It could be curtains for the Busharraf
show By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The growing crisis over
Islamic extremism in Pakistan is drawing attention
to the complicity of that country's military
government in the rise of the biggest haven for
Islamic terrorism in the world.
The issue,
which is also linked to the threat to US troops in
Afghanistan from Taliban bases in Pakistan, is
likely to push aside the George W Bush
administration's campaign to portray Iran as the
primary external source of instability and violence
against US troops in the
region.
The serious impacts of the policy
of accommodation practiced by Pakistani President
General Pervez Musharraf toward the Taliban and
its extremist supporters in Pakistan have been
dramatized by the clashes between security forces
and Islamic extremists at the Lal Masjid (Red
Mosque) in Islamabad.
That crisis came
only a few days after a report in the New York
Times on June 28 that the Pakistani Interior
Ministry had warned Musharraf earlier in June that
a "general policy of appeasement towards the
Taliban" had "further emboldened" the Islamic
extremist forces.
But despite these
indications that the news from Pakistan is likely
to shed a harsh light on its Pakistan policy, the
Bush administration has continued to offer
unqualified endorsement of Musharraf's policy
toward terrorism. Efforts by journalists to elicit
an expression of concern about the implications of
the violence in Islamabad from State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack produced only reassuring
phrases that there is "still a lot more to do" in
regard to Islamic extremists in Pakistan and that
"we support [Musharraf] in those efforts".
The Bush administration knows that
Musharraf has been playing a double game over
al-Qaeda and Taliban networks. Four months
earlier, it had tried to exert quiet pressure on
Musharraf over the issue, but had also continued
its policy of portraying Musharraf as a loyal ally
in the "war against terror", even after he
signaled his rejection of any pressure.
Vice President Dick Cheney visited
Islamabad in late February, accompanied by Stephen
R Kappes, deputy director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), when unnamed US
officials told the Washington Post that there was
evidence al-Qaeda operatives in camps in Pakistan
had resumed training of foreign jihadis. Just
hours after Cheney had reportedly delivered a
warning that aid would be cut by the US Congress
if something was not done, the Musharraf
government issued a statement insisting that
"Pakistan does not accept dictation from any side
or any source".
That response suggested an
unwillingness or inability on Musharraf's part to
change his policy toward the Islamic terrorists.
But back home the US administration continued to
issue statements aimed at minimizing the problem.
Assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher went
so far as to deny that Cheney had delivered any
warning to Musharraf and gave his government a
pass, saying, "Steps have been taken, cooperation
has improved."
US, North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and Afghan officials had already
concluded that the Pakistani intelligence service
had continued to collaborate with the Taliban and
al-Qaeda operating from bases in North and South
Waziristan. The confession of a captured Taliban
spokesman, Muhammad Hanif, that Taliban leader
Mullah Omar is living in Quetta, Pakistan, under
the protection of that country's Inter-Service
Intelligence agency had been videotaped by Afghan
intelligence and distributed to journalists in
January.
Dr Barnett Rubin, a top academic
specialist on Afghanistan from New York
University, who travels frequently to that
country, said in an interview for a Public
Broadcasting Service Frontline special last
autumn that US military officials in Afghanistan
believe Pakistan could seriously disrupt the
Taliban by taking down its leadership body in
Quetta.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister
Peter MacKay demanded before Parliament's Defense
Committee last November that Pakistan seek out and
arrest senior Taliban officials, and prevent the
exploitation by insurgents of refugee camps in
Afghanistan.
The Musharraf government's
deals with pro-Taliban groups in 2004 and 2006 in
the border provinces of South and North Waziristan
helped the Taliban generate increased manpower and
logistics support for cross-border raids into
Afghanistan by Taliban guerrillas based in those
provinces.
According to a report by the
International Crisis Group last December, after
the September 2006 accord, the government
"released militants, returned their weapons,
disbanded security check posts and agreed to allow
foreign terrorists to stay if they gave up
violence". The new accommodation with the Taliban
"facilitates the growth of militancy and attacks
in Afghanistan by giving pro-Taliban elements a
free hand to recruit, train and arm", the report
said.
When New York Times correspondent
Carlotta Gall visited border towns without
permission in January, she reported finding "signs
that Pakistani authorities are encouraging the
insurgents, if not sponsoring them".
The
result of the policy of appeasement of the Taliban
is that Pakistan has madrassas in the
border provinces that churn out committed jihadis
by the tens of thousands every year, and the
number of active supporters of Islamic terrorism
in Pakistan appears to be in the hundreds of
thousands.
In testimony to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that put the Bush
administration's portrayal of al-Qaeda in Iraq as
the main foreign terrorist threat in perspective,
New York University's Rubin declared, "The main
center of global terrorism is in Pakistan."
Al-Qaeda forces in Iraq, which Bush has
highlighted in recent speeches as the central
front in his administration's "war against
terrorism", have never been estimated at more than
a few thousand.
Musharraf's failure to act
against religious extremists and their
madrassas is widely understood to be part
of a fundamental strategy by the military regime
of using political parties that embrace extreme
Islamic ideology as a political base of support
for the military dictatorship to ensure against
the return of democratic forces seeking to reverse
Musharraf's 1999 coup.
Musharraf helped
the Jammat-e-Islami party, which has had ties with
al-Qaeda leaders in the past, and five allied
Islamic groups win state elections in October 2002
in the provinces bordering Afghanistan. After that
electoral victory, officials of those parties
began actively assisting the Taliban and al Qaeda
activities in the border provinces.
Bush
administration officials have cited the arrest of
several key al-Qaeda officials since September 11,
2001, as evidence of Musharraf's bona
fides. But New York Times correspondent James
Risen shows in his book State of War [1]
that the Musharraf regime was far from fully
cooperative in the US effort to destroy the
al-Qaeda network in Pakistan.
Risen writes
that al-Qaeda operatives began to set up a new
center of operations in Pakistan's South
Waziristan province after fleeing from Afghanistan
in early 2002, and the Pakistani military
tenaciously fought to keep the US forces in
Afghanistan from crossing the border into Pakistan
to pursue al-Qaeda operatives.
The CIA was
later allowed to set up secret bases within
Pakistan to try to locate Osama bin Laden,
according to Risen, but CIA personnel could only
travel with Pakistani security escorts, which
severely limited their ability to gather
intelligence in Pakistan's North-West Frontier
Province.
The Bush administration has been
protecting Musharraf's regime from the domestic US
consequences that would have followed any official
acknowledgement of the truth, despite its
awareness of Musharraf's bad faith. As the risk of
political backlash at home over the issue
increases, however, that policy is certain to come
under severe pressure.
Note 1. Spying, lying, and saying
no (Asia Times Online, February 3,
2006) is based on a review of State of War.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
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