(2007-1635-F) Pakistan and Support of Terrorist Operations in Jammu & Kashmir

The majority of these records related to this FOIA case are closed for national security reasons. This collection contains records from late 1993 to 2001. Open records are largely administrative paperwork tracking the movement of memorandum through the National Security Council. The collection also includes correspondence to the President from members of the public, the United States Congress and Senate, and some from the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front. It also includes some open press articles reporting on the situation in the Kashmir. On May 19, 1994, President Clinton held a press conference with Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narashimha Rao. During that press conference Clinton was asked if the United States intended on placing Pakistan on the list of states that sponsor terrorism. In what might have been the first public discussion of the subject by the Clinton administration, the President responded that, “based on our best evidence Pakistani material support to the Kashmiri militants has dropped.” Though the President acknowledged Pakistani support of militants, the available evidence did not support a finding that Pakistan was a state supporter of terrorism. However, it was certainly not the last time that the administration would address that issue. Indeed, many people felt that since the creation of Pakistan as an independent state in 1947 it had been a supporter of terrorism. “On October 23, [1947] British trucks and jeeps of the Pakistan army loaded with some 5,000 armed Pathan Afridi, Waziri, and Mahsud tribesmen of the North-West Frontier crossed the Kashmir border….That ‘invasion’ of Kashmir from Pakistan would long be called by Pakistan a purely ‘volunteer’ action undertaken ‘simultaneously’ by irate ‘tribals’ rushing to the aid of oppressed Muslim brothers.” As told by Stanley Wopert in Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), only weeks after becoming an independent country, Pakistan was supporting militant action in Jammu and Kashmir.(348) In fact, Pakistani support of militants—or freedom fighters as they are often called in Pakistan—is one of the least well kept secrets in South Asia. Husain Haqqani notes in his book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005) that for a number of years Pakistan has been accused of supporting terrorism, “mainly because of its support for militants opposing Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan territory of Jammu and Kashmir.” (1) This support by the state was used, in the case of Jammu and Kashmir, as tool of foreign policy. It was also used to “influence domestic politics and to support the military’s political dominance.” (3) Jammu and Kashmir has become for both Pakistan and India integral parts of their national identity. In Pakistan is it referred to as shah rag, the jugular vein, and in India they refer to the area as their atoot ang, or integral part. Jammu and Kashmir, often referred to simply as Kashmir, is a region made up of very diverse populations. It is easy to underestimate the diversity of the peoples ethno historically, linguistically, and in religion. India controlled Kashmir consists of Jammu, the Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh. Pakistani controlled Kashmir is Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Chinese Kashmir consists of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakorum. A British census in the 1940s noted that the population of the Jammu and Kashmir was seventy-seven percent Muslim, twenty percent Hindu, and three percent other. At the time this population was ruled by a third generation Hindu maharaja whose family gained control of the territory from the British. In 1947, Maharajah Hari Singh was faced with a difficult decision; accede to India or to Pakistan. Singh chose instead to attempt to retain power and to create an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir. As the chaos of transition boiled around him Singh vacillated; most importantly though Singh failed to address the needs of his own state. With a population that was approximately three quarter Muslim, Singh continued to favor the Hindu minority. Prem Nath Bazaz, a Kashmiri journalist, in 1941 wrote of Jammu and Kashmir, “The poverty of the Muslim masses is appalling. Dressed in rags and barefoot, a Muslim peasant presents the appearance of a starving beggar. Most are landless laborers, working as serfs for absentee [Hindu] landlords.” (qtd. in Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 16). The uprising began in late September 1947 in the largely Muslim, Poonch district. It was followed in October by the militants, freedom fighters, tribesmen, what-have-you from Pakistan. Soon after the October invasion Singh pleaded with the British and Indians to save him. They forced him to accede to India before sending assistance. The first Indo-Pakistan war ensued. They would go to war again in 1966 and 1971. These wars however were largely Pakistan and India fighting over the Kashmir. However, by the late 1980s the Kashmiri began an insurgency of their own. Coincidentally, this insurgency began as money from the United States and Muslim populations around the world poured into Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) coffers. The money was intended for support of militants in Afghanistan but with the withdrawal of Russian forces the jihad movement looked to support other Muslim populations. Bose notes that because of Indian oppression of Muslim populations in Kashmir there was an explosion of anti-India sentiment in the late 1980s. “Between 1988 and 1990 ISI operatives assisted the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)…in launching the insurrection.” (Bose 126) During that same period, as the Muslim, but secularist JKLF grew, there formed a Muslim guerilla group the Hizb-ul Mujahideen (HM). The HM was “strongly promoted by Pakistani military authorities” and they fought for the accession of Kashmir into an Islamic state that was part of Pakistan. (Bose 3, 103, 117) The 1990s were a period of growing jihad within the Kashmir. Heavily supported in the Kashmir, particularly Kashmiri youth, there were militants from other Middle Eastern and Muslim countries. The rise of, and the quickly changing nature of, the various militant groups makes it difficult to summarize concisely and adequately. Jama’at-i-Islami, like HM, became one of ISI’s surrogates. (Bose 127) Many of the other groups support Pakistan or militant Muslim movements generally. Some of those groups are, or were: Harakat-ul-Ansar, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Harakat-ul-Jihad-Islami, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen, Al-Jihad, Al-Barq, Ikhwan-ul-Mussalmin, and Tariq-ul-Mujahideen. The 1999 Pakistani invasion of Indian controlled Kashmir nearly brought the two countries to war again. Militant groups remain active in the Kashmir though the level of violence has decreased as insurgent activities increase elsewhere. India still accuses Pakistan of supporting terrorist activities in the Kashmir.