Pakistan, terror funds and Kashmir

Global sanctions against Pakistan for not doing enough to curb terror financing will not deliver any relief to India

On June 21, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) listed Pakistan among the “jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies” in addressing money laundering and financing of terrorism. The others were Bahamas, Botswana, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Panama, Sri Lanka, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and Yemen. The FATF, headquartered in Paris, was founded three decades ago to look at money laundering, and after the 9/11 attacks also began looking at terror financing.
 
The strategic deficiencies observed by the FATF are mostly concerned with Pakistan’s ability to implement an action plan it has itself put together. Most of this has to do with the transfer of money, a problem that is regional and cultural and not specific to Pakistan. India’s government put its economy through pain in 2016-17 because the problem of black money was thought to be unaddressable through conventional means. The FATF says that Pakistan should continue “demonstrating that authorities are identifying cash couriers and enforcing controls on illicit movement of currency and understanding the risk of cash couriers being used for terror financing.” The cash courier is a part of the networks that operate outside the usual channels in South Asia, including for the financing of the diamond trade. It will not be easy for Pakistan or India to eliminate such entrenched systems.
 
However, another deadline for Pakistan to complete its action plan has been set for October. In case it finds insufficient progress, the FATF has said it will decide next steps. India’s media and government are naturally keen that Pakistan be put by the FATF on the list of non-cooperative countries and face sanctions.
 
The question for us is whether Pakistan is at all acting against terrorism and if so what the indicators are to suggest that it is. Pakistan has had two major shifts in its strategy with respect to armed groups and terrorism. The first was after the death of Gen Zia ul Haq in 1988. The incoming president, a bureaucrat-hawk named Ghulam Ishaq Khan, bullied the young Benazir Bhutto (who became prime minister at the age of 35) and kept control over strategic affairs. One of the things the Pakistani army wanted was to switch its front from west to east. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was ending at the same time as unrest in Kashmir was beginning. For a period of around seven years, Kashmir would be under governor’s rule because democracy was too dangerous for Delhi. The timing was perfect to take the jihad from Afghanistan to Kashmir.
 
Of the Afghan resistance groups that were funded by the Americans and Saudis through the ISI, the Pakistani favourite was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami. Not particularly effective in battle, this was a modernist and urban organisation with thinking similar to Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami.
 
The Jamaat in Kashmir, headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani and its militant group the Hizbul Mujahideen, were therefore preferred by the ISI as their agents.
 
The ineffectiveness in battle of this form of thinking led to dependence on other groups. The two main ones were Deobandi (Jaish e Muhammad, with its roots in a masjid in Karachi) and Salafi (Lashkar e Taiyyaba, from Punjab). The active promotion of these groups and those associated with their ideologies had afallout on Pakistan: The killing of Shias, seen as heretics. Over 600 Pakistani Shias were killed in 2003 as the state was unable to promote religious violence without setting alight sectarian hatred.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

 
After 9/11, and particularly after the attack on the Indian Parliament, President Pervez Musharraf acted against the Deobandi and Salafi groups. This was the second major shift. The effect was immediate. In India, fatalities from terrorist and related violence collapsed in Kashmir. It peaked with 4,000 deaths in 2001, then dropped to 3,000 in 2002, then 2,000 in 2003, then 1,000 in 2004, then 500 in 2008 and 300 in 2009. Meaning less than 10 per cent of the violence seen at peaks. It had remained stable at that figure and, in fact, had fallen further under Manmohan Singh, though it is now going back up again. Last year, the 450 fatalities were the highest in 12 years.
 
India has fenced the LoC and the J&K authorities and police believe that exfiltration and infiltration have become very difficult. Meaning that Pakistan’s role is limited and locals are unable to cross over to receive training. It is essentially those Kashmiris who are motivated enough to fight against the Indian state who are keeping the army occupied.
 
The fallout of this action against groups it nurtured was felt immediately in Pakistan. The violence that they had exported all these decades began showing its teeth at home. Terrorism related fatalities in all of Pakistan were 166 in 2000. When Musharraf tried to shut them down, terror exploded in Pakistan’s cities. Fatalities went from 900 in 2004 to 1,400 in 2006, to 3,000 in 2007, and 6,000 in 2008. They peaked at 11,000 in 2009, a year after Musharraf left. Since then they have been in decline, falling to 7,000 in 2010, 6,000 in 2011, 5,000 in 2013, 3,000 in 2015, 1,000 in 2016 and 600 last year. This year, 2019, will be the most peaceful year in Pakistan in almost two decades.
 
India’s governments have always told their people all terrorism is the product of Pakistani mischief. If we believe that Pakistan is responsible for violence going up, we have to accept that it is also responsible for violence going down. This we have not been willing to do. Of course, the fact is that today the violence in Kashmir is almost entirely local. It is the product of Indian policies over decades, the Indian media’s recent hatred of Kashmiris and our absolute refusal to consider with sympathy their human rights.
 
Even if Pakistan faces sanctions after October and is punished for its many mistakes over the decades, this will not deliver any relief to India on the matter of terrorism, other than the satisfaction that the enemy has been humiliated.