The Daily Clarity

The other British Army in Afghanistan

There is an alleged 4,00 strong British Army in Afghanistan, however they are not fighting for Queen and Country, but rather are British-born Central Asians fighting for the Taliban against NATO troops. These British youths have been detected by the intelligence services monitoring Taliban radio chatter on the front line of battles between NATO and  insurgents in the Southern provinces, such as Helmand,. When the imported fighters get over excited, they drop their Punjab and Urdu language skills, and resort to colloquialaccented English to communicate to each other. They are also identifiable as non-native, as they are not fluent in the local Pashtu language, but use the more prevalent generic central Asian  languages of Urdu and Punjabi. It is assumed that these fighters were recruited in Britain, trained in the Pakistani camps, and then placed into the Taliban ranks in the hotly contested battle ground areas in Afghanistan.

We have reported before on how some of the most extreme strands of Islamic philosophy are being exported back from the West to Asia, by people bred and raised in Europe. To quote from our earlier report , the groundbreaking research being done by Major General Muniruzzaman, from  Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS) is at the forefront of this work. Muniruzzaman, is no novice in this field and his opinions should be taken seriously. In addition to his own military and intelligence career, he has extensive field experience in United Nations Peace Support Operations and was selected by the UN Secretary General to lead the post election UN mission in Cambodia.

His study has focused on how Western individuals, using social media sites such as Facebook, are communicating their version of Islamic fundamentalism back to the country of their origin. Muniruzzaman says, “What we have seen is that many of the diaspora population living in the West have become perhaps more radicalized than their home roots. So we are not only seeing roots exporting radicalism to diaspora living in other countries but we are also trying to see whether the diaspora of those living in other areas on other continents is taking radical thoughts back to their roots. So we need to see the cross-pollination routes – what level of radical ideology can be taken back, what has been transferred. We are also seeing a disturbing trend now – the typical theory of the madrassas no longer exists. The London bombers did not go to madrassas, the Glasgow bombers were highly educated. 9/11 terrorists were educated in North American universities. So a paradigm shift has taken place in the profiling of the terrorists.”

This study is the precursor to a larger work to be published next year on how these radicalized opinion sets are being communicated over the Internet. Muniruzzaman says, “We are interested in studying the Facebook generation, to see how the Facebook generation is shifting radical thoughts from one country to another.” General Muniruzzaman warned that his own country Bangladesh should not be ignored in any threat assessment, and he pointed to its growing political Islam and militant wahabism, and the “social stress” of the country, which is currently governed by a military-backed interim government. He identified extremists groups operating in Bangladesh such as Harakat ul-Jihad-I-Islami (HUJI), Hizb ut Tahrir, and referred to Fazlur Rahman, of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh (JMB) who was a signatory to the 1998 Al Qaeda declaration of war. Although General Muniruzzamanrefused to disclose any information about any front organizations those groups have in the UK, he said: “we haven’t had clear idea how money is funneled into Bangladesh through various means. We haven’t really regulated the inflow of money. So in terms of counter terrorism financing we have lack of capacity, so I only hope there are loopholes that we have not been able to stop and we need to find them. “

The British newspaper, the Independent, has the report on the British extremists fighting in Afghanistan. To quote the report:

Some of the British Muslims had originally trained in Pakistan to commit attacks in Kashmir. But security sources say the rising threat of Indian retribution, especially after the Mumbai attacks, had led to the Pakistani government curbing the activities of the Kashmiri separatist groups, so the fighters are being switched to Afghanistan. The numbers involved in Afghanistan, the intelligence document shows, are relatively few, dozens rather than hundreds, but the pattern of involvement is described as a cause for concern. Last week, during a visit to Helmand, the Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, was shown Taliban explosive devices containing British-made electronic components. An explosives officer said the devices had either been sent from Britain, or brought over to the country. They ranged from remote-control units used to fly model airplanes to advanced components which could detonates bombs at a range of more than a mile.

Evidence of British Muslims fighting inside Afghanistan and training in insurgent camps in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been provided to the UK authorities by the Americans. The US has significantly stepped up its surveillance inside Pakistan as part of a more aggressive policy including cross-border raids by unmanned Predator aircraft.The Americans are said to have raised the issue of the Pakistan connection, complaining that the UK is not doing enough to curb radical Muslims. The US pointed out that this threatens their own security because UK passport holders can get into the US under the visa waiver programme. The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, the chairman of the Commons’ sub-committee on anti-terrorism, which has been examining the activities of British Muslim extremists, said: “We know the problem we have with UK-based jihadists. We also know that a number of them have been arrested trying to leave the country. With the UK intelligence services at full stretch, it is not surprising some of these jihadists had ended up in Afghanistan.”

Given other developments in the region such as the suspected peace agreements between the Taliban and the Pakistan army in certain areas of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and regions of Kashmir, the Taliban seems to be making an all out effort prior to the arrival of the extra US troops promised by President Obama. The Taliban appears to be pulling out resources from Iraq, Pakistan and Kashmir committing them to the fierce combat with NATO troops in Afghanistan. Certainly the Taliban is gaining ground, and is now estimated to have a substantive presence in over 70% of Afghanistan according to some estimates. NATO is reeling and with Western educated recruits able to blend in with the local tribes, and potentially infiltrate Afghan Security forces, the stakes are being raised again. This latest development must be a concern, a further irritant in the sometimes tense relationship between the US and British Commanders,  and a strategy that European IntelligenceServices need to counter quickly. As if that wasn’t enough, the Independent report closes by alluding to the contents of another “…confidential NATO report revealed that more than 30 per cent of the population believed the government of President Hamid Karzai had lost control of the areas in which they live and much of that has slipped back into Taliban control.” The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, and unless President Obama has a new policy to accompany his troops, it is unlikely that just putting extra boots on the ground will change the dynamics there.