Al Qaida's No. 1 goal: Destabilizing India and Pakistan?

---

See the Sol Sanders Archive By Sol Sanders SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

A murderous terrorist rampage in a Hindu temple in the Indian state of Gujarat following on the heels of gang-style ÒexecutionsÓ of Christian charity workers in Karachi in Pakistan begs the question: how much coordination is there behind a wave of terrorist attacks in both countries exacerbating tensions between the two nuclear powers?

Whether dead or alive, in the tribal areas of Pakistan or in Afghanistan, or escaped through Iran to Yemen or elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, Osama Bin LadinÕs central command has been dismantled. Yet various Islamic terrorist groups with connections to the former Afghanistan terroristsÕ sanctuary, are feeding communal tensions in India and in Pakistan. Their aim is to further embitter India-Pakistan relations, with a million military still in battle array along their border, by inflaming religious fanatical passions in both countries.

In India, the agitationÕs center has been Kashmir where there is a daily toll of a dozen dead. New Delhi insisted, with some support from Washington, in proceeding with elections for a new state government, ignoring continuing violence, which it blames on infiltration of terrorists from the Pakistan-held region of the Himalayan state. The presence of half a million Indian security forces, however, could not mask the local support and intimidation, which permits violence to continue. And the polls have only exacerbated the situation with PakistanÕs charges of sham.

The Kashmir violence has spread to the prosperous state of Gujarat, origin of much of the North Indian Diaspora in the U.S., the UK, and Africa. There this spring an attack on a trainload of Hindu pilgrims by Moslem terrorists turned into a pogrom against local Moslems, in effect condoned by the state government. The federal government in New Delhi refused to intervene against its local political allies despite widespread media criticism and by human rights groups. [That culpability has not been repeated in the latest instance when police and military have clamped down to prevent new revenge killings against local Moslems.]

Meanwhile, in Pakistan the terrorists have gone after the small Christian community, attacking defenseless churches and social welfare offices. There have also been clashes brought on by the MusharrafÕs governmentÕs effort to suppress banned Islamicists, some of them closely affiliated with Al Qaida. Some of the Al Qaida escaped from Afghanistan into the semi-independent tribal areas along the border and into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Karachi, PakistanÕs huge [more than 15 million], chaotic port city, long has seen bitter and bloody ethnic violence among the native Sinhdi population, the progeny of the refugees during the Partition of the subcontinent in 1948, and a more recent immigration from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas. Fishing in this have been radical Moslems, including the killers of Daniel Pearl, the Wall St. Journal reporter, often operating in the huge UK expatriate community where they are protected by traditional British tolerance and civil liberties.

While it is true that the Islamic radicals represent a small minority and that the countryÕs elite is largely secularized, Gen. Musharraf is in a precarious balancing act. He appeases the feudal civilian elite by running a military dictatorship without martial law, by moving toward elections later this month [no matter how rigged]. He must worry about renegades, products of the former close ties of his intelligence community to the Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, and about the possible penetration of the younger military. He is known to have been the target of at least one recent assassination plot. Moslem radicals and ousted politicians and their underground terrorist allies are trying to exploit as sycophancy MusharrafÕs cooperation with U.S. authorities trying to root out Al Qaida, American support of Israel, and WashingtonÕs effort to bring down the Iraqi regime, as Òanti-MoslemÓ. Meanwhile, Musharraf nurses his military alliance with China which supplies Pakistan with missile technology to match IndiaÕs Soviet/Russian-based weaponry.

In India, Prime Minister VajpayeeÕs ÒmoderateÓ espousal of Hindu revivalism is under attack from advocates of ÒHindutuvaÓ ø the effort to turn India into a Hindu state. Home Minister and Deputy PM Advani is allied with the Hindu ÒultrasÓ, including the paramilitary RSS, the activist base of the ruling BJP party. Advani, after each terrorist episode, has blamed Musharraf, the Pakistan authorities, and its intelligence agency, the ISS. The Pakistanis have answered in kind: pointing out that Hindu revivalists in the past also attacked Christian missionaries in India. Indian authorities have played down, for obvious reasons, the growing militancy among its own 150 million Moslems, in part as a result of the governmentÕs lukewarm efforts to prevent attacks on Moslems.

While the actual military confrontation may have cooled ø in part through U.S. mediation ø the level of rhetoric and frustration is rising. And the possibility of new and bloody communal disturbances is growing in India with no end in sight for growing terrorist incidents in Pakistan.