Indian Defence Review

In 1983, the State of Jammu and Kashmir was going to the polls for Assembly elections. Earlier, Sheikh Abdullah had passed on his mantle to his son Dr Farooq Abdullah, who was now leading the National Conference to the polls. Mrs Gandhi, the then Prime Minister did not like him, because he had befriended the new Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, NT Rama Rao, who had defeated the Congress party there. When Mrs Gandhi campaigned in Kashmir, she hinted that the National Conference was close to the Pakistan ISI. This, to say the least was absurd.

The National Conference was a secular party and was dead against Pakistan. The people naturally did not like this and the National Conference won hands down in the Kashmir Valley and Dr Farooq Abdullah took over as the Chief Minister. At this juncture, Mrs Gandhi asked the Governor of Kashmir Mr BKNehru to destabilize Farooq’s Government by winning over his brother in law who was sulking in the background, as he had been denied the crown in Kashmir by Sheikh Abdullah. Mr BK Nehru refused to carry out Mrs Gandhi’s direction. She, then, shifted him to Gujarat and sent her minion as the Governor to Kashmir, who carried out her diktat, by buying Farooq’s brother-in-law and dismissing Farooq’s government. The people of Kashmir were naturally incensed at this dirty game. In 1984 Mrs Gandhi was killed by her bodyguards. Her son who knew no politics or administration was made the Prime Minister. His advisors suggested to the new Prime Minister that they should dismiss the Government in Kashmir and hold fresh elections. This was done. Then they advised the new inexperienced Prime Minister to tell Farooq Abdullah to have an alliance with the Congress in the new election. Farooq agreed to this. The people of Kashmir were aghast at this.

Here was Dr Farooq, who had been dismissed by Mrs Gandhi now being made to have an alliance with the Congress for the new election! When the elections were held, the National Conference openly rigged the elections, stuffing ballot boxes, and even beating up the opposition candidates. Hundreds of young boys began an exodus across the Line of Control to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. What Pakistan had tried to foment from 1947 till 1983- to start a rebellion in Kashmir by training and arming boys who slipped across to Pakistan, now found India offering the chance of fomenting a rebellion on a platter! In the background of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the creation of the Maktab-al- Kidmat-il-Mujahideen-al -Arab in Pakistan to fight the Russians and the ferment in Pakistan with the ISI in full cry, we created a situation in Kashmir for the ISI to divert the mujahideen after the Afghan war to fight in Kashmir. This was the real cause of the Kashmir insurgency. With the jihadis from Morocco to the Philippines collected in Pakistan for fighting the Russians, it was only a matter of time for a section of these jihadis to be sent to Kashmir. If Mrs Gandhi and her son and the leaders of the Government in Delhi had not blundered, there would have been no ground for Pakistan to divert the jihadis to Kashmir after they sent the Russians home.

The Pakistan Army’s Inter Services Intelligence immediately organised the reception of hundreds of young men from Kashmir, who had come by slipping across the Line of Control. Insurgent groups or Tanzeems had already been formed and camps established for training them in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, mainly in an area called Elaka Gair. The Kashmiri young men were poorly motivated as the majority of them were from a Sufi background. The Tanzeems formed like the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Ikhwan-ul-Mussalmeen, Al Jihad, Al Umar were poorly motivated and turned out to be poor fighters. The first Kashmiri group that performed with credit was the Hizbul Mujahideen formed by cadres of the Jamaat-e-Islami. The volunteers turned out to be hard fighters. A related Tanzeem, the Jamaat-ul Mujahideen also turned out to be good fighters. The cadres of all the above mentioned Tanzeems flooded the state. It was at this stage in the early 1990’s that the ISI sent in the first Tanzeems who had fought in Afghanistan against the Russians. These were the battle hardened, Hizb-e-Islami a Tanzeem of the Jamaat-e-Islami, while the Harkatul Ansar was a Tanzeem of the JUI. Both these groups raised the tempo of the encounters in North Kashmir and the Army and the Border Security Force had some fierce encounters before killing two guest militants as they were called, Akbar Bhai, an Afghan and his compatriot from Sudan in 1992-93 in Sopore.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan the Russians were taking a beating. Among the groups who were battling the Russians a division began surfacing between the Jamaat-e-Islami sponsored Tanzeems like the Hizb-e-Islami. Initially they were also favoured by the Pakistan ISI. The Tanzeem sponsored by the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) had by now several thousand acolytes, all Talibs, children of Pashtun refugees from Afghanistan.

We have seen the birth of the Al Qaeda midwifed by Abdullah Azzam, the Jordanian and his friend Osama-bin-Laden. Bin Laden had come to Pakistan when Azzam had started the Maktab-al-Kidmat-il-Mujahideen-al Arab and Bin Laden was flush with money from his father’s construction business in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden liberally funded the Maktab. The other financier was the United States, obsessed with fixing the Russians. Their funding was through Pakistan, where the funds were handled by the Pakistan Army through its Inter Services Intelligence. Naturally a part of the money was diverted to arming and training the Kashmiri militants and the Pakistani militants being trained for operating in Kashmir.

As far as India was concerned, Abdullah Azzam was the architect behind raising one of the fiercest Tanzeems—the Lashkar-e-Taiba the Army of the Pure (LeT). For raising this he found the ideal religious fanatic in Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed a committed Sunni cleric. It was with the funds from the CIA given for raising the Maktab that a part was diverted for raising the LeT. Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed located several hundred acres of land outside Lahore and there a vast complex of dormitories, mosques, and training facilities, firing ranges was constructed. His other associate was Zafar Iqbal. This was the Markaz-e-Dawa-wal-Irshad.

Strangely the LeT was sent into Kashmir for the first time in 1994. The Tanzeems of the JUI like the Harkat-ul-jihad-e-Islami (HUJI), The Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) were sent earlier from 1993. I was posted in Kashmir in June 1993. By this time the first cadres of the HUA had already infiltrated. My first encounter with this group was in September 1993, when we had information that three Pakistani militants had occupied a house in Ilahi Bagh a locality of Srinagar on its northern outskirts. We had quickly surrounded the target bungalow and vacated several houses surrounding it and were exchanging fire with the militants holed up inside the bungalow. The target bungalow was quite big and we soon found that bullets that we were firing were not reaching the inner rooms.

The grenades we fired also did not land in the inner rooms. We could guess that the militants holed up were Pakistanis and from a tough tanzeem, because when we shouted through the loud hailer to the insurgents holed up inside the bungalow, that they should come out throwing down their weapons and we would not shoot them, they shouted back that they had come to become shaheeds (martyrs). Ultimately we had to fire rocket launchers that set the bungalow on fire and all three militants inside were killed. In all further encounters with the Harkat-ul-Ansar or the Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, their cadres never surrendered and we had to fight every inch of the way till all the insurgents were killed.

The LeT were exclusively recruited from Pakistan, Punjab. They were carefully selected and rigorously trained and motivated. Once ordained they never cut their hair. All the cadres were given pseudo names from the kuniats of the Companion of the Prophet. They were trained to be ruthless. In all encounters they never asked nor gave any mercy. Generally, when they fought an encounter and found that the enemy had exhausted his ammunition, they closed in and finished off the force personnel by decapitating their heads or disemboweling them. LeT is a very secretive organisation. Hafiz Sayeed says that Allah has ordained every Muslim to fight until his rule is established. We have no option but to follow Allah’s order.

Pakistan’s journey to a jihadi state began with the training camps organised on the border with Afghanistan in the North West Frontier Province to train the mujahideen who were to fight the Russians. The ISI organised the training and the instructors were from the Pakistan Army’s elite group the Special Services Group (SSG). Among the trainees was a young Afghan from Kandahar Muhammad Omar, who would later lead the young Talibs from the JUI Madrassas. Omar was selected for the longer course and his trainer would remember him as one of the best trainees.

The long road to a jihadi state began even earlier for Pakistan when Gen. Zia-ul-Haq took over the Government in a bloodless coup on July 5, 1977. The Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) chief had a key role in the coup plan, indicating the role of the ISI in the future talibanisation of the State. Gen. Zia started the process of Islamisation of the Pakistan Army, by permitting the Tablique Jamaat, a fundamentalist Islamic religious group that was born in India to preach inside the cantonments. In 1979, Gen. Zia appointed Lt. Gen. Akhtar Abdur Rehman as the ISI chief. Cold, inscrutable, and secretive Gen. Rehman ensured that all contacts with the mujahideen in Afghanistan, all supplies of weapons to them would be handled by the ISI officials only. No CIA official was allowed to go into Afghanistan and all movements of the mujahideen into Afghanistan were handled exclusively by the ISI. Funds totaling millions of dollars received from the United States, matched by equal amounts from Saudi Arabia were all handled by the ISI only. The character of the ISI was effectively changed and it became a dreaded organisation in Pakistan.

The next step to a fundamentalist Pakistan was the raising of the Sunni communal organisation, the Sipah-e-Sahiba. The raising of this communal organisation was not connected with the crusade against the Soviets. It was because of the fact that political and economic power in Punjab lay in the hands of large land owners, mostly Shias, a minority compared to the Sunni sect. In a predominantly agricultural district of Pakistan Punjab called Jhang, most of the landlords were Shias. Over the years, Jhang developed into a centre of rich traders, transport operators, who were all Sunnis. There was a clash of interests. The 1979 revolution in Iran which sparked off a wide movement of awakening in Islamic societies led to the Shias in Pakistan to assert their rights. The Sunni Deobandi and Ahle Hadith seminaries that had come up by then led to a Sunni-Shia sectarian clash. This led to the birth of the Sipah-e-Sahiba a Sunni sectarian group to oppose the Tehriq-e-Nifaz-e-fiqh-e-Jafria. The Sipah-e-Sahiba soon declared that the Shias were not Muslims. Clashes took place where the Shias lost as they were numerically much smaller. The attacks on Shia mosques soon took the form of suicide bombers coming into a Shia mosque at the time of prayer and triggering off their suicide jackets amidst the congregation resulting in the most revolting casualties.

Meanwhile in Peshawar, Abdullah Azzam was suddenly killed in a bomb explosion. The Al Qaeda was taken over by Osama-bin Laden. The murder was never solved, but it was strongly believed that Azzam was killed by a bomb set up by Jordanian Intelligence. The majority of the people who joined the Al Qaeda were Arabs from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, The actual brain behind the Al Qaeda was the lieutenant of Osama bin Laden Dr Ayman Zawahiri a product of the Islamic Brotherhood raised by Hassan al Banna. He was a medical doctor, not a doctor of divinity but he was the genius behind Al Qaeda. His motivation came from a deep study of Syed Qutub, the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaeda came into existence in the 1980s, but it took its real shape when ideas fused with resources in the middle 1990s, with the alliance of Al Zawahiri’s ideas and bin Laden’s resources. Dr Zawahiri and bin Laden issued a joint statement in February 1998 sanctioning the shedding of the blood of every American. Al Qaeda motivated tribal youth in Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan to raise pro-Taliban militias. It also hunted for natural leaders like Nek Muhammad, Beitullah Mehsud, Abdullah Mehsud, and Hakimullah Mehsud to infuse into them the spirit of Al Qaeda ideology and the strategies to be employed in the future.

The fallout of the Al Qaeda being constituted and the campaign against the Russians was the complete churning that took place in the two totally underdeveloped regions of Pakistan, its Tribal agencies, the Frontier Administered Tribal Area, particularly in two of its main divisions—North and South Waziristan. This area was inhabited by tribal clans who prized their independent way of life. The population in this Agency and in the districts of Afghanistan bordering FATA was mostly Pashtuns or related tribes who were fiercely independent and had their own way of life and code of honour called Pashtunwali. The British had not extended the pattern of administration they had structured for the plains districts of undivided India to these tribal areas. Here, tribal elders of each village were allowed to administer their population by jirgas or tribal councils. The Governor of FATA was generally a retired Army general. All offences committed was decided by convening a Jirga or council and after listening to the two sides a decision was given by the leader of the area called a Malik.

With the advent of the Al Qaeda and the fundamentalist Islam of the Taliban prevailing, the Mullahs who were generally well down the social scale now pushed down the Maliks and took over their role. Hundreds of madrassas for training the JUI cadres had come up in these border areas of Pakistan. The FATA had been given a thorough Islamisation of the Deobandi variety.

After the Russians retreated from Afghanistan in 1979, it was the Tadjhik leader Ahmed Shah Masood, who took control of Kabul. This was not liked by Mullah Omar, the Pashtun leader of the Taliban from Kandahar. He challenged Masood and after some fierce fighting captured Kabul. The Afghans were now divided. On one side was the majority Pashtun from the south and east of Afghanistan and on the other, the Tadzhik, moderate Sunni, the Uzbek also moderate Sunni, the Heratis, majority Shia and the Hazaras, Shia. The ISI could not intervene to resolve this problem..

It is after the Taliban captured Kabul that the situation began to deteriorate for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The forward movement of the Taliban was guided and abetted at every stage by units of the ISI attached with each group of the Taliban. Meanwhile the Al Qaeda was busy planning to carry the Islamic war into the country who was its arch enemy, the United States.