By David Lepeska
I used to be residing in New York Metropolis on September 11, 2001, and in response to that gorgeous assault I returned to varsity to check journalism. After graduating, I accepted a job on the opposite facet of the world, as a reporter on the Kashmir Observer.
Why would a reporter pushed into journalism by the 9/11 assault — perpetrated by al-Qaeda, a terrorist group led by a Saudi and dominated by Arabs, and adopted by American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — go to Kashmir for solutions? Is he lazily placing all persecuted Muslims right into a field marked “potential terrorists”? Truthful query, however the two are nearer than they seem. I’ve already talked about the 1995 kidnapping of Westerners in Kashmir by anti-American Islamist radicals. That’s simply the tip of the glacier.
In November 2002, Osama bin Laden printed a letter to the American folks wherein he defined why he had attacked the US. He talked about American help for Israel’s battle towards the Palestinians, then went on: “You supported the Russian atrocities towards us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression towards us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression towards us in Lebanon.” This is perhaps dismissed as PR — the chief of the world’s prime Islamist terror outfit seeking to develop his base and ranks by claiming to battle for all main Muslim causes. But Osama’s weren’t empty phrases. “I, myself, drove three Arab fighters into the middle of Kashmir,” jeep driver Nasir Ali instructed US journalist Philip Smucker in July 2002, referring to al-Qaeda militants arriving from Afghanistan. “A whole bunch have entered Kashmir within the final a number of months.”
The regional chief of Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence company (ISI), Mohammed Muslim, instructed Smucker there was no al-Qaeda presence in Kashmir and denounced what he noticed as an American conflict towards Islam. “The US authorities destroyed the World Commerce Middle in order that it will have an excuse to destroy Afghanistan,” Muslim stated. Many within the Muslim world pushed this conspiracy principle within the years after 9/11, and nonetheless at this time it’s heard in some circles. Even again then I used to be assured the U.S. didn’t assault itself, killing 1000’s of its personal civilians, and didn’t intend to destroy Afghanistan. However my nation was partly guilty for essentially the most profitable terrorist assault of all time — and, I’ve come to study, for the depth of the insurgency in Kashmir.
Among the many handful of books I dropped at Kashmir in 2006 was Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, which had received the Pulitzer Prize a couple of months prior. Coll particulars how america funneled weapons and cash, by way of the ISI, to the Afghan mujahideen to assist them battle the Soviet Union. In 1980, the Central Intelligence Company (CIA) spent $100 million delivery weapons to the jihadis. A number of years later that quantity hit $700 million, marking the US’ priciest covert motion of the Chilly Conflict.
But U.S. help of Islamic parts in Pakistan had begun lengthy earlier than. Within the early Nineteen Fifties, the US Info Company, a part of the State Division and abolished in 1999, despatched an official to Lahore to ask revered creator Saadat Hasan Manto to pen a contribution to its journal. Over the following few years, Manto, who was of Kashmiri heritage, wrote 9 “Letters to Uncle Sam”, as he known as them. In a single he recommended the U.S. fund parts of extremist Islam as a counter to the Soviets. “Our mullahs are one of the best antidote to Russia’s communism,” Manto wrote in 1954. “The aim of army help, so far as I perceive it, is to arm these mullahs…If this sect of mullahs is armed American-style, then the Soviet Union must choose up its spittoon from right here.”
Nonetheless sardonic, Manto’s prediction got here to fruition within the Eighties, with the US’ funding of Pakistani and Afghan mujahideen to battle off the invading Soviet military. Ghost Warsparticulars the next development of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, flush with U.S. funding and weapons, throughout the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan and after the Russians retreated. Robert Gates, deputy CIA director within the Eighties earlier than serving as Obama’s Secretary of Protection, later acknowledged the error the U.S. made in strolling away from the mujahideen. US funding helped create the Taliban and led to the primary World Commerce Middle bombing, in 1993, and later to 9/11. “I really feel a sure sense of private accountability,” Gates instructed Congress in 2007. “If we abandon these nations, as soon as we’re in there and engaged, there’s a very actual chance that we’ll pay a better value in the long run.”
By way of its ISI middlemen, the U.S. equally helped arm militants in Kashmir. By the summer time of 1988, when Kashmiris started turning to militancy, the ISI’s predominant international backers included Washington. “ISI loved an ongoing operational partnership with the CIA…with periodic entry to the world’s most refined expertise and intelligence assortment programs,” Coll writes. “The service had welcomed to Pakistan legions of volunteers from throughout the Islamic world, fighters who had been keen to pursue Pakistan’s international coverage agenda not solely in Afghanistan, however, more and more, throughout its jap borders in Kashmir, the place jihadists skilled in Afghanistan had been simply beginning to bleed Indian troops.”
When the insurgency exploded in 1989, Pakistan was prepared, thanks partially to the CIA. “Impressed by their success towards Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers introduced to [Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir] Bhutto that they had been ready to make use of the identical strategies of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir,” writes Coll:
ISI organized coaching camps for Kashmiri guerrillas in Afghanistan’s Paktia province…The Kashmiri volunteers skilled facet by facet with Arab jihadists. The Kashmir guerrillas started to floor in India-held territory with Chinese language-made Kalashnikov rifles and different weapons siphoned from the Afghan pipeline. The CIA turned apprehensive that Pakistani intelligence may additionally divert to Kashmir high-technology weapons such because the buffalo-gun sniper rifles initially shipped to Pakistan to kill Soviet army officers. America handed personal warnings to India to guard politicians and authorities officers touring in Kashmir from long-range sniper assaults.
Take into consideration that. Not solely did america finance the coaching of Kashmiri insurgents — terrorists within the view of its ally in New Delhi — it offered weaponry that was so superior it felt compelled to warn India.
The US’ failures of omission had been practically as dangerous. A number of observers have argued that President George H. W. Bush might have been capable of finish the insurgency shortly after it started had he been extra centered on resolving Kashmir somewhat than avoiding one other India-Pakistan conflict. But no actual effort was made, persevering with President Harry Truman’s coverage of non-interference in response to the preliminary emergence of the Kashmir query. After presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all tried and didn’t resolve Kashmir, conflict avoidance, somewhat than dispute decision, turned the default U.S. place. Neither the primary President Bush nor his successor, Invoice Clinton — who at one level declared Kashmir essentially the most harmful place on earth — made any actual try to maneuver Pakistan, India and Kashmir towards decision. Following the December 2001 assault on Indian parliament and the Might 2002 Kaluchak Bloodbath, the second president Bush stepped in to maintain India and Pakistan from going to conflict. Once more america had an opportunity to form a peaceable future for Kashmir. As an alternative, Bush stepped again, handing the reins to India and Pakistan together with his assertion that america couldn’t power nations to agree.
That had by no means stopped us earlier than. The US helped nurture the insurgency and bore some accountability for its crushing influence. However somewhat than working to finish it, America let Kashmir burn. “The unwillingness of the U.S. authorities to take a robust stand on Kashmir not solely makes the dispute that rather more tough to resolve,” Peter R. Lavoy argued in April 2006, shortly after writing a ebook on the 1999 Kargil battle. Lavoy would later function an advisor to presidents Obama and Trump on South Asian safety. “It additionally may have the unintended penalties of exacerbating political tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad,” he added, “presumably producing better instability inside Indian-held Kashmir.”
Kashmiris merely needed “azaadi”, or freedom — a aim that appeared to align with Bush’s repeated requires international freedom.Wasn’t American exceptionalism about encouraging the unfold of our beliefs? President Abraham Lincoln described the US as “the final greatest hope of earth”. Franklin Roosevelt, throughout World Conflict II, talked of the US’ “divine heritage”. Richard Nixon stated the US was not meant to have freedom for itself, “however to hold it to the entire world”.
As in a number of of the world’s troubled areas, Washington twisted itself up in its personal beliefs when it got here to India and Pakistan. “Bush’s counter-terrorism advisers determined that Kashmir-focused jihadi teams posed no direct menace to the U.S.,” writes Coll, including that over time the Bush administration gave Pakistan practically $10 billion in counter-terror funding with no oversight. In the meantime, Delhi talked the US-style discuss on terror to garner help for one Kashmir crackdown after one other. In June 2002, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee stated that for India to face down Pakistan must cease infiltrations and dismantle ”the infrastructure of terrorism” — echoing Bush’s phrases about al-Qaeda. For perhaps a decade, US leaders noticed Kashmiri militants as terrorists when speaking to Delhi and as freedom fighters when speaking to Islamabad. Whereas encouraging Pakistan and India to resolve Kashmir, america did an ideal deal to make sure failure.
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