Kyle Orton, British Security Analyst

Seventeen years ago, in this very month of July, four Al-Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the London transport system and in just under an hour murdered fifty-two people from eighteen countries and wounded seven-hundred, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in British history. An important thread in the story was the role of Pakistan in fostering the ideological and material environment that created the killers, which did not get the attention it deserved at the time, nor in the years since. The West has also ignored the lessons of 7/7 and 9/11. And failed to come to grips with Pakistan’s game of blackmail wrapped in the mystery of ISI -run transnational ISI jihadist network with a footprint in Britain.

First a word about Pakistan dimension of 7/7

At 8:50 on 7 July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer (22) detonated his suicide vest on a tube train. A minute later another suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan (30), detonated on a second train, and after another minute yet another train was blown up by Germaine Lindsay (19). At 9:47, a fourth suicide-killer, Hasib Hussain (18), blew himself up on a bus at Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury.

These suicide killers were not on the British Security Service, MI5, radar before the attacks, but once they were identified it became clear that Mohammad Sidique Khan had been on the periphery of a prior investigation, Operation Crevice, which in March 2004 had rolled up an Al-Qaeda network in and around London that was planning to carry out a terrorist strike using a fertiliser bomb.

The sleuths ran various checks on Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Khan was found to have been in telephone contact with one of the conspirators, Omar Khyam. Both were literally let off. Reason? The security services reasoned that neither of them merited further resources a euphemism for more surveillance.  Both got what is no more than a reprieve as they seemed to be involved in a minor fraud as part of financing the terror network, rather than having any involvement—and potentially not having any knowledge—of the terrorist planning that Op Crevice was interested in.

Jonathan Evans, who went to become M15 chief, was heading G-Branch dealing with international terrorism in those days. According to him, Op Crevice had thwarted the plot led by Mohammed Qayum Khan. “It (the plot) was directed by Al-Qaeda based in Pakistan’s tribal areas and involved British citizens or British residents of Pakistani heritage, which became something of a theme for this period”.

Except Germaine Lindsay, all other terrorist players in the 7/7 attack were of Pakistani extraction; it originated in “plans from Pakistan”, and, indeed, the logistics of the plot itself “did not fundamentally differ from all the other plans that failed to come to fruition” during the mid-2000s.

After 7/7, British intelligence revisited an input they had with them since February 2004. Khyam had spoken in person to Sidique Khan in a car bugged by MI5. From the snippets of that conversation, as also the testimony of a jihadist prisoner, it became clear that Khan and Tanweer had been to Al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.

Khan visited the training camp on 25 July 2003.  (He made two more trips to Pakistan. About those trips a little while later). Pakistan handed over the photographs of Khan visit to London a month after 7/7.

Pakistan’s reluctance to proactively assist Op Crevice, and its efforts to appear helpful post -7/7 are hardly surprising. After working with Mujahideen groups in the early 1990s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency turned to the Taliban as its instrument to conquer Afghanistan – a task that was largely completed by 1996.

It was under the ISI’s close watch that the Taliban became entirely intermingled with Al-Qaeda and its derivatives like “Haqqani Network (HN)”, as it did with the “Kashmiri” groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

It is analytically quite misleading to treat as autonomous “groups” what is in reality a fluid single network that shares personnel, geography, resources (everything from training camps to ammunition), and ultimately a unified command structure running through the ISI headquarters at Abpara locality in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Mohammad Sidique Khan, as it turned out, previously travelled to Pakistan and trained in a jihadist camp in Kashmir in July 2001, before being taken over the border to a Taliban camp near the frontlines. He made a third trip to the Pakistani jihadi enterprise, between November 2004 and February 2005; Tanweer accompanied him. Both made contact with Al-Qaeda though it is unclear whether they went into Afghanistan.

AL-QAEDA & ISI -RUN JIHADIST INFRA

Al-Qaeda was woven into the fabric of this ISI-run jihadist infrastructure, designed significantly for an unending ideological war with India, that ran through—and now runs through again—Kashmir and Afghanistan, which simply shifts personnel from front to front as Pakistan desires.

The ISI’s fingerprints were visible in the earlier plot that Op Crevice has dismantled. One of the conspirators, Omar Khyam told the court that the ISI was threatening his family in Pakistan because “they (ISI) are worried I might reveal more about them (ISI).” Therefore, he was “not going to discuss anything related to the ISI any more”. The judge told him that if he did not open up, “inferences” would be drawn from his deposition. He understood the purport of judge’s observation. But, for him, inferences had less repercussions than giving evidence about the role the ISI had played in facilitating a terrorist plot on the British soil.

LONDON JIHADI BASE – SLOW REALISATION  

Britain has a special place in this long-standing, transnational ISI jihadist network

Masood Azhar, an ISI operative and UN-listed terrorist, toured Britain in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad. And created local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State (IS) which is also known as Daesh these days.

Azhar had created a template for “Londonistan” in the 1990s, where jihadists set up shop in London to provide resources to insurgencies in the Muslim world. There was a de facto agreement with the British state that so long as this activity was directed abroad, the jihadists would not be interfered with.

What happened on 7/7 was a demonstration that this jihadist network ran two ways: what had been exported could come home. The realisation was slow in coming.

In September 2005, Al-Qaeda released a video to Al-Jazeera of Khan’s last testament declaring his “war” on the West and praising “today’s heroes”- Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda’s then-deputy (now emir) Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the founder of the Islamic State movement, which was at that time part of Al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian, whose real name was Ahmad al-Khalayleh.

Later in September 2005, a statement from Al-Zawahiri confirmed Al-Qaeda had “launched” the “blessed raid” on London. Yet the official British government report on 7/7, released in May 2006, said: “There is as yet no firm evidence to corroborate this claim or the nature of Al-Qaeda support [for the 7/7 attacks], if there was any.”

Two months later, to coincide with the first anniversary of the attacks, Al-Qaeda released the video of Tanweer’s testament, with Al-Zawahiri, showing “a terrorist training site and a map of London with areas circled as potential targets”.

Now, whether Lindsay, the only one of the 7/7 killers born outside of Britain, in Jamaica, had also been to Pakistan—as he claimed—remains unclear.  Abdullah al-Faisal, a jihadi cleric who later supported the IS, as a strong influence over Lindsay. ‘We were both close’, Al-Faisal said once.

PAKISTAN IS STILL THE PROBLEM

The 9/11 attacks exposed the hollow “realism” of believing that Afghanistan was too strategically peripheral to matter to the West. After 2001 NATO took over the responsibilities for our security in that blood-soaked country. And last year (2021) a foolish and entirely needless decision was taken to stand aside and allow Pakistan’s jihadists to retake the country.

It appeared that the media was finally going to cover accurately Pakistan’s role in the Afghan catastrophe but the general trend towards ignoring this has largely reasserted itself, as could have been predicted.

Little attention was paid to the implications of several ISI officers being killed in the Al-Qaeda camps when the U.S. launched cruise missiles in retaliation for the 1998 East African Embassy bombings.

The coverage got no better over the twenty years when anybody who wanted to know could see that Pakistan stood behind the killing of hundreds of Western troops and intelligence officers, as well as thousands of Afghans.

During the NATO presence in Afghanistan, it was common knowledge among servicemen that Pakistanis were generally the commanders of Taliban units, and it is likely that the old habit of embedding Pakistani Special Services Group (SSG) operatives with the Taliban-Qaeda insurgents, especially during the ISI-planned “spring offensives”, continued.

Pakistan had helped Bin Laden escape in 2001, and harboured him in a safe house in a garrison town close to its capital till the cover was blown up in 2011.  Even the public murmurs about what kind of “ally” of Pakistan soon died down.

PAKISTAN BLACK MAIL

There was certainly some ignorance among Western officials about Pakistan’s game, but a lack of knowledge was never the real problem. The issue was fear, more precisely blackmail, that any challenge to Pakistan’s lawless conduct—its fundamental strategic commitment to the use of terrorism as a state policy under the protective canopy of pirated nuclear weapons—would make things even worse.

“Pakistan has essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise,” as a scholar aptly put it.

If the West cut off the vast aid subsidies, let alone adopted a coercive approach to try to change Pakistan’s policies, Islamabad held out the prospect of instability that would lead to terrorists acquiring its nuclear weapons.

So, the West kept paying Pakistan to help solve a problem it created and sustained—and had every incentive to sustain, since without the problem there would be no more cheques.

BRITAIN PROBLEM-ISI EXPLOITS

In Britain, this problem is especially acute. There are around 1.2 million British citizens of Pakistani descent and about 200,000 Pakistani nationals’ resident in Britain. This population concentrates in ways that give it an outsized domestic political sway, and the ISI exploits this to push its own agenda through various “community” lobby organisations and other front groups.

This is a partial explanation for some of the oddities in British public “discourse” on this matter.

Then there is the fact that hundreds of thousands of people travel back and forth from Britain to Pakistan every year. As the 7/7 inquiry report noted, one of the reasons Khan and Tanweer did not raise immediate red flags with their Pakistan journeys is that “extended visits to Pakistan by young men are not unusual”.

Terrorists can obviously blend in easily with such a large movement of humanity.

Which returns us to the issue of Pakistani blackmail.

Now that NATO is out of Afghanistan, with Western intelligence effectively blind, if and when a British citizen goes rogue, in or from Pakistan, the ISI will be there to offer a helping hand in finding them—for a price.

And if Britain accepted the apparent necessity of cooperation with the ISI at a time when the ISI was killing British troops, it is unlikely this will change now.

The mind-bending logic of relying on the organisation that nurtures the terrorist groups that threaten Britain will win out by bureaucratic exigency and inertia; what that ensnares Britain into giving away—whether in money or political concessions—will only become clear over time.

DELUSIONS – AMERICAN WAY

The aftermath of partition of British India in 1947 left Britain closer to Pakistan—the head of the ISI until 1959 was a British General—and with a sense that Pakistan was a useful ally, delusions passed on to the American cousins as the burdens of hegemony shifted in the Cold War.

There have been many occasions in the decades since that should have prompted a rethinking—almost any day during the 2001-2021 Afghan engagement could have done it—but in the soot and ruin on London’s streets seventeen years ago the necessity of rethinking British approach to Pakistan was most clearly spelled out, not that we ever noticed. (POREG)

—The writer Kyle Orton is a British Security Analyst who focuses on the Middle East Geopolitics and Islamic terrorism. He is on Twitter @KyleWOrton.–Blog https://kyleorton.substack.com.