[Senate Hearing 106-297]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 106-297
EXTREMIST MOVEMENTS AND THEIR THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND
SOUTH ASIAN AFFAIRS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 2, 1999
__________
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Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
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COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
JESSE HELMS, North Carolina, Chairman
RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware
PAUL COVERDELL, Georgia PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut
GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
ROD GRAMS, Minnesota RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota
CRAIG THOMAS, Wyoming BARBARA BOXER, California
JOHN ASHCROFT, Missouri ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey
BILL FRIST, Tennessee
Stephen E. Biegun, Staff Director
Edwin K. Hall, Minority Staff Director
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SUBCOMMITTEE ON NEAR EASTERN AND SOUTH ASIAN AFFAIRS
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas, Chairman
JOHN ASHCROFT, Missouri PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota
GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey
ROD GRAMS, Minnesota PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland
CRAIG THOMAS, Wyoming CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Bearden, Milton, retired CIA officer, former chief of station in
Sudan and Pakistan............................................. 23
Prepared statement of........................................ 24
Ijaz, Mansoor, managing partner, Crescent Equity Partners, LLC,
New York, NY................................................... 18
Prepared statement of........................................ 21
Krepon, Michael, president, Henry L. Stimson Center, Washington,
DC............................................................. 31
Prepared statement of........................................ 32
Sheehan, Hon. Michael A., Ambassador at Large and Coordinator for
Counterterrorism, Department of State.......................... 3
Prepared statement of........................................ 8
Starr, Dr. S. Frederick, chairman, Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute, Johns Hopkins University/ASIS, Washington, DC....... 27
Prepared statement of........................................ 28
(iii)
EXTREMIST MOVEMENTS AND THEIR THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES
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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1999
U.S. Senate,
Subcommittee on Near Eastern
and South Asian Affairs,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 3:15 p.m., in
room SD-419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Sam Brownback
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Senator Brownback.
Senator Brownback. I call the hearing to order. I welcome
everybody here to the first in what I hope will be a number of
hearings on the problem of extremism and its threat to the
United States.
We have two panels, and excellent panels. On our first
panel, the Hon. Michael Sheehan, Ambassador at Large and
Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State.
Welcome, Ambassador. We are delighted to have you here.
On our second panel will be Mr. Mansoor Ijaz, managing
partner, Crescent Equity Partners; Mr. Milt Bearden, retired
CIA officer and former CIA Chief of Station in Sudan and
Pakistan; and Dr. S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University. All three
are excellent in their knowledge of this very important topic
of key current and future importance to the United States.
It is clear that the United States needs a coherent and
comprehensive policy to deal with extremism. In addition to
facing the existing terrorist threat, we need to be looking
ahead and thinking about how to turn around what looks like a
steeper and steeper slide into anti-Western extremism in
certain parts of the world. I look forward to hearing from our
panelists about the sources of this extremism, what keeps it
alive, where we are now, and what policies the United States
should be pursuing to deal with this threat.
There is a certain conventional wisdom gaining some
currency among experts that state sponsorship of terrorism has
disappeared and that instead the U.S. faces some loosely knit
independent actors who are not beholding or answerable to any
foreign government. Thus, we have a Saudi national, who once
lived in the Sudan, based out of Afghanistan, mounting
terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in Africa. Now, who is
to blame?
It is my firm belief that while we may not see states
specifically planning and orchestrating terrorist acts on the
United States, countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, and The Sudan can all be counted as state sponsors of
terrorism because they provide safe haven to terrorists. They
allow the operation of terrorist training camps. They allow
terrorists access to funds, and may well facilitate their
travel around the world.
Then there is a second tier of states. Let us refer to them
as aiders and abetters. These are states which are otherwise
friendly to the United States, but are unwilling or unable to
take the necessary steps to crack down on members of their
government or on their citizens who are providing financial and
logistical support to terrorist groups. Without such states, it
would be infinitely more difficult for terrorists such as Osama
bin Laden to operate.
Take, for example, the case of Saudi Arabia. If last week's
USA Today article is accurate, significant funds are being
funnelled to bin Laden from private citizens in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis are good friends of the United States. But
permitting this sort of thing to happen is absolutely
unacceptable. The Saudis have a responsibility to exert more
financial control. We undertook to work with Saudi Arabia to
protect their interest when they were threatened, but this is
certainly a two-way street.
I am also worried about what appears to be a tacit compact
between the Clinton administration and the Saudis not to finger
the Iranians for the Khobar Towers bombing. There seems to be a
tendency to play down and even to whitewash the involvement of
certain states with terrorist groups, such as Syria, Lebanon,
Iran, and others. And another case in point is obviously Iraq.
Ambassador Sheehan, I have seen reports that bin Laden has
either been in Iraq or is contemplating setting up operations
in Iraq. And I hope you will address that today in your
testimony.
I must confess that I continue to be disappointed in the
administration's failure to match action to rhetoric in the
case of Iraq. We are not moving nearly aggressively enough to
remove Saddam Hussein. And as a side note on that, on Friday,
Senator Bob Kerrey and myself were both in New York to meet
with the Iraqi National Congress, as well as Congressman
Gilman, the chairman of the International Relations Committee
on the House side. It looked to a number of us that this was a
very promising get-together of groups that have had difficulty
cooperating, and we need to be as aggressive as possible to
work with them to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
In a nutshell, the Iraq question, the Iran question, and
Osama bin Laden are challenges to the United States leadership
and are symptoms of a phenomena with which we must deal. As a
Nation, we cannot afford to tiptoe around this problem. We do
need a strong and a comprehensive policy for dealing with this
threat.
Ambassador Sheehan, I certainly welcome you to the
committee. I look forward to hearing your testimony. I have a
number of questions for you and the administration about what
we are doing to pull together and to carry off a comprehensive
policy on dealing with extremism and its difficulty that it
presents to us both now and clearly in the future.
With that, welcome to the committee, and the floor is
yours.
STATEMENT OF HON. MICHAEL A. SHEEHAN, AMBASSADOR AT LARGE AND
COORDINATOR FOR COUNTERTERRORISM, DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Ambassador Sheehan. Thank you, Senator, Mr. Chairman,
members of the committee. I welcome very much the invitation to
speak with you today about terrorism in the Middle East and
South Asia, as well as our efforts to combat it.
With your permission, I would like to submit my full
statement for the record.
Senator Brownback. Without objection.
Ambassador Sheehan. And I will read a short summary, it
should keep to about 10 minutes or so, of that statement at
this time.
We have witnessed in the Middle East and South Asia
examples of all the detrimental effects of terrorism. Beyond
immediate results of terrorism, such as a bomb or a killing,
the tragic loss of life and property damage, terrorism can also
take a terrible toll on peace processes and it can inflame
difficult regional and local conflicts. In addition to the
material damage caused by a bomb, terrorist activities can also
have a long-term economic impact in the region. Foreign and
local investment can be reduced dramatically in the wake of
terrorist activity. And a tourist economy, such as Egypt's, can
be shattered.
In recent years, the locus of terrorism directed against
the United States has shifted somewhat, by my analysis. In the
past decades, the Middle East has been the center of activity
for some of the world's most dangerous anti-U.S. terrorist
groups and some of the most brazen state sponsors of terrorism.
No one in the State Department, least of all my office, nor I
personally, will forget the 241 marines killed in Beirut, the
Americans killed in Lebanon in the embassy bombings, the TWA
847 hijacking, the hostages of the mid-eighties, 270 passengers
who perished in Pan Am 103, or the 19 servicemen who died at
Khobar Towers in Dhahran in 1996.
I deal with the families of many of these victims, and it
is my responsibility to see that the perpetrators of these
terrorist acts be brought to justice. But the center of anti-
American terrorism, by my analysis, has shifted eastward since
the 1980's and early nineties, from Libya, Syria and Lebanon to
South Asia. Our attention is increasingly focused on Osama bin
Laden and the alliance of brutes operating out of Afghanistan,
with the acquiescence of the country's de facto rulers, the
Taliban.
These Afghan based terrorist conglomerates brought about
the bombings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in
August 1998. I will discuss this in more detail later, but I
will start with a brief overview of terrorism in the Middle
East. It is important to note that we have brought progress
about reducing terrorism in the Middle East. It certainly has
not ended. It is still a major area of concern for me. But I
think it is important to recognize the progress that we have
made over the last 20 years, to learn from what has worked, so
that we can continue to apply the lessons of those policies
that have worked in the future.
During the late seventies and eighties, the Governments of
Syria, Libya and Iran played a prominent role in supporting and
directly promoting the activities of terrorist groups, as well
as carrying out terrorist attacks themselves, using their state
security or intelligence personnel. Today, following years of
international pressure and sanctions, blatant state sponsorship
of terrorism as we saw in the seventies and eighties has
declined.
Make no mistake about it, Senator Brownback, I do not mean
to suggest that we no longer have problems with Middle Eastern
governments, particularly Iran. But also Syria, Libya and Iraq
remain on our list of state sponsors because they provide safe
haven and material support to terrorist groups. But their
direct sponsorship of terrorist acts has diminished. And that
will have implications for our policy, which I hope we will
have time to discuss.
Governments are taking more decisive action against
terrorists. Recent examples include the Jordanian Government's
crackdown on Hamas, the counterterrorism actions of the
Palestinian Authority, and Egypt's success in curbing its own
domestic terrorism. We have established effective
counterterrorism cooperation with more countries than ever
before. This includes dramatically improved intelligence
sharing and law enforcement cooperation across the board.
My office hosted a multilateral conference this past summer
that brought together senior counterterrorism officials from
over 20 countries, mostly from the Middle East and South Asia.
We are having greater success than in the past in persuading
governments to arrest terrorist fugitives and render them to
the United States for prosecution. A number of governments have
cooperated with U.S. authorities in handing over individuals
indicted in U.S. courts for involvement of the two 1998
bombings of our embassies.
Notwithstanding these successes, our fight against
terrorism in the Middle East has a very long way to go. Some
groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PFLPGC continue
actively to plan terrorist attacks aimed at derailing the
Middle East peace process. Iran remains an active state sponsor
of terrorism, giving material support to a wide range of
terrorist groups. And particularly, two Iranian Government
organs, the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of
Intelligence Security, have institutionalized the use of
terrorism as an instrument of policy over the past two decades
and still do so today.
We continue to investigate the 1996 bombings at Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 U.S. servicemen died. We
will pursue that investigation wherever it leads, including
following up on information suggesting that the Iranian
officials played a part in planning or facilitating the attack.
I will also get back to that issue as well, Senator Brownback.
I know it is of interest to you.
We have ongoing concerns about Syria, Libya and Iraq. In
the case of Libya, a decade of international sanctions and
isolation has clearly had an effect on Qaddafi's policy. Libya
no longer plays host to the most violent and deadly terrorist
groups in the Middle East as it did a decade ago. And this is a
victory for the past several administrations that have a very
committed policy on Libyan sponsored terrorism.
Last April, following years of U.S.-led pressure, Libya
turned over two individuals to be tried in The Hague for
carrying out the Pan Am 103 bombing, 11 years after that
December 1988 tragedy. This action, while important from our
perspective, does not end our designation of Libya as a state
sponsor of terrorism. That can only happen when we have clear
evidence that Qaddafi has fully cooperated with the Pan Am 103
trial, which we will hope will start in February of next year,
as well as fulfilling all the other obligations under the
United Nations Security Council resolutions, and renounce the
use of terrorism and sever the remaining ties to any terrorist
groups.
We are confronting new problems and new challenges in South
Asia. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is a prime example of
an alarming trend in terrorism, that you referred to earlier in
your remarks, against us that are from loosely knit networks
with fewer direct ties to governments. Their organization is
very flat, less hierarchical than we have see in previous
years. Bin Laden's organization operates very much on its own,
without having to depend on a state sponsor for material
support, though he certainly gets sanctuary from the Taliban.
He possesses financial means and raises funds through
narcotics trafficking, legitimate front companies and local
financial support. Bin Laden has created a truly transnational
terrorist enterprise, drawing in recruits from areas across
Asia, Africa and Europe, as well as the Middle East, linked
only by hatred of the United States and those governments with
which we have friendly relations. Perhaps most ominously, bin
Laden has avowed his intention to obtain weapons of mass
destruction. And we know he is actively engaged in pursuing
that endeavor.
Afghanistan has become a haven for terrorist groups. In
addition to bin Laden and al-Qaida, the Taliban plays host to
members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Algerian Armed
Islamic Group, Kashmiri separatists, and militant organizations
from Central Asia. We have imposed U.S. sanctions on the
Taliban and have worked to bring about international sanctions,
approved by the United Nations Security Council last month. Yet
the Taliban persist in giving refuge to bin Laden and his
associates. The Taliban is not overly hostile to the United
States, but its tolerance of these groups obstruct our
counterterrorism efforts and are clearly unacceptable.
We have urged Pakistan, as well, to use its influence to
persuade the Taliban to render bin Laden to a country where he
can be brought to justice. We have repeatedly asked Islamabad
to end support for terrorist training in Afghanistan, to
interdict travel of militants to and from Afghan camps, to
prevent militant groups from acquiring weapons, and to block
financial and logistical support to camps in Afghanistan.
Within Pakistan, there are numerous Kashmiri separatist
groups and sectarian groups involved in terrorism, which use
Pakistan as a base. We have continuing reports of Pakistani
material support for some of these militants. One such group,
the HUM, the Harakat ul-Mujahedin, was involved in the still
unresolved July 1995 kidnapping of four Westerners, including
one American, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. In February 1998,
the HUM leader consigned bin Laden's anti-American fatwah, and
openly promised to kill Americans everywhere in the world.
One of our most effective tools is the Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a creation of the U.S.
Congress and an instrument that is extremely important to my
office, and through which this authorization we designated 28
groups as foreign terrorist organizations, or FTO's, half of
which are from the Middle East or South Asia. We also continue
to label seven countries, including the four Middle Eastern
governments I mentioned earlier, as state sponsors of terrorism
under U.S. law.
We carefully review these lists to determine if the groups
and countries persist in their support for terrorism. Both of
these documents, the foreign terrorist organizations and state
sponsorship, are meant to be living lists which can change over
time as the behavior of groups and governments changes. If they
end terrorist activities, we will consider removing them from
the list.
In my prepared statement, I describe in detail the criteria
for keeping a group on the FTO, the foreign terrorist
organization, list or a government on the state sponsor list.
It is not just a matter of ordering and carrying out direct
terrorist attacks. We are equally focused on preparations for
terrorism, in which we include activities such as recruiting,
training, funding, equipping, planning, and providing safe
haven to terrorists. We have strong evidence of the direct
involvement in terrorism over the past 2 years of groups such
as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihan, the
Egyptian Islamic Group, the PFLPGC, the Algerian Armed Islamic
Group, and the Pakistani-based HUM. These are the most active
of the groups.
Then there are a number of groups which have not carried
out overt terrorist acts in recent years but continue to
recruit, train, equip, and plan for terrorism. These groups
include the Abu Nidal Organization, the PFLP, the PLF--the Abu
Abbas faction, and the two Jewish extremist groups, Kach and
Kahane Chai.
In conclusion, I want to reaffirm that the central element
of our counterterrorism efforts remains a combination of
political will and diplomatic action. We can combat terrorism
only if we persuade other governments to work with us.
Intelligence sharing, law enforcement cooperation and armed
force are important. But they must be integrated into an
overall political/diplomatic strategy, exactly as you have
indicated in your opening remarks.
It requires a long-term, sustained effort, however, and
requires not just a firm commitment from our leaders, but we
also need some resources. It is vital that we help friendly
governments acquire counterterrorism skills. Part of this
effort is to provide training through the State Department's
anti-terrorism assistance program. This training has courses
such as bomb detection, airport security, hostage negotiation,
and crisis management, that helps protect Americans overseas.
And as you alluded to in your remarks, Senator, we deal
often with countries that are friendly but not have as strong a
counterterrorism policy as we wish. We use our anti-terrorism
funding and those programs to work with those countries to
increase their capability, as well as, most importantly, their
will to go after these terrorist organizations that may be
operating within their soil.
Anti-terrorism assistance is the currency that a U.S.
Ambassador can use to influence a foreign government on the
need for firm counterterrorism action. Without it, our
representatives often have nothing to offer in the way to
enlist the foreign governments to help us do such things as
protect the airports, their borders and other such activities.
Fighting terrorist fundraisers and bomb makers also takes
some money. I do want to note that the foreign operations bill
cut the anti-terrorism programs and terrorist interdiction
programs by 36 percent this year. And this is unconscionable in
my opinion. These cuts make it impossible for us to initiate
the training that we have been planning after the embassy
bombings last year, as well as additional training for some of
the other areas in the world where this type of activity is
spreading.
International cooperation, anti-terrorism training, action
to counter terrorist fundraising, advances in explosives
detection equipment, exercises that deal with crises, and
rewards for information--these are not abstract ideas or
giveaways of foreign aid. They are good investments in the
protection for American citizens and interests.
Mr. Chairman, whenever there is a major terrorist incident,
everyone demands that we do something. But, weeks later, when
the TV images fade away, it is very difficult the next year to
get the funding for the programs that we need to implement. As
a former special forces operator and officer in the
counterterrorism business, I realize it is often easier to get
funding for other types of organizations, such as the CIA, FBI,
Defense, even HHS has a growing counterterrorism budget, even
some American colleges and universities have an increasing
counterterrorism budget. But it is difficult to see that as
these budgets are increasing that we were slashed by 36
percent.
And as you indicated, sir, in your remarks, really, the
work of counterterrorism policy over the long term is one of
political will. A country must have the political will to go
after counterterrorism. It is the job of the State Department
to work with these countries to enhance their political will.
It is a long slog of diplomatic action and political pressure
that really brings about international cooperation and changes
the behavior in groups and regimes.
I know that you personally, your committee, and the members
of your staff have been very, very supportive of our efforts.
And we are very grateful for that. I hope that you will be able
to help us get the funding we need, and continue to keep
pressure on those countries and organizations that are involved
in these types of activity.
The bottom line, however, is the State Department will need
some resources to do that. And we will need a continued,
focused effort to bring the political pressure to bear where it
needs to be done. And we are committed to do that and to make
sure that Americans who live and travel overseas will continue
to be protected and to diminish risk from whoever might carry
out a grudge against them.
Thank you for your time, Mr. Chairman, and for the
opportunity to speak here this afternoon.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Sheehan follows:]
Prepared Statement of Ambassador Michael A. Sheehan
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, I welcome the invitation to
come speak with you today about terrorism in the Middle East and South
Asia, as well as our efforts to combat it.
We have witnessed in the Middle East and South Asia examples of all
the detrimental effects of terrorism. Beyond its immediate results--a
tragic loss of life and property damage--terrorism can often take a
terrible toll on political and economic stability. It enflames regional
conflicts and brings about a vicious circle of retaliatory violence. It
can often undermine--or at a minimum stall--important peace processes
by complicating the task of reconciliation between hostile parties. It
frequently puts pressure on governments to react in a heavy-handed
manner. On the economic side, it inhibits tourism and stifles foreign
and domestic investment.
In recent years, we have observed a shift in the locus of terrorism
directed against us. In past decades, the Middle East has been the
center of activity for some of the world's most dangerous anti-U.S.
terrorist groups and for some of the most brazen state sponsors of
terrorism. No one in the State Department--least of all my office nor I
personally--will forget the 241 U.S. Marines killed at Beirut airport
in 1983, the Americans killed in Lebanon in the embassy bombings, the
TWA 847 hijacking, and hostage-takings in the mid-1980's, the 270
passengers who perished in the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988, or the 19
U.S. servicemen who died at Khobar Towers in Dhahran in 1996. I deal
with the families of many of these victims, and it is my responsibility
to see the perpetrators of these terrorist acts brought to justice. For
this reason, I think it is fair to say that my office devotes special
attention to the Middle East.
But the center of anti-American terrorism has moved eastward, from
Libya, Syria, and Lebanon to South Asia. As direct involvement in
terrorism by most Middle Eastern state sponsors and groups has
declined, our attention has increasingly focused on Usama bin Ladin and
the alliance of groups operating out of Afghanistan with the
acquiescence of the country's de facto rulers, the Taliban. This
Afghan-based terrorist conglomerate brought about the bombings of our
embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998. I will discuss
this in more detail later; I'll start with an overview of the Middle
East.
signs of progress in the middle east
It is important to note the progress we have brought about in
reducing terrorism in the Middle East. State sponsorship of Middle
Eastern terrorism has declined. During the 1970's and 1980's, the
governments of Syria, Libya, and Iran played a prominent role in
supporting and directing the activities of terrorist groups, as well as
carrying out terrorist attacks themselves using state security or
intelligence personnel. These state sponsors routinely used terror as
an instrument of state policy to attack their opponents, both foreign
and domestic, and to put pressure on their neighbors.
Today, following years of more coordinated, generally U.S.-led
international pressure and sanctions, governments realize they can no
longer blatantly support terrorist groups, plan terrorist attacks, and
harbor criminals with impunity. Make no mistake--I do not mean to
suggest we no longer have problems with Middle Eastern governments--
Iran remains an active state sponsor, and Syria, Libya, and Iraq remain
on our list because they provide safehaven and material support to
terrorist groups--but their direct sponsorship of terrorist acts has
diminished.
Governments are taking more decisive action against terrorists. For
example, just last month, the Jordanian government closed Hamas offices
and clamped down on Hamas activities in the kingdom. The Palestinian
Authority has mounted counterterrorist operations designed to undermine
the capabilities of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to use
terrorism to disrupt the peace process. Egypt has scored great
successes in curbing domestic terrorism. Many other countries are
taking steps to prevent terrorists--including those claiming religion
to justify their violence--from using their territory for their
activities.
international cooperation
In the Middle East and South Asia, we have established more
effective counterterrorist cooperation with more countries than ever
before. In addition to our longstanding relationship with Israel,
Egypt, and Jordan on counterterrorism, we are now working these issues
on a regular basis with Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and a number of
Gulf states. I recently traveled to India and laid the groundwork for
expanded cooperation with New Delhi in fighting terrorism.
We have dramatically improved bilateral and multilateral
intelligence-sharing and law-enforcement cooperation across the board,
and in some cases have held joint military exercises focused on
counter-terrorism. My office hosted a multilateral conference this past
summer that brought together senior counter-terrorist officials from
more than 20 countries, mostly from the Middle East and South Asia. We
are having greater success than in the past in persuading governments
to arrest terrorist fugitives and render them to the United States for
prosecution. A number of governments have cooperated with U.S.
authorities in handing over individuals indicted in U.S. courts for
involvement in the two 1998 embassy bombings. The latest example was
South Africa, which just last month turned over to U.S. custody a
suspect in the Dar es Salaam bombing.
Notwithstanding successes in many areas, our fight against
terrorism in the Middle East and South Asia has a long way to go. Some
Middle Eastern groups, such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and
Hizballah, continue actively to plan terrorist attacks aimed at
derailing the Middle East peace process. Iran, which I will discuss in
more detail shortly, remains the one active state sponsor of terrorism.
new challenges in south asia
But we are confronting new problems and new challenges in South
Asia--Usama bin Ladin's al-Qa'ida network is a prime example. Today's
terrorist threat comes primarily from groups and loosely-knit networks
with fewer ties to governments. Bin Ladin's organization operates on
its own, without having to depend on a state sponsor for material
support. He possesses financial resources and means of raising funds--
often through narcotrafficking, legitimate ``front'' companies, and
local financial support. Today's non-state terrorists benefit from the
globalization of communication, using e-mail and internet websites to
spread their message, recruit new members, raise funds, and connect
elements scattered around the world.
Bin Ladin and al-Qa'ida represent an alarming trend in terrorism
directed against us. Bin Ladin has created a truly trans-national
terrorist enterprise, drawing on recruits from areas across Asia,
Africa, and Europe, as well as the Middle East. Bin Ladin's alliance
draws together extremist groups from different regions, linked only by
hatred of the United States and those governments with which we have
friendly relations. Perhaps most ominously, bin Ladin has avowed his
intention to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Afghanistan has become a new safehaven for terrorist groups. In
addition to bin Ladin and al-Qa'ida, the Taliban play host to members
of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Algerian Armed Islamic group,
Kashmiri separatists, and a number of militant organizations from
central Asia, including terrorists from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. We
have imposed U.S. sanctions on the Taliban and have worked hard to
bring about the international sanctions approved by the U.N. Security
Council last month. Yet the Taliban stubbornly persist in giving refuge
to Usama bin Ladin and his associates. We have urged Pakistan to use
its influence to persuade the Taliban to render bin Ladin to a country
where he can be brought to justice, and we will persist in this effort.
Within the territory of Pakistan, there are numerous Kashmiri
separatist groups and sectarian groups involved in terrorism which use
Pakistan as a base. Pakistan has frequently acknowledged what it calls
``moral and diplomatic support'' for militants in Kashmir who employ
violence and terrorism against Indian interests. We have continuing
reports of Pakistani material support for some of these militants. One
such group, the Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM), was involved in the still-
unresolved July 1995 kidnapping of four westerners, including one
American, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. In February 1998, the HUM's
leader co-signed bin Ladin's anti-American fatwa. The HUM has openly
promised to kill Americans ``everywhere in the world.'' In addition,
the HUM cooperates with bin Ladin and receives his assistance in
maintaining its training facilities in Afghanistan. The HUM is also
tied to the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, a militant sectarian group believed
responsible for the attempted assassination of then-Prime Minister
Sharif in January 1999. Other groups, such as the Lashkar-i-Taiba, the
Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, and the Hizbul Mujahideen, operate freely in
Pakistan and support terrorist attacks in Kashmir.
The Taliban leadership is not overtly hostile to the United States,
but its actions and its tolerance of terrorist groups seriously
obstruct our counterterrorist efforts. As far as Pakistan is concerned,
we have repeatedly asked Islamabad to end support for terrorist
training in Afghanistan, to interdict travel of militants to and from
camps in Afghanistan, to prevent militant groups from acquiring
weapons, and to block financial and logistical support to camps in
Afghanistan. We have also urged Islamabad to close certain madrassas,
or Islamic schools, that actually serve as conduits for terrorism.
u.s. designation of foreign terrorist organizations
Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, we
designate 28 groups as ``foreign terrorist organizations'' (FTO's),
almost half of which are from the Middle East or South Asia. We also
continue to label seven countries, including four Middle Eastern
governments, as state sponsors of terrorism under U.S. law. We keep a
careful eye on these FTO's and on the key state sponsors to determine--
through a painstaking review process--if they are continuing their
support for terrorism. Both the FTO list and the state sponsors list
are meant to be ``living'' lists, which can change over time as the
behavior of groups and governments changes. If a group or country
ceases its terrorist activity, we will give serious consideration to
removing it from the list. We want to give them an incentive to mend
their ways.
There is a misconception, however, about the kinds of terrorist
activity that keep a group on the FTO list or government on the state-
sponsors list. It is not just a matter of ordering or carrying out a
direct terrorist attack. We are equally focused on preparations for
terrorism, in which we include activities such as recruiting, training,
funding, equipping, planning, and providing safehaven to terrorists.
In the case of many of the groups which we have just redesignated
as foreign terrorist organizations--as well as most of the state
sponsors--we do not have evidence they carried out direct terrorist
attacks over the past two years. But we nonetheless consider them
guilty of ongoing terrorist activity because they continued to be
involved in the things I mentioned earlier: recruiting, training,
funding, equipping, planning, and providing safehaven. We will only
consider removing a group from the FTO list, or a government from the
state-sponsors list, when we are convinced all such activities have
stopped.
In the case of the Middle East and South Asia, we have strong
evidence of the direct involvement in terrorist attacks over the past
two years of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic group, the PFLP-GC,
the Algerian Armed Islamic group, the Pakistan-based Harakat ul-
Mujahideen, and the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, also known as the LTTE.
These groups are a long way from being considered for removal from the
FTO list.
Then, there are a number of groups which have not carried out an
overt terrorist act in recent years but continue to recruit, train,
equip, and plan for terrorism. These groups include the Abu Nidal
organization, the PFLP, the PLF (Abu Abbas faction), and the two Jewish
extremist groups, Kach and Kahane Chai. Any of these groups could end
all activities in preparation for possible terrorist acts and
eventually qualify for removal from the FTO list.
We designate foreign terrorist organizations not to develop a
``black list'' for its own sake, but to curb their funding. We urge
other governments to take similar steps. As Congress stated in the
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, ``foreign organizations
that engage in terrorist activity are so tainted by their criminal
conduct that any contribution to such an organization facilitates that
conduct.'' We encourage other governments to tighten their laws and
regulations, and we are developing a training program to help them
identify and block terrorist money flows.
state sponsors
Now turning to state sponsors, four of the seven state sponsors on
our list are Middle Eastern states--Libya, Syria, Iran, and Iraq.
Although more reluctant today to sponsor terrorist attacks directly,
they continue to give safehaven and support to terrorist groups,
individuals, and activities.
First, Iran
Iran remains a leading state sponsor of terrorism. CIA Director
Tenet affirmed before Congress earlier this year that ``hardliners
continue to view terrorism as a legitimate tool of Iranian policy, and
they still control the institutions that can implement it.'' As noted
in this year's Patterns of Global Terrorism--the State Department's
primary annual publication on terrorism--Iran continues to be involved
in a range of terrorist activities. These include providing material
support and safehaven to some of the most lethal terrorist groups in
the Middle East, notably Hizballah, Hamas, and the PIJ. Iranian
assistance has taken the form of financing, equiping, offering training
locations, and offering refuge from extradition. In the case of
Hizballah and Hamas, Iranian support totals tens of millions of dollars
in direct subsidies each year. Tehran also continues to target Iranian
dissidents abroad.
In particular, two Iranian government organs, the Revolutionary
Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, have
institutionalized the use of terrorism as an instrument of policy over
the past two decades. These two government organs have longstanding
ties to the terrorist groups I mentioned earlier, among others, and
they appear determined to maintain these relationships regardless of
statements to the contrary from some of Iran's political leaders.
We continue to investigate the 1996 bombing at Khobar Towers in
Saudi Arabia, in which 19 U.S. servicemen died; We will pursue that
investigation wherever it leads, including following up on information
suggesting that some Iranian officials might have played a part in
planning or facilitating the attack.
Iran's support for terrorism activity stands in contrast to other
countries in the region, including Syria, which is telling these groups
to end ``military'' activity. Although we have repeatedly assured the
Iranians that we have no preconditions for beginning dialogue, we have
also made it clear that there cannot be a lifting of U.S. sanctions or
an improvement in relations until Iran takes meaningful steps to end
its support for terrorism and cooperate in the fight against terrorism.
Syria
International sanctions in the 1980's, following a 1986 Syrian-
directed attempt to bomb an El Al flight, had a dramatic effect on
Syrian actions. Syrian officials have not been directly linked to a
specific terrorist attack in this decade. Nonetheless, Syria continues
to provide support and safehaven to a number of key terrorist groups,
many of which have offices in Damascus and training facilities on
Syrian soil and in Syrian-controlled areas of the Bekaa valley in
Lebanon. These groups include Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and
the PFLP-GC.
We recognize that Syria's role in sponsoring Middle Eastern
terrorist groups has substantially diminished by comparison with its
involvement in terrorism 20 years ago. We also note the recent Syrian
moves to put pressure on various Palestinian groups to move from armed
struggle to political action. But, until Syria ceases to give safehaven
to these groups, it will remain on the state-sponsors list.
Iraq
Iraq's capabilities to cause trouble through international
terrorism have been seriously eroded, largely through international
cooperation. Nonetheless, Saddam Hussein retains a willingness to
attack us by terrorist means--and the connections to Middle Eastern
terrorist groups that could lead to such acts. We are concerned over
the fact that Abu Nidal relocated himself and his terrorist
organization to Iraq over the past year. Iraq also continues to host
and arm the Iranian Peoples' Mujahedin, a terrorist group with American
blood on its hands. Thus, we are not looking at removing Iraq from the
list any time soon.
Finally, Libya
In the mid-80's, Libya hosted and supported some of the most
violent and deadly terrorist groups, including the Abu Nidal
organization (ANO), which operated terrorist training camps on Libyan
soil. A decade of international sanctions and isolation, however, has
clearly had an effect on Libyan policy. It appears they have expelled
the ANO, and we no longer have evidence that terrorist camps still
exist in Libya. On April 5th, following years of U.S.-led pressure,
Libya turned over two individuals who will be tried in the Hague for
carrying out the Pan Am 103 bombing, eleven years after that December
1988 tragedy. This action, while important from our perspective, does
not end our designation of Libya as a state sponsor of terrorism. That
can only happen when we have clear evidence that Qadhafi has:
Fully cooperated with the Pan Am 103 trial,
Fulfilled all obligations under U.N. Security Council
resolutions,
Renounced the use of terrorism, and
Severed remaining ties to terrorist groups.
A French court convicted Qadhafi's brother-in-law, Libyan
intelligence chief Abdallah Senoussi, for his involvement in the UTA
772 bombing. Last month, the French magistrate investigating the UTA
772 case is seeking to indict Qadhafi himself. We will be following
this case very carefully over the next few months.
Beyond these officially designated state sponsors, we remain
concerned about other countries in the Middle East and South Asia. I
spoke earlier about our efforts to persuade Pakistan to use its
influence to bring Usama bin Ladin to justice. This is a bone of
contention between Pakistan and the United States. I am also disturbed
that Lebanon remains a haven for terrorist groups and individuals, some
of whom are fugitives from U.S. justice for acts committed against
Americans in the 1980's. We continually raise this problem with the
Lebanese government.
Long-term strategy and needs
Mr. Chairman, I want to reaffirm that the central element of our
counterterrorist efforts remains a combination of political will and
diplomatic action. We can combat terrorism only if we persuade other
governments to work with us. Intelligence-sharing, law-enforcement
cooperation, and armed force are important, but they must be integrated
into our overall political/diplomatic strategy. A long-term, sustained
effort, however, requires not just a firm commitment from our leaders,
but also resources.
Let me say a word about the resources we need to fight terrorism.
It is vital we help friendly governments acquire counterterrorist
skills. Part of our cooperative effort includes providing training
through the State Department's antiterrorism assistance program. This
training in such courses as bomb detection, airport security, hostage
negotiation, and crisis management is extremely important both as a
foreign policy tool in fighting terrorism and also in protecting
Americans who travel or work overseas.
Every American ambassador has explicit instructions from the
President to protect the lives and the welfare of American citizens
overseas. Antiterrorism assistance permits our envoys to do their jobs.
It is the currency that a U.S. ambassador can use to ``sell'' a foreign
government on the need for firm counterterrorist action. Without it,
our representatives have nothing to offer and no way to enlist foreign
governments in protecting our citizens.
Fighting terrorist fundraisers and bomb makers takes money. Yet the
foreign operations bill would cut our proposed combined antiterrorism
and terrorist interdiction programs by 36 percent. This is
unconscionable, in my opinion. These terrible cuts are short-sighted
and make it impossible for us to continue the three-year training
programs launched for countries in Africa and Eastern Europe after the
bombings of our embassies in East Africa last year and still provide
needed training for key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
International cooperation, antiterrorism training, action to
counter terrorist fundraising, advances in explosive-detection
equipment, exercises to deal with crises, and rewards for information
are not abstract ideas or ``foreign give-aways.'' They are good
investments in the protection for American citizens and interests.
Mr. Chairman, whenever there is a major terrorist incident,
everyone demands that we ``do something.'' But weeks later when the TV
images fade away, it becomes frustratingly difficult in the next year
to get the funding for programs that do something.
I know that you and your committee have been supportive of our
efforts and we are grateful. But I am not sure that the importance of
these programs is understood fully elsewhere in Congress.
The bottom line is that, to fight terrorism effectively, the State
Department needs resources to do so. Without them, Americans who live
and travel overseas will continue to risk attack from whoever carries a
grudge and weapon.
Senator Brownback. Thank you for your testimony. I look
forward to some questions. I hope the administration, as well,
puts it as a high priority on these funds on the foreign
operations budget, that it is a top priority that they put
forward. Because, as you know, we are in a budget negotiation,
and everybody is trying to protect Social Security. And I
certainly agree with that. So it is going to be important that
the administration make it a high priority, this area. And I
think it will be important that they do that.
The thing I am searching for, and I want to go, first, on a
general statement, and then I am going to have some specific
questions, is the start to find the comprehensive policy that
the United States is going to exert both now and in the future
in dealing with these extremist threats. Because it strikes me
that we need a combination of both sticks and carrots here, in
working with various governments, and effective threats and
penalty for terrorist groups. And you have got it really
covering the front of this entire subcommittee's jurisdictional
area, which covers Northern Africa, the Middle East and South
Asia, and you have got different policies that need to go into
play in each area.
In the Sudan it might be one policy. In Pakistan it might
be another. In what is taking place in Afghanistan, it could be
a policy, and yet you could go just up into Central Asia, what
is taking place in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan and it will be
another. There are friendly governments that seek to work with
us, and we should help and work with them. There are those who
oppose us clearly, and we should oppose them clearly, if that
is the route that they choose to go.
And then there are nations like Saudi Arabia, who have
links to much of this, that we seem to kind of look the other
way. I do not see the comprehensive policy thread here. Can you
shine that light to me? Or I guess maybe you just pledge to
work with us on developing that, to confront this extremism in
that region of the world that hits us so much.
Ambassador Sheehan. Mr. Chairman, I do believe we have a
policy. Maybe it has not been articulated that well. I can take
a crack at it this afternoon.
The policy basis starts with an effort to depoliticize the
use of terrorism and to criminalize its behavior. And we try to
do that on a wide range of activities, with international
legislation, international conventions, that we have built up
over the last 20 years. We have instruments that help us define
countries or organizations that are involved in terrorism. Two
of those instruments were the creations of the U.S. Congress
that I mentioned in my remarks--state sponsorship and
designating terrorism.
These are very important tools that we use to pressure the
state sponsor, to bring sanctions to bear on them, which not
only have an economic bite, but I think, as importantly, is to
shine the light of truth on these governments and to embarrass
them politically and bring international pressure against them.
There is a growing consensus around the world that
terrorism is an illegitimate instrument, shown by the
overwhelming support for the resolution against the Taliban in
the Security Council last month. A range of governments joined
together to condemn the Taliban for that. That is an important
aspect of our policy--gaining consensus on that.
As we build that political consensus, then we need an array
of instruments that we need to coordinate and synergize to
leverage countries to behave properly. And beyond the state
sponsors, I keep informally, in the back of my own mind, a
list--what you call the aiders and abetters--I call, in the
back of my mind, the nations behaving badly regarding
terrorism.
And we need to have concerted pressure on them to get them
to change their behavior, not to allow them to turn a blind eye
to terrorists that may operate in their borders or pass through
their borders to conduct attacks in other places. And we have
to bring all our instruments to bear--intelligence, law
enforcement--as ways to cooperate with them, and use other
sticks, like you say. And primarily those can be financial and
trying to bring pressure to bear on them.
Our Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury, we
work closely with them. That brings pressure on governments
whose banks may not be as vigilant as they should be involving
terrorism funds. So there is a whole array of instruments that
we try to bring to bear, often quietly, behind the scenes, but
I think do represent a broader policy that we have at work.
When you talk about a strategy, I think you are absolutely
right. We need country-specific strategies. And I have tried to
do that in my office over the past year, focusing on the
primary threats that face the United States. And I alluded to
those in my testimony. They are mostly emanating out of South
Asia right now. Unfortunately, that is where the threats that I
see coming at us are coming from there.
And we have tried to design a country-by-country strategy,
on finding out how we can bring pressure to bear on that
equation. And so we have that policy. It probably can be better
articulated. I am sure it can be improved. And as you indicated
earlier, I look forward to working with you and the members of
your staff, who I know have thought a lot about this, to
improving that policy and making it more effective.
Senator Brownback. We may look even at some legislative
vehicles to put together for this next year to consider what we
could do in combatting extremism.
Let me take you to the specific case of Osama bin Laden. It
has been in the news a great deal lately about some discussion
of him leaving Afghanistan. There have been a couple of
discussions about him leaving Afghanistan, and going, with safe
passage, possibly to Iraq. And these are the news accounts I am
just reiterating. And also about him getting financing still
out of Saudi Arabia.
What can you tell us? Is he continuing to get financing out
of financial institutions in Saudi Arabia?
Ambassador Sheehan. Let me take the first question, Mr.
Chairman, regarding Osama bin Laden's possible movement out of
Afghanistan. We have heard this before. And it did not pan out.
He has been there for quite a while now. Right now there are
increasing reports of him potentially leaving and reports of
him writing a letter to the Taliban leadership about offering
to leave.
We have made it clear to the Taliban that they are required
to turn him over to justice, not only by our own executive
order, signed by the President in August, but also now, by the
entire international community, as represented in the Security
Council resolution.
He does not have a lot of places to go. And part of the
reason of that is the success we have had over the last several
administrations in making it more difficult for state sponsors
to take on a blatant terrorist like bin Laden. There are a
couple of options out there for him. Iraq has been mentioned. I
have heard Chechnya and other areas. They all have difficulties
for him. And we are working with governments, a range of
governments, to try to shut down his opportunity to leave
Afghanistan, and make sure he has only one place to go. And
that is to face justice for what he has been charged with.
It remains to be seen how that will pan out. We are talking
to the Taliban. We get some positive signals from them
sometimes that they would like to resolve this issue. I am
convinced that there are members of their organization who want
to resolve this issue. But it remains to be seen what they do.
And that is what matters. And up till now, they have determined
that they want to provide safe haven for Osama bin Laden.
But I can assure you, Senator, that we are working hard. I
have been working with my colleagues at the NSC staff to try to
figure out where he may be heading to, based on our
intelligence reports, and trying to shut off those avenues.
On your second question, regarding funding for Osama bin
Laden, of course it is widely reported that he had his own
resources that provided funding for his organization. He is
also able to tap into resources such as the narcotics trade out
of Afghanistan, which is growing significantly, my colleagues
in the narcotics bureau tell me. He is able to tap that.
It is also fairly evident that there is Gulf money that
works its way back into Afghanistan.
Senator Brownback. And to bin Laden?
Ambassador Sheehan. Yes. Yes, sir, through bin Laden.
Through a variety of ways.
Senator Brownback. Is it going through some legitimate
institutions, as well?
Ambassador Sheehan. We have had conversations with a lot of
our Gulf friends about some of the banks out in the Gulf. And
some of that has been reported in the press.
I think the article you referred to had some inaccuracies
in it regarding the level of that knowledge. My personal view,
from what I have read, much of that money that comes from Gulf
sources is not--a lot of that money is held overseas and can be
moved fairly easily in today's international financial
networks. It is a difficult problem to tackle.
And the terrorists, they understand the international
financial markets and circuits and have found ways to move it
around internationally. So it is not as easy as focusing on one
or two banks in order to tackle that. They know how to move it
around quickly.
But we are working. We have a task force of folks in the
government that are working on this issue, not only looking at
some of the banks, but also at other groups, such as NGO's and
other front companies that are increasingly used to launder
money through to terrorist organizations. Some of the
fundraising in the Gulf, in my view, is done innocently.
A rich individual may be asked to contribute millions of
dollars to an organization to help refugees in a certain
country. And he may write that check innocently, not knowing
that a lot, or portions, of that funding may be diverted to
terrorist activities. Others may be writing the check knowing
full well where its destination may be.
It is one of the most difficult areas we have to deal with.
And we are trying to advance a multi-pronged strategy on this.
One of the issues we are doing in the U.N. right now is trying
to get a convention on money laundering, financial support for
terrorism. We think that is going pretty well. The French have
sponsored that. It will provide us the legal basis that we need
internationally to help go after some of these organizations
and banks.
Senator Brownback. Are the Gulf states all fully
cooperating with the United States' efforts to stop this flow
of money to extremist organizations?
Ambassador Sheehan. They are cooperating, sir. We have had
teams go to several Gulf states from Treasury, the White House,
and the law enforcement community. They are cooperating.
I will say, though, I would like to see that cooperation
increase. And they need to increase their efforts. And we can
help them also, providing some of the training and skills, the
expertise we have developed in money laundering, often in the
counternarcotics community, and bring those lessons to bear as
the terrorists become more adept at finding ways to raise and
move money around.
Senator Brownback. I hope we will press those Gulf states
if that is where the problems are. We have had a hesitancy, it
seems like to me, too much of the time to confront sometimes
people who have been good friends of ours, but they seem to,
for whatever reasons, turn something of a blind eye to this
activity, or are not as aggressive as the situation would
warrant, when you have so many who have been killed and so much
of a continuing upsurge in this extremism movement.
I want to focus your specific view on Khobar Towers. Do we
know any further about terrorist groups linked with the
Iranians and what, if anything, they are doing or have been,
associated with the Khobar Towers bombing?
Ambassador Sheehan. Mr. Chairman, I am not sure, at this
hearing, I am going to be able to add much to what Martin Indyk
said in his confirmation hearings the other day, that we have
information that links Iranian officials to the Khobar bombing
incident. The FBI has that information. The intelligence
community has that information. It is information that is being
developed on a daily basis.
We have not made the determination that that information
clearly implicates the Government of Iran for Khobar Towers. I
share with you, Mr. Chairman, the goal of getting to the bottom
line truth of this incident, of this bombing which claimed 19
servicemen. I am working within the interagency community that
deals with the analysis of this situation. You have the law
enforcement analysis, which is trying to build a case, to get
indictments, to bring people to trial. You have the
intelligence community that has a different standard of
information and making judgments.
Collectively, we will make that judgment on the culpability
of the Iranian officials and, if necessary, how far, if at all,
it goes up to the Iranian Government. I commit to you, Mr.
Chairman, that we will work very hard on examining this
evidence and shining the light of truth on to it as we
determine what the policy implications might be for that in the
future.
And I look forward to that. I could perhaps provide more
detailed information on what we do know, but it might need a
closed session in the future. And I can bring colleagues from
the law enforcement and the intelligence community, perhaps
with you or members of your staff, to lay out where we are
right now and where we are in our judgment about the complicity
of those officials.
Senator Brownback. I hope that in our desires to broaden
relationships with Iran, which is a laudable goal, but that we
do not look past the deaths that took place at Khobar Towers.
We cannot allow that to take place. And as you mentioned in
your statement, about working with relatives of the people who
have been killed in these terrorist attacks, we owe it to them
to provide clear answers, and conviction on our part that they
are not made to succumb to some overall policy desire that may
or may not happen, that we get to the bottom of this and that
we pursue the appropriate actions with the facts that we do
learn.
Let me say in closing, too, because I need to get the next
panel up, and we are going to have a series of votes, I am
told, around 4:15, that there is another type of extremism that
is raising its head, and a number of people are getting killed
associated with it. And that is in the religious persecution
area in that region as well. And we are seeing it from the
entire area and breadth. And I hope your office continues to do
work on that issue, too. Because these are cases where there
are terrorist actions that are taking place and large numbers
of people are being killed. That is inappropriate altogether.
So if you will look at that.
I want to just mention this to you before I let you go. The
list of major drug trafficking groups was due on the Hill, by
law, by November 1. Has that list gotten up to the Hill yet? I
do not believe it has. Is that list going to be forthcoming
shortly?
Ambassador Sheehan. Mr. Chairman, I am not sure, but I will
check with my friend and colleague, Randy Beers, as soon as I
leave this committee room, to make sure that that gets up to
you in a timely manner.
Senator Brownback. So we could have that to work with, as
well.
Ambassador Sheehan. Yes, sir.
Senator Brownback. As I said, we may be working on some
legislation. We look forward to continue working with your
office, and also until we get to the bottom of a number of
these cases.
It is just that a number of different groups are operating.
But the overall thing that I would like for you to really place
in your mind is what we can do, working together, to put
together this comprehensive strategy. Because this is not a
problem that is going away any time soon.
Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador.
Ambassador Sheehan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Brownback. In the interest of time, I want to call
up the next panel before we get a vote called. That will be Mr.
Mansoor Ijaz, managing partner, Crescent Equity Partners; Mr.
Milt Bearden, retired CIA officer and former Chief of Station
in Sudan and Pakistan; and Dr. S. Frederick Starr, chairman of
the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins
University; and Michael Krepon, president of the Henry Stimson
Center. I welcome you gentlemen.
Gentlemen, I have got a dilemma. And that is that at 4:15,
we are supposed to go into a series of rollcall votes that will
keep me away for a couple of hours. I guess that would be
called a rain delay in baseball, or a vote delay here. We can
go probably until about 4:30.
And what I would like to do is if I could--because each of
you deserve to be fully heard, and I want to hear your
testimony--but I am wondering if we could go, say, somewhere in
the 5- to 7- or 8-minute category on actual comments, take your
full statement in the record, and then we will see. Maybe this
vote will get delayed and we will get a chance to have an
exchange. But right now it looks like we would have to probably
end the hearing at 4:30.
So with that, if you could participate within that
structure. And I apologize again for doing that, but they just
went ahead and scheduled the votes.
So, Mr. Ijaz, I hope I am stating that correct, I have got
you down first, if you would like to go ahead. We will take
your full statement in the record. And if you could summarize
in the 5- to 7-minute category, I would certainly appreciate
that.
STATEMENT OF MANSOOR IJAZ, MANAGING PARTNER, CRESCENT EQUITY
PARTNERS, LLC, NEW YORK, NY
Mr. Ijaz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to be
with you today and offer a perspective on how we might address
some of the problems associated with extremism and terrorism.
I come before you today as an American of the Islamic faith
and a citizen deeply concerned about the dangers posed to free
societies all over the world by unbridled extremist behavior,
whether it is Islamic or otherwise. Terrorism, as you well are
aware, is used by sponsors because it is a cheap and effective
way of expressing challenges to what is perceived, certainly in
the demographic area that we are talking about today, as
Western hegemony and imperialism. It is a viral infection of
the mind that cannot be seen until it is too late.
For too long, the United States, in my judgment, has tried
to impose a vision of societal organization and governance on
countries that were either unwilling or unable to accept our
doctrines, because their people were not sufficiently educated
to accept a form of self-rule so heavily dependent on personal
responsibility. America's abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan--
and here I am going to just say that I will talk about Pakistan
and Afghanistan initially, and I will let my colleague, Milton
Bearden, address the issues in the Sudan, even though I have
done some work there, as well--but the abrupt withdrawal from
Pakistan and Afghanistan after the collapse of communism is a
prime example of how poorly thought through U.S. policies can
be in germinating the very forces that we seek today to try and
contain.
In 1990, we left our friends in Pakistan, then a nascent
democracy, healing the wounds of a decade of dictatorial rule,
to deal with the remnants of our ideological war: drug
trafficking, arms bazaars and millions of unwanted refugees.
Our precipitous departure created a vacuum for other regional
Islamic powers, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, to fight their
ideological war, pitting Sunni Islam against Shia Islam, a war
whose terrorist dimensions have afflicted virtually every
Islamic state in Central and South Asia.
Mr. Chairman, I respectfully submit to you that our policy
vacuums cannot continue without serious ramifications for U.S.
interests. A multidimensional approach is needed to be crafted
to replace current policies of blunt instrument sanctions and
isolationism in order to better calibrate--and that is the key
word--to calibrate U.S. responses to terrorist acts.
Now, the most important of these multidimensional
approaches that I would like to talk about are education
programs in these affected countries and intelligence-to-
intelligence cooperation. And I will give you two examples in
that process.
The first is the recent military coup in Pakistan. And the
second is what I did about 2 years ago to try and effect a
reconciliation between the Sudan and the United States, in
which I was able to bring a meaningful counterterrorism offer
from the Government of the Sudan to the United States prior to
our intelligence community becoming engrossed in this process
of trying to figure out whether they were producing chemical
weapons or not.
So the question there that has to be asked is, what would
have happened if they had acted on the counterterrorism offer
that I brought in April 1997--I hand carried the letter from
Khartoum to Washington--and gone in there with our FBI's
counterterrorism units and had a good look around? That was the
offer. It was an unconditional, open the doors, let us come in
and see what is going on. And it was an intelligence-to-
intelligence contact that we could have had.
Now, on Pakistan, the coup is a manifestation, in my
judgment, of how extremism has taken root at the core of
societal institutions and overwhelmed the dilapidated
educational infrastructure once in place to combat it.
Pakistan's Islamists may have failed to win popular electoral
support due to the country's unique brand of feudal politics,
but they have learned that taking to the streets with a mix of
sectarian violence and popular disruptions can exert enough
pressure on corrupt civilian leaders to force ill-advised
domestic and foreign policy decisions which serve the
Islamists' narrow ideological objectives. The Kashmiri gambit
of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the summer of 1999 is a good
example of how extremist politics can spiral out of control.
Now, the origins of all of this extremism come from the
Iranian revolution. In 1980, when the Iranian Shah was
overthrown, you had a very large amount of money put into
Pakistan. Because, as you know, at that time, Pakistan's
population was exploding. It was literally growing at 3.5-5
percent per annum. So militant Saudis and militant Iranians
decided that Pakistan's population explosion was a good place
to try and play their own ideological struggle out.
And so they started these radical religious schools. Every
Pakistani family that had 10 children donated their extra sons
to a life of Islam. They thought they were doing something in
the cause of their religion that was the right thing to do.
Instead, it turned out that their children are today's
Islamic extremists. And this is a part of the process that we
have not yet understood in this country. Too few of our leaders
understand what Islamic extremism is about because too few of
them understand what Islam is about. This is something that has
to be corrected in the way that we do things.
Now, I would also like to make a comment about Pakistan's
intelligence services, which, in my judgment, have been a very
destructive force in South Asia, after we pulled out in 1990.
Let us keep in mind that we were engrossed in Pakistan. In
fact, Milt ran one of the largest CIA operations in Islamabad
for the period of time during which the Afghan war was going
on.
And during that period of time, we had a very close
relationship, military to military, intel to intel. The
international military exchange and training program was going
on. So military officers from Pakistan were coming to the
United States. They were being trained in what a military
government was all about and how the military ought to act in
civil society when civil rule would return. And all of these
things have now been literally shut off as a result of our
sanctions policies, our unilateral sanctions policies, against
Pakistan. Which I think was one of the biggest blunders that we
made in this country.
Now, you can look at this problem in a slightly different
way, as well. When you lose the ability to influence the minds
of the people running the most powerful institution in a
country that today has nuclear weapons, and at that time was
developing nuclear capabilities at our behest, you lose the
ability to influence events. We have lost our leverage, in my
judgment, over what can happen in Pakistan today.
Now, what are we doing to try and correct that? And I will
end my comments with this example, if I might. For the past 5
years, myself and other concerned Americans of Pakistani
origin--and I am a born American citizen, as you well know--
have been trying to combat the effects of these madrassa
schools, these radical religious schools, by building what I
call sort of the normal example of what a school ought to be,
where you do not learn just the Koran and how to shoot a
Kalishnikov rifle at age 12, but you learn the Koran, you learn
English, you learn Urdu, you learn math, you learn science, you
learn a little bit of biology.
So we have been building these rural schools all throughout
the northwest frontier province and Punjab, to try and combat
the effects of this rising tide of radicalism that has
overtaken Pakistan in a very real sense. You would be surprised
to know that it only costs you $1,000 to build and operate a
normal rural school, teaching up to 30 students in these very
remote areas. And it only takes 5 years to get these children
on the right track and make them literate as you go along.
So what I would like to say in conclusion, Mr. Chairman,
given the time constraint, is the following. No matter how much
we do as private American citizens, our program, which is
called Development in Literacy, and the acronym is DIL, which
in Urdu is the word for heart, it is only a microcosm of what
we really need to be able to do. We need to be able to do this
on a larger scale.
Education is a critical cornerstone. Just as we are
fighting that battle right here in the United States, we have
to devote resources to ensure that those problems do not reach
our shores in other forms and other different religious
beliefs, under different systems that we do not understand
here. The young boys and girls of Pakistan and Afghanistan who
face a life of illiteracy and religious zealotry have not
chosen that path voluntarily. To sit idly by and do nothing not
only dooms them, but I fear it will doom us as well in the end.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I ask that the balance of my
remarks be entered into the record.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ijaz follows:]
Prepared Statement of Mansoor Ijaz
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and distinguished members of the
Subconmiittee present here today for permitting me to share with you
some ideas on how to combat the growing problem of extremism and its
by-product, terrorism.
I come before you today as a born American of the Islamic faith and
a citizen deeply concerned about the dangers posed to free societies
all over the world by unbridled extremist behavior, whether Islamic or
otherwise.
Terrorism is used by its sponsors because it is a cheap and
effective way of expressing challenges to what is perceived--certainly
in the geographic region we are addressing today--as western hegemony
and imperialism. It is a viral infection of the mind whose visible
effects cannot be seen until it is too late.
For too long, the United States has tried to impose its vision of
societal organization and governance on countries that were either
unwilling or unable to accept our doctrines because their people were
not sufficiently educated to accept a form of self-rule so heavily
dependent on personal responsibility.
America's abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the
collapse of Communism is a prime example of how poorly thought through
U.S. policies can be in germinating the seeds of the very forces we
seek to contain today.
In 1990, we left our friends in Pakistan, then a nascent democracy
healing the wounds of a decade of dictatorial rule, to deal with the
remnants of our ideological war--drug trafficking, arms bazaars and
millions of unwanted refugees.
Our precipitous departure created a vacuum for regional Islamic
powers, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, to fight their ideological war
pitting Sunni Islam against Shia Islam--a war whose terrorist
dimensions have afflicted virtually every Islamic state in Central and
South Asia.
Mr. Chairman, I respectfully submit to you that our policy vacuums
cannot continue without serious ramifications for U.S. interests. A
multi-dimensional approach needs to be crafted to replace current
policies of blunt instrument sanctions and isolationism in order to
better calibrate U.S. responses to terrorist acts.
We must develop strategies for long-term education programs aimed
at preventing extremism from infecting new generations of children in
susceptible regions of the world.
We must increase our military-to-military and intelligence-to-
intelligence contacts with unfriendly governments.
And, we must more vigorously structure human intelligence networks
that can inform us about extremist organizations before they become
full-blown terrorist networks.
The education and intelligence-to-intelligence dimensions of the
strategy I suggest are best exemplified by Pakistan's recent military
coup and my own efforts at reconciling the failures in our relationship
with the Sudan.
Pakistan's coup is a manifestation of how extremism has taken root
at the core of its societal institutions and overwhelmed the
dilapidated educational infrastructure once in place to combat it.
Pakistan's Islamists may have failed to win popular electoral
support due to the country's unique brand of feudal politics. But they
have learned that taking to the streets with a mix of sectarian
violence and popular disruptions can exert enough pressure on corrupt
civilian leaders to force ill-advised domestic and foreign policy
decisions which serve the Islamists' narrow ideological objectives.
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's gambit in the heights of
Kashmir during the spring and summer of 1999 is a glaring example of
how extremist politics brought the world to the brink of a fourth Indo-
Pakistani war.
Not surprisingly, extremism has taken root within Pakistan's army
as well, fracturing its western trained secular upper management from
its battalions of soldiers educated in radical religious schools, or
Madrassas--fractures that were also at the very heart of the October
12, 1999 coup.
The origins of these fractures began some twenty years ago, at the
height of the Iranian revolution, when Iran's radical Shiite mullahs
and Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist Sunni clerics decided Pakistan's
population explosion was fertile ground for fighting their ideological
struggle.
Madrassas were built throughout the Pakistani countryside with
large infusions of Saudi and Iranian cash and readied staffs of Islamic
clerics. Overpopulated Pakistani families donated their extra sons to a
life of Islam, reducing their financial burdens and vesting themselves
in the promises of redemption from extremist clerics who chided their
secular ways.
Today, these schools number in the thousands and teach primarily
Islamic fanaticism and basic military training rather than a broad-
based set of pluralistic values and diversified knowledge.
Poorly educated, militarist adolescents have now grown up to
populate army brigades and intelligence bureaus. These Islamists are
tomorrow's generals, corps commanders and intelligence chiefs, devoid
of training that breeds moderation and respect for dissension.
Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, has aggressively used
Madrassa graduates to man covert and overt operations. ISI-trained and
financed freedom fighters now populate resistance movements in China's
Xinkiang province, Chechnya, Dagestan and Kashmir among other places
where radical Islam is now spreading.
America's complicity in perpetuating this regional turmoil is
inescapable. Take for example the decades in which the U.S. military
trained Pakistan's secular army personnel under the International
Military Exchange and Training Program, commonly known as IMET.
IMET fostered the development of personal military-to-military
bonds that allowed America to ``see'' inside Pakistani anny minds while
also encouraging the development of an ethos in the army that respected
civilian rule.
Freezing IMET assistance in 1990 caused a vacuum that has now been
incrementally filled during the past decade by the creeping footsteps
of urban Islamists slowly ascending the ladder of command inside the
army.
It has also encouraged rogue elements to operate inside the ISI, in
effect catering to the whims of corrupt civilian politicians for
conducting inappropriate covert intelligence operations--often inside
Pakistan's borders.
In an effort to combat the destructive forces being bred in these
Iranian and Saudi-financed Madrassa schools, myself and concerned
Americans with Pakistani roots have been building rural schools in
Pakistan for the past five years through a private U.S.-based
philanthropy.
You may be surprised to know that $1,000 builds and operates a
normal rural school teaching up to 30 students everything from the
Koran to science and math to Urdu and English for a whole year. And, it
only takes five years to make a child literate in our programs.
But no matter how much we do, our program is only a microcosm of
what needs to be done on a much larger scale throughout the region to
combat the cancerous spread of extremism.
The young boys and girls of Pakistan and Afghanistan who face a
life illiteracy and religious zealotry have not chosen this path
voluntarily. To sit idly by and do nothing not only dooms them, in the
end I fear it will doom us as well.
Mr. Chairman, I would like to also briefly address the issue of
developing intelligence liaisons with countries who support extremist
and terrorist organizations that are directly at odds with American
interests.
I offer as an example my 1996-97 efforts to effect a reconciliation
between the militant Islamic government of the Sudan and U.S.
authorities through intel-to-intel contacts before the U.S. bombed
Sudan's Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998 under suspicions
it was producing chemical weapons precursors.
In April 1997, I hand carried an offer by Sudanese strongman Omar
Hassan El Bashir to U.S. authorities, including Congressional leaders,
the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor, in which
Bashir stated, ``We extend an offer to the FBI's counterterrorism units
and any other official delegations . . . to come to the Sudan and work
with our External Intelligence Department in order to assess the data
in our possession and help us counter the forces your government and
ours seek to contain.''
Jim Risen's October 27, 1999 expose in the New York Times is must
reading on the internal divisions that occurred in our national
security apparatus as well as distasteful efforts by senior
administration officials to coordinate a cover-up of the dissension
that surrounded the decision to bomb Al Shifa.
What would have happened, following Mr. Risen's timeline, if U.S.
authorities had responded to Bashir's April counterterrorism offer and
sent the FBI into the Sudan for a good look around before U.S.
suspicions arose later in the summer that nerve gas agents were being
developed at Al Shifa? The offer was unconditional.
On two occasions, I met privately with Sudan's intelligence chief
to explore the modus operandi for such interactions.
The reasoning behind my approach to Bashir was simple: if the Sudan
was genuinely not harboring terrorists or fomenting radicalism after
its 1996 decision to expel Osama bin Laden, the alleged Saudi
mastermind of the embassy bombings, the only way to prove Khartoum's
complicity or innocence was to invite America's premier institutions
fighting global terrorism into the country for an unobstructed look.
Had we responded, the Sudanese people could be assured America was
holding true to its principle of innocent until proven guilty, while
U.S. national security advisors would retain their options in dealing
with signs of terrorist training camps, illicit chemical weapons
factories or other problems associated with the surge in radical
Islamic behavior.
Equally important, ordinary Americans might not have to face angry
Muslim radicals unless the evidence of guilt uncovered was compelling
and condemnable not only by the U.S. but by other Muslim nations and
the world community at large.
Why wasn't Bashir's offer acted on sooner? In fact, it is precisely
this inaction by U.S. authorities that raises the deep skepticism
pervading America's Muslims as well as many Muslims elsewhere about the
true agenda in Washington for dealing with complex and unstable
elements in the Islamic world.
The key to defusing radical Muslim behavior cannot be found by
choosing its most vulnerable targets for missile practice.
Rather, we should aim to raise up the Islamic world's most
disaffected people so they are not as desperate to tear us down. We
must resolve to engage rather than contain the elements of Islam we do
not understand.
American Muslims can and should be foremost in assisting with this
effort.
If we do not, we might find one day soon that terrorism on our soil
was born of the unjust and indiscriminate policies we condoned through
our complacency, inaction and ignorance.
Thank you Mr. Chairman for affording me the opportunity to offer
this perspective. I ask that the balance of my written remarks be
entered in their entirety as part of the record and I am happy to take
any questions you may have.
Senator Brownback. Without objection, they will be.
Thank you. You are quoting Abraham Lincoln, as well. He
said that whoever controls the classroom today will control the
country tomorrow.
Mr. Bearden, you have had a great deal of experience
dealing in these areas. I look forward to your comments and
your thoughts on what we need to do.
STATEMENT OF MILTON BEARDEN, RETIRED CIA OFFICER, FORMER CIA
CHIEF IN SUDAN AND PAKISTAN
Mr. Bearden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Brownback. I will go ahead and run the clock, just
to give you an idea of where we are time-wise.
Mr. Bearden. I will give you my abbreviated comments and
enter for the record the full remarks.
Senator Brownback. Without objection.
Mr. Bearden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your kind
invitation to appear before the committee today to discuss the
important topic of extremist movements and their threat to the
United States. It is a topic involving policy issues that will
reach increasing prominence in the new millennium and in a
world that is still adjusting to the end of the bipolar
alignments of the cold war and the order that they exerted.
I speak to you today as a private citizen, but also as one
who spent 34 years in public service, 30 of that in the CIA.
After many years of living and working in Islamic societies, I
feel qualified to comment on U.S. policies toward Islamic
states in general, and toward the states and groups we now
consider the most menacing; in particular, Sudan and
Afghanistan.
As we are speaking of regional influences in Central Asia,
Mr. Chairman, we must also discuss U.S. policy toward Pakistan,
which though by no means is a terrorist state, is nevertheless
a growing concern. We are at a policy crossroads with respect
to all three of these countries. All are under unilateral or
U.S.-led multilateral sanctions, and all are considered
potential threats to peace to the United States or to our own
vital interests.
In 1998, the United States launched cruise missile attacks
against Sudan and Afghanistan, driving to a new low our already
severely strained relations with those countries. And during
the ensuring 14 months, anti-American sentiments in Pakistan
have become so heated that the cries for jihad against
Americans have been heard in the streets of Peshawar and
Islamabad for the first time in almost 20 years.
As we assess the situation in Sudan and Afghanistan, and
separately in Pakistan, we might instinctively conclude that
Islamic fundamentalism is the root cause of our concerns. But a
more thorough assessment might lead to another conclusion. In a
frank appraisal, we might deduce that the common denominator
among these three countries is not really fundamentalist Islam
or the tragic and frightening specter of the crushing poverty
of failed or failing states. We might determine instead that
the real common root of our concern is the U.S. disengagement
from each of these countries for most of the last 10 years.
Being the world's sole superpower carries with it awesome
responsibilities. The immense military and economic power of
the United States and our truly remarkable national values
weigh equally heavily whether we apply them to isolate or to
help failing states. To be successful in dealing with the
changing nature of the terrorist threat, our government must
commit itself to a disciplined and demanding approach to the
problem and to the formulation of policies designed to provide
lasting solutions rather than expedient demonstrations of
power.
Our government must take care to concentrate the focus of
American power on clearly illegal and disruptive acts carried
out by hostile governments and groups, while avoiding dwelling
excessively on the aspects of their cultures, which we may find
alien or noxious. In short, it is time to ask whether or not
the best policy is to continue to attempt to isolate these
troubled states and, in the process, possibly ensure that they
slip into chaos, or whether we should take steps that might
lift them out of their isolation and, in the process, deny them
as safe havens for extremists elements that wish us harm.
Mr. Chairman, if there is a new world order for the next
century, it is this. The United States, as the sole remaining
superpower, can no longer choose to isolate and ignore entire
nations without dangerous consequences. The time-honored
expectation of the last half century that the other side would
somehow bring them under control if we let them go has expired.
Things may have worked out that way in the bipolar world of the
U.S. and the USSR, but they do not work that way today.
Mr. Chairman, the entire concept of a failed state is new.
It is a post-cold war concept, and I do not think we have
developed policies to deal with it.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And my full remarks can be entered
into the record.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Bearden follows:]
Prepared Statement of Milton Bearden
Mr. Chairman, thank you for your kind invitation to appear before
the committee today to discuss the important topic of ``Extremist
movements and their threat to the United States.'' It is a topic
involving policy issues that will reach increasing prominence in the
new millennium and in a world that is still adjusting to the end of the
bipolar alignments of the Cold War and the order they exerted.
I speak to you today as a private citizen, but also as one who
spent 34 years in public service, 30 of that in the CIA's Directorate
of Operations. In many years of living and working in Islamic
societies, I feel reasonably qualified to comment on U.S. policies
toward Islamic states in general and toward the states and groups we
now consider among the most menacing: Sudan and Afghanistan. And as we
are speaking of regional influences in Central Asia, we must also
discuss U.S. policy toward Pakistan, which, though by no means a
terrorist state, is nevertheless of growing concern.
We are at a policy crossroads with respect to all three countries.
All are under unilateral or U.S.-led multi-lateral sanctions and all
are considered potential threats to peace, to the United States, or to
our vital interests.
In 1998, the United States launched cruise missile attacks against
Sudan and Afghanistan driving to a new low our already severely
stressed relations with those countries. And during the ensuing
fourteen months anti-American sentiments in Pakistan have become so
heated that cries for Jihad against Americans have been heard in the
streets of Peshawar and Islamabad for the first time in almost twenty
years.
As we assess the situation in Sudan and Afghanistan, and separately
Pakistan, we might instinctively conclude that Islamic fundamentalism
is the root cause of our concerns. But a more thorough assessment might
lead to another conclusion. In a frank appraisal we might deduce that
the common denominator among these three countries is not really
fundamentalist Islam or the tragic and frightening specter of the
crushing poverty of failed or failing states and their attendant slides
into violence and drug trafficking. We might determine instead that the
real common root of our concerns is U.S. disengagement from each of
those countries for most of the last ten years.
Being the world's sole super power carries with it great
responsibilities. The immense military and economic power of the United
States and our truly remarkable national values weigh equally heavily
whether we apply them to help or to isolate failing states.
Having served as the CIA chief in The Sudan as it slipped into
Islamic fundamentalism in the early 1980's, and in Pakistan during the
last three years of neighboring Afghanistan's brutal war to free itself
of Soviet occupation in the late 1980's, I am personally familiar with
both the U.S. foreign policy positions and the cultural realities in
these countries and how they have come into dangerous conflict.
The United States, once viewed as a close friend by the people of
Sudan, is now viewed by the Sudanese as having indiscriminately
attacked a harmless pharmaceutical plant. America, who once worked hand
in hand with the people of Afghanistan in their struggle against the
ten-year Soviet occupation, is now viewed by the people of eastern
Afghanistan as the latest in a succession of foreign powers to attack
those tortured foothills of the Hindu Kush. And the people of Pakistan,
despite an enormous reservoir of good will toward the United States,
have come to view us as at best unreliable and at worst erratic and
bullying.
To respond to these specific situations, a policy of diplomatic,
and, in the case of Pakistan, military reengagement might well produce
results we seek, but which have been so elusive for the last decade.
In South Asia, Pakistan has been the United States' most reliable
ally in the years since WWII. Pakistan stood on the side of the West
during the early years of the Central Treaty Organization; it lent a
hand at the critical moment of our opening to China in 1971, and it
offered its territory for the U.S. to coordinate the effort to aid the
people of Afghanistan in their war against the Soviet Union from 1979-
1989. In 1989, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan,
setting in motion a wave that crested the Berlin Wall seven months
later. But in 1990, the United States invoked sanctions against it old
ally, Pakistan, because of its ongoing nuclear weapons program, and
abruptly ended military-to-military contact.
In the ensuing ten years we have seen the Pakistani Army, born in
the British Army tradition and tempered by decades of close cooperation
with the United States, become increasingly radicalized. The once
outward-looking officer corps of the Pakistan Army whose foundations
were laid at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, and whose flag rank officers
all attended the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth,
is being replaced by inward-looking officers who have been trained only
in religious fundamentalist Madrassa schools.
I cannot stress how the ranks of the Pakistan Army below general
officer level have changed in the decade since military-to-military
contact between the U.S. and Pakistan was terminated because of the
strictures of U.S. legislation. If those laws were designed to punish
Pakistan, they have, indeed, succeeded. But at the same time they have
gone a long way to create the very conditions we most fear--an
increasingly radicalized Pakistan with an ``Islamic Bomb.''
Last month the Pakistan Army seized power from Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif. It is right and proper that the suspension of the constitution
by the military National Security Council, however temporary, be
decried. But such a development is not without some positive openings,
particularly if through pressure by the international community,
General Musharraf sets an early timetable for new elections. More
immediate, however, are new opportunities these developments in
Pakistan may present.
Pervaiz Musharraf is a member of the last generation of Pakistani
Army officers who remember the military partnerships of the past with
the United States. He was trained at Fort Bragg, and was an early
member of the elite 19th Baluch Regiment, the Pakistani Special
Services Group, that trained jointly with U.S. Army Special Forces a
few decades ago. At one time, he was just one among a majority in the
Pakistan Army with such ties to the United States military.
General Musharraf may represent a last good chance to bring the
powerful force of our standing in the world and our system of values to
bear on the course Pakistan will chose for the new millennium. If we
choose to engage Pakistan, even cautiously, he might be able guide
elements within Pakistani society away from the dangerous,
fundamentalist path so many seem to be taking out of desperation and on
to a more reasonable and responsible course that will have positive
effects not only in South Asia but across Central Asia.
Afghanistan's Taliban, who control perhaps two thirds of the
country, may have already begun responding to events in neighboring
Pakistan. In last week's ministerial shuffle in Kabul a few key hard-
line and unyielding mullahs appear to have been replaced by leaders
more open to compromise. I am convinced that events across the border
in Pakistan, particularly the curbing of the most dangerously vocal
fundamentalist elements by the military council, is prompting this
realignment in Afghanistan.
While it is by no means clear how the issue of Osama bin Laden will
play out in the coming days and weeks, I believe that the Taliban want
to be rid of the bin Laden problem almost as earnestly as the United
States wants to bring it to resolution. If we prudently reengage the
Taliban after years of abandonment, and if in the process of talking
the problem through, we show a minimum of respect for Afghan culture
and traditions, we may take those first steps toward success in our
goal of closing down the terrorist training camps, reducing opium poppy
cultivation, and ultimately bringing about some of the changes we and
many Afghans seek in their society. If, however, we wave our fingers in
the faces of the Afghans, and threaten them with more cruise missiles
there will be no winners.
Sudan is another case of the costs of U.S. disengagement. Since the
Bashir regime came to power in 1989, we have chosen not to deal with
Sudan for a number of reasons, initially ranging from the suspension of
the democratic process by Bashir's takeover, to the political position
Sudan took in opposing the Gulf War against Iraq. But over the years
the list of complaints against Sudan has grown to include all that an
American focus group considers evil. On international terrorism,
Sudanese Islamic leader Hassan al Turabi, with his face appearing on
the cover of the Department of State's publication on terrorism, has
become the personification of state sponsored terrorism.
Beyond that, the perception of the Arab north of Sudan against the
African south in a brutal seventeen year civil war that has probably
claimed a million lives, provides another reason to despise the
Khartoum government. Muslim north versus Christian south plays to yet
another constituency. And the slavery issue, just now being treated
with some doubt, rounds out a Khartoum regime that can do no right,
only evil.
The United States has not had meaningful diplomatic contact with
Khartoum since 1996, while all of our closest allies have chosen to
remain engaged. Nevertheless, the Sudanese Government has repeatedly
stated its willingness to work with the United States and the
international community on issues of terrorism. At the behest of the
Saudi Government and with U.S. encouragement, Khartoum expelled Osama
bin Laden in 1996. It handed over fugitive terrorist Carlos, The
Jackal, to French security agents a year later, and has again offered
to cooperate with the United Sates and its allies on terrorist issues.
Even after the cruise missile attack, the Sudanese signed the Chemical
Weapons Convention as a sign of their intentions. It is time to
consider engagement, rather than isolation.
To be successful in dealing with the changing nature of the
terrorist threat our government must commit itself to a disciplined and
demanding approach to the problem and to the formulation of policies
designed to provide lasting solutions rather than expedient
demonstrations of power. Our government must take care to concentrate
the focus of American power on clearly illegal and disruptive acts
carried out by hostile governments and groups, while avoiding dwelling
excessively on the aspects of their cultures which we may find alien or
noxious.
In short, it is time to ask whether or not the best policy is to
continue to attempt to isolate these troubled states, and in the
process possibly insure that they slip into chaos, or whether we should
take steps that might lift them out of their isolation and in the
process deny them as safe havens for extremist elements that wish us
harm. If there is a new world order for the next century it is this.
The United States as the sole remaining super power can no longer chose
to isolate and ignore entire nations without dangerous consequences.
The time honored expectation of the last half century--that the other
side will bring them under control if we let them go--has expired.
Things may have worked out that way in the bipolar world of the U.S.
vs. the USSR. But they don't work that way today.
Senator Brownback. Yes, without objection. That was an
excellent thought, and well put and succinctly put, too. It was
well done.
Dr. Starr, please proceed.
STATEMENT OF DR. S. FREDERICK STARR, CHAIRMAN, THE CENTRAL
ASIA-CAUCASUS INSTITUTE, NITZE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL
STUDIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Starr. Thank you very much, sir. I will be brief.
The phenomenon of radical political Islam is common
throughout this large inner Asian region, and extends across
the former Soviet Union's south--Central Asia--and into
Xinjiang, in China, and of course in Pakistan, Afghanistan, et
cetera. It is worth asking, whom are these movements against?
Perhaps in our self-preoccupation we think we are the focus
of their passion, or the West in general. And certainly there
is much truth in that. But the real enemy is generally much
closer to home. It is those secular states that rule in pious
Muslim societies. This is an arrangement which obviously
reflects the Kamalist tradition in Turkey and elsewhere. It is
an arrangement which is anathema to many of the radical
Islamicists.
And the Islamicists' enemy is not just these states that
maintain secular principle, but particularly the Muslim muftis
and mullahs and the faithful who support such an arrangement.
We forget this. The strongest passion is reserved for those
fellow Muslims who have accepted and find value in the
arrangement of a secular state, ruling an essentially pious
Muslim society.
Now, the question I would like to raise here is, can you
break out of this cycle of radicalism that is settling in the
region? I am not going to pause on the interesting and
precarious experiment in Tajikistan, where a legalized Islamic
party now exists. Let me just suggest reasons why, in general,
it may not work.
First, you, sir, have mentioned the substantial
international funding for such activities. That has been
discussed here. Second, I would add and put immense emphasis on
the importance of the drug trade. The phenomena of radical
Islam in this part of the world and drug trafficking are
intimately interlinked today. The drug trafficking from this
part of the world is now the largest, most developed narcotics
trade on the planet. And it is obviously a threat to any kind
of normal society.
However, looming over all these issues and, it seems to me,
the one thing that must be the first object of American long-
term attention, is poverty. We know about the poverty of
Afghanistan. Tajikistan was the poorest of the poor in the
Soviet Union. Kyrgyzstan, even though it was the first former
Soviet country to join the WTO, is desperately poor. The
Ferghana Valley is poor.
But, above all, we are talking about the poverty that
exists in this vast mountain zone of inner Asia. These are
people who have been neglected not simply by Soviet development
processes but largely by Western development and development
agencies as well. We are talking about people who, in many
cases, were uprooted, who were told the only way out is for
them to go to the big city, to abandon everything that their
life has focused on up to that point. These people are now in a
truly desperate plight.
And I would just like to point out the obvious comparison
that exists between the widespread radicalism in this region
and that which exists in Bosnia, in Karabakh, in Chechnya, in
Dagestan, in Chiapas in Mexico, and in Peru, where the Sundero
Luminosa was strikingly similar to the general pattern of
sophisticated urban organizers stirring up passion among a
desperately poor mountain people. The core problem, then, is
mountain poverty.
Is this a hopeless issue? Is this mountain poverty
something we should just build a fence around and walk away
from? I do not believe that is the case. On the contrary, it
seems to me, on the basis of my own observations in the region,
that poverty in mountain zones can be alleviated.
I have been particularly impressed by the efforts of the
Aga Khan Development Network in the northern territories of
Pakistan. They have also worked in the Badakhshan Autonomous
Region of Tajikistan, which for the entire Soviet period was 95
percent dependent upon outside food sources. In a very few
years, amid civil war, this region is now 85 percent self-
sufficient in food.
The AKDN is also working in the Garm Valley, which was the
locus of some of the most extreme radicalism during the Tajik
civil war. It is obviously too early to declare victory there,
but the AKDN is working with exactly some of the people who
were most upset during the fighting.
What I am suggesting here is that there really exists the
basis of a long-term strategy. It is not terribly expensive to
have a huge impact on this mountain poverty. It seems to me
that in the long run this has to be done. We can delay it. But
it has to be done. Ultimately we will find ourselves addressing
mountain poverty in Afghanistan, as well.
Thank you very much, sir.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Starr follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. S. Frederick Starr
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for the opportunity to speak briefly on
an important and generally misunderstood subject, namely the role of
Islamic extremism in the region under your committee's purview. I speak
as one who is devoted to the study of the broad Central Asian region
that includes Afghanistan, Iran's northeast, northern Pakistan and
China's Xinjiang province, as well as the five new states that were
formerly republics of the Soviet Union.
My message, in brief, is that diverse types of adherents of
politically radical Islam control Afghanistan and important parts of
Pakistan but have at least a foothold in every other country of the
region. Their major enemy is neither America nor the West but what they
see as the discredited authority of mainstream leaders of Islam's
several principal branches and the secular states to which those
leaders lend their support. This is, in short, a kind of civil war
within Islam. These radical groups are small and unlikely in the long
run to prevail over the more deeply rooted religious and community
traditions of the region, let alone over the forces of secular
modernity. Yet if ignored or mishandled, they have the potential to
destabilize a broad zone that includes present nuclear states and
formidable regional powers. This is the more likely because they are
increasingly linked with the narcotics trade. It is in the interest of
the United States to see that this does not happen. I will suggest that
the core problem is not ideology but poverty, especially in mountain
areas. Whereas direct efforts to repress political extremism and the
drug trade have largely failed, the problem of rural poverty can be
successfully addressed today. This should be the focus of U.S. policy
in the region.
The genealogy of political radicalism within Islam trace to the
1920s and 1930s in Sunni Egypt and Pakistan, to the 1960s and 1970s in
Shiia Iran and southern Iraq, and to a small and more recent current
within the Wahhabi faith that prevails in Saudi Arabia. All came
together in the Afghan civil war that erupted in 1979. In other words,
politically radical Islam was international from the outset.
Nowhere in the region--even in Afghanistan--is radical Islam a mass
or ``popular'' movement. It is, instead, a network of small and
clandestine bands of young activists, most of whom have no other
profession. Such groups invite repression and thrive on it. Wherever
possible, they seek to organize armed bands from the local population
that can take over a small territory and provide stability and modest
rewards to communities that accept their control. When thwarted in
this, they often turn to terrorism, as in the many recent murders in
Dushanbe, the February 16 explosions that rocked Tashkent or the many
bombings in Xinjiang.
Viewed from the safe distance of a peaceful western capital, it is
tempting to suggest that the best way to head off these possibilities
is to open the electoral systems to Islamic parties. Maybe this is so,
in spite of the negative experience of Pakistan. The recent decision by
Tajikistan to allow religious-based political parties bears watching.
But across the region, a very diverse group of political leaders have
rejected this route, opting instead for some variant of the Kemalist
formula of a secular state in an essentially Muslim society, backed by
repression. In nearly every case they receive strong support from the
better-educated and ``modern'' segment of their citizenry. The United
States, let it be noted, has supported this approach in Turkey, Egypt
and elsewhere.
One reason leaders as different as Askar Akaev in Kyrgyzstan and
Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan have opposed bringing adherents of radical
Islam into the system is that their movements receive such strong
clandestine financial support from abroad. It is a sad irony that
significant financial backing for the movement today comes from private
citizens in three countries that are oriented towards the western
security system, namely Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Much
attention has been focused on the single figure of bin Laden, the Saudi
millionaire who has purportedly funded some of the more extreme
terrorist groups. But it is a mistake to think that he is the sole
financier for these movements. Ample financial aid flows from private
citizens and groups in all three of these countries, as well as from
the Gulf states. Their governments have had little or no success in
stopping this flow of money. In the case of Saudi Arabia one wonders if
the government is even trying.
Few news reports fail to characterize adherents of radical Islam as
``anti-American'' or ``anti-western.'' This is certainly true in some
general sense. They despise what the French anthropologist called the
``global monoculture'' and equate this most directly with the modern
West. But their main enemies are closer to home. Of course, they abhor
the very idea of a secular state and vow to bring it down. The fact
that secular leaders across Central Asia profess Muslim piety, support
the construction of mosques, establish Muslim universities and maintain
them with tax money, and pay for citizens to make the haj to Mecca,
only makes them more loathsome in the radicals' eyes.
Even more objectionable to these people are the main-stream Muslim
muftis and clerics who support this arrangement. Never mind that devout
Muslims since the time of the Caliphate have made their peace with non-
clerical governments, provided they respect the Faith. Westerners are
quick to blame the new secular governments in Central Asia for their
supposed ``paranoia'' towards radical Islam. What they fail to note is
the even stronger defensiveness and fear with which mainstream Muslim
leaders and most of their flock regard the insurgents. As the leader of
one of the main Sufi movements puts it, ``We are under assault by
people who reject our Saints and would tear down their shrines, all in
the name of Islam.''
Twenty years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that country
remains at the center of the human circuitry that constitutes radical
Islam in Central Asia. It is revealing that when Kyrgyz negotiators
sought to open contact with leaders responsible for the recent armed
incursion into their country from Tajikistan, they went directly to
Afghanistan. It is undeniable that rural-based rebel bands of Tajiks
who were not included in that country's peace process remain a threat,
as do Uzbek activists who were excluded from their country's political
life in the first years after independence. But the main organizational
focus, staging point, and safe haven for all these groups remains
Afghanistan. There will be no constructive movement on the larger issue
of radical Islam in Central Asia until the international community
solves the Rubic's Cube of that long-suffering land.
At the heart of the Afghan problem, and hence of the problem of
political Islam across the region, is the narcotics trade. Sustained by
demand from the West, Afghanistan is now the world's largest drug
producer and all the surrounding countries have been drawn into its
vortex. It is well and good for outsiders to preach about the
incompatibility of narcotics with Islam, or, for that matter, with
Christianity in Colombia. But profits from the production and transport
of drugs are so enormous that few, if any, human communities can resist
it, especially those that are desperately poor. Today, radical Islam in
Central Asia is inextricably linked with traffic in narcotics.
Is there any way to address this problem? Many think the best
approach is to ``build a fence around Afghanistan.'' But as Tajikistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakstan, Iran, and Pakistan are
all drawn deeper into the narcotics industry, and as this industry's
capacity to fund radical movements increases, this fence will have to
grow ever longer and higher.
Barring a reduction in demand, it is probably impossible to address
the problem this way. But that does not mean that no solution exists.
The single common element linking all the areas spawning radical
Islamic movements in Central Asia today is poverty. Poverty is the
fertile soil in which radical groups have germinated in the Ferghana
valley of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. More to the point, it
provides the soil for extremist movements throughout the vast mountain
zone of Central Asia, just as it has in Chechnya, Bosnia, Chiapas in
Mexico, and the Andean highlands of Peru.
I submit that the great engine driving both radical Islam and the
drug trade in Central Asia is poverty, and that the most desperate and
dangerous zone of poverty is that vast mountain region embracing the
western Himalayas, Hindukush, Pamirs, Tien-Shan, and Kopet Dag ranges.
Like the extremist movements and drug trade it has nourished, this
region is international in scope, embracing not only Afghanistan but
large parts of Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as
important areas of Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Xinjiang, and
Turkmenistan. Until the problem of poverty in these mountain zones is
addressed, there will be no solution to any of the region's other
urgent problems.
Unfortunately, the very notions of development that informs the
work of governments in the region and of many international agencies
active there only exacerbate the problem. Under the USSR, development
meant movement from the mountains to the lowlands, in other words, the
destruction of traditional mountain communities. The new states have
yet to break with this tradition. All too often, international agencies
have focused their attention on macro-economic issues, neglecting rural
areas where most people live and especially the mountain populations.
But there exists at least one successful model for rural
development in the mountain zones of Central Asia, namely, the work of
the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). Beginning in the Northern
Areas of Pakistan and now extending into Tajikistan, the AKDN has
developed a model of sustainable development in mountain zones that
enables mountain peoples to be self sufficient and to develop their own
schools and micro-credit institutions. Suffice it to say that the bleak
Badakhshan Autonomous District of Tajikistan, which imported 95% of its
food throughout the Soviet period, is now able to provide 85% of the
food it needs. In short, sustainable development is a real possibility,
even in the mountain areas that have generated political extremism and
the narcotics trade.
Nowhere is this truth more clearly manifested than in the notorious
Garm region of Tajikistan, home to many of the most radical Islamic
groups during the Tajik civil war. Today the AKDN is working
productively in the Garm valley, often with the same people who a few
years ago were fighting with the Islamic militants. It is far too early
to claim success there, but it is not too early to conclude that
success is indeed possible, and with a surprisingly modest expenditure
of funds. At some point in the future, one might realistically hope
that these AKDN projects in Pakistan, Badakhshan, and Garm might
provide a useable model for similar projects elsewhere in this
politically volatile region, and, yes, even in Afghanistan.
It is not surprising that the new governments of Central Asia
should respond to the rise of Islamic militancy with blind fear and
measures of repression that often prove counterproductive. But their
shortsightedness is no greater than that of the international
community, which has largely failed to recognize that the core problem
is rural poverty, especially in mountain areas, and has yet to put its
shoulder firmly behind workable programs for its alleviation.
Fortunately, such programs exist, and, if replicated, can realistically
be expected to bear fruit. In the long run, this is the only solution
to the problem of Islamic extremism and drug trafficking.
Senator Brownback. Thank you, Dr. Starr.
And our final witness, Mr. Krepon, I hope I am saying that
right, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center. Thank you for
joining us.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL KREPON, PRESIDENT, HENRY L. STIMSON
CENTER, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Krepon. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As subcommittee chairman of Near Eastern and South Asian
Affairs, you cover some of the most important territory and
some of the most problematic territory on the face of the
globe, as you have discovered. These countries have long
histories, but real short time lines as independent states.
Many of them came to life as independent states when Great
Britain, an exhausted imperial power, withdrew after World War
II. A colonial hand penned borders before leaving. And it did
not work out, and people immediately took up the gun. And
violence has been a part of both regions ever since.
The difference between South Asia and the Middle East, or
at least one difference, is that in the Middle East there is a
peace process. In South Asia there is no peace process. Whether
there is a peace process or not, there is going to be political
violence, and violence directed against noncombatants. If there
is a peace process that seems to be making headway,
irreconcilables are going to take to the gun, as leaders in the
Middle East have discovered.
But at least if there is a peace process, there is the hope
to an end to violence. In South Asia, there is no peace
process. There is continued violence. And without a peace
process around the central issue of Kashmir, the prospect is
just unending sorrow.
Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about Kashmir,
because I know you are going to be spending a fair amount of
time worrying about that problem and about India and Pakistan.
India and Pakistan each have a one-track approach to the
Kashmir issue. The Indian one-track strategy is
counterinsurgency. And they are pretty good at it.
The Pakistani strategy revolves around support for
insurgency. The official Pakistani position is that we only
give moral, diplomatic and political support. But as you have
seen from the testimony of my colleagues, there is also some
military support, as well.
Pakistan is caught up, regrettably, in the Kalishnikov
culture. It is caught up in it vis-a-vis its neighbor,
Afghanistan, and it is caught up with the gun culture because
of its connectivity with Kashmir. And I believe this is causing
grave, grave harm to Pakistan.
My sense is that both India and Pakistan need to reevaluate
their one-track strategies toward Kashmir. A counterinsurgency-
only strategy is not going to work. It is not going to work. It
puts a very, very heavy burden on Indian security forces. And
it puts an even heavier burden on Kashmiris. But a political
strategy to complement that, a serious political engagement for
India, with Pakistan and with disaffected Kashmiris, is not
happening.
Pakistan also needs to reconsider its one-track strategy of
support for insurgency. It is damaging the country. The new
chief executive, General Musharraf, has listed a series of very
ambitious and necessary reforms that are needed domestically. I
do not know that he can do it unless he reevaluates his
country's Kashmir policy.
I have gone over the time limit. I know you have other
things to do. But maybe we can continue this conversation
later.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Krepon follows:]
Prepared Statement of Michael Krepon
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. Other
witnesses have discussed terrorism in the Middle East. With your
indulgence, I will limit my remarks to the issue of terrorism as it
relates to India, Pakistan, and the Kashmir dispute. In South Asia,
terrible acts of violence afflict Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, as well,
but others could help you understand these tragedies far better than I.
The independent states of India and Pakistan, like the State of
Israel, emerged from the contraction of an exhausted imperial power
after World War II. Great Britain left hurriedly from both outposts,
sparking conllict upon its withdrawal from the subcontinent and
Palestine. These conflicts remain unresolved to this day, although
Israel has made far more progress in this regard than India and
Pakistan.
Unresolved conflicts are the breeding grounds for acts of violence,
including those directed expressly against non-combatants. These acts
of violence are designed to affect political outcomes. The current
Israeli government understands that an effective strategy against acts
of violence requires not only well-planned and executed
counterinsurgency operations, but also purposeful diplomacy to resolve
the underlying bases for continued conflict.
Violent acts will be generated by a peace process and by the
absence of a peace process. If peace making appears to be making head
way, irreconcilables will seek to stop positive momentum. Serious
efforts at peace making, however, offer the promise of an end to
violence. In contrast, the absence of a peace process invites never-
ending sorrow.
In South Asia--in stark contrast to the Middle Fast--the political
``track'' to conflict resolution has been almost entirely absent.
Substantive dialogue between India and Pakistan or between Indian
officials and disaffected Kashmiris has rarely occurred. In the absence
of substantive dialogue between aggrieved parties, counter-insurgency
operations can have only limited effect. Put another way, in the Middle
East or in South Asia, there is no light at the end of a tunnel defined
solely by counter-insurgency operations. Israel has understood that
counter-insurgency operations must be supplemented by a strategy of
political reconciliation and conflict resolution.
In India, this recognition is not broadly accepted and has not yet
translated into government policy. As a result, the Government of
India's relies heavily on a one-track policy based on counter-
insurgency operations. New Delhi's Kashmir policy therefore places a
heavy burden on Indian security forces and a heavier burden on
Kashmiris. A reconsideration of India's one track Kashmir policy might
therefore be wise. It would also be very difficult to do, given India's
vibrant domestic politics as well as Pakistan's well-entrenched policy
toward Kashmir.
Successive governments in Pakistan have publically maintained that
their support for insurgency is limited to moral, political and
diplomatic initiatives. Few Pakistanis--and fewer outsiders--believe
these assertions. Pakistan's military and political leaders have been
deeply involved in supporting militancy in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.
By supporting the ``Kalashnikov culture'' in Afghanistan and across the
Line of Control dividing Kashmir, Pakistan is also paying a very heavy
price. The gun culture and sectarian violence within Pakistan are
growing. The rule of law within the country is endangered. Critical
social indicators are trending downward. Meanwhile, militant groups
involved in the Kashmir and Afghan struggles educate and train new
cadres within the country and hold press conferences in Lahore and
Islamabad.
Pakistan's Kashmir policy might also benefit from a fundamental re-
evaluation. Who is benefitting from Pakistan's Kashmir policy? How has
a decade of support for the struggle in Kashmir helped Kashmiris or
helped Pakistanis? Is Pakistan better off now, after a decade of
support for insurgency, than before?
A new government in Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf has
been established to deal with that country's manifold domestic
problems. General Musharraf has properly identified the urgent tasks
facing Pakistan: rebuilding morale;, restoring national cohesion;
reviving the economy; ensuring law and order; depoliticizing state
institutions; devolving power to the grass-roots level; and ensuring
accountability for misdeeds. Can these critical tasks be tackled
effectively without a fundamental re-assessment of Pakistan's Kashmir
policy? I do not believe so. Pakistan's well being must be won in
Pakistan, not in Afghanistan, and not in Kashmir.
Pakistan, like India, presently has a one track strategy for
Kashmir. While India's strategy revolves around counter-insurgency,
Pakistan's strategy revolves around support for insurgency. Diplomatic
efforts by both countries are designed to place the other in a negative
light, not to resolve basic issues. Of course, these one-track
strategies are mutually reinforcing. They combine to create misery for
Kashmiris and for villagers on both sides of the Line of Control--the
dividing line over which India and Pakistan fought this summer.
One-track strategies succeed only in negative ways. They succeed in
allowing sitting governments to avoid hard political choices, and they
succeed in imposing pain and suffering. The impact of these
complementary, one-track strategies differ, however: India appears able
to absorb the challenges of counter-insurgency. It is less clear
whether Pakistan can continue to absorb the domestic challenges of
supporting insurgency.
Does this mean that Pakistan should give up its claims over
Kashmir? No. It means that India and Pakistan should settle their
differences in an honorable way, and in a way that involves centrally
those who have suffered so much as a result of this dispute. South Asia
needs a peace process--one that might take different shape than the
Middle East peace process, but one with similar seriousness of purpose.
In the fall of 1998, India and Pakistan finally agreed to a
structure for substantive bilateral discussions on Kashmir, peace and
security, and on a variety of other topics. Since then, both countries
have been on a roller coaster ride, including nuclear weapon tests, an
extraordinary summit meeting in Lahore, and the undeclared war this
summer along the northern reaches of the Line of Control.
After this undeclared war, trust is in short supply in South Asia.
The newly elected Indian government headed by Prime Minister A.B.
Vajpayee has said that it is willing to resume substantive dialogue
with Pakistan, but that Pakistan's support for militancy across the
Line of Control must subside. This is a reasonable position. The new
Chief Executive of Pakistan, General Musharraf, has stated his
willingness to resume substantive dialogue with India.
Bilateral dialogue is likely to resume. Whether these talks are
serious or pro forma will depend, in large part, on whether Pakistan
and India re-evaluate their separate but interlocking Kashmir policies.
If these talks remain rooted in mutually reinforcing one-track
strategies, we will continue to witness a dialogue of the deaf.
Meanwhile, nuclear capabilties are growing, along with political
alienation in Kashmir and centrifugal forces within Pakistan.
Senator Brownback. I hope so. And I think we are going to
have plenty of chance to, because this is a big topic.
The vote is on, but we have a few minutes. I would like to
ask a couple of questions.
Mr. Bearden, why do the Saudis fund some of these
operations?
Mr. Bearden. Funding some of the operations?
Senator Brownback. Mr. Ijaz talked about some of the
schools that are training some people.
Mr. Bearden. The Saudis have been involved, as has bin
Laden, going back to the early eighties, during the struggle
against the Soviet occupation, collections, large collections
of Gulf fundraisers. And that is what bin Laden was, was a
fundraiser. He was not a warrior inside the Afghan war. It
brought in large amounts and established a funding mechanism
that would bring in, after the jihad turned in favor of the
Mujahedin in 1986-87, of maybe up to $25 million a month coming
in through Gulf sources. I do not think it has ever stopped. I
think that those mechanisms have been in place.
I think they have been in place for the Wahabbis, who have
brought their brand of Islam into Pakistan and who have done
everything from those funding mechanisms to building one of the
largest mosques in the universe in Islamabad. This goes on. And
it creates competition from the Iranians, who have been
involved in some of the madrassa schools that Mr. Ijaz
mentioned himself.
I do not think that you can point to a reason why. I think
it has been going on so long and it is so much a part of the
Saudi interest in being competitive for a plumb like 130
million to 140 million Pakistanis. I do not even know how many
there are. It is that kind of an issue. And I do not think,
without discussion, one could even think about stopping it.
Senator Brownback. Do you have a thought on that, Mr. Ijaz?
Mr. Ijaz. May I just add one thing to that? And that is the
following. That I would characterize it a little bit
differently. I think the Saudis and the Iranians, who are the
major forces of Sunni and Shia Islam, they house the holy sites
in each country of each of the sects of Islam, they are
interested in fighting this ideological struggle that has gone
right back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon
Him.
And the problem is that they are not willing to fight it on
their soil. They want to fight it somewhere else. It is like
keep it out of my back yard, but I still want to have the
ideological struggle in my name. And so the funding that goes
on is to try and win, as Milton Bearden correctly said, as many
new converts to the process as you can. And because Pakistan is
a country that has so many different kinds of problems,
population control being one of them, it was an ideal and very
fertile ground on which they could fight that struggle.
And so what they did is they went in and they said, all
right, let us build a school and put 35-40 students in it right
away. People will be brought from families that have extra
children that they do not want to have. And what they were
doing in their own minds, the fathers and the mothers that gave
those sons away, were two things.
One, they are giving them to a life of Islam, which is a
good thing in our religious beliefs. And the second was that
some of them thought, well, maybe they will work in the army
one day and they will bring glory to our family in that way.
And, most importantly, it reduced the financial burden on these
families.
Now, what would happen if you took exactly the same amount
of money that he is talking about and the amount of money that
you talked about last week when you went on this trip to New
York to meet with the Iraqis, and we just form an education
program and fund it year after year? You start building a base
up. We have already lost one generation. The question is
whether we are going to lose multiple generations thereafter.
And that is really what I think needs to be looked at.
Senator Brownback. Dr. Starr, did you have a comment on
this?
Dr. Starr. As a professional educator, I can hardly be
against what has just been recommended. And I heartily agree.
On the other hand, there are philosophical and religious
differences that we can never resolve, of course. We also talk
about problems of foreign support for radical Islamicists. But
this would have the potency and destructive force that it does
were it not for the fact that this whole region is so
desperately poor, particularly the mountain areas.
We are talking about people who have $5 a month. We are
talking about people who have no way out. None of us is so
strong that we would withstand the temptation to drug
trafficking and violence. Until we have a long-term strategy
that is based on giving these people the capacity to live
normal lives in situ, in the place where they live and where
their forefathers have lived, until that happens, we will not
make any real progress.
We cannot deal with the drug issue directly unless we are
prepared to kill the demand. And we cannot deal with any of
these issues in the long run on a fundamental basis unless we
address the issue of poverty. And we can do this. That is the
good news in this story. There is no party to this conflict
that would not welcome American initiatives, provided that
there are a little more intelligent and well framed than many
of our initiatives in the past.
Senator Brownback. Well, I think we will be talking about
this a great deal more. This has been an excellent panel and
very experienced and thoughtful people, and I appreciate that a
great deal. As I stated, I hope to have several hearings on
this, because I think this is critically important that we
reengage, as virtually all of you have said. And you have put
forward some good, different ideas.
I invite you to put more flesh on the bones of the ideas
that you have. And if they are things that we can work together
on in developing this overall strategy, I would love to hear
them, because this is an important problem facing us.
I regret I am going to have to excuse myself now and that
we are going to have to terminate the hearing. We may have some
questions. If you would like to amend your statements to the
record, it will remain open for a period of 3 days. I believe
that is what is required.
Thank you again very much for joining us.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:30 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]