arun wrote:Note use of the word “also” which does not suggest to me that a clean chit is being handed out to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan
I agree with arun. Swapan Dasgupta should not over-analyze. All the terror tanzeems in Pakistan go a long way back to the Afghan jihad days. They were either
ansars (helpers) who helped the Arab & African terrorists who were pouring into Peshawar or Quetta or direct participants in the jihad. Their leaders came from Binori or Akora Khattak and the dozen other
madrasseh that people like Fazl-ur-Rehman (or his father) and Sami-ul-Haq and others were running. They had excellent relationship among themselves. They were all followers of the same or similar schools of Islamic thought like Deobandism or Wahhabism. They shared resources like training camps, manuals, trainers, training programmes, funds and foot-soldiers. The landscape from Kandahar to Paktia, Paktika, Jalalabad, Waziristan, Balakot to Kotli and Muzzafarabad in PoK was littered with training camps and
maskars. When Tomahawk missiles slammed into six OBL training camps around Jalalabad and Tora-Bora in c. 1998, two of them belonged to Harkat-ul-Mujahideen killing a few dozen of its cadres. HuM's chief, Fazlur Rehman Khalil exploded and promised to take revenge. People like Riaz Basra of LeJ, Qari Saifullah Akhtar of HuJI and Maulana Masood Azhar of JeM had been close to OBL.
Today, as before, there is no difference among these groups. At the foot-soldier level, they may have labels like LeT, HuJI etc., but their leaders are unanimous in their outlook and operations.