Published on South Asia Analysis Group (http://www.southasiaanalysis.org) Home > RATIONALITY VS IRRATIONALITY RATIONALITY VS IRRATIONALITY Submitted by asiaadmin2 on Mon, 09/24/2012-12:46 Paper No. 831 04.11.2003 by B.Raman In 1995, Wahabi terrorists belonging to a Pakistani organisation then called the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA) and now called the Harkat-ul- Mujahideen (HUM) kidnapped a group of Western tourists in J&K. They operated under the assumed name Al Faran. One of them, an American, managed to escape. 2. It was reported that the terrorists slit the throat of an European, like one slits the throat of a sacrificial goat. As he bled to death, they sat round him, prayed and thanked Allah for giving them an opportunity to kill a Christian. The world does not know till today what happened to the remaining Western tourists. 3. In October, 1997, the US designated this organisation a Foreign Terrorist Organisation. Pakistan did not act against it. In December,1999, two months after the Pakistan Army under Gen.Pervez Musharraf seized power, Wahabi terrorists from the same organisation hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft and forced it to fly to Kandahar in Afghanistan, which was then under the control of the Taliban and where Osama bin Laden was then living and plotting his terrorist strikes against the USA. 4. On the way, they separated a young boy from his newly-married wife and slit his throat like one slits the throat of a sacrificial goat. As he bled to death, they sat round him, prayed and thanked Allah for giving them an opportunity to kill a Hindu. After the hijacking ended, the Pakistani hijackers escaped to Pakistan. Till today, Pakistan has not arrested them and handed them over to India for trial. Nor did it ban the organisation. 5. The then US President, Mr. Bill Clinton, visited India in 2000. The whole Indian nation was touched when in a remarkable gesture, he
remembered this Wahabi terrorist slaughter, sent for the young widow, conveyed to her his condolences and expressed to her the US determination to fight this terrorism and to give all necessary help to India to ensure that the terrorists were brought to trial. 6. Today, three years later, the Wahabi hijackers are still roaming free in Pakistan plotting more terrorist strikes against India, the USA, Israel and other nations of the world. Pakistan has avoided acting against them. 7. In January, 2002, Pakistani Wahabi terrorists belonging to organisations allied to the HUM and the Al Qaeda kidnapped a young American journalist Daniel Pearl. After some days, they slit his throat like one slits the throat of a sacrificial goat. As he bled to death, they sat round him, prayed and thanked Allah for giving them an opportunity to kill a Jew. Pakistan claimed to have brought to trial the terrorists responsible. One of them was even sentenced to death, but the sentence has not been carried out. The world does not as yet know the full facts of the case. 8. The Pakistani media reported that the Wahabi terrorist sentenced to death used to head the office of the Al Qaeda in Lahore and that after kidnapping Pearl he voluntarily surrendered to a retired officer of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who was then working as the Home Secretary of the Pakistani State of Punjab. It was said that he used to handle him as his source for many years and use him for terrorist strikes in Indian territory. 9.President Pervez Musharraf recently sought to reward this officer by posting him as Pakistan's High Commissioner to Australia. It reportedly refused to accept him. The Pakistani media has reported that Musharraf now proposes to send him as Ambassador to Indonesia. Reward for what? Reward for raising a terrorist and motivating him to kill Indians and Americans? The world does not know the truth. 10. The Muslims of Kashmir are largely descendents of converts from Hinduism and had been influenced in the past by the traditions of tolerance of Sufism. Since 1993, the ISI, by infiltrating hundreds of jihadis of Wahabi-Deobandi orientation into the State, has been trying to Wahabise the Muslims of the State and rid them of the influence of tolerant Sufism. The extent of the infiltration of ISI-trained Wahabis into the State would be evident from the fact that whereas before 1999, the number of foreign Wahabi mercenaries killed by the Indian Security forces in the State came to an average of 172 per annum, it has steeply gone up to an average of 951 per annum since the Army under Musharraf seized power in October,1999. The majority of them were Pakistanis. A small number of terrorists belonging to 18 other nationalities have also been killed or captured 11.What India has been confronted with in J&K since Musharraf seized power is no longer what used to be called Kashmiri militancy, but Wahabi jihad. Four Pakistani Wahabi-Deobandi organisations have been in the forefront of this Wahabi jihad. They accept the ideology of Osama bin Laden and are members of his International Islamic Front (ISI) for Jihad Against the Crusaders and the Jewish People. The fact that all these four Wahabi organisations are based in Pakistan and not J&K and that at least three of them have links with Al Qaeda find mention even in the Annexures of the annual report of the US State Department on the Patterns of Global Terrorism during 2002 submitted
to the Congress in May this year. 12. These Wahabi jihadi terrorists subscribe to an ideology which holds, firstly, that a Muslim's first loyalty is to his religion and only then to the country of which he is a citizen or resident; secondly, that the Muslims recognise only the religious frontiers of Islam and not national frontiers; thirdly, that the Muslims, have, therefore, a right and an obligation to go to any country to wage a jihad to protect the Muslims there; and, fourthly, that the Muslims have not only a right, but also a religious obligation to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction to protect their religion, if necessary. They project the Pakistani atomic bomb as the Islamic bomb to counter the Christian, the Jewish and the Hindu bombs. 13. The Wahabi terrorists hold that it is glorious to kill a non-muslim and that it is even more glorious to get killed while killing a non-muslim. The indigenous Kashmiri militants did not believe in suicide terrorism. The Wahabi mercenaries from Pakistan have introduced suicide terrorism into J&K since 1999. There have been 46 acts of suicide terrorism or fedayeen attacks in J&K since Musharraf came to power, of which 44 have been carried out by Pakistani Wahabi terrorists. 14. The Wahabi jihadi terrorists spawned by the madrasas and training camps of Pakistan and pre-9/11 Afghanistan have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians and members of the security forces in India, the USA, Indonesia, Kenya,Tanzaniya,Israel, Saudi Arabia, even Pakistan and Morocco. They are the motivating and funding force behind the jihad being waged against the forces of the Hamid Karzai Government in Afghanistan through a re-grouped, re-trained and re-armed Taliban from sanctuaries in Pakistan and against the American troops in Iraq. This Wahabi jihadi terrorism has already cost the precious lives of over 130 brave and patriotic soldiers of the USA in Iraq and continues to kill more every day. 15. The hopes placed by the US Administration in the Government of Pervez Musharraf that it would eradicate the snake-pit of Wahabi jihadi terrorism in the Pakistan soil have been belied. While pretending to take action, he has taken no action to prevent the infiltration of Wahabi terrorists not only into India, but also into Afghanistan, to stop the flow of funds to the terrorists and to wind up the terrorist infrastructure. He continues to provide sanctuary to 20 terrorist leaders of different terrorist organisations, Muslim as well as non-muslim, Kashmiri as well as non-kashmiri, wanted by India for trial for their involvement in hijackings of aircraft, the explosions in Mumbai (Bombay), the attack on the Indian Parliament, a plot to assassinate the Deputy Prime Minister of India and other acts of terrorism in J&K, Punjab and other parts of India. 16. We in India were gratified recently to learn that justice has at long last been done to the families of over 200 innocent American civilians who died in an explosion on board a Pan Am aircraft (Lockerbie) in 1988, for which the Libyan intelligence was established to have been responsible. The US held Col Khadaffi responsible for this horrible act of his intelligence, imposed punitive sanctions against Libya and ensured that the guilty were brought to book and that justice was done to the families of the victims. 17.Since 1981, there have been eight acts of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism against India's civil aviation-- five hijackings by Sikh terrorists,
one by Pakistani Wahabi terrorists, one explosion aboard an Air India plane off the Irish coast in 1985 in which over 200 innocent civilians were killed and one attempted explosion in the Narita airport of Tokyo the same year in which two ground personnel were killed. The perpetrators are still roaming free in Pakistan and no action has been taken by the international community against their handling officers in the ISI. 18. Action against terrorist funding, to which the US attaches so much importance, has been reduced to a farce by alerting the terrorists about the impending freezing of their accounts, thereby enabling them to withdraw the bulk of their bank balances or transfer them to other accounts under different names. As a result, according to an official statement laid on the table of the Pakistan National Assembly in June last, three accounts of bin Laden in Peshawar banks had a total balance of less than US $ 3,000 only. The account of his No.2, Ayman Al- Zawahiri, had only US $ five. The HUM had similar paltry amounts in its accounts. 19.The two terrorist organisations---the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad--ostensibly banned by Musharraf on January 15, 2002,continue to operate under different names. Their leaders travel all over Pakistan, hold public meetings and rallies, even in Islamabad, the capital, and continue to collect funds, acquire properties and run madrasas and training camps. They also give shelter to the survivors of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their madrasas. In September, some Muslim students from Indonesia and Malaysia, suspected to be connected with the Jemmah Islamiya, which is stated to have been responsible for the Bali bombing of October last year, were arrested by the Police from a madrasa of Karachi being run by the Lashkasr-e-Toiba. Its leader, Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, who was taking classes at that time, was not arrested even though his organisation has supposedly been banned. 20. The time has come for the US, as the leader of the international coalition in the war against terrorism, to act to eradicate this snake-pit of Wahabi jihadi terrorism, which threatens international peace and security. Otherwise, there will be no enduring freedom for the free nations of the world. The lives and property of their patriotic citizens would continue to be in jeopardy. A democratic State, whether it be the USA, India, Israel or any other country, has no greater duty today than to protect its citizens from these irrational jihadi serial killers and eradicate them before they manage to lay hands on what they call Pakistan's Islamic atomic bomb and turn it into a Wahabi atomic bomb. 21. Over 3,500 innocent civilians died in the 9/11 jihadi terrorist strikes in the USA, but, fortunately, many of us lived to fight another day. If they get hold of a jihadi atomic bomb, many of us may not live to fight another day. 23. It is not a clash of civilisations. It is a clash of rationality vs. irrationality. By choosing to have creators and sponsors of irrational forces like Musharraf as its allies, the US has weakened its ability to defeat this Wahabi jihadi terrorism and is paying a heavy price for it in Iraq. The more it trusts Musharraf's words, the more its soldiers will die in Iraq
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Advisory Committee, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com [1] ) Category: Papers [2] Topics: Terrorism [3] Copyright 2012. All Rights are Reserved. Source URL: http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/paper831 Links [1] mailto:corde@vsnl.com [2] http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers [3] http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/terrorism