Pak Using Terror Groups for Strategic Purposes in Kashmir against India
A UN report has said that Pakistan’s military intelligence agency ISI continues to have close links with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and used services of the terror outfit to trigger anti-Indian passion in Kashmir and elsewhere, said media reports.
“The Pakistani military organised and supported the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan in 1996. Similar tactics were used in Kashmir against India after 1989,” said the report.
The much-awaited report is prepared by UN-appointed independent panel to probe the killing of former Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto.
The report of three-member panel concludes that such the Pakistan military has a policy of using militants as a tool for achieving its strategic purposes against its neighbours and as a result, active linkages were set up between elements of the military and the Establishment with radical Islamists at the expense of national secular forces, reports said.
The 65-page report noted that jihadi organizations are Sunni groups based largely in Pakistna’ Punjab province and the members of these outfits helped the Taliban effort in Afghanistan on behalf of the ISI and later cultivated ties with Al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban groups, reports said.
“The Pakistani military and ISI also used and supported some of these groups in the Kashmir insurgency after 1989. The bulk of the anti-Indian activity was and still remains the work of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has close ties with the ISI,” the panel headed by Chile’s UN ambassador Heraldo Munoz was quoted as saying.
“A common characteristic of these jihadi groups was their adherence to the Deobandi Sunni sect of Islam, their strong anti-Shia bias, and their use by the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir,” the report was quoted as saying.
The panel said that though many Pakistani authorities, both current and former, said that their agencies had no links with terror groups in 2007 but virtually all independent analysts provided information to the contrary and affirmed the ongoing nature of many such links, reports said.
The report said that Qari Saifullah Akhtar, one of the founders of the extremist Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI), was reportedly one of the ISI’s main links to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and is believed to have cultivated ties to Osama bin Laden, who lived in Afghanistan during that period.
“Akhtar’s one-time deputy Ilyas Kashmiri, who had ties with the Pakistani military during the Afghan and Kashmir campaigns, had been a senior aide to bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al Zawahiri,” it was quoted as saying.
“It was such links and connections between elements in the intelligence agencies and militants, which most concerned Bhutto and many others who believed that the authorities could activate these connections to harm her. Given their clandestine nature, any such connection in an attack on her is very difficult to detect or prove,” the report said.
(Based on internet reports)
