DOWN DUSTY lanes in the southern Punjabi town of Bahawalpur are two religious schools well-known to security services on both sides of the Pakistani-Indian border and further afield.
They do not look like centres of global terrorism. Earlier this week, when this reporter visited, students poured out of the Dar ul-Uloom Medina at the end of morning lessons and teachers sat on rope beds drinking tea and eating bananas. The high-walled, heavy-gated Usman au Ali school in the heart of the city was quiet.
Yet appearances may be deceptive. Both schools are accused of being recruitment and logistics bases for Jaish-e-Muhammad, a militant group now among India’s suspects for this week’s Mumbai attacks. Elsewhere in Bahawalpur and in the surrounding villages are other schools and safe houses linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the other group in the frame.
Both groups have their roots in the conflict over the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir. Developing out of irregular militias to fight Indian security forces in the Indian-administered parts of Kashmir in the early 1990s with the encouragement and support of Pakistani intelligence services, the groups’ fighters have been blamed for a catalogue of atrocities.
They include a gun and grenade assault on the parliament buildings in New Delhi in 2001, hundreds of violent killings in Kashmir, the 2002 killing of Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl, an airplane hijacking and bombings in Indian cities.
The result is that, while Pakistan’s tribal areas along the frontier with Afghanistan are internationally known as “al-Qaeda central”, it is towards the towns and villages of Pakistan’s Punjab province New Delhi’s finger is pointing.
“Given the power asymmetry between the two neighbours, Pakistan knows that it is the weaker militarily and that bleeding India is one way of attaining strategic aims. And using paramilitary groups with plausible deniability is one way of doing that,” said Farzana Shaikh of the Chatham House think tank.
In recent years, the dynamic has changed, although judging how far is hard. In 2002, Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which had been openly fundraising and recruiting. Assassination attempts on him and the occupation and armed siege of the Red Mosque in central Islamabad had brought home the perils of trying to manage the militants.
Analysts say the militants are more fragmented than before and that although the Pakistani security establishment maintains some control over some of them, others have turned against their former patrons. With British officials trying to verify Indian statements that two of the militants involved in the Mumbai attacks were British-born, the Pakistani groups and security establishment will come under greater scrutiny. – (Guardian service)