Guli Badral, Pakistan, May 27 : In this Pakistani village surrounded by forests and glacial streams just 35 miles from where Osama bin Laden was killed, people become uneasy when asked what goes on up the mountain. It's where villagers avoid cutting pine trees for firewood - and where they know not to ask questions. When pressed, they say it's a secret training complex for Islamic militants and that the Pakistani army is aware of it. The army denies that it exists..
Accounts gathered by the Associated Press in the Ughi area of Mansehra district add to suspicion that Pakistan is playing a “double game” - that is, accepting U.S. aid to fight militants on the one hand but tolerating and in some cases encouraging and harnessing the power of extremism on the other.
Three men who identified themselves as mujahedeen - militants - told the AP that the training complex is one of at least three in the region that among them house hundreds of recruits.
The mission, the three say, is aimed at taking recruits to Kashmir to fight India. But Kashmiri veterans have been known to join forces with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including those fighting the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The charges of Pakistani duplicity have gathered strength in the aftermath of the May 2 U.S. raid against bin Laden, who was hiding in the army town of Abbottabad and a short walk from a military academy. Pakistani officials have denied any collusion, but the country is coming under renewed pressure to abandon its links to all Islamist militant networks.
In 2001, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said the country was severing its ties to jihadi groups amid intense U.S. pressure after the Sept. 11 attacks, but few are convinced that has happened.
The Mansehra area, a roughly four-hour drive north of the capital, Islamabad, was known to have hosted state-backed militant groups in the 1990s.
The region was considered ideal for such activities largely because it is so close to Kashmir - about 25 miles from Pak Occupied Kashmir and about 45 miles from the Line Of Control.
When contacted by the AP last week, the armydenied that any training camps or other facilities are hidden away in the Mansehra area. “The allegations are baseless,” said spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas.
In Guli Badral, however, locals say extremists and men whom they presume to be soldiers are familiar sights in the village square, where they shop for meat, flour and beans before getting back into pickup trucks for the two-hour trip along a rough track to the training camp.
The three militants who spoke to the AP about the camps did not give their names and asked that the names of their organizations not be published. They said the road leading to one of the larger camps, near the village of Khatai, has an army checkpoint.
Militants and villagers alike gave the same advice to an AP team: Do not attempt to get any closer. It's too dangerous.
At least one of the militants appeared motivated to speak out because of anger at the army, which he said is not as supportive as it once was. Before 2001, Kashmiri-focused militant groups had offices across the country where they could openly recruit and allegedly received considerable state funds.
The man said the army was “putting up hurdles” to the group's work and briefly arrested some of its members. He gave no details. It's widely believed that the army has been unwilling to go a step further and dismantle militant training camps and crack down on the groups using them.
The reason: Pakistan's obsession with India as an existential threat. The two countries have fought three wars since 1947 - two over Kashmir - and remain in a state of semi-hostility.
“Pakistan has never changed its policy of using jihad as an instrument of its defense policy, even after 9/11,” said Arif Jamal, author of “Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir.” “They do not want evidence of that getting out, but everybody knows what they are doing,” Jamal said.
This policy comes with a price.
Many of Pakistan's former jihadi proxies already have turned against their former patrons in disgust at their collaboration with Washington after 9/11. Allied with al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, they have carried out scores of suicide attacks within Pakistan.
One group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is of growing concern to the West because it is suspected of seeking international links and modeling itself on al Qaeda. Foreigners have attended its camps. Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives were trained in Pakistan before carrying out the 2008 terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai.
The three militants who spoke to the AP said all the bases in Mansehra were training recruits for jihad in Kashmir, not Afghanistan.
An essential part of that process is religious indoctrination, especially a willingness to kill - and die - for Islam, said Jamal. who visited Mansehra camps about a decade ago.
The camp near the village of Khatai houses a mosque big enough for 2,500 worshippers as well as dormitories and classrooms, according to one militant, who said his job is to deliver supplies such as boots and jackets to the facility. He said firing exercises take place deeper inside the forest, where the recruits stay in tents.
Recruits may enroll in a four-week course that covers basic military skills, or three-month stints with extensive instruction in guerrilla warfare, according to this militant. He said “chosen graduates” are sent to the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir for more explosives training.
Not every graduate goes on to fight, he said.
“We don't make just killing machines. Rather, we are trying to make them God-fearing men so that they don't do anything wrong during jihad,” said the second militant.
The camp supplier said the training camps closed temporarily in 2005 after an earthquake that killed 80,000 people brought international attention and aid groups to the region. A signboard hammered into the ground in Guli Badral indicates that the U.S. government once funded a medical clinic here. AP
