PAKISTAN: As President Pervez Musharraf renews his crackdown on Muslim militant factions after this month's terrorist bombings in London, new evidence has emerged that Pakistan has continued to let such groups run military-style camps to train guerrilla fighters. For years, the camps have been only half a secret.
"Everybody has known they were there, but no one would officially admit it," said a Pakistani official interviewed recently. "And they were kept hidden - no ordinary people could go there."
Inconveniently for the government, the camps have become a bit more public in recent weeks, both in Pakistan's press and through US courtroom affidavit.
While the Bush administration has portrayed Mr Musharraf as an ally in its global war on terror, the training camps reflect how deeply that role has divided Pakistan and its ruling elite.
The camps are used by Pakistan-based militant groups such as Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (Army of the Pure). For over a decade, the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate has sponsored such groups to attack India in the conflict over the territory of Kashmir, much as it nurtured the Taliban movement to pursue Pakistani interests in Afghanistan, western intelligence sources have said.
While the government has aggressively hunted down Arab and other non-Pakistani militants identified with the al-Qaeda movement, and while it formally banned Jaish and Lashkar in 2002, it has never dismantled either the Taliban or the Pakistan-based outfits. The local groups simply renamed themselves and have been spared destruction, even though some are suspected of assassination attempts against President Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
Pakistani and foreign analysts say the Pakistani militant groups and their training camps have survived largely because the government crackdown has been half-hearted. Many officers in the army (Pakistan's real ruling party), "don't want to eliminate these groups that have fought in Kashmir and Afghanistan, because they think they may want to use them again at some future time", said a foreign intelligence analyst.
The problem is that there is no clear separation between the Pakistani groups and the Taliban or al-Qaeda. For example, militants accused of the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl include al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Jaish-e-Muhammad militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.
New evidence of the camps includes this month's cover story in Herald, a Karachi-based news magazine, whose reporter described visiting a training camp in Mansehra, a district of rugged, wooded hills in north-central Pakistan.
The reporter was shown a camp protected by a checkpoint and guards, where militants carried automatic weapons and wore camouflage uniforms. A dormitory held 60 to 80 sleeping bags laid out on thin mattresses, and another building housed an unknown number of boys taking an "18-day ideological orientation and fitness and arms training".
The Herald and the Pakistani official said that since late 2001, when President Musharraf signed on to the US-led campaign against militants, Pakistan's ruling military has forced camps periodically to reduce operations or move to more hidden locations.
For two years, militant groups have had to shrink or conceal public activities, such as soliciting donations and running recruiting offices. An estimated 13 camps in Mansehra were forced to suspend training operations last year, the Herald reported, but were allowed to resume in April and May.
A separate account of a camp emerged in a Sacramento courtroom last month, when the FBI filed an affidavit citing a young Pakistani arrested as he entered the US. Hamid Hayat told FBI questioners, "he attended a jihadist training camp in Pakistan for approximately six months in 2003-2004", the affidavit said.
He faces a criminal charge of having lied to US authorities by initially denying having been trained. Under questioning, he "described the camp as providing structured paramilitary training, including weapons training, explosives training, interior room tactics, hand-to-hand combat, and strenuous exercise", the affidavit said.
Mr Hayat said his camp was run by al-Qaeda, and trainees "were being trained in how to kill Americans", the affidavit said.