Pakistan is Jihad Inc’s global HQ : Pakistan Islamic Terrorism

Recently I read in the media a memo had been recorded by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, in which he reportedly expressed exasperation over the fact that the more the number of jihadi terrorists the US forces put out of action in Afghanistan and Iraq, the more the number of jihadi terrorists who come out of the madrassas to replace them.

He did not mention the country in which these madrassas are located. From the context of the memo, it was apparent these madrassas are the madrassas in Pakistan.

Last year, Jessica Stern, a counterterrorism expert at the Harvard University, brought out a very widely read study on the working of the madrassas in Pakistan, where she describes them as jihad factories. In India the problem is the same one Rumsfeld referred to. The problem which we are facing today in Kashmir is not because of Kashmiri militancy but because of large-scale infiltration of people into Kashmir from Pakistan.

Till 1993, the number of foreigners killed by the security forces in Kashmir used to come to 32. It went up to 172 per annum between 1993 and 1998. Since 1999, our security forces have been killing 951 foreign mercenaries per annum in Kashmir. The majority of them are Pakistani nationals.

I’d request the distinguished panel to read the reports, the annexures of the report of the State Department on Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2002, submitted to the US Congress in May this year. They refer to the fact that most terrorist organisations operating today in Kashmir are foreign.

The State Department report says that almost all Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists are foreigners, mostly Pakistanis from madrassas across the country and Afghan veterans of the Afghan wars. In respect to each organisation the State Department report says, in anticipation of asset seizures by the Pakistani government, the organisation withdrew funds from bank accounts. This shows how sincere or how insincere the government of Pakistan has been in acting against terrorist funding.

I would like to draw the attention of the panel also to four other recent documents of the US government. On October 14, the Department of Treasury issued an order freezing the bank accounts of a supposedly charity organisation of Pakistan called the Al Akhtar Trust.

It says the charity trust was founded by the Jaish-e-Muhammad, the same organisation whose supporters have played a leading role in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl and which has been active in Jammu and Kashmir.

This organisation is supposed to have been banned (in Pakistan) by an order issued on January 15, 2002. If it was banned, how did the Pakistan government allow it to start a charity and collect funds? The second significant observation in that order of the US Department of Treasury is the Al Akhtar Trust funded jihad not only in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but is also suspected of funding jihad in Iraq.


That means an organisation founded in Pakistan has been funding attacks on the American troops in Iraq. How did this happen? What action did General Pervez Musharraf take against this organisation?

The other order is of the US Department of Treasury. Dated October 16, it concerns Dawood Ibrahim, head of a mafia group closely involved with terrorist groups. He was involved in the explosions in Bombay in 1993, along with five others who have been given shelter in Pakistan.

The government of India has been repeatedly asking for their arrest and handing over to India so that they could be tried for terrorism. But the government of Pakistan has all the time been maintaining that they are not on Pakistani territory. This order, which has designated Dawood Ibrahim as a global terrorist, says, he had links with Al Qaeda and with the Taliban and had been helping them by placing his ships at their disposal. Two, it also says he has been living in Karachi and gives his passport number. In spite of that, the Pakistan government has denied that he is in Karachi, denied this passport belongs to him. For these reasons, when Musharraf says he has been taking action against terrorists, we in India find it difficult to believe it.

One last point. We in India are gratified by the fact that justice has at last been done to the families of victims of the Lockerbie tragedy. Your plane was blown up by a Libyan intelligence officer. He planted the explosives.

The US imposed punitive sanctions against Colonel Gaddafi. They held him responsible for allowing his intelligence agencies to blow up the aircraft. Ultimately, justice was done.

There’ve been seven instances of terrorist attacks directed against Indian civil aviation: five instances of hijacking by Sikh terrorists of Punjab; one instance of hijacking by a Wahhabi terrorist organisation of Pakistan, the Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, 1999; one instance in which an Air India plane, Kanishka, was blown up off the Irish coast, resulting in the death of over 200 civilians; and one instance in which an unsuccessful attempt was to blow up another Air India aircraft in Tokyo.

And all these instances took place when the military was in power. There has not been a single attack on civil aviation by terrorist groups from Pakistan when a democratically elected government was in power.

The people involved in the explosions have been given sanctuary in Pakistan. Is it not the responsibility of the international community to see they are brought to trial? Doesn’t it have an obligation to do justice to the families of the victims, just as it was required to do justice to the victims of Lockerbie?