Pakistan: A Hard Country (69 page)
The JUH stemmed from the revivalist religious tradition established by the Deoband madrasah in what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and known as ‘Deobandi’.
For several decades the different branches of the JUI have become more and more overwhelmingly Pathan – unlike the other leading Islamist political party in Pakistan, the Jamaat Islami, which has a much more al -Pakistani character. The JUI also differs from the Jamaat in being far less intel ectual and in having a far looser organization and leadership structure. In fact, rather than a modern Islamist party it resembles the ANP in being an al iance of local notables, though in the case of the JUI the notables are religious figures rather than local khans, and there is no hereditary dynasty to hold it together. Instead, there has been a succession of charismatic leaders, which has led to the party splitting into two wings, the JUI(F) led by Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, and another branch led by Maulana Sami-ul-Haq.
As Joshua White writes:
Key decisions by the JUI-F are routinely made by Fazlur Rehman and a traveling coterie of personal advisors, and the party has only recently invested in a wel -equipped headquarters. The combination of charismatic leadership and decentralized party structure has led to nearly constant dissension within the JUI-F, most of which is dealt with informal y in Pashtun-style shuras and quiet deals.9
The JUI’s Islamism, like the ANP’s nationalism, has – or had – asocialistic tinge, and the party remains strongly committed in principle to spreading development among the poor. In 1972, the JUI formed a brief government of the NWFP in coalition with the ANP (or NAP as it was then known), with a programme of economic populism and of strengthening the rules of the Shariah. Alcohol and gambling were banned in the province, and the JUI attempted unsuccessful y to pass laws forcing women to wear veils in public. At the same time, the JUI often cooperated with the ostentatiously secular Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leading to a subsequent history of intermittent al iances with the PPP, and charges of hypocrisy, opportunism and treachery from other Islamist parties, and now from the Taleban.
The ful ‘Pashtunization’ of the JUI was above al the product of the 1980s and the jihad against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan and their Afghan Communist al ies. Support for the Islamist groups among the Afghan Mujahidin, both from the Pakistani state and from Saudi Arabia and private donors in the Gulf, led to a huge influx of money to madrasahs in the Frontier where many of the Afghan Mujahidin were educated and shaped ideological y, and to an enormous growth in the number of those madrasahs. Both the JUI and the Jamaat became heavily involved in various forms of support for the Afghan jihad, and profited greatly as a result.
In one way the ANP and JUI resemble each other. They both began as ‘revolutionary’ parties in a Pakistani context: the ANP for the abolition of Pakistan itself, or at least its transformation into a very loose democratic federation; the JUI for a revolutionary transformation of the Pakistani state and society along Islamist lines. Both, however, have in practice long since become ‘mainstream’ political players, forming coalitions for political and above al patronage advantage.
Both in consequence are at risk of being outflanked ideological y and political y by the Taleban.
Thus, despite its deep ideological opposition – in theory – to the US
presence in Afghanistan and to Pakistani help to the US, the JUI functioned as a de facto supporter of Musharraf’s administration, and at the time of writing is a partner in government of President Zardari’s PPP – a government whose programme it says it detests for a whole set of reasons, including most of al its al iance with the US!
In July 2009 I asked the JUI spokesman Jalil Jan why in view of his party’s bitter opposition to Zardari’s policies they did not leave the government. He replied:
Our ministers stand in parliament and criticize the government of which they are part. Don’t you think that is brave of us? ... It is not kufr [disbelief, or disobedience to God] that people voted for us in order to get jobs for them. So it isn’t bad that we are in power at the centre and in Balochistan, and are able to give jobs to our people.10
Of course, like everyone else I always knew this about the JUI – but it is nice to have it confirmed from the horse’s mouth. ‘Money doesn’t smel ,’ a Peshawari journalist quoted cynical y when I asked about this.
The JUI’s problem is that American money does increasingly smel in Pathan nostrils – in fact it stinks to high heaven. The victory of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) Islamist coalition in the 2002 elections in the NWFP and the Pathan areas of Balochistan was due in part to favouritism by the Musharraf administration in order to defeat the PPP
and PML(N); and in part to the fact that the PPP and ANP simply could not agree to cooperate either against Musharraf or against the Islamists.
To judge by my own observations and public opinion pol s, however, by far the most important factor in their victory was mass Pathan anger at the US invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the Taleban there.
In the succeeding years, the MMA’s de facto support for Musharraf – even as he forged a closer and closer al iance with the US and abandoned the jihad in Kashmir – did not go unnoticed among Pathan voters. Repeatedly on the streets of Peshawar people told me that they had voted MMA in 2002 but not 2008, because ‘the JUI support Musharraf and Musharraf helps the Americans’.
In addition, leading the government from 2002 to 2008 meant that the JUI, like the ANP after 2008, was exposed to the standard accusations against al Pakistani governments: of not having fulfil ed their campaign promises of better government and more development; of engaging in corruption; and of not giving my brother/cousin/uncle/
nephew a job, contract, or whatever.
The JUI – a bit like Communists in the past – also suffered from their own inflated promises. They had promised to introduce true Shariah rule in the Frontier, and thereby to transform society. Since by definition the Shariah – being the Word of God – cannot suffer from inherent flaws as far as conservative Pathans are concerned, the explanation of the MMA’s failure in this regard could only be attributed by voters to the failings of the MMA and its leaders.
The MMA had its very origins in Pakistani Islamist outrage at the US
invasion of Afghanistan, and took shape in 2001 – 2 as the ‘Pakistan – Afghan Defence Council’. Its six parties included the two wings of the JUI, the JI, three smal er Sunni parties and one Shia party. The inclusion of the Shia and a party belonging to the Barelvi theological tradition (old rivals of the Deobandis) marked the ‘broad church’ nature of the al iance, and also drew a line between the JI and JUI on the one side and extreme anti-Shia Sunni radical groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba on the other.
The record of the MMA in government between 2002 and 2008
reflected a number of features which say a good deal about the ‘mainstream’ Islamists in Pakistan, about the balance of power between the centre and the provinces, and about Pakistani politics in general. The first was confusion. The government took a long time to put a legislative programme together and, even when it did, no one was quite sure what was and was not a law. Secondly, the only real y radical Islamist laws that the MMA government passed (for example, extending the writ of the Shariah in the state legal system) were in any case blocked by the Supreme Court and the government in Islamabad – something that has happened to every provincial government that has attempted serious change.
Lastly, there is the actual content of the MMA’s legislation and governance, which in some respects was very different from the standard view of Islamist politics in the West, and showed an interesting mixture of what in the West would be cal ed ‘progressive’
and ‘reactionary’ elements. The more progressive sides of the MMA government mark the al iance off very clearly from the Taleban, in both its Afghan and Pakistani manifestations. Thus, while on the one hand the MMA tried to bring in a range of measures enforcing public standards of dress for women, and its activists launched vigilante attacks on video stores and other sources of ‘immorality’, on the other hand its government did more than most previous administrations to increase education for girls. This was due not to the JUI, but to the presence in the MMA coalition of the Jamaat Islami and a Shia political party.
When I visited the MMA’s Minister for Local Development, Asif Iqbal Daudzai, in May 2007, he was at pains to emphasize his government’s progressive agenda. This included community participation in developing local infrastructure projects, Rs50 mil ion for improvements in sanitation in Peshawar, and a great increase in primary education, including for girls. While this was doubtless mostly for Western consumption, it did not seem whol y so. He and other government officials laid special stress on their moves to end the negative features of the pashtunwali as far as women are concerned, and in particular what he described as the ‘hateful’ practice of giving girls in compensation as part of the resolution of disputes.
The problem was and is that, as with both previous and later governments, resources are so limited. This was rubbed home by the minister’s own office, which I approached up a flight of broken stairs with hardly a lamp working, barking my shins in the process, to sit on a broken chair in a bleak office with cracked windows and peeling wal s.
This was in its way impressive, since it indicated that if there was corruption in this ministry the officials had not spent it on their own offices; but it also il ustrated the deep poverty of the province and its government.
However, the reputation of the MMA al iance both in the West and with officials in Pakistan was deeply tarnished by its murky relations with the radicals who later went on to found the Pakistani Taleban, and by its ambiguous attitude to jihad within Pakistan. In 2007 the al iance split over this issue, with the JUI condemning the radicals who took over the Red Mosque complex in Islamabad, while the Jamaat Islami supported them (see next chapter). However, the JUI retained close private links to some of the Taleban, who supposedly helped Fazl-ur-Rehman in the February 2008 election campaign, even as other Taleban rejected the electoral process altogether. On the other hand, the JUI was tainted in the eyes of more-radical Muslims, and indeed of much of the population in general, by its continued association with Musharraf – thereby ending up with the worst of al worlds.
In August 2008, after they had been defeated in the elections, the information secretary of the JUI, Abdul Jalil Jan, came to drink tea with me in my guest-house in University Town, Peshawar. Echoing the words of many people in the NWFP (including voters for the ANP and PPP), he asked me:
Why have Beitul ah Mahsud and Fazlul ah declared war on the Pakistani government and army? Wouldn’t you do so if someone invaded your territory and kil ed your women and children? It doesn’t matter if it is the US or Pakistan who have done the kil ing. They have been attacked ... So we support talks aimed at peace. The previous peace negotiations were a success, but then they were violated, and by whom? By the government and army on the orders of America. If there is to be peace, then the government must stick to the terms of peace and not launch new attacks ... As to Afghanistan, that is the Afghans’ own business, but natural y people here have strong feelings about what is happening and what the US is doing there. After al , like many people here, I am an Afghan Pashtun myself by origin: my ancestors came here long ago from Kunar.11
Within the NWFP, both the JUI and JI thus opposed any strong action against the radicals who gained an increasing grip on Swat during the MMA period in government. Indeed, many of the Swat radicals had previously been Jamaat cadres and retained close links to the party. The MMA parties did not favour the more brutal and retrograde actions of these forces (including attacks on police, vigilante executions and floggings, and the burning down of girls’
schools) but seem to have found it impossible publicly to take action against groups claiming to act in the name of the Shariah and the Afghan jihad. This inaction on the part of the MMA, and the failure of the JUI and MMA government to consolidate their support, helped open the way for the rise of the Taleban among the Pathans of the Frontier.
Meanwhile, JUI links to hated governments in Islamabad were also losing it local support. In 2008 I heard this about the party in the context of its support for Musharraf. Even a few days before Musharraf’s resignation, both the Fazl-ur-Rehman and Sami-ul-Haq wings of the party were stil very hesitant about supporting his impeachment, as Sami-ul-Haq himself told me in August 2008 – using as his excuse that ‘if Musharraf should be impeached, then so should many of the other politicians. Al have committed crimes.’
By 2009, ordinary people in Peshawar were cursing the party’s membership of the government of the hated Zardari. It is highly questionable, therefore, whether the patronage extracted by the party real y compensates any more for this growth in unpopularity. The JUI’s al iance with Pakistani national parties and aspirations to share power in Islamabad, either for patronage or to change the Pakistani system, also mean that there are clear limits on how far it can exploit Pathan nationalism. As Abdul Jalil told me: We support greater autonomy for the NWFP and other provinces, but on one condition: that this demand must not be based on hatred and must not encourage conflicts with Punjabis, Baloch or other ethnic groups in Pakistan. If this plan is based on good relations and agreements with our ethnic neighbours, then we wil support it. But ANP ideas create a real danger of ethnic conflict. That is especial y true of al this talk of a Greater Pashtunistan taking in huge bits of Balochistan and Punjab. Of course other nationalities wil oppose this.