Behind the farce of Pakistan’s dossier on ‘Indian terror’ is a deadly script

The man in the dust brown Pakul cap dragged the corpses of the dead Pakistan army soldiers out of a blue van one by one, each missing a head cut off by an executioner’s ax, a video camera following the traces of blood that stained the road with a curious and pornographic taste. The clothes of the slain soldiers were carefully rearranged, covering unseemly samples of meat. “The Holy Quran,” the man who turned murderers into an army had said in an interview in 2007, “praises Muslims 480 times to wage jihad.”

“Only jihad can bring peace to the world.”

“We will continue our fight until the foreign troops are expelled [of Afghanistan and Pakistan]”Continued the jihadist leader Baitullah Mehsud. “Then we will attack them in America and Britain until they accept Islam or agree to pay jazia [a tax on non-Muslims living in an Islamic State]”.

Following the savage terrorist attacks of November 26, 2008 in Mumbai, Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha, head of the Directorate of Interservice Intelligence, had informally briefed a small Pakistani group. Fazal Hayat, Baitullah Mehsud’s mentor and patron, insisted, was a “true patriot.”

Now, there is a twist in the story: This weekend, Islamabad has released a dossier claiming that India is funding the same Tehreek-e-Taliban jihadists it raised and raised. The file, a summary The one released to the media is full of comic errors, but this base sham is part of a lethal script, in which India is just a pretext.

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Like last week’s leftover kebabs, stored in the back of the fridge and quickly heated in the microwave to deal with the nightly hunger crisis, there’s not a single hint of mold on the record. Factual errors have flourished throughout the text: there has never been a chief of the Research and Analysis Wing named Ajit Chetorvedi; the reference is probably Ashok Chaturvedi, who served from 2007-2009. The last name of former spy chief Vikram Sood is misspelled, as is that of Gautam Mukhopadhaya, who reopened the Indian embassy in Kabul after 9/11 and served as ambassador from 2010 to 2013.

The dossier was, said two separate sources familiar with the Pakistani government, prepared under the supervision of Moeed Yusuf, the Boston-educated academic who is now Pakistan’s Assistant Prime Minister on National Security. Clearly your challenges will include introducing your staff to Google.

The errors in the record, however, go far beyond spelling. There is a reference to a general Ranjeet Senha visiting a camp for Baluch insurgents with Mukhopadhaya; no general with that name, or similar ones like Sinha, served in the Indian army during that time. There is also no evidence that a Colonel Rajesh, allegedly related to jihadists, is stationed at the Indian mission in Kabul.

The only visit made by Ambassador Mukhopadhyay to Hajigak, allegedly the site of India’s terrorist training camp, Indian and Afghan diplomatic sources confirmed, took place in the company of Bamian Governor Habiba Sarobi in the midst of an unfortunate Indian. effort to extract iron ore from the troubled Afghan province.

The fictional elements in the file become more florid, however, in the story it tells of the alleged jihad commander Malik Faridoon, named in it as the perpetrator of the massacre of 140 people by Tehreek-e-Taliban, 132 of them children, in the Army Public of Peshawar. School in 2014. In 2017, the report claims, investigations into a separate terrorist attack led to information about Faridoon’s key role in the massacre. In 2017, the file continues, Faridoon received treatment for injuries at a New Delhi hospital.

However, from page 351 to 389 of Peshawar High Court Judge Mohammad Ibrahim Khan’s authorized judicial inquiry into the APS massacre, it is clear that the Pakistani government itself had never hinted at Faridoon’s existence before, much less its role in the attack.

Judge Khan’s investigation, completed in June 2020 and released by the Supreme Court in September, includes granular details about the perpetrators, four of whom were hanged after a trial in a military court in 2015.

Even if new intelligence on Faridoon emerged after those trials were completed, there is no reason it would not have been shared with the Judge Khan Investigation. There is also no explanation in the file as to why Pakistan never notified the Afghan and Indian authorities that it was seeking his arrest through Interpol, a standard procedure in transnational crime investigations.

This is not the only puzzling hole in the record. The document also alleges that R&AW sent funds to Altaf Husain, the head of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement linked to the crime cartel, through two Dubai-based companies, Paras Jewelery, and a firm identified as JVGT, likely Jasmine Valley General Trading.

Again, there is no explanation as to why the Pakistani investigators did not seek legal assistance in the UAE prosecution. No company responded to First commentThe request for comment, but authoritative diplomatic sources in the UAE said no request had ever been made for them to be investigated.

In some cases, the dossier eludes public information that challenges its narrative. For example, the record states that 30 Indian jihadists were “recently” transferred from India to serve with Islamic State commander Abdul Rehman Muslim Dost. a former Guantánamo detainee who, when last heard from in 2016, roundly denounced the organization Pakistan now claims that it serves to massacre civilians, calling its commander “illiterate.”

However, there are some questions arising from the fact that Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Security Directorate, has said that those jihadists of Indian origin were in fact commanded by the Pakistani national Aslam Farooqi and the former commander of the jihad. Kashmir Aijaz Ahanger, both linked to interservice intelligence. The two men are now incarcerated in Kabul.

In essence, the story told in the dossier is simple: The many enemies of the Pakistani state are Indian agents, who are paid to wage war on their own. The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated.

For a full understanding of the story, one has to look to the first years after 9/11, when Islamabad tried to repair its relationship with jihadists alienated by the wars imposed by the United States and General Pervez Musharraf on the Afghan borders. In April 2004, Tehreek-e-Taliban commander Nek Muhammad Wazir stood next to the XI Corps commander, Lieutenant General Syed Safdar Husain, and promised that, in a war with India, he would be “the atomic bomb from Pakistan”. Journalist Daud Khattak has detailed many similar peace agreements that the Pakistani military made with the jihadists.

However, the ISI negotiation did not work: the jihadists did not want to sever their ties with anti-US terrorists or stop seeking to subordinate military authority to an Islamic state. The Pakistani army was forced to fight a long and savage war. The Tehreek-e-Taliban eventually withdrew to Afghanistan, some joining the Islamic State and others establishing fringe groups that continued to attack the Pakistani state.

Now, as a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan draws near, the ISI is working again to bring its prodigal sons home. For the Pakistani military, an Afghanistan without the United States promises a Kabul controlled by its allies, but also the risk that jihadists who oppose it will operate with greater freedom. Groups like Hizb-ul-Ahrar and Jama’at-ul-Ahrar have separated from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and have re-committed to fighting against the Pakistani state; the ISI seeks to classify them as Indian agents, as it did in 2004.

Like any good story, the credibility of the record is based on the fact that it does contain plausible material. The file complains, for example, that India has been carrying out bombings in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir. Government sources admit that R&AW has significantly enhanced covert operations against jihadist targets through the Line of Control, seeking to disrupt the logistical bases and leadership of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Proceedings in a London court have yielded testimony that R&AW funded the Altaf Husain cartel; India is also known to have long-standing ties to Baloch nationalist insurgents, forged to retaliate against ISI sponsorship of terrorism in Punjab and Kashmir.

However, Indian involvement in any specific terrorist act has never been proven, including in the 2017 trial of suspected spy Kulbhushan Jadhav. This is in stark contrast to the long list of Pakistani nationals with well-documented ties to the ISI prosecuted both in India and the West on terrorism charges.

The secret war between the intelligence services of India and Pakistan, fueled by Islamabad’s use of covert assets in Kashmir from 1947-1948 onwards, is well known in western capitals where Islamabad will circulate its dossier. In 2009, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly dismissed allegations that India was involved in terrorist acts in Baluchistan; a file distributed in 2016 did not gain ground either.

However, from the large amount of inventive material on the record, it is clear that the primary purpose is to shape opinion at home. It takes a little genius to see what the Pakistani military is waiting for. From Baloch and Pashtun dissidents, to politicians like former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who have challenged the military in unprecedented language: critics of the military are tools of India.

For decades, Islamabad has worked to this toxic strategic script, fueling a never-ending war with India as a means of ensuring the institutional primacy of the Pakistani Army in the country. The policy has not brought strategic benefits; instead, the state and politics of Pakistan have been shattered by jihadism and military authoritarianism. The dossier could win the ISI some applause from the faithful, but it is not the map that Pakistan desperately needs to get out of the minefields it has drawn.