Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Gefrustreerd door de tekortkomingen in de sociale mobiliteit?
Waar hebben we dat eerder gezien?
En is dit nog wel te benoemen als Jihad?

Groet / Cees

Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world/asia/28youth.html
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and WAQAR GILLANI February 27, 2010

LAHORE, Pakistan — Umar Kundi was his parents’ pride, an ambitious young
man from a small town who made it to medical school in the big city. It
seemed like a story of working-class success, living proof in this
unequal society that a telephone operator’s son could become a doctor.

But things went wrong along the way. On campus Mr. Kundi fell in with a
hard-line Islamic group. His degree did not get him a job, and he
drifted in the urban crush of young people looking for work. His early
radicalization helped channel his ambitions in a grander, more sinister way.

Instead of healing the sick, Mr. Kundi went on to become one of
Pakistan’s most accomplished militants. Working under a handler from Al
Qaeda, he was part of a network that carried out some of the boldest
attacks against the Pakistani state and its people last year, the police
here say. Months of hunting him ended on Feb. 19, when he was killed in
a shootout with the police at the age of 29.

Mr. Kundi and members of his circle — educated strivers who come from
the lower middle class — are part of a new generation that has made
militant networks in Pakistan more sophisticated and deadly. Al Qaeda
has harnessed their aimless ambition and anger at Pakistan’s alliance
with the United States, their generation’s most electrifying enemy.

“These are guys who use Google Maps to plan their attacks,” said a
senior Punjab Province police official. “Their training is better than
our national police academy.”

Like Mr. Kundi, many came of age in the 1990s, when jihad was state
policy — aimed at challenging Indian control in Kashmir — and jihadi
groups recruited openly in universities. Under the influence of Al
Qaeda, their energies have been redirected and turned inward, against
Pakistan’s own government and people.

That shift has fractured long-established militant networks, which were
once supported by the state, producing a patchwork of new associations
that are fluid and defy easy categorization.

“The situation now is quite confusing,” said Tariq Parvez, director of
the National Counterterrorism Authority in Islamabad, Pakistan’s
capital. “We can no longer talk in terms of organizations. Now it’s a
question of like-minded militants.”

The result has been deadly. In 2009, militant attacks killed 3,021
Pakistanis, three times as many as in 2006.

The issue is urgent. Pakistan is in the midst of a youth bulge, with
more than a million people a year pouring into the job market, and the
economy — at its current rate — is not growing fast enough to absorb
them. Only a tiny fraction choose militancy, but acute joblessness
exacerbates the risk.

A Student’s Education

Mr. Kundi’s journey and the ways he veered off course parallel
Pakistan’s own recent history. Born to Pashtun parents, he grew up in a
small town in southwestern Punjab, where camels lumber in slow clumps,
and sand stings the eyes. His father’s monthly income of $255 put them
at the lower edge of Pakistan’s middle class. But life still took
patience. Meat was a luxury. His father could afford to visit him in
medical school only once.

He brought that past — part shyness, part shame — with him to college in
Faisalabad, the third-biggest city in Pakistan. The city was an
explosion of things modern. Traffic jams. Fancy restaurants. Uncovered
women. For young people from small towns, unfamiliar with city life, the
atmosphere can arouse a rigid defensiveness, said Mughees-uddin Sheikh,
a dean at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan’s
second-largest city.

“The student is tempted, but he doesn’t understand it because he wasn’t
educated,” said Mr. Sheikh. “He’s been deprived of things like this.”

To ease the adjustment, young people join student groups, which, like
powerful inner-city gangs, help them navigate life — how to use a bank,
which mosque to pray in — but also offer protection.

When Mr. Kundi arrived at Punjab Medical College in the late 1990s, he
chose a group with an Islamic focus, according to a classmate and
friend, Muhammad, who asked that his last name not be used because he
feared association with a militant. It was a typical choice for students
from devout families, who want their sons to stay out of trouble in the
city.

The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, ran charities and prayer meetings. It also
offered training for jihad in Kashmir. Lashkar’s blend of adventure and
patriotism appealed to restless young men. It even had an office on
campus: Room 12D.

Such jihadi groups had become part of mainstream society in Pakistan in
the 1980s, when the United States was financing Islamic radicals
fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and when an American-supported
Pakistani general, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, empowered hard-line mullahs and
injected Islam into school textbooks.

By the 1990s, recruiters for jihad in Kashmir were holding rallies on
public university campuses. After 2001, Lashkar was driven underground,
but it continues to operate through a charity wing. American, Indian and
Pakistani officials say it carried out the attacks on hotels and other
landmarks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008.

It is the lower middle class in Pakistan that is most vulnerable to
radicalization, according to Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan
Institute for Peace Studies. They consume virulently anti-American
media. They are recruited aggressively by Islamic student groups in
public universities, which are attended almost exclusively by lower- and
middle-class youth.

“They’re politically conscious, but it’s not mature,” Mr. Rana said.
“They have big problems, but when they try to solve them, they get
confused.”

Mr. Kundi threw himself into Lashkar’s activities, working summers at an
eye clinic in Kashmir, his friend Muhammad said. He held Koran-reading
sessions. He developed a close relationship with the group’s spiritual
leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Mr. Kundi was a skilled recruiter, even
winning over a secular classmate whose family lived in Canada.

“He had logic for every single point,” Muhammad said. “He could convince
anyone.”

Despite his zeal for jihad, it was a relatively quiet time in Pakistan.
The war against the Soviets was long over, and most of the country’s
jihadi groups were drifting. All that changed when the United States
invaded Afghanistan in 2001, jolting young Pakistani jihadis who saw it
as a war against Muslims.

“That was the beginning,” said a security official in Karachi. “They
went from small local targets, to a much bigger global one, the United
States.”

When Al Qaeda came to Pakistan, Mr. Kundi did not have to go far to find
it. The American invasion had pushed many of its leaders over the
border, including Abu Zubaydah, a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner
circle. In 2002, he surfaced in Allied Hospital in Faisalabad, where Mr.
Kundi was working. He was seeking treatment and preaching against
Pakistan’s government for supporting the United States. His audience
loved it, Muhammad said.

“Every doctor at the hospital was against the government,” he said.
“They saw Abu Zubaydah as the hero of Muslims.”

Lashkar’s activities now seemed small, and embarrassingly
pro-government. Mr. Kundi began to argue with Mr. Saeed, the group’s
leader, picking fights with him in public about Lashkar’s mission. The
United States, he argued, was killing Muslims, and Lashkar was doing
nothing for them.

In a stinging insult, Muhammad recalled, Mr. Kundi began calling Mr.
Saeed “the B team of the government,” a reference to the group’s
not-so-secret connection to the state.

His frustration coincided with a bitter discovery. His father, who had
retired, could not pay for schooling beyond Mr. Kundi’s basic medical
degree. A pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and a family wedding had sapped the
family’s savings, Mr. Kundi’s father, Dilawar, said in an interview.
Without a specialization, Mr. Kundi faced a salary at a public hospital
of less than $100 a month, too low to support a wife and children, a
humiliating prospect.

“ ‘I’ve earned a degree, but I’m a zero,’ ” Muhammad recalled him saying.

His father begged him to return and open a practice in their hometown.
Mr. Kundi refused.

It was 2005, the year he disappeared.

Life as a Militant

Conventional theory on militant organizations says that groups have
hierarchies, members and sometimes territory. But in Pakistan after
Sept. 11, 2001, those lines blurred. Of the half a dozen groups that
were active in Punjab in the 1990s, many had splintered by the middle of
the next decade, divided by differences over, among other things,
whether jihad required attacking the Pakistani state.

Now, most acts of terrorism are carried out by loose associations of
individual militants, making militancy more fluid.

“It’s more about networks than formal organizations now,” said an
American defense official who studies the issue. “Their attacks are
focused on aspects of the state in a way they haven’t been ever before.”

While the Pakistani Taliban have captured imaginations and headlines,
many law enforcement officials say they believe that militancy in
Pakistan is much more diffuse.

According to the police investigation, Mr. Kundi was one of eight
jihadis under a man named Sheik Issa al-Masri, Arabic for “the
Egyptian.” Most were born around 1980 and had come to jihad after the
Sept. 11 attacks.

They moved between cities in Punjab and Waziristan, an area near the
Afghan border where militants from Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other
groups have set up bases.

They came together for attacks — on the Lahore office of Pakistan’s spy
agency, on two police training academies and on the Sri Lankan cricket
team — but more often for crimes to pay for their militant activities.

In Faisalabad, Mr. Kundi extorted a textile mill owner. In Lahore, his
friend Asif Mehmoud stole cars. According to a police interrogation of
Mr. Mehmoud, one kidnapping that brought $60,000 was split among
themselves and Sheik Issa.

In an indication of how fluid their lives were, Mr. Mehmoud, a graduate
of Lahore’s most prestigious engineering university, also held a string
of ordinary jobs, as a repairman for textile equipment, a welding
instructor in a cutlery institute, a worker in a call center. His résumé
lists two hobbies: cooking and current affairs.

Sheik Issa, who is on the United States’ most-wanted list, provided the
early intellectual justification for attacking Pakistan, a development
the American defense official described as “very significant.” It was a
common approach for Al Qaeda in other Muslim countries, but a sharp
departure for Pakistan, whose militants had fought Soviets, Indians in
Kashmir and Pakistani Shiites, but had never gone all-out against the
state itself.

“Sheik Issa said the Pakistani Army has become the well-wisher of
America,” stated a police interrogation report, citing a 29-year-old
member of the network arrested last year. “It’s mandatory that we should
give maximum losses to the agencies of Pakistan. This is also jihad.”

Their strikes were skillful. In last year’s attack against the Sri
Lankan cricket team, led by another educated young man from a
working-class family, a 29-year-old nursing assistant, Aqeel Ahmed, only
three top people out of about 14 attackers knew the nature of the
target, according to a police official who investigated the attack. The
rest believed that the bus they were ambushing held an American delegation.

Their plans were ambitious. A computer memory stick found on a militant
linked to Mr. Ahmed and killed last fall in a shootout with the police
in the southern Punjab town of Dera Ghazi Khan contained plans to
destroy bridges and railroads and to strike at the heart of the
Pakistani state, its military. The language was in code: “Lentils” meant
aluminum paste. “Wheat” was fertilizer.

“GHQ is an important task — do it immediately,” said the voice on the
memory stick, referring to the military’s headquarters. “Don’t wait.”

A Powerful Addiction

When the attack on the army headquarters unfolded last October, Mr.
Ahmed, the nursing assistant, was at the center of it. His father,
Nazir, watched it on television. A photograph of his son’s face flashed
on the screen. It was the first glimpse he had had of his boy since he
disappeared in 2007. He froze, overcome with shock and shame. “My
muscles were not with me,” Mr. Ahmed said in an interview in November.

Since then, a question has tormented him. His son earned A’s in high
school, had a decent salary in a military hospital and received spending
money from an uncle in Canada. How could he have gone so wrong?

A Pakistani military psychiatrist is trying to answer that question. In
a study of 24 young men who were involved in terrorist attacks in
Pakistan, the psychiatrist, Brig. Mowadat Hussain Rana, has found that
they tend to be the younger or middle siblings in families of six or
more children. The households are not always poor but are often violent,
and the youngsters get lost in the chaos.

“He’s that boy who is not in a rigorous system of rule setting,”
Brigadier Rana said in an interview in Rawalpindi. “He becomes someone
who drifts, who spends afternoons hitting stray dogs, and no one notices.”

His parents, at their wits’ end, take him to a mullah, hoping to instill
discipline, the theory goes. The two develop a close relationship,
sometimes even sexual, giving the boy the attention he has long craved.
The mullah then introduces him to others, men who make him feel
important, as if he is part of something bigger than himself.

Of the 24 militants in the study, about a third attended college, though
not all graduated.

But socio-economic theories explain only so much. For Mr. Kundi, an
emotional young man with thwarted ambitions, militancy had a
psychological pull. Mr. Parvez of the National Counterterrorism
Authority said militants he had interviewed called jihad an addiction, a
habit that made them feel powerful in a world that ignored them.

“Out there I’m a useless guy, unemployed and cursed by my family,” one
militant said. “Here I’m a commander. My words have weight.”

The police in Punjab Province arrested about seven young militants last
year who they say were connected to Mr. Kundi, weakening two groups,
they said.

Since then, attacks in Pakistan’s main cities have dropped sharply. But
militants’ capacity for regeneration has surprised the authorities
before, and a deeper fix would be tackling some of Pakistan’s social
problems, which the country’s political elite, preoccupied by power
struggles, has ignored.

The last time Muhammad saw Mr. Kundi they were sitting together on a
bench outside Allied Hospital in Faisalabad. A scruffy old man walked
by, hunched over a cane. The man’s death, Mr. Kundi said, would be
unimportant. His own, in contrast, would have meaning.

But did it? Muhammad disapproved of Mr. Kundi’s choice, because it led
to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. But he understood it. Mr.
Kundi wanted badly to be important. Now, in a way, he is.

“He applied his mind,” Muhammad said. “He took what society offered.”

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