Pervez Musharraf had admitted Pakistan trained groups to carry out terrorism in Kashmir

Former Pakistan President and army general Pervez Musharraf, who passed away on February 5, had admitted in a 2015 interview that Pakistan was supporting and training groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in the 1990s to carry out militancy in the Kashmir region. Musharraf passed away on Sunday at a hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates at the age of 79. He was suffering from amyloidosis, a rare disease caused by a build-up of an abnormal protein called amyloid in organs and tissues throughout the body and had shifted to Dubai in 2016.

“In the 1990s, the freedom struggle began in Kashmir. At that time, Lashkar-e-Taiba and 11 or 12 other organisations were formed. We supported them and trained them as they were fighting in Kashmir at the cost of their lives,” Musharraf said in an interview to Dunya News on October 25, 2015. The former army chief was responding to a question about action against LeT’s Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. He said people like Saeed and Lakhvi enjoyed the status of heroes at that time. Saeed and Lakhvi are designated terrorists and key figures within the Lashkar-e-Taiba, both of them played a pivotal role in the November 26, 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

“The Kashmiri freedom fighters including Hafiz Saeed and Lakhvi were our heroes at that time. Later on, the religious militancy turned into terrorism. Now they (referring to militants in Pakistan) are killing their own people here and this should be controlled and stopped,” Musharraf had said. To a question whether Saeed and Lakhvi should also be “controlled and stopped”,  Musharraf said, “No comments.”

Musharraf also claimed that, in 1979, Pakistan was in favour of religious militancy. He said that “religious militancy” was started by Pakistan which brought militants from all over the world to fight against Soviet forces. “We trained Taliban and sent them to fight against Russia. Taliban, Haqqani, Osama Bin Laden and Zawahiri were our heroes then. Later they became villains,” he said, adding that people need to understand the whole environment at that time.

Musharraf on the 2001 New Delhi Parliament attacks

On December 13, 2001, when the Indian Parliament in New Delhi was attacked by Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, India, in response, amassed its troops along the boundary with Pakistan. A military stand-off ensued for 10 months, with tensions getting very high at certain points: some observers have even suggested that India was seriously contemplating a limited war to flush out the so-called terrorist training camps from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, claimed a policy paper by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

President Musharraf, when banning Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in January 2002, used a rationale that might be considered a tacit admission of those organisations’ role in the parliament attack and other attacks in India. In his televised address to the nation, the president said, ‘Those involved in terrorist attacks in India are also trying to destabilise Pakistan’.