| |
COMMENTARY
The message behind bin Laden's
message
By B Raman
In a
series of articles written since October 7, 2001, I have
stressed the following points:
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban adopted a
deliberate policy of avoiding a frontal confrontation
with the allied troops led by the US and dispersed from
Afghanistan into the adjoining tribal areas of Pakistan
immediately after the US air strikes began in late 2001.
While the US managed to kill Mohammed
Atef, the former Egyptian police officer who was the
operational chief of Osama bin Laden and who was
responsible for his personal security, and subsequently
captured, with Pakistani help, Abu Zubaida and Ramzi
Binalshibh, the majority of the leaders and trained Arab
cadres of al-Qaeda remain alive and kicking, including
bin Laden himself, and have dispersed in Pakistan,
including Karachi. Bin Laden, who was physically
incapacitated and whose speech was impaired by a
shrapnel injury, had been given shelter in the Binori
madrassa (religious school) of Karachi, where he
is said to have been treated by a group of serving and
retired doctors of the Pakistani army.
The survivors of the International
Islamic Front (IIF), also led by bin Laden, who
frontally confronted the Northern Alliance and the
US-led troops for some weeks after October 7, 2001,
before fleeing to Pakistan, have also dispersed. While
the survivors of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the
Jaish-e-Mohammad, have largely taken shelter in
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas (Gilgit
and Baltistan), those of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and a
splinter group of the HUM, called the HUM (Al Almi -
Universal) have taken shelter in Karachi.
The survivors of the IIF from Southeast
Asia and Chechnya, who confronted the Northern Alliance
and the US-led allied troops in Afghanistan under the
banner of the five Pakistani components of the IIF, have
been finding their way back to their countries of
origin, and were responsible for the recent acts of
terrorism in the Philippines, Indonesia (Bali) and
Moscow. The spurt in their acts of terrorism was
Iraq-related, with a US invasion pending there.
The Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV network is
reported to have telecast on November 12 a
voice-recorded speech of bin Laden in which he referred
to the recent terrorist incidents in Tunisia, Yemen,
Kuwait, Bali and Moscow, condemned President George W
Bush and his senior colleagues, and hinted at further
terrorist strikes directed not only at the US, but also
at its allies, such as the United Kingdom, France,
Italy, Germany, Canada and Australia.
While the
US is yet to officially confirm the authenticity of bin
Laden's voice in the recording, US media have informally
quoted US intelligence officials as having confirmed
that it was his voice. Some officials of Al Jazeera and
Arab journalists who claim to have interacted with him
in the past have also been quoted as having stated that
they were convinced that the voice, the language used
and the style of speaking were that of bin Laden.
(Others, such as Egyptian political scientist Mamoun
Fandy, say exactly the opposite.)
Nevertheless,
the recording has been widely interpreted by Western
counter-terrorism experts as a call to his supporters
for a fresh wave of terrorism directed against Western
targets named by him.
According to reports
circulating in circles close to Mufti Nizamuddin
Shamzai, of the Binori madrassa, the recording
was made in the madrassa and passed on to Al
Jazeera via Bangladesh. It is not clear as to why it had
to be sent through Bangladesh since it could have been
easily sent from Balochistan through a fisherman's boat,
without much danger of being intercepted or through the
diplomatic bag of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
as was done with some of the past visual/audio
recordings. It is also not yet known whether ISI
officers sympathetic to bin Laden played any role in
facilitating the transmission through Bangladesh.
The reference made by bin Laden in his message
to the recent wave of terrorist incidents does not
necessarily mean that these were actually carried out at
his instance or that he coordinated them, but he has
tried to give the impression that he was the mastermind
behind them in order to maintain his credibility in the
eyes of his followers in different countries, and to
boost their morale. It has been my assessment and it
continues to be so that the recent terrorist strikes in
the Philippines, Indonesia and Moscow were carried out
by his followers in those countries at their own
initiative and for their own reasons. An attempt is now
being made either by bin Laden himself, if the recording
is authentic, or by someone based in Pakistan on his
behalf, if it is not authentic, to project all these
incidents as part of a masterplan inspired and
orchestrated by him.
The tape refers to the
attack on French submarine construction engineers in
Karachi earlier in the year, but omits any specific
mention of the kidnapping and execution of Daniel Pearl,
the journalist of the Wall Street Journal, the grenade
attack inside an Islamabad church in which two US
nationals were killed, and the car bomb explosion
outside the US Consulate in Karachi. All these strikes,
I believe, were carried out by cadres of the Pakistani
components of the IIF.
This omission by bin
Laden, which seems to be deliberate, is apparently meant
to avoid creating any embarrassment to the regime of
President General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military
dictator, which has, at least in a "non-active" sense,
been protecting him. Bin Laden has tried to project that
the anti-US terrorist incidents in Pakistani territory
had nothing to do with him or his al Qaeda or the IIF.
The recording clearly corroborates, if further
proof were needed, what I have been saying repeatedly -
namely, that al-Qaeda and the IIF could not have
survived intact without the support and the complicity
of elements of Pakistan's military-intelligence
establishment. Musharraf's cooperation with the US in
the past has been limited to the capture of those
terrorists such as Abu Zubaida and Binalshibh, about
whose presence in Pakistani territory the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) had confronted him with precise
intelligence. In other cases, he has avoided helping the
US, hoping that the FBI would not be able to get
intelligence of their whereabouts in Pakistani
territory.
The US has not so far succeeded in
smoking out the sleeper agents of the HUM and the
Jamaat-ul-Fuqra on US territory. They are all US
nationals who were trained in Pakistani training camps
in the 1990s and sent back to the US for carrying the
jihad to the US homeland. They are likely to play an
important role in any encore of September 11 by bin
Laden in pursuance of his (or his impersonator's) latest
taped warning.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail:
corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
(©2002 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
