Amir Mir, however, offers a peep through a different keyhole to an audience fixated on another hell. For Indians, as Mir himself notes, Osama resonates far less strongly than say Dawood Ibrahim, and the Jaish-e-Mohammad or Lashkar-e-Toiba evoke more immediate concerns than Al Qaeda. It makes good marketing sense, therefore, to update and publish in English the handbook on jehadis that Amir had published in Urdu some years ago.
While the book may evoke some interest amongst uninformed aficionados of the macabre—after all, crime bulletins on TV news have a growing audience—it is unlikely to greatly interest more serious students of the linkages of terrorism. The book offers a menu of 33 chapters, some of them no more than six pages, featuring delicacies like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi: The Group of Choice for Hard-Core Militants and Mullah Mohammad Omar: One-Eyed Commander. The same facts are endlessly recycled between chapters, depending upon where they can be fitted in. Since Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the World Trade Center attacks, was arrested in the home of Jamaat-e-Islami office-bearer Ahmed Quddus, his arrest is replayed in the chapters on the Pakistani Army, on the JeI, on Khalid Sheikh Mohammad himself and on the FBI that arrested him.
The True Face of Jehadis, then, is more a quick reference handbook, a variety of assertions pigeon-holed into a large number of sections. For the casual reader or for a student flitting through the Jehad 101 course, this is most convenient. For those expecting a deeper look at terrorism in South Asia, there are two serious problems in this book. The first of them is that, unlike some others in this genre, Amir Mir is long on accounts and short on references. While it is admittedly difficult to provide a reference for an event like, say, a United Jehad Council meeting in Muzaffarabad, Mir must give us some reason to believe his account of the meeting.
One way of doing this is to be factually correct in all verifiable issues in the book. But when Mir declares that Mohammad Jameel, the fidayeen bomber waiting to ram General Musharraf's car in Rawalpindi, made and received 109 phone calls in 30 minutes (page 13), it strains credulity. The book is also littered with historical discrepancies like the declaration that Indian CBI officials, proceeding to Kandahar in 2003 to investigate the IC-814 hijacking, took permission of the "Northern Alliance" government in Kabul.
Footnotes, therefore, would have given the book a flavour of truth but where they are provided, they are somewhat unconvincing. An interesting account of Osama bin Laden's CIA-sponsored medical treatment in an American hospital in Dubai in October 2000 is referenced to a newspaper report in the French daily, Le Figaro.
The more serious problem lies in Mir's broader analysis. Even if one accepts the somewhat shallow thesis that the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan lies at the root of jehadi terrorism in the region, there is little to support the argument that the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 left Pakistan with thousands of jehadis on its hands with no place to send them except Kashmir.
As a deeper analysis would show, the withdrawal of the Soviets did not mean the end of fighting in Afghanistan or a mass "laying off" of mujahideen. And large numbers of Pakistani fighters were pumped into J&K only after Islamabad decided in 1991 to sideline the JKLF by strengthening the Hizbul Mujahideen.
Despite the book being a journalist's perceptions rather than a carefully-studied and correlated academic work, it does contain interesting nuggets on domestic Pakistani politics and issues like the ideological connections of the LeT with the Palestinian liberation activist, Abdullah Azzam. In the final balance, the book will arouse interest because a Pakistani author has strongly endorsed what New Delhi has always said on a range of issues like terror camps and the role of the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Also See: AmirMir's Response
