The
Deceptive Cloak of Musharraf's Enlightened Moderation
By Husain Haqqani
WASHINGTON,
June 15: The arrest in California of a Pakistani father and son
allegedly linked to terrorism highlights, once again, the superficiality
of the Pakistani regime’s rhetoric about changing the country’s
direction.
So
far no evidence has been presented by US officials of the California
detainees being linked to Al-Qaeda, except an affidavit by one
of the accused admitting to attending a militant training camp
near Rawalpindi. It is possible that the Pakistanis arrested in
California turn out to be innocent of Al-Qaeda links, joining
the ranks of hundreds of Muslims caught in America’s currently
over-zealous law enforcement. It is equally possible, however,
that they were associated with a Pakistani Jihadi group, which
in turn might be linked to the global network loosely described
as Al-Qaeda.
The
Pakistani Foreign Office was, as usual, quick in denying that
any Al-Qaeda facility exists in Pakistan. Of course, it is the
same Foreign Office that, through its permanent representative
to the United Nations has been periodically debating the definition
of terrorism at the UN even though Pakistan has ostensibly been
a crucial ally in the US-led global war against terrorism. One
could ask Pakistani officials how they can be America’s
partners in fighting terrorism if they do not agree with the US
definition of terrorism but that argument is not the subject of
our immediate concern.
The
same week that the California arrests served as a reminder of
the Jihadi presence in Pakistan, the famed victim of a gang rape
whose rapists had earlier been set free was detained and forbidden
from traveling abroad. The “enlightened moderate”
State in Pakistan chose to extend its protection to the perpetrators
of the gang rape rather than Mukhtaran Mai, the victim.
With
the passage of time, differences between the “Islamist”
dictatorship of General Ziaul Haq and the “modernizing”
regime of General Musharraf are clearly a lot less pronounced
than Musharraf’s supporters make them out to be. The military
regime’s priority appears to be to suppress or deny bad
news rather than to change the circumstances that give rise to
it.
In
case of the California arrests the Pakistani authorities should
have obtained full information and checked the facts on ground
before setting their spin machine in motion. One of the California
accused reportedly told his interrogators that he attended a Jihadi
facility run by Maulana Fazlur Rehman at “Tamal in Rawalpindi.”
Given that the FBI officer writing the Pakistani detainee’s
statement was unfamiliar with both Rawalpindi’s geography
and the who’s who of Pakistani Jihadism, it is perfectly
possible that he simply failed to figure out the information he
was given.
Maulana
Fazlur Rehman Khalil, originally of Harkat-ul-Ansar has maintained
a Jihadi facility at Dhamial in Rawalpindi for many years. Had
the Pakistan Government been serious in its claims of uprooting
militancy and terrorism, it would have paid some attention to
this possible link between last week’s arrests in California
and a shadowy group that participated in the officially sanctioned
Afghan and Kashmir jihads.
Maulana
Khalil was one of the signatories of Osama bin Laden’s 1998
fatwa against the United States and was reportedly in
the camp struck by US cruise missiles in Afghanistan in 1998.
In January 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that
Maulana Khalil remained openly active despite government-imposed
bans on him and his organizations. Khalil had survived the ban
in 1995 on Harkat-ul-Ansar and renamed it Harkat-ul-Mujahideen.
When Harkat-ul-Mujahideen was banned after September 11, 2001,
he emerged as the leader of Jamiat-ul-Ansar.
Instead
of doing anything about Maulana Khalil or his followers after
the publication of the LA Times report, Pakistani security
services threatened the newspaper’s Pakistani reporter.
The reporter’s reporting, rather than Maulana Khalil’s
activities appeared to irk Pakistani officials more. Maulana Khalil
was finally arrested with considerable publicity in March 2004
only to be released quietly seven months later.
He
has reportedly gone underground after the recent arrests of his
followers in California. Unlike Mukhtaran Mai, the rape victim,
Pakistani authorities are unable to find and detain him. Ironically,
the same Pakistani officials who had no qualms about keeping Asif
Ali Zardari (husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto)
in prison without a conviction for almost eight years have never
found sufficient reason to detain Maulana Khalil – or several
other militant Jihadi leaders for that matter.
It
should be obvious to all but the most naïve that General
Pervez Musharraf’s U-Turn in the aftermath of September
11, 2001 has been selective and aimed more at pleasing the United
States than at ridding Pakistan of domestic militant groups. General
Musharraf made his views clear in an interview with the Washington
Post in 2002, in which he made a distinction between various
elements of Pakistan’s militant problem and stressed that
the militants fighting in Kashmir were freedom fighters.
“There
are three elements of terrorism that the world is concerned about,”
Musharraf said in that interview and went on to list these three
elements. “Number one, the Al-Qaeda factor. Number two is
what [the Indians] are calling cross-border terrorism and we are
calling the freedom struggle in Kashmir. Number three is the sectarian
[Sunni vs. Shia] extremism and sectarian terrorism in Pakistan...The
third one is more our concern, and unfortunately, the world is
not bothered about that. We are very much bothered about that
because that is destabilizing us internally.”
Thus,
in the General’s world view sectarian terrorists were the
real source of trouble while Al-Qaeda’s Arab members had
to be apprehended to ensure the flow of US support. Homegrown
militants trained for operating in the region were the least of
Musharraf’s concern at the time of that interview. But Pakistani
authorities cannot eliminate the international terrorist network
or the sectarian militias without decapitating the domestic Jihadi
networks. All Islamist militant groups sympathize with one another
and in some cases, such as Kashmiri Jihadi groups and sectarian
militias, have overlapping memberships.
From
the point of view of Pakistan’s Islamist militants and their
backers in the establishment, Jihad is only on hold but not yet
over. The major Kashmiri Jihadi groups retain their infrastructure
that could be pressed into service at a future date. Afghanistan’s
Taliban also continue to find safe haven in parts of Pakistan
as recently as the spring of 2005. Afghan and American officials
complain periodically of the Taliban still training and organizing
in Pakistan’s border areas but their protests are rejected
summarily with rhetoric similar to the one about domestic militant
groups.
The
Musharraf regime has been careful to take all steps necessary
to retain the goodwill of the United States and its rhetoric of
“enlightened moderation” has won it America’s
support. President Bush described Musharraf as “a courageous
leader” who had risked his life to crack down on the Al-Qaeda
terrorist network. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, declared
during a March 2005 visit to Pakistan that Pakistan “has
come an enormously long way...This is not the Pakistan of September
11. It is not even the Pakistan of 2002.”
American
officials regularly express the belief that Pakistan had turned
the corner and could now be trusted as an American ally. The United
States sees Pakistan’s glass as half full rather than half
empty. For Pakistanis faced with on-ground realities, such as
militants living in their midst and the treatment of gang rape
victims like Mukhtaran Mai, there is little in the glass that
gives them satisfaction.
The
writer is Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston
University and author of the forthcoming book 'Pakistan Between
Mosque and Military' (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2005, Title Top Left)
