Pakistan: A Hard Country (51 page)
Most importantly, perhaps, unlike most of the ‘feudals’, the industrialists and businessmen in politics have no mass kinship groups to fal back on – and their workers are hardly likely to behave like a clan and guarantee them a permanent vote bank. Because so many city-dwel ers have only recently arrived from the country, even in the cities kinship networks often remain vital to power and influence.
Money and property are of course very important, but not al -important.
Even in Faisalabad city and district, a majority (though a smal one) of members of the national and provincial assemblies are from landed families. These are not huge ‘feudals’, and they usual y draw most of their wealth from urban land, but they are stil primarily landed notables rather than urban businessmen or professionals.
Al of this might have been set aside if the military and the industrial elites had formed a solid al iance to develop the country, as has been the case in a number of developing economies in the past (Germany and Japan are the most famous, if not the happiest examples). This looked as if it might be happening when Zia-ul-Haq recreated the Muslim League and put Nawaz Sharif in charge of it. But in the ten years after Zia’s death, first the army refused to back the Muslim League against the PPP, then the Muslim League tried to gain dominance over the military, and then the military under Musharraf shattered the al iance for good by overthrowing Nawaz Sharif.
Musharraf, to stay in power, compromised with the same old ‘feudal’
elements in Punjab, and al chance of a military – political – industrial al iance for development was lost.
That leaves the Islamists. In Turkey, the moderate Islamist party (in its various incarnations) rose to power with mass support, but also very much on the shoulders of provincial business and industrial elites. If anywhere in Pakistan, Faisalabad would seem to be the place where the beginnings of such a development might be found. But, as mentioned earlier, the Jamaat Islami there seems hopelessly tied to its lower-middle-class constituency – which is barred from seeking working-class support by class and cultural factors, but is also too poor and uneducated (compared to its Turkish, Egyptian or Iranian equivalents) to generate any kind of coherent modern social and economic policies.
In the words of a local administrator: ‘It would be very difficult for the Islamists to make much headway in Faisalabad, because they have no answer to practical problems like gas and electricity, and this is a very practical place. We are Punjabi businessmen here, not Pathans – warriors, dreamers, fanatics.’ Despite the intense anger of many Faisalabad workers at electricity cuts and growing unemployment, during my stay in the city I found no one who seemed to think that there was any serious chance of the Pakistani Taleban successful y appealing for their support and setting off a mass revolt in Faisalabad.
SECTARIANS AND TERRORISTS
It is quite otherwise in different parts of central and southern Punjab. If Punjab – and Pakistan – were to be broken from within by Islamist extremism, then the process would start here, in the belt between Jhang and Bahawalpur, with the ancient city of Multan at its heart.
Here, Islamist militancy may be able to make serious inroads with the help of local sectarian forces which since the 1980s have been attacking the local Shia community. The Pakistani Taleban have formed an al iance with these sectarian groups which in 2009 – 10 led to increasing terrorism in Punjab. Because of poverty, madrasahs in southern Punjab are more important than in the north, where the state education system has a bigger presence (in rural areas, the literacy rate is less than 25 per cent); and these madrasahs have long been a key recruiting ground for militant groups.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, madrasahs sent many fighters first to the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, and then to the jihad in Kashmir; so groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, formerly backed by the Pakistani military to fight in Kashmir, have a strong presence in southern Punjab. Hundreds of recruits from this region were kil ed in Kashmir, and as in the Frontier their graves have become local places of pilgrimage. As elsewhere, association with the Kashmiri and Afghan jihads has been absolutely critical to increasing the prestige of local militants.
However, the main jihadi groups in Punjab are not yet in revolt against the Pakistani state; and, precisely because the most important extremist forces in southern Punjab are sectarian forces, it seems to me extremely unlikely that they wil be able to start a rebel ion that could conquer the region, as the Taleban were able for a number of years to take over large parts of the FATA and Swat. Their ideological programme is bitterly resisted not only by the Shia but by al the local Sunni who are deeply attached to their local shrines and traditions – like Data Ganj Baksh; and their social radicalism wil be equal y savagely resisted by most of the local elites. This picture would change only if Lashkar-e-Taiba /Jamaat-ud-Dawa were to al y with the TTP – and failing a real y determined crackdown on them by the Pakistani authorities, they seem unlikely to do so. I have been told by officials that precisely because their core agenda is anti-India, this gives LeT’s leaders an especial y acute sense of the Indian threat, and discourages them from taking actions that would weaken or even destroy Pakistan.
What the extremists in this region can do, however, is carry out bloody terrorist attacks, which they have been doing for many years against the Shia. By mid-2010, this extremist al iance had also repeatedly shown its ability to carry out serious terrorist attacks in Punjab against the state and the general public – though it is important to remember once again the crucial difference between terrorism and successful rebel ion.
A certain latent tension has existed between Sunni and Shia in this region for a long time, owing to the tendency of successive regimes, ending with the British, to reward Shia nobles – some, like the Turkic Qizilbash, from far away – with great land grants in areas populated by a mainly Sunni peasantry. However, despite occasional denunciations of the Shia as heretics by Sunni preachers, until the 1980s this tension remained very limited.
As the Multan Gazetteer of 1923 stated: ‘General y speaking there is very little bitterness between the Sunni and Shia sects, and in the ordinary intercourse of life there is little to distinguish the two’12 – something that could certainly not have been said of Shia – Sunni relations in other South Asian Muslim cities like Lahore, Quetta and Lucknow. But as Sunni peasants moved into local towns in the mid-twentieth century, a new Sunni lower middle class emerged which saw its access to jobs and patronage blocked by the Shia elites and their clients. A degree of resentment at Shia dominance is therefore widespread. As a (personal y enlightened) head teacher in Multan told me: ‘There is a feeling among many people here that the Shia stick together, protect each other and give each other the best jobs – like the Freemasons in England.’ Anti-Shia groups also built on the successful campaigns from the 1950s to the 1960s to have the Ahmedi sect declared non-Muslim.
In the early 1980s several factors came together to create a whol y new level of sectarian violence, starting in the Jhang district of central Punjab. The Iranian revolution gave new confidence and prominence to the Shia minority in Pakistan, and raised fears in the establishment that they might become a revolutionary force. Many Shia firmly believe – though without any actual evidence – that Washington encouraged the administration to attack the Shia, out of fear that they could spread Iranian-style revolution.
President Zia-ul-Haq had already become bitterly unpopular with many Shia for the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (a Shia), and for his promulgation of Islamic laws for Pakistan based purely on the teachings of the Hanafi Sunni sect. This move led to massive Shia protests orchestrated by the radical Shia organization the Tehriq-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqah Jafferia, which forced the government to back down and concede to the Shia their own separate code in certain respects.
These developments in turn stoked the anger of certain Sunni groups, and may have led Pakistani intel igence services to favour the creation of Sunni sectarian forces in response. There is, however, no actual evidence of this, and it is entirely possible that these forces simply bought some of the arms which flooded into Pakistan to arm the Afghan Mujahidin – especial y as these were being funded by state and private money from Saudi Arabia, with its strong traditional hostility to Iran and Shiism.
Later, the sectarians also forged links with groups participating in the Kashmir jihad, and probably received guns from them – another case of the Frankenstein syndrome or, rather, of Frankenstein’s monster wandering off, making friends with other monsters, and starting whole families of little monsters.
The result was the creation in Jhang in 1985 of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), as a breakaway group of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). The SSP began a programme of attacks on local Shia targets, in the name of declaring the Shia non-Muslims and making Pakistan an official y Sunni state like Saudi Arabia. Local police told me that, in a few cases, local Sunni businessmen owing debts to Shia creditors or with business disputes with Shia rivals paid the SSP or LeJ (Lashkar-e-Jhangvi) to kil them.
Over the years the SSP’s activities spread beyond Jhang to take in southern Punjab and other areas of the country where old Sunni – Shia tensions had been latent, including Quetta, Peshawar and the Kurram Agency of FATA, where tribal conflict between the Sunni Bangash and Shia Tori tribes dates back some 300 years. In recent years, the SSP
and their even more radical offshoot the LeJ have also extended their anti-Shia campaign to take in Ahmedis and Christians. Radical Shia fought back through the Tehriq-e-Jafferia and other groups, and in the 25 years to 2010 more than 6,000 people have been kil ed in sectarian clashes and terrorism, with the dead in a rough proportion of three Shia to two Sunni. Individual leaders and activists on both sides have been kil ed, mosques have been bombed, and on occasions bazaars frequented by people of the rival community have also been attacked.
It should be noted that, unlike with the jihadi groups fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan, since General Zia’s time at least there has been no evidence of Pakistani governments backing the anti-Shia militants. The PPP is natural y extremely hostile to them, if only because the Bhuttos and Zardaris are Shia, and so are (in private at least) many of the PPP’s chief supporters among the landowners of central and southern Punjab. Despite the apparent sympathy of some leading members of the PML(N) for the anti-Shia militants, when Nawaz Sharif was Prime Minister in the late 1990s, his government launched a crackdown against them during which many were kil ed.
The response was an attempt by the LeJ to kil Mr Sharif. The Musharraf administration continued this assault on the Sunni sectarians, and banned the SSP and LeJ in January 2002.
These repeated attacks by the state are a key reason why the SSP
and LeJ (unlike the militants fighting in Kashmir such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba) have themselves increasingly attacked the state as wel as the Shia and Christians, and as of 2009 have formed an al iance with the Pakistani Taleban. The wave of terrorism they have launched in Punjab also gives one more sympathy for the Pakistani state’s deep unwil ingness to add to the number of their terrorist enemies by attacking the even more formidable Lashkar-e-Taiba. As a senior official in Faisalabad told me in January 2009: I am seriously worried about the spread of militancy from Jhang to the rest of Punjab. It is true that so far LeJ and SSP have been only sectarian, but they can switch. The same is even true of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, even though we have backed them al these years. We have to worry that if we do what you say and crack down on them that some of them at least wil turn to terrorism against Pakistan in al iance with the Taleban. After al , they have the ideology and the training. The last thing we need now is yet another extremist threat.
The fact that despite crackdowns by successive Pakistani regimes the sectarian extremists have been able to survive is another reflection of the weakness of the Pakistani state, and especial y of the police and judiciary. In the words of a police officer in Jhang district in 2002: There are hundreds of thousands of SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi sympathizers in this region and we aren’t America – we can’t arrest them al and send them to Cuba. We have to stay more or less within the law. It’s different for the hard-core terrorists who we know have kil ed people – them, we can sometimes just kil . But there are so many more people who may have given them shelter, or who may be going to become terrorists, but who haven’t actual y done anything yet. Under the anti-terrorism laws, we can hold people for three months, but after that we have to go to the High Court, and the court wil demand evidence that we usual y don’t have, because witnesses just wil not come forward – you can understand why.
Only very rarely do the courts al ow us to hold people permanently in preventive detention. And of course the judges are also frightened. That is why they let out Azam Tariq, though everyone knows he has ordered God knows how many murders ...
Everyone says that it is because the police sympathize with the militants, but I can tel you that is definitely not true at the senior level – junior policemen, yes, in some cases. But you know twenty-two policemen have been kil ed by these bastards in Jhang alone in the past ten years. The superintendent of a jail where SSP prisoners were being held was even kidnapped in front of his own jail and kil ed. That kind of thing scared the police, and for a time we became quite inactive in this part of Punjab. That was especial y true in the early ’90s, but in recent years we have become much tougher.