COMMENTARY
Impact of Indian jet hijacking still felt
By Hannah Bloch
It has been two years since Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan by extremists linked to al-Qaida. More recently, suicide bombers have tried to kill Pakistan's president and army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
The events are not unrelated, and indeed share roots in a relatively overlooked terrorist episode from the final week of 1999: The hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814.
Daniel Pearl
The hijacking received scant attention in the United States because it took place in a remote and forbidding corner of the world, was overshadowed by other news events and was centered on the obscure issue of Kashmir separatism.
But it has had a far-reaching impact that is worth examining.
The Indian Airlines hijacking unleashed a vicious trio of terrorists on the world; and once they were free, the world did nothing to stop them. As a result, they went on to do incalculable harm.
Five masked hijackers commandeered the Indian Airlines Airbus 300 after it took off from Katmandu, Nepal, on Christmas Eve 1999. Armed with knives, pistols and grenades, they diverted the plane from its scheduled destination of New Delhi and took it on a terrifying detour across South Asia and the Middle East.
The hijackers forced the plane to land in Amritsar, Lahore and then Dubai — where they released 27 passengers and dumped the body of a young Indian honeymooner whose throat they had slit in Amritsar — before heading to Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that served as the ruling Taliban regime's base of power.
The terrorists held 155 hostages, including an American woman from Bakersfield, Calif., for seven days in Kandahar while the Indian government decided how to defuse the crisis.
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After blaming Pakistan for the hijacking (a charge Pakistan denied) and dithering for three days, New Delhi dispatched a negotiation team to Kandahar, where the hijackers demanded $200 million, the release of 35 militants held in Indian jails and the return of a Kashmiri separatist's corpse.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf was the target of at least two assassination attempts last month.
The Taliban persuaded the hijackers to tone down their wish list, but in the end the Indian government, fearing for the passengers' lives, yielded to the terrorists' central demand: the release of a high-profile trio of Muslim extremists from Indian jails.
India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, flew to Kandahar on New Year's Eve with the three militants in tow and personally handed them over — insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that his country had not capitulated to terrorists.
The three militants joined the five hijackers in getaway cars provided by the Taliban, who gave them 10 hours to leave Afghanistan. The eight sped off into the Kandahar desert, celebrating the success of their mission.
It was a grimly fitting transition to the new millennium, which has been defined so far by the repercussions of the better-known Sept. 11 hijackings.
The three released prisoners all made their way to Pakistan, where they were not arrested, because Pakistan argued that they had broken no local laws.
Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a Briton who already was infamous in India for his expertise in kidnapping, went on to mastermind Pearl's abduction in Karachi. He is now in jail, awaiting the appeal of his death sentence.
Mushtaq Zargar, a militant leader in Kashmir's separatist movement, resumed his violent activities in the disputed Himalayan region.
The third freed prisoner, Masood Azhar, a Pakistani cleric turned holy warrior, immediately formed an extremist group to wage jihad in Kashmir. That group, Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), is known for its ties to both al-Qaida and ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, and became the first Pakistani jihad outfit to engage in suicide attacks. It is now included on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations.
As for the five hijackers, they are still at large. Encouraged by their success, they might do even worse should they ever decide to strike again.
In the aftermath of Pearl's abduction by Sheikh and his accomplices, Musharraf blamed the journalist for having been "overintrusive" in his reporting, which had included an investigation of Jaish-e-Muhammad's post-9/11 activities.
But Pearl's widow, Mariane, recognized shortly after her husband's death that Musharraf, as a U.S. ally, soon would become a target as well.
"They executed Danny," she writes, "but somehow (Musharraf was) the one they wanted to kill."
Last month alone, in the span of 11 days, the Pakistani president narrowly escaped two assassination attempts.
A suicide bomber responsible for the second assault has been identified as a militant from Kashmir with links to Azhar's Jaish-e-Muhammad, and possibly to Sheikh as well.
It is little surprise that extremists are targeting Musharraf, whose government has handed over 500 al-Qaida fighters to the United States, and who announced recently that Pakistan would curtail its support of a 15-year insurgency to wrest the Muslim-majority Kashmir region from Indian control.
For more than a decade, Pakistan has encouraged militants to flourish on its soil. The success of the U.S.-supported Afghan jihad in defeating the Soviet Union in 1989 convinced Pakistan that a similar strategy would work in Kashmir. So the ISI started backing Kashmiri separatist groups, training guerrilla fighters in Pakistan who went on to do battle in the disputed region.
Some of these groups joined hands with sectarian extremists and eventually collaborated with al-Qaida to attack Western targets, including Pearl.
But two years after Pearl's death, we still don't understand the roots of the rage that fuels such attacks. Aside from the facile analysis that Muslim fanatics hate the American way of life, Americans have little real idea as to why and how much of the world perceives us as the enemy.
Perhaps that is because we've missed some important signals in the past.
America does not know or care much about the fight over Kashmir because the issue seems irrelevant and remote. But the Indian Airlines' hijacking by supporters of Kashmir separatism illustrates the wider impact an apparently obscure cause can have — and how it can attract and motivate terrorists who go on to other causes, targeting innocent Americans like Pearl and U.S. allies like Musharraf.
If we had paid more attention to the examples of Azhar, Sheikh and Zargar, they would have had much to teach us.
Sheikh's life is particularly instructive because he is the highly educated product of a Western upbringing in London, yet he ended up embracing anti-Western goals and favoring violence to achieve those goals.
These are issues that surely would have interested Daniel Pearl. His mission as a journalist was, in the words of his widow, to "bridge the world." He wanted to contribute to peace by waging a war on ignorance and misunderstanding.
One way to do that is to pursue uncomfortable questions that have no easy answers.
Musharraf has suggested that Pearl asked questions at his own peril, but the peril to the world will be far greater if such questions never get asked.
Hannah Bloch is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent based in Pakistan and former Freedom Forum Asia studies fellow at the University of Hawai'i.
