Thursday, 03 July 2014 |
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/lets-not-forget-that-india-is-a-target-too.html
The first round of action in the Islamists' bid to rule the world is on dangerous display in Iraq. Worse can happen if things aren’t checked
The war against the Maliki regime is the first round in the Islamists' bid to dominate the world. Should they win, the next round will be against India. Not surprisingly, a television channel reported recently that the Al Qaeda wing that goes by the name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria wants to set up a State called Khurasan which includes Gujarat.
The agenda was first outlined most clearly by Syed Saleem Shahzad, the outstanding Pakistani journalist who was savagely tortured and killed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in May 2011. In Inside Al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11, he wrote that according to a saying attributed to Prophet Muhammad, the “End of Time” battles would start after victory in the East, which then meant Khurasan. According to him, geographically, Kurasan included part of modern Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. To these, ISIS has included not only Iraq, parts of Syria as well as Gujarat in India.
Shahzad further pointed out that after victory in Khurasan, the army of Islam would launch Ghazwa-e-Hind — a term also used in Prophet Muhammad's sayings — or the battle for India, which then included what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. Muslims believe, according to Shahzad, that following victory in India, Islamist forces would march to the Middle East, where they join forces with the promised Mahdi and fight to liberate Palestine. Success in this campaign will pave the way for the final triumph of Islam and the worldwide imposition of sharia’h rule.
As elaborated in my book, Endgame in Afghanistan: For Whom the Dice Rolls, Al Qaeda wants not territory but an end to the United States' global hegemony, the subjugation of the West and the establishment of a global Muslim Caliphate which would implement its version of reductionist Islam. The US, which enjoys formidable military prowess, had to be enfeebled by being drawn into a prolonged, exhausting war in Afghanistan, which would take it to the verge of collapse as happened with the Soviet Union. Thus it would combine the beginning of the Khurasan battles with the undermining of the United States.
This fitted in neatly with Pakistan's national strategic goal of balkanising India to dominate the Indian sub-continent, which has been made abundantly clear in Lieutenant-Colonel Javed Hassan's officially-sponsored book, India: A Study in Profile. Arguing that “India was hostage to a centrifugal rather than centripetal tradition”, Lieutenant-Colonel Hassan, who retired as a Lieutenant-General in the Pakistani Army, argued that this country “had a historical inability to exist as a unified state” and mentioned centrifugal tensions which could be exploited. In his Pakistan between Mosque and Military, the well-known Pakistani scholar and former diplomat, Hussain Haqqani, mentions how Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, who headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, referred to an operational plan to exacerbate the centrifugal forces in India that existed during his tenure as Director-General of Military Intelligence from 1984 to 1987.
Indeed, the ISI began its Ghazwa-e-Hind in the early 1980s when it started training India's Kashmiri and Punjab terrorists in camps meant for Afghan jihadis. It continues with its mischief despite the fact that some of the terrorist organisations it had created now threaten Pakistan itself with disintegration, and sees American withdrawal from Afghanistan as providing an opportunity to redouble its efforts to install a pliant Government in that country and, simultaneously, steeply escalate its unconventional war against India following the pattern it did in 1947, 1965 and during the Kargil War — sent in irregulars and, when India responds strongly, unleash its armed forces which have armed themselves to the teeth with American assistance. India needs to gear up quickly to meet the threat.
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