Page 2 of
2 To die under the
wings of B-52s By Philip
Smucker
West, particularly the United
States, is probably as culpable as Pakistan's
generals in the matter. The "Talibanization" is,
in truth, a lot of what Yogi Berra would call,
"deja vu all over again".
"The
glorification of jihad was never a part of the
Islamic mainstream here until it was introduced in
the 60s and then given a major lift in the 80s
from the US assistance money that was funneled
toward extremists," said Afrasiab Khattak, a leading
Pakistani Pashtun
human-rights activist based in Peshawar. Indeed,
he insisted, "Talibanization" has been the
official policy in Pakistan for decades - and
still is.
It isn't going away any time
soon from the looks of the hundreds of radical
madrassas that line the highway from
Peshawar to Chitral and back down to Quetta.
To some it might sound like a presumptuous
conspiracy theory, but Khattak is not a lone voice
in the wilderness when he insists that "Pakistan's
generals think they can force the West to quit
Afghanistan by sending body bags to back to these
countries". Khattak said that the Pashtun
tribesmen are being used as "canon fodder" in this
Machiavellian effort that is already showing signs
of backfiring on its masters.
Indeed, I
hadn't believed the Malakand district prosecutor
when he told me in 2001 that the jihadis could -
as far as he was concerned - go die under the
wings of B-52s. All those people streaming across
the border of a sovereign state didn't make much
sense unless there was some national interest at
work.
What was really going on when those
thousands of jihadis from Pakistan slipped
unscathed into Afghanistan was a great deal of
serious "male bonding" between angry combatants.
It was something that rogue elements in Pakistan's
intelligence services wanted all along, said
Khattak. It set the stage for the rebirth of the
jihad they had nurtured against the Soviets.
After the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban
came running or straggling out into the tribal
areas in 2001 and 2002, they regrouped and - to
their eventual salvation - found a great deal of
their Arab brethren, including the godfather of
jihad himself, Osama bin Laden, right in their
midst.
I wandered across the highway after
talking to the cops in Chakdarra and had a word
with Mullah Allam, the another TNSM leader, who
fought in Afghanistan for several months right
after September 11, 2001.
I asked him
about Osama bin Laden and what kind of local
backing he still had. "Osama is a great spiritual
leader," he said. "We are not even prepared to
hand over even the least important of his
followers."
Several other Taliban
sympathizers promised me that if anything like the
capture of bin Laden took place Musharraf and his
American associates would have hell to pay. Of
course, they had used that same line in 2001.
But what is so astounding, Khattak told me
back in Peshawar, is that George W Bush and the US
government can't understand that they are - in the
language of the American ghetto - getting "played"
by a clique of Pakistani generals and intelligence
operatives.
After a half decade of
covering a war that looks more confounding by the
day, I traveled to Islamabad for more answers.
I paid a visit to the now infamous Red
Mosque, near to which Abdul Rashid Ghazi sits in
his Internet cafe on the grounds of a militant
madrassa surrounded by young men holding
Kalashnikovs. Along with his brother, Ghazi, he
oversees, along with several thousand angry young
men, a few thousand female militants covered from
head to toe in black and purportedly armed to the
teeth. They are threatening to send suicide
brigades into the fray if Musharraf's forces lay a
hand on them. (A couple of them hissed at me for
just trying to take their photograph.)
A
lot of residents in Islamabad think that Ghazi and
the Red Mosque radicals are just a front for the
same rogue elements in the Inter Services
Intelligence who aid and abet the jihad on the
frontier. How can you explain the Pakistani
military's willingness to kill hundreds of
rebellious tribals in the NWFP if they can not lay
a finger on the Red Mosque radicals, they ask. (It
did seem suspicious.)
As far as Ghazi is
concerned, it is not any of Pakistan's 13.000
madrassas that are responsible for turning
out the anti-American jihadis who traipse across
the border into Afghanistan or turn on authorities
in Pakistan. They only goad them on a little.
"We tell them that to stop the aggression
is jihad," he said. "And if they go to fight, we
can't stop them. We cannot say, well, you have
done the wrong thing. We will say, well, you have
gone in the right direction."
It sounded
to me like the way an intelligence agency would
recruit and train operatives and then inculcate
them with a "deniability" quotient.
In any
case, Ghazi insisted that both the Taliban and
al-Qaeda are a direct creation of Bush's "war on
terror".
"It is Musharraf and Bush who
have created these suicide bombers," said Ghazi, a
polite and surprisingly erudite man of about 50
years told me. "People talk about the 'local
Taliban' but why have they appeared? I mean, the
more you try to suppress them, the more they
appear. If you kill one Taliban, a hundred people
will stand up and take the role of the Taliban."
He was expressing, of course, former US defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld's worst nightmare.
Ghazi, like several other leading radicals
in modern Pakistan, is an old associate of bin
Laden. Even the godfather of global jihad is an
American production, he insisted.
"Before
9/11, he was just an ordinary mujahid," he
said as his armed guards kept ducking my camera
lens. "But it was America that made him al-Qaeda -
or this or that. America made him a hero and now
whatever he says is taken as holy scripture."
Philip Smucker is a commentator
and journalist based in South Asia and the Middle
East. He is the author of Al-Qaeda's Great
Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror's
Trail (2004).
(Copyright 2007 Asia
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