Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to Jihad
By Sabrina Tavernise and Waqar Gillani
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.
Lahore has enduring social problems like chronic unemployment.
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.”
A car bombing in Lahore last May killed 23. Officials said it
was a failed strike on Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
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.” |
