How Pakistan can help to stop terrorist camps training Britons

by Jeremy Page, The Times; March 25, 2009

Since the September 11 attacks the British security services have agonised over how to monitor British Pakistanis who regularly travel back to Pakistan to study, get married or visit relatives.

The problem is that, although most do just that, a significant number disappear into radical Islamic seminaries or militant training camps and return with the potential to carry out an attack. British security officials estimate that about 4,000 people have been trained in this way in Pakistan or Afghanistan and now account for three quarters of serious terrorist plots in Britain — which explains why Pakistan features so prominently in the new counter-terrorism strategy.

The new approach does not resolve the two issues at the core of the problem: the sympathies of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, and the lack of any state control in the tribal areas on the Afghan border.

The British have invested millions both in monitoring the 400,000 British Pakistanis who visit the country every year and in trying to discourage young British Pakistanis from becoming radicalised. In Pakistan they have trained local forces and funded TV adverts featuring prominent British Pakistanis explaining why Britain is not anti-Islam.

At some point, however, the British have to rely on their Pakistani counterparts to identify, monitor and detain suspects. And even with that cooperation, they can do precious little in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). That is where the system tends to fail, given the historical links between the ISI and Islamic militant groups, and given the deteriorating security in the FATAs. Pakistan's police force is too poorly funded and trained to handle counter-terrorism. Its civilian intelligence agencies are weak and rely on the ISI for information and resources. So British counter-terror strategy depends largely on the ISI, which helped to create the Taleban and has long used militants groups as a proxy to fight Indian rule in Kashmir and offset Indian influence in Afghanistan. British and American officials say that the ISI has been co-operative in tracking down al-Qaeda members in Pakistan. It has been less helpful, however, with Pakistanis involved in home-grown militant groups. A low point came in December 2007 when Rashid Rauf, a British Pakistani suspected of planning to blow up transatlantic passenger flights in 2006, escaped from police custody.

Until recently this lack of co-operation was tolerated because the US, which has given Pakistan more than $11 billion in military aid since 2001, was more focused on al-Qaeda. The issue has grown more urgent now that home-grown Pakistani militants have become a threat as serious as al-Qaeda, after the attacks on Mumbai and Lahore.

British officials are particularly concerned about Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group blamed for the Mumbai attack, and Lashkar-e-Janghvi, the one suspected in the Lahore attack.Also of concern are Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat-ul-Mujahidin, which in recent years have expanded their influence in Punjab province - a major source of Pakistani migrants to Britain.

British security services are understood to have arrested three to four dozen terror suspects based on tip-offs from the ISI in the past three to four years, but many more are thought to have slipped through the net.

Since the British Government cannot stop British Pakistanis travelling to Pakistan, most analysts agree that the only way to prevent them from undertaking militant training is for Pakistan to shut the camps.