Al Qaeda and terror in Karachi

It will take a much better organised force with a healthy ratio to face the Frankenstein we are up against.

The November 11 terrorist blast that destroyed the Sindh Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID) offices has understandably evoked shock at the national level; and one is not surprised that the Sindh and federal governments have reacted to it energetically. The officials of the investigative agencies, whose knowledge is considerable even though stymied by political obstacles, have been swooping down on the strongholds of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and are expected to get to the origin of the plot that matured into the destruction it caused.

Investigators in Sindh and the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) are on the scent of the killers while Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik is in his usual over-confident mode about how the terrorists will soon be caught and punished. His remark that he was betting his ‘smart money’ on the TTP being ‘solely responsible’ for the deadly attack appears to emanate from a lack of understanding of how the TTP operates and in combination with what other elements. Anyone who has followed al Qaeda’s spoor in Pakistan will tell you that the TTP cannot be ‘solely responsible’ for an action as big as the CID blast.

There is a general consensus among the public that our politicians and officials should not repeat the mantra ‘no Muslim could do it’ because it sounds hollow. If the TTP has announced its complicity in the blast, it should be accepted as such unless our own investigation proves that it was some non-Muslim organisation sent in by our enemies, the US, India and Israel. When Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah said it, the nation already knew that it was not a non-Muslim terrorist but our own TTP who, together with al Qaeda, claims to be better Muslims than the government of Pakistan which is a ‘mere slave of America’. That al Qaeda and its adjuncts like the TTP are accepted as ideal Muslims is proved by the circulation of Al Zawahiri’s ‘constitution’ for Pakistan through the madrassa network of the country, including the Deobandi madrassas of Karachi.

The investigators also refer to Jandullah, the Karachi-based terrorist organisation that surfaced some years ago with a family of doctors taking care of the al Qaeda wounded in their hospital. Dr Akmal Waheed and his younger brother Dr Arshad Waheed were convicted in 2005 by an anti-terrorism court and received rigorous imprisonment totalling 18 years. The officers who say that Jandullah has been ‘restricted’ by them in Karachi should explains how Akmal Waheed succeeded later in transferring himself to South Waziristan to join his masters and then how he was allowed to escape to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after the Pakistan Army attacked the tribal area in 2010.

First, let us end the confusion of seeing TTP, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jandullah and al Qaeda separately. Someone has to get all the investigative officers together and run before them the information being spread by al Qaeda itself. Better still, the investigative agencies have to end their mutual insulation and allow the more informed officers to brief those who speak to the media and create a bad impression because of their indifference to facts. A website connected to al Qaeda's military arm in Pakistan sprang up on the Internet around June 2010, and became active in early July. It is called The Brigade 313 website and blazons a flag with words “Al Qaeda Brigade 313” in the centre, while the text describing Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jandullah, and the “Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan” occupies the four corners of the flag.

The killers in Karachi are highly centralised in their planning and we know that Brigade 313 is being led by someone who once fought our war in Kashmir with great distinction, Ilyas Kashmiri. He is also a walking lesson on how not to create non-state actors because he has killed more Pakistanis than anyone else, and his victims have been many army officers, including a former chief of the Special Services Group Major-General Faisal Alvi in Islamabad, through another retired army officer, Major Ashiq, who also filled the coffers of al Qaeda through kidnappings for ransom. Ilyas Kashmiri has arisen in the ranks of the al Qaeda hierarchy and sits in on all the meetings of the Arab terrorist top brass. He is now being named the ‘next bin Laden’ by the followers of the terrorist ‘republic’ in North Waziristan.

By several accounts from various sources including the usually well-informed blog “The Long War Journal”, Brigade 313 is al Qaeda's military organisation in Pakistan, and is made up of Taliban and allied jihadist groups. Members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Jandullah (the Karachi-based, al Qaeda-linked group), and several other Pakistani terror groups are known to have merged with al Qaeda in Pakistan, and the group operates under the name of Brigade 313. It is absurd, after absorbing this information, to ignore al Qaeda while surmising about the terrorists who perpetrated the CID outrage, Karachi’s biggest to-date.

Who is abetting Brigade 313? That too has become clear repeatedly in the past incidents. There is an involvement of ethnic politics in it, which means the anti-ANP Pashtuns emanating from the Afghanistan and Waziristan diaspora filling the madrassas of Karachi; it also means a large number of boys from South Punjab who went to Karachi madrassas while Karachi was the world’s most significant headquarters of al Qaeda headed by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad; and it also means the human fodder keeping alight the intra-madrassa conflict in the mega city, with al Qaeda arrayed against the Barelvi school of thought.

Lastly, it will take a much better organised force with a healthy ratio to the population to face the Frankenstein we are up against. Since Brigade 313 also contains non-state actors that the state is protecting as proxy warriors against India, the institutions of the state — including the intelligence agencies — will have to be cleansed before we are on an equal footing with our foe. As far as the nomenclature ‘non-Muslim’ is concerned, it is we who are non-Muslims under al Qaeda’s doctrine of ‘jahiliya’, not the terrorists.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 16^th, 2010.