Pakistan: US responsible for creating environment of terror

Tracing the roots of terrorism, Pakistan officials say the United States planted the seeds of what are now the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

“You reap what you sow,” Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, director-general of the Inter-Services Public Relations, said in a recent briefing with Filipino journalists at the Pakistan Army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

In assessing the global war on terrorism led by the United States with Pakistan as one of its key allies, Abbas said one has to go back to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Abbas recalled that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the United States decided to convert the struggle for democracy into a holy war to mobilize and motivate Afghan freedom fighters.

“A policy was decided in the United Sates. The literature for this holy jihad was not printed here. It was printed in the United Sates,” Abbas said.

He said Americans brought Pakistan clerics to the United Sates to lecture and recruit more Muslims for the “Hijad International.”

In his book “In the Line of Fire,” Pakistan Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf has an expanded version of the beginnings of the global war that started just across his country’s borders.

He gave credit not only to United States but also to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan itself. “We helped create the mujahideen, fired them with religious zeal in seminaries, armed them, paid them, fed them and sent them to jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.”

One of those recruited and trained in Pakistan for the war in Afghanistan were Filipino Muslims who included Abdulrajak Janjalani, who later founded the Abu Sayyaf terror group in Mindanao.

Abbas said after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Americans “left these people high and dry, with nothing to bank on except the weapons and drugs left in the area.” He said the environment was of total chaos, an ideal breeding ground for terrorism.

Pakistan officials this reporter met during a visit sponsored by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute stressed the importance of looking at the origins of the international menace in the light of criticisms from US officials that Pakistan is not doing enough to destroy Al Qaeda, whose leaders have found sanctuary among the Talibans.

Many of the Talibans have slipped into the volatile North Western Frontier Province on the border with Afghanistan.

“We totally reject this contention of the West that Pakistan is not doing enough. What’s enough?” Abbas asked, citing the more than a thousand Pakistan troops killed and thousands more wounded.

As to the nearly $11 billion aid that the Bush administration has extended to Pakistan since the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy, Abbas asked: “What is the price tag for our casualties, the permanent disability of persons? How do you calculate it? Who’s going to pay for our wounded and the families of the dead? It’s not the United States that is going to pay for that.”

Abbas said the post 9/11 US-led war against terror which has put Pakistan in the frontline has broken Al Qaeda as a network. “I’m absolutely sure of that,” he said. “They are on the run.”

But as to the question if group is completely finished, the general, whose elegant prose makes his military talk less intimidating, hardly thinks so.

Al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden, who surfaces every now and then to deliver a message, and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, are believed to be protected by tribal groups in the Afghan-Pakistan border where the Talibans hold sway.

Abbas said Al Qaeda today has foreign linkages but the network does not have a unified system of operation under a central command. It operates like a franchise with splinter groups all over the world following the concept of Al Qaeda. Some regional groups are just using the name of Al Qaeda to lend legitimacy to their group.

As to the links of Muslim rebel groups in the Philippines with Al Qaeda, as claimed by President Arroyo immediately after 9/11 in her bid to get increased military assistance from the United States, Abbas, who visited the Philippines and made a trip to Mindanao in 2004, said as far as they know, that was only true during the 1979 mujahideen war against the Soviets.

“In the present war, we don’t have information and knowledge that there has been any cooperation or linkage between the MILF or MNLF and Al Qaeda and Taliban,” he said.

The Pakistani government has embarked on winning the hearts and minds of the impoverished population on the 2,560 kilometer Afghan-Pakistani border. Smuggling of all kinds of goods, including drugs, is rampant. The territory teems with all kinds of weapons, including mortars, artillery and missiles.

A Filipino in Lahore shared his experience when he and a friend once dared visit the rugged mountainous area near the border, a modern day “Wild West.”

He said their car was stopped by a turbaned tribesman who was firing his rifle in the air. He said that having read about rampant kidnappings in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he was almost sure that they would suffer the fate of journalist Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and eventually executed.

When they got out of the car, the tribesman made an offer. The “tourists” could try their hand at gunnery. Ten rupees for every round fired from a rifle, 100 rupees for every round from a machine gun and for a more substantial payment, they could shoot off a missile.

Pakistan is complementing its military operations in the area with infrastructure building and social services. If there is anything Pakistanis have learned from collaboration with the Americans in the mujahideen war, it is that military operations do not stop after the bombs have pulverized the target.

“If only they (Americans) had reconstructed what was destroyed,” Abbas mused.

“The kind of terror you sowed there you would reap,” he said.