The federal defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, the Punjab’s home minister Shuja Khanzada and the Inter-Services Public Relations chief General Asim Bajwa have all blamed India for stoking terrorism in Pakistan via Afghanistan.
Many analysts and ex-officials like the former military dictator General Pervez Musharraf and his Interior Minister, General Moinuddin Haider have been playing up any imaginary or real Indian involvement in Pakistan.
The logic put forth is that since Pakistan has started acting against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan et al, "the Indians want to distract the Pakistani security forces and keep Pakistan internally weak". The Ministry of Interior has claimed that the rabidly anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi terror group“has allied with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan”, implying that the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is killing the Shias at India’s behest.
That Pakistan’s domestic social, political, ethnic and sectarian rifts could be exploited by any outside power is a real possibility. But it is a different debate. Pinning all violence, including the weekly massacres of the Shias, on India and Afghanistan, however, is a disingenuous cop-out for the state and its functionaries at a time when they should be hunting down the perpetrators.
Targeting Shias
Instead, the culprits are being brought into the mainstream, projected into the living rooms through prime time television exposure. The patron-in-chief of the virulently anti-Shia outfit, the Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamat, Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi, was only recently interviewed by a Pakistan television anchor Syed Talat Hussain.
Citing various fatwas, Ludhianvi indulged in Takfir of the Shias, apostatising them, declaring them as non-Muslims, without any hard follow-up questions being asked by the anchor. Whether an arch bigot should have gone unquestioned or given prime-time space is another debate but the edicts that Ludhianvi alluded to have been issued by the Deobandi seminaries such as the Jamia Islamia Binori Town, Karachi and Dar-ul-uloom Haqqaniah, Akora Khattak which are the alma maters of the who’s who of the jihadist terrorism.
Thirty long years
The Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan was founded in September 1985 in Jhang and, armed with such poisonous fatwas and deadly weaponry, it has unleashed a reign of Takfiri terror on the Shias for the past 30 years, while the Pakistani state has kept its eyes wide shut.
These seminaries have groomed the leaders who go around declaring Shias as non-Mulsim. They have also indoctrinated the cadres who carry out the killings with impunity. All this while, the state has either deflected the blame as it is doing now or, even more ominously, given them patronage.
The names like Jhangvi’s Tigers and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, eponymously named after the Sipah-e-Sahaba founder Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, were first heard in 1995 when the Sipah-e-Sahaba’s executioners led by Riaz Basra killed the founder-president of the Shia group Imamia Students Organisation, Dr Muhammad Ali Naqvi, along with five others in Lahore.
Before that, Basra had been arrested for the 1990 murder of the Iranian diplomat Sadeq Ganji but escaped from police custody. The formal announcement of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi ostensibly parting ways with the parent outfit, the Sipah-e-Sahaba, came in 1996. Basra, Muhammad Ajmal aka Akram Lahori, Malik Ishaq and Sheikh Haq Nawaz brought together six of the Sipah-e-Sahaba’s execution squads and founded the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
Under the thin veneer of plausible deniability the Sipah-e-Sahaba and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi remained joined at the hip. The Sipah-e-Sahaba was nominally banned by General Musharraf in 2002 but has continued to operate openly under the Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamat name. The Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamat leadership neither pretends that it is any different from the Sipah-e-Sahaba in agenda or organisation, nor has it severed ties to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
In fact, the Sipah-e-Sahaba/Ahle-Sunnat-Wal-Jamat leader Azam Tariq had offered to pay diyyat (blood money) for the murder of another Iranian diplomat to get the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi man Sheikh Haq Nawaz off the death row. Azam Tariq’s son Muawiyah Azam Tariq had vowed publicly to spring the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi honcho, Malik Ishaq,from Multan prison if the government did not release him. Muhammad Ahmed Ludhianvi has attended rallies along with Malik Ishaq where they made rabidly anti-Shia speeches.
In the aforementioned interview Ludhianvi backtracked on his speeches saying that it was just “hawaee firing” (aerial firing or blowing hot air) but the fact is that wall-chalking, distributing fatwas and such vitriol has set the stage for Shia massacres as the ones perpetrated on Quetta’s Hazara Shia.
Open secret
Generals Musharraf and Moinuddin Haider and the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif know full well that almost all of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi top leaders and cadres trained in Afghanistan in camps run by Kashmir-oriented Pakistanis – Qari Saifullah Akhtar, Fazl-ur-Rahman Khalil and Maulana Masud Azhar – all of whom were alumni of the Binori Town madrassa, just like their host and Pakistani establishment’s protégé Mullah Omar and the Sipah-e-Sahaba's late leader Azam Tariq.
Consider this 1998 "non-paper" originally written in Pashto, sent by Pakistan to the Taliban regime that named the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi operatives, including Riaz Basra and Akram Lahori, whose extradition it requested while identifying the Kashmir-oriented jihadist camps they were in.
Similarly, the entire leadership of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, including its Balochistan operatives Dawood Badini, Shafiq Mengal and the recently killed Usman "Saifullah" Kurd, had fought alongside the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
India or the US was nowhere near the Durand Line when the Pakistani security establishment turned both its sides into a jihadist viper pit. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif were targeted by these very same groups and, according to Sindh police officials, General Moinuddin Haider’s brother Ehtishamuddin Haider was killed by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
As Hillary Clinton had said, “It's like that old story – you can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. Eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard." These vipers, however, do not just have regional designs or associations; their ambition is global and links transnational.
General Musharraf writes in his autobiography In the Line of Fire,
“On February 21, 2002, the horrifying videotape of Pearl’s murder was released. It didn’t show the faces of his murderers. In addition, we had nobody. Then, in May 2002, we arrested someone named Fazal Karim, an activist of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant wing of the Sunni sect known as Sipah-e-Sahaba. We had arrested him for other reasons, but when we interrogated him we discovered that he was involved in Pearl’s slaughter. He also told us that he knew where Pearl was buried. He was asked how he knew. Chillingly, he replied – without remorse – that he knew because he had actually participated in the slaughter by holding one of Pearl’s legs. But he didn’t know the name of the person who had actually slit Pearl’s throat. All he could say is that this person was ‘Arab-looking’ … The man who may have actually killed Pearl or at least participated in his butchery, we eventually discovered, was none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, al Qaeda’s number three.”
That the mastermind of the Pearl murder Omar Saeed Sheikh had also trained in the exact same camps as the LeJ underscores the vicious nexus between the Pakistani sectarian outfits and the Kashmir-oriented jihadists.
What Musharraf conveniently left out was that Omar Sheikh, who had been sprung from an Indian prison along with Maulana Masud Azhar through the IC-814 hijacking to Kandahar, surrendered to the ISI operative Brigadier Ejaz Shah. As he himself conceded, the people involved in Daniel Pearl’s murder i.e. Omar Sheikh, Khaled Sheikh Muhammad and Amjad Faruqi, were to later plot Musharraf’s assassination too.
The officials deflecting the blame away from the jihadist and sectarian mass murderers are actually throwing a lifeline to their venomous nexus and condemning the Shias to another 30 years of Takfiri terror. The vipers, however, are bound to turn back on their benefactors, but the regional and global powers must not let their guard down.
Dr Mohammad Taqi is a regular columnist for Daily Times, Pakistan, where an abridged version of this post appeared. He can be reached via email:mazdaki@me.com or Twitter @mazdaki