Мир вам,
С ув., Мазут
Заметки из сегодняшней Ванкувер Сан. ВЕСТИ С ПОЛЕЙ
«Ищут пожарные, ищет милиция....» -- Почему со всеми технологич-и-ескими штучками не могут найти Бин Ладена??
· «Много бегает – то в пещеру, то в ущелье. Беспилотный разведчик узнал бороду, пока передавал данные – Ладен убежал.»
· «Местные не хочут помогать. Мы рассчитывали побомбить для острастки, а они, мол, бы нам его сами принесли. Пакистанский резидент ЦРУ разработал план, который оказался до кошмарного наивен.....»
Без масштабной наземной операции не обойтись
· Рамсфельд: «Мы знаем, что, возможно, нам его никогда не пойматъ.» Ну да, типа, не больно и хотелось!
· «Если вторгаться, потребуется около 250 000 бойцов. А вообще-то, скорее всего, 500 000.» Трепещи налогоплательщик! Пррячься призывник!
Милошевич в Гааге:
· «Я же американцам еще когда доводил, что Ладен был в Албании, а они, млин!»
· «И вообще, я уже устал слушать тут обвинения, написанные семилетним ребенком, простите, поправочка – недоразвитым семилетним ребенком.»
Северный Альянс: «Автоматы у нас всё старые, а пулемет уже который день в починке....»
Афганский беженец в Пакистане: «Да бомбите, бомбите, чтоб их! Рамадан, не Рамадан! В Боснии уже не воюют, в Чечне завязали, пора уже и нам.....»
АНАЛИЗ: Эволюция исламского государства: «Как режут в церквях.» «Это все Уль-хак виноват: Бхутто скинул, семимильную исламизацию проводил....»
THE VANCOUVER SUN WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2001
Why can’t they find him?
U.S. relying on a high-tech hunt for bin Laden and it's not working
By TONY ALLEN-MILLS
Like many Afghan refugees arriving at Pakistan's border, Gul Alam had a story to tell. Months before the suicide hijackings of Sept. 11, he had joined a work a work crew that was sent by Taliban militiamen into the mountains near Bamian, 160 kilometres west of Kabul. He spent a week building hardened mud walls inside a network of caves.
His story reached the ears of an agent for Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency, and it eventually arrived, in compressed form, on a list of dozens of similar reports at the Virginia headquarters of the CIA. Agency analysts pored over satellite photographs of barren Bamian mountainside, seeking the faintest trace of human activity that might lead American military forces to the hiding place of Osama bin Laden. If they spotted something, nobody yet knows.
There was another report last week about a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers seen driving east out of Kandahar a few days after Sept. 11. The drivers were not Afghans, but Arabs, a possible indication that bin Laden or his terrorist associates were behind the heavily tinted windows. Where they went was unknown.
It also emerged that earlier this year an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance drone took high-quality video of bin Laden, with his distinctive beard and white robes, surrounded by a large entourage at one of his bases in Afghanistan. When the drone returned later he was gone.
It has been like this for at least six years, ever since the CIA established a special unit to monitor bin Laden's movements. Reports arrive, but invariably too late. Targets are identified, but the quarry has always "just left" before the bombs and missiles strike.
For the past six weeks the most formidable manhunt ever assembled has been reduced to chasing shadows. Arrayed against bin Laden and his henchmen are the combined forces of the CIA, the ISI, the U.S. Air Force, the British SAS, satellite surveillance, Afghan opposition fighters, a smattering of Taliban defectors, and floods of talkative refugees keen to, bargain their way to safety.
They all say something different. Bin Laden is hiding in a cave. He has built a dozen fortified redoubts across the mountains. He moves every night. He has fled across the border to Pakistan, where he is protected by a local Pashtun warlord. Or perhaps he never left the Taliban's headquarters at Kandahar, where he may or may not be right now, with his feet up in the cellar of a mosque.
The monster is now a ghost, and he is beginning to scare American planners who thought they could find him. Not for the first time in Afghanistan's tortured history, a carefully devised military strategy is in trouble.
With Halloween approaching, one charitable group in Florida last week opened a seasonal haunted house display with a mock execution. An actor dressed as bin Laden was grabbed by "FBI agents" and dragged, kicking and screaming, to a fake electric chair. Sparks flew and the floor shook as bin Laden died theatrically. The audience cheered for more.
It is a scene many Americans would like to become reality, but senior U.S. officials have begun to express public doubts. Even Donald Rumsfeld, normally stirringly resolute as the secretary of defence, wobbled a little last week when he suggested that bin Laden might never be found.
He later qualified this, but other Pentagon officials confirmed their surprise at the absence of a breakthrough in toppling the Taliban.
The plan looked sound. CIA agents, with Pakistani intelligence and exiled Afghan opposition leaders, would spearhead attempts to divide the Taliban by encouraging defections, through bribery if necessary. While American airstrikes kept pressure on the Taliban military, intelligence teams would seek bin Laden's whereabouts. "It will be betrayal, not bombardment, that gets him," said Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan.
Yet the strategy has proved "horrendously naive," according to one Western official. The absence of a serious alternative to Taliban rule has left many tribal leaders deeply reluctant to bargain with America. Pakistan's support for Washington, and the alacrity with which it abandoned the Taliban after years of support, has made even the most opportunistic Taliban allies suspicious of further betrayals.
"They are making very little progress with key people in the Taliban who might know where bin Laden is," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA's counter-terrorist unit. Another intelligence source added: "Defections aren't happening. It's going to be a long struggle."
At the Pentagon the lack of quality intelligence is beginning to hurt.
Although the net around bin Laden may be tightening, it shows no sign of ensnaring him yet. Despite widespread rumours that the Saudi-born fugitive has skipped the country, military planners are sure he is still in Afghanistan.
When he is not on the move, the Americans believe, he has two likely hiding places: in mountains near Jalalabad and an underground complex in the mountainous Oruzgan province north of Kandahar. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was born in Oruzgan, whose tribespeople are said to be fiercely loyal to him and unlikely to betray the "special guest" bin Laden.
In the past three weeks the U.S. has used burrowing or "bunker-buster" bombs against caves that showed signs of human use. Last week it reportedly focused on the Paktia province, near Pakistan. Professor Jack Schroder, a University of Nebraska geologist who worked in Afghanistan, says a recent video statement by bin Laden showed distinctive patterns on the rock behind him, indicating a spot in Paktia, where the mountains are full of natural limestone caverns and tunnels, and man-made passageways. Bin Laden was based in this area when fighting the Russians.
Some of the caves are little more than bunkers just under the surface, Schroder said. Others stretch for kilometres under the rock, carved out decades ago as an irrigation system for the parched lowlands. But experts are divided on whether the terrorist chieftain would choose such a site for a likely fight to the death with U.S. and British special forces.
"On a purely technological level the U.S. military is prepared to find and destroy these caves," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington defence policy research firm.
"But the notion that we can find bin Laden's 'fortress of solitude' and that all 5,000 of his henchman are going to be down there among the stalactites is ridiculous."
Until recently the Pentagon hoped bin Laden's habit of moving around from cave to cave would expose his convoy. But reports now suggest he has abandoned his fleet of maroon Land Cruisers for mules or horses. And two senior intelligence sources said there was evidence that bin Laden had "pulled his wires" — cut off all communication — and was intending to lay up for the looming Afghan winter with a small group of trusted fighters and lieutenants.
Fewer than 20 of bin Laden's 150 elite personal bodyguards are believed to accompany him at any time. The rest have been scouting new locations and making them secure, or acting as decoys across the region.
These men, mainly Egyptians, Uzbeks, Algerians and other Arabs, have sniper rifles with silencers and night sights plus high-tech French communications equipment, backed by special forces training. What marks them out is their complete loyalty to their leader, whom they have known for 10 years or more.
One further option is that bin Laden, aware that his cave complexes would be obvious targets, and would be more exposed to detection from the air in the winter, might have abandoned the hills altogether for a city, where the risk of betrayal may be higher but where even the SAS would find it hard to strike at him. Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, may be too obvious a sanctuary, but other potential havens exist in the Taliban-controlled towns of Qalat, Ghazni or Khowst.
In truth, it is little more than guess-work. Lacking reliable human intelligence, the Pentagon has instead been relying on its unrivalled state-of-the-art electronic spying technology, hoping that one lucky break, one tell-tale speck on the landscape, will lead it to the terrorist's den.
Spy satellites with high-resolution cameras scan the terrain every day. The U.S. Air Force and CIA deploy manned U2 spy planes and unmanned Predator and Gnat drones for detailed aerial reconnaissance. The Predators carry both night-vision cameras and Hellfire missiles for immediate launch.
In addition, a new generation of unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, the turbo-fan-powered Global Hawk, which boasts even greater surveillance potential, is believed to have been rushed through testing and into the battle zone.
And it does not stop there. Helicopters and other aircraft can spread sophisticated electronic motion sensors across suspect mountain paths. With cold weather already cloaking the mountains, the Pentagon plans to fit helicopters with thermal cameras to detect signs of underground warmth, such as cooking fires in caves.
The helicopters will be armed with AGM-130 missiles that can be fired into the mouths of suspect tunnels. American bombers will continue to target "basically everything ever identified with bin Laden", said Cannistraro.
In a coordinated attempt to reduce the gap between receiving intelligence and ordering strikes, the U.S. air force is sending airborne command posts into Afghan airspace, with senior officers on board specially equipped transport aircraft ready to order instant attacks on so-called "targets of opportunity" — or moving targets that emerge after conventional strikes.
For President George W. Bush, beset by domestic problems with anthrax, the news from the front has scarcely been encouraging. Doubts that were largely absent in the shocked aftermath of Sept. 11 are beginning to find a public voice. "The Bush administration may be getting worried — whether they are stating it or not — that the public is going to associate getting bin Laden with success," said Charles Hermann, a former staff member for the National Security Council.
Cal Jillson, a political researcher from Texas, Bush's home state, said the administration had left itself "no choice". He added: "They've put such a clear face on this evil — Osama bin Laden's — that they have to chase him until they run him down."
Last week Rumsfeld likened the hunt to a search for a "needle in a haystack." He added: "Have we located bin Laden in a way that allowed us to do anything about it? No. Are we continuing the effort? You bet. Do we expect to get him? Yes."
The Sunday Times
U.S. Troops On The Ground in Afghanistan
Confirming ‘modest’ presence, defence chief says Gulf War-style invasion not rueld out
JABAL-US-SARAJ, Afghanistan — The United States confirmed on Tuesday that U.S. troops are on the ground inside Afghanistan and held out the prospect of a Gulf War-style invasion to crush the Taliban and their al-Qaida allies in Afghanistan.
U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "a very modest number" of American troops were already in Afghanistan, based in the region controlled by the Northern Alliance of local groups which are fighting the ruling Taliban.
Nearly 100 U.S. warplanes, Conducting an air war now in its fourth week, pounded Taliban and al-Qaida targets on Tuesday.
Rumsfeld, in the Pentagon's first acknowledgment that U.S. troops are based in rugged Afghanistan, told reporters the units were liaising with the Afghan opposition and spotting targets for warplanes.
He said the U.S. presence was limited, but added: "It is true we do not have anything like the ground forces we had in World War Two, or in Korea, or in the Gulf War, but nor have we ruled that out."
Rumsfeld said when the bombing began Oct. 7 that air power alone would be insufficient in Afghanistan, and special operations forces would play a key role in the campaign to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
Troops on the ground probably will be needed to deal with bin Laden and other leaders of al-Qaida, but past wars in Afghanistan — notably the former Soviet Union's failure after 10 years of fighting — have shown the high cost of a conventional large-scale ground invasion.
The only previous ground mission publicly disclosed by the Pentagon was a hit-and-run raid by more than 100 paratroopers led by elite Army Rangers 11 days ago.
The debate over ground troops in Afghanistan is not so much a question of whether, but when and for what purpose, said Sandy Berger, a national security adviser to former president Bill Clinton during his administration.
Daniel Goure, a former defence official, said that to take on the Taliban and the forces of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network directly would require at least 250,000 troops, and perhaps as many as 500,000. The Soviets had a peak force of about 120,000 in Afghanistan during their war there, which lasted from 1979 to 1989.
In Afghanistan, opposition spokesman Mohammad Ashraf Nadeem said that up to 20 U.S. soldiers were in opposition areas.
"Following the launch of the allied operation [on Oct. 7], between 15 to 20 Americans came ... to coordinate attacks against the Taliban," Nadeem said. "They have their own base there and are equipped with guns and other means of defence and wear uniforms."
The front is near the northwest city of Mazar-e-Sharif, a prize that stands astride supply routes to Kabul and has an airfield. The opposition, a loose-knit coalition of warlords from ethnic minorities in northern Afghanistan, has repeatedly tried to take the city from the mainly Pashtun Taliban.
The air war against the Taliban has had little apparent success in weakening the movement so far, but Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf said he detected splits that could open the way for a political end to the conflict.
"I do see that. Afghanistan has suffered, the people are suffering so much that I am reasonably sure there are many people who even question the wisdom of their suffering for the sake of somebody who is there and not an Afghan, like Osama bin Laden and his people," Musharraf said.
Pakistan supported the Taliban government until the Sept. 11 attacks. It has long had an intelligence network among Afghans.
"No, it's not wishful thinking," Musharraf said when pressed about the prospect of desertions in the dominant Pashtun tribe that has supported the Taliban so far. But he declined to go into details about who he expects to desert. Musharraf said he accepted that the military campaign had to continue in Afghanistan and he would not press Bush at their scheduled meeting next month to halt bombing during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
Reuters
Bin Laden in Albania last year, says Milosevic
THE HAGUE — Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic told the UN war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands on Tuesday that Qsama bin Laden was in Albania last year.
Milosevic said the U.S. government had turned to him for help in tracking down bin Laden, who was believed to be behind the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"The previous American administration knew that bin Laden was in Albania two years after he blew up their embassies and they discussed these facts with me and my associates," Milosevic told the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Albanian authorities have repeatedly denied foreign media reports that Osama bin Laden had visited in recent years.
On Sept. 21, Joseph Limprecht, U.S. ambassador to Albania, said the U.S. government had no such reports and he commended Albania for expelling Islamic extremists.
Milosevic flared up in court again Tuesday at a hearing to schedule his trials for alleged war crimes in Kosovo and Croatia. As before, he refused to cooperate, rebuffing the court's request to plead to indictments against him, and arguing with Judge Richard May.
He voiced impatience with the lengthy hearing of the day before.
"Don't bother me and make me listen for hours on end to the reading of texts written at the intellectual level of a seven-year-old child — rather, I correct myself — a retarded seven-year-old child," he said.
Associated Press
Fighters Talk tough As U.S. Bombs Taliban Troops, But Doubts Remain
Front-line Northern Alliance soldiers carry older rifles; machine gun is in for repair
By LEVON SEVUNTS
JELAMKHOR, Afghanistan — The deafening thunder of American bombs dropped on a hilltop Taliban position near this village Tuesday was music to the ears of Commander Haji Muhammaddin.
His troops, dug into deep narrow trenches on Puze Pulekhomry hill opposite Taliban positions, need all die help they can get.
Just six months ago this range of hills hi the Takhor province of northern Afghanistan was in his rearguard.
Now his troops will have to cross about two kilometres of no-man's land, which has become a giant minefield, and fight against a dogged, numerically superior enemy to retake that hill range.
American jets bombed Kale Kata hill range, not far from the Tajik border, twice in the past three days.
In addition to its strategic location — from the hill range Taliban gunners control a narrow valley between Afghan hills and the Tajik border and can check any advance westward by the anti-Taliban forces — Kale Kata has a symbolic importance for the Americans.
According to the local commanders the hill is occupied by fighters affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.
"We are hopeful by the mercy of God we will take that hill soon," Muhammaddin, 34, said, as he listened to the conversations of his enemies on a walkie-talkie. "If Americans bomb, that's good, but even if they don't bomb we are still going to fight the Taliban. We have been fighting them for seven years now."
A mortar burped on the neighbouring hill, lobbing a shell at Taliban positions. A white plume of smoke and dust on the slopes of the opposite hill marked where the shell landed.
One of Muhammaddin's deputies, Commander Muhammad Omar, started taunting the invisible enemy, yelling Insults in Urdu and Arabic Into the walkie-talkie.
"At first the Taliban had a lot of Afghans but now it's mostly foreigners," Omar said. "We are facing about 1,000 people: Arabs, Punjabis, Chechnyans and fighters of Juma Namagani's Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan."
Muhammaddin said his troops are ready to take on the Taliban.
"We have everything we need, we are just waiting for the order from the defence minister to start the offensive," he said^ repeating a mantra that every commander in the area has been repeating to visiting journalists.
However, Muhammaddin might have been exaggerating a little the military preparedness of his troops.
Most of them were armed by older Chinese or Iraqi-made AK-47 assault rifles.
They had a couple of light machine guns but their only heavy machine gun — capable of reaching Taliban positions on the opposite hill about two kilometres away — was in the repair shop.
Most soldiers were wearing new Russian combat boots, but unlike their colleagues hi the valley below, instead of military uniforms they were wearing the traditional Afghan garb.
Nevertheless for Azim, a 21-year-old fighter who spent almost a year in the dusty trenches on Puze Pulekhomry, the moment when he would be ordered to attack the Taliban positions couldn't come soon enough.
"I want to avenge my family," Azim said, firing off his AK-47 to suppress incoming small arms fire from the Taliban positions in the valley below.
Azim's father, a colonel in the army of president Burhannuddin Rabbani commanded by the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, was killed fighting against a Taliban offensive on his home town.
When the Taliban finally took Foryob, Azim's home town, they lined up his six brothers and shot them in their own courtyard.
The military leadership of the Northern Alliance, meanwhile, seems to be hi no hurry to start an offensive that is sure to cause enormous casualties.
"They have nothing to lose and everything to win If they drag the war throughout the winter," said Hashmatullah Moslih, an Australian of Afghan origin who has come to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. "They can easily defend their positions now and prepare their troops for a major offensive."
As he spoke, U.S. jets roared in the skies above and dropped a bomb on the Kata Kale Taliban positions, rattling windows in the town of Dashteqala, some 15 kilometres from Kale Kata.
Moslih said the United Front has to start the offensive on its own terms.
"Let's face it," Moslih said. "Americans came here for bin Laden, not for us."
Keep Bombing, Refugees Tell U.S.
There is little sentiment among Afghan Muslims who fled the Taliban for slowing the war during the Ramadan holy month
By MIKE BLANCHFIELD
KHWAJA BAHUDDIN, Afghanistan — Fresh from three hours of morning prayers, Mohammad Sharif emerges from the mosque here with advice for those who think the U.S. should stop bombing Afghanistan out of respect for the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
"They are not refugees like me. They did not lose their house like me. They did not have their house burned by the Taliban like me," says the 41-year-old ex-farmer and shopkeeper who fled his home in the hills about 30 kilometres west of here 14 months ago when it fell to the Taliban. "If they are refugees and they lose everything, they must say America must continue the bombing."
Nov. 16 marks the start of Ramadan, the most sacred month in the Muslim calendar. It calls for day-long fasting by all adherents. Some are suggesting the U.S.-led war on terrorism — the key feature being the air bombardment of Afghanistan that started 24 days ago — should take a hiatus if it has not brought Osama bin Laden and his al-Qai-da network to their knees by then.
With the Taliban fuelling the fires of anti-American sentiment across parts of Muslim Asia with accusations that President George W. Bush has launched a holy crusade against Islam, some worry that continued air strikes during Ramadan would be ill considered.
The overriding sentiment among the faithful emerging from the brand-new yellow concrete mosque here on Tuesday afternoon was, in essence, thank you world, but we'd prefer the bombing to continue.
Sharif, who lost his house, his shop, his farm, 20 pieces of livestock, including cows, sheep, goats, donkeys and a horse, was the most hawkish in his support of the U.S. bombing campaign among those leaving Khwaja Bahuddin's Mosque on Tuesday afternoon.
This northern Afghanistan city has swelled from 20,000 inhabitants to 130,000 in the past year since the Northern Alliance, the guerrillas fighting the Taliban, came to town and set up shop. The alliance's political arm, the United Front, declared this region the new capital of anti-Taliban Afghanistan.
Refugees flooded into the area. The Front established its government in exile. And the alliance, courtesy of some cement shipped in from Russia, finished the mosque here, and topped it off with a wood and steel roof.
"The Taliban kill," said Mohammed Zahir, 30. "We want them killed everywhere and every time and every place because they killed our best friends. The Taliban is not from Afghanistan."
Khan Mohammad, 28, has mixed feelings about the bombing continuing during Ramadan, but in the end, he can't see anyway around it.
"I think in my heart no Muslim should be killed during Ramadan. It is what my heart wants," he said. But his family was also forced out its village, 35 kilometres from here, last year when it fell to the Taliban.
"Last year, we lost everything, our house, our land, our shops,” he said. “Now we hope that America finishes them during Ramadan.”
The alliance doesn't want the bombs to stop falling either. Asked recently by reporters what U.S. military personnel should do during Ramadan, alliance foreign minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah quipped: "They should fast." U.S. Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld left no doubt this week that the bombs would continue falling during Ramadan. "The Taliban and al-Qaida are unlikely to take a holiday," he told a Pentagon briefing.
"And given the fact that they have killed thousands of Americans ... we are under an obligation to defend the American people and we intend to work diligently to do that."
When war and religion clash, war usually prevails.
Islam does prohibit fighting during Ramadan. The Prophet Mohammed fought and won Mecca during Ramadan in 624. Egypt started its 1973 war against Israel during Ramadan.
In Algeria, 150,000 people were killed during a month of rebel insurgency in 1994 during the holy month.
Two years ago, during the bombing of Yugoslavia in support of Kosovar Albanians, pressure to halt hostilities during Orthodox Easter, a sacred Serbian holiday, went by the wayside.
During the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, Ramadan didn't stop Mujahedeen fighters determined to rid their country of invaders.
On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. bombing continued on the front lines just 30 kilometres west of here. By mid-afternoon the skies over Khwaja Bahuddin's mosque were filled with the roar of unseen, high-flying jets.
The dull thud of six bombs exploding in the hills nearby echoed through the region.
Despite the continued fighting, Sharif is hopeful that he will one day be able to return to his land, rebuild his farm, and restock his fields with new animals.
"The war finished in Iraq. The war finished in Chechnya. The war finished in Bosnia. We hope the war finishes in our country."
Pakistan: The evolution of an Islamic state
The massacre of 16 people at a Christian church follows a constant erosion of non-Muslim rights
Jonathan Manthorpe
Degrees of religious intolerance and social coercion are built into any theocratic state. It is inevitable.
Any nation or community that fashions its customs and morality on an exclusive divine revelation cannot help but be threatened to the core by contact with other people equally certain that God's message to them is the right one.
Just as threatening is dissent within the community, because while theocracies might like to portray themselves as havens of moral and religious purity, they are political power structures for priests, mullahs and pastors whose authority is the unchallenged right to interpret God's word.
This handy device even removes responsibility for repression from the shoulders of religious despots, for they are merely messengers of the revealed word.
And it goes without saying that the terrorist who straps on the armour of scripture is assured absolution for the death and destruction he causes.
We cannot know at this moment if the men who gunned down a Christian congregation at Bahawalpur in Pakistan on Sunday killing 16 people, including a Muslim police officer, feel absolved or what perverse thinking led to the outrage.
The assumption is this was a reaction by radical Muslims to the American-led attacks on the Taliban regime in neighbouring Afghanistan. The logic of this thought is that the victims were Christians and the United States is seen as a Christian country, even though it is probably the most vehement nation anywhere in demanding clear separation between the loyalties to church and state.
The Pakistani Christians, who number about three million in the country's total population of 140 million, are hardly the knife edge of rampant Christendom.
(The largest group are Protestants, descended from people who accepted the teaching of Christian missionaries during the tune of British imperial rule of the Indian subcontinent. Very many of them came from very low rungs on the ladder of the region's almost immovable caste system. They found siding with the foreign imperial masters was one way of end-running the local hierarchical straitjacket.
The second largest group of Pakistani Christians are Roman Catholics, who originally came from Goa, the tiny Portuguese coastal enclave swallowed by India when Lisbon abandoned most of its colonial holdings in the mid-1970s.
Again, it takes a stretch of imagination to see the Pakistani Goan Christians as agents or symbols of the Washington-led fight against terrorism.
But religious violence comes easily in Pakistan, which has seen a steady ratcheting up of religious restrictions and suspicions since it was founded as a Muslim homeland at the tune of the partition of India in 1947.
Sunday's attack was the largest single outrage against Christians since Pakistan's founding, thought they are subject to constant repressions and inequities.
Laws against blaspheming against Islam are regularly used against Christians in petty local squabbles. They hardly ever lead to any serious legal action, but are a constant threat.
There is also political apartheid. Non-Muslims are permitted to vote only for religious-minority candidates who are meant to protect their interests, but who in reality perpetuate political isolation.
By far the most bloody and persistent religious violence in Pakistan, however, is between rival Muslim sects. The father of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged the new nation enshrining a clear division between its religious and secular lives.
Addressing the country's constituent assembly in August, 1947, Jinnah said: "You are free to go to your temples; you are free to go to mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the state."
Whether he would have stuck to that determination cannot be known because he died just over a year later.
Within a few months religious vested interests came to dominate the men framing the constitution, who founded the new country as an Islamic state.
Initially that affirmation was mild and the rights of members of minority religions — the Christians, the Hindus, the Parsis, the Buddhists, the Sikhs and the Baha'is — were observed.
The first significant change was implemented by then-prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in 1973. Under the banner of "Islamic socialism," Bhutto pushed an amendment of the constitution to assert "Islam shall be the state religion of Pakistan."
His appeasement of the hardline religious lobby went further. There are two main Muslim sects in Pakistan — the majority Sunnis and about 10 per cent who are Shi'a.
There are also about four million people who are Ahmadis and who do not accept that Mohammed was the last prophet of Islam. They believe there is another Messiah yet to come.
This thought is anathema to Sunni and Shi'a clerics. In 1974 Bhutto accepted their judgment and pushed a constitutional amendment that said the Ahmadis are not Muslims.
The momentum of Islamization gathered speed after Bhutto was ousted in a military coup in 1977.
For 10 years, until he died in a plane crash in 1987, the military dictator General Zia ul-Haq encouraged the emergence of religion-based political movements and oversaw the introduction of Muslim law. Zia brought in Hudood laws incorporating punishments mentioned in the Koran, such as amputations, for crimes. He also introduced the blasphemy laws and other Islamic legal provisions that count the evidence of a Muslim man to be worth twice that of a Muslim woman and several times more believable than that of a non-Muslim.
Since Zia successive governments have continued to pander to Pakistan's radical Muslim minority, entrenching ever deeper the Islamic state and the authority of Sharia law. This has continued despite the small appeal of radical Islam in Pakistan. In recent municipal elections, for example, radical Muslim candidates won only two per cent of the vote.
Since he took power in a coup in 1999, General Pervez Musharraf has taken some tentative steps to reverse the trend. Those initiatives are now on hold.
Sun International Affairs Columnist
jmanthorpe@pacpress.southam.ca