History of Pakistan

The U.S. Navy SEAL team that stormed bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2 blew up the chopper after it was damaged during a hard landing. They wanted keep sensitive U.S. technology out of enemy hands.

But bits of the helicopter, including the tail section, remained behind and the United States demanded that Pakistan return them to U.S. custody.

"It (the wreckage) was returned over the weekend and is now back in the United States," Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said.

The raid that killed bin Laden badly damaged U.S.-Pakistan relations, and nagging questions remain in Washington about how bin Laden managed to go unnoticed for years in the garrison town of Abbottabad, only 30 miles from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. Some U.S. officials speculate he must have had support.

In turn, Pakistan has branded the raid a violation of its sovereignty, since Islamabad was not informed about the U.S. operation until it was over. Pakistan's parliament has threatened to cut supply lines to U.S. forces in Afghanistan if there are more military incursions.

Senator John Kerry, on a trip to Islamabad on May 16, described a Pakistani pledge to return the chopper's wreckage as one step needed to rebuild trust between the two countries which was badly damaged by the raid.

But Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who has advised President Barack Obama on policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, said returning the helicopter fell far short of what it would take to mend frayed ties.

"It's too little, too late to change the downward spiral in U.S.-Pakistani relations," Riedel said.

Even before bin Laden's death, bilateral ties had reached a low point over Pakistan's arrest of a CIA contractor and mounting U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's western regions.

The government of President Asif Ali Zardari, along with Pakistan's even more powerful military leaders, has denied any prior knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts.

But some U.S. lawmakers are calling for a radical shift in U.S. policy on Pakistan as officials brace themselves for possible revelations about Pakistani complicity in data seized from bin Laden's compound.

On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged the "trust deficit" between the two countries. But he also said Pakistan was too important to walk away from.

"Pakistan is very important, not just because of Afghanistan but because of its nuclear weapons and because of the importance of stability in the subcontinent," Gates told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank.

Study ties new al Qaeda chief to murder of journalist Pearl

A Wall Street Journal reporter, Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi in January 2002 while researching a story on Islamist militants, and was later beheaded.

The findings by investigators of the Pearl Project revealed al-Adel had discussed Pearl's abduction with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, also known as KSM, the accused mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

"KSM told the FBI that he was pulled into the kidnapping by a high-level leader in al Qaeda circles, an Egyptian named Saif al-Adel, who told him to make the kidnapping an al Qaeda operation," said the investigators in their report which was published in January.

Journalism academics and students set up the Pearl Project at Georgetown University in the United States to investigate Pearl's kidnapping and murder.

The linkage of al-Adel to Pearl's murder shows the long-standing ties between al Qaeda and Pakistan militancy, which flourishes not only in the lawless northwest along the Afghan border but in Karachi and other urban centers.

Pearl fell into al Qaeda's hands after Pakistani militants, the subject of Pearl's research, kidnapped him.

Al-Adel learned of Pearl and approached Mohammad to take him off the Pakistani militants' hands.

"He (al-Adel) thought this was an opportunity," Mohammad told FBI agents, according to the report's authors.

"We can take advantage of it. He said he wanted to make sure it's an al Qaeda thing."

Mohammad, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and taken to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, later admitted he beheaded Pearl.

Mohammad told investigators he initially had no idea about the kidnapping and he also said al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was reportedly angry over Pearl's brutal killing, the report said.

A former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo Bay military commissions told the researchers: "One of the high value detainees told interrogators that Osama bin Laden was angry that KSM had slaughtered Pearl so publicly and brutally, arguing that the murder brought unnecessary attention on the network."

A British-born Islamist militant, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani court in 2002 for his role in Pearl's killing. He has appealed his conviction. Three other co-accused who face life sentences, have also appealed.

Al-Adel, the latest militant named in connection with Pearl's murder, was appointed al Qaeda's temporary leader following the killing of bin Laden by U.S. special forces in a Pakistani town on May 2.

U.S. prosecutors say al-Adel is one of al Qaeda's top military commanders and helped plan 1998 bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. They also say he set up al Qaeda training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Islamic charities from Saudi Arabia and UAE giving $100 million yearly to jihad in Pakistan

The idea that poverty causes terrorism has been refuted again and again, but unfortunately the fact that the connection is made in a cable like this only means that the solution will be to pour more money into Pakistan. Ironically, that money will also be used to fund jihad, not to fight against it.

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Funding Pakistani Jihad

All the commitment and fanaticism notwithstanding, terrorist operations cannot be run without funds. Funds for jihad are required for procuring weapons, financing training camps, providing logistical support, compensating the families of jihadis, paying instructors and also the wide networks of agentsand running recruitment offices.
During the Afghan war, western governments were a major source of funding and weapons for the groups engaged in taking on the Soviet occupation army in Afghanistan. Much of these funds came from covert accounts of the states funding the Afghans. Islamic countries also poured in billions of dollars into the coffers of the jihadi groups. While the role of Saudi Arabia has been limited to the provision of funds to the Islamist and jihadi organisations, the Kingdom, to this day, is the biggest source of official and private funding to Islamist and jihadist organisations in Pakistan, and it is to their credit that certain Deobandi and Ahle-Hadith extremist organisations became so powerful with the growth in their size.
One also has to see the Saudi financial support to Deobandi organisations in the context of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran post the Iranian revolution where both these countries had supported militant sectarian organisations to organise attacks and counter-attacks on each other’s sects and fought a proxy war inside Pakistan.
So open was Saudi support to Sipah-e-Sahaba (now the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jundullah) that the Saudi government, in 2000, gave out Rs 17 million to fund hardcore militant madrassas in Jhang alone. Another Saudi charity, called the International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO), is an affiliate of the Saudi welfare organisation, Rabita Alam-e-Islami, which in turn helped to set up the Rabita Trust in Pakistan that was banned after 9/11 because of a strong bin Laden connection. The most interesting aspect of the Trust was that its chairman was none other than General Pervez Musharraf, the chief of army staff. To save embarrassment to a close ally, a state department official said, “We do not think the prominent people who have their names on it were aware of the infiltration.”

In fact, so murky is the source of funds coming from Saudi Arabia that the leader of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Maulana Fazlur Rahman Khalil said, “The US had instructed, through Rabita Alam-e-Islami that we should initiate jihad in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, to which I replied that we have grown up now. We do not do jihad at your bidding.”

Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’s (LeT’s) parent organisation, the Dawat wal Irshad, initially also attracted the sympathy of certain Arab donors interested in purifying Islam in the subcontinent, which is considered to have been tainted by the influence of Hinduism. In fact, one such Saudi donor, Abu Abdul Aziz, who invested millions of dollars on LeT, LeJ and various jihadi organisations, even donated Rs 10 million to make a mosque at Markaz-e-Dawa’s headquarters.
And while it may be true that over the years the militants have developed a vast and effective network for raising funds by taking as much as a rupee from a poor man to millions from the rich, donations are pouring in for jihad from every segment of society. And while many jihadi organisations collect sacrificial hides to raise funds, many have started raising their capital from publishing magazines to even the property business, and now, as a jihadi told me sheepishly, “the national disaster business”. In a report published by the Aga Khan Development Network in 1998, approximately 50 percent of Pakistanis gave an estimated amount of Rs 770 billion in money, goods and time, of which 90 percent of the surveyed donors cited religious faith as the motivation for giving.

If all this foreign and local funding were not enough, the Pakistani government gives out an estimated Rs 20-35 billion in grants to madrassas and jihadi movements indirectly from government resources like zakat or iqra funds. Another funding source after the crackdown on Saudi sources and tighter monetary controls is the Afghan Transit Trade, which is a cash cow for jihadis and certain rogue establishment actors who exploit the trade for procuring weapons and narcotics smuggling, earning millions of dollars to be funneled into proxy wars from Afghanistan to Pakistan. There was a reason why the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) offered $ 10 million to replace American aid. The hundi trade is another source that is ‘welcomed’ by the State Bank of Pakistan, as it has, over the years, been buying billions of dollars to shore up its balance of payment positions. The hundi trade helps launder money for jihadis but in the land of the pure, jihad is used as a weapon to further our so-called strategic plans.
Even after 9/11, much of what is happening inside the tribal belt is a bit of a charade. In fact, what earlier used to be taking place openly has now been pushed behind the curtain, otherwise it is business as usual. Every time the Americans start getting impatient, the Pakistanis make a show of launching an operation in the tribal belt. There are arrests of Afghan and Arab jihadis or the killings of certain individuals until everything returns to normal. One big reason why our own Pakistani government will never really close the funding source and cut the roots of jihadis is because doing so would have a direct impact on the various jihads it is involved with to suit certain foreign policy goals. Moreover, by shutting down these rackets, the Pakistani state will lose an important leverage over deciding affairs inside Afghanistan. Often, the Pakistani state has used smuggling as a carrot for the various Afghan warlords and agents, and in return has managed to get them to do Pakistan’s bidding inside Afghanistan. This currency of power will be lost if Pakistan were to curb the illegal rackets. But, in the process of taking action on this trade, what will happen is that the Pakistani state will try to regain total and complete control over this trade, something it was gradually losing out on with the increasing privatisation of jihad.

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Never heard of him

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seven in Pakistan

Pakistan returns U.S. helicopter from bin Laden raid

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Islamic charities from Saudi Arabia and UAE giving $100 million yearly to jihad in Pakistan

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training for jihad in tribal regions

Pakistan's Islamic supremacist and jihadist madrassas

"run on the goodwill of local businessmen"

Stop the presses: Pakistan supported jihad outfits as hedge against India and Afghanistan

Funding Pakistani Jihad

Amenewsآمین

Asian Minorities Express News