ISLAMABAD, 25 July 2005 — Caught between Western demands to fight Islamic terrorism and protests from hard-line Muslims at home, Pakistan’s leader faces a dilemma that will only grow with each new attack, analysts say. President Pervez Musharraf, a key Western ally since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has earned praise abroad but criticism at home for ordering the arrests of some 300 suspected militants after it emerged the London bombers had ties to Pakistan.
The latest bloody attacks in Egypt are only likely to heighten international pressure on him to uproot Islamic extremists in a country many see as a breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of Osama Bin Laden.
“He is caught between the devil of the West, which wants him to crush religious extremism, and the deep blue sea of taking on the entire religious community,” said Lahore-based political commentator Mohammed Afzal Niazi.
Gen. Musharraf, who once led troops in Kashmir, pinned his fate to the “war on terror” after Sept. 11 and allowed US forces to launch the 2001 Afghanistan invasion to unseat Bin Laden and the Taleban from Pakistani soil. Washington has since been a strong political and economic backer of Musharraf despite the fact he took power in a military coup and turned Pakistan into a declared nuclear state in its arms race with India.
Yet at home, Musharraf faces both open and silent opposition to each new crackdown he orders, both from Muslim clerics and the government and security apparatus over which he presides, said political scientist Hasan Askari. Muslim protesters on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, condemned Musharraf, who has escaped two assassination attempts for his pro-Western stance.
Many of his generals and spy chiefs have also backed jihadists, or Islamic holy warriors, in the past to fight in the divided state of Kashmir and in the 1979-1989 US-backed war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said Askari. “It seems that opinion in the official circles is divided on how these (militant) groups should be dealt with,” Askari, the former head of political science at Lahore’s Punjab University, told AFP. “There are elements in the establishment who continue to see the extremists as potentially relevant for their Kashmir policy. Therefore they let them get off the hook after some time.”
Political commentator Ayaz Amir voiced skepticism over the latest anti-militant drive, saying they had happened before with little effect. “How many crackdowns constitute a crackdown?” he said. “There is no easy textbook military solution to the jihadi problem in Pakistan.”
Even a senior security official involved in the anti-terrorism campaign told AFP that “as long as the ideology of the terrorists continues to be popular, they will continue to recruit people”.
“The basic purpose of such crackdowns is to send a signal to the support network of terrorists that ‘we know you, we are after you’. So people on the borderline give up, but hard-liners continue,” he said on condition of anonymity. “Such crackdowns will not cure the deeper ailment.”
Niazi, a columnist with the Nation daily, said that even Musharraf “probably believes (the raids) will not be much help in winning the war on terror”.
The president, in a national address last week, pledged he was serious about the latest series of raids against hard-line madrasas, the Islamic religious schools long seen as incubators of anti-Western hatred. But he also pointedly reminded Western nations it was them who pumped cash and weapons into the Mujahedeen’s religiously-driven struggle to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan. “It was during this period that Pakistani intelligence agencies and the American CIA worked together to promote Islamic orthodoxy and militancy by providing funds, training and weapons,” said Askari.
When Soviet forces withdrew and Western attention shifted elsewhere, Afghanistan plunged into the chaos that paved the way for the rise of the Taleban while battle-hardened Mujahedeen exported their war across the world. “Had the world paid attention to Afghanistan at that time, perhaps we would have had the Twin Towers standing. Perhaps today we would not have had the bombings in London ... and other parts of the world,” Musharraf’s regional neighbor, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said last week.
