It traces the emergence of the jihadi culture in Pakistan, and the government’s active role in encouraging it. Today the dire situation Pakistan finds itself in is due to the wrong polices of the military government and agencies. This is a must have book.
Muhammad Amir Rana traces the emergence of the jihadi organizations in Pakistan. He also talks to some young recruits about how they joined their groups.
The martyrdom of 30,000 Pakistanis in Afghanistan and Kashmir, 2,000 sectarian killings and the enthusiastic enrolment of 200,000 young men in various jihadi and sectarian organizations in the last two decades is the direct result of the jihadi culture prevailing in the country. A progeny of the Afghan war, this jihadi culture was strengthened by the revolution in Iran, nurtured by the Americans via ‘Operation Cyclone’, nourished by the extremist views and money of Osama bin Laden and came to fruition in the acts of the Taliban. Consequently, Pakistan found itself playing host to terrorism instead of acquiring either Kabul or Srinagar.
When Soviet forces entered Afghanistan, religious factions had already found a foothold in Pakistani politics by helping dismiss the democratically elected People’s Party government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in an undemocratic manner and installing a military dictator in its stead: a ‘Mard-i-Momin’ with his own religious agenda. The religious parties gained strength from the ‘benevolence’ of the United States which invited true believers from all over the world to unite against the threat of communism posed by the Soviet Union. Many religious leaders in Pakistan welcomed the call and, declaring the Afghan war to be a ‘jihad’, began to send young men to join the cause.
America began to invest heavily in the Afghan war. According to a disclosure by Zbigniew Bzerzinski on July 3, 1979, Jimmy Carter had set aside a secret fund of 500 million US dollars for this. A fund so secret that even the Congress knew nothing about it. The purpose of this fund, according to John Pilger, was to create a terrorist organization that encouraged and utilized Islamic extremism to undermine the Russian government in Central Asia.
The CIA called it "Operation Cyclone’’ and in the following years four billion dollars were committed to its promotion that included the establishment of a large number of religious madressahs or schools in Pakistan. John Pilger also states that eager young men from Pakistan’s religious parties were sent to espionage training centres run by the CIA in Virginia, where future Al Qaeda members received their training in terrorism while others were sent to the Islamic School of Brooklyn, New York, to study terrorist techniques under the very shadow of the World Trade Centre. In Pakistan, officers of the British MI6 and the local ISI played the role of ‘teacher’.
The November-December 2000 issue of the American magazine Foreign Affairs published an article “The culture of jihad in Pakistan” by Jessica Stern. Referring to Milt Bearden, the chief of an American secret agency in Pakistan during 1986-1989, the article states that America and Saudi Arabia provided 3.5 billion dollars to Pakistan during the Afghan war and, along with drugs and arms, ‘jihad’ became an important business of this region.
During the Afghan war the Pakistani secret service agency, the ISI, was reorganized in the manner prescribed by ‘Operation Cyclone’. The CIA and the ISI together controlled the Afghanistan war but the reorganization of the ISI resulted in serious damage to Pakistan ultimately. The ISI tightened its grip on matters of state and in the following years coerced democratically elected governments to function according to its agenda. Toppling and creating regimes became a pastime. During the 1988 general elections the grand alliance of religious parties, the IJI, mocked the Pakistan People’s Party with “You lost Dhaka, we won Kabul”. Even when the PPP came to power with its liberal leanings it could not change this policy. The Taliban experiment took shape during its rule and there was no change in either the Afghan or Kashmir policy. The ISI was not willing to compromise on any of these issues. In her first tenure as prime minister, when Benazir toured Muzzaffarabad, she was briefed by the ISI on the working of the organization called ‘Hurriyat’ in occupied Kashmir and requested to continue the policies of the previous government in this respect; a request that Benazir granted. Nobody had thought of challenging this jihadi role of the ISI prior to September 11.
The ISI and the governments under its influence did much to promote the jihadi culture in the country. ‘Raw material’ for jihad was acquired through two sources:
1 Religious madressahs
2 Government schools and colleges
To acquire the desired human resource, a large number of religious madressahs were established utilizing the Afghan war fund set up by the Americans. Parties organized on sectarian basis were used for this purpose and students from these madressahs played an important role in the war in Afghanistan. It is important to note here that prior to 1980 there were only 700 religious schools in Pakistan and their rate of growth only three per cent per annum that increased by 136 per cent by the end of 1986. Now there are 7,000 large religious madressahs in the country that award degrees equivalent to MA and PhD.
Most new madressahs were established in the NWFP, Southern Punjab and Karachi and have served as breeding grounds for jihadis. According to the renowned Azad Kashmiri scholar and intellectual, Syed Mehmud Azad, “maulvis (orthodox religious scholars) will only send their students for jihad if they have been promised ample recompense. Since the government could not send the regular army to Afghanistan, the students were handed over to the agencies by the thousands. The flows of money from the United States whet the agencies’ appetite and more and new pastures were sought to sustain the trend. Kashmir proved fertile ground for their activities even though the maulvis were not interested in its liberation, then or now. Jihad has become a business well publicized by the press”.
Another source of the jihadi manpower was found in student unions with a religious manifesto that had acquired a strong hold in schools and colleges. The list of martyrs of six jihadi organizations show that on the average five times as many students of regular institutions lost their lives than those coming from religious madressahs. Religious parties also used their regular members and the jobless for this purpose.
The ouster of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan should have signalled the completion of the American agenda in the region, but the resulting jihadi culture in Pakistan could not be brought to an end as this would mean that the Afghan jihad was not mandated by the shariah. Religious parties and madressahs continued to promote this culture with the blessing of the establishment.
Let us view some of the reasons given by mujahideen of Jaish-i- Mohammad for joining a jihadi organization. These were published in October 2001 in the Karachi edition of the fortnightly Jaish-i- Mohammad.