Allure of ISIS for Pakistanis Is on the Rise

Across Pakistan, the black standard of the Islamic State has been popping up all over.

From urban slums to Taliban strongholds, the militant group’s logo and name have appeared in graffiti, posters and pamphlets. Last month, a cluster of militant commanders declared their allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State.

Such is the influence of the Islamic State’s steamroller success in Iraq and Syria that, even thousands of miles away, security officials and militant networks are having to reckon with the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Its victories have energized battle-weary militants in Pakistan. The ISIS brand offers them potent advantages, analysts say — an aid to fund-raising and recruiting, a possible advantage over rival factions and, most powerfully, a new template for waging jihad.

Although the Islamic State is not operational in Pakistan, just its symbolic presence is ample cause for concern. It is there, after all, that Al Qaeda was founded in the 1980s, followed by other extremist ideologies that easily found the means and support to carry out international attacks.

“It doesn’t matter that Daish has not yet established its presence in Pakistan — it has already changed the dynamics of militancy here,” said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, using the group’s Arabic acronym. “Our groups were in crisis; now Daish has provided them with a powerful framework that is transforming their narrative.”

During his visit to Washington this week, the new Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, assured his American hosts that the Islamic State would not be allowed to take root in Pakistan. Instead, officials say, local groups are manipulating its name to their own ends.

When Islamic State posters appeared on electricity poles in Lahore, the hometown of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, this month, the police blamed it on sectarian militant groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. “They are just using the Daish name to intimidate Shiites,” said Ijaz Shafi Dogar, a police commander.

Even nonjihadist groups have seized upon the potency of the Islamic State brand. In Karachi, secular politicians have claimed that Islamic State graffiti shows how militants are slipping into the city amid an influx of Pashtun migrants — a contention angrily rebutted by Pashtun leaders.

“It is totally exaggerated, and an attempt to slur our community,” said Abdul Razzaq, a community leader.

But inside the splintering network of the Pakistani Taliban, the Islamic State phenomenon has had a very real effect as a powerful catalyst for tensions.

As a punishing military offensive against militant cells in the North Waziristan enters its sixth month, the Islamic State has highlighted to militant leaders the shortcomings of their own insurgency and provided an outlet for dissent.

The ISIS cause became openly divisive in October when a group of six commanders led by Sheikh Maqbool, a former Taliban spokesman, openly pledged loyalty to the Islamic State. “A large number of mujahedeen are with us,” said Abu Zar Khurassani, a senior figure in the breakaway faction. “Soon we will decide on how to help the Islamic State.”

The split was partly a product of simmering disputes inside the Taliban leadership, said a Taliban commander in Peshawar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. But, he added, many fighters were inspired by the dramatic video images of Mr. Baghdadi, draped in a black cloak, declaring a new caliphate.

He presents a stark contrast with the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who has been nearly invisible since American airstrikes drove him from Afghanistan 13 years ago.

“The mujahedeen are raising questions about how we can follow someone whose presence has not been confirmed for the past decade, except for greetings at Eid,” said the commander, referring to an annual Islamic holiday. “We don’t even know if he’s dead or alive.”

Although the Islamic State has extended its franchise and resources to at least one other foreign militant movement, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which is battling Egypt in Sinai, such recognition has not been publicly granted to any Pakistan-based groups. In a video message, Mr. Maqbool, the breakaway Taliban commander, said he had tried to reach the Islamic State over the summer, using Arab intermediaries, but had yet to receive a reply.

Yet there are also signs that the Islamic State’s leadership is aware of its Pakistani constituency and wishes to pander to it.

In the summer, the Islamic State publicly demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist serving an 86-year prison term in the United States for her part in an attack on Americans in Afghanistan, in exchange for the American journalists James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, who were later beheaded.

“That’s quite important,” said Zahid Hussain, author of “The Scorpion’s Tail,” a book about the rise of Islamist militancy in Pakistan. “It shows they knew who Aafia Siddiqui was, and that they wanted to have some kind of influence on the Pakistan groups.”

In fact, there are important connections, historic and current, between the jihadist fronts in Pakistan and the Middle East.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant commander killed by American forces in Iraq in 2006, lived in Pakistan and Afghanistan for long spells during the 1990s and early 2000s. The eruption of civil war in Syria in 2011 drew a steady traffic of fighters from militant groups, both foreign and local, based in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.

“The linkages are old,” said one senior Pakistani security official in Peshawar, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “They went quietly — not in droves but in ones and twos.”

Recruiters draw on Pakistan’s broad pool of extremist and sectarian militant groups; most recently Saudi-funded groups have recruited fighters from Baluchistan Province, where violence against Shiites is high, said Mr. Hussain, the analyst.

Some fear those fighters could return from the Middle East imbued with an invigorated sense of purpose — and money from Iraqi oil fields — to further stoke Pakistan’s own wars.

“We don’t discount the emergence of a new militant front in the region that has a direct nexus with Islamic State,” the security official in Peshawar said.

Tentative contacts have begun, according to some intelligence reports. In an internal letter last month, officials with the Home Department of Sindh Province warned that an Islamic State representative from Uzbekistan had appointed Abid Kahot, a militant commander based in Rawalpindi, to draw Pakistani groups into the Islamic State’s orbit. The letter was seen by The New York Times, but its authenticity could not be confirmed.

Still, other Pakistani officials are skeptical that the Islamic State could change much in a country that has already suffered years of suicide bombings, beheadings, drone strikes and several tens of thousands of deaths. “In tactical terms, it would change nothing,” said one government official in northwestern Pakistan.

The last jihadist conglomerate group to create such a frisson among Pakistani militants was Al Qaeda, which remains the predominant foreign group in the country. But its ranks in the tribal areas have been hit by more than 400 American drone strikes in the past decade. And the messages from its leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, mostly in lengthy and static video and audio recordings, look dated alongside the nimble social media of the Islamic State.

Apparently seeking to bolster his support in the region, Mr. Zawahri announced a new franchise, named Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, in September. This month, the group’s spokesman, Usama Mahmood, called on rival jihadist groups in Syria to unite against the United States. And on Friday, the Qaeda branch in Yemen condemned the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate as a divisive power grab.

Failure to face up to the threat of the Islamic State could pose a greater danger to Pakistan than Al Qaeda did, the English-language newspaper Dawn warned in a recent editorial. “Miss the warning signs now, or fail to deny it space within Pakistan,” it said, “and it may not be long before I.S. becomes the mother of all militant problems.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/world/asia/isis-pakistan-militants-taliban-jihad.html

Pakistan police take harsh justice to the streets: ‘Mostly we get the right people’

Stories about cornered criminals coming to sticky ends in shootouts with police are so routine in Pakistan that newspapers rarely bother with more than the few sentences that recorded the death of Mutabar Khan.

The 25-year-old preacher was killed in May after he and an accomplice apparently opened fire on police who had interrupted them as they were robbing a shipping container, according to a cursory report in the Daily Janbaz, a neighbourhood paper in Karachi.

The news, illustrated with a grisly photo of the dead man’s bloodied face, was a shock to his family. But it was not a complete surprise.

They had been dreading that he might be killed in what in Pakistan is known as an “encounter” with police ever since plainclothes officers launched an early-morning raid on their home in a slum area not far from the city’s port.

“They raided the house, shone torches in our face and took him away,” said Mansoor, one of Mutabar’s brothers. “We started visiting every police station but they all said: ‘We don’t have this guy.’

“We were told maybe the agencies have him,” he added, referring to Pakistan’s various, shadowy civilian and military intelligence outfits.

Death by police encounter is a nationwide phenomenon, but has become more common in Karachi, where police are under pressure to crack down on criminal gangs, street toughs controlled by political parties and Taliban-affiliated terrorists who have made Pakistan’s economic capital one of the most turbulent cities in Asia.

One of the measures of success used by police is how many terrorists they claim to have killed, which was more than 200 in September.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), 267 people died in police encounters between September 2013 and this June.

“Everyone knows most of these encounters are fake,” said Akhtar Baloch, a Karachi-based member of the HRCP. “It is always the same – the victims are picked up by ununiformed men, tortured for information and then killed in an encounter.”

When Khan’s body was finally returned to his family he not only had more than a dozen bullet wounds, but also a damaged eye and broken arm.

Rao Khalid, station house officer of the nearby Keamari police station, said Khan was associated with an armed wing of a political party, had been involved in extortion rackets, and had been charged under anti-terrorism laws. He denied the police covered up extrajudicial killings with tales of gunfights.

“Every citizen in Pakistan has the right to self-defence and every time we raid a terrorist hideout they definitely retaliate,” he said.

The occasional death of suspects already taken into custody could be explained, he said, by the fact that sometimes such people were taken along to the raids and were subsequently injured.

“Sometimes the informant also gets shot and people think it is a fake encounter,” he claimed.

But speaking privately, senior police officers say bogus “encounters” are the only way to take dangerous criminals and militants off the streets. They say a weak court system, overseen by easily intimidated judges, almost never convicts such men.

“Sometimes to fight monsters you have to become a monster yourself,” said one of Karachi’s most senior policemen.

Police say they are at war with Karachi’s militant groups, particularly the Pakistani Taliban, which was responsible for the vast majority of the 130 policemen killed in the past eight months.

Among the senior figures targeted was Chaudhry Aslam Khan, the popular police chief who revelled in his reputation as Karachi’s Dirty Harry, and who was killed in a suicide car-bomb attack in January.

The Pakistani Taliban said at the time that the killing was intended to avenge Aslam’s involvement in “killing Taliban prisoners in CID cells in Karachi”.

“He was an encounter specialist, there were many complaints against him,” said Baloch of the HRCP. “Maybe for some people he was a hero but he was a killer and kidnapper.”

Encounter killings have risen since a military-backed operation launched last year by a newly elected government to impose order on Karachi. “Most of the time we get the right people, although there is always room for misjudgment,” said the senior police officer.

But given the near-total impunity enjoyed by the police it is not clear whether all the people killed in encounters are genuine threats.

Mutabar Khan’s family claim he had no connection with criminal or militant groups. His focus in life was his small shop and the months-long trips he would make around the country to proselytise alongside members of Tablighi-Jamaat, a preaching group dedicated to spreading an austere form of Islam.

The family suspect he was targeted after falling out with a gang who had been harassing a restaurant owner. Despite a mediation effort by local elders, the family believes Khan’s enemies fed false information to police.

Crime reporters say most of those killed were members of banned sectarian or militant groups.

One group that is far less likely to see its members killed in encounters is the militant wing of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the political party representing the descendants of Urdu-speaking Muslims who moved from India to Pakistan at partition.

Few police officers wish to cross a party that has maintained a firm grip on the city through violence and through a political machine that controls nearly all of Karachi’s parliamentary seats.

In the early 1990s the government sent the army into Karachi to brutally crack down on the group.

“On the list of encounter killings there will be very, very few MQM,” said the senior police officer. “There is a good reason behind it – all the police officers who were involved in the operation against the MQM in 1992 were all later killed.”

Khan’s poor family of factory and dock workers said they lacked any such influence, and that it had not even occurred to them to stage a protest. “We are not associated with any political party,” said Mansoor Khan. “We don’t know about these things. We just picked the body up for the funeral and brought him home.”

source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/17/encounters-pakistan-police-justice-streets-gangs-terrorists-karachi

Attacking and Defending Indus Civilization Language – Cultural Chauvinism or Rampant Racism

written by Shayan Khan

Many experts in south Asia and elsewhere believe that symbols and marks inscribed on seals and other artifacts found here represent an as yet undeciphered language. Arguing it may be the predecessor of one of several contemporary south Asian argots, these experts say it is proof of a literate Indian society that existed more than 4,000 years ago.
However, recently experts based in the US have put forward another theory claiming that although the symbols may contain information, they are not a true language. They claim the judgement of their counterparts in south Asia may be swayed by regional nationalism.
The Indus civilisation in its heyday covered more than 500,000 square miles and lasted, during what experts term its “mature phase”, from 2,600 till 1900 BCE. The ruins, 100 miles south-west of the Pakistani city Lahore, the ruins were rediscovered in the early part of the 19th century.
The skills of its residents – at least in terms of making bricks that could endure centuries – were revealed by two British engineers, John and William Brunton, who were building the East Indian Railway Company line to connect Lahore and Karachi and needed ballast for their track. The engineers later wrote that locals told them of well-made bricks from an ancient ruined city that the villagers had made use of. With little concern for preserving the ruins, huge numbers of the Indus-era bricks were reduced to rubble and used to support the tracks heading west.
In the early 20th century, excavation of Harappa proceeded along with that of the other Indus city at Mohenjo-daro, in the south of Pakistan, and it was at that time many of the seals now on display in museums containing symbols and images of animals were discovered. And they have continued to beguile, fascinate and frustrate scientists, causing a running controversy that has played out on internet message boards, scientific papers and at academic conferences.
Asian experts believe that the Indus script may have been a forerunner of so-called Dravidian languages, such as Tamil, spoken today in southern India and Sri Lanka. In addition to technical clues, the continued existence of a Dravidian language in modern Pakistan – Brahvi, which is spoken by people in parts of Balochistan – supports this idea. Some enthusiastic nationalists have even claimed that the script may be an early Indo-European language and that remnants of it may even exist in Sanskrit, an ancient language that is the root of many present languages in north India, including Hindi. It has even been claimed the Indus script belonged to metalsmiths, and others believe it died out with the city of Harappa itself and gave rise to no successor.
Part of the problem for the experts is that, unlike for those who cracked the hieroglyphics of Egypt, there is no equivalent of the Rosetta stone, the slab of granite-like rock discovered in 1799 that contained Egyptian and Greek text. In the 1950s, academic interest in Mayan hieroglyphics intensified when experts began to study modern spoken Mayan, but for the Indus scholars there is no agreement on which, if any, modern language is the successor to their script.
In 2004, the debate was jolted into a war of words after three American scholars claimed the Indus symbols were not a language at all. In a paper provocatively subtitled “The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilisation”, they said there was insufficient evidence that the symbols constituted a proper language. They pointed to various factors: that there was no single long piece of text; that there was disagreement over the number of actual symbols and that other well-organised societies had been illiterate. The symbols, they argued, may well contain information in the same way that an image of a knife and fork together might represent a roadside eatery but they were not a language that could record speech.
The theory ensued an uproar from the sub-continent, who denounced the theory as a racist indulgence. This led to counter-research and within a couple of years a team of Indian scientists ran computer programmes which led them to conclude the symbols almost certainly constitute a language. Central to their claims was the theory of “conditional entropy”, or the measure of randomness in any sequence. Because of linguistic rules – such as in English the letter Q is almost always followed by a U – in natural languages the degree of randomness is less than in artificial languages.
In a rebuttal the American team hit back denouncing Indian team’s conclusions and methodology.

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