The detention of Americans seeking to contact militants and join holy war through the Internet suggests the country may need more than security crackdowns to contain threats from an insurgency. The five men, students in their 20s from northern Virginia, were detained this week in the city of Sargodha, security officials said.
The suspects were being investigated for possible links to a group suspected of carrying out high-profile attacks and with links to the Taliban and al Qaeda. Laptops, cellphones and maps of Pakistani cities were seized from them.
"It's a very difficult job to dismantle such networks which operate through the Internet. Their mode of communication was the Internet and email. All five and their contacts were using the same password and just putting their messages in draft and weren't sending them," said a security official.
"It's very difficult to detect them. If the FBI could not detect these types of messages, how can we? It's not an easy job." The possibility of having to track down militant networks on the Internet could not have come at a worse time for Pakistan. It is already struggling against militants who seem to carry out bombings at will, killing hundreds since October and raising questions over the stability of the nuclear-armed country.
Radicalisation starts thousands of miles away from the strategic region. Some security officials say the Americans had intended to go fight in Afghanistan. Two were of Pakistani origin. Officials said one of the Americans was of Egyptian origin, one of Yemeni origin and another of Eritrean origin, illustrating how the Internet can spread militant networks across continents, undetected.
If young men are leaning towards leaving behind the West to seek jihad, the Internet offers a variety of videos, made by some of the world's deadliest militant groups, to help them decide. Cost-free indoctrination by the Taliban and al Qaeda is readily available on sites such as You Tube, which one official said was used by the five Americans to try and contact militants. Videos romanticise what could be a violent future.
Militants jump through fire rings, climb obstacles and open fire with assault rifles to train for "martyrdom". Video clips often lead to images of aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center. Militants will smile in the face of death, viewers are told. Pervez Hoodhbhoy, a nuclear physics professor and writer on social and political issues, has seen the fury that drives men to take up violent causes during his meetings with members of the Pakistani community in the United States.
He says clamping down on militant networks on the Internet could be impossible for any government. But Hoodhbhoy emphasised that Pakistan's policy of trying to modernise religious schools, some of which are seen as breeding grounds for extremism, may make the job more difficult.
"The government put these computers and Internet into the madrasas as part of its reform package. The hope was that this would modernise the madrasas," said Hoodhbhoy, who has been called a traitor by militants on the Internet and received death threats. "In fact, it has given them means of networking with jihadist groups across the world."
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