Ehsan came to the jihad in a roundabout way. He served in Pakistan’s Army for 20 years, training with the elite Special Services Group along with Pervez Musharraf, now a general and Pakistan’s ruler. (“He is a very brilliant strategist and very determined,” Ehsan says of his former colleague. “But he is a secularist, so he is weak.”) In the mid-1960s, Ehsan was trained by American Green Berets in Pakistan. “They taught us to plan and execute maneuvers, given whatever resources we have,” he says. “But they only believe in three dimensions: whatever we can see, we believe. When you are fighting for Allah, you believe in the unseen.”
In 1986, Ehsan volunteered for service in Afghanistan. There he fought the Soviet invaders alongside the Islamic mujahedin–a cause encouraged and aided by the United States. Now, to Ehsan and his supporters, the struggle against Indian control of predominantly Muslim Kashmir is more of the same. “What is the difference between the jihad in Afghanistan and the jihad in Kashmir?” asks Hafiz Saeed, head of the Lashkar-i-Taiba, one of the largest groups fighting in Kashmir. “That was for freedom, and this is for freedom.” Ejaz Haidar, a Pakistani journalist who is no friend of the guerrillas, asks: “If America can use jihadis for their own cold-war purposes in Afghanistan, then what’s wrong with an Islamic state using them for its own purposes in Kashmir?”
Ehsan’s conversion to the jihad came when he led 125 of his men through a minefield to attack a position held by about 1,000 Afghan allies of the Russians. Miraculously, as he sees it, only one of his men was lost to the mines. He says that fighter was instantly shahid, a martyr headed for Paradise. “When a shahid dies, the body smells very sweet,” says Ehsan. “And insects don’t eat the body, as they normally do in death.” Attacking the position on the other side of the minefield, Ehsan’s men put the enemy to rout–aided, he claims, by angels in white gowns riding on horseback in the air. In both Afghanistan and Kashmir, he insists, “I have seen corpses where the heads were chopped off–not by man, but by angels.”
For devout Muslims like Ehsan, random violence is not a proper jihad. Allah’s rules are clear: no women, children or old people are to be killed. Prisoners are to be treated with respect and invited to embrace Islam. Standing crops are to be left intact. Trees may not be cut down. (Ehsan even drinks his tea in the manner prescribed by the Qur’an: in three slow sips, not blowing on the tea, but waiting for it to cool naturally.) “It’s not that the Pakistan Army says we have to fight,” he explains. “It’s that Allah says we have to fight when people are oppressed, and so we do.” The fight, he adds, could take place anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened.
