibited under Islam. Haroon was closely watching developments in Pakistan. He was in touch with all of his former colleagues in the armed forces (except those who were part of the military operations), including a Major General who was the officer commanding the garrison in Peshawar. The General had tried to reach Haroon many times to condole with him on the death of his brother Khurram, but Haroon had not responded. Meanwhile Haroon was getting information on expanding US influence from his old Army colleagues. Being an avid internet surfer and book reader, he was well-informed about state apparatus procedures, their manipulations and strategies. He focussed on altered plans to counter them before the state could use them. He realised that if the US continued to enjoy the success it had had up till then, Pakistan’s Army would ultimately have no choice but to bow down to it. The US was already promoting a role for India in Afghanistan as a countervailing force to Pakistan. Haroon knew the US was playing on the existing rivalry between India and Pakistan to encourage Pakistan to engage more fully in the US War on Terror. He saw this as a carrot-and-stick game aimed at luring the Pakistan Army into the trap of committing itself to fight the Jihadis. From 2007 onwards, Haroon worked on a counter-strategy along with his Ameer (commander), Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. The essence of this strategy was to expand the terror war into India. In the first phase Haroon aimed to conduct a 9/11 type event in India, which he thought would surely lead India to declare war on Pakistan. Haroon assessed that once that happened, the Pakistan Army would have no choice but to pull its troops out of the military operations against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on its western front. Haroon assigned Major Abdul Rahman, the close friend and former colleague of his slain brother Captain Khurram, for the Indian operation. Rahman was a living encyclopedia on Indian affairs. Haroon then set up an India cell and worked to expand the network to its maximum limits. Haroon had left the LeT but was still in touch with its field commanders. He was aware of the LeT’s strengths and weaknesses. The LeT’s main strength was its connection with Pakistan’s military establishment and its resources. Its weakness was limited vision. Haroon would often discuss these aspects with the LeT commanders, who considered him a totally trustworthy person because he was a Salafi as well as a retired Army officer. Haroon used his connections for the execution of Al-Qaeda’s plan. He was aware that in late 2007 the ISI had decided on the launch of a new uprising inside J & K and LeT was to be used for it. Funds were allocated and LeT was given the green light by the ISI to launch the operation. That was the routine proxy war plan. But after the fencing of the LoC, the infiltration of terrorists into India became difficult. The LeT then had to use the deserted coastal area of Thatta (in the southern Sindh province of Pakistan) to move its fighters into India. From there they moved on into J & K.
Haroon met with a LeT commander, Abu Hamza, and advised him not to waste his time and resources on futile exercises inside India. He told Abu Hamza that he would draw up a more effective strategy for the cause. Haroon next turned to his expert on India, Rahman, to brief him more fully on the country. Rahman had visited India many times. He had photographs and maps of all the important targets in India. He identified the areas in Mumbai where Caucasian foreigners lived, like Nariman House and the Taj Mahal Hotel. Haroon informed Abu Hamza that they would travel on a Pakistani boat initially and then capture an Indian trawler to land from. He told Abu Hamza that once they were in position to launch a massive operation it would force India to the negotiating table to discuss an advantageous settlement on J & K. Abu Hamza forwarded the plan to the LeT commander-in-chief Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, who immediately left for Karachi to organise the operation. Lakhvi spent two months in preparation before the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai. He worked night and day to select and train the combatants who were to carry out the mission. When the selected combatants were thought to be fully prepared to proceed precisely along the lines of Haroon’s plan, they were launched. Haroon devised the mechanism of indirect communication for Abu Hamza, drawing the guidelines for instructions to the infiltrators, which were conveyed from countries other than Pakistan. The Mumbai attacks stunned the whole world. The event was a great test for India as the regional superpower. One of the attackers, Ajmal Kasab, was taken alive, and during his grilling he told his Indian captors the whole story of how, where, and when he had been given his training. All links led to Pakistan, and India geared itself for a limited war on Pakistan, which was to include air strikes on LeT camps in Muzaffarabad, in PoK, the LeT headquarters in Muridke, in Pakistani Punjab, and its seminaries in Lahore. This could have been the beginning of a fourth India-Pakistan war.
Al-Qaeda’s objective in undertaking the Mumbai 26/11 attack was to provoke a war between Pakistan and India. All hostilities between the Pakistan Army and the terrorists would then come to a halt in the Swat Valley in Pakistan’s KPK province, as well as in the tribal areas of Bajaur, Mohmand, and the two Waziristans. Pakistani Taliban leaders Mullah Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud announced that they would fight alongside Pakistan‘s armed forces in an India-Pakistan war, and the Director-General of ISI, Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, confirmed this understanding in his briefing to national and foreign correspondents, when he called Fazlullah and Baitullah Mehsud Pakistan’s strategic assets. The stage was all set to change the dynamics of enmity and friend-ship in the region when Washington put its foot down. Washington hurriedly sent several officials to India and Pakistan to advise their governments that any war between them would only benefit the terrosists. Washington assured India that Pakistan would cooperate fully in the investigation of the Mumbai attacks and arrest those who had been responsible for their planning. Watching his plan fail, Haroon advised Rahman to use another approach for the 313 Brigade. LeT structures were now under siege because of US pressure on Pakistan, and hence of little value. Rahman journeyed to India again to acquire more information and photograph sensitive installations. These included India’s nuclear research laboratories in Mumbai and Hyderabad. He also took photographs of the National Defence College, India’s Parliament building, and some other high-profile government offices in Delhi. Rahman always drew up a contingency plan for assaults on different targets. In this case, if the terrorists were unable to hit India’s National Defense College during the day when several senior military officials were present, they were instead to attack the Indian Parliament. Rahman was arrested after a 313 Brigade combatant, Zahid Iqbal, was picked up by the ISI in Islamabad on July 2009 and identified him. But as he had not been involved in any terrorist act in Pakistan, he was released and soon back at work planning the sabotage operations in India using the 313 Brigade. However, information was leaked to the FBI before he could proceed with the action, and the entire team, including Rahman, was captured.
In October 2009 a conspiracy was unearthed in Chicago by the FBI. Two suspects were arrested, David Headley and Tahawwur Rana. Their interrogations revealed that they had been planning to attack the National Defence College in Delhi and India’s nuclear facilities. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which had published allegedly blasphemous cartoons featuring the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him), was also on the hit-list. The conspirators all belonged to Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade. Their affidavit exposed the roles of Major Haroon and his aide Abdul Rahman in the recruitment and orientation process. Kashmiri was optimistic about giving India a far bigger jolt than the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai when I interviewed him on October 9, 2009. “So should the world expect more Mumbai-like attacks?” I asked. “That was nothing compared to what we have planned for the future,” he replied.
Extracts from the FBI’s affidavit: After visiting Denmark in January 2009 [David] Headley travelled to Pakistan to meet with Individual A. During this trip, Headley travelled with Individual A to the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) region in north-west Pakistan and met with (Ilyas) Kashmiri. Headley returned to Chicago in mid-June 2009. Following Headley’s return from Pakistan, Headley communicated by e-mail with LeT Member A regarding the status of the Northern Project. Because LeT Member A responded that he had “new investment plans”, coded language for the planning of a different attack, Headley and Individual A began to focus on working with Kashmiri to complete the attack on the newspaper. In late July 2009. Headley travelled again to Copenhagen, Denmark, and to other locations in Europe. When Headley returned to the US, he told a Customs and Border Patrol inspector that he was travelling on business as a representative of an immigration business. Headley’s luggage contained no papers or other documents relating to such business. Following Headley’s return to Chicago in August 2009, Headley used coded language to inquire of Individual A on multiple occasions whether Individual A had been in touch with Kashmiri regarding planning for the attack. Headley expressed concern that Individual A’s communications with Kashmiri had been cut off. In early September 2009, Individual A called Headley to report that Kashmiri might be dead. Headley expressed dismay and concern, and said that Kashmiri’s death means “our company has gone into bankruptcy then,” and that “the projects and so forth will go into suspension.” Shortly after initial press reports that Kashmiri had been killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, Headley and- Individual A had a series of coded conversations in which they discussed the reports of Kashmiri’s death and the significance of Kashmiri’s death for the projects they were planning. Individual A sought to reassure and encourage Headley, telling him, among other things, that “This is business sir; these types of things happen.” According to the affidavit, Headley also talked about A’s friend “Harry.” A was Major Abdul Rahman, who was in charge of the India cell, and Harry, his friend, was Major Haroon.
Before the arrest of Rahman, Haroon had approached his LeT and Army friends. He convinced them to take part in the battle against NATO in Afghanistan. He took them to the Pakistani tribal areas and trained them in modern guerrilla warfare. In a matter of a few years the 313 Brigade came to be held in high regard in Jihadi circles for its expertise and resourcefulness. However, as more missions appeared on the horizon, more resources were required. Money had always been lacking for the war, and Haroon was now facing a situation in which he did not even have enough money to buy fuel for his car, let alone pay hotel bills during his travels. To keep going, he sold his Corolla station wagon and resorted to a modest style of living. At one point he sold his AK-47 silencers in the Dara Adam Khail market, but even that did not generate enough money. Their monetary situation forced Haroon and Kashmiri to think of an alternative strategy. This was kidnapping for ransom. However, they would only abduct non-Muslims. Haroon came to Karachi and contacted an old army friend, retired Major Abdul Basit. The only help Haroon sought from Basit was to spy on Satish Anand, a renowned film producer. Satish is a Hindu, an uncle of the famous Indian actor Juhi Chawla and son of the renowned film distributor Jagdish Anand. With the information he had received from Basit, Haroon came back to Karachi and abducted Satish for ransom, thinking his family to be rich. He took the film distributor to North Waziristan, only to discover that all the estimates about his money were wrong. Satish did not have liquid funds. He owned properties but in captivity he could not sell them. Satish was told to contact his family-members and ask them to raise a ransom, but it was to no avail. The abductors then made Satish an offer: they would release him if he embraced Islam. They did not kill Muslims. Satish embraced Islam and promised to make a documentary on the militants. It is still a mystery whether or not any money was paid for his release, and if so how much, but what is true is that Satish came back safely to Karachi and refused to register any case against his abductors. He was also tight-lipped about their identities. Haroon was eventually arrested in February 2009 in Islamabad while he was trying to abduct Sarwar Khan, a member of the Qadyani sect. (The Qadyanis are considered non-Muslims under Pakistan’s Constitution.) Several cases, including the murder of Faisal Alvi, were then lodged against Haroon. Haroon had served under some leading military officers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Staff Committee, Gen Tariq Majeed (now retired), while his brother Khurram had served under the Director-General of ISI, Lt Gen Shuja Pasha. I am sure that the Pakistan Army command, who knew of their professional skills, would miss these two brothers, very much like the Saudi establishment might have missed Osama bin Laden. These are the stories of Islamists pushed by circumstances onto a particular track, and then indoctrinated. They then became counterproductive, if not useless, for Muslim establishments that decide to go along with the US designs of a new world order in the post-Cold War era.
On March 3, 2009, only a week after Haroon’s arrest in Islamabad, around ten gunmen attacked a bus carrying the Sri Lankan cricket team on its way to play in Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore. The pattern of the attack suggested that the attackers had no intention of killing the cricketers, as they sprayed bullets only on the escorting policemen. When the policemen fled, the gunmen tried to hijack the bus. This was prevented by the bus driver who kept his wits about him and drove the vehicle past the gunmen to safety. Six of the policemen escorting the team bus were killed, and seven crick- etersand an assistant coach were injured in the attempted hijack. Rocket launchers and grenades were left on the site of shooting, as were water bottles and dried fruit. Officials said the incident bore similarities to the deadly November attacks in Mumbai. ISI claimed the incident was an action taken by militants trained by Haroon, and that the intention was to capture the cricketers and hold them hostage until they could be exchanged for the captive commander.
All the Western strategic experts wondered how Taliban’s rag-tag militia, which was on the verge of collapse, had in a few short years rehabilitated itself and come up with hugely effective guerrilla tactics. These strategists wondered how the guerrillas’ skills, which had been virtually non-existent till 2005, had suddenly transformed. NATO failed to comprehend that there could be a strategist behind the change. That strategist was Haroon, who had been shuttling continuously between Pakistan’s tribal areas in the two Waziristans and Karachi, undetected. In Al-Qaeda circles Haroon is today held in as high regard as Abu Hafs (killed in 2001) for his military operations and strategy. While walking on the sandy shores of the Arabian Sea near my Karachi sea-view residence with Haroon, it was hard for me to believe that this was the person who had moved the internal dynamics of the war in South Asia from Afghanistan to India. Like al-Zawahiri, Haroon’s whole life was the movement. Every part of his mind was focused on formulating a strategy to win the war against NATO. While walking near Karachi’s Clifton beach he never once appeared to enjoy or comment on the cool breeze, or the sight of the awesome waves. Instead his eyes were rivetted on the oil terminal as he pondered strategies to block NATO’s shipments from the port in Karachi to land-locked Afghanistan. Haroon shared his thoughts with me every time he came to Karachi in 2008, when I was living in the city. He said: Dr Saab, the victory of Khurasan is near. I am certain that if the Mujahideen succeed in severing the NATO supply-lines from Pakistan by 2008, NATO will be left with no choice but to withdraw by 2009. And, if the supply-line is cut by 2010, NATO will leave Afghanistan by 2011. This strategy is of critical importance in this war game. NATO’s claim of an alternative supply route through Central Asia is a joke. It is so long and complicated that the economy of the whole of Europe and the United States would collapse under the financial strain. The only other option is to move the NATO shipments to Iran. But if you study history, you will see that relations between the ancient Persian Empire and Roman Empire were strained. Similarly, in this battle, although Iran facilitated the US invasion of Afghanistan against the Taliban, it is still looking to defeat America and its NATO allies. I don’t think that Iran would allow NATO any permanent route for its supplies through its territory.
Haroon saw the climax of the battle coming in 2012: This is the time the Mahdi [the ultimate reformist leader] will make his presence felt. By all the reckonings and the estimates of Muslim scholars he has already been born. By 2012, he will come forward to command the Muslim forces in the Middle East and defeat the Western forces led by the Anti-Christ [Dajjal\. I used to spend hours walking with Haroon on the sea shore in the evenings, trying to understand the Al-Qaeda perspective on various issues. It was doubly perplexing for me that while the West doubted the loyalty of the Pakistan Army in the War on Terror in Afghanistan, believing it to be hand-in-glove with the Taliban, the Taliban were repeatedly attacking Pakistan’s armed forces, believing their loyalties were pro-West. Haroon was the perfect source of enlightenment on this, as not only was he a former officer of the Pakistan Army, he had also personally served under the command of several leading Generals, including Gen Tariq Majeed. Haroon said: “Their [the Pakistan Army’s] support to the Afghan Taliban is purely tactical. It does not come from any conviction. This kind of support to the insurgencies in neighbouring countries is given by states for its nuisance value—and to gain influence in the region. The Pakistan Army also supports LeT, but only as the means of waging a proxy war against India. India does the same with its fifth columnists in Pakistan. If the situation changes, the Army will also change its policies on India. For instance, the ISI used to launch LeT men in Calcutta [India] for acts of sabotage. These men were always arrested. Some because of their long beards, some because of the Salafi rituals they practiced, and some because of the language they conversed in. Whenever they carried out an operation, they were found and arrested. The Pakistani intelligence agencies wondered why ISI operations in India were always exposed while Indian proxy operations in Pakistan never came to light. The reason became clear to them later. The Indian saboteurs in Pakistan were rarely Indian. The Indian intelligence hired Pakistanis as their proxies. Pakistan decided do the same, and in 2007 and 2008 it used the Indian underworld to carry out bomb blasts in Delhi and other places. For the first time the Indian security agencies were clueless about the origin of the saboteurs. Now Pakistan does not need or want to use the LeT any more”. “But if that is the case, what prevents Pakistan from completely dismantling LeT?” I asked. He answered: “They still require LeT for many reasons. First, after their U-turn following 9/11, Pakistan lost its Islamist allies one by one. LeT is their only ally in Pakistan. There is one major reason for this. The Pakistan Army is culturally Punjabi. Approximately 60% of its strength comes from the rural areas of Punjab. LeT comes from the same background. LeT is from the Ahle-Hadith school of thought [the South Asian version of the Saudi Wahhabi school] and in this school of thought khuruj [revolt] is not allowed. In other words, LeT is a pro-establishment group. The Pakistan Army does not feel threatened by it.”
Comparison between the various Muslim societies and the successes or the failures of local insurgency movements was Haroon’s other favourite topic. “Dr Sahib, Islam is a universal message for all of mankind, but it does not ignore local themes, culture and traditions,” he remarked when we discussed the philosophy of Michael Aflaq, the founder of Arab Baath Party, and how Islam was practiced by Saddam Hussein in both letter and spirit. “But isn’t it against the basic spirit of Islam to paint this great religion in a narrow perspective of Arab nationalism, as did Michael Aflaq and Saddam Hussain?” I argued. He answered: Dr Sahib, there is no denying the fact that Islam is culturally Arab, but I don’t think that there is any harm if somebody supports the Islamic state on the basis of Arab nationalism. That happened in the time of Umar Bin Khattab [the second Muslim Caliph and the Prophet Muhammad’s companion], when he gained the support of some Iraqi Arab tribes on the basis of Arab nationalism during the war against the Iranian imperialism. “Then what do you think of the Muslim Brotherhood, which condemns Arab nationalism and the Baath ideology?” I asked. “I don't know enough about their perspectives, but I do believe that in wars for the protection of an Islamic state, nationalist themes can be used,” Haroon replied. I often confessed to Haroon that I could not understand the rationale of wars in which thousands of non-combatants are killed. His answer was: Big causes demand big sacrifices. History witnesses that innocent people are often killed in wars and otherwise. In peace they are crushed by the tyrannical systems. Life is only for those who chose to play an active role on one side of the fence or the other. The rest are anyway caught in no-man's land.
Haroon is now in Adyala jail, Rawalpindi. The senior police officer who interrogated him and exchanged notes with me admitted he was impressed with him, and is at a loss to understand how Haroon got himself arrested for a crime like abduction for ransom. He quotes Haroon frequently and is proud he has had the chance to meet such a revolutionary in his lifetime. He wondered why Haroon’s life is such an under-reported story. Haroon continues to share his views on the need to defeat NATO forces in Afghanistan with his interrogators. Sometimes the loneliness and the emptiness of jail depress him, but his convictions bring him back to the world, and he lives for another day. His is another story of Al-Qaeda’s One Thousand and One Nights tales which lead to the promised ‘End of Time’ battles. Meanwhile his colleagues in Waziristan look forward to his coming back to the tribal theater of war. They are convinced that his ideas and presence would lead them to victory.
Al-Qaeda was looking for a person who was a master of guerrilla warfare with a global perspective, someone able to think over and above his own personal interests. Once again a crisis in the Kashmiri militants' camp provided it with an opportunity to benefit and to breathe its soul into a new order. This came with the attack on the Pakistani President Musharraf in late 2003, which resulted in a massive crackdown on the Pakistani Mijahideen fighting for the right for self-determination in J & K. During the course of investigations, any shred of doubt about a person was enough to nail anybody connected with Jihadi circles, no matter how well-connected he was with Pakistan’s military establishment. The supreme commander of Jaish-e-Mohammad, Abdullah Shah Mazhar, was one of the people picked by the ISI when it found a person by the name of Asif Chotu financing the attack. Asif had once been a member of Jaish-e-Mohammad. He later joined Al-Qaeda. Abdullah Shah Mazhar gave me this account of his days in detention: I was picked up from Karachi and taken in a vehicle. The last building I saw was the Sultan Mosque in the Defence Housing Authority. After that I was blindfolded and taken to a bungalow. I was offered good food and treated with all good manners. I was asked few questions about Asif and how much I knew of him, and my possible involvement in attacking Gen Musharraf. I told them categorically that although Asif and I had studied together in a madrassa, I knew nothing of his activities, and nor was I involved in his purported plot to assassinate Gen Musharraf. The military officer told me that I had three days to think, after which he would hand me over to people who would not be nice to me. My answer remained the same: I had no idea what Asif Chotu had been up to. Abdullah said that in next three days he was shifted to another location, which was a military barracks: Nobody came to see me except for a person who used to give me food and water. Then one day I was taken to the airport and to another city, possibly Lahore. There I was not asked a single question. They simply hanged me from the roof as a butcher hangs a chicken before slaughter—my hands and legs were tied together with a rope and I was strung up to a roof. Each muscle and bone of the body cried with pain. After an hour they pulled me down and then took off my shalwar (Pakistani trousers) and beat me on my hips with a thin cane. Each hit of the cane ripped off my skin. Throughout this time nobody spoke to me. When I was near-unconscious, I was shifted to a small cell. After a few hours a man came, slid the small window in the door open, and asked me to give him my hand. I gave my hand and he put some ointment into it and told me to spread the ointment over my wounds. Abdullah said that after this, there was a brief interrogation session, then he was left in isolation. He was given a chamber pot to use as a toilet. After six months he was declared innocent. A Brigadier came to him and tendered his apology for the harsh treatment. He offered monetary compensation, which Abdullah refused with thanks. Abdullah then returned to Karachi and became engaged in routine work, without any thought of revenge. But there were other people like Ibne Amin (real name Bin Yameen) from Swat who were detained in the same detention cells and refused to forget the vicious treatment meted out to them. Ibne Amin later became the most influential Taliban commander in the Swat Valley.
Another person, who, unlike Mazhar, adopted the path of defiance against the state of Pakistan was Commander Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. His name still terrifies the Indian military establishment. Among the guerrilla commanders of today’s world nobody has attained the type of success Kashmiri had as a field commander. His track record and his complete submission to Al-Qaeda impressed the Al-Qaeda leaders. He was quickly included in Al-Qaeda’s Sbura and later given command of Al-Qaeda’s operations. This was Al-Qaeda’s turning point. Al-Qaeda was now able to operate independently. It gathered together commanders like Qari Ziaur Rahman and Sirajuddin Haqqani, and its soul shifted into a new organisation, Laskhar al-Zil. Its best brains, men like Haroon and Ziaur Rahman, were members of Laskhar al-Zil. Born in Bhimber (old Mirpur) in the Samhani Valley of PoK on February 10, 1964, Ilyas passed the first year of a mass communication degree at Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad. He did not continue because of his involvement in Jihadi activities. The Kashmiri freedom movement was his first exposure in the field of terrorism. Then there was the Harkat-ul Jihad-i-Islami (HUJI), and ultimately his legendary 313 Brigade. This grew into the most powerful group in South Asia, with a strongly knit network in Afghanistan, Pakistan, PoK, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. According to some CIA dispatches, the footprints of 313 Brigade are now in Europe, and it is capable of carrying out the type of attack that saw a handful of terrorists terrorize the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008. Little is documented of Ilyas’s life, and what has been reported is often contradictory. However, he is invariably described by the world’s intelligence agencies as the most effective, dangerous, and successful guerrilla leader in the world. Kashmiri left the Kashmir region in 2005 after his second release from detention by the ISI, and headed for North Waziristan. He had previously been arrested by Indian forces, but had broken out of jail and escaped. He was next detained by the ISI as the suspected mastermind of an attack on then-President Musharraf in 2003, but was cleared and released. The ISI picked Ilyas up again in 2005 after he refused to close down operations against Jammu & Kashmir. His relocation to the troubled Durand Line sent a chill down spines in Washington. The US realised that with his vast experience, he could turn the unsophisticated battle blueprints in Afghanistan into audacious modern guerrilla warfare. Ilyas’ track record speaks for itself. In 1994, he launched the Al-Hadid operation in the Indian capital, New Delhi, to secure the release of some of his Jihadi comrades. His group of 25 included Sheikh Omar Saeed (the abductor of US reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002) as his deputy. The group abducted several foreigners, including UK, US, and Israeli tourists, and took them to Ghaziabad near Delhi. They then demanded that the Indian authorities release their colleagues. Instead the Indians attacked their hideout. Sheikh Omar was injured and arrested. (He was later released in a swap deal for the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines IC-814) Ilyas escaped unhurt. On February 25, 2000, the Indian Army killed 14 civilians in the village of Lanjot in PoK after its SF (Para) forces had crossed the Line of Control (LoC). They returned to the Indian side and threw the severed heads of three of them at the Pakistan Army soldiers manning their side. The very next day, Ilyas conducted a guerrilla operation against the Indian Army in Nakyal sector after crossing the LoC with 25 fighters from 313 Brigade. They kidnapped an Indian Army officer and beheaded him. This officer's head was then paraded in the bazaars of Kotli in PoK.
Ilyas’ deadliest operation took place in the Akhnoor cantonment in Jammu & Kashmir against the Indian Army following the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. In this, he planned attacks involving 313 Brigade being divided into two groups. Indian Generals, Brigadiers, and other senior officials were lured to the scene of the first attack. Two Generals were injured (in contrast, the Pakistan Army did not manage to injure a single Indian Army General in three wars), and several Brigadiers and Colonels were killed. This was one of the most telling setbacks for India in the long-running insurgency in J & K. With Kashmiri’s immense expertise in India-specific operations, he stunned Al-Qaeda leaders with the suggestion that expanding the theatre of war was the only way to overcome the present impasse. He presented the suggestion of conducting such a massive operation inside India that it would bring India and Pakistan to war. With that, all proposed operations against Al-Qaeda would be brought to a grinding halt. Al-Qaeda excitedly approved the proposal to attack India. Kashmiri then handed over the plan to a very able former Pakistan Army Major fom the Special Service Group (SSG), Haroon Ashik, who was also a former LeT commander who was still very close to LeT chiefs Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi and Abu Hamza. Haroon knew about a contingency ISI plan for a low-profile routine proxy operation in India through LeT in the event of an all-out war between India and Pakistan. It had been in the pipeline for several years prior to 9/11, but the eventual official Pakistan policy was to drop it. The former Army Major, with the help of Ilyas Kashmiri’s men in India, hijacked this very ISI contingency plan and turned it into the devastating attacks that shook Mumbai on November 26, 2008 and brought Pakistan and India to the brink of war. According to investigations, the attackers travelled across the Arabian Sea from Karachi, hijacked the Indian fishing trawler Kuber, killing the crew, then entered Mumbai in a rubber dinghy. The first events took place at around 20:00 Indian Standard Time (1ST) on November 26, 2008, when ten Urdu-speaking men in inflatable speedboats came ashore at two locations in Colaba. They targetted the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Leopold Cafe, the Taj Mahal and Oberoi Trident hotels, and the Jewish Centre in Nariman House. They held people hostage and then killed them. The drama continued for almost 72 hours. The entire world was stunned by 26/11. It was almost identical to 9/11 in that it aimed to provoke India to invade Pakistan in the same manner as 9/11 prompted the US to attack Afghanistan. The purpose of 26/11 was to distract Pakistan’s attention from the ‘War on Terror’, thereby allowing Al-Qaeda the space to manipulate its war against NATO in Afghanistan.
However, the decision-makers in Washington had read between the lines. They rushed to India and Pakistan to calm nerves and prevented a war from breaking out. Significantly though, during the time Pakistan and India stood eye-to-eye, the fighting between Pakistan’s military and Al-Qaeda militants came to a complete halt. While the sword of an Indian invasion was hanging over the head of Pakistan, the militants were saying Qunut-e-Nazla (prayers in days of war) that they would not be forced to fight against a Muslim army. They prayed that Al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Army would join and fight India together, instead. Timely US intervention had prevented this, but while the Pakistan military was readying for a showdown with India, the terrorists availed themselves of the opportunity to mount attacks on NATO supply-lines in the Khyber Agency. This left Pakistan with no choice but to close down the transportation link between Pakistan and Afghanistan for several days during December 2008. This had a devastating effect on the NATO forces in Afghanistan, especially those based in the provinces of Ghazni, Wardak, and Helmand. NATO troops there faced serious fuel shortages and had to suspend operations. Due to the tense situation on its eastern borders with India, Pakistan’s participation in ‘Operation Lion Heart’ was tepid, and it was forced to strike a deal with the Pakistani Taliban, on their terms, in Swat at the beginning of 2009. Several actions followed, including a new operation in the Swat Valley, operations in South Waziristan and Mohmand, and the killing of Baitullah Mehsud. But these did not faze the militants. Their retaliation came in the form of an attack on the GHQ in Rawalpindi on October 10, 2009, and a high-profile massacre of some of Pakistan’s military officers in Rawalpindi’s military mosque during Friday prayers on December 4, 2009.
