How could Osama bin Laden's terrorists operate a training facility near the army's principal garrison town where President Pervez Musharraf has his residence at Army House? The very idea was too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

Think again.

According to an early draft of the FBI complaint, circulated to the media in error by the Justice Department after the arrests last week, Hayat's father, Umer Hayat, 47, told investigators that he had paid his son's airfare to Pakistan and a stipend of $100 a month while he was training at a jihadi facility called Tamal.

Hayat senior added that the camp was run by a close friend of his father-in-law the complaint names as Maulana Fazlur Rehman.

It so happens there is just such a jihadi training facility - known as Dhamial - within the sprawling army city of Rawalpindi, just 20 minutes from Islamabad, the capital.

But it isn't run by firebrand politician Fazlur Rehman.

Rehman is one of the two co-chairmen of the six-party Islamic coalition called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, which emerged from Pakistan's elections in 2002 as the third largest bloc in the National Assembly - and which governs two of Pakistan's four provinces.

No, the top honcho at Dhamial (which the FBI appear to have phonetically morphed into Tamal) is another Islamic extremist, a man long associated with Pakistan's shadowy underworld of jihadi terror groups, by the name of Fazlur Rehman Khalil.

Dhamial has trained hundreds of youngsters to become good jihadis. But Musharraf has had to develop a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality that aims to distinguish between those the U.S. considers terrorists and those Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency considers patriotic jihadis - the Islamic holy warriors who backed Taliban rule in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001, and fight for the return of Indian-held Kashmir to the Pakistani motherland.

Musharraf is committed to eradicating al-Qaida and is convinced he speaks the truth when he assures his U.S. allies there is no such thing as a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. But if he were serious about eliminating militancy that is borderline terrorism he would have ordered Dhamial closed.

Instead, it has been allowed to train jihadis with impunity, both before and since Sept. 11. Thus, deep denial became policy.

One knowledgeable Pakistani who is familiar with Musharraf's split personality that speaks one language to U.S. interlocutors and another to Islamist leaders is Husain Haqqani, an associate professor of international relations at Boston University.

Haqqani served in a wide variety of key functions in his native Pakistan that included a job in Inter-Services Intelligence, ambassador to Sri Lanka, and adviser to Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, two former prime ministers who are Pakistan's principal democratic leaders, both in exile abroad and banned from returning by Musharraf.

In his latest book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military" (Carnegie 2005), Haqqani says, the military regime's priority appears to be to suppress or deny bad news rather than to change the circumstances that give rise to it.

Rehman Khalil, Haqqani reminds us, was one of the signatories of Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa against the United States and all Americans, and was reported to be in the Afghan camp President Clinton ordered hit by Tomahawk cruise missiles in 1998, after the attacks on U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Following Sept. 11, and Musharraf's decision to answer affirmatively President Bush's are-you-with-me-or-against-me phone call, Rehman Khalil's Harkat-ul-Mujahideen organization was banned. He quickly popped up again as the leader of the equally extremist Jamat-ul-Ansar.

Bugged by U.S. questions about the wisdom of letting Khalil run free, Musharraf ordered him arrested in March 2004 - only to have him surface seven months later a free man.

When news broke of the FBI arrests in Lodi - where 2,500 of the town's 62,000 residents are Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans - Khalil slipped underground and the authorities said they couldn't find him.

As Haqqani points out, the same government that kept Benazir Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari in prison for eight years without a conviction has somehow never found sufficient grounds for detaining all manner of jihad-preaching extremists.

Nor can Musharraf accede to repeated U.S. requests to gain direct access to Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the Don Corleone of a nuclear black market that sold America's enemies - North Korea, Iran and Libya - the wherewithal to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Suspicion is growing in U.S. intelligence circles that those protecting Khan wish to keep the option of a lucrative nuclear black market open for future years. But there is also the fact that Pakistan's national hero being subjected to CIA interrogation would most probably trigger widespread riots in the country's major cities.

Abu Ghraib prison pictures, the Newsweek story about Korans flushed down the toilet, Amnesty International's preposterous and insidious comparison of Guantanamo to the Soviet forced labor concentration camps, Sen. Richard Durbin's odious description of U.S. prison guards' behavior being no different from what Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot once did, and the insurgency in Iraq, all have been force multipliers for anti-U.S. feelings in Pakistan and in the rest of the Muslim world.

Pity poor Karen Hughes, who as the Bush administration's image-improvement czarina has to swim against this rip tide - without any salmon-like attributes.

It is this same powerful current that keeps Musharraf from cracking down on Taliban's Pakistani support group. "Pakistani authorities cannot eliminate the international terrorist network or the sectarian militias without decapitating the domestic jihadi groups," writes Haqqani. What the FBI did in California, President Musharraf cannot do in his own country.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2004 by United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of by United Press International.

Related Links
SpaceDaily
Search SpaceDaily
Subscribe To SpaceDaily Express

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only