Why Pakistan Produces Jihadists

[BanglaBhoot]

By SADANAND DHUME

Monday night's arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday, will undoubtedly stoke the usual debate about how best to keep America safe in the age of Islamic terrorism. But this should not deflect us from another, equally pressing, question. Why do Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora churn out such a high proportion of the world's terrorists?

Indonesia has more Muslims than Pakistan. Turkey is geographically closer to the troubles of the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Syria are immeasurably more hostile to America and the West. Yet it is Pakistan, or its diaspora, that produced the CIA shooter Mir Aimal Kasi; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef (born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents); 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapper, Omar Saeed Sheikh; and three of the four men behind the July 2005 train and bus bombings in London.

The list of jihadists not from Pakistan themselves—but whose passage to jihadism passes through that country—is even longer. Among them are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed Atta, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Over the past decade, Pakistani fingerprints have shown up on terrorist plots in, among other places, Germany, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands. And this partial catalogue doesn't include India, which tends to bear the brunt of its western neighbor's love affair with violence.

In attempting to explain why so many attacks—abortive and successful—can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan's emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it's important to go back further, to its creation.

Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.

From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism. The Quranic scholar Muhammad Asad—an Austrian Jew born Leopold Weiss—became an early Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. The Egyptian Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, made Pakistan a second home of sorts and collaborated with Pakistan's leading Islamist ideologue, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Abul Ala Maududi. In 1949, Pakistan established the world's first transnational Islamic organization, the World Muslim Congress. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the virulently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed president.

Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life. In the 1960s, Pakistan launched a war against India in an attempt to seize control of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority province, one that most Pakistanis believe ought to be theirs by right.

In the 1970s the Pakistani army carried out what Bangladeshis call a genocide in Bangladesh; non-Muslims suffered disproportionately. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto boasted about creating an "Islamic bomb." (The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, would later export nuclear technology to the revolutionary regime in Iran.) In the 1980s Pakistan welcomed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian theorist of global jihad Abdullah Azzam.

In the 1990s, armed with expertise and confidence gained fighting the Soviets, the army's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spawned the Taliban to take over Afghanistan, and a plethora of terrorist groups to challenge India in Kashmir. Even after 9/11, and despite about $18 billion of American aid, Pakistan has found it hard to reform its instincts.

Pakistan's history of pan-Islamism does not mean that all Pakistanis, much less everyone of Pakistani origin, hold extremist views. But it does explain why a larger percentage of Pakistanis than, say, Indonesians or Tunisians, are likely to see the world through the narrow prism of their faith. The ISI's reluctance to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism—training camps, a web of ultra-orthodox madrassas that preach violence, and terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba—ensure that Pakistan remains a magnet for any Muslim with a grudge against the world and the urge to do something violent about it.

If Pakistan is to be reformed, then the goal must be to replace its political and cultural DNA. Pan-Islamism has to give way to old-fashioned nationalism. An expansionist foreign policy needs to be canned in favor of development for the impoverished masses. The grip of the army, and by extension the ISI, over national life will have to be weakened. The encouragement of local languages and cultures such as Punjabi and Sindhi can help create a broader identity, one not in conflict with the West. School curricula ought to be overhauled to inculcate a respect for non-Muslims.

Needless to say, this will be a long haul. But it's the only way to ensure that the next time someone is accused of trying to blow up a car in a crowded place far away from home, the odds aren't that he'll somehow have a Pakistan connection.

Sadanand Dhume: Why Pakistan Pumps Out Jihadists - WSJ.com

 

[BanglaBhoot]

In a Ditch

The growing--and murderous--divide between old and new guard jihadists in Pakistan.

Nicholas Schmidle

May 4, 2010 |

Corpses have been showing up on roadsides in North and South Waziristan for years. Some of the time they are headless; almost all of the time they display a note alleging that the deceased was a spy. Khalid Khawaja’s death was no different, except that he never hid the fact that he had once worked for Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the ISI. The association gave him credibility in many circles. Khawaja’s generation of spooks, after all, trained local and foreign jihadis in Afghanistan during the 1980s, frequented Taliban-controlled Afghanistan during the 1990s, and continued—at least unofficially—to support some insurgents in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) throughout the past decade. Between his intel background and his continued devotion to the cause, Khawaja was an important, outspoken player on the jihadi scene.

It was shocking, then, to hear that a previously unknown faction of militants calling themselves the Asian Tigers had kidnapped Khawaja, along with a British reporter and another retired ISI officer, a month ago in North Waziristan. Two weeks later, Khawaja appeared in a hostage video, confessing to have been secretly working for the ISI throughout the crisis at the Red Mosque, the hyper-radical mosque in Islamabad that was stormed by commandos in July 2007. And on Friday, Khawaja’s dead body appeared on a roadside in North Waziristan, along with a note claiming that he was an American spy.

So how could someone like Khawaja—a self-described confidant of Osama bin Laden who relished affiliations with the Taliban of old—have ended up dead in a ditch, murdered by the kind of people he was previously accused of aiding? And what does that say about the dramatic cultural changes underway in Pakistan?



A quick word about Khawaja himself. A squadron commander in the Pakistani Air Force early in his life, Khawaja later joined the ISI. After getting kicked out of the spy agency in 1988 for writing a letter to President Zia ul Haq that charged the army chief with hypocrisy, he set out freelancing. He reportedly arranged five meetings in the late 1980s between bin Laden and former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He described himself as a mujahid, while also acting as the chief spokesperson for the Defense of Human Rights, a Pakistani organization campaigning on behalf of the legions of “disappeared” persons suspected of being kidnapped by the ISI. Most recently, he had been acting as counsel to the five Americans arrested in Pakistan in December 2009.

I first met Khawaja in early 2006 at Cafe Lazeez, an upscale restaurant in Islamabad. I had been trying to arrange a meeting with Abdul Rashid Ghazi, one of the two brothers running the Red Mosque; Khawaja was playing the role of the mosque’s press attache. Khawaja was a skilled propagandist, with his fluent English and bulging Rolodex. Such credentials, not surprisingly, made him rather shady as well. Daniel Pearl and Khawaja had met, and then stayed in phone and email contact, just prior to Pearl’s abduction in January 2002. Pearl’s wife claims that Khawaja had a hand in her husband’s death.

Sitting across the table from me, Khawaja stroked his whiskbroom beard and trained his dark, sharp eyes on mine. While sincere and generous with his time, there was little I found settling about Khawaja’s presence. “I’ll talk to Ghazi and see if he wants to meet you,” Khawaja said, concluding the luncheon. “But if I tell you that Ghazi is off-limits, I don’t want to hear that you’re going behind my back trying to meet him through other channels, okay? I told Daniel Pearl that Sheik Gilani was off-limits …”. His voice trailed off and I anxiously departed from the cafe. A week later he facilitated the first of my many meetings with Ghazi.

Khawaja was also sensitive to the press, unlike the majority of Pakistan’s current generation of jihadis. Last June, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reviewed my book and the writer briefly mentioned my relationship to Khawaja: “Chillingly, and perhaps foolishly, [Schmidle] uses the same intermediary (Khalid Khawaja) that slain journalist Daniel Pearl used.” Khawaja must have maintained a Google Alert account on his name. A day later, Khawaja took to the message boards and posted two comments at the end of the piece defending himself and even including his personal phone number in case people wanted to discuss further.

Despite his technological and media savvy, Khawaja was nonetheless old school when it came to the generational divides among militants. The old guard feels as if it’s at least partly acting on behalf of the state, while the new guard seeks to overthrow the state. Whoever steps in the way of that mission is considered an enemy—and, by extension, an American stooge. Did Khawaja see himself as a bridge between the two groups? Perhaps. But he clearly didn’t make a good enough impression on the new guard.

It’s important to consider what Khawaja might have been doing in North Waziristan. The Pakistani army is apparently gearing up for an offensive there against the Taliban, akin to the ones conducted in Swat and South Waziristan last year. In his confession from captivity, Khawaja claimed that he was sent by two former ISI chiefs to broker a deal with the militants, telling them that they’ll be spared if they simply aim their weapons towards Afghanistan, rather than on targets in Pakistan. It’s also been reported that Khawaja had arranged for the kidnapped British journalist to meet with Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader rumored dead who has recently surfaced. That Khawaja, on either mission, would be kidnapped and murdered illustrates a profound evolution that’s occurred in Pakistan over recent years concerning the dynamic between the ISI and their one-time jihadi clients.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the ISI fostered the development of several militant organizations as national security assets; Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad were instruments of Islamabad’s foreign policy in Kashmir. Pervez Musharraf banned the prominent militant outfits after September 11, but the status quo remained until 2004. Then, under American pressure, Musharraf ordered the army into South Waziristan. The relationship between the army and the militants cracked. Ghazi’s brother at the Red Mosque issued a fatwa decreeing that any soldiers killed in South Waziristan should be denied a proper Muslim burial. When commandos stormed the Red Mosque in July 2007, leaving Ghazi and hundreds of others dead, the militants turned their guns fully against the state. Five months later, the Pakistani Taliban was formed.

One of the characteristics distinguishing the new generation of militants from the old has been their deep mistrust of traditional authorities, such as the intelligence agencies, the tribal structures, and the mainstream Islamist parties. Two months before his death in July 2007, Ghazi told me even the traditional jihadi organizations like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba (a sectarian outfit that attacks Shias) were being undermined as the rank-and-file defected and joined his movement. “Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones,” he explained. The splintering phenomenon continues today: the Asian Tigers are considered an offshoot of either Jaish-e-Mohammad or of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which itself broke off from Sipah-e-Sahaba in the early 1990s. Some Western audiences might applaud the fracturing and dividing, assuming that smaller outfits are easier to isolate. But each new group is more violent and reckless than the next—and also more removed from the original puppet-masters in ISI headquarters. Negotiations, bribes, and settlements hold no appeal for this generation of militants.

Several major questions remain about Khawaja and his death. Is it possible that he, as the Tigers allege, intentionally misled Ghazi and his brother Abdul Aziz during the July 2007 rebellion at the Red Mosque, which ultimately led to Ghazi’s death and Aziz’s arrest? Was Khawaja still working for the ISI and—perhaps by extension—the CIA?

No matter what the answers are, even positing such questions about a man like Khalid Khawaja speaks to the tremendous state of deception and paranoia in Pakistan. An already confusing place has perhaps never been more inscrutable.

In a Ditch

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Terror made in Pakistan

By Paul Cruickshank, May 4, 2010

There are few eyewitness accounts available about the nature of al-Qaeda's safe haven in the FATA in 2009-10. The terrorist group appears to have come under increased pressure due to a record number of drone strikes during 2009. According to the New America Foundation count, there were 53 such strikes in 2009, killing at least 284 militants, nearly triple the number in 2008. Also according to the New America Foundation research, around half a dozen of these were senior al-Qaeda operatives, half the figure of the previous year.[ii] The lower number of top al-Qaeda commanders being killed may be a result of the extra precautions taken by senior operatives within the group.

The drone strikes, while by most accounts very effective, appear to have provided the Pakistani Taliban with an additional recruiting tool. According to the New America Foundation study, at least 289 of those killed in drone strikes between 2004 and today -- one-third of the total -- were civilians.[iii] David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was held hostage by the Taliban in the tribal areas during much of 2009 and has provided one of few recent eyewitness accounts, described the drones as a "terrifying presence." He wrote:

Remotely piloted, propeller-driven airplanes, they could easily be heard as they circled overhead for hours. To the naked eye, they were small dots in the sky. But their missiles had a range of several miles. We knew we could be immolated without warning.... The drones killed many senior commanders and hindered their operations. Yet the Taliban were able to garner recruits in their aftermath by exaggerating the number of civilian casualties. The strikes also created a paranoia among the Taliban. They believed that a network of local informants guided the missiles. Innocent civilians were rounded up, accused of working as American spies and then executed.[iv]

In August 2009, a Predator strike killed Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, eliminating one of al-Qaeda's strongest protectors in the tribal areas and creating uncertainty in the ranks of the Pakistani Taliban. In the months that followed, however, his successor Hakimullah Mehsud established his authority and continued to give al-Qaeda full backing.[v] Hakimullah Mehsud appeared to have been killed by a drone strike against his compound in North Waziristan in January 2010; however, he recently appeared in two videos supposedly taped in April and is now believed to be alive.[vi]

A rare recent glimpse into conditions in the FATA came from an e-mail sent by David Headley, the Chicago-based alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba operative, to several associates in May 2009, shortly after he traveled to the area. Headley described how the local tribes in North Waziristan were still offering sanctuary to foreign fighters and their families, who he said made up a little less than a third of the population in the area. "Just walk around the bazaar in Miranshah [Miram Shah, the capital of North Waziristan]. This bazaar is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from EU countries and of course our Arab brothers," he wrote. "Any Waziri or Mehsud I spoke to seemed grateful to God for the privilege of being able to host the ‘Foreign Mujahideen.'" [vii]

David Rohde, the New York Times reporter taken hostage, wrote that he "found the tribal areas-widely perceived as impoverished and isolated-to have superior roads, electricity and infrastructure compared with what exists in much of Afghanistan." Rohde described both North and South Waziristan as a safe haven for foreign militants. When Rohde was taken by his captors to South Waziristan in March 2009, he observed that it "teemed with Uzbek, Arab, Afghan and Pakistani militants." [viii]

The pressure on al-Qaeda from drone strikes may have led the group to begin reevaluating the tribal areas as a safe haven. In the second half of 2009, U.S. intelligence officials began to see evidence that a small handful of al-Qaeda recruits were leaving the tribal areas for other jihadist fronts such as Yemen and Somalia.[ix]

In October 2009, Pakistan sent 30,000 ground troops into South Waziristan in an attempt to clear the area of pro-al-Qaeda militants. According to a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, the ongoing Pakistani military operation could be a game-changer, even though al-Qaeda has shown significant resilience in the tribal areas. "For the first time you have Pakistani boots on the ground and U.S. pinpoint strike capability," said the source, "and this may hurt al-Qaeda."[x] Pakistani military pressure may have led some al-Qaeda operatives to move across the border into Afghanistan in December.[xi] According to reports, the Pakistani military has seized most of the major militant strongholds in South Waziristan. However, the majority of Pakistani Taliban militants appear to have fled to other tribal agencies well before the troops arrived.[xii] U.S. intelligence agencies do not yet judge the Pakistani Taliban to have been defeated.[xiii]

While life may have been made more difficult for al-Qaeda in South Waziristan, the group will continue to enjoy a safe haven to the north unless the Pakistani military extends its campaign to North Waziristan. The area in and around Mir Ali, the second-largest town in the tribal agency, has arguably been ground zero for al-Qaeda terrorist plots in recent years. The airline plotters, the Danish recruit Hammad Khurshid, the German recruit Aleem Nasir, the Sauerland group, the Belgian-French group, and Bryant Neal Vinas all trained or spent time in that area. And new waves of Western recruits are traveling there. In August 2009, four Swedes were arrested trying to cross into North Waziristan.[xiv] New York Times journalist David Rohde underlined the extent to which the Haqqani network, a key al-Qaeda ally, was present in the area:

The Haqqanis oversaw a sprawling Taliban mini-state in the tribal areas with the de facto acquiescence of the Pakistani military.... Throughout North Waziristan, Taliban policemen patrolled the streets, and Taliban road crews carried out construction projects. The Haqqani network's commanders and foreign militants freely strolled the bazaars of Miram Shah and other towns. Young Afghan and Pakistani Taliban members revered the foreign fighters, who taught them how to make bombs.[xv]

Al-Qaeda has likely continued in recent months to adapt to the intensified drone strikes. The terrorist network may have increasingly taken its instruction on the road, training recruits from different militant groups such as JeM, the Pakistani Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Janghvi in temporary training camps set up by the groups, according to researchers at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.[xvi] Al-Qaeda also appears to have adapted its propaganda operations. As-Sahab released nearly 100 tapes in 2007, but that number was halved in 2008, presumably because of the intensification in the drone campaign. As-Sahab's propaganda output was restored in 2009, however, suggesting it moved its media operations deeper into Pakistan.[xvii]

According to a U.S. counterterrorism official, Britain still has the most expansive jihadist facilitation network of any Western country. Militants on the European continent (with the exception of Germany) find it more difficult to make contact with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. In the United States, there is very little in the way of an al-Qaeda facilitation network.[xviii]

The continued threat posed by al-Qaeda in the FATA was underlined by a January 2010 RTL interview in the tribal region with Adelbert Naaktgeboren, a militant claiming to be a Belgian al-Qaeda operative from the city of Ghent. Naaktgeboren, who spoke in English, claimed that he had been fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan for five years and that he had traveled to the region after being exposed to the online sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based American cleric. The militant stated he was currently leading a small band of al-Qaeda fighters on raids to attack NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan, but that he had other ambitions, too: "If God wills it we will fight you in your own countries: We will not stop till all your people are converted to Islam."[xix]

The Militant Pipeline Between the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Region And The West - By Paul Cruickshank | The AfPak Channel

 

[third eye]

By SADANAND DHUME

.....

Why do Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora churn out such a high proportion of the world's terrorists?

Indonesia has more Muslims than Pakistan. Turkey is geographically closer to the troubles of the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Syria are immeasurably more hostile to America and the West. Yet it is Pakistan, or its diaspora, that produced the CIA shooter Mir Aimal Kasi; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef (born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents); 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapper, Omar Saeed Sheikh; and three of the four men behind the July 2005 train and bus bombings in London.

The list of jihadists not from Pakistan themselves—but whose passage to jihadism passes through that country—is even longer. Among them are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed Atta, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Over the past decade, Pakistani fingerprints have shown up on terrorist plots in, among other places, Germany, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands. And this partial catalogue doesn't include India, which tends to bear the brunt of its western neighbor's love affair with violence.

In attempting to explain why so many attacks—abortive and successful—can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan's emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it's important to go back further, to its creation.
.....

Pakistan's history of pan-Islamism does not mean that all Pakistanis, much less everyone of Pakistani origin, hold extremist views. But it does explain why a larger percentage of Pakistanis than, say, Indonesians or Tunisians, are likely to see the world through the narrow prism of their faith. The ISI's reluctance to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism—training camps, a web of ultra-orthodox madrassas that preach violence, and terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba—ensure that Pakistan remains a magnet for any Muslim with a grudge against the world and the urge to do something violent about it.


Sadanand Dhume: Why Pakistan Pumps Out Jihadists - WSJ.com

Points to ponder..

Zia & his times has done incalculable damage ,the complete effects of which are still not completely visible.

 

[Kompromat]

'All Pakistanis are terrorists'



Clearly it's a nonsensical headline.

But a quick glance across news headlines on Tuesday May 4 reveals the two top stories are both about young Pakistani men, one a resident of Lahore, the other with a background similar to mine, a Western citizen of Pakistani descent.

The first has been convicted with terrorism offences in India, the second arrested in connection with the Times Square foiled bomb attempt.

Now, I have no idea whether the chap arrested in connection with New York offence is a terrorist or not. But it almost does not matter.

Form of racism

Pakistanis and those of Pakistani descent are once again under the spotlight. It's a form of racism and anger is building because of it.

I travel a lot. In the last eight months I have visited the US a number of times.

Each time I have been pulled into secondary immigration, a sort of holding pen whilst your validity to enter the US is checked out.

It takes at least three hours and, after a 14-hour flight, is not a welcome proposition.

Same questions

The questions are always the same: Why are you here? Who are you visiting? My answers inevitably are always the same. No matter, each time I had to go through the process.

A visa application of mine to a country I won't name has been put through a much more stringent process because I am of Pakistani descent.

In 2005, I travelled to Israel, where yet again I was stopped and asked several questions about my family background. It was just after the 7/7 bombings in London. A crime committed by, as you probably recall, British men of Pakistani descent.

I arrived having travelled through Jordan. I was carrying a British passport, holding $10,000 in cash (for our bureaux, not personal funds, I might add).

My full name is Mohammed Imran Khan and I work for Al Jazeera.

Oh, and I was carrying a rucksack, the favoured delivery method of the 7/7 bombers. It took me five hours to clear customs. I was never told why.

How things are

Trifling, I know, when compared to the Palestinian experience, but indicative of how things are.

In the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, I bumped into a fairly well known BBC reporter and former colleague of mine. I told him the story of my crossing.

"What do you expect," he said. "You are Pakistani."

Except I am not. I am British.

In the UK, where I was born and have lived the vast majority of my life, I was stopped and searched.

Once, when I was working for that most British of Institutions, the BBC, I was stopped filming when a nosey policeman ran my name through the system.

It was clearly red-flagged. His response was terse when I requested to get on with my job. "You are in our system," he said. The BBC to their credit took up the matter with the police, but I have no idea whether it made any difference.

It is frustrating. But I have got used to my status of being of Pakistani descent not being a plus point. For others, though, it breeds anger and resentment.

Subject of Pakistan

Three weeks ago I was staying in New York, just few blocks away from Times Square. I was sitting with a friend, just talking about everything and nothing as one does.

The subject of Pakistan came up and I shared my thoughts. The bartender overheard our conversation and said something startling to me: "Do you know where Bin Laden is?"

I was shocked, but not surprised. My American friend, however, carefully picked up his vodka and cranberry juice, took a small sip and then poured the rest of it on the floor.

He then opened his wallet, left a large tip and walked silently out of the bar. He later told me that he felt it was simple racism that he would not tolerate.

My Pakistani friends across the West often complain of racism.

Pakistan has become terror central and it's most public export is terrorism, it would seem.

Plurality of Pakistan

I have long given up trying to explain to people about the plurality of Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora.

I have long given up on trying to talk about how Pakistan's biggest export into India is pop music, how Pakistani fashion designers produce beautiful collections that sell for thousands of dollars all over the world, of how Pakistani artists are producing some incredible and very modern work.

No, I listen as people rail against my background, accuse me of being a terrorist or the very least a terrorist sympathiser.

But here is the rub. Ancient cultures are littered with references to something called a "self-fulfilling prophecy'.

Call someone something and they eventually become that thing. Call Pakistanis terrorist and guess what? You will have Pakistani terrorists.

Anger builds

It's a simplistic argument, but when faced with visa delays, when asked personal questions about my background from Po-faced border guards, when stopped and searched by police officers, an anger does build.

My protestations about being British don't count. They see my skin colour and my name and they see one thing.

A threat. I smile and hope common sense prevails, and to be fair it often does.

But as Pakistani terror fills the headlines, I wonder how long it will be before this kind of racism becomes normal.


'All Pakistanis are terrorists' | Al Jazeera Blogs

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

By SADANAND DHUME

Monday night's arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American accused of planting a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday, will undoubtedly stoke the usual debate about how best to keep America safe in the age of Islamic terrorism. But this should not deflect us from another, equally pressing, question. Why do Pakistan and the Pakistani diaspora churn out such a high proportion of the world's terrorists?

Indonesia has more Muslims than Pakistan. Turkey is geographically closer to the troubles of the Middle East. The governments of Iran and Syria are immeasurably more hostile to America and the West. Yet it is Pakistan, or its diaspora, that produced the CIA shooter Mir Aimal Kasi; the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef (born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents); 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's kidnapper, Omar Saeed Sheikh; and three of the four men behind the July 2005 train and bus bombings in London.

The list of jihadists not from Pakistan themselves—but whose passage to jihadism passes through that country—is even longer. Among them are Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed Atta, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Over the past decade, Pakistani fingerprints have shown up on terrorist plots in, among other places, Germany, Denmark, Spain and the Netherlands. And this partial catalogue doesn't include India, which tends to bear the brunt of its western neighbor's love affair with violence.

In attempting to explain why so many attacks—abortive and successful—can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan's emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it's important to go back further, to its creation.

Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.

From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism. The Quranic scholar Muhammad Asad—an Austrian Jew born Leopold Weiss—became an early Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. The Egyptian Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, made Pakistan a second home of sorts and collaborated with Pakistan's leading Islamist ideologue, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Abul Ala Maududi. In 1949, Pakistan established the world's first transnational Islamic organization, the World Muslim Congress. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the virulently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed president.

Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life. In the 1960s, Pakistan launched a war against India in an attempt to seize control of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority province, one that most Pakistanis believe ought to be theirs by right.

In the 1970s the Pakistani army carried out what Bangladeshis call a genocide in Bangladesh; non-Muslims suffered disproportionately. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto boasted about creating an "Islamic bomb." (The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, would later export nuclear technology to the revolutionary regime in Iran.) In the 1980s Pakistan welcomed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian theorist of global jihad Abdullah Azzam.

In the 1990s, armed with expertise and confidence gained fighting the Soviets, the army's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spawned the Taliban to take over Afghanistan, and a plethora of terrorist groups to challenge India in Kashmir. Even after 9/11, and despite about $18 billion of American aid, Pakistan has found it hard to reform its instincts.

Pakistan's history of pan-Islamism does not mean that all Pakistanis, much less everyone of Pakistani origin, hold extremist views. But it does explain why a larger percentage of Pakistanis than, say, Indonesians or Tunisians, are likely to see the world through the narrow prism of their faith. The ISI's reluctance to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism—training camps, a web of ultra-orthodox madrassas that preach violence, and terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba—ensure that Pakistan remains a magnet for any Muslim with a grudge against the world and the urge to do something violent about it.

If Pakistan is to be reformed, then the goal must be to replace its political and cultural DNA. Pan-Islamism has to give way to old-fashioned nationalism. An expansionist foreign policy needs to be canned in favor of development for the impoverished masses. The grip of the army, and by extension the ISI, over national life will have to be weakened. The encouragement of local languages and cultures such as Punjabi and Sindhi can help create a broader identity, one not in conflict with the West. School curricula ought to be overhauled to inculcate a respect for non-Muslims.

Needless to say, this will be a long haul. But it's the only way to ensure that the next time someone is accused of trying to blow up a car in a crowded place far away from home, the odds aren't that he'll somehow have a Pakistan connection.

Sadanand Dhume: Why Pakistan Pumps Out Jihadists - WSJ.com

Dhume gets it right when he talks about the Afghan Jihad and the effects from it. The rest of his commentary about Pakistan's history and 'DNA' is typical Indian drivel.

 

[Bang Galore]

Dhume gets it right when he talks about the Afghan Jihad and the effects from it. The rest of his commentary about Pakistan's history and 'DNA' is typical Indian drivel.

You criticise a piece written in the WSJ simply because the author of the piece is called Sadanand Dhume. Yet it is expected of everyone else in the world to make no connection to the names of people because they sound Pakistani or because they were born in Pakistan or hold Pakistani passports.

Weakens the argument, don't you think?

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

You criticise a piece written in the WSJ simply because the author of the piece is called Sadanand Dhume. Yet it is expected of everyone else in the world to make no connection to the names of people because they sound Pakistani or because they were born in Pakistan or hold Pakistani passports.

Weakens the argument, don't you think?

I have read his articles before, commented on them at the WSJ, and know his background.

What was weak was your attempt to suggest that I was unfamiliar with SD without attempting to find out whether that was indeed the case.

And SD's 'Pakistan's DNA' argument is just a rehashed regurgitation of a common diatribe by Indian commentators. Pakistan's Islamic identity, like that of many other nations, has nothing to do with terrorism. Terrorism in Pakistan is directly related to the events arising out of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The author's argument is but another attempt, albeit more oblique than others, though in line with the now Murdoch led WSJ neo-con school of thought, to paint Islam as the problem.

 

[Thomas]

Why has no one mentioned the Madrasas that make it their mission in life to fill the heads of the young with extremist poison. and serve as recruiting grounds for the Taliban? Until the Government reigns them in The extremists will have a never ending supply of recruits.

 

[Bang Galore]

I have read his articles before, commented on them at the WSJ, and know his background.

So you accept that background is important when making decisions.
My point was not whether you were familiar with this gentleman or not. It is regarding your remark of "typical Indian drivel" to an article in an American paper. You did not refer to it as "American drivel". That would go to show that no matter what or where, people are judged by their background and not necessarily by their current position.

Why is there such surprise then that Pakistanis of varying nationalities or in varying professions are singled out ? Would it not, however wronged one might feel, be natural because of their background?

The author's argument is but another attempt, albeit more oblique than others, though in line with the now Murdoch led WSJ neo-con school of thought, to paint Islam as the problem.

Again my question. Why "Indian drivel"? Why not "neo-con drivel", "standard Murdoch drivel", "right wing drivel"?

Easier to point out prejudices in others than to look within.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Why has no one mentioned the Madrasas that make it their mission in life to fill the heads of the young with extremist poison. and serve as recruiting grounds for the Taliban? Until the Government reigns them in The extremists will have a never ending supply of recruits.

Well in this case the suspect does not appear to be a madrassa product, and had a BS CS as well as an MBA from the US, and worked on Wall Street.

While the Madrassa's are an issue, primarily a social one for Pakistan given that they are wasting productive Pakistani youth by producing semi-literate graduates with little real world skills, they are not some sort of 'center of evil and terrorism' that will fix the problem of extremism if reformed. But they do need to be reformed.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

So you accept that background is important when making decisions.
My point was not whether you were familiar with this gentleman or not. It is regarding your remark of "typical Indian drivel" to an article in an American paper. You did not refer to it as "American drivel". That would go to show that no matter what or where, people are judged by their background and not necessarily by their current position.

I did not refer to it as American drivel since, as I pointed out in my response, which you conveniently ignored, his article is a regurgitation of a line of though expressed often by Indian commentators in the past.

Were it a new line of thought I would have addressed it as such, but it is not new, and it has Indian lineage.

Why is there such surprise then that Pakistanis of varying nationalities or in varying professions are singled out ? Would it not, however wronged one might feel, be natural because of their background?

Did I even talk about this in my post?

And there is a difference between a large number of intelligentsia from a particular background pursuing a particular line of thought, and a handful of individuals out of millions pursuing a line of thought/action.

Again my question. Why "Indian drivel"? Why not neo-con drivel, "standard Murdoch drivel", "right wing drivel"?

Easier to point out prejudices in others than to look within.

Oh but it is all three - the implicit denigration of Islam is straight out of the neo-con book. But the manner in which the argument uses Pakistan as an example specifically is, as pointed out, an old Indian line of attack.

 

[Bang Galore]

I did not refer to it as American drivel since, as I pointed out in my response, which you conveniently ignored, his article is a regurgitation of a line of though expressed often by Indian commentators in the past.

Were it a new line of thought I would have addressed it as such, but it is not new, and it has Indian lineage.

Oh but it is all three - the implicit denigration of Islam is straight out of the neo-con book. But the manner in which the argument uses Pakistan as an example specifically is, as pointed out, an old Indian line of attack.

My last point on this subject because we are probably getting repetitive :

If we were to accept all of the above, would you still refer to it as "Indian drivel" if it was written by an author having a western name? Me thinks not.

Anyway, thanks for your time. Always appreciate your insight on such issues.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

My last point on this subject because we are probably getting repetitive :

If we were to accept all of the above, would you still refer to it as "Indian drivel" if it was written by an author having a western name? Me thinks not.

If the exact same thing were written by an American, I would call it 'Indian influenced drivel'.

 

[bc040400065]

Another nonsense article.. again just targeting pakistan and islam... islamophobia again... just few point... Aman alzehrawi is an ejyptician not pakistani,, and also the london bombing were carried out by british born and the only link with pakistan was their parents being pakistani origin. Also please do remember who brought all the Usama Al zehrawi and others to afghanistan in the 80's.?? did pakistan brought them in afghanistan??? please do read some history... these article are propanganda and nothing and show their hatred about islam and pakistan.