By John Ballard
Via a tweet from Vali Nasr comes "Terror's Training Ground," a cover story from Newsline, an English language periodical from Pakistan. It is dated September, 2009, but the information presented will not be out of date, unfortunately, for some time. I am linking this piece in humility because simply reading it leaves me feeling even more ignorant than before I started. It prints out to only four and a half pages, but it is filled with so many names, terms, political and geographical references it may as well be a textbook in chemistry. I have read through it several times and have decided to post it for others more wonky than I.
This material is pretty dry.The rest is after a break to save screen space for casual visitors.
The writer, Ayesha Siddaqa, is a security analyst from Pakistan. Here is her bio from a FORA.tv link.
Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa Agha is an independent security analyst and strategic affairs columnist of Pakistan. Dr Siddiqa has been a civil servant for 11 years during which she was asked to work as the Director of Naval Research with Pakistan Navy making her the first civilian and a woman to work at that position in Pakistan's defense establishment. She is also a Ford Fellow and was the 'Pakistan Scholar' at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington, DC for 2004-05.
I became aware of Vali Nasr several years ago and got his book, The Shiite Revival. Like this article by Dr. Siddiqa it is more dense than I expected. I never "finished" but to this day I sometimes pick it up to see what I might learn when something in the news rings a bell. Here is a link to an interview with Vali Nasr at CFR, 2007. He is among those I follow with Twitter, hence the link above.
Four opening paragraphs set the stage of "Terror's Training Ground."
A few years ago, I met some young boys from my village near Bahawalpur who were preparing to go on jihad. They smirked politely when I asked them to close their eyes and imagine their future. �We can tell you without closing our eyes that we don�t see anything.�
It was not entirely surprising. South Punjab is a region mired in poverty and underdevelopment. There are few job prospects for the youth. While the government has built airports and a few hospitals, these projects are symbolic and barely meet the needs of the area. It�s in areas like this, amid economic stagnation and hopelessness, that religious extremists find fertile ground to plant and spread their ideology.
The first step is recruitment � and the methodology is straightforward. Young children, or even men, are taken to madrassas in nearby towns. They are fed well and kept in living conditions considerably better than what they are used to. This is a simple psychological strategy meant to help them compare their homes with the alternatives offered by militant organisations. The returning children, like the boys I met, then undergo ideological indoctrination in a madrassa. Those who are indoctrinated always bring more friends and family with them. It is a swelling cycle.
Madrassas nurturing armies of young Islamic militants ready to embrace martyrdom have been on the rise for years in the Punjab. In fact, South Punjab has become the hub of jihadism. Yet, somehow, there are still many people in Pakistan who refuse to acknowledge this threat.
That's straightforward enough. But from this point on the reader is advised to get a notepad or highlighter. I have no intention of parsing what is in this paper but several main themes and important points jump off the pages in a way that even someone as uninformed as I can understand.
She describes four major militant outfits in the South Punjab.
- Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP)
- Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ)
- Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and
- Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT)
Of the four, I only recall having heard of #4, in connection with the Mumbai terrorist Thanksgiving Day attack two years ago. Those four are in "South Punjab", by which I presume she means in Pakistan, but the term Punjab also refers to a larger geographic area that predates modern nation-states and overlays both Pakistan and India. Wikipedia has this:
The area now known as the Greater Punjab comprises what were once vast territories of eastern Pakistan and northern western India. The bigger section of the Punjab is 70% within Pakistan and 30% within Republic of India although the region has been divided into three states. The Punjabi population is distributed proportionately to the land mass between the two Republics.
That is irrelevant at this point. I mention it to illustrate how easy it is to misunderstand even a simple word. I'm still uncertain to which she refers, but this part of the paper is the main point...
Sources claim that there are about 5,000 to 9,000 youth from South Punjab fighting in Afghanistan and Waziristan. A renowned Pakistani researcher, Hassan Abbas cites a figure of 2,000 youth engaged in Waziristan. The area has become critical to planning, recruitment and logistical support for terrorist attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Seems to me we are being fed numbers of Taliban and Associates in the hundreds, not thousands. Either I'm not getting something right or we have a clear case of misinformation.These "youth" fighters may not be card-carrying Taliban, but if they are under the Taliban command the distinction is academic.
Dr. Sissiqa suggests that Pakistanis are in denial of the number and significance of these young warriors and lists five explanations. (I am reminded of another unrelated reading from a week ago that argued that "Denial is a national habit in Pakistan.")
- opinion makers and policy makers are in a state of denial regarding
the gravity of the problem. [and] believe an overemphasis
on this region might draw excessive US attention to South Punjab � an
area epitomising mainstream Pakistan. - officer Sukhera and others like him do not see any threat because the
Punjab-based outfits are �home-grown� and are not seen as directly
connected to the war in Afghanistan - since all these outfits were created by the ISI to support General Zia-ul-Haq�s Islamisation process, in essence to fight a proxy war for Saudi Arabia against Iran by targeting the Shia community, and later the Kashmir war, the officials feel comfortable that they will never spin out of control. Those that become uncontrollable, such as Al-Furqan, are then abandoned.
- there is confusion at the operational level in the government regarding the definition of Talibanisation, which is then reflected in the larger debate on the issue.
- many believe that Talibanisation cannot take place in a region known for practicing the Sufi version of Islam.
With some modification the same list can be applied to American denials of similar developments here...
Opinion and policy makers are quick to minimize the "gravity" of increasing numbers of domestic killers, dismissing them one at a time as "isolated incidents." Since they are "home-grown" they don't qualify as bona fide enemy combatants. Militia groups and other paramilitary outfits are just overdoing the patriotism thing and we can curb their power if curbing is in order. We can't all agree anyway on the real meaning of terrorism, and besides, when you examine them closely they come from American roots and ran off the rails because of some psychiatric disorder. They really don't reflect a large movement.
See how easy that it?
?000?
That leaves four pages to go and there is no way to condense what remains. For complete understanding the reader either needs to come armed with a large store of relevant background information or be prepared for remedial study. The vocabulary and acronyms alone are intimidating.
For some scholars of Islam, especially those from the West such as Carl W. Ernst, Sufi Islam is a powerful force. In Pakistan�s society and politics, Sufi Islam represented by the shrines and pirs has always played a critical role. In fact, successive governments including that of Ayub Khan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Ziaul Haq representing different political traditions wooed the pirs or sajjada nasheens. There are many who believe that the rise in extremism is not a reflection on the waning strength of Sufi Islam because a majority of the people continue to owe allegiance to pirs. Quantitatively, Sufi Islam remains part of the popular religious tradition or a religion of the masses. Go to any shrine and you will observe hundreds and thousands of people, mainly the poor and destitute, congregating around the shrine and seeking forgiveness and a passport to heaven stamped by the living saint or pir.
Barelvi Islam
Deobandis and Barelvis are the two major groups of Muslims in the Subcontinent apart from the Shia. Barelvi Hanafis deem Deobandis to be kaafir. Those hostile to the Barelvis deprecated them as the shrine-worshipping, the grave-worshiping, ignorant Barelvis. Much smaller sects in Pakistan include the Ahl-e-Hadees and Ahl-e-Tashee. The non-Pakhtun population of Pakistan is predominantly Barelvi. The stronghold of Barelvism remains Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan. By one estimate, in Pakistan, the Shias are 18%, ismailis 2%, Ahmediyas 2%, Barelvis 50%, Deobandis 20%, Ahle Hadith 4%, and other minorities 4%. The Ahle-e-Hadith is a small group of Sunni Muslims in India who do not consider themselves bound by any particular school of law and rely directly on the Prophet�s Sunnah. By another estimate some 15 per cent of Pakistan's Sunni Muslims would consider themselves Deobandi, and some 60 per cent, are in the Barelvi tradition based mostly in the province of Punjab. But some 64 per cent of the total seminaries are run by Deobandis, 25 per cent by the Barelvis, six percent by the Ahle Hadith and three percent by various Shiite organisations.
Mazaris, Legharis, Gilanis, TNSM, Tableeghi Jamaat, Zakat fund, FATA, NWFP, Seraiki (language), Jamaat-ud-Dawn, dacoits... it's a fairly dense collection of terms.
This is English, but it may as well be another language for me.
The purpose of this post is simple. The reader should know by now that the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not confined to those two countries. There are too many references to other places, other interests. This is a proxy war but we cannot tell for whom. And the US military presence there is making matters worse. This is not a military conflict. It is a conflict of values deriving from conditions outlined in the opening paragraphs.
...South Punjab is a region mired in poverty and underdevelopment. There are few job prospects for the youth. While the government has built airports and a few hospitals, these projects are symbolic and barely meet the needs of the area. It�s in areas like this, amid economic stagnation and hopelessness, that religious extremists find fertile ground to plant and spread their ideology.
And this is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for a long time and thousands of militants (whom we would like to call "extremists" but who in their own environment are simply patriots) are in the pipeline. Check this...
Everyone has been so focused on FATA and the NWFP that they failed to notice the huge increase in religious seminaries in these districts of South Punjab. According to a study conducted by historian Tahir Kamran, the total number of madrassas in the Punjab rose from 1,320 in 1988 to 3,153 in 2000, an increase of almost 140%. These madrassas were meant to provide a rapid supply of jihadis to the Afghan war of the 1980s. At the time of 9/11, the Bahawalpur division alone could boast of approximately 15,000-20,000 trained militants, some of whom had resettled in their areas during the period that Musharraf claimed to have clamped down on the jihad industry. Many went into the education sector, opened private schools and even joined the media.
We're talking thousands of trained militants here, not hundreds.
This September, 9/11 will be eight years past. And it would appear from this paper that the numbers have not diminished but swelled.
This includes teachers, journalists and others in positions of influence.
I'm drawing no further conclusions.
The reader can take it from here.
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