Is the Pakistani government helping or hindering the fight against terrorism?

Hindering

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by Russell H. Smith

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As radical mullahs roam the deserts and refugee camps of Balochistan- trekking through the mountainous corridors along the lawless Pakistani-Afghan border - spewing venomous vindictive at every turn; pronouncing fatwa and inciting jihad, while imbuing the forces of political Islam across Pakistan. So concerned was its US-ally at the violence and siege at the Red Mosque Seminary in Islamabad last February, that the Bush administration demanded reassurances from the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf, that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal (some 60 warheads) remained uncompromised. Last September, Osama bin Laden's deputy, al-Zawahiri, released videotapes calling for jihad in Pakistan and around the globe. Pakistan remains dangerously fluid: Making common cause with fundamentalist Islam during the 1940s - (the Taliban regime only a recent manifestation) helped spawn the nation, ensuring its long-term radicalization.

But it would be unfair - indeed inaccurate, to use a broad brush-stroke of radicalism across the canvas of the nation. Parliamentary elections held on February 18, were generally viewed as not only a repudiation of the Musharraf dictatorship, but a rejection of terrorism. To be sure, it could be viewed as a battle for the nation's Islamic soul; a recognition that the tenets of democracy, the rule of law, and strong state institutions, remain the panacea to a Failed State.

Despite the blood-stained legacy that accompanied British India's partition in 1947 - and ushered in the creation of Pakistan - nationhood itself was a democratic process, involving national elections, parliamentary resolutions and a referendum. The polity of the day was "split between radical Islamists, moderate Islamists, secular nationalists and the left." (Dreyfuss 75) The leaders of the new Pakistan; many of them lawyers with a strong commitment to parliamentary government, with varying degrees of personal commitment to Islam, inherited the reforming zeal of the nation's pioneering forebears.

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), intellectual, politician and modernist - encouraged his fellow Indian Muslims to education, liberalism and the arts. His founding of a college which became Aligarh Muslim University: an institution which produced many of the free-thinkers, philosophers and lawyers of the nation-in-waiting. Sufi poet and philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) who's inspirational theories on modern Islamic governance in the 1930s spurred; "[T]he movement for the formation of Pakistan, based not on religious extremism or emotionalism, says former Supreme Court judge Javid Iqbal, Sir Iqbal's son. It was a modern state, adhering to modern interpretations of Islam, particularly Islamic laws." (Mahmud 28)

So it came as little surprise that in the run-up to recent parliamentary elections - it was Pakistan's law-makers who were at the forefront in denouncing the authoritarian rule of president Musharraf - and in their activism became democracy's best hope. But the challenges remain enormous. Consider the conclusions of an August 2007 poll in Pakistan: "A new nationwide survey of Pakistan by Terror Free Tomorrow may help explain why Osama bin Laden remains at large in Pakistan and why both al Qaeda and the Taliban have regrouped there. Nearly three quarters of Pakistanis oppose American military action to pursue Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters based inside Pakistan. Moreover, a third or more of Pakistanis have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and bin Laden. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is also the least popular political leader in Pakistan today-falling considerably behind bin Laden." (TFT)

If there remains such a high degree of tolerance for bin Laden and his terror affiliates on the street, this charity is magnified within the state apparatus and among factions of the Pakistani elite. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, Ron Suskind recounts in - "The One Percent Doctrine", (a compelling account of America's pursuit of its enemies) - an event three weeks before to 9/11. Around a campfire in the Afghan city of Kandahar, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are dining and drinking tea; "Across the campfire were two men believed to be Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and his associate Abdul Majid. Mahmood had been a key patriarch of Pakistan's three-decade mission, ultimately successful, to build a nuclear bomb." As chairman of Pakistan's atomic energy commission he mentored the now infamous A. Q. Khan himself a nuclear scientist and responsible for the proliferation of nuclear technology to rogue regimes. Mahmood was lauded and awarded in Pakistan as a national hero before as Suskind says, "He became increasingly radicalized, believing that such a destructive grant would trigger and "end of days" scenario and triumph of Islam." (Suskind 27)

As "The Islamic Republic of Pakistan" - a name meaning Land of the Pure - alternates between bouts of military despotism, corruption-prone civilian governments' and its obsession with political Islam - in the process becoming neither a permanent military dictatorship, democracy or theocracy. "The Army had ruled Pakistan for twenty-four of its forty-one independent years, and there had been only three general elections in four decades", (Weaver 54) records author Mary Anne Weaver in her sweeping contemporary portrait, "Pakistan in the shadow of jihad and Afghanistan". It is arguably these episodic military dictatorships with their near genocidal human tallies; complicit in the "Talebanization" of the Federally Administered Areas, perennially hindering any effective buttress against terrorism. This is not to suggest that the dead-hand of successive civilian governments abstained from fomenting political Islam.

To be sure, by the spring of 1994 the corrupt second-term premiership of the late Benazir Bhutto had abandoned its traditional support of the Afghan mujahedeen and rewarded favor to the Taliban. "[T]he Bhutto government as the governments of Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf would later do routinely denied that it was shoring up the Taliban, the fact remained that the planes, tanks, and armaments that the black-turbaned Talibs frequently showed off were clearly not all captured in battles with the remaining mujahedeen opponents." (Weaver 26) The principal architects of the "Afghanistan Experiment - the planned and state-sponsored fostering of political Islam found its benefactors at the most senior levels of the ISI (Pakistan Intelligence Service), and the Army: Bhutto's powerful Minister of Interior, Gen. Nasirullah Babar was assisted in this policy coined "strategic depth" by the little-known Director-General of Military Operations Pervez Musharraf.

During Afghanistan's Taliban period (1996-2001) the two countries had become more politically enmeshed - largely synonymous. Hardcore Islamists within the Pakistani Army Officer Corps together with elements inside the ISI resolutely pursued the importation of Talebanization to large areas of Pakistan. Weaver observes, " [F]or many of the madrasahs although they had begun as religious schools that educated, among others, the Taliban had by now, in a role reversal of sorts, begun preaching the Taliban's ideology on militancy and jihad." (Weaver 39) This deliberate grass-roots strategy fed the dozen or so private Islamist armies, based in Pakistan. A US State Department report suggests that, 40 percent of the militants fighting Indian troops in Kashmir are not Kashmiris: they are Pakistanis and Afghans.

In its pursuit to be the "Land of the Pure" Pakistan needs to reevaluate its entanglements with political Islam. For it is not Islam the religion that continues to fray at the fabric of Pakistani society, rather the progenies of Abul-Ala Mawdudi and his 1940s Muslim Brotherhood-style, Islamic Group. Nor is it Islam that commits near genocide on the populace and thwarts democracy, but despotic General's Yahya Khan, Zia ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf. And it is most certainly not Islam that is stifling economic prosperity and the emergence of a viable middle-class, but more specifically the corrupt civilian governments' that blithely entertained the genies of a failed state while giving mere lip-service to democracy.

Pakistan remains the nation of choice when it comes to schooling terrorists - the local madrasahs their institution of learning.

Works Cited:
Dreyfuss, Robert. Devil's Game. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005.
Mahmud, Ershad. "A Matter of Faith." Time 3 March 2008: 28.
Suskind, Ron. The One Percent Doctrine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
TFT. Terror Free Tomorrow. 17 October 2007. .
Weaver, Mary Anne. Pakistan - In the shadow of jihad and Afghanistan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

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