Terror - And the Ties That Bind
2 November 1997
It comes as no surprise that the US State Department has blacklisted
Harakat ul-Ansar, Pakistan's armed agents in Indian Kashmir, as a terrorist
organization. What's astonishing is that the Taliban - HUA's far more
ambitious sister organization, serving Pakistan in Afghanistan much as
the HUA does in Kashmir - were left off the list.
As the October 1997 issue of the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Review
(JIR) describes in some detail, the HUA and the Taliban share common origins,
personnel and especially patrons. The latter include Pakistan's obscurantist
JUI faction; an Afghan mercenary warlord now in Taliban hire; Arab extremists;
and above all, Pakistan's main spy service, the Inter Services Intelligence
directorate (ISI):
The Taliban run HUA's training facilities. The Independent (London), JIR and
others have reported that the Taliban have maintained HUA's training camps in
eastern Afghanistan though they promised Western officials they would be closed.
Today, HUA's Afghan patron Jalaluddin Haqqani, the mercenary warlord who has run
those camps since the early 1980s, and his followers are the linchpin of Taliban
occupation forces in Kabul - when they're not training HUA terrorists back in Paktia.
HUA and the Taliban play the same strategic role: extending Pakistani hegemony
into neighboring states. JIR notes that in contrast to other Kashmiri groups,
"the HUA has always advocated rule from Islamabad" - precisely what a Taliban
victory would mean, in fact if not in name, in Afghanistan.
Where the Taliban and HUA do differ, the Taliban look even worse. "On occasion,"
notes JIR, the HUA "has allowed innocent civilians to get caught in the crossfire."
Applied to the Taliban that would be comic understatement: Their spokesmen left no
doubt, during 1995-96, that they were starving and shelling Kabul's civilians in
order to drive them from their homes. The Taliban's other Balkan-style outrages have
far surpassed anything HUA has attempted. Ironically, it was HUA's Afghan patron
Haqqani who led Taliban ethnic-cleansing operations north of Kabul, forcing
100,000 civilians from their homes in the dead of last winter.
The Taliban's links with international terrorism are far better documented than
those of HUA (see "The Taliban's New Friend," in this site's News Review section).
The Oct. 13 international edition of Newsweek reported that the Taliban used a
$3 million gift from terrorist financier Osama bin Ladin - "a radical Saudi
national wanted by US Justice Department officials on suspicion of having
bankrolled several major terrorist attacks, including the truck bombing of the
US military barracks in Khobar" - to buy "the strategic Afghan defections that
stripped away Kabul's defenses" last year.
In short, the Taliban owe their physical occupation of Kabul - their only factual
claim to legitimacy - to help from "one of the most significant financial sponsors
of Islamic extremist activities in the world," as the US has dubbed bin Ladin. But
bin Ladin isn't the Taliban's only sponsor: Newsweek notes that though "no direct
ties were found between the Taliban and US spy services, the group has enjoyed the
full backing of Washington's main friends in the region, Islamabad and Riyadh ...
Riyadh became the Taliban's main source of funds." This might have some bearing
on the US reluctance to slap the Taliban with the terrorist label they so richly
deserve.
The United States, as a matter of urgent self-interest, should develop independent
views on Afghanistan, from a perspective not influenced by rogue states and regional troublemakers.
The Taliban and Harakat ul-Ansar (HUA)