:: Farrukh Dhondy

Deadliest terror is foreign-returned

Farrukh Dhondy

April.4 : "The apple of my eye —

Fruit through which the worms crawl…"

From Disappointments by Bachchoo

Major General Faisal Alavi, former head of the commandos in Pakistan, assassinated last year by other Army elements afraid of what he knew of their corruption and collusion with the Islamicists and what he would do about it, spoke to the British secret services a few months before his death. The talks were not public or publicised. I heard about the gist of them from his sister Lady Nadira Naipaul.

Alvi said that the Islamicist within Pakistan were either tribal and part of the Taliban and centrally organised or they were peasant boys, brain-washed by radical fundamentalist murder groups and set loose to kill and maim. The Taliban could never win Pakistan because the country did not want to be Talibanised and would, whatever stance the Army took, revolt against such an imposition.

About the murder-squadwallahs, the sort who attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team and the terror team that attacked the Police Academy in Lahore this week, incidents that happened after his death, he was confident that they could be wiped out if the political will to do so was there. He told the British security service that the terrorists born or brought up in Britain, the descendants of Mirpuri, Bangladeshi, Somali or other immigrants, the namak haramis of Britain, were much more dangerous.

The peasant boys, with a few months’ training by the terror outfits and the promise of a couple of lakhs of rupees, could be wiped out tomorrow if the politicians had the will. These mercenaries were uneducated, unable to formulate strategy or change it as the unpredictable situations of siege, leaks of intelligence and counter-attack require. They are fodder. Witness the likes of Qutub who was captured by the Mumbai Police when his Lashkar outfit invaded the city and murdered 168 people. The man is not exactly General Rommel or Fidel Castro. He is a hapless brainwashed human animal, trained to kill strangers meaninglessly.

The opposite specimen, held in Pakistani jails at present, is bred — Omar Sheikh who kidnapped Daniel Pearl and had him murdered on world-webbed video. This Omar Sheikh is a British ingrate, brought up in a public school and then admitted to the London School of Economics, a boy from the London suburbs whose father was made rich enough by Britain to afford a house in a street in which the London middle classes used to live.

General Alvi was making a distinction between the foot soldiers of the Islamicist revolution and those who would be its network of brains.

As per the evidence today, the Osama men are all professionals trained in the skills that the Western world has given them. In Pakistan they are the ex-officers of the Army which is trained and has the traditions of the British Raj. They are, as citizens of Pakistan, born and indoctrinated into Islam. They then, as elites, pass through the corrupt fabric of an Army which has usurped power in the country for more years than was necessary and have tasted the fruits of that power. These officers know that America enriched their Army and them, first when Nehru’s India seemed to be aligned with the Soviet Union during the cold war years and later when the US armed and set loose the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then came the Taliban phase in which the Americans paid for Pakistan to convert itself into a base for the export of fundamentalist militant philosophy, guerrilla warfare and hegemony.

The Afghans and the tribals needed no instructions in insurrection or guerrilla warfare. Their history has long been one of absorbing or defeating invaders or simply watching them pass from Samarkand and points north through the Khyber. Left to themselves they would need nothing but money and armaments from the Pakistani Army cadres. And left to themselves they would never conceive an international jihadist mission. They would be content to rule their country, impose Sharia law as they or their mullahs interpret it, and get on with oppressing their women and tending to their goats and lads as they have done for thousands of years.

Yes, there was in Afghanistan an aspiration to urbanise, modernise, even democratise and join the contemporary world, which emerged in the brief period of "communist" ascendancy. It was crushed by American idiocy and Pakistani compliance with the wrong strategy.

But the Afghans weren’t left to themselves. They became the hub of a conflict when, attracted by their fundamentalism, Osama and his gang sought refuge there. Afghanistan became the arena of conflict after Osama launched his jihad, on 9/11, from there and Pakistan remained the dressing room, the training ground of universal jihad.

It is to Pakistan that the namak haram Britishers go. These are all "educated" boys, if the definition of "education is having passed through school and having been chosen as part of the 16 per cent of British who go on to any form of meaningful higher education. Very many of them are computer operators, programmers or the like. Very many are chemists, biologists and some are even medical students. Very, very few are students of history, theology, literature or any intellectual discipline that would give them the tools and the inclination to challenge the dictates of doctrine which they pick up from student societies and then from virulent preachers inside or outside "radical" mosques.

It is now estimated that 4,000 of these jihadi recruits from Britain are actively fighting British and American troops on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

My advice to them is that that is a dead-end for their cause. Even if the Taliban win that conflict — and we all know that no invading power has ever triumphed in that terrain — it will never be a launching pad for international jihad or the universal Islamicist state they want. They would be well advised to stay in Britain and try and create havoc and murder innocent people here. They wouldn’t win the Universal Caliphate, but they’d get more press coverage.

But then who am I to hand out advice to these hardened frustrates? It may be that as Taliban valiants are provided with wives and women without having to woo or win them. In a British club if you went up to a woman you fancied and said, "I’m an Islamic fundamentalist and you belong to me", you’d probably get a slap you wouldn’t forget.