[Mr. Saeed’s very public
life seems more than just an act of mocking defiance against the Obama
administration and its bounty, analysts say. As American troops prepare to
leave Afghanistan next door, Lashkar is at a crossroads, and its fighters’ next
move — whether to focus on fighting the West, disarm and enter the political
process, or return to battle in Kashmir — will depend largely on Mr. Saeed.]
By Declan Walsh
 |
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“I move about like an ordinary person — that’s my
style,” said
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. “My fate is in the hands
of God, not
America.”
|
LAHORE, Pakistan — Ten million dollars does not seem to buy much in this bustling
Pakistani city. That is the sum the United States is offering for
help in convicting Hafiz
Muhammad Saeed, perhaps the country’s best-known jihadi leader. Yet
Mr. Saeed lives an open, and apparently fearless, life in a middle-class
neighborhood here.
“I move about like an
ordinary person — that’s my style,” said Mr. Saeed, a burly 64-year-old,
reclining on a bolster as he ate a chicken supper. “My fate is in the hands of
God, not America.”
Mr. Saeed is the
founder, and is still widely believed to be the true leader, of Lashkar-e-Taiba,
the militant group that carried out the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, in which
more than 160 people, including six Americans, were killed. The United Nations
has placed him on a terrorist list and imposed sanctions on his group. But few
believe he will face trial any time soon in a country that maintains a perilous
ambiguity toward jihadi militancy, casting a benign eye on some groups, even as
it battles others that attack the state.
Mr. Saeed’s very public
life seems more than just an act of mocking defiance against the Obama
administration and its bounty, analysts say. As American troops prepare to
leave Afghanistan next door, Lashkar is at a crossroads, and its fighters’ next
move — whether to focus on fighting the West, disarm and enter the political
process, or return to battle in Kashmir — will depend largely on Mr. Saeed.
At his Lahore compound —
a fortified house, office and mosque — Mr. Saeed is shielded not only by his
supporters, burly men wielding Kalashnikovs outside his door, but also by the
Pakistani state. On a recent evening, police officers screened visitors at a
checkpoint near his house, while other officers patrolled an adjoining park,
watching by floodlight for intruders.
His security seemingly
ensured, Mr. Saeed has over the past year addressed large public meetings and
appeared on prime-time television, and is now even giving interviews to Western
news media outlets he had previously eschewed.
He says that he wants to
correct “misperceptions.” During an interview with The New York Times at his
home last week, Mr. Saeed insisted that his name had been cleared by the
Pakistani courts. “Why does the United States not respect our judicial system?”
he asked.
Still, he says he has
nothing against Americans, and warmly described a visit he made to the United
States in 1994, during which he spoke at Islamic centers in Houston, Chicago
and Boston. “At that time, I liked it,” he said with a wry smile.
During that stretch, his
group was focused on attacking Indian soldiers in the disputed territory of
Kashmir — the fight that led the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate to help establish Lashkar-e-Taiba in 1989. But that battle died
down over the past decade, and Lashkar began projecting itself through its
charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which runs a tightly organized network of
hospitals and schools across Pakistan.
The Mumbai attacks
propelled Lashkar-e-Taiba to notoriety. But since then, Mr. Saeed’s provocations
toward India have been largely verbal. Last week he stirred anger there by
suggesting that Bollywood’s highest-paid actor, Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim,
should move to Pakistan. In the interview, he said he prized talking over
fighting in Kashmir.
“The militant struggle
helped grab the world’s attention,” he said. “But now the political movement is
stronger, and it should be at the forefront of the struggle.”
Pakistan analysts
caution that Mr. Saeed’s new openness is no random occurrence, however. “This
isn’t out of the blue,” said Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former Obama
administration official and an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm.
“These guys don’t start talking publicly just like that.”
What it amounts to,
however, may depend on events across the border in Afghanistan, where his group
has been increasingly active in recent years. In public, Mr. Saeed has been a
leading light in the Defense of Pakistan Council, a coalition of right-wing
groups that lobbied against the reopening of NATO supply routes through
Pakistan last year. More quietly, Lashkar fighters have joined the battle,
attacking Western troops and Indian diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan,
intelligence officials say.
The question now is what
will happen to them once American troops leave. One possibility is a return to
Lashkar’s traditional battleground of Kashmir, risking fresh conflict between
nuclear-armed Pakistan and India.
But a more hopeful
possibility, floated by some Western and Pakistani officials, is that Mr. Saeed
would lead his group further into politics, and away from militancy.
“When there are no
Americans in Afghanistan, what will happen?” said Mushtaq Sukhera, a senior
officer with the Punjabi police who is running a fledgling demobilization
program for Islamist extremists. “It’s an open question.”
A shift could be risky
for Mr. Saeed: Some of his fighters have already split from Lashkar in favor of
other groups that attack the Pakistani state. And much will depend on the
advice of his military sponsors.
For their part,
Pakistan’s generals insist they have abandoned their dalliance with jihadi
proxy groups. In a striking speech in August, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani, said the country’s greatest threat came from domestic extremism.
“We as a nation must stand united against this threat,” he said. “No state can
afford a parallel system of governance and militias.”
Five years of
near-continuous battle against the Pakistani Taliban along the Afghan border,
where more than 3,300 members of Pakistan’s security forces have been killed in
the past decade, has affected army thinking, some analysts believe. Senior
officers have lost colleagues and relatives, softening the army’s singular
focus on India.
“This is a changed
army,” said Shaukat Javed, a former head of the Intelligence Bureau civilian
spy agency in Punjab Province. “The mind-set has changed due to experience, and
pressure.”
But for all that, there
is ample evidence that parts of the military remain wedded to jihadi proxies.
In Waziristan, the army maintains close ties to the Haqqani Network, a major
player in the Afghan insurgency. In western Baluchistan Province, it has used
Sunni extremists to quell an uprising by Baluch nationalists — even though the
same extremists also massacre minority Shiites.
And Mr. Saeed’s freedom
to roam around Lahore — and, indeed, across Pakistan — suggests some generals
still believe the “good” jihadis are worth having around.
Western intelligence
officials say Lashkar’s training camps in northern Pakistan have not been shut
down. One of those camps was the training ground of David C. Headley, an
American citizen recently sentenced to prison by an American court for his role
in the Mumbai attacks.
“There’s a strategic
culture of using proxies,” said Stephen Tankel, an American academic and author
of a book on Lashkar-e-Taiba. “And if that’s the tool you’re used to grabbing
from the toolbox, it can be hard to let go.”
For all his apparent
ease, Mr. Saeed has to walk a tightrope of sorts within the jihadi firmament.
His support of the state puts him at odds with the Pakistani Taliban, which, he
claims, are secretly supported by America and India — a familiar refrain in the
right-wing media. “They want to destabilize Pakistan,” he said.
But that position leaves
Mr. Saeed vulnerable to pressure from fighters within his own ranks who may
still have Taliban sympathies. Western security officials say Lashkar has
already suffered some defections in recent years..
“If he continues in this
direction, the issue is how many people he can bring with him,” Mr. Tankel
said.
But ultimately, he
added, much depends on the Pakistani Army: “The army can’t dismantle these
groups all at once, because of the danger of blowback. So for now they are
putting them on ice. It’s too early to tell which way they will ultimately go.”
This article has been
revised to reflect the following correction:
