KARACHI - Consummated soon after September 11,
2001, the marriage of convenience between the United
States and Pakistan in the "war on terror" helped turn
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf from a
local commando into an international statesman.
But being "a trusted US ally" has become
synonymous with "playing with fire", and Musharraf now
faces a stark choice: risk setting the country's tribal
belt aflame, or watch the key commercial port city of
Karachi burn.
Starting at the beginning of this
year, the US intensified efforts to root out foreign
fighters and Afghan resistance figures sheltering in
Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal areas, and with
extensive surveillance, either on the ground or in the
sky, even identified several "high-value targets". The
task of tracking down these people was handed over to
the Pakistani security apparatus.
In April,
Islamabad dispatched thousands of troops to South
Waziristan, one of the seven tribal agencies, but in the
face of stiff resistance from the local population,
Pakistan's army bigwigs concluded that "they simply
cannot fight" their own people. This was not the answer
Washington wanted to hear, both in terms of the "war on
terror" and with presidential elections approaching.
An even tougher approach was needed to get
Islamabad to do the necessary in the tribal regions.
Target Karachi Fatima
Jinnah Road in Karachi is a thoroughfare most motorists try
to avoid as it houses the US Consulate's residence, and
all traffic is screened by the heavy security presence
in the surrounds.
Previously, any incident -
and there have been several over the years - in the
vicinity has been branded an attack on US interests. However,
the twin bomb blasts that occurred just 100 meters from
the consul's residence last week in which a
policeman was killed and 17 injured was not taken as a
"serious threat" against the United States.
"The
target of two car bombs that exploded on Wednesday in
Karachi was a privately run English-language school and
not the nearby residence of the US consul general," a
State Department official said in Washington.
Musharraf's eyes and ears, the chiefs of the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military
Intelligence, only too well understand the low-key US
response, according to officials close to these
organizations who spoke to Asia Times Online.
They maintain that the bomb attacks were
directed not at the US but at Musharraf himself, to
serve as a warning that he needs to do something, and
quickly, in the tribal areas, or there will be continued
trouble in Karachi.
According to Asia Times
Online sources, US assistant secretary of state
Christina Rocca, in a recent visit to Islamabad at which
the director general of the ISI was present, expressed
concern over possible trouble in Karachi if operations
in the tribal areas did not go well.
On Sunday,
Pakistan warned of imposing some form of economic
sanctions on the people of South Waziristan if they did
not hand over foreign fighters, and more paramilitary
troops were sent to the areas.
On the same day,
though, the high-profile Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai was
killed by gunmen in Karachi. As a radical Sunni cleric,
he had repeatedly called for a holy war against the
United States.
This assassination was followed
on Monday by a bomb attack on the Shi'ite Ali Raza Imam
Bargah mosque during evening prayers that killed 22
people. The mosque was less than two kilometers from the
seminary where Shamzai was killed. On May 7, a bomb
killed 23 worshippers and wounded 125 at the Shi'ite
Haideri Mosque in Karachi.
Monday's attack virtually shut down
Karachi, with all port operations suspended, as well as
the stock exchange. Thousands of security personnel were
deployed to control the crowds, and when
police fired warning shots at some mourners they
were stoned. Shi'ite groups have announced a mourning period
of three days, and people are still burning
tires and stoning cars, while all the city's markets
have been shut.
Shamzai's murder had the
potential really to set Karachi alight, but key
religious figures acted quickly. All the top leadership
of the Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), a grouping of six
religious parties that controls the North West Frontier
Province (NWFP) assembly (the province in which the
tribal areas are located), traveled to Karachi for
Shamzai's funeral. Also present were the the leader of
the opposition in the national parliament, Maulana
Fazalur Rehman, NWFP Chief Minister Maulana Samiul Haq,
and Pakistan's grand mufti, Rafi Usmani. They all worked
to pacify the thousands of mourners, who included the
leaders and workers of numerous jihadi organizations.
Sectarian smokescreen The bloodshed
of the past few days in Karachi has widely been
attributed to sectarian troubles. In one sense this
is understandable, as the country, and the city, have
had considerable such strife: more than 4,000 people
are thought to have been killed as a result of
Shi'ite-Sunni violence since the 1980s. About 97 percent of
Pakistan's population is Muslim. In Karachi, as well as in
Pakistan as a whole, Sunnis make up about 70 percent of
the population, while Shi'ites account for less than 20 percent.
It should be noted, though, that after Monday's
attack on the Ali Raza Imam Bargah mosque, the
leadership of Shi'ite Muslims pointedly refused to
apportion blame to any Sunni Muslims.
Speaking
to this correspondent, a top leader of the Shi'ite
community, Maulana Hasan Turabi, said the government had
conveniently tried to label the attacks as suicide, even
though no evidence of this had been found. He said the
police do this as the attackers are said to have been
killed and nobody needed to be arrested.
Contacts in the intelligence
agencies who spoke to Asia Times Online squarely rejected a sectarian angle.
Instead, they pointed to the ethnocentric Muthahida Quami
Movement (MQM), which is a part of
the present federal and the Sindh provincial government in which
Karachi is located. They also claimed that the
Sindh police, who are under the thumb of the
Adviser for Home Affairs (the MQM's nominee), were culpable through negligence
- at best - in not preventing the
attack on Shamzai, even though they had information that it was
likely.
A comprehensive report has been sent to
Islamabad, to which Musharraf reacted strongly and
"vowed to take major decisions in Sindh province",
according to these contacts.
Initially, it was
decided to appoint the former governor of Sindh and
minister of the interior, retired Lieutenant-General
Moinuddin Haider, as a powerful adviser to the president
on Sindh affairs, but after a strong reaction from the
MQM's leader in exile, Altaf Hussain, who strongly
opposed any such unconstitutional action in Sindh and
lambasted the army leadership, only a face-saving
measure is to be taken under which the already weak
chief minister is likely to change.
Implications of Shamzai's death On the
one hand, Shamzai was the icon of the anti-US movement
in Pakistan, an ideologue for all jihadi forces and a
most respected name for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. More
important, though, he was crucial to the establishment
as he was never prepared to allow Pakistan to be
destabilized, and he often used his influence to quell
mobs and soothe passions when they ran too high for
comfort.
This dichotomy made Shamzai virtually
indispensable to the establishment, but alienated him
from hardliners, especially after Musharraf's about-turn
on the Taliban in 2001, which Pakistan had long
supported, as Shamzai successfully defused anti-US
protests at the time.
Born in 1952 in Swat,
NWFP, Shamzai came from a modest background. He studied
in Jamia Farooqia, Karachi, and then taught there for 22
years. After that he joined the Binori Town Islamic
Seminary, Karachi, where he was a teacher of the Hadith
(the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed).
He
quickly earned a reputation for speaking his mind in
difficult times. He was one of the first to support the
Taliban movement when it emerged as a force in the early
1990s. He became famous when the US attacked Kandahar,
Afghanistan, in 1998 with cruise missiles in retaliation
for terror attacks linked to al-Qaeda in Africa. He
immediately issued a religious ruling saying that any
counterattack on US interests worldwide would be
justified by Muslims. The same ruling was repeated after
September 11 when the US announced its attack on
Afghanistan. He also signed the first ruling to declare
that Muslims who died while defending themselves in
South Waziristan would become martyrs, while Pakistan
soldiers who died while attacking Muslims there would be
considered mercenaries and would meet "vicious deaths".
But beyond these convictions, Shamzai believed
totally in the nation of Pakistan. When tribals blocked
the Silk Route in NWFP to protest Pakistan's support of
the US attack on Afghanistan, on the request of the
Pakistani government, Shamzai was taken to the site, and
he quickly averted a bloody clash between pro-Taliban
Pakistani tribals and Pakistani forces.
Shamzai's murder not only had the potential to
create a law-and-order situation in Karachi. With his
death a vital link with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and
al-Qaeda is broken. At a time when the US is clearly
aiming to build a "moderate" Taliban political force in
Afghanistan, which would have broad acceptance in
Pakistan's seminaries, with Shamzai out of the picture,
there is no one of such influence to oppose such a move,
and Mullah Omar could be sidelined.
The MQM
connection The MQM was the dream of a few Marxian
scholars such as Rais Amrohvi, Mohammed Taqi, John Ailia
and Shahanshah Hussain to establish an organization that
could protect the rights of immigrants who chose
Pakistan over remaining in India when the sub-continent
was partitioned from British India in 1947. The All
Pakistan Mohajir Student Organization (APMSO) was the
initial reality of the dream. It became established on
campuses in Karachi, and allied itself with the
left-wing Progressive Student Alliance. However, the
Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba, which was ideologically allied
with the Jamaat-i-Islami and which had been the main
force on Karachi campuses, expelled the APMSO. As a
result, its founder Altaf Hussain left his studies and
went to the US, where he drove a taxi to earn a living.
At this time in the 1980s, the
honeymoon between the Jamaat-i-Islami and military ruler General Zia
ul-Haq was over, and they developed differences
on several national political issues. The sector commander
of the ISI (now retired and still
living in Karachi) persuaded Altaf Hussain to return to Karachi
and take on the Jamaat-i-Islami. Altaf held big rallies
and spoke against Punjabis and Pashtuns living in
Karachi. In 1986, a bus driver who happened to be a
Pashtun killed a college girl who was a member of a
family that had migrated from India. The incident was
immediately turned into a riot. The MQM was by now close
to many bigwigs in the underworld - it still is - and
they had several Pashtuns killed. Pashtuns retaliated in
kind, and more.
Altaf then initiated a drive to
sell televisions and video recorders, the proceeds from
which he used to purchase arms and ammunition. MQM
activists now numbered thousands, and they roamed all
over Karachi with AK-47 assault rifles and other
sophisticated arms. Later years saw the MQM turn against
Sindhis as well as Pashtuns and Punjabis. Killings and
strikes were the order of the day for Karachi.
In 1988, the MQM won national and provincial assembly elections,
marking the all-out defeat to the Jamaat-i-Islami, knocking it
from its only stronghold in the country.
The MQM then joined hands with the
Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and became
a partner in the Sindh and federal governments. However, this
participation in government did nothing to curtail its gutter politics.
In the early 1990s the MQM was a
part of Nawaz Sharif's coalition government when its vice
president, Saleem Shehzad, now in exile in London, kidnapped an army major, stripped
him and beat him like a dog. As
a result, the first army operation was conducted against the
MQM. However, Altaf fled to the United Kingdom before it
began, and he now holds a British passport.
A
second operation was subsequently launched against the
MQM, commanded by a former interior minister in the PPP
government, retired Major-General Naseerullah Baber.
This exposed extensive MQM torture cells and "no-go
areas" in Karachi. Scores of MQM activists were killed
in extrajudicial killings by the police.
After
Musharraf took over in 1999 in a coup, he helped resolve
differences with the MQM, and now it is a partner in the
Sindh provincial government, as well as in the federal
government. Yet it often remains critical of the
establishment, and has the ability to raise rabble on
the streets or call for citywide strikes at the drop of
a hat.
Because of its declared secular nature,
the US has traditionally been closer to the MQM than any
other party in Pakistan. Over the years, thousands of
its activists have been given asylum in the US, where
the MQM has a powerful bureau.
After September
11, the United States identified even more with the MQM
as it was the only party in Pakistan that widely mourned
the attacks on the US, openly condemned the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, and launched a powerful campaign in support of
the US attack on Afghanistan. Latterly, the MQM has been
the only party to support the military's intervention in
the tribal areas. Visits by US diplomats to MQM offices
in Karachi have - and continue to be - commonplace.
Asia Times Online sources say that only US
diplomatic intervention stopped Musharraf from taking
strong action against the MQM after he received the
report on the recent unrest in which the MQM was
implicated. Washington indeed has a powerful southern
ally in Pakistan.
Musharraf is now carefully
weighing the alternatives of taking tough action in the
tribal areas, or risking more trouble in Karachi, the
country's commercial center.
(Copyright 2004
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
