The government of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf was left with no option but to order the security forces to storm Islamabad’s Red Mosque once the radical occupants had rejected the final pleas of clerical mediators to surrender without further violence. That does not make any less tragic the considerable loss of life, among security forces and hostages and also among the many impressionable and radicalized young people who refused pleas, some from their parents, to surrender.
The long and bloody last phase of what the army commanders named “Operation Silence” brought a sorrowful end to a weeklong stand off that at times had bordered on farce. The humiliating capture of the Red Mosque’s chief cleric Abdul Rashid Abdul Aziz, trying to flee the compound disguised as a woman in a “burqa” suggested that despite a death toll that already stood at 16, the cleric and his brother Ghazi were not entirely committed to the idea of taking their own lives for the cause even while they encouraged their followers to do so.
Maybe Ghazi miscalculated when the peace negotiators left for the last time in the early hours of Wednesday morning. He may still have believed he could save some sort of face and maybe his skin by refusing to compromise. What swung the decision to attack if he did not surrender at that hour was the presence of women and children as hostages. This tactic itself condemned Ghazi as a heartless bigot bent on destruction. Whatever cause he imagined he was serving by engineering this confrontation with the government of Pakistan, hiding behind women and children hostages and noncombatants pretty much sums up his moral outlook.
Musharraf may be hoping for political gains from his firm handling of the Red Mosque siege but the inquest on this affair may cause him difficulties. It is not so much the way in which the compound was stormed that will be at issue, though some are already questioning the tactics used; it is how this situation was allowed to arise in the first place. Radicals from the mosque had for quite some time been mounting a reign of terror, meting out their version of vigilante justice in defiance of the authorities. Pakistani officials failing to initiate action against them emboldened them to push further. Indeed it is now clear, as it was not a week ago, that the incident, which finally triggered official action, was the kidnapping of seven Chinese nationals, six of them women, on the alleged grounds of immorality. The authorities drew the line at foreigners, especially from such a key economic ally as China, being kidnapped.
The Abdul Rashid brothers had known Taleban links. They were also supposed to enjoy powerful friends within the intelligence community. The latter should not have canceled out concerns that the former associations could lead to the serious trouble it did in the nation’s capital. The Red Mosque radicals should have been disarmed and neutralized the minute they began their violent campaign.
