SACW | 12 May 2004

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at mnet.fr
Tue May 11 20:15:38 CDT 2004


South Asia Citizens Wire   |  12 May,  2004
via:  www.sacw.net

[1] Online Petition to Remove ban on Ahmadiya books in Bangladesh.
[2] Pakistan: Enter the suicide bomber (Rashed Rahman)
[3] Rape survivor educates Pakistan (Juliette Terzieff)
[4] India: Riding The 'Secular' Rath (Nissim Mannathukkaren)
[5] Useful Recent Documentary Films on Kashmir : 
by Pervez Hoodbhoy, Shilpi Gupta, a reportage for 
Channel 4
[6] India: Gujarat  - Who Planned The Genocide?
Struggles For Justice In The Shadow Of Communal Terror
A discussion meeting with  celebrated dancer and  activist
Mallika Sarabhai and Yusuf Dawood (May 20, London)
[7] The Rise of bin Laden: A Book Review by Ahmed Rashid


--------------

[1]

Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 13:37:59 +0600
Subject: REMOVE BAN ON AHMADIYA BOOKS IN BANGLADESH.

Please join the signature campaign demanding the 
removal of ban on the AHMADIYA books in 
Bangladesh. Note that while enlisting your name 
please use the Private or Available to Petition 
Author option instead of public.

Visit this web-site for enlisting your name: 
www.petitiononline.com/ahmadiya/petition-sign.html

_____


[2]

The Daily Times [Pakistan]
May 12, 2004

ENTER THE SUICIDE BOMBER
by Rashed Rahman

Karachi burns as Shia anger boils over at years 
of sectarian murder in the city. After a long 
series of targeted killings of Shia doctors, 
shootings at and bombings of imambargahs in 
recent years, the suicide explosion in a Shia 
mosque on Friday that killed 15 and wounded about 
a 100 people, proved the last straw.
Rioting Shia crowds have clashed with shopkeepers 
not heeding their strike calls, stoned premises, 
torched vehicles, and attempted to bring life in 
Karachi to a halt. Their partial success, despite 
the violence that accompanied the protests, 
reflects in miniature the precariousness of the 
Shia minority in Pakistan as a whole.
The city administration and the police, clueless 
about how to handle the situation, and condemned 
for past and present failures in protecting the 
Shias, have again used fire-brigade tactics 
against the protestors, thereby inflaming the 
situation. Shia leaders express their 
helplessness in attempts to calm their followers 
until the perpetrators of this latest sectarian 
outrage are caught and punished.
One of the reasons the street is ignoring calls 
for calm is because the city (and the country as 
a whole) has a poor record in apprehending and 
punishing perpetrators of terrorism, sectarian or 
other. Karachi has suffered 96 bomb blasts in 
mosques, churches, government offices, buses, 
trains, hotels, foreign consulates and bazaars 
since 1987. The attacks have claimed 350 lives 
and left 1,350 injured. Despite scores of arrests 
in the aftermath of such incidents, not one 
perpetrator has been punished, the existence of 
special and anti-terrorist courts notwithstanding.
Clearly, intelligence failure has led to such 
poor results and fed the government's credibility 
deficit on this account. Karachi, as the 
industrial and commercial hub of Pakistan, is 
particularly vulnerable to economic disruption 
when normal life there is disturbed. This round 
of riots has already yielded 25-50 percent losses 
in business.
The police is now proposing a comprehensive 
listing of all imambargahs, mosques, and 
seminaries throughout the province. It intends to 
depute prominently visible police guards at these 
obvious sectarian targets, as well as at 
government properties, shopping centres, petrol 
pumps, food chains, consulates, offices and 
residences of foreign diplomats.
This belated response is typical of the law 
enforcement agencies' approach: close the stable 
door after the horses have bolted. The police 
claims it knows who has perpetrated the latest 
sectarian outrage. Lashkar-e Jhangvi heads the 
cast of usual suspects. At the same time, a 
reward of Rs2.5 million has been announced for 
information leading to the arrest of the group 
behind the attack. This has failed to mollify the 
protestors. Second, it misses the point about the 
latest trends and developments in terrorist 
actions around the world, and now increasingly in 
Pakistan.
The suicide bomber is a comparatively recent 
phenomenon. The Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka are 
generally regarded as the pioneers in this field. 
They have been followed by people under 
occupation whose desperation has mounted to the 
level where certain death is embraced willingly 
for the cause of national liberation. Examples in 
this regard are the Palestinian resistance and, 
lately, the Iraqi resistance.
But whereas the Tamil Tigers are a secular 
movement inspired by fierce nationalism, the 
current crop of suicide bombers around the world 
is overwhelmingly populated by religious 
extremists. The suicide bomber motivated by 
religious underpinnings has no fear and embraces 
what is perceived as martyrdom for the cause of 
freedom on the guarantee that he will immediately 
find a place in Paradise. This makes him 
virtually unstoppable by ordinary means.
Of late, a pattern of violent actions in 
different parts of the country has begun to 
emerge. On Saturday, Quetta suffered another bomb 
blast. Before that, the Gwadar attack killed 
three Chinese engineers, casting a shadow over 
the premier project of the development of a new 
port and city. It could affect the efforts of the 
Balochistan government to attract investment 
through the conference being held for this 
purpose in the provincial capital.
Earlier, the Ashura incidents warned of a 
resurgence of sectarian violence. The government 
failed to respond to the perceived threat in any 
meaningful manner. It was on Ashura that a 
suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque in 
Rawalpindi. Although the loss of human life and 
damage to property in that incident was 
relatively light, it should have alerted 
intelligence agencies to the advent on Pakistani 
soil of a new actor: the suicide bomber 
fanatically convinced of the justness of his 
cause and methods, and sanguine and content in 
the received knowledge that he was ensuring 
himself a berth in Heaven. This is the domestic 
fallout of the policy of fanning religious 
fundamentalism in the context of the Afghanistan 
wars. Can something be done?
Guarding potential targets is neither effective 
nor sustainable in the long term. The only 
feasible course is to review the working of the 
intelligence establishment and weed out any 
elements close to extremist groups. There is a 
clear need for agencies to infiltrate groups 
known to be wedded to sectarian and extremist 
terror. This would require improved humint (human 
intelligence) and a change of priorities at the 
state level.
Terrorism cannot be eliminated totally. But it 
can be contained. In our case it flows from the 
extremism we have nurtured in the name of jihad. 
The state needs to not only improve its ability 
to pre-empt such attacks but must seek to 
eradicate the mindset that leads to extremism. 
The last is more difficult and requires a 
long-term integrated approach to reverse the 
process started by General Ziaul Haq.
The writer is currently a freelance contributor 
who has held editorial positions in various 
Pakistani newspapers

_____



[3]


San Francisco Chronicle
May 10, 2004
Page A - 3

RAPE SURVIVOR EDUCATES PAKISTAN
Victim of tribal sentence pushes for justice, builds school to fight status quo

Juliette Terzieff, Chronicle Foreign Service

Islamabad, Pakistan -- Slight in stature and so 
soft-spoken that people have to lean forward to 
hear her, Mukhtaran Mai hardly looks the part she 
has been forced to play. In this overwhelmingly 
male-dominated society where women are seen but 
rarely heard, the gutsy 30-year-old rape victim 
is taking Pakistani society to task for the 
horror she experienced.

Almost two years after she was brutally 
gang-raped in her central Punjabi village of 
Mirwali on the orders of a local panchayat 
(council), Mukhtaran continues to press for the 
completion of the legal case against her 
assailants while administering a school she 
funded with money the Pakistani government gave 
her after the rape. She also is trying to help 
others who fall victim to the problems of 
Pakistani society.

"The unbelievable pain I experienced is hard to 
put into words," she says in a near-whisper. "But 
I hold on to it, put myself in the public no 
matter what they say about my motives. ... I just 
don't want people to forget."

In June 2002, members of a more powerful tribe, 
the Mastois, accused Mukhtaran's younger brother 
of engaging in unacceptable behavior with one of 
their women. Panchayat members ignored the pleas 
of Mukhtaran's father, who is from the 
lower-caste Gujar tribe, and watched as four 
Mastoi men dragged the sobbing woman into a shed 
to beat and rape her before forcing her to walk 
home naked.

In a country where most people are desensitized 
or indifferent to the never-ending flow of 
newspaper stories about honor killings, rapes and 
acid- burnings of women, Pakistanis erupted into 
rage -- condemning the feudal system that still 
dominates most of the country and demanding 
action.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sent envoys 
to comfort Mukhtaran and gave her 500,000 rupees 
(about $9,000). Human rights workers, Punjab 
provincial politicians and journalists rallied to 
her side with promises of support.

But as the case entered Pakistan's legal 
labyrinth, press reports died down, and Mukhtaran 
found herself alone to face the consequences of 
her decision to go public with charges of rape.

"Almost from the very beginning, and even more so 
now, I receive messages from influential people 
in the village pressuring me to keep quiet, drop 
the case and stop causing trouble," she says 
bitterly. "They want to me to forget it."

Six men -- four convicted rapists and two members 
of the tribal council -- were sentenced to death 
by hanging by a special anti-terrorism court in 
Punjab province; eight other defendants were 
acquitted for lack of evidence. But the case is 
now locked in appeals that could drag on for 
years.

"If they slaughter me to pieces, I will never 
give up the case,'' she says. "Justice has to be 
served, and everybody should support that."

Last year, she joined about 100 other women in a 
march in central Pakistan to protest violence 
against women after a young woman from another 
village was raped by 10 men.

Determined to overcome her pain, Mukhtaran used 
half of the money she received from the 
government to purchase land for a primary school 
in her area and convinced provincial officials to 
erect a building because she believes the 
education of future generations is the key to 
preventing others from suffering her fate.

But almost nobody came.

For the first six months, the school had only six 
students. The first person to enroll was 
Mukhtaran herself. The second was her younger 
brother, Abdul Shakur.

"People would say they supported the idea when 
they were talking to me or my family, but then in 
public they were silent," she says.

Mukhtaran stubbornly continued her studies and 
has now advanced to the fourth grade. Gradually, 
more and more families sent their children to 
school. As of last month, the Mukhtaran Mai 
Primary School boasted 207 students -- 102 of 
them females.

"A lot of people would have taken the money and 
run away, tried to forget, but Mukhtaran has not 
only stayed but has launched a visible challenge 
to the feudal landlords to change the status 
quo," says Sarwar Bari, national coordinator for 
the nongovernmental organization Pattan, which 
has publicly backed Mukhtaran's efforts.

"She is a symbol of resistance, an activist for 
others wronged, and to achieve her goals she must 
be seen to have broad support," he adds. "She 
deserves it."

Her quiet strength has earned Mukhtaran a 
reputation that is spreading beyond Mirwali. 
Other impoverished Pakistanis who encounter 
problems -- like harassment from landlords, 
family tensions and neighborhood disputes -- come 
to her seeking help and advice.

"Most of the time, I can't really do anything to 
help them," she says sadly. "Sometimes, though, 
when I can, it's the best feeling in the world."

Mukhtaran's plans for the future are simple: to 
work as hard as she can to make the primary 
school succeed and to do everything in her meager 
power to help the women of her area.

"Maybe it's not much, but it is enough for me," 
Mukhtaran says. "It's more than I would have 
thought possible two years ago."


_____


[4]

Outlookindia.com
May 06, 2004    

RIDING THE 'SECULAR' RATH
Secularization of the BJP? Nothing could be 
further from the truth. The verdict in 
Muvattupuzha will tell us whether the Christians 
in Kerala will capitulate to the spin-doctors of 
Hindutva, or deny the legitimacy it craves for...

by Nissim Mannathukkaren

The noted scholar Benedict Anderson in his famous 
book on the origins of nationalism, The Imagined 
Communities had pointed out how the pre-bourgeois 
classes did not need language to construct 
alliances:

"If the ruler of Siam took a Malay noblewoman as 
a concubine, or if the King of England married a 
Spanish woman - did they ever talk seriously 
together?"

If one substitutes ideology for language, one can 
get a fair picture of the promiscuity of 
political parties in the 'shining India' of ours. 
It is this promiscuity that political 
commentators across the spectrum of the Indian 
media have (mistakenly) celebrated as the 
secularization of the BJP. Nothing could be 
further from the truth.

In the last two decades we have seen a seething 
debate in the academic and non-academic world 
about the relevance of secularism in a 
'traditional' and 'religious' society like that 
of India. In fact, the BJP rode the crest of 
success by demolishing - what in its eyes was - 
the myth of Nehruvian (read Western) secularism. 
But BJP's descent into more perverse forms of 
'pseudo-secularism' is something that has not 
received enough attention.

If BJP's alliance with the National Conference 
was the greatest of ironies (people in Kashmir 
saw through this chimera eventually), the 
induction of P. C. Thomas into the union ministry 
last year made one feel aghast at the brazenness 
of the ruling classes. For Thomas represents the 
Indian Federal Democratic (sic) Party (IFDP), a 
unique entity in the nation's political history: 
it was probably the first time a parliamentary 
party was formed by MPs from various parties (and 
also independents) and regions as varied as 
Kerala, Bihar and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.

The other known face in the party was Pappu 
Yadav, one of the leading members of the Bihar 
mafia who has at least twelve charges of murder 
(including the killing of Ajit Sarkar, CPI [M] 
MLA) and kidnapping against him. The BJP, by 
inducting this rag-tag formation into the NDA, 
truly proved that it is a party with a 
'difference'. The vacuity of a party like the 
IFDP was reiterated when recently most of its MPs 
other than Thomas left it to join other parties.

The temptation of flaunting its secular 
credentials through the first Christian member of 
the cabinet (if we discount the Christianity of 
George Fernandes) was too much to resist for the 
BJP. More important was the opportunity to make a 
headway into Kerala, an electoral barren desert 
for the BJP. And what better way to accomplish it 
than dangling the carrot of ministership to the 
Syrian Christian community, which constitutes a 
strong 20 percent of the Kerala electorate.

If Advani's Bharat Uday Yatra rolled onto the 
streets of Muvattupuzha, a predominantly 
Christian Lok Sabha constituency, which Thomas 
has been representing since 1989 (on a Kerala 
Congress [Mani] ticket), it is not without a 
reason. Unbeknownst to the rest of the country, 
the verdict in this constituency, assumes 
significant national importance.

A victory for Thomas will be the crowning glory 
on the BJP's plank of 'positive secularism', 
which apparently can only be an attribute of 
Hinduism. After all, ours is the great 
civilization that 'happily' and 'peacefully' 
tolerated the invasions from the Greeks to the 
Mughals. What better advertisement for the BJP 
than all the Thomases and Sangmas declaring a la 
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, "BJP is the only secular 
party in the country"?

Until recently, Kerala has had a relatively 
remarkable record of communal harmony (despite 
the presence of three major world religions), 
something to which the Left has contributed in no 
small measure.
The significant influence of communitarian 
consciousness was always harnessed to the 
peaceful and democratic pursuit of secular goods 
thus resulting in what could be called a 
non-antagonistic communalism.

In this kind of scenario, even confessional 
parties such as the Muslim League were forced to 
tone down, if not completely abandon the reliance 
on the sacred. The pervasiveness of this model 
saw the unique phenomenon of the BJP/RSS combine 
reduced to constructing secret alliances with the 
Congress-led front or transferring votes to the 
latter (for example, the 1982 and 1991 Assembly 
elections) in a desperate bid to stop the Left 
from coming to power. What is galling for the 
sangh parivar is this status of a political 
hermaphrodite (to use a term from their own 
discourse of masculinity) despite the fact that 
the Kerala has one of the highest RSS 
cadre-strengths in the country.

However, three decades of RSS activity is finally 
beginning to 'bear fruit' (including the 
provoking into existence of Islamic 
fundamentalist groups in the nineties). The last 
decade has seen a shocking incursion of the 
Hindutva agenda into the socio-cultural sphere 
through the various front organizations of the 
sangh targeting sections like children, tribals 
etc. and areas like education, arts and 
literature, theatre and temple renovation. The 
public sphere is now awash with religious 
symbols, motifs and 'spiritual' gurus. The 
communal violence in Marad in the last two years 
was an outcome of the long process of erosion of 
the non-antagonistic model of communalism.

Nevertheless, the task of making Hindutva the 
political alternative is still an immensely 
difficult one in the highly polarized political 
atmosphere of Kerala--it is the only major state 
in the country that still does not have a BJP MLA 
or an MP, a remarkable trough in the high tide of 
Hindutva. Here, the alliance with the IFDP allows 
the BJP to piggyback on Thomas' popularity and 
gain the necessary legitimacy. This is a proven 
strategy that has worked in other states. 
Therefore, the verdict in Muvattupuzha will be of 
crucial importance to the future direction of 
state politics too.

History and common sense tells us that it would 
be a tough ask for Thomas to win in a 
three-cornered contest in Kerala, but reports 
from the constituency indicate that there is 
substantial support emerging for him among the 
Syrian Christians.

While the various factions of the Kerala Congress 
representing the latter had always dreamed of the 
power and benefits that would flow their way if 
they were to enter into an alliance with a BJP in 
government, the Kerala sensibility which still 
abhors any kind of religious extremism prevented 
them from making the final jump.

However, in the present scenario, there is an 
increasing attraction for the BJP among the 
Syrian Christians. The prosperous sections among 
them are enthused by the BJP emerging as a better 
enforcer of the neo-liberal agenda, which equates 
progress and development solely with capitalism 
and economic growth. P.C.Thomas echoed this 
sentiment during Advani's yatra:

"only BJP can save the nation and only a BJP 
government can bring development to the country".

Advani himself in his speeches throughout Kerala 
criticized the state for becoming a "prisoner of 
its political ideologies" and thereby lagging 
behind in "progress" and "development". In this 
discourse of crude neo-liberalism and market-led 
Hindutva, the building of an extensive welfare 
state in Kerala (the likes of which have been 
hardly achieved elsewhere in the third world), 
does not even qualify as either progress or 
development.

The tendency to view the economic in isolation 
from all other aspects of human social life and 
glorify it is a pernicious tendency of our times. 
In Kerala, this is seen in the celebration, even 
by the liberal media, of the 'efficiency' of 
someone like O.Rajagopal, RSS man and union 
minister (presently Lok Sabha candidate from 
Thiruvananthapuram), in fighting for Kerala's 
share of the economic pie at the centre. This 
totally ignores the role of Rajagopal's ideology 
and its culpability in the destruction of the 
secular fabric of Kerala.

Christians in Kerala may justify the new bonhomie 
between them and the BJP as purely motivated by 
the secular motive of economic development, and 
thus conforming to the Kerala model of 
non-antagonsitic communalism which has 
subordinated the sacred to the secular. On the 
one hand, this is a misunderstanding stemming 
from the inability to recognize the Janus-faced 
nature of the BJP - that even when it seeks to 
appropriate the centrist space of the Indian 
polity, it is dependent on the right wing fanatic 
cabal. On the other hand, it shows the increasing 
identification of Christians with the Hindu 
demonization and vilification of Islam parallel 
to the Christian-Jewish alliance against Muslims 
in the world stage.
In the psyche of a middle class Syrian Christian, 
the threat of Hindutva and the violence 
perpetrated by it is a malady that afflicts only 
the northern parts of the country. It denotes the 
sheer fact that communal violence and its 
associated history is something that is 
physically far removed from his/her immediate 
reality (although, it is increasingly less so).

At the same time, and this is the tragedy of the 
times we are living in, it shows the moral 
estrangement from the plight of the distant 
stranger, not just from the Muslims and Hindus 
who are victims of communal violence, but also 
from his/her own co-religionists frequently 
subjected to violent attacks by Hindu 
fundamentalists in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and so 
on (the ongoing violence in Jhabua is an 
example). This kind of moral apathy was 
demonstrated in the muted protest against the 
Gujarat events.

The mad rush to align with the BJP across the 
country portends a dangerous tendency in our 
polity -- the willingness to legitimize the 
unspeakable horrors that have been wrought upon 
by the fascist forces in the last decade and 
more. Sadly, even the minority communities, are 
imbibing the 'art of forgetting' systematically 
fostered by the forces of cultural and religious 
nationalism.

Nothing is more shocking than to find that one of 
the worst carnages in the post-independence 
history of our country -- the state-sponsored 
genocide in Gujarat -- does not figure, even as a 
foot-note, in the election debates. The BJP's 
shift to the discourse of bijli, sadak and paani 
does not signify the secularization of the party, 
but rather an attempt at evasion of 
responsibility for the communalization of society 
and its horrendous outcomes. The discourse of 
religious nationalism is never given up, but 
lurks underneath the discourse of development, 
waiting to erupt and cause another Gujarat.

Even development, as noted before, connotes 
something else for the BJP. The vision document 
of the party gives telling evidence of its 
Goebbelsian propaganda and sleight of hand which 
dexterously equates development with achieving 
'Great Power' status on the world stage. Never 
mind that for the time being we are the 'running 
dogs' of American imperialism. The party leaders 
crow about the world stature that nuclear India 
has acquired in the five years of NDA rule, and 
how five more years will see it attaining the 
'glory' that our 'great' civilization was always 
destined for.
Never mind that our Human Development Index 
ranking has fallen from 124 to 127 or that the 
per-capita food availability for the year 2000- 
01 was lower than during the period of the Bengal 
famine!

There is some food for thought when the media 
here in N.America, which usually devotes not more 
than cursory space for the largest democracy in 
the world, decided to feature Lalji Tandon in the 
headlines. After all, it is not every day that 
people die for something which cost less than a 
dollar (the cost of each saree was Rs.40)! 
However, it is not a surprising fact considering 
that in the priority agenda drawn by the BJP, 
poverty alleviation comes fifth. So what if the 
masses do not have food to eat or sarees to wear, 
at least their 'lives' are safe under the nuclear 
umbrella? All this shows that in the BJP version 
of secularization basic livelihood issues of the 
poorest 40 crore Indians do not feature at all.

BJP's recent wooing of Christians and other 
minorities and its willingness to align with 
anyone and everyone is only seemingly secular. In 
reality, it is an abuse of the fundamental 
principles of secularism. One need not look 
beyond the irony of a Narendra Modi showering 
praises on Irfan Pathan to understand this. 
Commentators, who have gone to town delineating a 
split between the moderate party and the hardcore 
RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal troika, obfuscate the fact 
that the BJP is reaping electorally what the 
sangh parivar has sown culturally. The 
Hinduisation of adivasis and the BJP's stunning 
electoral success in the adivasi belt of Central 
India is the classic example of this. Pray, where 
was the moderate face when fetuses were gouged 
out and speared by Ram bhakts in Gujarat? The 
ineradicable role that violence plays in BJP's 
success should stop us from harboring any 
illusions about its benign face.

The 'moderate' face of the BJP and the 
shallowness of the media celebration of the same 
were exposed when the 'sophisticated' Arun 
Jaitley, the darling of the middle classes, had 
the temerity to suggest that the scathing verdict 
of the Supreme Court in the Best Bakery case was 
not an indictment of the Gujarat Government! All 
his education and sophistication could not endow 
Jaitley with the moral courage needed to condemn 
the perpetrators of a human tragedy. He 
unwittingly justified the Supreme Court's 
characterization of the ruling political class as 
the 'modern day Neros'.

Critics who cannot stop gushing at BJP's 
downplaying of the issues of Ayodhya and Article 
370 in its vision document miss the silent 
penetration of the Hindu majoritarian agenda into 
various spheres of civil society in the last 
decade. Nothing illustrates this more than the 
case of the young Indian immigrants in Western 
societies: they are some of the brightest minds, 
'modern,' 'educated' and at the same time 
carriers of the most retrograde of ideologies. 
What unites an IIT professional from the 
Hindu-Hindi heartland with the Christian doctor 
from Kerala is their virulent support for the 
American crusade against Islam.

True secularism does not exist in a vacuum; it 
can flower only with a simultaneous substantive 
commitment to democracy, equality, rights and 
justice. BJP's record on these is pathetic. Can 
we can dare to talk of secularism without 
summoning the courage to look into the eyes of 
Bilkis Yakub Rasool, who after being gang-raped 
had to see her two-year old daughter's head being 
smashed by the rioters along with the killing of 
13 other relatives in Gujarat? BJP's religious 
nationalism is neither based on a principle of 
religious tolerance or on, what Gandhi had 
identified as a superior principle, the equal 
respect of all religions. The verdict in 
Muvattupuzha will tell us whether the Christians 
in Kerala will capitulate to the spin-doctors of 
Hindutva, or deny the legitimacy it craves for.

(Nissim Mannathukkaren is a doctoral candidate at 
the Department of Political Studies, Queen's 
University, Kingston, Canada)

_____


[5]  [USEFUL RECENT DOCUMENTARY FILMS ON KASHMIR]

(a)

The News International [Pakistan]
May 11, 2004

Movie on Kashmir provokes flak

By our correspondent

KARACHI: Premiere of Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy's 
documentary film 'Crossing the Lines - Kashmir, 
Pakistan and India' invited a fair amount of 
criticism on Tuesday, particularly for offering a 
dreamy solution to the 'unfinished business of 
the partition'.

Produced by Pakistan's anti-nuke physicist, 
focussing the thorny issue of Kashmir, the 
documentary appeared on a screen at the Pakistan 
Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) with 
sharp images ranging from past and present of 
India and Pakistan.

The MIT-trained physicist exploited his 
filmmaking venture to incorporate the political 
agenda of the Pakistan's left-wingers, making it 
an old-fashioned political commentary. He played 
some of the stock-shots superbly to document 
course of Indo-Pak history in its true 
perspective as well.

Brig (retd) AR Siddiqui, a defence commentator, 
did not like the end piece of the film where Dr 
Hoodbhoy yearned for peace in a conflict 
situation.

He was critical of not portraying the nuclear 
zeal on the Indian part, while showing the very 
euphoria emanating from Pakistani leadership of 
1998. Similarly, he missed what he called a fair 
portrayal of the political thoughts from 
Pakistani side of the Kashmir.

Iqbal Haider, a PPP hawk and former law minister, 
sounded furious at what he dubbed Jihad culture 
that caused more damage to Pakistan than to 
India. "Jihadis cannot recover an inch of 
occupied territories; they are engaged for vested 
interests."

He agreed with Dr Hoodbhoy's realistic message 
that people of Pakistan could no longer afford to 
be the 'salves of past'. He described Dr 
Hoodbhoy's filmmaking a courageous attempt. "This 
film must be screened at the National Defence 
College."

During the Q&A session with the audience, Dr 
Pervez Hoodbhoy defended his deliberate omission 
of the post-9/11 reference, as he deemed it would 
eventually drag the subject into a bizarre 
international perspective demanding inquiry into 
the US designs in the region.


o o o

(b)
Shilpi Gupta's documentary WHEN THE STORM CAME 
examines the experiences and testimonies of women 
from Kunnan Pushpora a village in the militarised 
Kashmir Valley. The film delves into the night of 
February 23, 1991 when the villagers were victims 
of mass rape at the hands by Indian security 
forces. Rape remains a universal weapon of war.

URL: www.kashmirfilm.com/
Contact: Shilpi at Kashmirfilm.com

o o o

(c)
The Killing of Kashmir
Unreported World

Published: 08-Apr-2004
By: Channel 4
www.channel4.com/news/2004/04/week_1/05_kashmir.html


_____


[6]

GUJARAT  - WHO PLANNED THE GENOCIDE?
STRUGGLES FOR JUSTICE IN THE SHADOW OF COMMUNAL TERROR

A discussion meeting with  celebrated dancer and  activist
MALLIKA SARABHAI and YUSUF DAWOOD (Dawood Family Campaign)
organised by South Asia Solidarity Group in conjunction with
Akademi South Asian Dance in the UK

Thursday 20 May 7.00pm
Hampstead Town Hall
Haverstock Hill, NW3 [London, UK]
(1 minute from Belsize Park Tube, buses 168, C11)

MALLIKA SARABHAI,  renowned Indian classical dancer and
social activist, will speak about her initiative to bring the
perpetrators of the  2002 genocidal attacks on Muslims in
Gujarat to justice and the persecution she has faced from
Gujarat's BJP government as a result.

YUSUF DAWOOD,  whose brother and cousin were murdered during
the genocide while visiting Gujarat from the UK, will speak
about the Dawood family's on-going campaign for justice and
their current legal challenge to the Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi.


_____



[7]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004

Review

THE RISE OF BIN LADEN

By Ahmed Rashid

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, 
Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet 
Invasion to September 10, 2001
by Steve Coll
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95

1.

As millions of people around the world gathered 
in front of their TV sets in March and April to 
observe the public hearings held by the 
independent commission investigating the 
September 11 attacks, the one name that seemed to 
hover over the room was Osama bin Laden. While 
they watched, one senior official after another 
from the Clinton or Bush administrations spoke of 
the numerous attempts by the CIA before September 
11 to capture or kill him.

Some of the stories of their efforts to capture 
bin Laden had already been told. Those who had 
followed recent accounts of the work of US 
intelligence knew that the Clinton administration 
would not give an order to kill him in February 
1999, when he was at a hunting camp in southern 
Afghanistan with a group of Arab princes. They 
also knew that the CIA hired both an Afghan 
mercenary group to kidnap him from an al-Qaeda 
farm in Kandahar in Afghanistan and a group of 
Pakistani commandos to do the same. Some of the 
listening public probably knew as much as the 
members of the commission.

Among the best informed were those who had read 
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, a remarkable book 
published a few weeks before the public hearings 
began, which got much attention among people who 
follow intelligence matters, although nothing 
like the publicity given shortly afterward to 
Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.[1] Clarke, 
after all, was one of the most powerful experts 
on terrorism in the White House. That he would 
openly say that the administration he once worked 
for was fighting the wrong war was wholly 
unexpected. Steve Coll's background is quite 
different. He was a reporter in Afghanistan, and 
he has been the managing editor of The Washington 
Post since 1998.

Ghost Wars, which has taken him twelve years to 
write, spells out the CIA's covert work in 
Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union invaded 
that blighted country in 1979. Coll recounts in 
detail the CIA's encouragement and support of the 
Islamic jihad against the Soviets, and the 
consequences of this support for the rise of 
radical Islamists like bin Laden. Not 
surprisingly, the book gives particular emphasis 
to the critical period during the late 1990s 
after bin Laden established himself in 
Afghanistan and then, with the help of the 
Taliban regime, began his global jihad against 
the US and the West.

Coll was able to secure secret documents about 
the CIA's operations. He talked not just with its 
officials, but with spymasters and spies in 
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other 
countries. No one else I know of has been able to 
bring such a broad perspective to bear on the 
rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard 
put to beat his grasp of global events. Rarely 
hasa book been able to anticipate, as Coll's has, 
the revelations of government bureaucrats, such 
as Richard Clarke, about intelligence. It does 
so, moreover, in a more comprehensive way than 
the recent testimony of US officials has done.

Coll has avoided a pitfall facing any reporter 
who is given access to secret government files. 
The CIA has a long record of manipulating the 
press and television and putting out its own 
interpretation of events. And its chief, George 
Tenet, the only high-level official who has 
served both Clinton and Bush, is a master of 
political survival and spin. Some writers given 
access to the innermost corridors of power appear 
mesmerized by their proximity to the real 
players, and it shows. It does not show in Coll's 
book.

Bob Woodward's Bush at War[2] got more attention 
than any of the other post-September 11 books. 
Woodward was given access to the decision-making 
process in the White House in the days following 
September 11, which led to the US attack on 
Afghanistan.[3] From Woodward's account, George 
Tenet and the CIA come out smelling like roses; 
clearly, they were prime sources of his book. 
Woodward would have us believe that the CIA had 
"assets"-informants and agents-on the ground in 
Afghanistan; that it was fully in command of the 
facts about bin Laden; and that it was raring to 
start covert operations in that country before 
the war in Afghanistan began. The CIA thus wanted 
to put to shame Secretary of State Colin Powell 
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because 
they did not appear to have the resources that 
Tenet claimed to have. Coll shows that the 
reality was entirely different-very few CIA 
agents, for example, spoke any one of the 
languages of Afghanistan.

Woodward's book made some of his fellow 
journalists cringe with embarrassment. In 
uncritically reporting Tenet's views to his 
readers, he wrote as though he was the court 
note-taker for a medieval king. He rarely 
questioned what he was told, he seldom offered a 
nonofficial point of view, and he accepted 
Tenet's self-serving version of events.

We can be thankful that Coll is not mesmerized by 
access to the powerful and does not feel obliged 
to defend the CIA. Instead, he offers us a much 
more balanced account, blaming the CIA for not 
having had an adequate presence in Afghanistan 
and for not knowing much about the country. He 
also blames the Clinton and Bush administrations 
for having prevented the CIA from taking action 
against al-Qaeda. In contrast to Woodward, Coll 
draws on a variety of different sources and shows 
how there was conflict within both 
administrations over the seriousness of the 
threat of terrorism. Particularly striking is the 
portrait he gives of Clarke as the tough-minded 
expert on terrorism who fought for stronger 
measures against al-Qaeda.

At least some of the facts are simple enough. 
During the 1980s, the CIA paid hundreds of 
millions of dollars in covert aid to the Afghan 
Mujahideen, an Islamist force that opposed the 
Soviet domination of Afghanistan and was also 
backed by Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani 
Interservices Intelligence (ISI). Following the 
initial success of the anti-Soviet campaign, CIA 
director William Casey persuaded the Reagan 
administration in 1985 to increase this support 
dramatically. The CIA particularly encouraged the 
recruitment of radical Islamist fighters- many of 
whom were linked to the Muslim 
Brotherhood-believing them to be more dedicated 
to the defeat of the Soviet occupying forces than 
secular or royalist Afghani groups. As Coll 
writes, the United States adopted a policy that

looked forward to a new era of direct infusions 
of advanced US military technology into 
Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist 
guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques, 
and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers 
designed to demoralize the Soviet high command. 
Among other consequences these changes pushed the 
CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan 
resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer 
to the gray fields of assassination and terrorism.

When the US walked away from Afghanistan in 1989, 
it left behind a seasoned group of jihadists, 
whose brand of radical Islam had found an 
enormously rich supporter in Osama bin Laden. The 
son of a Saudi billionaire, bin Laden had joined 
the jihad shortly after the Soviet invasion, 
using his financial resources to build military 
facilities and training camps for volunteer 
fighters. Bin Laden first began to turn his 
radical energies against the United States in 
1990, when the Saudi royal family agreed to 
invite American troops to be stationed in Saudi 
Arabia as part of its alliance against Iraq. Coll 
quotes Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence 
chief, suggesting that this was the moment when 
bin Laden's extremism and hatred for American 
infidels began to assert itself: "He changed from 
a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in 
helping Muslims into a person who believed that 
he would be able to amass and command an army...."

After the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from 
that country, so did the CIA-not just from 
Afghanistan, but from virtually all of South and 
Central Asia, a region that had less and less 
importance for the post-cold war foreign policy 
of the two Clinton administrations. In 1996 the 
CIA was taken completely by surprise when the 
ragtag Taliban captured Kabul and put the famous 
Tajik-speaking resistance commander Ahmed Shah 
Massoud to flight. In 1998, the CIA failed to 
predict that India would explode a nuclear device 
or that Pakistan would launch a military 
offensive in the Kargil district of Indian 
Kashmir the following year. And these are just 
some of the more publicly known failures of the 
agency that Coll has pointed out.

Coll writes that although the CIA had passed, 
through Pakistan, billions of dollars in military 
aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, it was not much 
interested in who was getting the weapons, nor 
was it concerned with what a post-Soviet 
Afghanistan would look like. In choosing the 
leaders and organization that would get arms and 
money, the CIA was dependent on the ISI and the 
Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Department 
(GID). Coll writes of the period, "There was no 
American policy on Afghan politics at the time, 
only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as 
carried out by Pakistani intelligence." Huge 
deliveries of arms and money intended for the 
Mujahideen passed first through the hands of the 
ISI, which predictably took a considerable cut 
for itself before allowing deliveries to the 
Mujahideen groups they had selected.

Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's intelligence 
services first backed the Islamic extremist group 
Hezb-e-Islami-led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar-and 
then, finding Hekmatyar greedy and unpopular, 
they backed another group, the Taliban, led by 
Mullah Mohammed Omar. Both men are now on the US 
most-wanted list. When the Pakistanis were 
supporting Hekmatyar, the Saudis were channeling 
their money to a motley collection of Afghan 
Wahhabis tutored or educated in Saudi Arabia, in 
part with the help of the Saudi billionaire Osama 
bin Laden. In the mid-1990s the CIA allowed the 
ISI and the GID to dictate much of the course of 
the Afghan civil war, including the rise of the 
Taliban when the Mujahideen were weakened by 
incessant fighting with one another and by loss 
of public support. Coll writes that the Saudis, 
preferring to work from a distance, funded ISI 
activities in Afghanistan and even paid cash 
"bonuses" to the ISI officers who promoted Saudi 
interests.

Coll also found that by 1998, when the Taliban 
ruled over two thirds of the country, the ISI 
maintained eight stations in Afghanistan, staffed 
by officers who gave assistance to the Taliban 
and helped train militants for the war in 
Kashmir. He repeatedly accuses former Prime 
Minister Benazir Bhutto of "lying" when she told 
visiting US officials that Pakistan had nothing 
to do with the Taliban. He also debunks the 
widely held theory among conspiracy theorists 
that the CIA was directly supporting the Taliban. 
It did so essentially through its support of the 
ISI.

2.

I spent the 1990s trying to decipher the failure 
of the US to have a clear policy toward 
Afghanistan. I worked largely from Islamabad, 
where the US embassy had a single mid-level State 
Department official monitoring events in 
Afghanistan and a consulate with a small staff in 
Peshawar, near the border. No doubt there were 
CIA agents in touch with them, if they were not 
agents themselves, but their sources of 
information were largely Afghan exiles living in 
Pakistan and newspaper reports from journalists 
who ventured inside the country. In short, 
however energetically and enthusiastically, they 
collected much the same information that a 
competent journalist would have at the time. This 
left the US largely ignorant about the inner 
workings of the Taliban organization and its 
connections with bin Laden. Coll makes it clear 
that the CIA had no serious presence in 
Afghanistan or the capacity to monitor events 
there, let alone the ability to develop useful 
sources and allies inside the country.

Robert Baer, a former CIA official, has written 
that, in the 1990s, very few people in the entire 
agency could speak Pashto or Persian-the two main 
languages in Afghanistan.[4] The writer Robin 
Moore, in his book The Hunt for bin Laden,[5] 
notes that when groups of US Special Forces and 
CIA agents were secretly airlifted into northern 
Afghanistan to start mobilizing the anti-Taliban 
Northern Alliance against the Taliban after 
September 11, most of them could speak Arabic and 
Russian, but not any of the languages used in 
Afghanistan. In my own reporting, I observed that 
the CIA had no competent interpreters and had to 
use sign language in their initial contacts with 
the Northern Alliance as well as in dealing with 
other groups.

After September 11, I was deluged with dozens of 
e-mails from US recruiting agencies who asked my 
help in hiring Dari or Pashto speakers "for 
government work." For an outsider like myself, 
this lack of languages was the most obvious and 
glaring example of the lack of interest in 
Afghanistan by the US government and the CIA in 
particular. The CIA had by then a cell of agents 
and informants in the region to monitor al-Qaeda, 
but it suffered from the same ignorance.

For the preceding fifteen years, leading Afghans 
had been warning US officials of the dangers of 
ignoring the country. Coll quotes a prophetic 
statement by President Najibullah, the Communist 
leader who was ousted by the Mujahideen in 1992. 
He attempted to convince Washington to help put 
together a coalition government in Kabul that 
would keep out the most hard-line Islamic 
Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. "We have," 
he said,

a common task-Afghanistan, the USA and the 
civilized world-to launch a joint struggle 
against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes 
to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. 
Afghanistan will turn into a center of world 
smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be 
turned into a center for terrorism.

In 1992, Najibullah took refuge in a UN guest 
house in Kabul and was then captured and hanged 
by the advancing Taliban.

In the mid-1990s other leading Afghans, including 
Ahmed Shah Massoud, Abdul Haq, the Afghan rebel 
commander, and the current president, Hamid 
Karzai, criticized US officials for ignoring 
their country, but they could not get a hearing 
in Washington. Abdul Haq was wholly ignored by 
the CIA even after September 11 and he was killed 
by the Taliban soon after the US-led war began. 
Karzai, living in Quetta in Pakistan, was given 
an expulsion order by the ISI to leave the 
country just a few weeks before September 11, 
because he was trying to organize Afghan tribal 
chiefs to oppose the Taliban from Pakistani soil. 
Indeed, as I have learned, when Karzai went to 
the US and European embassies to try to get the 
expulsion order lifted, he received no support.

Coll makes it clear that when these men said they 
feared that their country was being taken over by 
the Taliban and al-Qaeda, they were considered no 
more than politicians with personal ambitions. 
Al-Qaeda took them far more seriously. Massoud, 
who continued to lead a fighting force against 
the Taliban, was killed by as- sassins linked to 
bin Laden just before September 11, and Karzai 
has survived several assassination attempts. To 
anyone who closely followed events in the region 
it was clear that before September 11, the 
threats posed by the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and bin 
Laden were of low priority for the Clinton and 
Bush administrations. After September 11, the US 
was suddenly faced with the problem of how to 
track down bin Laden and eliminate him, when he 
had for years successfully created close 
relations with the Taliban and many other Afghans 
and Pakistanis.

Coll gives a fresh account of those years. In 
January 1996, he writes, the CIA's 
Counterterrorist Center at its headquarters in 
Langley, Virginia, first opened a new office to 
track bin Laden, which became known as the "bin 
Laden Issue Station" with the code name "Alex." 
At the time the CIA thought bin Laden was merely 
funding terrorist groups, not directing them. A 
few months later bin Laden flew on a rented 
Afghan Airlines plane from Sudan, where he had 
organized al-Qaeda cells among Muslims in Africa, 
to Jalalabad in Afghanistan; he needed two other 
flights to take his wives, children, and 
bodyguards. The CIA officials were unable to 
monitor his arrival, Coll writes, because they 
had no agents in Jalalabad, one of Afghanistan's 
largest cities and just a few miles from the 
Pakistan border. Such, Coll found, was the state 
of knowledge about bin Laden when he arrived in 
Afghanistan, a country which he was to virtually 
take under his control within the next four to 
five years.

Coll outlines the various plans that the CIA's 
specialists on bin Laden drew up to try to kidnap 
him. They wanted to fund a commando swat team 
from Uzbekistan which had no experience in such 
matters. They tried to find such a team in 
Pakistan, whose government had little interest 
because it was backing the Taliban. The CIA 
started financing an Afghan squad to try to 
kidnap him; it restarted a relationship with the 
anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, paying 
him a monthly retainer and providing him 
equipment so his forces could keep track of bin 
Laden's movements. As Coll points out, the 
enthusiasm and dedication of the members of the 
CIA's special unit concerned with bin Laden were 
of no help, since they were supposed to carry out 
the foolish plans of the CIA management.

One problem was simply that the CIA had few 
people they could count on-"assets"-in 
Afghanistan itself. The Clinton administration 
had no coherent policy toward the three main 
political forces-the Taliban, the anti-Taliban 
resistance, and Pakistan. Condoleezza Rice almost 
inadvertently summed up the dilemma of both the 
Clinton and the Bush administrations when she 
testified before the September 11 commission on 
April 8:

America's al-Qaeda policy wasn't working because 
our Afghanistan policy wasn't working. And our 
Afghanistan policy wasn't working because our 
Pakistan policy wasn't working. We recognized 
that America's counterterrorism policy had to be 
connected to our regional strategies and to our 
overall foreign policy.

But Rice also claimed in her testimony that the 
Bush administration had been moving toward a 
decisive new policy in the region that would have 
increased the chances of catching bin Laden just 
a week before September 11. In fact, nothing she 
proposed showed any promise of accomplishing that 
aim. Once again, it was a case of too little too 
late.

In fact, as Coll makes clear, since 1996 the CIA 
and the US government have been working in a 
region where both governments and inhabitants are 
largely opposed to the US catching bin Laden. The 
US made no serious attempt to change this 
situation. Yet nowhere in the testimony and 
documents made public so far does George Tenet 
even acknowledge these obvious contradictions. 
Nor did he push for the strategic shift in 
regional policy -particularly toward 
Pakistan-that should have been dictated to the US 
by the threat that al-Qaeda posed.

In his testimony to the September 11 commission 
on April 14, Tenet admitted that the CIA made 
mistakes and he concentrated on the technical 
failings, lack of manpower, and coordination with 
the FBI and other agencies that hampered the CIA 
before September 11. He stated that "between 1999 
and 2001, our human agent base against the 
terrorist target grew by over 50 percent. We ran 
over seventy sources and sub-sources, twenty-five 
of whom operated inside Afghanistan." Even for 
those who know little about intelligence matters, 
it should be clear that this very small number of 
sources inside Afghanistan was insufficient. And 
Tenet gave us no idea of the quality of these 
sources-were they cooks and drivers or commanders 
and mullahs?

3.

Coll's book is deeply satisfying because it is 
much more than a treatise on the CIA's 
performance. It covers the entire region from 
Saudi Arabia to Pakistan; shows where al-Qaeda 
and bin Laden were getting support, discussing in 
detail bin Laden's complicated relationship with 
the Saudis, who had expelled him in 1991 but 
remained ambivalent about bringing him to 
justice; and it clarifies the battles over policy 
among the CIA, the White House, and the US's 
principal allies. It's an inside account written 
by an outsider, the most objective history I have 
read of the many failures of the CIA and the US 
government in the region.

Two minor criticisms can be made. First, the 
CIA's relationships with China and Iran could 
have had considerably greater emphasis. In the 
1980s China had developed a close relationship 
with the CIA by providing the Mujahideen with 
weapons during their war with the Soviets. In the 
1990s with the advent of the Taliban, China 
became increasingly concerned that some militant 
Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang province were 
joining the Tal- iban and al-Qaeda. Although 
China was Pakistan's closest ally, Beijing was 
never in favor of Pakistan's support of the 
Taliban. But China disappears from Coll's account 
after the 1980s.

Similarly, Iran was vehemently opposed to the 
Taliban and nearly went to war with it in 1998 
when Iranian diplomats were killed in the 
Afghanistan town of Mazar-e-Sharif, near the 
Uzbekistan border. Here the lack of official 
contacts between the US and Iran was a 
disadvantage for the US. But it is still unclear 
to what extent the CIA tried to take advantage of 
Iran's anti-Taliban sentiments. If they did not, 
they surely should have done so through British 
or German or other intelligence agencies. What we 
know is that Iran quietly acquiesced to the 
American war in Afghanistan and that a low-level 
dialogue between the two countries finally began, 
which culminated in Iran giving the US and the UN 
its full support at the Bonn peace talks in 
December 2001, when the new Afghan government was 
formed. This could have led to an opening with 
Iran, but within weeks Bush had foreclosed that 
possibility by including the country in "the axis 
of evil."

Meanwhile what of bin Laden himself? There can be 
no doubt that he is alive and active. On April 
15, he issued a new tape recording, which was 
interpreted by analysts as suggesting that 
al-Qaeda was taking a new strategic direction by 
trying to exploit the differences between the US 
and Europe. He offered European nations "a truce" 
if they would pull out their forces from Muslim 
countries. "The door to a truce is open for three 
months.... The truce will begin when the last 
soldier leaves our countries," bin Laden said. 
"Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling 
your blood...this is a difficult but easy 
equation," he added. Previous tapes issued by bin 
Laden have almost invariably been followed by 
further terrorist attacks. His reference to the 
March 11 attacks in Madrid as "your goods 
delivered back to you" intensified fears that an 
al-Qaeda cell may be organizing another major 
terrorist attack in Europe.

The next day almost every European leader replied 
to the tape saying they would not negotiate with 
terrorists, showing that bin Laden can now expect 
comment on his proposals from heads of 
government. The tape is also a major 
embarrassment to US and Pakistani forces, who 
since February have assigned thousands of 
soldiers to renewed offensive sweeps in the 
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in order to 
hunt down bin Laden. It is no secret that the 
Bush administration is desperately anxious to 
catch him before the November elections, a goal 
that has become all the more urgent in view of 
the difficulties facing the US forces in Iraq.

Ultimately, it has been the war in Iraq that has 
been mainly responsible for the failure of US 
attempts to capture bin Laden. Despite the 
horrific killings in New York and Washington on 
September 11, there is now (especially in view of 
the information in Woodward's recent Plan of 
Attack) more than enough evidence to prove that 
the Bush administration began planning the 
invasion of Iraq even before the war in 
Afghanistan ended in December 2001. Afghanistan 
badly needed peacekeeping troops, adequate 
security for both leaders and local populations, 
and funding for rebuilding the country. All were 
neglected by the US. Similarly neglected was the 
hunt for bin Laden. That many of his top leaders 
were arrested created the false impression that 
he and the cells of jihadists linked to him have 
fatally lost power. As events in Madrid and in 
Iraq have shown, this was an illusion.

The good will for the US and its allies arising 
from the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 should 
have been followed up by extensive local recon- 
struction projects, providing not only schools 
but, among much else, security forces, a basic 
welfare system, and jobs. If this had been done, 
local sources of reliable intelligence would also 
have been found. Instead, small US army garrisons 
were scattered along the border hundreds of miles 
apart. They were never provided with the funds, 
equipment, personnel, and other support they 
would have needed to gather information, follow 
up leads, concentrate on suspicious groups and 
activities, and take the other measures that are 
necessary if bin Laden is to be caught.

The hearings on September 11 have so far barely 
touched on the fact that the moment the Afghan 
war was over the US started moving much of its 
counterterrorism resources and activities from 
Afghanistan to Iraq-including soldiers, civilian 
experts, intelligence units, satellite 
surveillance, drones, and other high-tech 
devices. The hunt for Saddam Hussein took on more 
importance than the hunt for bin Laden, even 
though there is still no conclusive evidence that 
Hussein supported al-Qaeda or needed its backing.

Now the US military and the CIA, in a great hurry 
to catch bin Laden, are trying to make up for 
lost time in Afghanistan, sending in some two 
thousand Marines and moving large numbers of 
troops from Kabul and Kan- dahar to the border. 
But additional US troops will not make up for 
months that were lost both in gathering 
intelligence and gaining local tribal support as 
Washington pursued the war in Iraq.

Hiding out in the rugged and mountainous terrain 
between Afghanistan and Pakistan where some 
Pashtun tribesmen have proved to be excellent 
hosts, generously financed by cash from al-Qaeda, 
bin Laden seems far from being caught. The lack 
of attention from the US during 2002 and 2003 has 
probably allowed him to establish even closer 
links to the local population and to find more 
hiding places if he is threatened.

Some 70 percent of the original al-Qaeda 
leadership is now captured or dead, and bin 
Laden, unable to use the electronic 
communications that would reveal his location, is 
in no position to run day-to-day operations or 
direct the many organizations linked to al-Qaeda 
throughout the world-in sixty-eight countries, 
according to Tenet's testimony to the September 
11 commission. However, bin Laden remains the 
spiritual guru and strategic guide for many 
thousands of Muslim militants around the world; 
every time he demonstrates that he is alive and 
can still make a forceful presentation on tape, 
he can be assured of more recruits to his cause 
of global jihad.

In hindsight, September 11 was the result both of 
a chronic failure of intelligence gathering and 
coordination among agencies working in Washington 
and of a failure to conceive of a strategy for 
the region including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and 
neighboring countries. But since September 11 
there has been a far bigger blunder by the Bush 
administration: its failure to sustain momentum 
in the efforts to make Afghanistan more secure 
and more stable and to catch bin Laden. No 
hindsight is required in order to make this 
judgment. What needed to be done after the defeat 
of the Taliban should have been obvious. What 
successive US administrations could have done to 
prevent September 11 will always be debatable; 
perhaps the failure of intelligence to anticipate 
it is ultimately understandable, in view of the 
ponderous workings of bureaucracies. What is 
unforgivable is the failure of the current US 
administration to maintain the resources and 
manpower needed to rebuild Afghanistan and to 
arrest bin Laden after September 11, and its 
decision to go to war in Iraq instead.

-April 28, 2004

Notes

[1] Free Press, 2004. See Brian Urquhart's 
review, "A Matter of Truth," The New York Review, 
May 13, 2004.

[2] Simon and Schuster, 2003.

[3] Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack (Simon 
and Schuster), will be reviewed in a coming issue.

[4] See Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story 
of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism 
(Crown, 2002).

[5] Random House, 2003.

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on 
matters of peace and democratisation in South 
Asia. SACW is an independent & non-profit 
citizens wire service run since 1998 by South 
Asia Citizens Web: www.sacw.net/
The complete SACW archive is available at: 
bridget.jatol.com/pipermail/sacw_insaf.net/

South Asia Counter Information Project a sister 
initiative, provides a partial back -up and 
archive for SACW:  snipurl.com/sacip
See also associated site: www.s-asians-against-nukes.org

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not
necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.

-- 



More information about the Sacw mailing list