Western militants are still flocking to Pakistan and are joining the militant groups in the Talibanised belt of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan, according to reports in a section of the Pakistan media. These reports acquire significance because Pakistan police have arrested two French persons in Lahore on the suspicion that they have had links with the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings. The arrests took place in the backdrop of police picking up the mastermind himself.
It is too simplistic argument to say westerners are swelling the ranks of Pakistan militants. In fact, a closer examination of the reports show that most of the so called western militants picked up in Pakistan are people of Pakistan origin, who had returned home to acquire skills that would transform them into suicide bombers. For instance, the two Frenchmen arrested in Lahore are not French citizens by birth but by adoption. Their roots are in Pakistan.
Behind sensational bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, a foiled plot in Barcelona and New York’s Times Square plot in May 2010 were Pakistani militants. Also the arrests made in Germany were from the immigrants from Pakistan.
This is not to make out a case that there were no foreigners in the Pakistani militant strongholds. Radicalised youth from Central Asian countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and from Northern African countries like Egypt and Yemen have been making a bee line to join the Pakistan Taliban.
This is not a new development though. It dates back to the time of ‘jihad’ against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. That was the time Pakistan saw mushroom growth of madrasas as nurseries of death with the patronage of Pakistan’s and America’s official agencies. Both countries are paying the price for that policy, in a manner of speaking
