Lashkar-e-Taiba Founder Takes Less Militant Tone in Pakistan
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
"I
move about like an ordinary person — that's my style," said Hafiz
Muhammad Saeed. "My fate is in the hands of God, not America."
LAHORE,
Pakistan — Ten million dollars does not seem to buy much in this
bustling Pakistani city. That is the sum the United States is offering
for help in convicting Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, perhaps the country's
best-known jihadi leader. Yet Mr. Saeed lives an open, and apparently
fearless, life in a middle-class neighborhood here.
"I
move about like an ordinary person — that's my style," said Mr. Saeed, a
burly 64-year-old, reclining on a bolster as he ate a chicken supper.
"My fate is in the hands of God, not America."
Mr.
Saeed is the founder, and is still widely believed to be the true
leader, of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group that carried out the 2008
attacks in Mumbai, India, in which more than 160 people, including six
Americans, were killed. The United Nations has placed him on a terrorist
list and imposed sanctions on his group. But few believe he will face
trial any time soon in a country that maintains a perilous ambiguity
toward jihadi militancy, casting a benign eye on some groups, even as it
battles others that attack the state.
Mr.
Saeed's very public life seems more than just an act of mocking
defiance against the Obama administration and its bounty, analysts say.
As American troops prepare to leave Afghanistan next door, Lashkar is at
a crossroads, and its fighters' next move — whether to focus on
fighting the West, disarm and enter the political process, or return to
battle in Kashmir — will depend largely on Mr. Saeed.
At
his Lahore compound — a fortified house, office and mosque — Mr. Saeed
is shielded not only by his supporters, burly men wielding Kalashnikovs
outside his door, but also by the Pakistani state. On a recent evening,
police officers screened visitors at a checkpoint near his house, while
other officers patrolled an adjoining park, watching by floodlight for
intruders.
His security seemingly
ensured, Mr. Saeed has over the past year addressed large public
meetings and appeared on prime-time television, and is now even giving
interviews to Western news media outlets he had previously eschewed.
He says that he wants to correct
"misperceptions." During an interview with The New York Times at his
home last week, Mr. Saeed insisted that his name had been cleared by the
Pakistani courts. "Why does the United States not respect our judicial
system?" he asked.
Still, he says
he has nothing against Americans, and warmly described a visit he made
to the United States in 1994, during which he spoke at Islamic centers
in Houston, Chicago and Boston. "At that time, I liked it," he said with
a wry smile.
During that stretch,
his group was focused on attacking Indian soldiers in the disputed
territory of Kashmir — the fight that led the military's Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate to help establish Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1989. But
that battle died down over the past decade, and Lashkar began projecting
itself through its charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which runs a tightly
organized network of hospitals and schools across Pakistan.
The
Mumbai attacks propelled Lashkar-e-Taiba to notoriety. But since then,
Mr. Saeed's provocations toward India have been largely verbal. Last
week he stirred anger there by suggesting that Bollywood's highest-paid
actor, Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim, should move to Pakistan. In the
interview, he said he prized talking over fighting in Kashmir.
"The
militant struggle helped grab the world's attention," he said. "But now
the political movement is stronger, and it should be at the forefront
of the struggle."
Pakistan analysts
caution that Mr. Saeed's new openness is no random occurrence, however.
"This isn't out of the blue," said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former Obama
administration official and an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a
consulting firm. "These guys don't start talking publicly just like
that."
What it amounts to, however,
may depend on events across the border in Afghanistan, where his group
has been increasingly active in recent years. In public, Mr. Saeed has
been a leading light in the Defense of Pakistan Council, a coalition of
right-wing groups that lobbied against the reopening of NATO supply
routes through Pakistan last year. More quietly, Lashkar fighters have
joined the battle, attacking Western troops and Indian diplomatic
facilities in Afghanistan, intelligence officials say.
The
question now is what will happen to them once American troops leave.
One possibility is a return to Lashkar's traditional battleground of
Kashmir, risking fresh conflict between nuclear-armed Pakistan and
India.
But a more hopeful
possibility, floated by some Western and Pakistani officials, is that
Mr. Saeed would lead his group further into politics, and away from
militancy.
"When there are no
Americans in Afghanistan, what will happen?" said Mushtaq Sukhera, a
senior officer with the Punjabi police who is running a fledgling
demobilization program for Islamist extremists. "It's an open question."
A shift could be risky for Mr.
Saeed: Some of his fighters have already split from Lashkar in favor of
other groups that attack the Pakistani state. And much will depend on
the advice of his military sponsors.
For
their part, Pakistan's generals insist they have abandoned their
dalliance with jihadi proxy groups. In a striking speech in August, the
army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said the country's greatest
threat came from domestic extremism. "We as a nation must stand united
against this threat," he said. "No state can afford a parallel system of
governance and militias."
Five
years of near-continuous battle against the Pakistani Taliban along the
Afghan border, where more than 3,300 members of Pakistan's security
forces have been killed in the past decade, has affected army thinking,
some analysts believe. Senior officers have lost colleagues and
relatives, softening the army's singular focus on India.
"This
is a changed army," said Shaukat Javed, a former head of the
Intelligence Bureau civilian spy agency in Punjab Province. "The
mind-set has changed due to experience, and pressure."
But
for all that, there is ample evidence that parts of the military remain
wedded to jihadi proxies. In Waziristan, the army maintains close ties
to the Haqqani Network, a major player in the Afghan insurgency. In
western Baluchistan Province, it has used Sunni extremists to quell an
uprising by Baluch nationalists — even though the same extremists also
massacre minority Shiites.
And Mr.
Saeed's freedom to roam around Lahore — and, indeed, across Pakistan —
suggests some generals still believe the "good" jihadis are worth having
around.
Western intelligence
officials say Lashkar's training camps in northern Pakistan have not
been shut down. One of those camps was the training ground of David C.
Headley, an American citizen recently sentenced to prison by an American
court for his role in the Mumbai attacks.
"There's
a strategic culture of using proxies," said Stephen Tankel, an American
academic and author of a book on Lashkar-e-Taiba. "And if that's the
tool you're used to grabbing from the toolbox, it can be hard to let
go."
For all his apparent ease, Mr.
Saeed has to walk a tightrope of sorts within the jihadi firmament. His
support of the state puts him at odds with the Pakistani Taliban,
which, he claims, are secretly supported by America and India — a
familiar refrain in the right-wing media. "They want to destabilize
Pakistan," he said.
But that
position leaves Mr. Saeed vulnerable to pressure from fighters within
his own ranks who may still have Taliban sympathies. Western security
officials say Lashkar has already suffered some defections in recent
years..
"If he continues in this direction, the issue is how many people he can bring with him," Mr. Tankel said.
But
ultimately, he added, much depends on the Pakistani Army: "The army
can't dismantle these groups all at once, because of the danger of
blowback. So for now they are putting them on ice. It's too early to
tell which way they will ultimately go."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: February 7, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a former Obama administration official who is now an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. She is Shamila N. Chaudhary, not Chaudhry.
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