Pakistan and China Supporting Terrorism as a Defence Strategy
Abdur
Rahman Makki Was Designated A Global Terrorist.
Main
Points:
1. 2. China had
filed objection to it.
2. China keeps
Uyghur Muslims in the name of fight against terrorism but defends Pakistani
terrorists.
3. Jamat ud
Dawah and Lashkar-e- Taiba are state sponsored terror outfits of Pakistan.
4. Pakistan has
not learnt a lesson.
------
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
21 January
2023
Pakistan's
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meets Chinese President Xi Jinping during his two
days visit in Beijing, China, November 2, 2022. Press Information Department
(PID)/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
------
The
designation of Lashkar -e- Taiba second in command Abdur Rahman Makki as a
global terrorist is another blow to Pakistan’s image as a country that promotes
and harbours terrorism. Lashkar-e-Taiba is a state- sponsored terror outfit of
Pakistan with facilities and infrastructure built by the government of
Pakistan. It was directly involved in Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 and
ironically the then dictator Pervez Musharraf had acknowledge to the US media
that he had facilitated Mumbai attacks.
The Mumbai
attacks had come nearer to triggering a war between India and Pakistan. Because
of the terrorist outfits and terrorists of Pakistan, the two countries have
come close to a military confrontation a number of times. Still, the successive
Pakistani governments have harboured terrorists to wage proxy wars with India.
This has not caused any considerable damage to India but have huge political and
economic damage and loss to Pakistan. Because of these terrorists, Pakistan has
been in the grey list of FATF and has been the only county that houses a
terrorist organisation.
The
madrasas that are run by the Dawah publish textbooks that preach and promote
terrorism and sectarian violence. The Pakistan government cannot put pressure
on it because it depends on Lashkar -e-Taiba for proxy operations. But the
extremism the jihadist organisations are propagating has turned the entire
Pakistani society into a violent society. Murder, targeted killing, sectarian
violence, suicide bombings and assassination of national leaders has become the
order of the day in Pakistan. Karachi is one city that witnesses sectarian and
terrorist violence on a daily basis. Of late Khaibar Pakhtunkhwa has witnessed
terrorist attacks by TTP. Along with LeT, the Pakistan government supported TTP
in the hope that it could be used against India with the help of Taliban but the
TTP have turned the table on them. The tribal stretch along Afghanistan border
has come virtually under their control and the government is struggling to keep
TTP at bay.
The
government cannot launch a military offensive against TTP because of its
bankruptcy. The hatred of India and playing of the Kashmir card to divert
public attention has brought Pakistan to this mess. The role of Saudi Arabia in
the Pakistan's political affairs is also questionable. It financial helps
Pakistan with billions of dollars of loans and trade deals to salvage its
economy but does not pressurise it to dismantle terror infrastructure in the
country.
It does not
pressurise Pakistan to bring reform in its madrasa system and its syllabus that
is full of sectarian and extremist content that glorifies and promotes violence
in the name of Islam. Instead, Saudi Arabia is more and more promoting Arab
culture and hardline Islamic ideology in Pakistan. Professors subscribing to
Wahhabi version of Islam are appointed as principals of colleges who push for Wahhabi
religious agenda among the students. Recently, Pakistan Prime Minister said
that Pakistan had learnt its lesson and now wanted to live in peace with its
neighbours.
If it was
really so, he would have taken steps to dismantle terror infrastructure and
launched a decisive battle against every kind of terrorism flourishing on the
land of Pakistan. Instead, it took the help of China to unsuccessfully block
the UN move to designate Makki a global terrorist. In fact both China and
Pakistan have an unholy alliance to protect terrorists in Pakistan though China
has kept one million Uyghurs in detention centres on the pretext of rooting out
terrorism. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have defended China's Uyghur persecution
for some economic gains.
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Pakistan
Again Cultivating Lashkar, Jaish As Loyal Proxies. And Why China’s Got Its Back
By
Praveen Swami
18 January,
2023 1
Late one
summer evening five years ago, an air-conditioned SUV pulled up outside a
nondescript home in the dust-blown outskirts of Bahawalpur, Pakistan. The
elderly cleric who emerged from the car had arrived to deliver a eulogy for a
labourer’s slain son — teenager Muhammad Yakub had been buried weeks earlier in
southern Kashmir. Luridly-coloured pamphlets plastered across the town proclaimed he had been “martyred fighting the
Indian Army while performing Ghazwa-e-Hind,” the apocalyptic war prophesied to
precede the Day of Judgment.
From
accounts of similar funerals, recorded by scholar Mariam Abou Zahab, we know that Lashkar-e-Taiba second-in-command Abdul Rehman Makki
likely urged Yakub’s family to celebrate. The day after their son was killed,
one family gathered his friends “for walima [reception] to celebrate his shaadi
[wedding] with the houris [paradisical maidens].”
Earlier
this week, following months of delay due to Chinese objections, Makki was designated a global terrorist by the United
Nations Security Council. Four more important terror
commanders—26/11
operational commander Sajid Mir, Lashkar charities chief Shahid Mehmood, the
organisation’s heir-apparent Talha Saeed, and Jaish-e-Mohammad military chief
Abdul Rauf Alvi—remain off the global sanctions list because of China’s
Security Council veto.
The message
has to do with geopolitics: Islamabad can count on its Iron Brother to protect
it from confrontation with its jihadist clients. There is a less obvious story
unfolding, too.
Facing the
resurgence of anti-State jihadists like the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), Pakistan
is again cultivating the Lashkar and Jaish as loyal proxies. For months now,
there has been evidence that the Lashkar’s infrastructure remains active, with
the organisation able to mobilise funds and cadre. Last year’s floods saw
significant mobilisation by the Lashkar. The Jaish-e-Mohammad, for its part, has expanded its seminary complex and held
rallies calling for jihad in Kashmir.
The Model
Sons
Founded in
1986 by three religious studies professors at the Lahore University of
Engineering, the birth of the Lashkar had been midwifed by Abdullah Yusuf
Azzam, the Palestinian-Jordanian ideologue who served as mentor to generations
of Arab jihadists, including Osama Bin Laden. Then known as the ‘Markaz Ud
Dawat Wal’Irshad’—or centre for proselytisation—the Lashkar built a sprawling campus on land gifted by General Muhammad
Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime, complete with schools, colleges medical
facilities, and factories.
The campus
was the kernel of Gen Zia’s hope to rebuild Pakistan as a sharia-governed
Islamic State, with the law of God and jihad as its two guiding principles.
Late in
2018, as it battled
to emerge from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) terrorist-financing
watchlist, Islamabad began promising to dismantle the jihadist empire. The
hammer finally fell—but with extraordinary gentleness.
Even though
Lashkar chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2020, he
was moved to house arrest. Within weeks of his conviction that year, Makki’s
sentence was suspended by the Lahore High Court. The
trials of important 26/11 perpetrators like Sajid Mir, moreover, were shrouded
in secrecy.
The United
States publicly noted that Pakistan’s judicial system had often released
convicted terrorists, a fact that fuelled concern about what Islamabad would do
once the threat of sanctions was removed.
Last
summer, New Delhi moved to have five key jihadists added to the global list
maintained by the United Nations. Listing, the argument went, would make it
that much more difficult for Pakistan to release the jihadists it had convicted
under the threat of sanctions. Efforts to designate the five, though, ran into a
diplomatic
wallput up by
China.
The Family
Man
Even though
Kashmir police records suggest Makki had no significant military role in the Lashkar, family ties
qualified him as a trustworthy custodian of the empire when Saeed was in jail.
A cousin of Saeed — and also his brother-in-law through marriage to two sisters
— Makki was given charge of the Lashkar’s international relationships, expert C.
Christine Fair has written. That had given Makki links to financiers across West Asia
and in Pakistan’s global diaspora.
Fighters in
the organisation, moreover, respected Makki as an ideologue. Political
scientist Stephen
Tankel has noted
that Makki played a key role in crafting theological justifications of the
Lashkar’s suicide-squad operations. The testimony of 26/11 perpetrator David
Headley to the National Investigation Agency shows he regularly lectured at
jihadist gatherings in Lahore, together with Saeed.
Makki, the UN
notes, was a key figure in “raising
funds, recruiting, and radicalising youth to violence and planning attacks”.
Following
26/11, with Saeed under growing international pressure, Makki continued to
speak for the organisation, playing a key role in efforts by the Lashkar to
emerge at the head of an Islamist political coalition called the
Difa-e-Pakistan Council.
The Lashkar
second-in-command made clear his opposition to former Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif’s efforts to normalise the relationship with India. “If India is not our
enemy,” Makki wrote in 2017, “then why do we need a nuclear bomb? India is our
enemy, and the enmity is due to the Kashmir issue.”
Talha, Saeed’s
son, had been groomed to succeed his elderly father, but with few jihadist
credentials, he was less credible than the Lashkar’s rank-and-file. With the
father in jail, it was vital for Makki to remain free to secure the succession.
Abdul Rauf Alvi, brother to the seriously-ill Jaish chief Masood Azhar Alvi,
was handed a similar role.
The Jihadi
Dynasts
Like all
dynasts, the heirs to the Lashkar and Jaish will control empires built over
decades. The Lashkar’s al-Dawa school network, notably, continues to operate,
though under the notional administration of the government.
Tankel has noted that the organisation’s education wing was its “most
profitable and powerful department.”
First set up in 1994, the organisation’s al-Dawa system was claimed to
be operating 127 schools with 15,000 students and 800 teachers, with subsidised
tuitions for the poor.
Textbooks
published by the organisation, expert Muhammad Amir Rana has recorded, modified
standard information — ‘C is for cat and G is for goat’ to ‘C is for cannon and
G is for gun’. Teachers at its institutions were required to have received
jihadist military instruction. The Jaish-e-Mohammad continues to publish
jihadist literature for children, which is taught to students at its network of seminaries.
Likewise,
institutions like the al-Dawa medical missions—initially set up to care for
jihadists injured in Kashmir—have spawned elaborate networks that provide the
organisation with reach and influence among Pakistan’s poor.
Following a
ban imposed on jihadist charity network in 2018, journalists Asif
Shehzad and
Mubasher Bukhari reported, “a few government representatives were on site and
new signs hung to rename the facilities, but little else appeared to have
changed”.
The Jihad
Factory
For
generations of Generals helming Pakistan’s national security, State-sanctioned
jihadism has seemed a useful tool to ensure internal order. Lashkar membership,
Abou Zahab has perceptively noted, serves as “safety valve for surplus
manpower: Joining a jihadi movement gives young boys, who cannot afford to
migrate to the West or to the Gulf and are socially frustrated, a substitute
identity and compensates for their frustrations”.
The
financial incentives to join the group, the scholar noted, are not
insignificant. “Being a martyr is, in addition, an opportunity for lower-class
boys to become famous.”
Ever since
2001, when General Pervez Musharraf’s break with the jihadist movement pushed
thousands toward anti-regime organisations like the TTP and al-Qaeda, the
rationale for loyal, subservient proxies like the Jaish and Lashkar has seemed
even more compelling.
Four times,
though, terrorism has almost led Pakistan into a war its Generals know the
country simply cannot afford, economically and militarily. The crisis of
2001-2002, 26/11, 2016, and 2019 were all outcomes of terrorist strikes that
had consequences far larger than what the Generals had anticipated. The fifth
crisis could well lie ahead, with Pakistan determined not to turn off the
lights in the public-sector jihad factory founded by General Zia.
---
Praveen
Swami is ThePrint’s National Security Editor. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)
Source: Pakistan
Again Cultivating Lashkar, Jaish As Loyal Proxies. And Why China’s Got Its Back
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/pakistan-china-terrorism-defence-strategy/d/128934
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