In Pakistan’s Punjab, an unconvincing terror crackdown – by Omar Waraich
Bowing to intense public pressure, Pakistan’s largest province has finally moved against some local militant groups. The Punjab government, which had until now preferred to look away, last week ordered a crackdown after a series of vicious terrorist attacks on religious groups branded by the militants as heretics, apostates or infidels. Over 40 people were killed on July 1 in an attack at Lahore’s most famous Sufi shrine, sparking outrage across the country as even moderate Muslims staged armed demonstrations and vowed to tackle the militants themselves if the Punjab government declined to act.
Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and wealthiest province, is home to a toxic mix of sectarian and Kashmir-focused jihadist groups that have operated with state patronage since the 1980s. The province also houses the greatest concentration of hard-line madrasahs that supply young, impressionable recruits to jihadist groups. Some of these groups have been responsible for some of the deadliest terror attacks in Pakistan and also in neighboring India and Afghanistan.
Punjabi authorities are now trying ease fears of militancy run amok with a crackdown that police say has already seen over 150 arrests. But analysts and critics of the Punjab government are skeptical. “The feedback I’m getting is that it’s just an eyewash,” Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab and a loyalist of President Asif Ali Zardari, tells TIME. “They claim that there have been lots of arrests, but there are no details of whom they’ve caught and whom they haven’t.” Taseer is a rival of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose right-of-center Pakistan Muslim League–N (PML-N) leads the Punjab government.
Taseer believes the PML-N is unwilling to launch a determined crackdown because it seeks political support from the religious right.
The problem, says security analyst Muhammad Amir Rana, is that the police have only arrested relatively low-level activists already known to them. “They have not arrested any members of the big terrorist organizations operating in Punjab. No one has been arrested from Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) or Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), for example,” he adds, in a reference to two major Punjab-based jihadist groups formed with backing from the Pakistani military to fight India in Kashmir but banned in 2002 after a terror attack on the Indian Parliament brought strong U.S. pressure to rein them in. LeT was also responsible for the November 2008 Mumbai massacre. Just last month, its leader Hafiz Saeed held a rally with thousands of supporters in the center of Lahore with no hindrance from authorities — a clear sign, analysts say, that the security establishment continues to see the group as an asset in its strategic rivalry with India.
The political class also appears to have been inclined to indulge militant groups. One of the groups that has seen some of its members, although not leaders, arrested in the current crackdown is the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) — a banned sectarian organization that has been accused of attacks on religious minorities in Punjab over the past year, including the May massacre of nearly 100 members of the Ahmadi Muslim sect. Despite being banned since 2002, the group re-emerged under a new name earlier this year. In the central Punjabi town of Jhang, masked members menaced residents, wielding Kalashnikovs and chanting bloodcurdling anti-Shi’ite slogans. But during a special election there in February, the Punjab law minister assiduously courted the group’s votes, touring the town with the SSP’s leader. He was not alone. According the SSP, the group has — sometimes discreetly, sometimes publicly — helped up to a dozen parliamentarians from the ruling Pakistan People’s Party win their seats. Senior members of the party struggle to deny the charge. “If one or two people, for local political advantage, have a few surreptitious meetings, who knows?” says Taseer.
Authorities in Punjab also face questions about how best to tackle the province’s militants. Last month, Interior Minister Rehman Malik raised the prospect of a military operation “on the pattern” of those conducted in the northwest and tribal areas. But the Pakistan Army, which says that it is overstretched along the western border, is in no mood to open a new domestic front. And many analysts dismiss such proposals as alarmist. “There is a problem in Punjab,” says security analyst Rana. “The Punjabi Taliban networks, sectarian groups and Kashmiri jihadist groups are active there. But it’s not going to be the next Swat Valley. There’s a huge difference. The militants lack public support that they have in Pashtun areas and with a clear policy they can control the situation.”
The immediate challenge is to enhance the counterterrorism capability of local law-enforcement institutions. While police pay has been improved, repeated attacks on Lahore, Punjab’s capital and Pakistan’s second largest city, demonstrate that the force remains unable to thwart attacks. Part of the answer lies in better training and equipment; the rest in making the best use of existing resources. “A real crackdown would mean arresting those terrorists who are providing the logistics, the hideouts and the madrasah recruits,” says Rana. “To do that, the police need to have better coordination with the intelligence agencies.”
Institutional weakness is also clear in the judicial system, which often results in the release of arrested terror suspects. “The law-enforcement authorities will have to do a lot of work to make sure that the evidence is there to be able to prosecute them,” says Rana. Those steps are important not just in ensuring justice is done, but also in giving the police the confidence to take on the militants. “If a police officer is afraid that the militants will be let off the hook and take revenge, who is going to have the confidence to stand up to them?” says a senior Punjab official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You have to make sure they stay behind bars, or go for extrajudicial killings and hope for the best. Right now, neither is happening.”
Source: Time
South Asia
Jul 16, 2010
Pakistan cracks the whip
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD – Despite repeated warnings by Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, under American pressure the government has begun a risky crackdown on extremist religious organizations as well as the essentially inactive remnants of banned jihadi organizations.
Over the past few days, more than 200 people in the northwestern city of Peshawar have been detained, while in the eastern province of Punjab about 100 members of banned militant organizations have been arrested. The banned extremist Sunni Muslim group Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan – now known as Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat – was among those groups targeted.
The crackdown is similar to the one in 2004-2005 following unsuccessful assassination attacks on then-president General Pervez Musharraf. Hundreds of jihadis were arrested, including heroes of the Pakistani establishment such as Ilyas Kashmiri and veteran jihadi Abdul Jabbar. The crackdown led to a split between the militants and the Pakistani military and made Pakistan very much a part of the Afghan war theater by 2007. Top guerrilla commander Ilyas Kashmiri’s 313 Brigade is now an operational arm of al-Qaeda.
The latest crackdown sharpens the schism between the two largest Sunni sects and adds fuel to the fire of conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis.
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat is an anti-Shi’ite political party that wants to have Shi’ites declared non-Muslim through legislation in parliament. In the early 1970s, Ahmadis suffered this fate.
The group contested parliamentary elections in 2002, and its leader at that time, Maulana Azam Tariq (now assassinated), was elected. He supported the Musharraf-backed Pakistan Muslim League (Q). The party now supports the opposition Pakistan Muslim League of former premier Nawaz Sharif.
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat does not believe in armed struggle, but its breakaway faction, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, is a banned underground militant outfit that is allied with al-Qaeda and known to have killed several leading Shi’ite figures.
Many of Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat’s leaders have been killed by the banned Shi’ite militant organization Sipah-e-Mohammad, which is a breakaway faction of the banned political party Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqah-e-Jaferi. The Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqah-e-Jaferi now operates as the Tehrik-e-Islami and is a part of the six-party religious alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, as a representative of Shi’ites.
Following the twin suicide attacks this month in Lahore on a Sufi shrine in which more than 40 people were killed and nearly 200 injured, the Punjabi Taliban were brought into the spotlight. They are considered responsible for changing the dynamics of the Afghan war theater as they have vast expertise acquired while fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Indian forces in disputed Kashmir in the 1990s.
International players in Afghanistan such as the United States and UK therefore have pressed Pakistan hard to take action against them. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi was top on the wanted list for a crackdown in southern Punjab.
However, Pakistani intelligence agencies claimed there was no significant presence of the Punjabi Taliban in Punjab province, saying their sanctuaries were in the tribal areas and in Afghanistan and that they did not have strongholds in Pakistan’s urban centers.
All the same, the recent wave of attacks in Punjab indicates that they must have some foothold in Punjab and intelligence agencies therefore warned against opening up another front in the province – the military is already heavily involved in fighting against militants in the tribal areas.
So the authorities went after the complex labyrinth of sectarian-based political parties that are deeply interwoven into Pakistan’s social and political fiber, as well as jihadi organizations like the banned Jaish-e-Muhammad that also have complex relations with the military establishment. Madrassas (seminaries) are also likely to be targeted. Intelligence had also strongly warned against such action.
Anti-Taliban sections of the government have tried to elicit support from Sunni anti-Taliban organizations. In the southern port city of Karachi in Sindh province, organizations from the Brelvi (Sufi) school of thought have seized some mosques previously operated by the pro-Taliban Deobandis. This has provoked serious tension between the country’s two largest Sunni sects.
“We warn against any intrigues or conspiracies against Deobandi madrassas or mosques. Otherwise, we reserve our rights to strongly react,” said a representative of all Deobandi schools, mosques and religious parties.
The Brelvi school of thought is considered to have the largest following in the country. However, the Deobandis have the largest network of schools and mosques, in addition to the largest religious political parties. These include the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (all factions) and Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat. Deobandi scholars have important ministries in the federal cabinet and most jihadi organizations hail from the Deobandi sect (the others come from the Salafis and the Jamaat-e-Islami, which are also close to the Deobandis).
The crackdown is likely to provide a justification for the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to carry out more attacks inside Pakistan on Sunni and Shi’ite targets, which can only spark more sectarian unrest, as well as possible create a new wave of militants heading for the jihadi epicenter in the North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan.
This is precisely what happened after the 2004-2005 crackdown and it proved a decisive factor in the Afghan Taliban’s comeback in 2006.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online’s Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LG16Df04.html
CNN Blog
13 July 2010
Security Brief: Punjabi Taliban
The frontier territories in the mountainous north of Pakistan are used to terrorism. But U.S. and Pakistani officials are looking with unease at its spread to the country’s most important and populous province: Punjab.
This month, an attack on a Sufi shrine in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, killed at least 40 people and injured nearly 200. It was the latest in a series of deadly gun and bomb attacks in Lahore. Last month, Taliban attacked two mosques of the Ahmadi sect (which is regarded as non-Muslim by Sunni extremists in Pakistan). Some 80 worshipers were killed.
The Taliban denied that they were responsible for the attack on the shrine, but Pakistani officials speak of a new loose alliance of militant groups emerging, one they call the Punjabi Taliban.
The interior minister, Rehman Malik, said, “Factually speaking, the proscribed organizations are of course from Punjab, most of them.”
He was referring to 17 banned organizations that have their origins and headquarters in Punjab – organizations like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which has links with al Qaeda, and Jaish-e-Mohammed. And some of the groups have become influential in mainstream politics.
And that’s a worry. Punjab’s stability is vital: It is the country’s breadbasket, its industrial heartland, home to more than half the country’s population and most of its military and political establishment.
But in Pakistan, nothing is simple. The federal government in Islamabad plays up the threat of the Punjabi Taliban because it says the main opposition party, which runs Punjab, has colluded with extremist organizations. Malik belongs to the governing Pakistan People’s Party; the chief minister of Punjab is Shabaz Sharif of Pakistan Muslim League. Sharif throws the same accusation back at politicians of the PPP and complains of a lack of cooperation from the military in dealing with outlawed groups.
Even the Lahore police chief gives conflicting signals about the threat facing his men, who have been frequent targets of suicide bombings.
“This is a very wrong notion,” Aslam Tareem said, “the impression that there is a Punjabi Taliban, which means there are some camps and training camps in the south of Punjab … but there are not.”
But moments later, Tareem acknowledged the danger posed by Punjabi Taliban. He says they are trained by Taliban in the lawless tribal border regions, experienced fighters and bomb-makers. And he says his men have recently recovered a staggering 6,000 kilograms – more than 6 tons – of explosives.
Moderate clerics in Punjab want decisive action against extremists before the situation gets out of control. Mulana Raghib Naeemi, whose father was killed last year for speaking out against the Taliban, says that just issuing a banning order against militant groups serves no purpose.
“[The] government should ban terrorist groups completely, not only on the name but also on their working, on their leaders and on their literature,” he said.
After the shrine bombing, Sufi leaders also demanded immediate action to tackle Sunni militancy in Punjab and the resignation of one Punjab minister who had received support from the militant Sipah-e-Sahaba group during an election campaign this year. The group was banned in 2002.
Our own reporting suggests that Sipah-e-Sahaba operates freely. We caught up with its Secretary-General Khadim Hassain Dhellon.
“I have hundreds of thousands of followers,” he said. “If I’m arrested, they’ll join the Taliban in the tribal region.”
He doubts he will be detained, claiming to have helped some of the country’s most powerful politicians get elected by campaigning with them and telling his supporters to vote for them.
The fear among observers here is that as the political parties score points and exchange accusations, the militant groups will continue to grow in Punjab. For months, the government failed to take decisive action against the Taliban as they gained strength in the mountains near the capital Islamabad. When it finally sent the army in, the battles displaced hundreds of thousands of people. That sort of offensive in the densely populated rural plains of Punjab is not possible. Nor is it one that army commanders, their forces already stretched in the frontier regions, would entertain.
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/13/security-brief-punjabi-taliban/
At least Punjab government took some pity on the people of Punjab and Pakistan. The Home Department has issued a list of 23 outlawed organisations and the law enforcement agencies have been directed to keep a close eye on the office bearers of these entities, but it is just a cumin in the camel mouth. There is need a stringent action against terrorist banned outfits as their brazen attacks on innocent people are increasing day by day. In another move Hafiz Saeed has been told not to leave the country. This move is encouraging for the federal government, as its efforts are now starting to bear fruit. All these groups were previously banned but had started operating under different names and under the shade of Pakistan Muslim league-N. It is quite obvious that numerous acts of terrorism have been planned and executed by them and this ban will certainly help in checking their activities, but in a condition that this ban should not be a eye wash as N-league is under immense pressure because of its patronage to terrorist groups.
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