MILITANCY
IN PAKISTAN GETTING YOUNGER AND URBANE – ANALYSIS
Militancy in Pakistan is increasingly
getting urban and attracting the educated. Besides its numerous local
affiliates, the most significant beneficiary is Al Qaida.
That Pakistan
is home to several Islamist militant groups with Al Qaida connections is not a
secret. Several top-ranking foreign militants belonging to the transnational
terror franchise, including Osama bin Laden, have been apprehended on Pakistani
soil.
It is also not
a secret that while thousands of impoverished tribal youths recruited from the
rural areas have provided the foot soldiers for the ‘jihad’ against Afghanistan
and India and for sectarian violence, the ‘brains’ are coming from the urban
areas.
The recent
discovery of what Dawn newspaper (Feb 14, 2014) has called an “organized network”
of Al Qaida by Karachi Police indicates that Al Qaida is recruiting university
students from numerous middle-class Karachi localities, focusing on young
talent proficient in information technology.
They are part
of a new Al Qaida that has taken root in Pakistan, one whose influence is no
longer confined to the distant mountains. The port city of Karachi, a
metropolis of 18 million people that is Pakistan’s economic capital, has become
a significant militant hub and source of funding. Thousands of madrassas in the
city provide a steady stream of new recruits and suicide bombers.
Militancy has
come a long way since the students recruited from thousands of madrassas that
dotted Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan provided the fighting force against
the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, a process that was fully backed,
politically, monetarily and militarily by the West. Even a reference to this
has become passé as the US-led NATO forces begin to leave Afghanistan by the
end of this year, without even a mention of the “war on terror” that was
unleashed after 9/11.
Pending the
withdrawal, the battle for the mind of Pakistan is seriously on. The discovery
of the organised network has put the spotlight on urban religious militancy.
Its spread is indicated by the fact that most of the earlier focus had been on
extremist madrassas. Now, besides Karachi, discoveries have been made in Lahore
as well.
Undoubtedly,
madrassas continue to be the recruiting ground. But the urban educated youth
plucked from universities and colleges and selected to run the infrastructure
of ‘jihad’ are perhaps more dangerous than the jihadi foot soldier, providing
the brains for transnational terrorism.
Al Qaeda
recruits these young educated Pakistanis to groom them for leadership roles and
to provide the technical and logistical support structure for global militancy.
Al Qaida has
gained strength on the ground despite the wave of US drone attacks that have
killed many of its leaders. A flood of recruits from Pakistan’s well-educated
urban middle class — young people, professionals, and retired military officers
—have flocked to its strongholds in the tribal areas. This new generation of
militants, committed to global jihad, act as a magnet for Muslim radicals from
across the world.
The educated militant
is politically aware, media and tech -savvy and ideologically driven. Its role
is reflected in increasing use of radio and social media. The mainstream media
too has been providing a platform to the spokesmen of the Tehrik-e Taliban
Pakistan (TTP), and other proscribed groups. Speaking from undisclosed
locations, they are able to effectively articulate their viewpoints, while the
state that has proscribed them, remains silent.
The picture we
have is one of a phenomenon that is not exactly new. Also, educated youths of
different nationalities from the West, of the United States, the United Kingdom
and Germany among them, have been attracted and have received training and
motivation in Pakistan. Among them is David Coleman Headley, partly of Pakistani
origin, who played a key role in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.
Faisal
Shahzad, the Pakistani-American, spent weeks in Waziristan with the group
before his attempt to blow up Times Square in 2010. It is hardly surprising
that the Pakistani Taliban has threatened to attack American cities.
The phenomenon
of militancy among Pakistan’s urban educated has a long history. There were
leftist groups who rose against the government in order to overthrow it and
those who supported the ‘nationalists’ struggle in Balochistan. They were
driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology of different variants and focused on the
streets and university campus.
The important
thing is that although they were dubbed as terrorists by the state because they
used violent means, they did not kill unarmed civilians. They never indulged in
acts of slaughtering innocent people in mosques, shrines and markets. And
thanks to their leftist ideology, they did not engage in sectarian killing or
targeted the religious minorities.
This marks
them out as totally a different lot compared to the current wave of right-wing,
religion-driven extremism that has its roots in the policy pursued by former
military ruler Zia-ul Haq and Pakistan’s involvement in the ‘jihad’ against the
then Moscow-backed regime in Afghanistan.
Al Qaida
provided the global platform to the Pakistani youth and 9/11 consolidated this
trend. Omar Shaikh, convicted in 2002 for the murder of the Wall Street Journal
correspondent Daniel Pearl in Karachi, belonged to a well to do urban
middleclass family. He had studied in prestigious British schools and at the
equally prestigious Atchison in Lahore. He had a degree in economics from the
London School of Economics.
Shaikh had
well-known links with a number of clandestine jihadist organisations and had
already been jailed in 1993 by an Indian court for entering India and taking
part in the kidnapping of a number of foreign tourists to raise money for the
so-called ‘Kashmir jihad’. Shaikh was released in 1999 when jihadis hijacked an
Indian airliner and negotiated the release of Shaikh and others from Indian prisons.
Shaikh’s links
with extremist terror outfits quickly called for a reassessment of the way
terrorism’s demographics were understood. But the trend has only stepped up in
the recent years. Indeed, after Shaikh, more cases have emerged in which the
arrested or killed extremists have turned out to be members of educated
middle-class families.
The only
exception to this trend is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the young chief of the
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). He attacked the Taliban during the recent
Karachi Cultural Festival, something that demanded courage, considering that
his mother Benazir was killed by the same militants in 2007. Reports indicate
that he is facing opposition on this score from his father, former president
Asif Ali Zardari, and other PPP leaders.
Islamist
militant outfits played a key role in the elections in May last year. The
Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) rode to power on the tacit support it received
from these outfits that targeted the rival parties. At least a hundred
political activists, particularly of the Awami National Party (ANP) and the
Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) were killed.
The most
prominent apologist for the TTP and other outfits is cricketer-turned
politician Imran Khan. Along with Islamist parties, he also benefitted from the
selective violence unleashed by the militants.
Considering
that the charismatic Khan is himself a product of the urban educated middle
class that idolizes him, the phenomenon of this class producing more recruits
for Al Qaida and their Pakistani franchises can only get strengthened in the
foreseeable future.
(Mahendra Ved is a New
Delhi-based writer and columnist. He can be reachedatmahendraved07@gmail.com)
1 comment:
very nice blog.
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