Pakistani internal security (catch all)

[davidbfpo]

From a BBC report:

Officials in Pakistan's MQM party have told the UK authorities they received Indian government funds, the BBC learnt from an authoritative Pakistani source.UK authorities investigating the MQM for alleged money laundering also found a list of weapons in an MQM property.
A Pakistani official has told the BBC that India has trained hundreds of MQM militants over the last 10 years.
The Indian authorities described the claims as "completely baseless". The MQM said it was not going to comment.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33148880

The MQM is mainly active in Karachi and can order up crowds, disorder and shootings. For context see the stand-alone thread on Karachi:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=21443

[davidbfpo]

It appears that patience with his activity just ran out. The headline and subtitle from The Guardian:

Pakistan terrorist leader killed in police shootout
Malik Ishaq, head of al-Qaida-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, dies with 13 others in operation some suspect may have been staged by authorities

Some of the detail:

Leaders of Pakistan’s most infamous sectarian terrorist group, including its founder Malik Ishaq, were killed in a gun battle with police on Wednesday that many suspect may have been deliberately staged.
Ishaq and 13 other militants from the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) – including two of his sons and a top official – died after gunmen attempted to free them from custody in a pre-dawn operation, police claimed.

Link:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/29/pakistan-terrorist-leader-maliq-ishaq-killed-police-shootout

(Added later):http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33699133

[omarali50]

This is truly significant. Even if we suppose that his killikng is a one-off (maybe because he was not being cooperative and knew too much etc etc) and this is not a "genuine shift" in GHQ thinking (I think it IS a genuine shift, but just for the sake of argument), the end result is the same. True believer deobandi jihadists will leave the officially-approved Jihad world and move into opposition. Their numbers may be small and their ability to disrupt things less than it was advertised when their threat was magnified to get American money flowing or to explain why we couldnt "do more", but they are true believers. Without true believers, what will become of the official Jihad-machine and the two-nation theory? What asabiya will unite Pakistan? Sure, Gabon manages without deep Gabonese Asabiya, but we are not Gabon.
Interesting times.

[davidbfpo]

A succinct commentary in The Economist Explains and ends with:

In December 2014 a Pakistani branch of the Taliban massacred more than 130 schoolboys on Pakistani soil, in the city of Peshawar. In response the prime minister vowed to end the state's old distinction between “good and bad Taliban”. Progress towards that goal had seemed patchy, at least until July 29th, when the senior leadership of LeJ, including its kingpin, the once-untouchable Malik Ishaq, were all gunned down. The police have barely bothered to pretend the incident was anything other than a mass extra-judicial killing. Even people who were appalled to hear that Ishaq had been summarily executed hope to draw the conclusion that Pakistan has finally learned its lesson

Link:http://www.economist.com/blogs/econo...ng_in_pakistan

Just maybe the July 29th killing means a change in policy.