SUNDAY POSTMORTEM
New Delhi, 17 January 2009
Lesson Of Mumbai
TERROR OUT OF PAK
GROWING ALL OVER
By T.D. Jagadesan
The usual, suspects are declaring that the “cause” of the
Mumbai bombings was Kashmir or some other local
grievance. But what happened in Mumbai was no more local even than the July,
2005 attacks in London or the assault in Madrid on March 11,
2004. Pakistani propaganda about its claims on Kashmir
is almost entirely phony rhetoric intended to justify the predatory instincts
of the Pakistani Army and intelligence bureaucrats.
Pakistan insists that Kashmiri Muslims are
oppressed by India,
but in fact Indian Muslims live better than Pakistani Muslims and have
demonstrated a better capacity for true Islamic thinking. The attacks on Mumbai
are part of a global problem, which is why a passive western policy towards the
crisis is not acceptable.
It may appear comforting to the “progressive” elite. But in
reality it represents an attitude of suicidal and irresponsible disengagement
from confrontation with a continuing threat. In Mumbai, as in London, Madrid
and New York, but also in the Islamic cities of Iraq, Istanbul and Jakarta, and
in places like Peshawar and Quetta in Pakistan, a wide network of Muslim fundamentalists
continue their global offensive.
The common enemies of all civilized humanity in the ongoing
conflict include Saudi Wahabism and Pakistani Jihadism, the latter inspired by
a fundamentalist variant of Islam called Deobandism. What western appeasers
must remember is that Pakistan,
like Saudi Arabia
before it, is two-faced, professing to oppose terrorism while powerful factions
in its leadership espouse it. There is a wide gap between the ordinary local
people in Pakistan and India, whatever
their faith, and Islamic radicals in the Pakistani armed forces and clandestine
services.
This division cannot be spanned by a few ameliorative
gestures by Pakistani, American or British leaders. We owe it to these ordinary
people to treat Islamism seriously wherever it occurs. This war is mainly aimed
at gaining the loyalties of the world’s Sunni Muslims, the Saudis, Wahabis who now
favour a crisis in Pakistan.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
has begun a slow and at times almost imperceptible process of anti-Wahabi
actions, and so the main body of Islamic radicals (claiming the mantle of
Sunnism) has shifted its attention to Pakistan and its pool of Deobandi
foot soldiers. On the sub-continent, the extremists can corrupt, recruit and
kill more people, with more impunity, than is now imaginable in West Asia.
Remember that the Wahabis have failed in Iraq, and the Deobandis, who produced the
Taliban, are widely discredited in Afghanistan. Pakistan is now
the most obvious choice as a new battle ground. Action against India may be
the pretext, but the reality is a radical, global strategy.
The point that should be impressed on the mind of every
Briton is that the Pakistani Jihadi militia and the Al Qaeda collaborators
known as Lakshare-e-Taiba (LeT-Army of the Righteous) which attacked Mumbai
have a significant following in Britain,
Europe and the US.
Thanks to Pakistani government blandishments, LeT is
recruiting in British mosques as you read these words. LeT was involved in the
Heathrow plot of 2006, it trained 27-year-old Rashid Rauf of Birmingham,
planner of the multiple destruction of passenger’ aircraft, whom the US
allegedly killed in November but who some say remains alive and who was, if
nothing else, an inspirer of the Mumbai attacks.
LeT is active in the US, where it ran an aggressive
network headed by an American white man who converted to Islam, Randall Ismail
Royer. Royer’s cell was known by the alarmingly anodyne nickname of “the
Virginia paintball jihad”, because its ten or so wannabe mujahideen engaged in
that form of intimation war as practice for the real fighting they would face
as LeT troops in Kashmir.
Royer, a former functionary of the leading legal Islamic
group in America, the presumptuously titled Council On American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) had been in Bosnia-Herzegovina and adopted the charming habit of
ringing and harassing Bosnian and American Muslims who challenged Wahabism.
Then he was found driving around the American capital with a loaded AK-47 and
-219 rounds of ammunition in his car.
Royer joined LeT recruits from the US in Kashmir
for what is best described as jihad tourism, taking up arms against the
Indians. He and his group were charged with 41 counts of conspiracy to levy war
against India, an ally of
the US,
as well as arms and related infractions. They pleaded guilty to weapons’
violations in 2004 and received 20 years in an American prison. Royer’s
religious wisdom was succinctly summarized when he commented on his arrest, “I
really resent the idea that a Muslim with a gun-- is a threat. A Jew with a gun
– he’s not a threat”.
Perhaps a Muslim with a gun is not necessarily a threat; but
an Islamist with a gun certainly is. We must not forget that, in taking the
Islamist threat in Mumbai seriously, we are admitting it to be a global
problem. We are protecting not just the West but ordinary Muslims too. We must
not forget that many Muslims are also committed to civilized values and oppose
this perversion of their faith. The necessity of the struggle against Islamic
extremism is the central fact of our time.
To try to write recognition of the nature of Islamist
violence out of comprehension of Mumbai and crimes like those committed brings
to mind Orewell’s dictum: there are some notions that only the media and
intellectuals are stupid enough to believe. There are few places in the world
today without Muslims, and, of course, wherever there are Muslim communities
there is this possibility of radicalization.
But no situation is currently worse than that of
Saudi-satellite Pakistan and its British diaspora. So what should be done about
it? The British authorities should resolutely quarantine, deport, otherwise
expel, and in general combat LeT and other Deobandi elements in the British
Muslim population. This seems like a sensible and life-saving measure, but
nothing remotely like such a policy exists.
Instead the foreign office mumbles about the difficulties of
determining whether British subjects died as criminal assailants in Mumbai, the
US up toes around the question of LeT’s historically undeniable financing and
training by the Pakistani military, and Pakistani representatives whine that
they should not be judged until some kind of official inquiry into Mumbai has
taken place.
But what State other than Pakistan, however, failing would evidence
an incentive to tolerate LeT? Would Sri Lanka have encouraged a gang of
murderers to invade a major Indian city? Nepal, which happens to be Maoist?
Burma? Hardly, Pakistan’s army is the moral author of the bloodshed in Mumbai.
It recruits its cannon fodder in British cities like Birmingham and Bolton as
much or more than in the slums of Lahore or Karachi, and its represents the
main back up for Al Qaeda.
Ignoring the ideological and geographical dimension of the
world struggle against Islamist violence denies the existential reality of the
Mumbai events. The screams of the innocents in Mumbai are the immediate audible
evidence. To pretend that such deaths were caused by old complaints in Kashmir
is to ignore the real threat and thus to endanger humanity.
So what must be done? Pakistan and India both have nuclear
weapons and the Pakistani ruling clique is excitable about threatening their
use. Nonetheless London and Washington appear paralysed. The thinking goes that getting Pakistan and India to hug one
another, even while Pakistan continues to tolerate (if not deliberately assist)
LeT, will free the Pakistani military brass to make good on their repeated but
empty promises to act against the Taliban.
It would be the worst of all mistakes to think that
Pakistani complicity with the Taliban, and Islamabad’s support for the Kashmiri
killers and their Mumbai militants, can be separated into two issues and
handled in isolation from one another. Many individuals, British subjects included,
went to Afghanistan and joined Al Qaeda but ended up in Kashmir in the ranks of
LeT.
The fighting in Afghanistan in some major part exists as a
platform for continuing assault on Kashmir. Ending terror in Afghanistan is
indivisible from the same task in Kashmir and, indeed, elsewhere around the
world. If Pakistan is to avoid failing as a State, it must desist from
harassing its neighbour, accept responsibility for fostering terror groups, and
reform its Army and intelligence services from top to bottom, rooting out every
sympathizer of violent fundamentalism.
But this is unlikely to happen. Pakistan increasingly
resembles a bus with no brakes, burgling towards a cliff, and driven by a man
Asif Ali Zardari, who appears to have been struck blind. The lesson of Mumbai
may be that for Pakistan rescue will come too late. ---INFA
(copyright, India News and Feature
Alliance)
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