Nicholas Schmidle: The Divide Between Old and New Jihadists in Pakistan
[Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.]
Corpses have been showing up on roadsides in North and South Waziristan for years. Some of the time they are headless; almost all of the time they display a note alleging that the deceased was a spy. Khalid Khawaja’s death was no different, except that he never hid the fact that he had once worked for Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the ISI. The association gave him credibility in many circles. Khawaja’s generation of spooks, after all, trained local and foreign jihadis in Afghanistan during the 1980s, frequented Taliban-controlled Afghanistan during the 1990s, and continued—at least unofficially—to support some insurgents in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) throughout the past decade. Between his intel background and his continued devotion to the cause, Khawaja was an important, outspoken player on the jihadi scene.
It was shocking, then, to hear that a previously unknown faction of militants calling themselves the Asian Tigers had kidnapped Khawaja, along with a British reporter and another retired ISI officer, a month ago in North Waziristan. Two weeks later, Khawaja appeared in a hostage video, confessing to have been secretly working for the ISI throughout the crisis at the Red Mosque, the hyper-radical mosque in Islamabad that was stormed by commandos in July 2007. And on Friday, Khawaja’s dead body appeared on a roadside in North Waziristan, along with a note claiming that he was an American spy....
A quick word about Khawaja himself. A squadron commander in the Pakistani Air Force early in his life, Khawaja later joined the ISI. After getting kicked out of the spy agency in 1988 for writing a letter to President Zia ul Haq that charged the army chief with hypocrisy, he set out freelancing. He reportedly arranged five meetings in the late 1980s between bin Laden and former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He described himself as a mujahid, while also acting as the chief spokesperson for the Defense of Human Rights, a Pakistani organization campaigning on behalf of the legions of “disappeared” persons suspected of being kidnapped by the ISI. Most recently, he had been acting as counsel to the five Americans arrested in Pakistan in December 2009....
During the 1980s and 1990s, the ISI fostered the development of several militant organizations as national security assets; Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad were instruments of Islamabad’s foreign policy in Kashmir. Pervez Musharraf banned the prominent militant outfits after September 11, but the status quo remained until 2004. Then, under American pressure, Musharraf ordered the army into South Waziristan. The relationship between the army and the militants cracked. Ghazi’s brother at the Red Mosque issued a fatwa decreeing that any soldiers killed in South Waziristan should be denied a proper Muslim burial. When commandos stormed the Red Mosque in July 2007, leaving Ghazi and hundreds of others dead, the militants turned their guns fully against the state. Five months later, the Pakistani Taliban was formed.
One of the characteristics distinguishing the new generation of militants from the old has been their deep mistrust of traditional authorities, such as the intelligence agencies, the tribal structures, and the mainstream Islamist parties. Two months before his death in July 2007, Ghazi told me even the traditional jihadi organizations like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba (a sectarian outfit that attacks Shias) were being undermined as the rank-and-file defected and joined his movement. “Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones,” he explained. The splintering phenomenon continues today: the Asian Tigers are considered an offshoot of either Jaish-e-Mohammad or of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which itself broke off from Sipah-e-Sahaba in the early 1990s. Some Western audiences might applaud the fracturing and dividing, assuming that smaller outfits are easier to isolate. But each new group is more violent and reckless than the next—and also more removed from the original puppet-masters in ISI headquarters. Negotiations, bribes, and settlements hold no appeal for this generation of militants....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Corpses have been showing up on roadsides in North and South Waziristan for years. Some of the time they are headless; almost all of the time they display a note alleging that the deceased was a spy. Khalid Khawaja’s death was no different, except that he never hid the fact that he had once worked for Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the ISI. The association gave him credibility in many circles. Khawaja’s generation of spooks, after all, trained local and foreign jihadis in Afghanistan during the 1980s, frequented Taliban-controlled Afghanistan during the 1990s, and continued—at least unofficially—to support some insurgents in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) throughout the past decade. Between his intel background and his continued devotion to the cause, Khawaja was an important, outspoken player on the jihadi scene.
It was shocking, then, to hear that a previously unknown faction of militants calling themselves the Asian Tigers had kidnapped Khawaja, along with a British reporter and another retired ISI officer, a month ago in North Waziristan. Two weeks later, Khawaja appeared in a hostage video, confessing to have been secretly working for the ISI throughout the crisis at the Red Mosque, the hyper-radical mosque in Islamabad that was stormed by commandos in July 2007. And on Friday, Khawaja’s dead body appeared on a roadside in North Waziristan, along with a note claiming that he was an American spy....
A quick word about Khawaja himself. A squadron commander in the Pakistani Air Force early in his life, Khawaja later joined the ISI. After getting kicked out of the spy agency in 1988 for writing a letter to President Zia ul Haq that charged the army chief with hypocrisy, he set out freelancing. He reportedly arranged five meetings in the late 1980s between bin Laden and former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He described himself as a mujahid, while also acting as the chief spokesperson for the Defense of Human Rights, a Pakistani organization campaigning on behalf of the legions of “disappeared” persons suspected of being kidnapped by the ISI. Most recently, he had been acting as counsel to the five Americans arrested in Pakistan in December 2009....
During the 1980s and 1990s, the ISI fostered the development of several militant organizations as national security assets; Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad were instruments of Islamabad’s foreign policy in Kashmir. Pervez Musharraf banned the prominent militant outfits after September 11, but the status quo remained until 2004. Then, under American pressure, Musharraf ordered the army into South Waziristan. The relationship between the army and the militants cracked. Ghazi’s brother at the Red Mosque issued a fatwa decreeing that any soldiers killed in South Waziristan should be denied a proper Muslim burial. When commandos stormed the Red Mosque in July 2007, leaving Ghazi and hundreds of others dead, the militants turned their guns fully against the state. Five months later, the Pakistani Taliban was formed.
One of the characteristics distinguishing the new generation of militants from the old has been their deep mistrust of traditional authorities, such as the intelligence agencies, the tribal structures, and the mainstream Islamist parties. Two months before his death in July 2007, Ghazi told me even the traditional jihadi organizations like Jaish-e-Mohammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba (a sectarian outfit that attacks Shias) were being undermined as the rank-and-file defected and joined his movement. “Everywhere you look, you can see youngsters rejecting the old ones,” he explained. The splintering phenomenon continues today: the Asian Tigers are considered an offshoot of either Jaish-e-Mohammad or of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which itself broke off from Sipah-e-Sahaba in the early 1990s. Some Western audiences might applaud the fracturing and dividing, assuming that smaller outfits are easier to isolate. But each new group is more violent and reckless than the next—and also more removed from the original puppet-masters in ISI headquarters. Negotiations, bribes, and settlements hold no appeal for this generation of militants....