Documenting fundamentals

Gateway to Terrorism
Mohammad AmirRana
New Millennium
2004
Politics, Current Affairs
Price: Rs 600 

No one has ever doubted that Pakistan has a breed of courageous journalists. But this young author must rank among the braver. What Rana has done in the Gateway to Terrorism is to paint a pointillist picture of the Great Jihad Machine of Pakistan. The author is obviously fond of detail and recounts that the book is the outcome of a five-month effort in which he visited 47 towns in Pakistan and POK, visited 125 madarsas and interviewed scores of jihadi leaders and their cadre and accessed their publications. In the process, he had to face interrogation and with some understatement, he notes “some unpleasant incidents also took place.”

Just one view of the multiple tragedies unfolding in the Kashmir Valley.

The need to understand jihad and jihadis of Pakistan is important because, as Rana’s dismal arithmetic reveals, some 30,000 young Pakistanis have died in Afghanistan and Kashmir, 2,000 sectarian clashes have taken place and there is still a pool of 1.2 million young men (and growing) active in jihadi and religious organisations.

Rana has divided his book in two major segments — a study of jihadi organisations and their activities, and a look at the religious organisations of Pakistan and their ties with the establishment. There is little need to repeat that Pakistan is today facing the consequences of what this establishment did in the 1990s.

The book reveals the alarming extent to which the activities of these organisations have spread across Pakistan. Jihadi recruits come not only from the numerous madarsas and pool of unemployed village youth, but also from regular schools in towns and cities. Interestingly, Rana observes, “the tendency among the people of Azad Kashmir to join jihadi organisations is less strong, although the same cannot be said of the people of Punjab and the border areas.”