Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Inside Jihad
had previously served as the main training centre for militants from
Pakistan and other countries. The volunteers were given standard 40day
or three-month guerrilla training here. Jamil was captured fighting
for the Taliban regime by the opposition Northern Alliance forces
in 2000. After spending some three years in an Afghan jail, he was
finally released by President Hamid Karzai in April 2003. Pakistani
intelligence agencies, with their long association with militant groups,
cleared the young man of any anti-state activities and allowed him to
rejoin the militant camp in his home town of Kotli in Pakistan’s semiautonomous
state of Azad Kashmir. 45
Jamil’s links with the ISI were revealed during his detention at
Baharak jail in Afghanistan’s Panjshir valley, where he told his captors
that he was a Pakistani army officer. He repeated the claim when
paraded before foreign journalists. Pakistani authorities rejected the
statement saying it was extracted under duress. But there is no denying
his contacts with the Pakistani spy agency, which had facilitated the
recruitment of thousands of youths to fight in aid of the Taliban regime.
Intriguingly, the Kotli camp, run by JeM, had continued to function
under ISI supervision despite Musharraf’s orders to close down all
such facilities. (When Musharraf learned that it was still functioning,
he sacked Major-General Khalid Mahmoud, then the director of the
ISI’s Kashmir cell.)
JeM had developed a substantial following among the soldiers
and lower-ranking military officials. Those radical contacts were
extremely useful in the December attacks on Musharraf. Some two
dozen air force personnel were part of a clandestine JeM cell, which
was involved in the 14 December attempt to blow up the presidential
convoy. Members of the cell lived in a residential colony near the
Chaklala air base right in the heart of the Rawalpindi garrison, and met
regularly with jihadist leaders without being spotted by intelligence
agencies. One was Mushtaq Ahmad, who was instructed to plant the
explosives under the bridge over which Musharraf’s cavalcade passed
on 14 December. A high-tech jamming device fixed in the President’s
car delayed the detonation by a few crucial seconds that allowed the
cavalcade to cross before the explosion. It was not clear whether it
was inefficiency or a deliberate oversight on the part of the intelligence
agencies that they did not notice such a large quantity of explosives
tied to the bridge along the high-security presidential route. Ironically,
it was Indian intelligence that had warned Musharraf of the first attempt
to kill him by blowing up the bridge. Mushtaq was handed a death