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