Pakistan in denial

Ajmal Amir Kasab, the poor boy recruited by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Faisal Shahzad, the American college degree holder who discovered Islamism, represent two ends of a spectrum of violent jihadis groomed in Pakistan, which can no longer sidestep responsibility for being an export house of terror.

In a week in which one person of Pakistani origin has been accused of plotting New York’s most devastating terrorist attack since 9/11 and another convicted for the barbarity that Mumbai experienced on 26/11, it is pertinent to ask whether the Pakistani Islamist any more conforms to a stereotype. Consider the variations:

n Ajmal Amir Kasab comes from the seething, desperate poverty of southern Punjab. This region has in recent years become fertile ground for jihadist recruitment.

n Faisal Shahzad had a privileged background, an American college degree, a white collar job (albeit not a great career record). Till the downturn of 2008, his was the classic American immigrant success story. In the period that followed, he discovered Islamism.

n David Coleman Headley was the quintessential misfit. Born of mixed parentage, he was the white man in Pakistan and the ‘half-Paki’ in the West, the boy from a conservative Muslim household who came to America to find his mother living with her boyfriend, who could never hold a steady job and was sucked into drug running. Jihad became his vengeance on the world.

All three men have very different histories. Those who insist on seeking a ‘root cause’ for terrorism have in the samples above not one but multiple root causes — poverty, economic recession, a broken home. Throw in Kashmir and Palestine, Iraq and anti-Americanism and the number of supposed triggers just grows. However, this ignores the elephant in the room: Pakistan.
Kasab’s example is typical — the poor boy recruited by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (some say sold by his father) and fed the fantasies of Islamist supremacism. Headley’s case is atypical — a Lashkar soldier who looked white, had an American passport and insider understanding of the US intelligence matrix.
Yet there is a third category. It consists of Faisal Shahzad; it consists of Omar Sheikh, the London School of Economics student who became a jihadist in Kashmir, a warrior for the Taliban, the killer of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. This is the ‘new typical’ — Jihad Joe, the educated, upper class Pakistani who seems just so regular.
Such a person is impossible to profile or identify. Yet, detection can come only after recognition of existence. Here, one is dealing with a country in complete denial. This is no more the case of a weak political establishment in Pakistan, or a hypocritical military brass that sees Islamism as an instrument of foreign policy but resists the mullah’s incursions domestically. Those pat explanations are obsolete.
In the period since 9/11, Pakistan’s reputation as export-house of terror and base for every form of Islamist passion, as a toxic entity that could theoretically contaminate any Muslim who touches it, has become absolute. This is difficult to accept for any middle-of-the-road Pakistani. Nevertheless, it is a verity staring people in the face.
When Omar Sheikh became infamous in the aftermath of Pearl’s brutal murder, General Pervez Musharraf blamed his jihad on Britain, pointing out he was educated in London and part of a radicalised British-Pakistani community. Likewise, the Pakistani foreign minister has smugly dismissed Shahzad as an American citizen who just happened to have Pakistani ancestors. In both cases, experience in the Islamist factories of Pakistan and indoctrination by religious and military leaders of the jihad located in Pakistan, and occasionally sent out to London and other cities to find new disciples, have been conveniently sidestepped.
The 800,000 strong British-Pakistanis have been regarded as the Western community most likely to produce suicide bombers. Intelligence officials in the West already talk of the “Pakistan-isation of Al Qaeda”. As a Heritage Foundation report emphasised in 2009, “Three quarters of the most serious terrorism cases investigated by British police have links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.”
Some consider British jihad the misbegotten child of multiculturalism, a well-intentioned policy (complete with faith-based schooling) that unfortunately led to ghettoisation. The American integrative model was supposed to be superior. Even so, as the Shahzad episodes makes chillingly apparent, the jihadist impulse could catch up even very late in life.
Shahzad had obviously had a rough time professionally, having lost income and a home. This can be psychologically crippling. It took a few visits to the ‘homeland’ for it to be converted into religious hate. Easy availability of Islamist propaganda and smooth access to terror training centres — egalitarian institutions that accept a Kasab as easily as they do a Shahzad — has made Pakistan Islamism’s land of seduction. This is no more a functional nation-state. It is jihad’s Lebensraum.   
Ashok Malik is an independent writer