Word: rawalpindi
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...this climate of official duplicity that Qasab arrived in Rawalpindi. He was not seeking his shortcut to heaven. Rather, he says in his confession, he followed a friend in search of riches. "As we were not getting enough money, we decided to carry out robbery," he says, and they scoped out a house...
...Rawalpindi is not a city where fortunes are made. It is a refuge for those seeking relief from the backbreaking labors of rural life and a home for those fleeing the violence on Pakistan's troubled frontier with Afghanistan. 'Pindi, as it is known, may be a stifling metropolis where crime goes unpunished and hard work unrewarded, but it also offers a chance at the first rung of a very long ladder toward financial stability. Yet that ladder goes only so high. The greensward of the Rawalpindi Golf Club teases the poor with dreams of the good life...
That doesn't stop people from trying to slip through. It was in Rawalpindi that Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, the surviving gunman from the terrorist massacre that claimed 165 lives in Mumbai last November, took his first step toward infamy. In 2007 he visited a market stall run by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), an Islamist extremist group that has been blamed for the Mumbai attacks, among others. Qasab, at the time, was neither particularly religious nor particularly violent - just one of millions of poor young men in South Asia trying to cross the fence to a better life, existing...
Going Underground In the early 1990s, Pakistan was in a state of euphoria. Islamic holy warriors, many from cities like Rawalpindi, had defeated the Soviet army in Afghanistan, and jihad was on everyone's lips. In 1990, Muslims in Kashmir - the Himalayan territory that India and Pakistan have been arguing and fighting over since 1948 - rose up against Indian rule, and the mujahedin soon found a new cause. The Pakistani military used the jihadi movement, hoping that guerrilla warfare would destabilize its enemy India where conventional warfare failed. Jihadi groups in Pakistan collected donations for Kashmir. Young men signed...
...whatever reason, life at the Darbar was not enough for Qasab. He found employment, but after two years, his paltry salary began to rankle him, and he left Lahore to seek his fortune in Rawalpindi...