http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/11/MNGS2D786Q1.DTL
Lodi inquiry highlights Pakistan's complex role in war on terrorism Teresa Castle, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, June 11, 2005 A federal investigation into possible links between a Lodi man arrested this week and a terrorist camp in Pakistan has raised questions about the involvement of America's principal ally in the region in networks that train terrorists. According to the FBI affidavit outlining charges against Hamid Hayat, the 22-year-old said he was trained "to kill Americans" -- even using photos of President Bush and other U.S. officials as target practice -- at a camp called Tamal near Rawalpindi, a city just outside the capital of Islamabad. That assertion raised eyebrows among terrorism experts because Rawalpindi is home to the Pakistani army's general headquarters and also is the site of President Pervez Musharraf's official residence. A Pakistani senior foreign ministry official, Naeem Khan, rejected the assertion this week. "There are no training camps in Pakistan," he said. "We are the frontline state in the fight against terrorism. How could we allow such camps in our country?" But a number of experts on Pakistan said such training camps -- many of them formed to feed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir -- do exist in some parts of the country and in the part of Kashmir under Pakistan's control even as the Musharraf government works with the United States to combat terrorists. Michael Krepon, director of the South Asia project at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies international security issues, said "many thousands" of young would-be recruits to al Qaeda and other extremist groups cycle through camps in various parts of the country. Al Qaeda has long maintained a support network in Pakistan's remote, mountainous border with Afghanistan, and most experts believe that clandestine training sites operated by different jihadi organizations are concentrated in the fiercely independent North-West Frontier Province, in Waziristan, in the Punjab and in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. The government, which has carried out highly visible campaigns to smoke out terrorists near the border with Afghanistan in the past year, "may allow the camps to remain open so they can have the militants in a known place and keep an eye on them so they don't engage in mayhem elsewhere in the country,'' said Krepon. However, Husain Haqqani, a former senior adviser to Pakistan's government who is now a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said recent arrests and killings in such Pakistani cities as Mardan, Faisalabad and Gujarat, far from the border, show that terrorist groups have extended their presence in the country. Michael Weinbaum, a Pakistan expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington and former State Department analyst, expressed skepticism about the assertion in the original FBI affidavit, deleted from a later affidavit, that Hamid Hayat had been given a first-class tour of all the inner workings of terrorist camps and had seen "hundreds of attendees from various parts of the world.'' The presence of so many Arabs and Muslims from outside the region would be hard to hide, Weinbaum said. He also questioned the assertion that Hamid's father, Umer Hayat, had visited "several operational training camps" and "observed weapons and urban warfare training, physical training and classroom education." "You don't share that information with trainees. You create tight cells," Weinbaum said. In addition, he said, "it is very difficult to approach these camps." But he added that there are Al Qaeda cells all over the country as well as militant training camps run by Pakistani and Kashmiri jihadi groups. Rahimullah Yusafzai, a veteran Pakistani journalist who met al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1998, said it was "unlikely that even if such a camp existed it would be close to Rawalpindi.'' Yusafzai said two huge camps -- Muridke, near Lahore, run by the military arm of the militant Islamist group Lashkar-e-Tayyba, and Mansehra, near the Kashmir border, run by fighters affiliated with a militant group known as Jaish-e-Mohammad -- were well known in the past. Under pressure from the United States, Musharraf moved against them after the Sept. 11 attacks, but they may have been re-established elsewhere, he said. FBI affidavits Other allegations made by the FBI also raised questions. The government's first affidavit said the training camp the Lodi man allegedly attended was operated by Maulana Fazlur Rehman. In a second affidavit, however, his name was omitted, and it is unclear what, if any, role Rehman has in the current investigation. Rehman is secretary-general of the country's opposition Islamic Alliance and head of a pro-Taliban group called Jamat Ulema Islami. Arnaud de Borchgrave, director of the Transnational Threat Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Rehman "used to brag that he was a friend of Osama bin Laden," even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. De Borchgrave spent years in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a Newsweek correspondent and once interviewed Taliban religious leader Mullah Omar. However, Yusafzai said he thought the reference to Rehman in the FBI affidavit might refer to the similarly named Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, a senior figure in Harakat al-Mujahedeen, an outlawed group that operated the terrorist training camp at Mansehra, among others. In 1998, he vowed to take revenge on the United States after U.S. cruise missiles hit a training camp he operated in Afghanistan in an attempt to kill bin Laden. That same year, he was one of the original signers, along with bin Laden, of an edict calling for Muslims worldwide to wage holy war against Americans and Jews. Despite its status as the center of Pakistan's military establishment, some analysts said Rawalpindi's association with the military could, paradoxically, make it fertile ground for a terrorist training operation. Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, many in Pakistan's military and intelligence community were openly allied with the Taliban and with al Qaeda. Since then, Musharaff has tried to end such links, but old allegiances run deep. "Rawalpindi is full of retired military officers, many of whom were pushed out (of the armed services) because of their alliance with the Taliban, " said de Borchgrave. The militant groups may also draw support from current and former members of the country's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which openly sponsored a number of jihadi groups before Pakistan joined the U.S.-led war on terror, noted Hassan Abbas, author of "Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America's War on Terror." "Without their support, it's not possible for these militant organizations to operate," said Abbas, a former Pakistani police officer who is now a scholar at Tufts University's School of Law and Diplomacy and a fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Musharraf is still struggling to control his own military, said Haqqani, the former Pakistan government adviser. "The Pakistani security establishment is massive. Musharaff made a U-turn after 9/11, a U-turn that is like the Titanic turning in a very narrow stream, '' he said. "Some in the security establishment in Pakistan may act against Musharraf and follow their own agenda.'' Indeed, two assassination attempts against Musharraf were carried out in December 2003 on the road between Rawalpindi's military headquarters and the president's official residence. Last May, six army and air force officers were arrested in connection with the two attempts. Link acknowledged The government acknowledged the connection between some elements in the military and al Qaeda when it claimed recently that the assassination attempts were orchestrated by Abu Farraj al-Libbi, a terror mastermind it handed over to the U.S. government on Monday. Although al-Libbi is not on any U.S. terrorist list, Pakistan claims he was al Qaeda's No. 3 man. Despite the reports of terrorist training camps on Pakistani soil, analysts said the latest embarrassment would not harm Islamabad's relations with the Bush administration. "We've made our bargain with Pakistan, and they've made theirs with us," said Weinbaum of the Middle East Institute. "There's no one out there who serves our interests as well, and we're not going to let anything jeopardize that.'' Chronicle staff writers Michael Taylor and Edward Epstein and Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent Mark Williams contributed to this report.E-mail Teresa Castle at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Page A - 1 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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