[Imc-india] Recommended: "Al Qaeda-Pakistani ties deepen"

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Headline:  Al Qaeda-Pakistani ties deepen
Byline:  Gretchen Peters Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 03/06/2003

(RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN)This week's arrest of Al Qaeda's third-in-command was at once a 
tremendous coup for Pakistan's oft-maligned government and also a 
stunning embarrassment.

Officials here are quick to brag that local security forces nabbed 
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, along with another senior Al Qaeda leader, on 
their own. What they aren't crowing about is that Mr. Mohammed's arrest 
exposes a link between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's largest Islamic 
political party, Jamaat-e Islami.

The emerging connection highlights the political risks the Pakistani 
government faces as it hunts Al Qaeda leaders. It also implies a 
greater order of difficulty in rooting them out if thousands of Jamaat 
party members are willing to harbor terrorists in their homes.

Ahmed Abdul Qadoos, a Jamaat party member, was arrested alongside the 
two Al Qaeda terrorists. They had been holed up in the home of his 
mother, Farzana Qadoos, who is an elected district counselor for the 
conservative Islamic party.

Her residence, where the three men were arrested, is just five minutes 
from Army headquarters in this twin city to the nation's capital, and 
tucked in a guarded community that's home to top military officials. 
Officials say Mohammed had been coming and going from the home, 
apparently with little notice.

The party has also been implicated in other recent terror arrests. A 
Jamaat member was in the Karachi apartment where police found Al Qaeda 
leader Ramzi Binalshibh, and a doctor arrested in Lahore several months 
back for Al Qaeda ties was also linked to the party.

That's an uncomfortable fact for Pakistan, since Jamaat is a leading 
member in a coalition of hard-line Islamic parties that won control of 
two of Pakistan's four provinces in November elections and commands a 
sizable block in the National Assembly.

Senior Jamaat officials have variously insisted that Ahmed Qadoos was 
wrongly arrested or not a party member, and even claimed that the 
arrest actually took place at another location. They say their party is 
being targeted for political reasons.

"We have never supported violence or terror," says Jamaat leader Qazi 
Hussein Ahmed. "It is not in the good of the country."

Some government officials, too, have played down the link in Saturday's 
arrest, saying that Mrs. Qadoos and her husband may not have been aware 
that their houseguest was the chief architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, 
or even that there were guests staying at their home at all.

Gen. Rashid Quereshi, the spokesman for President Pervez Musharraf, 
says the couple was not in residence at the time, but adds that all the 
family members are all being interrogated by security forces here to 
determine their level of involvement.

But senior officials here are starting to admit that they are finding 
growing links between the Jamaat and Al Qaeda terrorists on the run. 
"All of the activists and terrorists who have been apprehended in 
recent months have had links to the Jamaat-e-Islami, whether we have 
arrested them in Lahore or here or Karachi...." says Pakistan's 
Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisel Saleh Hayat. "They have been 
harboring them."

Pakistan's religious parties themselves are a reflection of official 
ties to terrorism here - which Mr. Musharraf insists have been severed 
since Sept. 11, 2001. Past administrations here nurtured and funded 
extremists groups both to wreak havoc in Kashmir, the neighboring state 
which both India and Pakistan claim, and also during the Soviet 
occupation of Afghanistan, when the CIA and Britain's MI6 funded the 
mujahideen to fight a holy war against the communist invaders.

Some of that extremism took root here. Though the fundamentalist 
parties in the past had more success organizing street protests than 
getting into Parliament, a five-party coalition of Islamic parties, 
known as the United Front, made stunning gains in last October's 
election, and now commands the third-largest block in the National 
Assembly.

Jamaat is the largest and most popular party in the group. It had 
focused most of its attention on Kashmir, not Afghanistan or the 
Taliban. But yesterday, a spokesman for the party told Reuters that Al 
Qaeda's third-in-command was "a hero to Islam."

"The Jamaat has never condemned 9/11, and denies that Al Qaeda is a 
terrorist organization. This is a group that believes 9/11 was carried 
out by Jews in America," says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani author on 
terror issues. "The really scary thing is that this is also the most 
moderate Islamic party in Pakistan."

Members of the coalition have sparked fears they are trying to 
"Talibanize" Pakistan's frontier states. Among other things, they have 
moved to ban movie houses, which they deem un-Islamic, and have sent 
police to raid wedding parties where music was playing.

Some have even more direct links to terror. Many Front leaders run 
religious schools that sent young Pakistanis to fight alongside the 
Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The man who owns the Islamic 
school where so-called "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh studied, 
for example, is now a United Front senator.

As members of Parliament, these fundamentalist leaders enjoy immunity, 
though experts say they would have little access to sensitive 
information about the hunt for terrorists here or the political power 
to change Mr. Musharraf's policy to support the US war on terror.

But government officials still say they are concerned about the pattern 
of members of these groups harboring terrorist fugitives. "We certainly 
are," says Interior Minister Hayat. "Any Pakistani should be."

He and other analysts add, however, that they do not believe there is 
an official policy to support Al Qaeda fugitives by the Jamaat or other 
United Front members.

"Still, it poses a very serious question," says Ismael Khan, a senior 
columnist with the News newspaper in the Northwest Frontier Province. 
"The party leadership needs to answer why this is a recurring theme."





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