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A smoking
gun and Powell's blind eye
By B Raman
As part of the countdown to the expected invasion
of Iraq, General Colin Powell, the US Secretary of
State, is expected to present before the UN Security
Council on February 5 the evidence which the US claims
to have on Iraq's clandestine procurement of weapons of
mass destruction (WMD), its links with Osama bin Laden
and his al-Qaeda network, and the dangers of these
terrorist elements getting WMD from the Saddam Hussein
regime.
In his statement, one can expect
references to the alleged involvement of NEC
Engineering, a New Delhi-based company, in the
clandestine supply to Iraq of dual-purpose materials
that could be used for the production of chemical
weapons and rocket fuel. This matter has been under
investigation by the intelligence and investigative
agencies of the government of India for over a year now,
but some details were first leaked by the British
government in its White Paper of last September on
Iraq's clandestine WMD program. Subsequently, as
Anglo-American pressure on the UN to act against Baghdad
was stepped up, sections of the US media, some acting on
their own and some apparently at the prodding of the
administration, have turned the focus on the alleged use
of this company by the Iraqi regime.
Officials of the company, as
well as the Iraqi government, have strongly
denied these allegations. Despite this, these transactions continue to
be projected as part of the evidence against
Saddam Hussein. On January 26, a day before the presentation
by chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix of the inspectors'
report before the Security Council, some sections of the
Indian media and CNN came out with details of the
investigation made by Indian agencies against the
company. CNN's special feature on the subject sought to
project the results of the investigation as one of the
"smoking guns" which needed to be considered by Blix.
In his indictment of the Saddam government on the
question of complicity with al-Qaeda and the
International Islamic Front (IIF), Powell is expected to focus on
the activities from Iraqi soil of an allegedly
pro-Baghdad Kurdish organization called Ansar al Islam (AAI) led
by Najm al-Din Faraj Ahmad, also known as Mullah
Krekar, who lives in Oslo, Norway. For over a year now, the
AAI has been projected by Pentagon officials and
pro-US Kurdish leaders such as those of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan as a Kurdish Taliban, a member of the IIF,
and the West Asian equivalent of the Jemmah Islamiya of
Southeast Asia. Western, particularly US, media have
been replete with stories of the AAI's links with Saddam
on the one hand and bin Laden on the other, the alleged
training of its cadres in al-Qaeda's training camps in
Afghanistan before September 11, its alleged links with
some experts of al-Qaeda on chemical warfare, a
laboratory for the production of chemical weapons
allegedly run by it in the area under its control in
northern Iraq, its alleged links with the Algerians
recently arrested in the UK on suspicion of trying to
produce ricin, a lethal chemical extracted from castor
beans, etc.
It would seem that most of this
so-called evidence has been coming from the pro-US
Kurdish leaders. Even some US analysts have said that
while Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the
Pentagon as a whole have been projecting this evidence
as clinching, the CIA's counter-terrorism experts are
not that convinced, but have been going along with the
administration.
Until last
spring, even the US State Department's counter
terrorism division did not seem to have
believed seriously the Pentagon's allegations of Saddam's
links with al-Qaeda. In its annual report for
2001 on the Patterns of Global Terrorism presented to
Congress in April last, it referred to the
sanctuaries in Iraqi territory allegedly enjoyed by the
anti-Tehran Mujahideen-e-Khaq, the Kurdistan Workers' Party,
the Palestine Liberation Front, and the
Abu Nidal Organization, as well as Baghdad's contacts with
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But
there was not even an allegation that any of these
organizations had links with al-Qaeda. The only reference to
bin Laden was in a comment that Iraq was the only
Arab country which did not condemn the September 11 attacks
and that an article in a newspaper run by one of
Saddam's sons expressed sympathy for bin Laden.
As Eli J Lake, United Press
International's State Department correspondent, pointed out in a
dispatch dated January 28, the Pentagon accuses the AAI
of links with al-Qaeda, but has not so far considered it
necessary to seek the extradition and interrogation of
its leader, who lives openly in Oslo. The dispatch said,
"Najm al-Din Faraj Ahmad, also known as Mullah Krekar, is
- according to officials of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan in northern Iraq and administration hawks - a
terrorist with ties to al-Qaeda; a man who has acquired
chemical weapons; and who has received funding from Iraq
and logistical support from elements in the Iranian
intelligence service. Krekar himself denied these
allegations this month at a news conference in Norway.
But while hawks - especially in the Pentagon - believe
Krekar is a 'smoking gun' linking Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the CIA is skeptical about
his alleged ties to Baghdad. One US official sympathetic
to that view told United Press International Tuesday,
'There is no evidence that Saddam and his regime are
directly financing and arming Ansar al Islam'."
If you believe the hawks, Krekar meets the
criteria of what Bush described in his State of the
Union address last week as the gravest threat posed by
rogue regimes. "These regimes could use such weapons for
blackmail, terror and mass murder. They could also give
or sell those weapons to their terrorist allies, who
would use them without the least hesitation," he said.
And yet, the State Department does not appear disturbed
that Krekar - under house arrest in Norway - is able to
hold news conferences and communicate with members of
his group in northern Iraq.
In an interview with
Al Hayat, an Arab language daily published from Dubai in
the United Arab Emirates, Mullah Krekar alleged that in
2000 he had rejected a request from the CIA to
collaborate with it against Saddam and that since then
it had launched a campaign projecting him and his
organization as having links with al-Qaeda.
Powell announced on January 30 the designation
of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) of Pakistan as a foreign
terrorist organization under a 1996 US law. This
organization came into existence in 1996 as the militant
wing of the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan
(SSP), which itself has been active since the days of
the late Pakistani military ruler, Zia ul-Haq in the
1980s. The SSP and its LEJ were being used by the CIA,
the Iraqi intelligence and Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) for operations directed against the
Iranian regime. They killed a large number of Shi'ites, Iranian
diplomats and military officers in Pakistan during
the 1990s. They assisted the Taliban and al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan, became a member of bin Laden's IIF after its
formation in 1998 and were used by bin Laden for carrying
out a massacre of the Shi'ites (Hazaras) of
Afghanistan. The SSP's leader, Maulana Azam Tariq, who
is now a member of Pakistan's newly-elected National
Assembly, is considered by many as the mentor of many of
the Pakistan-based pan-Islamic jihadi organizations.
So long as the SSP and the LEJ served
US interests by creating trouble for Iran,
Washington closed its eyes to their acts of terrorism, but
after they started attacking US and other Western
nationals and Pakistani Christians from the beginning of
last year, the US suddenly woke up to its being a
terrorist organization. After a wave of attacks on Shi'ites
in Karachi in 2001, President General Pervez
Musharraf himself banned the LEJ on August 14, 2001, and the
SSP on January 15, 2002, but did not round up their
leaders and cadres trained by al-Qaeda. However, since
June 2002, under US pressure, he has been acting
more strictly against them and has tried to neutralize
them.
It will be interesting to see
whether Powell will refer to the well-established links of
the LEJ with the Saddam regime, and with the ISI on the
one hand and with al-Qaeda on the other. If he does,
how will he explain the pre-August 2001 use of the LEJ
by the ISI for achieving Pakistan's strategic objectives
in Afghanistan and India and the US's failure to act
as vigorously against the Musharraf regime as it has
been trying to act against the Saddam regime? How can
he argue that it was all right for Pakistani military
regimes to have created them and used them as long as
they did not attack US nationals and interests, but it
was an international crime for Iraq to have used them to
serve its own interests?
B Raman is
Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat,
Government of India, and presently director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the
National Security Advisory Board of the government of
India. He was also head of the counter-terrorism
division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India's
external intelligence agency, from 1988 to 1994.
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