Terrorist camps thriving(in Pakistan)

Terrorist camps thriving

Operating under new names and with the implicit approval of the Pakistani military, schools that train jihadists are an open secret

BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

July 22, 2005

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- As President Pervez Musharraf renews his crackdown on Muslim militant factions after this month's terrorist bombings in London, new evidence has emerged that Pakistan has continued to let such groups run military-style camps to train guerrilla fighters.

For years, the camps have been only half a secret.

"Everybody has known they were there, but no one would officially admit it," said a Pakistani official who was interviewed recently and requested anonymity. "And they were kept hidden; no ordinary people could go there."

Inconveniently for the government, the camps have gotten a bit more public in recent weeks, in Pakistan's press and a U.S. courtroom. (There has been no suggestion that the London bombers attended any such camp.)

While the Bush administration has portrayed Musharraf as an essential ally in its global war on terror, the training camps reflect how deeply that role has divided the government and its ruling elite.

The camps are used by Pakistan-based militant groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure). For more than a decade, the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate has sponsored such groups to attack India in the conflict over the territory of Kashmir, much as it nurtured the Taliban movement to pursue Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, Western intelligence sources have said.

While the government has aggressively hunted down Arab and other non-Pakistani militants identified with the al-Qaida movement, and while it formally banned Jaish and Lashkar in 2002, it has never dismantled either the Taliban or the Pakistan-based outfits. The local groups simply renamed themselves and have been spared destruction, even though some are suspected of involvement in assassination attempts against Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.

Pakistani and foreign analysts say the Pakistani militant groups and their training camps have survived largely because the government crackdown so far has been half-hearted. Many officers in the army, which is Pakistan's real ruling party, "don't want to eliminate these groups that have fought in Kashmir and Afghanistan, because they think they may want to use them again at some future time," said a foreign intelligence analyst who specializes in Pakistan.

The problem is, there is no clear separation between the Pakistani groups and the Taliban or al-Qaida. They are routinely seen to overlap, as when Jaish and al-Qaida militants were accused in the 2002 murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl.

New evidence of the camps includes this month's cover story in Herald, a Karachi-based news magazine whose reporter toured a training camp hidden up a dirt track in the rugged, wooded hills of Mansehra, a district in north-central Pakistan. Militants carried automatic weapons and wore camouflage uniforms. A dormitory held 60 to 80 sleeping bags laid out on thin mattresses, and another building housed an unknown number of boys taking an "18-day ideological orientation and fitness and arms training."

The Herald article and the government official, who asked not to be named, said that since late 2001, when Musharraf signed on to the U.S.-led campaign against militants, the army has forced camps periodically to reduce their operations or move to more hidden locations.

For two years, militant groups have had to shrink or conceal public activities, such as soliciting donations and running recruiting offices. An estimated 13 camps in Mansehra were forced to suspend training last year, the Herald reported, but were allowed to resume in April and May.

A separate account of a camp emerged in a Sacramento, Calif., courtroom last month when the FBI filed an affidavit citing a young Pakistani arrested as he entered the United States. Hamid Hayat told FBI questioners "he attended a jihadist training camp in Pakistan for approximately six months in 2003-2004," the affidavit said.

He faces a criminal charge of having lied to U.S. authorities by initially denying having been trained. Under questioning, he "described the camp as providing structured paramilitary training, including weapons training, explosives training, interior room tactics, hand to hand combat, and strenuous exercise," the affidavit said.

Hayat said his camp was run by al-Qaida and trainees "were being trained on how to kill Americans," the affidavit said.

Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, told the Herald its story was "totally baseless." But such blanket denials, repeated by Pakistani officials over the years, were looking a little more tattered after an admission by Yasin Malik, head of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, a Pakistan-backed group.

Talking with reporters June 13, Malik praised Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, saying "few know of his contributions" to the Kashmiri insurgency against India. Malik glowingly explained that, in years past, he and more than 3,000 other men had been trained to fight at a vast farm Rashid owned near Islamabad.

Rashid denied the statement, and the next day Malik said he had been "misquoted by the media." But the news, once out of the closet, wouldn't go back in. A half-dozen high-ranking Pakistanis from the time - including Army chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg and interior minister Naseerullah Babar - matter-of-factly confirmed it.

The new reports of the training camps "corroborate what we already have known for years" from interrogations of guerrillas captured in Kashmir, said B. Raman, a former counterterrorism chief at India's main intelligence agency. "The surprise is that they are now publishing it ... in the Pakistani press."