Pakistan: A Hard Country (28 page)

Before 9/11 there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan our society wil sort itself out ... We are not for the TTP but against America ...20

MILITANTS

The Jamaat’s ambivalence towards the violent militants probably reflects not only the party’s own divided soul, but also the fact that the party leadership is worried about being outflanked by those militants, and losing its own younger and more radical supporters to them. The leader of the single most spectacular Islamist action outside the Pathan areas – the creation of an armed militant base at the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in the capital, Islamabad – Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had indeed at one stage been associated with the Jamaat Islami, before leaving in protest at what he cal ed their cowardice and political compromises. His whole personal style, however, remained very close to that of the Jamaat – and very different from that of the Pathan Taleban up in the hil s. This gave me a very uneasy sense of the ease with which Jamaati activists might shift into violence.

Together with Peter Bergen of CNN, I interviewed Ghazi in April 2007, some two months before his death when the Pakistan army stormed the mosque complex. Ghazi was a slight man of forty-three years, with round spectacles, a spotless white shelwar kameez, and – for public consumption at least – a quiet, reserved and amicable manner. In his youth – a bit like St Augustine – he had initial y defied his father’s wish that he study to become a cleric, and took an MSc in International Relations at the Qaid-e-Azam University. He later had a junior job with UNESCO. He seems to have been radicalized by his father’s murder, but even more by the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

Although Ghazi was a veteran of the Mujahidin jihad against the Soviets, he was not, on the face of it, the kind of man to go down fighting in a desperate last stand, until you remember that many dedicated Communists in the old days looked just the same. In fact, in the view of a Pakistani journalist who interviewed him not long before the military assault, he himself by the end would have chosen to surrender; but this would have meant that international militants in the building would have been handed over to the USA (eighteen of them were among the dead, according to official figures); and for him this was too much of a humiliation. His brother tried to escape dressed as a woman and was captured, only to be released two years later on the orders of the Supreme Court. Ghazi himself was kil ed in battle.

Peter and I were taken to the office across the broad courtyard of the complex, crowded with male and female volunteers whom we were not al owed to interview. There were few obtrusive signs of defence, but during the attack on the mosque it was discovered that the militants had burrowed a set of tunnels and concrete bunkers beneath it. The army showed an array of weapons that it had captured there, including heavy machineguns, rocket-propel ed grenade-launchers, sniper rifles and belts for suicide bombs.

The office where we met Ghazi was smal and dingy, with grubby cream-coloured wal s, a row of computer screens on a long table, and broken, uncomfortable chairs on which we perched awkwardly. It al felt very far from the luxurious mansion where I had lunched that day with a leading pro-government politician – and the contrast was perfectly deliberate. Al the Islamist leaders I have met, militant or otherwise, have lived with a kind of ostentatious modesty.

Ghazi’s background helps explain how the movement at the Red Mosque got off the ground so easily, and why the government was so slow to try to stop it. His father, Maulana Mohammed Abdul ah, the founder of the mosque, had been at the heart of the Pakistani establishment, and the mosque itself was the first to be built in Islamabad when the site was chosen for the new capital in the 1960s.

‘In those days, around here was just jungle. This mosque is older than Islamabad,’ he told us. In 1998, his father had been shot in the courtyard that we had just crossed, something that Ghazi blamed on the ISI (even as Pakistani liberals were accusing the ISI of backing Ghazi).

The overal line that Ghazi put across to Peter and me was very close to what I had heard from Jamaat leaders over the previous days, and indeed since. His words, in certain respects, also reflect those of the leaders of the notorious anti-Indian militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (see below). Concerning America’s role, Ghazi’s statements would indeed be agreed with by the overwhelming majority of al classes of Pakistani society. This indicates the greatest opportunity for the more intel igent, non-sectarian Islamist militants. This is not that they wil be able to win a majority of the population over to their theological and ideological revolutionary agenda, which is shared by only a smal minority of Pakistanis. Rather, they may be able to exploit US and Indian actions to mobilize much larger numbers of Pakistanis behind their Islamic and Pakistani nationalist agendas, which have some degree of sympathy from the great majority of their fel ow countrymen.

Unlike the JUI, the Jamaat refused to condemn the Red Mosque movement, and the attack on the mosque was one factor in driving the party into more radical opposition to Musharraf. Ghazi’s views also il ustrate the very great differences between different strands of Islamism in Pakistan – except on one point: hostility to the US, India and Israel. Thus, like the Jamaat, Ghazi laid great emphasis on his family’s commitment to women’s education, though partly on pragmatic grounds. He said that he had argued with the Taleban in Afghanistan about this:

My father established the first female madrasah in this country.

Now, more than 6,000 of the 10,000 students here are women.

It is the same education for men and women, but girls have a reduced course of four to six years, while men study for eight.

There is a good reason for this. If you educate a man, you have educated only one person; but if you educate a woman you have educated a whole family. In this, we differ from the Taleban in Afghanistan ...

The Taleban were not the right people to rule. They did not have the expertise. Al the same, there were many good things to their credit. Under the Taleban, you could travel in safety from one end of Afghanistan to another. The Taleban started as a reaction against the crimes that were being committed in Afghanistan, and then turned into a movement. We too perhaps.

We are a reaction to a criminal system in this country. We do not want to rule. But if we are not recognized, then maybe we too wil turn into a movement.21

Ghazi denounced the MMA Islamist al iance (while making an exception for the Jamaat): ‘They are opposing us, just like the MQM

and other political al ies of Musharraf. The MMA are just products of this Pakistani system. They do not stand for real change.’ A few days later, a JUI minister in the MMA government of the Frontier, Asif Iqbal Daudzai, told me in Peshawar that: We support the basic demands of the Lal Masjid [Red Mosque]

group: anti-corruption, the return of democracy, a ban on pornography, and laws based on the teachings of Islam. But we question their credibility as a democratic force and the way they are going about things is wrong. Passing new laws is the business of the parliament and government. Islam doesn’t al ow anyone to impose their views by force, and the Constitution of Pakistan already defends both the basic rights of every person and the supremacy of Islam. The point is not to have a revolution, but to implement the existing constitution correctly.22

On the question of support for violence, Ghazi himself appeared to waver to and fro – just like the Jamaat, in fact. And as with the Jamaat and the JUI, whether this was from real doubts and internal conflicts of his own, calculated ambiguity, a deliberate desire to deceive, or a mixture of al three was not entirely clear.

Our view is that suicide operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are halal [legitimate] because they help stop the aggressor from continuing his aggression. After al , US soldiers have travel ed thousands of miles to kil innocent people. But such operations should not themselves kil civilians ... And terrorist attacks should not take place in Pakistan. You have to understand, though, that the people who are doing this are doing it from frustration and revenge. It is like a younger brother whose brother has been kil ed and who runs amok, forgetting about the law.

He gave what seemed a careful y tailored message to the American people:

Americans should think and think again about their government’s policy. If you talk to us and try to understand us, you can win our hearts. But if you come to attack us you wil never win our hearts and wil also never conquer us, because we are very determined people. How much have you spent on this so-cal ed war on terror? Tril ions of dol ars. If you had spent this on helping develop Pakistan and Afghanistan, we would have loved you and never attacked you. But this is the stupidity of Bush, I believe, not of al Americans.

Among the various armed militant groups operating in Pakistan by 2007 Ghazi’s was therefore towards the more moderate end of the spectrum. It is notable that like the Jamaat he rejected sectarian anti-Shiism, since this has formed the bridge linking the Taleban among the Pathans with the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in central and southern Punjab (this al iance wil be described further in Chapter 7 on Punjab).

In 2009, these groups contributed greatly to the spread of terrorism from the Pathan areas to Punjab. This included attacks on high-profile military targets which could hardly have been planned without at least low-level sympathizers within the military itself. Militant anti-Shiism has also encouraged parts of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) to turn against the Pakistani state and al y with the Taleban – though it seems that in 2009 the Jaish split and much of it remains loyal to the Pakistani state.

This split is said to have been due to the influence of the Pakistani intel igence services, which after 1988 trained and equipped the Jaish and other groups to conduct armed attacks and terrorism in Indian Kashmir, and which retain close links with them.

Western officials have often attributed the recruitment of militants in Pakistan to the enormous increase in the number of madrasahs (religious schools) during and after the Afghan war. This, however, seems to be in part a mistake. A majority of known Pakistani terrorists have in fact attended government schools and quite often have a degree of higher education – reflecting yet again the basis for Islamism in the urban lower middle classes rather than the impoverished masses. It is true that, as the chapter on the Taleban wil explore further, a large number of Taleban fighters have a madrasah education – but that largely reflects the fact that in the tribal areas government schools are very rare. The communities concerned would have supported the Taleban anyway, madrasahs or no madrasahs.

A very large number of ordinary Taleban fighters have had no education at al , and their recruitment owes less to specific Taleban education than to the general atmosphere prevailing in their vil ages.

Concentration on the role of madrasahs by Western policy-makers is not whol y mistaken, but it nonetheless reflects a very widespread mistake in Western analysis: namely, the tendency to look at Islamist groups and their strategies as instruments which can be isolated and eliminated, rather than phenomena deeply rooted in the societies from which they spring.

5

The Military

For men may come, and men may go, but I go on for ever.

(Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook)

Different sections of Pakistani society have different images or mirrors of paradise, which they try to create to the best of their ability on this earth, and that serve as havens from the squalor and disorder – physical and moral – by which they are surrounded. For believers, this image is of course the mosque, or, for the devotees of saints among them, the shrines.

As throughout the arid parts of the earth, almost everyone sees paradise as a garden, and those with the money to do so try to recreate on a smal scale the great gardens of the old Muslim rulers.

For the upper classes, paradise is an international hotel, with its polished cleanliness and luxury, its hard-working, attentive staff, its fashion shows and business presentations, in which they can pretend for a while that they are back in London or Dubai.

For the military, the image of paradise is the cantonment, with its clean, swept, neatly signposted streets dotted with gleaming antique artil ery pieces, and shaded by trees with the lower trunks uniformly painted white. Putting trees in uniform might seem like carrying military discipline too far, and the effect is in fact slightly comical – like rows of enormous knobbly-kneed boys in white shorts. However, the shade is certainly welcome, as are the signposts and the impeccably neat military policemen directing the traffic in an orderly fashion.

The buildings of the cantonments are equal y impressive inside. In the poorer parts of Pakistan, the contrast with civilian institutions – including those of government – is that between the developed and the barely developed worlds. In Peshawar, the recently refurbished headquarters of the XI Corps gleams with marble and polished wood, and has a fountain playing in its entrance hal , while government ministers work from decaying office blocks with peeling wal s and broken stairs. In the military headquarters, every staff officer has a computer. In the government offices, most ministers do not (and in many cases would not know how to use them if they did).