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PUNJAB FACING MILITANT HEAT:Pakistani policemen and rescuers searching for victims in the rubble of a destroyed police building after a suicide car bomb attack in Lahore in May 2009, one of many terrorist attacks in the province in recent years.
A. Srivathsan
CHENNAI: While Pakistan's security establishment is yet to be convinced that militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed need to be done away with, U.S. diplomats have long been sending worried messages back to Washington that these groups, along with a network of radical madrassas and charity fronts, are exploiting the poverty in the country's Punjab province and turning it into a hotbed of extremism.
PUNJAB FACING MILITANT HEAT:Pakistani policemen and rescuers searching for victims in the rubble of a destroyed police building after a suicide car bomb attack in Lahore in May 2009, one of many terrorist attacks in the province in recent years.
A. Srivathsan
In a series of cables sent over a period of two years, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and the Consulate in Lahore documented the ways in which the madrassas recruited boys as young as eight, indoctrinated them into jihadi philosophy, and sent them to terrorist training camps, on the back of an estimated $100 million flowing in from organisations from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The cables document that the southern and western Punjab, which once constituted “the spiritual heartland of South Asia's Sufi communities” and is a traditionally moderate area, had become a hotbed of extremism in Pakistan.
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