International Terrorism – or “IT” — Has Been Pak’s Homegrown Specialty For Over 3 Decades. Pak-Backed Terrorists Have Struck Across the World With Impunity And Very Little Consequence to the State That Uses Them as Assets.
But for the heroism of assistant sub-inspector Tukaram Omble, who, armed with just a lathi, threw himself at Ajmal Kasab amid a hail of gunfire at a check-post during the 26/11 attack on Mumbai, thus enabling his colleagues to capture the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist, Pakistan might still have managed to hoodwink the world about its depredations in India — and indeed across the globe.
For years, going back to multiple attacks on Mumbai and to the ones on Indian Parliament and Akshardham temple, Pakistan maintained a facade of deniability about its role in terror strikes in India and across the world. This was made possible because its proxies and perpetrators either died in suicide attacks or escaped. 26/11 was different.
Ajmal was captured alive even as his fellow terrorists were still massacring people — and he squealed, giving up names and coordinates of his handlers in Pakistan. There was no chance of denial, no allegations of “false flag” attacks, no insistence that it was t he work of “domestic insurgents” etc, because courageous sections of the Pakistani media confirmed the Pakistani nationality of Kasab and his herd and their affiliation to LeT. Pakistan was caught with its pants down.
From that day onwards, the finger of suspicious points to Pakistan “within five minutes” as its defenders complain. For good reason. Terrorism is Pakistan’s prime export, not just to India, but across the globe, leading to the crack that while India’s main export is information technology (IT), Pakistan’s is international terrorism (IT). The footprints and fingerprints of Pakistani terrorism are available all over the world, from London to New York, from Canada to Australia.
THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA:
As recently as Sept 2024, some two years after Pakistan got out of a FATF (Financial Action Task Force) “grey list” that implicated it for terror financing, US authorities zeroed in on Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, aka “Shahzeb Jadoon”, described by the FBI as “Pakistani national residing in Canada.” He had been posting for some months on social media about his support for ISIS, and through encrypted apps, he began scoping for material for a terrorist attack in the US.
From American undercover agents who penetrated his network, Khan sought to obtain AR-style assault rifles, ammunition, and other materials to carry out the attacks, which he would undertake after crossing over from Canada. His target was a Jewish neighborhood in New York City and he wanted to carry out the attack on Oct 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. Get some good hunting knives so we can slit their throats, he told the undercover agents, according to the US indictment filed in a New York Court. During one communication, according to the indictment filed after his capture as he was trying to cross the border, Khan noted that “if we succeed with our plan, this would be the largest attack on US soil since 9/11.”
PAKISTAN’S ROLE IN 9/11:
He is not the first Pakistani to plan a terrorist attack in America, but more of that soon. First 9/11 –so much on Osama bin Laden, so little on Pakistan.
It is now well known that OBL was eventually corned in Abbottabad, a Pakistani cantonment, in a US op right under the nose of the Pakistani military. Less well known, the long prelude to 9/11 that involved two Pakistani principals.
This correspondent has vivid memories of arriving in NYC on Feb 26th 1993. Driving from JFK airport to a hotel in midtown Manhattan, one saw a city in turmoil. A truck bomb had been detonated in the basement of the World Trade Center, with the intent, it was later established, of collapsing tower one onto tower two and bringing down both. Six people were killed, and 1,042 people were injured. This came to be known as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and it was largely forgotten after the 9/11 attack (2001) attack.
The terrorist who perpetrated the bombing was 25-year old Ramzi Yousef. He was initially identified as a Kuwaiti or an Iraqi because had entered the US on an Iraqi passport that later turned out to be forged. He was indeed born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents. In New York, he applied for US asylum and was given a new passport. By whom? The Pakistani consulate in New York, leaving no doubt of his Pakistani citizenship.
In subsequent weeks, Yousef planned the WTC-1 bombing and pulled it off with help from a variety of Middle-Eastern characters, including a blind sheik who captivated the US media. And where did Yousef escape to after the bombing? To Pakistan. Who was the chief of ISI at the time? Lt.Gen Javed Nasir, a fundamentalist terrorist-in-uniform who was later fired by Nawaz Sharif under pressure from the US — in the same vein as Lt Gen Mahmoud Ahmad, another fundamentalist who was the ISI chief during 9/11.
Yousef was eventually returned to the US by Pakistan to stand trial. The story goes that when he was being flown into Manhattan on a chopper, an FBi agent pointed to the WTC and said the towers were still standing. Yousef replied that it would not be for long, and if he had a little more money and explosive power, they would have come down.
Some eight years later on 9/11 — they did, brought down by Mohammad Atta & Co. Who was the mastermind of the attack? Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, also a Pakistani national. Also Yousef’s uncle! Literally Chacha. Yousef’s mother is Khalid Sheikh’s sister. Where was KSM captured? No surprise — Pakistan. Chacha-Bhatija are now rotting in US prisons — Yousef in Colorado and Khalid in Guantanamo. They are forgotten — as is their Pakistani nationality.
STEEPED IN BIGOTRY:
Pakistan often claims these are the acts of individuals and the govt has nothing to do with them. Or that they have captured such terrorists and handed them over to the US (never to India). But more terrorists like — Shahzeb Khan — keep crawling out of the Pakistan woodwork. They come from an ambient ecosystem in which even Pakistani cities embrace violent extremism.
This has been acknowledged by several Pakistani leaders, including an occasionally repentant Sharif Pervez Musharraf. But they couldn’t change the essential terrorist DNA that grew out of state-and military-mandated bigotry and extremism expressed by current army chief Asim Munir in a speech that preceded the Pahalgam massacre. Even Pakistani elites are stepped in it.
Take Faizal Shazad, who was arrested from New York’s Square in 2010 as he was attempting to detonate a car bomb: his father; Baharul Haq, was an Air VIce-Marshal in the Pakistan Air Force! More recently, Tahawwur Rana, extradited by the US to India for his involvement in 26/11, was a Pakistani Army doctor.
Pakistan’s other excuse is that these terrorists are Pakistani expats — Pakistani-Americans or Pakistani-Canadians or Brit-Pakistanis. But invariably, the perpetrators are either recent immigrants (Shazeb Khan came to Canada only in 2023 on a student visa) or they have close ties with Pakistan and go there for indoctrination and training. Two of the four Brit-Pakistani bombers who conducted the London bombing of 2005 travelled to Pakistan from December 2004 to Feb 2005, during which they received bomb-making training. Rizwan Farooq and Tashfeen Malik, the “Pakistani-American” couple who carried out the San Bernardino carnage that killed 14 people in California in December 2015, were also products of the Pakistani extremist ecosystem.
All this was well after Gen Musharraf had pledged to roll up terror networks after 9/11 and the Parliament attack. Incidentally, a small number of detail: the first time box-cutters were used to hijack an aircraft? Pakistani terrorists who used them to hijack IC814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar. Copy that, said the 9/11 hijackers, who also used box-cutters.
Some of the hijackers, including Mohammad Atta, visited Pakistan multiple times in 1998-1999, with the 9/11 commission noting that the country served as a “critical node” for Al-Qaeda’s operations. This includes Atta receiving a $100,000 wire transfer from Omar Saeed Sheikh, one of the three terrorists in the 1999 Kandahar hijackers got freed from a jail in Jammu and Kashmir (the other two are Maulana Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar). All three remained free — as does Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, the 26/11 mastermind — ensconced in “safe houses” in Pakistan after sham court trials that jailed them briefly to hoodwink the world (in contrast, the chacha-bhatija team of Ramzi and KSM are rotting in US prisons.
But according to Islamabad “Pakistan itself is a victim of terrorism.”
