Camps Thrive in Pakistan, India Charges

While pressure mounts on Pakistan to take tougher action against terrorism, India’s top spy agency charges that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has done nothing to dismantle what it says are at least 17 terrorist training camps in territory under his control.

India’s equivalent of the CIA, the Research and Analysis Wing, has identified the training camps in Pakistani-controlled areas of the disputed Kashmir region and Pakistan proper. The camps are used to train fighters for three Pakistan-based groups battling to end Indian rule in Kashmir, a senior Indian intelligence source said, speaking on condition he not be identified because of the clandestine nature of his work.

At least two of the three groups have links to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to the RAW, which answers directly to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

Although Musharraf insists publicly that he is determined to end all forms of terrorism, there is no evidence that his government has tried to shut down the camps, the Indian intelligence official said.

“He is incapable at this point in time to move against these camps physically. And he knows it,” the official said. Referring to Musharraf’s role in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, he said, “Beyond a point, Washington cannot pressure Musharraf because the entire strategy of sustaining him then gets distorted.

“We accept that he requires time. But at this point, I would say he has not done anything that reflects sincerity in the anti-terrorism campaign that Islamabad is embarking on.”

On Thursday, Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmed Khan said the anti-terror crackdown will continue.

“Pakistan is taking certain actions,” he said in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. “Pakistan will continue to take actions against terrorism.”

Musharraf is expected to announce stricter measures against at least some Kashmiri separatist groups, and may even ban the most extreme, when he makes a much-anticipated speech to his nation in the next few days.

India, which has heard Pakistani leaders promise to help root out international terrorism before, will want to see any promises of a new policy quickly followed by significant action, such as the closing down of the alleged training camps.

After the first bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in February 1993, the Clinton administration threatened to put Pakistan on a list of states sponsoring terrorism.

But the following July, the State Department removed Pakistan from a watch list after Washington received assurances that the Pakistani government would cooperate. More than eight years later, India insists that Pakistan has done little to keep its word.

Camps Can Easily Be Moved, India Says

If Musharraf closes down some or all of what India claims to be terrorist bases, New Delhi will then want to make sure that they aren’t reopened somewhere else.

“In our assessment, a camp is just a kitchen, a shooting area, a small training ground and maybe barracks,” the Indian source said. “It can easily be moved. It can easily be restructured.”

Most of the camps India wants shut down are in villages and towns in the roughly one-third of Kashmir under Pakistani control. They include Barakot, Bhimber, Kotli, Chilas, Astor, Gilgit, Skardu and Muzaffarabad, according to Indian intelligence sources.

But India claims that there is also a training camp in Swat, in Pakistan’s lawless North-West Frontier province.

India believes that three groups operate from the camps--in most cases, sharing them--and suspects that most of the camps are used by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the most feared guerrilla force in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The other two guerrilla forces are Harkat Moujahedeen and Hizbul Moujahedeen.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure, is a chief suspect behind the Dec. 13 terrorist attack on India’s Parliament, in which 14 people died, including the five gunmen.

The Indian spy agency has what it says is proof that all five attackers were Pakistani citizens, including tape recordings of cell phone calls that two of the gunmen made to their homes in Pakistan before the assault.

The calls, recordings of which have been given to the CIA, lasted about four minutes on the evening before the assault on Parliament.

“They were conversations with their families along the lines of: ‘We are planning something. Don’t worry about us.’ The tension in the voice and tenor of speech all gave away a lot of things,” the intelligence official said.

Police later found more than 10 pounds of RDX plastic explosive in the men’s car, which had failed to explode. Investigators say it is also clear that the RDX came from Pakistan because, they claim, it is stamped with the city of origin: Lahore.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is the militant wing of the Markaz al Dawa Wal Irshad, or Center for Preaching, which has its headquarters in Muridke, about 30 miles from Lahore in eastern Pakistan, a second Indian intelligence official said.

The 190-acre headquarters has been used to provide military training in three-week and three-month courses, the source said.

“It is not overtly proactive [in training] anymore, but it can be activated within no time,” the senior official said.

Markaz and Lashkar-e-Taiba joined Bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders in 1998, India says. Bin Laden issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to attack Americans, including civilians.

The signatures on the fatwa included Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, who until a year ago was leader of another Pakistan-based group fighting in Kashmir, Harkat Moujahedeen.

Pakistani police detained Khalil for a week in early October, at the start of the U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan but released him.

Khalil’s organization grew out of Harkat Ansar, a guerrilla faction in the Afghan war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s that was backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.

That complex evolution is an example of how South Asia’s militias frequently splinter or morph into new organizations that can plot terrorist attacks in the name of the struggle to liberate Kashmir, Indian authorities complain.

Maulana Masood Azhar, a former leader of Harkat, formed Jaish-e-Mohammed after India released him from jail in December 1999 in a deal to free passengers on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Azhar is on a list of 20 people, about half of whom are Indian nationals, whom New Delhi wants Pakistan to extradite for trial on terrorism, hijacking, drug-trafficking and other charges.

Musharraf could prove his credibility in the war on terrorism if he at least handed over Indians Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, the main suspects in a string of bombings in Bombay that killed 257 people and wounded 713 others in March 1993, the senior official said.

“The biggest risk [to Pakistan’s ISI] if [Ibrahim] comes to us is the damaging account he can give of the linkages, because Dawood is the point man for Al Qaeda,” the senior official said. “He was the contact man for funding certain Taliban-related things.

“He is an ISI mentor, not an agent. He is a big gun with assets worth millions of dollars. So it would not be a token handing-over. Once we had access, we would interrogate him and what followed could be very damaging.”

New Delhi has provided Musharraf’s government with Ibrahim’s addresses in the Pakistani cities of “Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi, his telephone numbers, photographs of his houses and the women he is with--everything,” the source said. “He is not hard to find at all.”

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appeared to support India’s demand that Musharraf extradite at least some of the 20 suspects.

“We have discussed the list with him. I know he is examining it, and I hope he will take appropriate action on this list,” Powell said in Washington. “But it is in his hands.”

Powell plans to fly to India and Pakistan next week to press for a diplomatic solution to the nations’ dangerous confrontation, which erupted after the Dec. 13 attack.

India sees the training camps not only as a measure of Musharraf’s real intentions but as potential targets if New Delhi decides to follow the U.S. and Israeli examples and launch military strikes to take out alleged terrorist bases.

The Indian spy agency has concluded that the Kashmiri separatist groups can survive only with continued logistics, training and other support from Pakistan. In turn, Pakistan accuses the RAW of trying to destabilize Pakistan through secret support for militants who have carried out car and bus bombings in several Pakistani cities during the 1990s.

By detaining suspected terrorists but not yet charging them with criminal offenses, Musharraf is only doing enough “to placate Washington and London,” said the senior Indian intelligence source, who has several decades of experience tracking Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri separatists.

“He has not done enough to structurally, or quantitatively, damage the jihad [holy war] framework,” he said.

Despite daily clashes between Indian and Pakistani forces along a 1972 cease-fire line in Kashmir known as the Line of Control, guerrilla fighters continue to infiltrate Indian-controlled Kashmir from bases in Pakistani-controlled areas, the Indian intelligence source said.

“Now only the really daring ones are coming across, the ones who have absolutely safe bases in the other [Pakistani-held] part of Kashmir,” he said.

Many See Musharraf as ‘Indispensable’

India sees the Bush administration’s strong support for Musharraf as part of a pattern in U.S.-Pakistani relations that has treated that country’s military rulers as stabilizing forces that can stop the spread of Islamic extremism.

The late Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who seized power in 1977, was a key U.S. ally on a front line of the Cold War. But he built popular support by making Islam a more powerful force in society and the military. Musharraf is now trying to tame the monster that Zia set loose.

“The world view is that he is indispensable, he is the ‘last bastion’ of Islamic moderation, and if he goes, you open the corridors to an extremist takeover,” the senior Indian intelligence official said.

“The same logic had also been adhered to when Zia was in power. Western calculations were, ‘When Zia goes, there will be chaos, hellfire and all of that.’ ”

But even as Vajpayee refuses to talk with Musharraf about a way out of the current crisis, Indian officials acknowledge privately that they think they could eventually reach a deal with him.

Their real worry is the military, and especially the ISI, because they doubt that Musharraf has complete control over a powerful apparatus that is united only by a goal as old as Pakistan itself: unification with Kashmir.

“You need a tectonic change--in attitude, in psychology, in personnel and in tactics on Kashmir,” the senior Indian intelligence source said.

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Watson is a Times staff writer and Barua is a special correspondent.