The United States government has been advertising handsome rewards for information leading to the capture of Mir Aimal Kansi. The Pakistani is the prime suspect in the murder on January 25, 1993 of two CIA employees outside the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va. He is accused of wounding three others. Mystery surrounds Kansi's case. His victims were Lansing C. Bennet who was described in a Washigton Post story as a "physician and intelligence analyst for the CIA", and Frank Darling who was "assigned to tasks involving covert operations". Two of the injured were also identified as CIA agents. Kansi obviously knew his men. He approached their cars at the stop light on Dolly Madison Boulevard, barely 500 yards from the gate of the CIA's 258 acre headquarters in Langley, shot them inches from the windows of their cars, spared a woman passenger, and sped away. The next day he was reported to have fled to Pakistan from the National Airport, a D.C. fish bowl. His Pakistani passport had expired in March 1992 and according to Pakistani officials had not been renewd. What did he travel on?
Aimal Kansi's life in the U.S. also had its mysterious aspects. On arrival in March 1991 -- on a business visa -- he was spared the usual procedure for aliens entering the country. No one would say why. He requested political asylum -- in 1991 -- and was granted a renewable one year work permit which he did not renew. He was employed in an outfit, Excel Courier Inc., on a salary of $700 a week, an unusual windfall for one with limited qualification and scant record of employment in the U.S. The company is owned by Chris Marchetti, son of Victor Marchetti, a former CIA official who had once been an aide to its Director, Richard Helms. The Kansi family lives in Quetta a city from where the CIA had engaged in covert operations and left behind a lot of disgruntled clients.
Pakistanis were hosts during October-November to a number of terrorist events -- two lucky escapes and one great atrocity. A group of army officers were arrested for planning a coup that would wipe out the top echelon of the army, execute the president and prime minister, and impose upon the country an Islamic caliphate of inverted imagination. The officers claimed to be patriots who intended merely to aid the Kashmiri's struggle. Without waiting for justice to take its course, Pakistan's premier Islamic party expressed solidarity with them. As if this were not chilling enough, a group of sectarian terrorists entered human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir's house with the intent, and equipments, of mass murder.
On November 19, the earth trembled in Islamabad, trees shook, homes rattled, and people died. Three Islamic parties in Egypt took credit for this crime, most foul and heartless. The communique of the International Justice Group was notable for its graphic sadism: "The platoon of Martyr Khaled Istanbuli executed an operation today which sent skulls, limbs and corpses flying leaving dozens dead and wounded at Egypt's diplomatic mission in Islamabad."
Pakistanis, Americans, and Egyptians have yet to come to terms with the fact that the dead and wounded of November 19 were victims not only of the extremists who call themselves Islamic but also of the opportunism, deception, and crimes of our governments and leaders. This is a long though uncomplicated subject because the states which I mention here have spawned sectarian terror in multiple if crude ways. There is here neither space nor time to elaborate this point. So what follows are a few pointers:
With Mohammed Ziaul Haq and his cohorts collaboration, the United States helped revitalize and internationalize the notion of armed Jihad in a manner and in senses that the muslim world had not experienced in recent centuries. To add insult to injury Washington not only used armed Islamism as an instrument of its policy but also abondoned and denounced it after its purposes had been served. The current anti-Americanism of the Islamic movement is causal; it is by no means pathological.
In Pakistan the governments -- of PPP no less than PML -- which came after Ziaul Haq have continued to view opportunistically even the most sectarian and violent of Islamic parties. Thus both parties have variously coalesced with the Jamaat-i-Islami, Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam, and the Anjuman-i-Sipah-i-Sahaba; both failed to amend the worst features of the blasphemy laws; both have shied away from repealing the Hudood Ordnances.
As for Egypt, the extent of its government's responsibility is not widely known. I should mention two points: First, that it was Anwar Sadaat who opportunistically promoted the religious parties to counter his secular opposition. Second, the government of Hosni Mubarak devalues the rule of law, and legitimises terrorism when it employs illegal and inhuman methods to suppress its Islamic opposition.
On Novemeber 4, 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Governments and the world media praised Prime Minister Rabin as a peace maker who had paid the `price of peace'. The asssassin belonged to Eyal, a militant Zionist organization committed to colonizing the territories which Israel captured in the 1967 war. The establishment of these settlements has been Israel's bipartisan policy since 1969 whereby all Israeli governments, including those in which Rabin held high positions, actively promoted the settler movement, established and financed no less than 300 settlements in the occupied teritories, forcibly expropriated vast amounts of Arab land, diverted and deprived native peoples of their water resources, and let loose the armed Jewish zealots among a disarmed muslim and christian people, all that in clear and flagrant violation of international law and covenants. This sordid record notwithstanding, Yitzhak Rabin and his government could reasonably be described as `peace maker' had the Oslo Agreements held for the disposessed Palestinians some promise of restitution.
The `peace process' does little to ameliorate those cruel injustices, and nothing whatsoever to roll back the illegal, officially subsidized and protected enclaves of extremism in the occupied territories. The zionist right does dislike the `peace process' but only because it has the appearance of limiting the orbit of its sectarian ambition, and its hopes of expelling the remainder of Palestinians from their homes. Yitzhak Rabin paid the price not so much of peace making but of letting loose a monster he and his party are reluctant to disown -- politically or ideologically -- even now. The symbiosis of terror, ideology and statehood is so deep in the zionist tradition that it would take decades to uproot, and with a different model of peace making than Oslo 1 & 11. After all, among the sapplings which sprouted from these roots is the Likud which has grown into one of Israel's two major parties.
Extremism is now an integral part of the Israeli state and society. Note the assassin's relations with Israel defence and intelligence services. Yigal Amir is not a fringe figure. He is as columnist Zeev Schif put it the "boy next door", a member of the elite Golani brigade in Israeli Defence Forces, an undercover agent of Shin Bet, an activist in the settler movement, and a law student at the Bar Ilan university. The bullet which killed the Israeli prime minister came from the arsenal of the Israeli army. Naturally, conspircy theories abound among Israelis; most implicate their own secret services in the murder. Michael Harsagor, a respected historian at Tel Aviv University concludes bluntly that "the attack could not have succeeded without the conspiracy of the security services." And Rabin's assassin tells the court ominously that "Truth will turn Israel upside down".
For thoughtful Israelis this ought to serve as a painful moment of truth. For decades their state engaged in organized terror over another people. To advance their agenda of colonizing Palestine even its `liberal' politicians -- Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres -- opportunistically fostered movements and ideas which were extremist in their belief, violent in their outlook, and deeply contemptuous of life and civilization. And to consolidate their conquests and colonization they are engaged even today in creating a peace of apartheid in occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. An agenda of peace so inverted can bring lasting peace neither between Jews and Arabs in Palestine nor in the heart of Israel itself.
The larger conclusion is general, not confined to Israel alone. Sectarian movements rarely possess the virtues of patience, discipline of discourse, a culture of analysis, or a sense of security in a broad and complex environment. Hence, on the mildest scent of threat, the slightest suspicion of betrayal they turn on enemies and allies alike, inward no less than outward. (END)
@ Eqbal Ahmad. 11th December 1995