“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
“Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace,
for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man." “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
Jihad Watch : With the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) decision on Pakistan
expected to be out shortly, there is frenetic activity to try and tick
all the boxes (only in letter, not in spirit) so that Pakistan isn’t
pushed into the “Blacklist” and cut off from the international financial
markets and trade.
At one level, the Pakistani government is desperately trying to pass
new laws that ostensibly seek to tighten the anti-money laundering and
countering financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) framework, but which in fact
is going to be used less against terror financiers and money launderers
and more against politicians in the opposition. At another level,
Pakistan is trying to show that it is taking action on ground by not
only giving data on the number of cases it has booked against money
launderers and accounts of terror groups and individuals it has frozen,
but also the convictions it has secured against some leaders of one of
the deadliest terror groups – Lashkar-e-Taiba / Jamaatud Dawa (LeT
/JuD).
All the above action is supposed to convince the international
community that Pakistan is indeed draining its terrorist swamps. But
scratch the surface and it becomes clear that Pakistan is protecting the
“real” bad guys – the ones who are closely linked with the Pakistani
State, who function as auxiliaries and hit-men of the Pakistani “deep
state”, who have gained international notoriety because of their
involvement in planning and executing spectacular terror attacks in
other countries.
Among the most notorious of these terrorists is a shadowy figure who
is wanted in more than half a dozen countries for his involvement in
terrorism but who remains under the protection of the ISI – Sajid Mir.
What is shocking is not so much that Sajid Mir is being protected by the
ISI as is the fact that none of the countries against whom he has
practiced his craft of terrorism seem to be pressing for his trial and
punishment. What is even more perplexing is that fact that some of these
countries were in the forefront of holding Pakistan accountable for its
acts of omission and commission before the FATF, and yet are
soft-peddling on Pakistan’s refusal/denial to bring Sajid Mir to
justice.
Sajid Mir gained infamy not only as the man who planned and executed
the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and who manages LeT’s overseas assets
(terrorists), but even more as the chilling voice which sitting in his
control room in Karachi instructed the Lashkar terrorists in Mumbai to
shoot one of the hostages in the Chabad House in the back of her head.
The 26/11 terror strike is not the only terrorist outrage that Mir is
responsible for, though it is certainly his most spectacular attack. He
has planned and nearly carried out attacks in about half a dozen other
countries – US, Australia, France, Denmark, and the UK. He is on FBI’s
most wanted list. A French Court has convicted him in absentia. India
has demanded his extradition from Pakistan. Despite his mugshots being
available, none of the intelligence agencies have been able to locate
him. As is their wont, the Pakistanis feign complete ignorance about
Sajid Mir; a standard Pakistani response when confronted with an
inconvenient demand. This is precisely the tack they have adopted with
the Americans on the Taliban. According to the author Shuja Nawaz, every
time US officials presented evidence of Taliban and Haqqani Network
sanctuaries inside Pakistan, they were met with “blank stare”.
Sajid Mir remains a shadowy figure about whom not much is known. Even
his antecedents are fuzzy. Some reports claim that he joined the LeT at
a young age of 16 and then rose up the ranks. But other reports, which
might be circumstantially more credible, claim that he is a Pakistan
Army/ISI member/officer who has been working very closely with the LeT.
The fact that he speaks English fluently, the influence he wielded
within the LeT which was manifest by his ability to not bother too much
about the Lashkar hierarchy in deciding what he wanted to do, the extent
to which the Pakistanis have gone to protect him from any kind of
prosecution (he, along with a Major Iqbal (an ISI official), are the
only two 26/11 terror attack planners who haven’t been arrested by the
Pakistanis), the sort of security that has been provided to him (head of
state level), all suggest that he is someone special and not just
another LeT commander. He might have been deputed to the LeT, or he
might have quit the army and joined the LeT full time.
There are many other terrorists who have followed this trajectory –
Ilyas Kashmir for example. But unlike others, Sajid Mir seems to have
not allowed his addiction to jihad come in the way of his loyalty to the
Pakistan Army, which in turn has protected him ever since his face
became public. Not surprisingly, like another globally designated
terrorist Dawood Ibrahim who is another ISI favourite, Sajid Mir too has
managed to avoid the dragnet. Part of the reason for this is that the
focus of the international law enforcement and intelligence agencies has
remained fixated on the LeT/JuD chief Hafiz Saeed and some of his other
lieutenants like Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi (who has been released on bail by
the Pakistani courts) or Abdul Rehman Makki.
As a result, the lack of Pakistani action against Sajid Mir just
doesn’t figure on the radar screen; despite the fact that operational
commanders like Sajid Mir are far more dangerous and destructive than
the ideologues. He has remained elusive partly owing to Western
diffidence. In the words of an unnamed senior US law enforcement
official “Sajid Mir is too powerful and too well connected for them to
go after. We need the Pakistanis to go after the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
With Pakistan facing crunch time at FATF, it is perhaps time for Western
countries to push Pakistan to stop the deflection, deception and denial
on Sajid Mir and bring him to justice. To not doing this would
tantamount to allowing a free pass to a terrorist who has the blood of
hundreds of people, including Westerners, on his hands.