( Author's Note: Pakistan's President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is scheduled to visit the US from February 13, 2002, in response to an invitation from President Bush. Applauded by the US and the rest of the Western world, Musharraf, who had in the past created or contributed to the creation of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda, Mullah Mohammad Omer and his Taliban, Azam Tariq and his anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Maulana Masood Azhar and his Jaish-e-Mohammad and Mufti Soofi Mohammad and his Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi and thwarted every effort of the US before September 11, 2001, to bring bin Laden to justice and of the UN to implement the sanctions against the Taliban, would now be projecting himself to the American public as the greatest and the most courageous fighter against terrorism the world has known. He and his perception managers would also try hard to whitewash the involvement of Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment in promoting cross-border terrorism against India. It is hoped that the updated analysis annexed herewith would enable US public opinion to see the matter in its real perspective without being taken in by his perception management techniques)

India has been the target of cross-border terrrorism emanating from Pakistan since the late 1950s. Between 1956 and 1971, disgruntled Naga, Mizo and other elements from the border areas in India's North-Eastern region were given sanctuaries, training and arms and ammunition by Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of the then East Pakistan. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 gave a respite from this problem till 1981.

From 1981, Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment started providing assistance to terrorists belonging to the so-called Khalistan movement in Pakistani territory. At its instigation, a number of extremist organisations came into being in the Sikh diaspora abroad and these took to acts of terrorism such as hijacking of Indian aircraft, blowing up of Indian aircraft, attacks on civilians in the Punjab through the use of hand-held weapons, sophisticated explosive devices etc.

Terrorists belonging to the so-called Khalistani organisations were given sanctuaries, training and arms and ammunition in Pakistani territory. Pakistan refused to hand over to India the hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane in 1981 and terrorists wanted in connection with the blowing-up of the Kanishka aircraft of Air India off the Irish coast in 1985 and other terrorist incidents. As a result of the effective counter-terrorism operations undertaken by the Indian Security Forces, terrorism has been almost completely wiped out in the Punjab since 1995, but Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment has not given up its efforts to re-kindle terrorism in the Punjab with the help of the dregs of the terrorist movement still given sanctuary in Pakistan, whom it has been refusing to hand over to India for trial.

In 1993, Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment, through a mafia group of narcotics and other smugglers headed by Dawood Ibrahim who is wanted for many offences in India, organised a series of explosions in important economic targets in Mumbai (Bombay) such as India's premier stock exchange, a hotel run by Air India etc. The terrorists, who participated in these explosions had been taken to Pakistan via Dubai, trained in the use of explosive devices and sent back to Mumbai. The explosives and other arms and ammunition for their use were sent across in boats and clandestinely landed in the remote coastal areas. The explosions killed over 300 innocent civilians.

After the explosions, Dawood Ibrahim and others involved, all Indian nationals, were given sanctuary in Karachi and issued with Pakistani passports under different names. Red corner alerts issued by the Interpol for their arrests as well as repeated requests from Indian investigative agencies for handing them over to India have not been honoured. Though Pakistani newspapers have been reporting in detail about their presence and activities in Karachi, the Pakistani Government has been repeatedly taking up the stand that they are not in Pakistan. These elements based in Pakistan continue to indulge in acts of terrorism and other serious crime in Indian territory.

Before 1989, there were two major acts of terrorism relating to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) instigated by the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment. The first was the hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft to Lahore in 1971 by two members of the J&K Liberation Front (JKLF), both Indian nationals. Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, the then Foreign Minister of Pakistan, welcomed the hijackers in Lahore, lionised them and helped them to meet the international press for projecting their cause. Thereafter, the hijackers blew up the aircraft with explosives provided by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), after having evacuated the passsengers. Pakistan refused to hand over the hijackers to India. This led to India banning all Pakistani overflights over Indian territory, which lasted till 1973.

The second incident was the kidnapping and murder in 1983 of Mhatre, a diplomat of the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, UK, by a Pakistan-based faction of the JKLF, headed by Amanullah Khan, a Pakistani national. He continues to operate from Rawalpindi without any action being taken against him by the Pakistani authorities.

Pakistan's proxy war against India in J&K through cross-border terrorism started in 1989 after the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. For this purpose, Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment diverted to J&K from Afghanistan the remnants of the arms and ammunition and explosives received by it from the USA and other Western countries for use against the Soviet troops and battle-hardened mercenaries of Pakistani and other nationalities with experience of having fought against the Soviet troops. Since the beginning of this proxy war till November 15, 2001, 12,581 innocent civilians, many of them Muslims, and 3,246 members of the Security Forces have been killed. During the counter-terrorism operations since 1989, the Security Forces have killed 14,078 Pakistani-trained terrorists, many of them Pakistani nationals.

The new phase of Pakistan's cross-border terrorism against India since 1989 has so far passed through the following four stages:

* 1989-93: Pakistan largely used indigenous Kashmiri elements. They were recruited in J&K, taken across the border/Line of Control to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), trained and armed and infiltrated back into J&K. Their leaders were given sanctuaries in Pakistan. In 1989-90, Pakistan assisted any indigenous Kashmiri group irrespective of its objective. Subsequently, it stopped assisting groups, which called for an independent Kashmir State, and assisted only those who advocated J&K's merger with Pakistan. After 1990, the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the armed wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of J&K, which advocates merger with Pakistan, emerged as the privileged recipient of assistance from Pakistan. By 1993, the indigenous groups trained and armed by Pakistan were unable to make headway against the Indian Security Forces. Moreover, they were increasingly unwilling to carry out the instructions of the ISI to massacre members of the Hindu, Sikh and other religious minority groups and intimidate the surviving members into leaving the State in order to change the demographic composition of the State.
* 1993-99: Disappointed by the results achieved by the indigenous Kashmiri groups, Pakistan started relying on Pakistani and Afghan nationals and other foreign mercenaries for achieving its strategic objectives. For this purpose, it infiltrated into J&K trained Pakistani and other foreign cadres of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and the Al Badr. Subsequently, since the beginning of 2000, the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) has also been infiltrated. The Al Badr, an armed wing of Pakistan's JEI, was originally created by the ISI in the then East Pakistan in 1971 and used by it for the massacre of Bengali intellectuals in Dacca and other places. It consisted largely of Pashtun tribesmen and some Punjabis of Pakistan. It was withdrawn from Dacca into Pakistan after the defeat of the Pakistani Army in the war of December,1971, and became practically dormant till the early 1980s, when it was re-activated, trained, armed and infiltrated into Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet troops. After the overthrow of the Najibullah Government in Kabul in April,1992, the Al Badr was withdrawn by the ISI from Afghanistan and infiltrated into J&K. The Al Badr is presently not active anywhere else in the world except in India. It does not advocate a pan-Islamic ideology. The HUM and the LET, both of Wahabi orientation, came into existence in Pakistan during the Afghan war of the 1980s. They are Pakistani organisations, with largely Pakistani office-bearers and have their entire administrative, logistics and training infrastructure in Pakistan and, before September 11, 2001, they had their training infrastructure in Afghanistan too. Both advocate a pan-Islamic ideology and defend their right to go to the assistance of Muslims anywhere in the world, who, in their perception, are suppressed. Thus, they have not only been indulging in acts of terrorism in India, but also assisting terrorist groups in the Southern Philippines, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya and Dagestan. They also provide moral and material support to fundamentalist elements in Islamic countries such as Algeria, Tunisia and even Saudi Arabia. By the end of this period, these three Pakistani organisations, two of them of Pan-Islamic orientation, practically took over the control of the terrorist movement in J&K, almost totally marginalising the indigenous Kashmiri organisations, except the HM. Indigenous organisations such as the JKLF gave up violence during this period and started focussing on propaganda and other political means for projecting their demands. Since this period, there is no longer any Kashmiri terrorism to any significant extent. It is almost exclusively Pakistani terrorism in the name of Kashmiris. After the Taliban captured power in large parts of Afghanistan in 1994-96, these organisations shifted many, if not most, of their training camps to Taliban-controlled territory. Most of the ground infrastructure in Afghanistan destroyed and people killed in the US Cruise missile strikes of August,1998, belonged to the HUM and the LET and not to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. In October,1997, the USA designated the HUM as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation under a law of 1996.

* 1999- September 11, 2001: In 1998, the HUM and the LET became members of bin Laden's International Islamic Front for Jehad Against the US and Israel. The leader of the HUM signed bin Laden's first fatwa against the US. In 1999, the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment used the trained cadres of the HUM, the LET, the Al Badr and the Al Qaeda of bin Laden to facilitate its occupation of the Kargil heights which led to fighting between the Indian and Pakistani military and the ultimate ejection of the Pakistani military and terrorist groups from the Indian territory occupied by them clandestinely by taking advantage of the 1998-99 winter. The influence of bin Laden's teaching and tactics on the HUM and the LET became increasingly evident since July, 1999. Before that, there was hardly any suicide terrorism in J&K. Since July,1999,the Pakistani terrorists, influenced by the modus operandi (MO) of the Al Qaeda, have increasingly shifted to suicide attacks on the Security Forces and military and civilian installations. Since July,1999, there have been 43 acts of suicide terrorism, of which only two were committed by indigenous Kashmiri organisations. The remaining 41 were committed by the LET and the JEM. The influence of the MO of the Al Qaeda has also been evident in the increasingly ferocious attacks on religious minorities reminiscent of the massacre of the Shias (Hazaras) of Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The JEM came into existence in the beginning of 2000 by a split in the HUM engineered by Maulana Masood Azhar a Pakistani national of Bhawalpur in Pakistani Punjab, who was released by the Government of India in December,1999, to secure the release of the passengers of an Indian Airlines plane hijacked to Kandahar. Till now, Pakistan has not honoured repeated Indian requests for the arrest and handing over of the hijackers, all Pakistani nationals. It has been saying that they will be tried in Pakistan according to Pakistani law, but none of them has so far been arrested or even questioned even more than two years after the hijacking. Pakistan has also not honoured the red corner notices of the Interpol. Azhar, who has been identified by the December, 2001, issue of the "Herald", the prestigious monthly journal of the "Dawn" group of Karachi, as an ISI-trained terrorist, started his career in terrorism in the SSP, an extremist Sunni organisation, which has been fighting for the proclamation of Pakistan as a Sunni state and for the declaration of the Shias as non-Muslims, gravitated to the HUM and, as an HUM office-bearer, assisted the Al Qaeda in Somalia and Yemen before entering India in 1994 with a Portugese passport, when he was arrested. Since the middle 1990s, the HUM and the LET have been proclaiming their objective as not only the merger of J&K with Pakistan, but also as the "liberation" of Muslims in the rest of India from Hindu rule and re-establishment of the Mughal rule over the Indian sub-continent. With this objective, the LET and, subsequently, the JEM have been trying to spread their terrorist infrastructure to New Delhi and other parts of India. The LET carried out an act of terrorism in the Red Fort of New Delhi in January, 2001.

* Since September 11, 2001: The JEM joined bin Laden's International Islamic Front. A large number of trained cadres of the HUM, the LET, the JEM, the SSP and the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), an extremist organisation of the tribal areas of Pakistan adjoining the Durand Line, infiltrated into Afghanistan with the complicity of Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment and fought along with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda against the Northern Alliance and the allied forces led by the USA, suffering large casualties. The "Herald" of December, 2001, has estimated the number of Pakistanis belonging to these organisations, who are missing in action, at 6,000 plus, but other independent reports indicate that at least 8,000 Pakistani members of these organisations were killed by the US air strikes or in the fighting against the Northern Alliance. The surviving members of these organisations have since returned to Pakistan with redoubled anger against the US and India for the casualties suffered by them and for the humiliation heaped upon them by the Afghan people after the collapse of the Taliban. The recent ban on the LET and the JEM by Gen.Pervez Musharraf was intended more to prevent an anti-US and anti-military backlash by them in Pakistani territory than to prevent their acts of  terrorism against India.

* The large-scale Pakistani, official and non-official, involvement in the building-up of not only the Taliban, but also of other terrorist infrastructure based in Afghanistan.
* The role of the HUM in the hijacking of a plane of the Indian Airlines in December, 1999, some of the papers relating to which were found in an abandoned safe house of the HUM in Kabul.

* The presence of rogue elements in Pakistan's scientific community in the fields relating to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which had been hobnobbing with religious extremists. The contacts of some of these scientists with bin Laden and his terrorist network in Afghanistan might have come as an unpleasant surprise to the rest of the world, but not to knowledgeable analysts in India. Serving and retired scientists of a sensitive set-up like the nuclear one are constantly under surveillance by the ISI to prevent undesirable contacts with foreigners and, as pointed out by the "Herald" of December, 2001, they could not have established contact with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda without the knowledge or complicity of the ISI. The arrest and court-martial in 1995 of a group of religious fanatics in the Pakistan Army led by Maj.Gen. Zaheer-ul-Islam Abbasi brought to light the extent of penetration of religious extremist elements into the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment at the lower and middle levels since the days of Zia-ul-Haq, but alerts of a similar penetration of Pakistan's WMD scientific community did not receive from the rest of the world the attention they deserved. The rogue contacts of Dr.Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, with Iraq were well known and were apparently being monitored by the West, but other rogue elements in the scientific community remained unsmoked out. The post-September 11 discussions in the Western media on likely threats from Pakistan's WMD capability have focussed on the possibility of the Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups one day getting hold of it. The danger is not only from the terrorists clandestinely getting hold of it, but equally from the rogue scientists willingly and voluntarily doing the bidding of the terrorists and religious extremists.

* The drawing-up of plans by terrorist organisations of Pakistan such as the HUM to take the jehad to the US territory by recruiting and training not only members of the Pakistani diaspora in the US and Canada, but also American nationals. Such recruitment and training had been going on at least since 1995, with most of the American recruits being Afro-Americans feeling alienated from the American establishment and society. This writer had drawn attention in 2000 to the plans and attempts of these elements to take the jehad to the US. The reported arrest in Mazar-e-Sharif of a white American convert to Islam and to the ideology of the Taliban/Al Qaeda shows that these elements have had success in winning adherents for their jehad directed against the US not only from the community of Pakistanis in the US and the Afro-Americans, but also from amongst the whites. How many of these trained recruits to terrorism are functioning as sleeper agents and accomplices in US territory and what role, if any, they might have played in making the terrorist strikes of September 11 and the subsequent Anthrax scare possible are questions which need attention to prevent another September 11.

While it is conceivable that at least some, if not many, of these survivors might have dispersed in the Afghan mountains and countryside and might be lying low for the time being, there are credible reports from Pakistan that a large number of the survivors managed to enter Pakistan with the complicity of serving and retired personnel of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment and have taken shelter in the FATA, in the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and in the mosques/madrasas, which had been providing the recruits for these organisations---particularly in the Binori

complex in Karachi, in the Darul Uloom Akora Khattak in the NWFP and the Jamiya Ashrafiya in Lahore. The ISI always maintains a strict surveillance over these three principal mosques/madrasa complexes of Pakistan and they could not thus have taken shelter there without its knowledge, if not complicity.

Practically the entire Taliban leadership is reported to have taken shelter in the mosques/madrasas in the NWFP and Balochistan. The surviving members of the brains trust of the International Islamic Front of bin Laden have reportedly moved over to the FATA, which is the safest place for them in the world. The talk in the FATA is that bin Laden is also amongst them, but this is yet to be confirmed.

The attacks by the Pakistani jehadi organisations on the J&K Legislative Assembly in Srinagar on October 1, 2001, and on the Indian Parliament House at New Delhi on December 13, 2001, were an important landmark for the following reasons:

* They constituted an attack not only on Indian democracy, but also on democracy as practised in the democratic countries of the world. The Pakistani extremist organisations, particularly the LET, look upon the Westminster-style democracy as anti-Islamic since it does not recognise the concept that sovereignty vests with God. They look upon the successful functioning of parliamentary democracy in India as a corrupting influence on the thinking of the Pakistani people.

* The attack on the Parliamentary House was yet another demonstration of the determination of these organisations to spread their acts of terrorism to other parts of India outside J&K.

* They reflected the anger of the Pakistani establishment and jehadi organisations against India over the perceived Indian assistance to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance and over the humiliation suffered by the Pakistanis in Afghanistan. The attack on the Parliament House coincided with the visit to New Delhi of Abdullah Abdullah, the Foreign Minister of the interim Afghan administration.

* They shocked the world into admitting without reservation or ambivalence that India has been the victim of terrorism emanating from Pakistani territory and has a legitimate right of self-defence against this terrorism

* They made untenable the contention of Musharraf till December 13, 2001, that these were Kashmiri freedom-fighters. Under international pressure and faced with the danger of an effective Indian retaliation in exercise of its right of self-defence, he was forced to admit that these constituted acts of terrorism and to condemn resort to terrorism, whatever be the cause, even if it be the so-called Kashmiri cause.

* They showed that there is a rational limit to even India's legendary patience and that the fact that Pakistan possessed some nuclear weapons would not inhibit India's exercise of its right of self-defence. Musharraf's nuclear bluff was called.

* He froze the bank accounts of the HUM, the LET and the JEM even before January 12.

* He banned the LET and the JEM on January 15, 2002, and arrested/detained some of their leaders and cadres.

* The bank accounts were frozen after giving the affected organisations sufficient time to withdraw, transfer or otherwise thin out the balances to their credit. As a result, according to the "News" of Islamabad (January 1, 2002),at the time of freezing, the account of bin Laden, maintained by his No.2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, had a balance of just US $ 252, that of the HUM US $ 70 and that of the JEM US $ 14. The balance in the account of the LET has not been given.

* He banned the LET and the JEM, which have indulged in acts of terrorism outside J&K including the attack on the Parliament House, but spared the HUM and the Al Badr, which have in recent months confined their terrorism to J&K.

* Even in the case of the LET and the JEM, he attributed the ban to their so-called terrorist activities in Pakistani territory and not to their terrorism in India. In fact, they have never indulged in acts of terrorism in Pakistani territory.

* The notification of January 15, 2002, banning the LET and the JEM was not made applicable to the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), including the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan), the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Provincially-Administered Tribal areas (PATA).

* The arrests of the cadres of the banned organisations have been restricted to political and administrative cadres. Some of them have already been released under the pretext that there was no evidence of their involvement in terrorism.

* Even according to reputed Pakistani journalists such as Kamran Khan of the "News", about 5,000 trained terrorists have not been touched and they have escaped to the POK, including the Northern Areas, or gone underground in other parts of Pakistan.

* The Police raids so far have been only on the subordinate offices of these two organisations. The headquarters of the JEM in the Binori madrasa in Karachi and of the LET, in Muridke, near Lahore, have not been raided.

* The seizures made so far by the Police consist only of records, posters, pamphlets etc. There have been no seizures of arms and ammunition.

* No action has been taken against indigenous Kashmiri organisations such as the HM operating against India from Pakistani territory.

* Musharraf continues to evade action on India's request for handing over terrorists, including hijackers of two aircraft (of 1981 and 1999), wanted in India for trial. In the case of the wanted Pakistani nationals, he has said that if credible evidence was forthcoming he would have them tried in Pakistan, but has initiated no action to have them arrested and questioned. In the case of the Indian nationals, he continues to say that the question of action against them would arise only if they were in Pakistani territory, thus denying their presence.

* He, like his predecessors, has not honoured any of the red-cornered notices of the Interpol relating to terrorism committed against Indian nationals or in Indian territory.

But, once Washington removed Pakistan from that list, it went back to its old ways of promoting cross-border terrorism against India. New Delhi has, therefore, strong reasons to be skeptic about the sincerity of Musharraf in really wanting to end terrorism in all its manifestations, whatever be its objective. The international community led by the US has to keep up the pressure on him till he shows verified results on the ground by way of dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and end of cross-border terrorism.

Till now, the focus of the US-led war against terrorism in relation to stopping funds flow to terrorists is restricted to the freezing of suspect bank accounts. Terrorists do not use legitimately earned money through donations etc for terrorist operations, for which they use clandestine money earned from sources such as heroin smuggling.

Unless the present war is utilised for tracing and destroying all heroin stocks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for putting an effective stop to illegal opium cultivation, for dismantling all heroin extraction refineries in Afghanistan and Pakistan and arresting and prosecuting heroin producers and smugglers as accomplices of terrorists, terrorists will not have difficulty in finding money for their operations. This aspect has not received any attention so far and there has hardly been any capture of notorious heroin producers and smugglers during the current operations of the US-led allies.

Deweaponisation is another important aspect of the war against terrorism. This has two sides---seizing all weapons circulating in Pakistan and dismantling the illegal weapons manufacturing and smuggling outfits operating in Pakistan.

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