A senior al Qaeda commander allegedly tied to the London airplane bomb plot has been arrested in Pakistan, Pakistani intelligence and law enforcement officials have told ABC News. Matiur Rehman, one of the most wanted men in Pakistan, is known to have met with the alleged plot ringleader Rashid Rauf, according to the officials.

Rehman’s capture could provide the most important leads in months to the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s top two leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. Rehman was believed to be in frequent contact with Zawahiri.
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Pakistan has apparently stepped up the crackdown on Al Qaeda suspects, but the question whether the state has cut off all its links with indigenous and foreign terrorist organisations remains.

FOR over four weeks now it has been a routine for the Pakistani media to publish claims by the authorities about the arrest of one key operative or the other of Al Qaeda. Strangely, they seem to emerge from virtually every part of the country. Yet few have any clue about how far the organisation has spread its tentacles or the extent to which the state has been able to neutralise it.

Since mid-July, Pakistan has made a series of arrests of important Al Qaeda suspects. More than 70 local and foreign Al Qaeda operatives have been detained in the stepped-up crackdown. Pakistan has handed over 600-odd Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, picked up from different parts of the country, to the United States ever since the so-called global war on terrorism began in October 2001.

In the past three months, the authorities claim to have dismantled major hideouts of Al Qaeda militants in the tribal region of South Waziristan. The continuing operations are said to have killed nearly 150 foreign and local militants.
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What has complicated matters is the inability of the Musharraf regime to abandon jehad as an instrument of foreign policy. Under pressure from the Bush administration Islamabad did a U-turn on Afghanistan, but its Kashmir policy has remained the same. Little wonder it has led to serious contradictions within and outside the state apparatus.
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Until the World Trade Centre bombing, Pakistan espoused the cause of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and advocated at every world forum the need for engagement with them. As one of the three countries in the world that recognised the Taliban regime, Pakistan was the last to snap its ties with the Taliban regime in Kabul.

And herein lies the rub. The figures dished out about the number of Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives captured might be impressive but the vital question is whether the state has been able to cut off its links with local militant organisations. There is nothing on the ground to suggest such an effort.
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The U.S. 9/11 Commission makes the point in a roundabout way. It says, “If Musharraf stands for enlightened moderation in a fight for his life and for the life of his country, the United States should be willing to make hard choices too, and make the difficult long-term commitment to the future of Pakistan… Sustaining the current scale of aid to Pakistan, the United States should support Pakistan’s government in its struggle against extremists with a comprehensive effort that extends from military aid to support for better education, so long as Pakistan’s leaders remain willing to make difficult choices of their own.”

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The official said the Pakistani investigators arrested a British national, Rashid Rauf, who allegedly masterminded the plot and recruited people in Pakistan and in Britain to carry out the operation.

He added that al-Qaeda’s number 2 leader - Ayman al-Zawahri - probably approved the plot before it went ahead.
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