Dissing Ideologies ZEE HERITAGE INDIA

The Zee Heritage Festival features performances by local and regional dancers representing the culture of India as well as food, crafts and much more. Cost is $4; discounted tickets are available on the Web site at www.hifestival.com. 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Montgomery County Fairgrounds, 16 Chestnut St., Gaithersburg. 301-213-1343.

The Pattern of Hatred The Weekly Standard

http://www.weeklystandard.com

Sheikh Gilani`s American Disciples

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/996lxfmd.asp

What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?

by Mira L. Boland

03/18/2002, Volume 007, Issue 26

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra`s founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan`s Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf`s decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra`s communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers` compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra`s criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff`s deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group`s continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn`t exist.

SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani`s close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra`s early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra`s principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Leela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.

FUQRA`S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver`s licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare ``pledged`` to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, ``I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well.`` Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to ``abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra.``

Several documents described the activities and code of the ``Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5,`` who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed ``Incogs`` instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed ``targeting packets`` on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn`t yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric`s mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was ``a carbon copy of the handwritten plan,`` said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque`s kitchen at night, proceeding by ``the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic],`` and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa`s death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.

FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of ``recon team,`` ``guard team,`` and ``hit team`` roles, and a description of how ``time delay`` bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would ``allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout.`` A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of ``conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life.`` A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators` arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, ``Muslims of the Americas`` and Sheikh Gilani`s ``Quranic Open University.`` On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani`s own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their ``foremost duty`` was ``to wage Jihad`` against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani`s poems is entitled ``We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun.`` Another exhorts, ``Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say `Victory is in the air` / The kafir`s [infidel`s] blood will not be spared.``

Gilani`s appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: ``We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us.``

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who`s who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an ``ex``-Pakistani intelligence official. In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of ``Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!,`` and (in Arabic) ``Death to the Jews!``

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. ``Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university,`` he said, ``they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them.``

THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani`s current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors` ``tightening the leash`` after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra`s core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a ``cost effective`` strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy`s CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay`s 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra`s compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers` compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made ``straw purchases`` of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers` compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall`s arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: ``Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan.``

And apparently the travel isn`t all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted ``many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic.`` Pakistan, of course, isn`t an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra`s American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra`s headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani`s U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, ``I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah`s sake.`` At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.

Mira L. Boland`s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

Riots The Weekly Standard

http://www.weeklystandard.com

Sheikh Gilani`s American Disciples

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/996lxfmd.asp

What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?

by Mira L. Boland

03/18/2002, Volume 007, Issue 26

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra`s founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan`s Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf`s decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra`s communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers` compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra`s criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff`s deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group`s continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn`t exist.

SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani`s close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra`s early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra`s principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Leela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.

FUQRA`S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver`s licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare ``pledged`` to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, ``I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well.`` Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to ``abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra.``

Several documents described the activities and code of the ``Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5,`` who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed ``Incogs`` instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed ``targeting packets`` on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn`t yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric`s mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was ``a carbon copy of the handwritten plan,`` said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque`s kitchen at night, proceeding by ``the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic],`` and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa`s death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.

FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of ``recon team,`` ``guard team,`` and ``hit team`` roles, and a description of how ``time delay`` bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would ``allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout.`` A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of ``conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life.`` A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators` arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, ``Muslims of the Americas`` and Sheikh Gilani`s ``Quranic Open University.`` On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani`s own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their ``foremost duty`` was ``to wage Jihad`` against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani`s poems is entitled ``We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun.`` Another exhorts, ``Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say `Victory is in the air` / The kafir`s [infidel`s] blood will not be spared.``

Gilani`s appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: ``We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us.``

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who`s who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an ``ex``-Pakistani intelligence official. In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of ``Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!,`` and (in Arabic) ``Death to the Jews!``

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. ``Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university,`` he said, ``they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them.``

THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani`s current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors` ``tightening the leash`` after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra`s core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a ``cost effective`` strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy`s CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay`s 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra`s compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers` compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made ``straw purchases`` of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers` compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall`s arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: ``Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan.``

And apparently the travel isn`t all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted ``many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic.`` Pakistan, of course, isn`t an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra`s American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra`s headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani`s U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, ``I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah`s sake.`` At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.

Mira L. Boland`s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

Memories of December 6th The Weekly Standard

http://www.weeklystandard.com

Sheikh Gilani`s American Disciples

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/996lxfmd.asp

What to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra?

by Mira L. Boland

03/18/2002, Volume 007, Issue 26

WALL STREET JOURNAL reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan.

Fuqra`s founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan`s Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf`s decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia.

Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra`s communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts--many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison--could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law.

Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers` compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra`s criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff`s deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial.

Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group`s continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn`t exist.

SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once.

As befits Gilani`s close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra`s early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra`s principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members.

Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Leela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.

FUQRA`S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra.

Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver`s licenses bearing identical photos but various names.

Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare ``pledged`` to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, ``I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well.`` Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to ``abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra.``

Several documents described the activities and code of the ``Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5,`` who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed ``Incogs`` instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation.

Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed ``targeting packets`` on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia.

One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn`t yet unfolded--but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric`s mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was ``a carbon copy of the handwritten plan,`` said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque`s kitchen at night, proceeding by ``the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic],`` and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God.

No one was charged with murder in Khalifa`s death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.

FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of ``recon team,`` ``guard team,`` and ``hit team`` roles, and a description of how ``time delay`` bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would ``allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout.`` A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of ``conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life.`` A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators` arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial.

By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, ``Muslims of the Americas`` and Sheikh Gilani`s ``Quranic Open University.`` On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani`s own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade.

Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their ``foremost duty`` was ``to wage Jihad`` against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani`s poems is entitled ``We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun.`` Another exhorts, ``Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say `Victory is in the air` / The kafir`s [infidel`s] blood will not be spared.``

Gilani`s appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: ``We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. . . . We are at present establishing training camps. . . . You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us.``

Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who`s who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an ``ex``-Pakistani intelligence official. In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of ``Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!,`` and (in Arabic) ``Death to the Jews!``

In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. ``Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university,`` he said, ``they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them.``

THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani`s current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors` ``tightening the leash`` after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra`s core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a ``cost effective`` strike.

Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy`s CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay`s 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra`s compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse--it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil)--but the district revoked its charter on January16.

This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers` compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan.

That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani.

Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah.

And at the Red House commune--whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions--agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made ``straw purchases`` of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers` compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster.

The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall`s arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: ``Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani. . . . We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan.``

And apparently the travel isn`t all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted ``many Muslims . . . from Pakistan, Arabic.`` Pakistan, of course, isn`t an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun.

There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra`s American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra`s headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels--considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani`s U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, ``I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah`s sake.`` At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story.

Mira L. Boland`s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times.

Is Thackeray a Terrorist? Famous Parsis (zoroastrians) of India

AFS Talyarkhan (Cricket Commentator/Broadcaster)

Vijay Merchant (Cricket)

Persis Khambhatta ( Bollywood actress)

Sabira Merchant (TV Host)

JRD Tata (Industrialist)

Jamshedji Tata (Industrialist)

Soli Sorabjee (Lawyer)

Bhikaji Cama (Freedom Fighter)

Pearl Padamsee (Actress)

Feroze Gandhi (Politician)

Farrukh Dhondy (Writer)

David Davidar (Writer)

Rohinton Mistry (writer)

Zubin Mehta (Music Conductor)

Jamshed Kanga (Politician)

Kaizad Gustad (filmmaker)

Sohrab Mody (Actor)

H.B. Wadia (Film maker)

Farrukh Engineer (Cricket)

Homi Bhabha (Scientist)

Homi Sethna (Scientist)

Russy Mody (Cricket)

Polly Umrigar (Cricket)

Nari Contractor (Cricket)

Sooni Taraporevala

Freddy Mercury (Music)

Dadabhai Naoroji (Freedom Fighter)

Mancherjee Bhownagree

Jehangir Sabavala (Painter)

Meher Mistry (Model)

Firdaus Kanga (Writer)

Shehnaz Patel (Actress)

Perizaad Zorabian (Model and Actress)

Sir Phirojshah Mehta

Sir Dinshaw Wacha

Dinshah Irani (Solicitor)

Shiamik Davar (Choreographer) ......

and many many more. Their contribution to India is immense. Such a tiny community but have contributed so much. Same with Indian Jews.

Running Naked http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2001-11-02.htm

You point out in your book that in the eighties the U.S. government supported the most extremist and anti-American of the mujahideen groups, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, because that was the group that Pakistan wanted us to support—a decision that led indirectly to the rise of the Taliban. Could the U.S realistically have supported anyone else?

I don`t think we could have. The problem with a lot of journalistic criticism of how the U.S. operated in the mid- and late eighties in Afghanistan is that journalists operate in this perfect universe, where every option is possible, while policy makers usually only have bad choices. And the bottom line was it was impossible to support the Afghans against the Soviets without the complete cooperation of Pakistan, because Pakistan provided the rear base. And Pakistan demanded a price. The price, though we were uncomfortable with it, was nevertheless still worth paying, in my opinion. Because what it led to was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern Europe. To say that supporting the Afghans against the Soviets was not worth it is like saying fighting World War II was not worth it because it led to a forty-four year Cold War.

It seems like we`re in a similar situation with Pakistan today—we`re dependent on them, and therefore may have to accept an Afghan government that the Pakistanis are partial to.

Yes, we face the same challenge, and this is an issue that`s going to come to the fore in the coming weeks and through the end of this year. Right now, as at the end of the eighties, we`re between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand we have to support Pakistan, because the government of Pakistan has put itself out on a limb for us. The government of Pakistan now, like thirteen years ago, has taken a tremendous risk to openly promote American objectives. Nevertheless, what the Pakistani government wants now, as then, is ultimately bad for Afghanistan. Pakistan demands a government in Afghanistan that it can control. In the late eighties that meant a fundamentalist government. Now it doesn`t so much, because there are some moderates whom the Pakistanis will accept. But, both then and now, the Pakistanis are insisting on Afghans who have little internal support and therefore are totally dependent on Pakistan. And what that led to the first time, a decade or so ago, was an Afghanistan so weak that it fell into chaos. And the same thing can happen again. The Pakistanis have been the instigator of much of the trouble in Afghanistan over the years and decades, yet at the same time we have no choice but to deal with them. That is the incredible policy challenge. The Pakistanis will not help us unless they are guaranteed basically a puppet government in Afghanistan. They want an Afghanistan that is pro-Pakistani and anti-Indian.

Your description of Pakistan—as a place rife with tribal and ethnic strife, sandwiched between India and Afghanistan and between its allegiance to the Taliban and dependence on the United States—makes one wonder how long it`s going to be around.

The overarching issue in South Asia is the ongoing institutional meltdown of Pakistan. Right now we`re focusing on a specific objective in Afghanistan—getting out a pro-terrorist government and capturing or killing terrorists. But this phase will not last forever, or too long. And then, even if we`re successful we`ll be back to the main problem of this region, which is the weakening of the Pakistani state. This is why I think that while Afghanistan may not stay in the news beyond another six months or so, Pakistan will be on and off the front pages through the decade. It will be a major story.

Pakistan`s leader, Pervez Musharraf, seems to be in an especially difficult position. How do you think he`s doing under the circumstances?

Well, it`s impossible for a Pakistani leader under these circumstances to be more pro-American than he has been. It`s an irony, but I will state it: the United States is fortunate, because there are two dictators who are in power. One is Musharraf in Pakistan. Let nobody be under any delusion: had we still had the democratic regime of Benazir Bhutto, we would be in a much worse situation now, because we wouldn`t get nearly the cooperation we`re getting, and the government we`d be dealing with would be far weaker internally. The other dictator is Islam Karimov, the ruler of Uzbekistan, who has allowed us relative carte blanche. And if Karimov had been overthrown or had held elections, as people had been demanding, Uzbekistan would be in even worse shape than Pakistan. It`s another country where there seems to be no alternative except tyranny or anarchy. Because of two dictators, the United States is able to place troops on the ground, in places contiguous to Afghanistan. Karimov and Musharraf have really come through for us, and there is no chance whatsoever that any other kind of regime in either of those countries would have performed as well.

http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/local/docs/bangladsh16a.htm

Published Sunday, Dec. 16, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News

Hindus in Bangladesh abused, groups claim

CRACKDOWN FOLLOWED OCTOBER ELECTION, ACTIVISTS SAY IN SUNNYVALE

BY KEN MCLAUGHLIN

Mercury News

While the world`s eyes are focused on Afghanistan, Hindus are being brutally repressed in Bangladesh, the most democratic Muslim-dominated country in the region, Hindu groups in Silicon Valley said Saturday.

Since the electoral victory of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia on Oct. 1, thousands of Hindus have fled Bangladesh to avoid being killed or raped, said representatives of Hindu groups and the human rights group Amnesty International at a Hindu Solidarity Day attended by about 150 people at a Sunnyvale temple.

``Without notice during the past two months, Hindus have been the victims of ethnic cleansing,`` said Venkatesh Murthy of San Ramon, West Coast secretary for Hindu Swayam Sevak Sangh, a cultural group.

The Bangladeshi government has strongly denied that Hindus were attacked following the October election. But in late November, the country`s highest court ordered the government to explain its failure to take steps to protect the Hindu minority.

About 10 percent of Bangladesh`s 135 million residents are Hindus. Virtually all the rest are Muslim.

The court issued the order after a legal rights group claimed that both before and after last month`s national elections, ``the minorities came under various threats, attacks and persecution and were subjected to looting of their properties.`` The group, Ain-O-Salish Kendra, also claimed that women and young girls have been raped by fundamentalist Muslim thugs.

If the repression is allowed to continue, ``in 20 years there will be no more Hindus left in Bangladesh,`` said Dhiman Chowdhury, president of the Human Rights Congress for Bangladesh Minorities, a worldwide organization based in Santa Clara.

Even before the election, the Hindu community was targeted by supporters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party for their perceived support for the rival Awami League, Amnesty International says.

Bangladeshi newspapers have reported that thugs have entered Hindu homes, beaten family members and looted their property.

On Nov. 5, according to Amnesty International, a gang of about 25 youths reportedly attacked Hindu homes in the village of Daspara. A 28-year-old man was hacked to death, and 16 others were injured. Police arrested a dozen people.

More than 100 women are believed to have been raped, often in front of their husbands or fathers, Govind Acharya of Oakland, the Bangladesh specialist for Amnesty International USA, told the group gathered at the Hindu Mandir temple.

Authorities claimed that Kabir`s videos contained ``objectionable and misleading statements that are detrimental to communal harmony and subversive of the state`` and that he was involved in ``tarnishing the image of Bangladesh and of the government in the outside world.``



Contact Ken McLaughlin at kmclaughlin@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5552.

CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION







The spectre of violence now haunts the globe. The terrorist attack on Parliament House on Thursday demonstrates that the phantasm is a terrifying reality. It is a sociological fact based on the observation of violence in history that youth is the natural carrier of violence and of radicalism. A study of late 20th century violence might suggest a corelation between violence and Islam. One study shows that between 1983 and 2000, Muslims were responsible for 11 of the major acts of international terrorism. The state department of the United States of America has listed seven states as supporting terrorism, of these five are Muslim. The majority of the organizations listed as engaged in terrorist activities is Muslim. Islam has, in one way or another, been involved in all the major wars of the late 20th and early 21st century: Israel-Palestine, Iran-Iraq, India-Pakistan, Soviet Union-Afghanistan, US-Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and parts of the former Soviet Union. It is worth noting that there is a close association between youth and Islam since the latter has what sociologists call the “youth bulge’’. There are too many young Muslims who are not gainfully employed, who are susceptible to radical and messianic ideas. Even the wealthy — Mr Osama bin Laden comes readily to mind — react violently to what they perceive as Western domination, and then proceed to use Western technology to destroy the power of the West and to advance the cause of Islam.

It is not easy, of course, to accept this overlap between the incidence of violence and one particular religion. It would be unwarranted and illogical to conclude from this coincidence that the message of violence is embedded in Islam. Like all other faiths, Islam has had its militant phases and sections. The violence of the late 20th century and that of the post-September 11 world has a very specific historical context. That context grows not out of the nature of Islam qua Islam but out of the historical experience of some of the Islamic countries. The experience of these countries is imbricated with resistance to Western domination, to a resurgence of an Islamic identity and even to greater divisions, ethnic and cultural, within the Muslim population. The coming together of these with the youth bulge has produced an explosive cocktail. An added dimension has been the use modern regimes of power have made of this volatile combination to secure some of their own political goals. Witness the use the US made of the mujahedins to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; and the use Pakistan makes of the same elements against India in Jammu and Kashmir.

It is convenient for those who demonize Islam to prophesy an apocalyptic clash on the basis of the present scenario. There already exists a gigantic clash and it is not between Islam and the West. Rather, it is between civilization and the forces of barbarism. The latter in the late 20th century conjuncture is identified with all kinds of religious fundamentalism and the use of violence linked to it. There is more at stake in the clash than faith.

Muslims and The West After 11th September Reader Ashish from Canada wrote commenting on a Canadian journalist, Eric Margolis, who was quoted in a rediff.com article on Rep Benjamin Gilman of the US. As Ashish said, Margolis, a self-styled ``foreign correspondent, broadcaster and war correspondent``, is a rabid India-hater. I used to be on his mailing list, and his views are simple: he hates Israel, he hates India, he loves Pakistan, he loves China. He is full of compassion for oppressed Muslims, but not for oppressed Tibetans. And his grasp of facts is somewhat tenuous -- according to him, in 1962, the Chinese were on the point of occupying Calcutta when they, magnanimously, retreated. Do take whatever Margolis says with a very large pinch of salt. He is not an objective observer.

Muslims and The West After 11th September Eric Margolis used to report from Peshawar, Pakistan

Cricket and the Clash of Cymbals Who said Savarkar was not married. I am sure he was married and had a family.

Brahmin and Mullah Dinar as currency

Dr Muhammad Karim Beebani

In the early period of Islam the currency names used were dinar and dirham. Dinar was the name used for gold coin whereas the silver coin was called dirham. Both these currencies were in use for many centuries but as the Muslim empire started disintegrating various countries started adopting names other than these.

Dinar is the only currency name that has appeared in the Holy Qur`aan in chapter No 3 (Aal-e-Imran). This name along with dirham has also been found in many sayings of Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Muslims therefore have great attachment with these names rather than with rupee, taka or other currencies being used in Islamic countries at present. I shall therefore suggest that Islamic countries should adopt the currency name of dinar to show the continuation of the Islamic legacy and scriptural heritage.

On the other hand the currency names being used in Islamic countries have no such historical significance. For example in Pakistan rupee is being used which is derived from Sanskrit language and has a relationship with Hinduism. It is worth mentioning that there are at least five Islamic countries, which are already using dinar as their currency names. These are Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq and Bahrain. I shall therefore request government of Pakistan to consider adopting the currency name of dinar instead of a non-Islamic name of rupee.

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2001-daily/24-11-2001/oped/newspost.htm

Here Are the Muslim Feminist Voices, Mr. Rushdie! Dinar as Pakistani currency

Dr Muhammad Karim Beebani

In the early period of Islam the currency names used were dinar and dirham. Dinar was the name used for gold coin whereas the silver coin was called dirham. Both these currencies were in use for many centuries but as the Muslim empire started disintegrating various countries started adopting names other than these.

Dinar is the only currency name that has appeared in the Holy Qur`aan in chapter No 3 (Aal-e-Imran). This name along with dirham has also been found in many sayings of Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Muslims therefore have great attachment with these names rather than with rupee, taka or other currencies being used in Islamic countries at present. I shall therefore suggest that Islamic countries should adopt the currency name of dinar to show the continuation of the Islamic legacy and scriptural heritage.

On the other hand the currency names being used in Islamic countries have no such historical significance. For example in Pakistan rupee is being used which is derived from Sanskrit language and has a relationship with Hinduism. It is worth mentioning that there are at least five Islamic countries, which are already using dinar as their currency names. These are Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq and Bahrain. I shall therefore request government of Pakistan to consider adopting the currency name of dinar instead of a non-Islamic name of rupee.

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2001-daily/24-11-2001/oped/newspost.htm

The Price Pakistani spies long linked to militants

Agency gave backing to Taliban, Kashmir fighters, mujahedeen



By Frank Langfitt

Sun Foreign Staff

Originally published November 25, 2001

http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/attack/bal-te.intelligence25nov25.story?coll=bal%2Dhome%2Dheadlines

BEIJING - Last winter, members of a militant Islamic group known as Jaish-e-Mohammed, or ``Mohammed`s Army,`` hijacked a bus in the Pakistani city of Bahawalpur after the driver refused their demand that he turn off all music in the bus.

Local police arrested some members of the group and seized a cache of guns, grenades and other weapons. According to a defense analyst who interviewed the police, the weapons carried permits issued by Inter-Services Intelligence, known as ISI, Pakistan`s shadowy spy agency.

The connection between ISI and the group, which is fighting Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir, is no surprise. The United States may now consider Pakistan a front-line ally in the war against terrorism, but the ISI has been arming Muslim militants for years.

During the 1980s, the ISI worked with the CIA to funnel weapons to the Afghan mujahedeen, or ``soldiers of god,`` in the war against the Soviet Union. Until the attacks of Sept. 11, the ISI had served as the benefactor of the Taliban, providing intelligence, strategic support and access to arms.

Since its founding in 1948, the ISI has grown into a giant intelligence and covert operations network with an estimated 10,000 employees - an ``invisible government,`` some say - that wields considerable influence over Pakistani foreign policy and sometimes meddles in domestic politics.

The agency counts among its major successes the theft of overseas technology critical to Pakistan`s development of nuclear weapons. It also stands accused of spending tens of millions of dollars to rig the country`s 1990 elections.

Capable operation

Detractors blame the ISI for political instability in Afghanistan and Kashmir, over which Pakistan and India have fought two wars. Other observers say the agency`s reach and exploits are exaggerated. Even critics, though, regard the ISI as one of the more capable operations of its kind in Asia.

``ISI is quite an effective intelligence agency,`` said B. Raman, who served from 1968 to 1994 as an analyst with the Research and Analysis Wing, India`s equivalent of the CIA. ``I always found they are good in the collection of intelligence and procurement of technology.``

But, he added, ``they invariably go wrong in assessment and judgment.``

Maj. Gen. Sir Walter Caw- thorne, a British officer who served as Pakistan`s deputy chief of army, established the ISI to gather foreign intelligence after major mistakes during the first Indo-Pakistani war, in 1947-1948.

Over the years, the ISI`s portfolio expanded to include domestic spying and support for militants in India and Afghanistan. As early as the 1950s, the agency began aiding insurgents in northeast India, according to Raman. When a nationalist revolt occurred in Pakistan`s southern province of Baluchistan in the early 1970s, the ISI spied on local police suspected of disloyalty.

Along the way, the agency committed some blunders. During Pakistan`s 1965 war with India, the ISI misread local support and launched an ill-fated operation that called for thousands of forces in civilian clothes to infiltrate Indian-controlled Kashmir and foment an uprising. During the war, the ISI also lost track of an Indian armored division headed toward Lahore.

Training for mujahedeen

The spy agency came into its own in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The ISI trained tens of thousands of mujahedeen and distributed hundreds of thousands of tons of arms and ammunition provided by the CIA.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the ISI took advantage of existing training camps and encouraged Islamic militants to join an uprising against Indian rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir, analysts say. Since then, more than 30,000 people have been killed or maimed or have disappeared in the struggle.

When the United States considered naming Pakistan a terrorist state in the early 1990s, training camps were moved to Afghanistan and old Cold War ties between Washington and Islamabad prevailed.

``The United States should have put Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorists 10 years ago, and we are now living to rue that day,`` said Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA official who served in the U.S. State Department`s office of counter-terrorism from 1989 to 1993.

Although the ISI is technically answerable to Pakistan`s prime minister, the army runs the agency. In the case of Afghan policy, the ISI bypassed Pakistan`s Foreign Office and embraced the Taliban when they emerged in 1994 during the Afghan civil war.

Two years later, the Taliban took Kabul, and Pakistan finally appeared to have a friendly, secure regime on its western border. Good relations with the Taliban, and by extension, Osama bin Laden, provided access to camps for training fighters destined for Kashmir. Though controversial, the ISI`s pro-Taliban policy was widely considered to be a success.

Cost of aid to militants

Pakistanis, though, paid a heavy price.

Some of the weapons the ISI shipped into Afghanistan during the 1980s flowed back into Pakistan, creating a violent ``Kalashnikov culture`` along the Afghan border and sparking an epidemic of sectarian shootings and bombings.

The ISI`s involvement with the Taliban also cost Islamabad in international prestige. Pakistan became increasingly associated with the Taliban and their extremist, almost medieval approach to governance, which included banning girls from school and punishing theft with amputation.

The cost of the ISI`s pro-Taliban policy rose after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. Under pressure from the Bush administration, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s president, abandoned support for the Taliban and pledged support for the war against them. To consolidate support within the army, Musharraf forced the chief of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, into early retirement.

Hopes for reform

Some analysts think the Taliban`s rapid retreat in the last 10 days will force the ISI to reconsider interference in Afghanistan and support for militants in Kashmir. Others hope for reform.

``What needs to be done immediately is to reduce their budget, make them more accountable and abstain from using this organization for political ends,`` said Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha, a defense analyst and adjunct professor at Islamabad`s Quad-i-Azam University.

Raman, the former Indian intelligence analyst, remains pessimistic. He thinks that if the Taliban are defeated and the United States captures or kills bin Laden, the United States will again lose interest in the region and the ISI will reassert itself.

``I think they will lie low for sometime now,`` Raman says. ``But ultimately, they will always be looking for an opportunity.``

Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

The Price http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61144-2001Nov20.html

Alliance`s Rise Catches Pakistan Off-Guard

`Strategic Debacle` Leaves Islamabad With Little Influence Over Afghanistan

By Susan B. Glasser and Kamran Khan

Washington Post Foreign Service

Wednesday, November 21, 2001; Page A14

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 20 -- More than a week after the Taliban retreat from the Afghan capital of Kabul and other cities, Pakistan is reeling from the rout of the strict Islamic militia it helped create.

Pakistan remains the only country in the world that still recognizes the Taliban and is unwilling to sever those ties. Pakistan also is not on speaking terms with the Northern Alliance, which now controls most of Afghanistan.

According to high-ranking political, military and diplomatic officials, Pakistan has seen its influence in Afghanistan evaporateas the future of the country is being plotted by the United Nations and the Northern Alliance, among others. Unable to wield power in Afghan affairs, Pakistan fears that it is now sandwiched between two hostile countries: India to the east and Afghanistan to the west. Pakistan`s military is on high alert, fearing trouble and instability along the 1,500-mile border it shares with Afghanistan.

Although Pakistan enlisted as a key ally in the U.S.-led coalition to oust the Taliban after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even top officials in President Pervez Musharraf`s government have expressed alarm in recent days at the outcome of the coalition`s efforts. Television screens here are flashing pictures of angry Afghans shouting ``Death to Pakistan!`` and Pakistan`s regional rivals are advising the new rulers of Kabul. One senior Pakistani Foreign Ministry official pronounced his country`s policy ``a strategic debacle.``

A top military official called the situation a ``quagmire`` for Pakistan, while several other senior government figures spoke bitterly in interviews of what they called a U.S. promise to keep the Northern Alliance out of Kabul -- a promise that was not kept.

The Northern Alliance, made up of Tajik, Uzbek and other ethnic groups in the northern part of Afghanistan, grew out of the mujaheddin who fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. After the Soviet pullout, the guerrillas fell into a civil war. Pakistan nurtured and supported the Taliban, whose members are mostly from the large Pashtun ethnic group in the south, in the mid-1990s. Pakistani officials saw the Taliban as a counterweight to the fractious, chaotic rule from 1992 to 1996 of the Kabul government, whose members are now largely back in control of the country.

Despite the enmity, Pakistan has signaled a willingness to open backdoor communications with the Northern Alliance through Turkey and Iran, both of which supported the alliance during its five-year battle to oust the Taliban. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, said in an interview that ``yes, they are reaching out to the Northern Alliance.``

Pakistani sources said top Foreign Ministry officials have also told Chamberlin they would welcome any U.S. efforts to help bridge the gap. Musharraf had talks with Iranian officials in Tehran earlier this month on his way to the United Nations, and then met with President Mohammad Khatami in New York. An Iranian official visited Musharraf in Islamabad last week. Musharraf also met with Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit in Istanbul last week.

Officially, Pakistan supports the creation of a ``broad-based, multi-ethnic government`` for Afghanistan and says the Northern Alliance occupation of Kabul should be replaced by an international peacekeeping force.

But Pakistan`s diplomatic contortions in recent days suggest how tentative and confused the government`s policy has become.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Abdus Sattar told reporters that Pakistan would allow the Taliban`s embassy here to remain open. But he also offered this confusing formula: Pakistan has not decided on the ``de-recognition of the Taliban government,`` but that ``does not mean that we continue to recognize it.`` Today, the Foreign Ministry spokesman announced the closure of two remaining Taliban consulates in the cities of Peshawar and Quetta, while insisting there have been no direct contacts between Islamabad and the Northern Alliance.

On Monday, Musharraf proclaimed vindication for his decision to join the U.S.-led anti-terrorism coalition. Pakistan is now on the world`s ``center stage,`` he told local leaders. ``Our policy will prove useful for the country, and everyone will benefit from it,`` he said.

But Musharraf`s government was unprepared for the consequences of ousting the Taliban, according to several senior government officials and political analysts here. A week after the Taliban fled major cities in Afghanistan, a new policy toward Afghanistan has yet to emerge.

``Pakistan has an important role to play in shaping the future of Afghanistan, but we are losing that role by virtue of indecision,`` said Mushahid Hussain, a member of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif`s cabinet, now a commentator here. ``We should recognize the new realities in the region, but instead our policy is reactive. Decisions are being made on the battlefield and not around the conference table.``

A senior Foreign Ministry official said: ``The sheer pace of events jolted each one of us here last week. It seemed that Taliban settled scores with Pakistan by offering Kabul to the Northern Alliance on a silver platter. The Taliban knew how much Islamabad would hate to see Northern Alliance leaders taking full control of the Afghan capital.``

``The very fact that people such as Abdullah and General Fahim have assumed power in Kabul is enough to push Pakistan into a strategic quagmire,`` added a senior Pakistani military official, referring to the Northern Alliance`s foreign minister and top military leader. ``To our displeasure, the Northern Alliance will now remain a grim reality in Kabul.``

Several top officials in Musharraf`s government privately questioned whether the Bush administration had tried hard enough to prevent the Northern Alliance from taking Kabul.

``The U.S. has rewarded its most formidable ally by allowing its sworn enemies to capture the seat of power in Afghanistan,`` said another senior military officer, who added pointedly, ``What actually happened in Kabul was opposite to what President Bush had promised to General Musharraf.``

Nonetheless, critics also point to the failure of Pakistan`s own Afghanistan policy, which for years backed the Taliban militia.

``The Americans never promised us a rose garden. We helped the Americans to oust the Taliban, so we shouldn`t be surprised when the Taliban`s principal opponents -- that is, the Northern Alliance -- are in a better position,`` Hussain said. ``We should stop carping about it. We should recognize that the government in Afghanistan has changed, and we helped change the status quo.``

But so far, Pakistan has been unable to even withdraw diplomatic recognition from the Taliban. ``It`s time,`` said Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador. ``This is the Taliban really on the skids, and it`s my personal view that they should definitively sever their relationship with the Taliban. At this point, it`s really a pro forma thing.``

While the political situation remains muddled, the Taliban`s collapse has also reshaped Pakistan`s military strategy, according to interviews with several top officials.

The current crisis along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is ``most unique in nature,`` as one official put it, because never before has the security situation -- not even during the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 -- warranted extensive deployment of army regulars, heavy artillery and tanks near the Afghan border.

But now, officials said, about 40,000 regular troops of the Pakistani army, 65,000 paramilitary troops and 35,000 frontier police and conscripts have been put on the highest alert to confront any emergency near the border.

``Before yesterday, Pakistan`s military strategy and most doctrines almost exclusively focused on an Indian threat to Pakistan`s security,`` a senior official said. ``The normal security situation on the western borders allowed us to allocate most of our military resources to the eastern borders.``

Correspondent John Ward Anderson in Istanbul contributed to this report.

The Price http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry112001.shtml

The Smear

It was Pakistan, not the Northern Alliance, that wrecked Kabul the first time around.

November 20, 2001 12:45 p.m.





consider myself a moderate Northern Alliance skeptic. Meaning that I thought we should arm the Alliance and aid its push in the north, but doubted it could rout the Taliban soon and didn`t expect much from it in the political arena.

Well, the Northern Alliance has, of course, defied all expectations on the battlefield. And if I`m still a doubter about how productive a role they — or anyone else for that matter — will play in post-Taliban Afghanistan, the Alliance does deserve to be defended from the rankest and most hypocritical charge levied against it by Pakistani-inspired critics: that it destroyed the capital city of Kabul when it took it over in 1992.

We hear this over and over again in the media. It`s one of the reasons Colin Powell wanted the Northern Alliance to ``invest`` Kabul, instead of actually capturing it (one of the most hilariously unworkable ideas in recent diplomatic history). And it is supposedly the reason why Pakistan — suddenly a great defender of reasonable, pluralistic government in Afghanistan — quakes at the idea of the Northern Alliance back in the saddle again.

This is all very rich, since it`s Pakistan that, through one of its proxies, bears most of the responsibility for wrecking Kabul in the early 1990s.

That proxy was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. His name has a Beelzebub-like ring to it, which is appropriate since he pretty much exemplifies the fanaticism, ruthlessness, and evil that has characterized recent Afghan history.

He was Pakistan`s favorite mujahedeen leader during the war against the Soviets, because he was a Pashtun and an Islamic extremist — sort of a Taliban before the Taliban existed. Hekmatyar`s faction in the 1970s became famous for throwing acid on women who dressed in Western clothes. The Pakistanis made a point of funneling U.S. aid to him even though — or, more like it, because — he was virulently anti-American.

When the Communist government fell in 1992, Hekmatyar decided that he would wage a campaign to oust the other mujahedeen factions from Kabul. This he proceed to attempt with artillery barrages that reduced Kabul to rubble and killed thousands of civilians.

And the Pakistanis backed him throughout, even when the civil war harmed their economic interests by making trade routes in Afghanistan impassable.

Ahmed Rashid explains in his book, Taliban:

Pakistan`s policymakers were thus faced with a strategic dilemma. Either Pakistan could carry on backing Hekmatyar in a bid to bring a Pashtun group to power in Kabul which would be Pakistan-friendly, or it could change direction and urge for a power-sharing agreement between all the Afghan factions at whatever the price for the Pashtuns, so that a stable government could open roads to Central Asia. The Pakistani military was convinced that other ethnic groups would not do their bidding and continued to back Hekmatyar.

So, maybe if the State Department is serious about avoiding another Kabul circa 1992, it should ban Pakistan from all meddling in a post-Taliban government. ( I once floated the idea of handing Pakistan the responsibility of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, as a way of making it someone else`s problem, but am now convinced the Pakistanis need to be controlled like any other Afghan faction.)

The Pakistanis eventually dropped Hekmatyar, not because he was killing people, but because he was killing them ineffectually. He was losing the war. The Pakistanis picked up the Taliban instead, who could kill and degrade women and actually take over the Afghan government.

Now, we get news that Hekmatyar is petitioning Pakistan to let him into Peshawar as a way station to reentering Afghanistan.

Talk of a country ``exorcising its demons`` is usually metaphorical, but Hekmatyar is an actual, living demon. The U.S. should demand that Pakistan keep him out of Peshawar, and do all it can to keep him out of Afghanistan, since he is the one who did so much to wreck Kabul the first time around.