Pakistan struggles with damage
control By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Pakistan is getting the backlash
it expected after the military action to root out
militants from the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in
Islamabad, but further violent reaction could come
from a new kind of enemy.
The country's
intelligence agencies have warned President
General Pervez Musharraf to expect an explosion of
violence, some of it from a loosely interlaced
network of underground
militants across the country.
Militants claim that more than 1,500 people,
mostly madrassa students, died in the
attack on the Lal Masjid last week, which lasted
several days. The government places the deaths at
75.
According to the intelligence
warnings, the reaction will include kidnappings
and killings of Pakistan Army officers and family
members. The president has also been informed that
the Inter-Services Intelligence's (ISI's) proxy
network in the tribal areas is collapsing. A
manifestation of this is the Taliban's removal of
Haji Nazir as commander of South Waziristan. Nazir
this year led a massacre of Uzbek militants in the
tribal area, in cooperation with the Pakistani
armed forces.
Top military and civilian
leaders are trying their hardest to talk to the
Pakistani Taliban in an effort to defuse the
situation, but it is little-known militant groups
that pose the biggest threat, and the ISI has
little or no access to them.
Dozens of
security personnel have already been killed in the
tribal areas since the raid on the Red Mosque, and
more attacks are expected.
Changing
faces As a general rule, Islamic militants
have a strong knowledge of Islamic tenants and
they have a roadmap of Islamic revolution
imprinted on their minds, including a full
understanding of what constitutes a model Islamic
state.
From recently spending time with
militants in the "red" zones of the Swat Valley in
NWFP and Bajaur Agency, a different picture
emerges. Previous interaction over the years with
militants suggested that they at least were
obsessed with defeating the Western coalition in
Afghanistan and reviving the Taliban government.
However, the present breed of jihadis rapidly
emerging in the Swat Valley, Bajaur, North
Waziristan and South Waziristan is different.
The militants this correspondent
encountered could hardly be called
"revolutionary", and they were not fully trained
combatants. At best they could be described as
disgruntled youths who have been manipulated by
clerics, or simply fired up by incidents such as
Lal Masjid.
They are up in arms and want
to take on the government. They say they want to
kill Musharraf, but they don't know how, or what
they would do next. This scenario promises to
generate serious violence, but not revolution. The
militants are divided into small groups, united
only in a desire to fight their common enemy, the
Pakistani military establishment.
Of
dozens of such militants this correspondent met,
Rauf (not his real name) is a good example. He is
a student at a madrassa in a village in the
Malakand area of Swat.
Rauf's journey to
jihad began when a few years ago he heard one of
the famous speeches of Maulana Masood Azhar,
called "Babri Masjid", on an audio cassette.
Azhar's Jaish-e-Mohammed was involved in the
struggle over disputed Kashmir with India, and the
tape dealt with the topic of a temple site
disputed between Muslims and Hindus in India.
An inspired Rauf went to Afghanistan for
several months. He interacted with several
charismatic people and chose the life of a Talib
(student) and made jihad the motto of his life.
"I did not read much. I only started my
Islamic learning recently. Actually, my
inspiration was the people around me in
Afghanistan's jihadi camps. One person was Shiekh
Omar [Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh - involved in the
killing of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002]. I
was one of his students. He used to teach us
sophisticated techniques of guerrilla warfare,
including hijacking aircraft. We were all thrilled
by his charismatic personality."
Rauf
claims that he is ready to take on the military,
like his fellow villagers, once they are deployed
in the Swat Valley. Maulana Fazlullah, the leader
of the banned pro-Taliban
Tehrik-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM -
Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws) has
announced that people should remain peaceful as
long as troops are in the towns in the area, but
once they are stationed in the mountains they are
fair targets.
The military establishment
has hurriedly contacted a number of religious
leaders to get them to use their influence in
calming militants, but their authority does not
extend to many of these new militants, including
even Fazlullah.
Last Thursday's attack on
a military convoy in Swat illustrates this. The
man who rammed his car into the trucks - killing
himself and several policemen - was initially
suspected to be one of Fazlullah's people. In fact
it was Noor Mohammed, once the chief of the banned
Harkat ul-Mujahideen in Malakand Agency. He had
been underground for the past few years and had
developed his own network of youths scattered in
remote villages.
Noor was a planner of
asymmetric warfare, which he learned in training
camps in Afghanistan. Contacts close to his
network believe that he never planned to carry out
the attack but was transporting explosives in his
car, as well as suicide jackets. They say that he
was at the wrong place at the wrong time and, when
he realized he was in the middle of a convoy, he
detonated some explosives, as he knew he would be
caught.
But whether he set out on that day
as a suicide bomber or became one on the spur of
the moment is not the point. What has alarmed the
authorities is that he had fallen off their radar
screens. They now suspect there are many more such
networks as Noor's, and they could stretch across
the country.
This adds yet another facet
to Musharraf's struggle against extremism and
militancy.
Syed Saleem Shahzad
is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He
can be reached at
saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
(Copyright
2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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