Lashkar-e-Taiba: Alive and kicking!

THE HINDU
08/12/2005
Inside the Lashkar-e-Taiba's network

Praveen Swami

Top Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Shabbir Bukhari's story offers unprecedented insight into the organisation's working — and raises disturbing questions about the threat it holds out to the India-Pakistandétenteprocess.

EARLY IN the autumn of 2003, Shabbir Bukhari delivered an impassioned speech defending Jammu and Kashmir's accession to India and condemning terrorist violence. Among those in the audience at Srinagar's Gandhi Bhawan who applauded the young Kashmir University law student's speech were the State's Director-General of Police, Gopal Sharma, and a host of senior bureaucrats and politicians.

At the Lashkar-e-Taiba's command headquarters in Muzaffarabad, however, top operatives knew another Bukhari. Known to his handlers by the code-name `Abu Sumama,' Bukhari had worked as a Lashkar courier, propagandist, and recruiter since 2002. In 2004, he would rise to command a unit that would carry out a series of fidayeen suicide-squad attacks in which dozens of security force personnel and civilians would die.

Over the last week, an intelligence-led operation by the Jammu and Kashmir Police has delivered the most vivid picture so far available of the Lashkar's operations in the State. Investigators have found that even as terrorist activity in Jammu and Kashmir went into decline after the India-Pakistan near-war of 2001-2002, the Lashkar focussed its energies on building up successive rings of highly-organised covert skills, drawing on individuals with high levels of education and technical skills.

In the wake of the great earthquake that destroyed much of Pakistan-administered Kashmir in October, the formidable capabilities of the Lashkar's covert cells have been unleashed. Its legitimacy revived by its well-funded and highly-organised earthquake relief efforts, the Lashkar now seems prepared to renew its operations against India in and outside Jammu and Kashmir. "Everyone thinks the jihad is drawing to a close," Bukhari says quietly, "but they are wrong. Just plain wrong."

To those who knew him well, Bukhari's 2003 speech was no surprise. His father, Syed Ghulam Mohiuddin Bukhari, was a well known Sufi mystic, a living repository of a religious tradition hostile to Islamists and their pro-Pakistan political project. His peers believed Bukhari's upbringing was the reason why he had maintained a studied distance from campus Islamists and Kashmiri nationalists, the two main ideological currents amongst the largely bourgeois student body.

In 2002, however, Bukhari began to evolve a life-transforming relationship with a north Kashmir-based Lashkar operative. Abdul Wahab, a resident of Multan in Pakistan educated at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, had abandoned his career as a chartered accountant to serve as a Lashkar operative in Jammu and Kashmir. "I was impressed," Bukhari says, "by the fact that he was willing to sacrifice so much for a cause larger than himself — to fight for something other than just a career or wealth."

Over months, Bukhari and Wahab built an intellectual relationship, forged over extended readings of Islamist tracts and through discussions of theology and religious issues. To Wahab, Kashmir's Sufi traditions were a failure. Quiescent Islamic practices, he argued, had led to wars of oppression against Muslims across the globe, from Kashmir to Chechnya and Palestine, and to the ascendance of the West. Jihad — not the kind of traditionalist piety represented by Bukhari's father — was the answer.

Although Bukhari never embraced the external manifestations of the Lashkar's Salafi-school ritual practices — "I never had the courage to fold my hands across my chest as they do during namaaz," he says, "for fear of my father's wrath" — he was persuaded by the arguments. Bukhari was slowly assigned low-level tasks. He wrote leaflets and newspaper articles under a pseudonym. On one occasion, in late 2003, he carried a defective satellite phone for repair to a Lashkar unit near Anantnag.

Bukhari's most abiding contribution to the north Kashmir Lashkar, however, was to provide it a steady flow of useful local intelligence. In 2003, after the Jammu and Kashmir Police's crack Special Operations Group established a unit in Kreeri, Bukhari helped organise efforts to have it removed. Pressure was brought to bear on an influential local People's Democratic Party leader, Basharat Bukhari, a distant relative of the Lashkar operative, by threatening to kidnap his brother. While the efforts did not yield results, Shabbir Bukhari had proved his utility.

Wahab's death in a 2003 encounter finally motivated Bukhari to join the Lashkar full-time. "He was buried like a dog," Bukhari recalls, "without even a headstone to mark his grave. I wanted to do something for the cause for which he gave his life." Operating under the command of the then-north Kashmir Lashkar divisional commander, still known only by his aliases `Khalid' and `Sierra-7', Bukhari was told to build contacts among political activists and journalists in Srinagar, and establish an overground structure that could provide infrastructure for the terrorist group's armed activities.

Abu Sumama's cell


Bukhari's decision to join the Lashkar full-time could not have come at a better time for the organisation. In 2003, 22 Lashkar operatives had been arrested as a consequence of an Intelligence Bureau operation that decimated the Lashkar's operational infrastructure. Its main city commander Abdul Rehman `Mota', a joking reference to his obesity, had been forced to shift to northern Kashmir. Under pressure from the United States, Pakistan had also begun to put pressure on the Lashkar to scale back its operations.

Drawing on the lessons of the 2003 debacle, the Lashkar set about building multiple cells under strong protective cover. For example, Bukhari recruited Shakeel Ahmad Sofi, a longstanding Youth National Conference activist who had been given secure official accommodation in 2002. Apart from allowing the use of his quarters for Lashkar work, Sofi provided party identification cards for Lashkar terrorists moving in and out of the city. Bukhari also purchased a white Maruti jeep, of the type used by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, allowing for the easy transport of weapons and Lashkar operatives.

Funds and operational instructions for Bukhari's cell were provided by the Lashkar commander who had replaced Abdul Rehman, a Pakistani national still known only by the multiple aliases `Bilal', `Haider,' and `Salahuddin.' `Salahuddin' whose police dossier records that he is over 6 feet 6 inches tall and wears size-14 shoes, had earlier served under `Khalid' in northern Kashmir, and knew Bukhari well. By the end of 2004, the group executed several sensational fidayeen operations, shipping in cadre to execute an attempt on the life of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November 2004 and the recent assassination of Jammu and Kashmir Minister of State Ghulam Nabi Lone.

Mirroring the activities of the Bukhari cell, other Lashkar cells run by ethnic Kashmiris were also set up in Srinagar, each under the command of a senior Pakistani operative. Abdul Rashid Khanday, a Srinagar resident who spent two years in jail after he was arrested in connection with an abortive fidayeen attack in 2000, ran what was codenamed the `Dar' cell. Operating under the command of Pakistani national Abdul Ahad, who used the code-name `Dawood,' the cell was responsible for several fidayeen attacks before the elimination of the terrorist and the subsequent arrest of its key members in August this year.

Abdul Rahman `Mota' himself, meanwhile, activated a third cell, code-named `Iqbal.' Little is known about the mechanics of the `Iqbal' cell, which police sources believe carried out several high-profile fidayeen attacks in 2004. Although Abdul Rehman was eliminated earlier this week by the Jammu and Kashmir Police, the local ethnic-Kashmiri support structure of the `Iqbal' cell still seems to be intact — evidence of the redundancies built into the Lashkar's new structures. "We are under no illusion," says Inspector-General of Police K. Rajendra, "that the Lashkar has been wiped out."

Challenges ahead


To analysts of terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, the unravelling of Bukhari's cell and the intelligence that has emerged from it hold several instructive lessons. First, the Lashkar has demonstrated the ability to recruit ethnic Kashmiri cadre — individuals, moreover, with significant educational and technical skills. Even if Indian policy-makers do arrive at an accommodation of the mainly ethnic-Kashmiri Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, this suggests groups like the Lashkar can pose an independent threat.

Secondly, the Lashkar has demonstrated both that its infrastructure is still intact and that its jihadist agenda remains in place. The Lashkar's renewal of pan-India operations after the October earthquake, illustrated dramatically through the Deepavali serial bombings in New Delhi, make clear just how ineffective Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's promises to act against terror groups have been. Indeed, General Musharraf's failure suggests the Lashkar has powerful allies within Pakistan's military establishment — allies whom the Pakistani President is either unable or unwilling to confront.

Given that Indian counter-infiltration positions along the Line of Control have been disrupted by the earthquake, and the fact that newly inducted Central Reserve Police Force formations in Srinagar have yet to demonstrate an independent operational capability, the challenges to the peace process are significant. A series of major terrorist operations will make it increasingly difficult for the Manmohan Singh Government to push ahead with the détente process, something organisations like the Lashkar will be delighted by.

With the credibility of the Musharraf regime undermined by its dismal earthquake-relief performance, though, it is far from clear if Pakistan can act to stop a renewed jihadist offensive. Indian policy makers will have to grapple with the difficult task of defending the détente process as the Islamist siege of the Pakistani state strengthens.
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