On the outskirts of the Pakistani capital lives a militant considered so powerful that Osama bin Laden consulted with him before issuing a fatwa to attack US interests.
Fazle-ur-Rahman Khalil heads Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, a group closely aligned with al-Qaeda and a signatory to bin Laden’s anti-US fatwa in 1998. Khalil, who has also dispatched fighters to India, Afghanistan, Somalia, Chechnya and Bosnia, was a confidante of bin Laden and hung out with the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Pakistani authorities are clearly aware of Khalil’s whereabouts, but they leave him alone, just as they tolerate other Kashmiri militant groups nurtured by the military and its intelligence agency to use against India.
Khalil is also useful to the authorities because of his unusually wide contacts among Pakistan’s many militant groups, said a senior government official who is familiar with the security agencies and who spoke on condition he not be identified, fearing repercussions.
Khalil’s presence in an Islamabad suburb, confirmed by Western officials in the region, underscores accusations that Pakistan is still playing a double game — fighting some militant groups, while tolerating or supporting others — even after the solo US raid that killed bin Laden on May 2.
The US Congress, enraged that bin Laden found refuge for at least five years down the street from Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, has threatened to cut off the billions of dollars in aid.
Officials in the administration of US President Barack Obama and US Army officers are trying to rebuild the relationship, considered vital to US hopes of negotiating an end to the war in Afghanistan, but if anything the two sides appear to have drifted further apart in recent weeks.
Pakistan’s intelligence service has arrested five Pakistanis who fed information to the CIA before the US raid that killed bin Laden, according to a Western official in Pakistan.
The group of detained Pakistanis included the owner of a safe house rented to the CIA to observe bin Laden’s compound in the military town of Abbottabad, a US official said. The owner was detained along with a “handful” of other Pakistanis.
Also, CIA Director Leon Panetta confronted Pakistan’s intelligence service about tipping off militants running bomb factories aimed at killing US soldiers in Afghanistan. Pakistan denied tipping them off. The militants belong to the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that has ties to al-Qaeda.
Khalil’s Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, blamed for a deadly attack on the US consulate in Karachi in 2002, has links to the Haqqanis and is considered a terrorist organization by the US. Hundreds of militants are thought to belong to his organization, though the strength of these groups are the links they share with each other, analysts say.
Khalil himself is not on any US wanted list. In the Islamabad suburb of Golra Sharif, he lives in a nondescript two-story compound that includes a seminary or religious school hidden behind a traditional high wall protected by barbed wire.
Reached on his cellphone last month, Khalil dismissed suggestions that he may have been in touch with bin Laden while the al-Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbottabad.
“It is 100 percent wrong, it’s rubbish,” Khalil said. “Osama did not have contact with anybody.”
Khalil’s phone number was obtained from a former aide who has since left the terror organization.
The Pakistani senior government official said Khalil has been arrested twice, but each time he was released on orders from Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
“He was significant for Osama bin Laden,” the official said. “He has connections with all these groups in Waziristan, but he is living here and we don’t go after him. He is the one you go to when you need to get to these groups,” tracking kidnap victims, for example.
Khalil was once the boss of terror leader Ilyas Kashmiri, believed killed in a drone strike on June 3.
Like most of the militant groups that get a wink and a nod from Pakistan’s security agencies, Harkat-ul-Mujahidin’s primary focus is Kashmir, a picturesque region divided between India and Pakistan and claimed by each in its entirety. Kashmir has been the cause of two of three wars between the South Asian neighbors and it brought them perilously close to a nuclear confrontation in 2000.
Khalil’s group has kidnapped foreigners in Indian Kashmir, killing one. His group also helped in the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane that resulted in the release of three militants, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who is now on death row for his part in the 2002 killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Khalil’s militant ties include the anti-Indian Lashkar-e-Taiba group, blamed for masterminding the November 2008 assault on Mumbai that killed 166 people. The official said that seven training camps are operating in Pakistani Kashmir and most of them are run by Jamaat-ud-Dawwa, the name Lashkar-e-Taiba took after being banned.
“There are seven jihadi camps working in Kashmir right now, giving them explosives training,” the official said.
He said military and intelligence agencies say the camps provide Pakistan with “strategic depth.”
“They say we need them, otherwise India will treat us like the rest of South Asia, like they can dictate,” he said. “It is only the military and intelligence. The government has no say.”
Pakistan has said it has severed its links with these Kashmiri militant groups, though many suspect that is not the case, but it does recognize the dangers posed by some militant groups in another corner of Pakistan — near the Afghan border.
Since deploying troops in 2004 to the region near the Afghan border, Pakistan has lost 3,000 soldiers to militant attacks, more casualties than NATO has suffered over 10 years in Afghanistan.
“Our concern at this point in time is our involvement with northwest Pakistan. We cannot manage to open a new front in central Punjab and in south Punjab,” where these groups are headquartered, said a senior military official on condition of anonymity. “Our army is not well trained for counterterrorism in urban centers and we do not have the capacity in our civil law enforcement agencies” to go after these groups.
However, many Pakistanis wonder how they got to this place, besieged by militants who bomb them daily, while suffering a litany of criticisms and perceived humiliations from their US allies for not doing enough.
Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist, columnist and peace activist, recently dubbed his homeland “Jihadistan,” saying it wasn’t always this way. He laid the blame on an array of players for the current state of affairs in Pakistan.
In a recent column, he first pointed the finger at former military dictator General Mohammed Zia ul Haq. Zia made Islamic radicalism the centerpiece of his military and political strategy, launching the country and the security forces on a path of religious extremism.
Hoodbhoy then blamed Washington’s Cold War doctrine that partnered the US with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Zia’s Pakistan in the 1980s to embrace Islamic radicalism to defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The partnership brought Islamic radicals from across the Middle East to Pakistan.
The strategy worked and the Russians left Afghanistan, but the cost of victory was a toxic mix of Islamic radicals.
“Jihadistan is a messy place these days, a far cry from the simple bastion of anti-communism in the 1980s,” Hoodbhoy wrote. “Today, the military must kill some of its former proteges and some radicals even as it secretly supports others.”
A former US ambassador to Islamabad says throwing money at Pakistan won’t wean it off jihadi groups so long as its fear of India dictates its security policies.
“It is the perception of India as the primary threat to the Pakistani state that colors its perceptions of the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s security needs,” Anne Patterson said in a 2009 cable made public by WikiLeaks.
She said the US should discourage India from excessive involvement in Afghanistan and scale back US military sales to New Delhi.
“We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies toward India, including the growing military relationship through sizable conventional arms sales, as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups, while reinforcing doubts about US intentions,” Patterson said in the memo.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion