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2 A sharp reminder for Musharraf
By Philip Smucker
ISLAMABAD - A battle in the Pakistani
hinterlands could be just what the doctor ordered
for an embattled President General Pervez
Musharraf. But it won't come without a price.
After attacks in recent days killed dozens
of police and army in the tribal areas, Pakistan's
president has been left with little choice except
to confront extremists in the border areas with
Afghanistan. Thousands of fresh security forces
streamed into the troubled North-West Frontier
Province (NWFP) last week in the
wake
of the successful flushing out of extremists at
Islamabad's Lal Masjid (Red Mosque).
Militants greeted them with suicide bombs
and frontal attacks, also disavowing a "peace"
agreement that analysts said had given them
significant leeway to implement Islamic sharia law
and plan cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.
As of Wednesday morning, it was not clear
what Musharraf's next gambit will be. The
government, including senior officials in the
Ministry of Interior, insisted that it wanted to
save the "peace deals", which have been roundly
criticized by Washington as mere "appeasement".
Akram Khan Durrani, the top elected
official of NWFP, told journalists in Peshawar,
along the frontier, that the failure of two major
peace deals, one in Bajaur Agency and another in
the Northern Waziristan tribal area, would have
"dangerous consequences".
Indeed, Durrani
sounded to be praying to avert a greater crisis as
stakes rose ever higher in the country's
confrontation with extremism. "Please God, may
this peace agreement not be broken because it will
have dangerous consequences," Durrani told a press
conference in Peshawar.
Analysts and
political opponents said Musharraf will, in any
case, attempt to use the evolving crisis in the
hinterlands to strengthen his hand politically.
That may be bad news for democracy in Pakistan,
they said.
"The timing of this crisis is
all rather expedient for him," said Sherry Rehman,
a leading light and spokesperson for former
premier Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party
(PPP), talking by phone from London. "All these
actions in the tribal areas should have been taken
months ago."
These words rang true on
Tuesday when a suicide bomb killed 16 people and
injured 86 at a rally in Islamabad in support of
the country's suspended chief justice, Iftikhar
Mohammed Chaudhry. "The government could take
several steps and a state of emergency is a
possibility," Tariq Azeem, the deputy information
minister, said after the attack.
A
correspondent for a leading political magazine,
Umar Farouk, agreed that Musharraf is using the
growing confrontation between the government and
jihadis to "deflect attention away from the real
political crisis", which involves the judiciary's
opposition to the president's plans to prolong his
dictatorial rule.
But Farouk doubted that
Musharraf would make good on his vows last week to
root out extremism wherever it raised its head.
As he has been able to do for nearly eight
years in power since staging a coup, Musharraf
appeared to be in a position to please Washington
while only going so far toward carrying out a
full-fledged crackdown on militants.
Past
efforts by the military in the troubled border
areas have left more than 700 soldiers and 1,000
militants dead. They have not, however, managed to
stop militancy or stem cross-border incursions by
Taliban and al-Qaeda militants from Pakistan into
Afghanistan.
Any serious effort finally to
stamp out militancy would be a break with recent
Pakistani history.
In the 1980s, the late
dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq stepped up the
military's flirtation with the religious right by
introducing limited sharia law and Islamic
banking. Zia saw this as a way of undercutting the
lingering secular power base of Benazir Bhutto's
father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom the military had
executed in 1979.
Religious parties were
encouraged to open religious schools and recruit
Pashtun tribesmen to fight in Afghanistan, a
practice many of them still engage in, even though
it is against a new "infidel" - not the Soviets,
but the Americans.
Zia's continued
manipulations in 1985 also changed the country's
constitution to allow the president instead of the
prime minister to become the supreme commander of
the armed forces. And operatives in the
Inter-Services Intelligence, under the thumb of
the military, helped strengthen the alliance with
the religious right
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