TALIBANISATION OF PAKISTAN AND THE GROWTH OF JIHADI CULTURE
By
Vikram Sood
‘See what a scourge is laid upon your hate’
William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet
Some might suggest that this may not be the most appropriate way to describe the tragedy that is being enacted in Pakistan today. Years ago many lamented that places like Jhang, in southern Punjab, the home of Heer Ranjha had become the home of sectarian hatred where Shias were described as kafirs. Sadly this is the story of today’s Pakistan.
Pakistan’s development into a highly Islamised society today can be divided into five periods. From the time of independence till 1971when it was period of search for a non-India identity and a desire to be India’s equal and if not that then to reduce India to its own size. The Seventies were a period of reflection and recuperation and marked by the brutal repression of the Baloch and the arrival of Zia. The Eighties were the heady days of the Afghan jihad where Afghanistan helped acquiring skills and the Indian Punjab theatre was for testing the enemy. The jihad had reaffirmed the power of the faith. The Nineties, having acquired nuclear technology under the benign neglect of its western allies and having tested the bomb kind courtesy the Chinese in Lop Nor in 1990 and confident it could now cut India asunder, Pakistan launched its Kashmir jihad. Not satisfied with this, it also felt strong enough to open a second jihadi front by mentoring the Taliban. It was this arrogance that led to the Kargil misadventure in 1999. We are today witnessing the fifth period of Pakistan’s Islamisation in the post September 2001 where the Pakistani establishment is having to battle its own surrogates. Jihad had become a foreign policy instrument, a force equaliser with India, a means to seek strategic depth in Afghanistan and today it is also a means to acquire financial and military assistance from an anxious West.
There are many in Pakistan who shudder at the thought of what their country has become and the direction in which it is heading but their voice is weak and drowned by the coarseness of the opposition which is armed and dangerous that is willing to kill other Muslims in the name of Islam. They are worried that the rise of religious intolerance is a threat to their fundamental rights and liberties and what is more worrying, they are frightened that if they assert this too strongly they will be declared apostates.
The Early Years
The seeds of this were sown right in the beginning. Pakistan had to be invented almost overnight for the millions and its identity and nationhood imagined. In the early days Pakistan was conceived by a group of elite Muslims who had never lived in the part that eventually became Pakistan. The campaign was on behalf of Muslims who eventually opted to stay behind and on behalf of millions others who were not interested and even opposed to the idea of Pakistan. Thus, one morning many millions woke up in Quetta Peshawar and elsewhere to discover that they had a new address but were not sure of their identity.
And that has been a major problem ever since. From the very beginning, everything had to be non-India, non-Hindu. Pakistani leaders would deny their Indo-Gangetic heritage and seek recognition elsewhere. Instead of being home to Muslims of the subcontinent that it set out to be, a succession of leaders, political and military made it the centre for religious bigotry, sectarian hatred and ethnic divisiveness.
Convinced and therefore fearful that the much larger India would one day swallow Pakistan, the country became a national security state. The Pak policy making elite, encouraged by the Armed Forces in their self serving interests defined threat to Pakistan in terms of the Indian peril. India’s actions were consistently considered hegemonist, its attitude arrogant and designs threatening. Thus any possibility of India acquiring a prominent role in the region, given its comparative military advantage, was seen as a potential threat.
Pakistan’s tragedy was that the feudal politician relied on the army and the mullah to shore his position against this rivals and the Army got rid of the politician from whom he had little respect and relied on the mullah to fill the vacuum and seek justification for its rule and role. Thus, invariably always the Pak Army has aligned itself with the Islamic right after having got rid of the mainstream political opposition because the mainstream politician tended to be too devious and there was always the fear that a popularly elected politician would seek to either curb the Army or make peace with India or both. The military mullah nexus has grown stronger over the years and it has been the Army that has nurtured them to the point that today they threaten to run out of control. Each time a politician has tried to control the Armed Forces or to vaguely attempt some reform, he has suffered for instance, ZA Bhutto (1977), Benazir Bhutto (1991 and 1996) and Nawaz Sharif (1999). In between Bhutto and Sharif were allowed limited freedoms in running the country but the nuclear option, India and Afghanistan were out of bounds for them.
Pakistan’s political leaders were ready to give in to religious demands or pander to the Mullah. It was not the religious or sectarian parties that have pushed Pakistan towards fundamentalism. Islam sat easily with the politician and the people after all it was a Muslim homeland but the politician was pushing it towards a more fundamentalist path. Everyone thinks of Field Marshall Ayub Khan as the epitome of modernity and secularism with his Sandhurst background. A careful reading of his speeches on national integration suggests that these were addressed to the religious lobbies. In 1962 he declared: `Pakistan came into being on the basis of an ideology which does not believe in differences of colour, race or language. It is immaterial whether you are a Bengali or a Sindhi, a Baluchi or a Pathan or a Punjabi - we are all knit together by the bond of Islam.` The Council for Islamic Ideology was established during his rule to scrutinise laws for their conformity to religion.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great leftist and socialist was the one who agreed to the demand to declare the Qadianis non-Muslims in 1974. He also capitulated to the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement by taking certain symbolic measures towards Islamisation and Pakistan became an Islamic Republic in his time. The National Education Policy of 1972 declared that Islam is woven firmly into Pakistani society and latter day education policies only ente3nched this further.
It was Benazir Bhutto`s Home Minister Gen Nasirullah Babar who invented the Taliban and it was during her second tenure that the Taliban gained control of Kabul in 1996 and her government was the first to recognise their rule. Again, during Nawaz Sharif’s first tenure, instituted the death penalty for blasphemy, a law which was then abused by religious zealots against the Ahmadiya and Christian communities. In his second tenure he introduced his infamous Shariat Bill which would have effectively made him Amir-ul-Momineen, for it was designed to gain power by deciding virtue and vice and imposing it upon the country. Most recently, the ANP has entered into a desperate agreement with TNSM for Shariat in return for peace - an expensive peace which may or may not come about! Liberal, centrist and Left-oriented leaders and parties have contributed heavily to the rise of religious fanaticism in order to maintain their hold on power.
Thus it was not Zia ul Haq alone who is responsible for the Islamisation of Pakistan. Each Pakistani leader, from Jinnah to Musharraf contributed although of course Zia was the main contributor in all spheres of Pakistani society especially the Army and the civil service. It was the Zia years that provided the additional fervour for Islamisation. The General went around with the single-mindedness of a zealot to turn the threat of Soviet Russia into an opportunity for grafting his brand of austere Islam on the people. The maulvi of the regiment, till then the butt of many jokes became an all important person; the tenets of Islam had to be rigidly observed. All this is very well documented so one need not repeat all that happened in the Zia years.
The Army Acquires a State
The initial weakness and factionalism of Pak politicians, the desire of the Punjabi and Karachi bureaucrat to control the new state led to an excessive reliance on the military for support where the latter two combined against the politician. From then on to a series of military coups is now a well-documented history of modern Pakistan.
Today, the Pak Army, in particular, is the strongest political force in the country, although under some pressure currently. Its power and influence, built steadily over the last few decades, remains all pervasive despite the fact that nominally there is civilian government in Islamabad. It has been helped in this by both the US and China in pursuit of their strategic interests. Pakistan has been a willing surrogate for the former and a cat’s paw for the latter.
It has acquired enormous economic and financial interests in the country. The Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare trust are the two largest conglomerates in Pakistan.
Along with the Shaheen Foundation and the Behara Foundation, they delve into diverse ventures varying from bakeries, farms, schools, private security firms, commercial banks, insurance companies, radio and TV stations, fertilizer and cement factories, and cereal manufacture. They collect toll at highways, manage PSUs like the PIA and WAPDA, gas stations and shopping malls. Its officers and to a lesser extent, its men receive favourable treatment and largesse by way of land allocations and sinecures in the civilian sector as well as plum posts. The latter has been curbed by General Kayani but this could easily be reversed at any time.
Talibanisation of the Mind
Today Talibanisation is a metaphor for obscurantism and intolerance; it is the Pakistani version of Wahabbism that replaces the soft Sufi Islam of the subcontinent by a medieval rigidity. Babar Sattar (The News May 9, 2009) describes it best in a recent article when he says “Simply put it [Talibanisation] is bigotry, intolerance, obscurantism and coercion practiced in the name of religion that feeds on (a) the fear of change being ushered in by modernity, (b) confusion about the role of religion in the society, and (c) the failure of the state to provide for the basic needs of citizens, including means of subsistence the absence of which renders people desperate and a balanced education without which they lack the tools to question and resist extreme intolerant ideas. The message of the Taliban or other religious bigots can be simple and appealing to a majority of the population that is deprived of basic needs, disempowered and consequently disgruntled. The contract between the citizens and the state is not being honoured by the state and thus the system neither provides for the basic needs of a majority of the citizens nor offers them any real prospect for upward social mobility. This problem of governance is then presented by the maulvi as a consequence of lack of religion.”
The Taliban of today are different from the ones that the Pakistanis sent into Kandahar in 1994 in terms of reach and composition, but retain their essential extremist tendencies. They are not just Afghans from the madrassas of the NWFP and Balochistan. One could call them fragmented or a conglomerate depending upon how they were shaping out. Typical of Pushtun behavioural patterns, there have also been shifting alliances of convenience. The southern Afghan Taliban are more or less unified under Mullah Omar and based around the Quetta Shura. In the east however, facing Pakistan and inside Pakistan, the groups are more diffuse. Pakistan’s hitherto India specific groups like the Punjab- based Lashkar- e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are rendering service with the Taliban of Waziristan. So also are Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the Jalaluddin Haqqani network very popular with the Pakistan ISI and an associate of the Al Qaida and Taliban at different times, and now we have the Waziristan Shura of the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan of Baitullah Mehsud while others also describe Maulana Sufi Mohammed’s Tehrik e Nifaz Shariat Muhammedi as the Malakand Shura of the Taliban. There are now reports of a Punjab branch of the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan. There is thus a wide choice and the Pakistanis would like to convince the world of the existence of the moderate Taliban (those who battle Afghanistan) and the extreme Taliban (those who battle Pakistan). It is difficult to estimate the strength of the Taliban insurgent forces in the Afghanistan and Pakistan; the estimate could be upward of 40000 to 50000 but the hard core would be much smaller. Some estimates put this figure of hard core as 10000 in Afghanistan and about 5000 in Pakistan. The rest are on call in different districts.
Over time the Taliban have acquired experience, skills and weapons along with newer means of communication. They still do not have the strength to conquer territory in mainland Pakistan but the danger is that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban together threaten Pakistan and Afghanistan with their desire to form an Islamic emirate of greater Pushtunistan. It has to be remembered that by 2006 on a resurge, some of the slogans of the Taliban have been very ethnic cum religious. For instance some of the slogans have been, “Our party, the Taliban”, “Our people and nation, the Pushtun”, “Our economy, the poppy,” Our constitution, the Sharia,” “Our form of government, the emirate.” We have had the sharia implemented the Taliban way in Malakand and there has been frequent reference to the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. Their strategy has been one of attrition and exhaustion of the counterinsurgent forces, not conquering of territory in non-Pushtun areas as they do not have the means to overthrow the government through use of force but have the capacity and local popularity to move in where the government is absent or corrupt, unjust and negligent in the extreme. The threat to Pakistan is perhaps less from the Taliban but infinitely more from the Talibanisation of the mind.
The image of Pakistan lies not just in the sophisticated salons of Lahore as many here naively believe. It is the villages that have begun to change drastically where huge loudspeakers at village mosques propagate hard Salafi Islam, oppose Barelvis, Sufis, Shias and other sects as none of these are considered to be Muslims. Even the Punjabis, long considered to be more liberal towards women, are now adopting the Taliban line. Classical music is disappearing, teaching music is violently opposed by the Islami Jamaat-e-Tulaba at the Punjab University, there are few kathak teachers– once the favourite dance at the Mughal courts –available today. Girls at the Kinnaird College Lahore cannot wear jeans to college and head scarves are compulsory in many schools. Again according to Sattar, “Be it warnings delivered to the medical community in NWFP to wear shalwar qameez, or edicts issued to music shops and barbers, or threats communicated to schools, or reports regarding women being harassed in bazaars and public spaces more generally, there has been a surge in vigilante action being carried out by our self-styled moral police. The worst justification for the Nizam-e-Adl regulation comes from liberals within the ANP and the PPP claiming that this legislation doesn't set up a parallel system of justice, as it is merely procedural law adorned with Islamic nomenclature. Accepting the demand to 'enforce' religion legitimizes the discourse of bigots and their obscurantist project of personally stepping into God's shoes to judge fellow Muslims, taking a measure of their sins and delivering divine justice in this world on God's behalf. The growing intolerance that our society is witnessing with mute horror is fuelled by our odious brand of hypocrisy that encourages double-speak in the name of protecting and preserving tradition, culture and religion.” But these are outward signs yet no longer isolated incidents. Pakistan has moved away from the salons of Lahore and the soirees of Karachi.
What has been happening is best described by Pervez Hoodbhoy in his article “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan”. He says “Pakistan’s self inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.” Hoodbhoy describes the education curriculum that is prescribed as “a blue print for a religious fascist state.” This curriculum has been in existence from the time of Zia ul Haq and successive governments including that of the self-proclaimed moderate Musharraf, have merely tinkered with it and today the young minds are fertile grounds for fanaticism.
The country that Jinnah thought of did not move from his version to what it is today in a flash but has been moving towards it for decades but has gathered rapid momentum today, a momentum that is so strong that many wonder if this can at all be stemmed, if not reversed. In its early years Pakistan’s leaders portrayed their country – and the West championed this – that theirs was modern Islamic nation even as they surreptitiously used religion to advance their political fortunes.
Some like Rubina Saigol (The News February 21, 2009) have even questioned Jinnah’s intentions about secularism and modernism. Her essay ‘Myths versus Facts About Fundamentalism’ is to dismantle eight of the most common myths about Muslim fundamentalism and extremism ‘(in our part of the world) by juxtaposing such myths against observable facts.’ One of the myths she dismantles is the belief or the claim that fundamentalism is the result of mental and moral backwardness, attitudes religion and beliefs. Her argument is that ‘Fundamentalism is about geopolitics, involving power, money, and control over territory, people and resources. If we examine the actions and pronouncements of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or the Swat Taliban - actions that include beheading, rape, murder, public display of dead bodies, public executions, suicide bombings killing scores of innocent people - it is not hard to discern that such actions have little to do with religion or a moral order. Through brutal means and barbaric methods, the Taliban have gained control over territory in Swat and Waziristan. They have forced the government to accept their power over people and resources through the Nizam-e-Adl agreement reached between the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi`s Maulana Sufi Muhammad and the provincial government of the ANP. Apart from drug trafficking, the money is raised from donations received from Saudi Arabia and other countries and goes to pay Rs15,000-20,000 per month to about ten thousand militant followers of Maulana Fazlullah’.
Ms. Saigol also corrects the common myth that only religious parties and sectarian outfits support or forge fundamentalism. The history of Pakistan shows that ‘Fundamentalism has been supported or encouraged as much by the so-called secular elite as by religious parties to maintain class power and privilege. The common assumption that only parties like the JUI-F, JUI-S and Jamaat-e-Islami and sectarian and Jehadi outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen support fundamentalism in Pakistan overlooks the constant capitulation to religious extremism by seemingly secular and liberal parties. Most analysts like to quote Jinnah`s August 11, 1947, speech to argue that he envisioned a secular state, but in several of his other speeches he catered to the religious lobby`s sentiments to justify the two-nation concept. In 1940 he declared: `It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literature. They neither intermarry nor inter-dine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.`
One aspect though that bears repetition is because it is quite often overlooked or at least not fully appreciated. This is that all jihadis were not the products of the NWFP/Balochistan madrassas. On the contrary, many of the jihadis were students at the mainstream schools of Pakistan where too the syllabus was one of distortion of history fed on a diet of hatred for the non- Muslim.
Undoubtedly, madrassas in Pakistan and the madrassa culture as it is commonly referred to, have been the symbols of Islamisation. They were the recruiting grounds and universities for the jehadi foot soldiers for the Afghan and the Kashmir theatre with their own sectarian beliefs and affiliations to different schools of Islamic thought. No one really knows how many madrassas there are and where and exactly what is taught in all of them. Pakistan’s Minister of Religious Affairs told the Brussels-based International Crisis Group in 2002 that the number was 10,000. There has not been any appreciable change in the number. The total number of students at these madrassas is estimated to be more than 1.5 million. Of course not all madrassas teach jehad.
Rubina Saigol says that today the largest recruitment for Afghan and Kashmir Jehad is from the Punjab followed by the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan. Amir Rana`s study reveals that Punjab contributes about 50 percent of the Jihadi workforce, followed by the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan. Punjab has the largest number of deeni madaris (5459 according to a 2002 study). The NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan have 2,483, 1,935 and 769, respectively. Karachi alone accounts for about 2,000 madrassahs. Statistics collected by the ministry of education show that FATA has 135 while Islamabad alone has 77 deeni madaris. According to Rana, the great majority of militants from the Punjab were sent to fight in Kashmir by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, while most of the Pakhtoon and Balochi youth from the NWFP and Balochistan were sent to and killed in Afghanistan. Most belonged to the JUI-F and the TNSM (which has now entered into an agreement with the ANP government of the NWFP). A large number of organisations, such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Jabbar wal Islami, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Badr and Lashkar-e-Islam have participated in the Kashmir and Afghan Jihad getting their poor foot soldiers killed while the leaders enjoy luxurious lifestyles that include Pajeros, expensive mobile phones, large houses and frequent air travel.
Research conducted by the Liberal Forum Pakistan some years ago on the kinds of subjects taught at some of the madrassas found that books published by the Lashkar-e-Taiba were distributed to institutions and madrassas run by the Lashkar’s ideological master the Jamaat-ud Dawa. The theme or the message was that, “Muslims alone have the right to rule the world and are allowed to kill infidels that stand in the way of Islam.” Seven-year old students continue to be taught that infidels are cowards who run away in fear and terror when a holy warrior attacks them; those that kill Hindus are super-heroes; children are taught to beat non-Muslims mercilessly. All second graders are advised that every student should become a holy warrior. Games are about guerrillas and infidels; poems are about the glory of waging jehad and fictitious letters from jehadis are circulated among children. These books are given free of charge to the students. This is where the country’s impoverished mostly send their children, hoping more for food and shelter rather than education.
But where do the country’s middle class send their children and what do they learn? It is usually assumed that if the madrassas were taken care of the problem would eventually be solved. This is not so. Only one-third of the children go to madrassas for education. The rest go to mainstream schools where the curriculum is fixed by the Curriculum Wing of the Ministry of Education. This wing formalises the national curriculum and thus has total monopoly. It functions rather like a Mind Control Brigade.
It is well known that Islamisation of schools began in real earnest during Zia-ul Haq’s time but rewriting of history began in 1971 with an Islamic fervour attached to it even then. Yvette Claire Rosser in her monograph Islamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks brought out by the Observer Research Foundation refers to what Pervez Hoodbhoy and A.H. Nayyar had said in their article ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’ way back in 1985. Referring to Zia’s efforts to Islamise education, they feared that “the full impact of which will probably be felt by the turn of the century, when the present generation of school children attains maturity.”
The Sustainable Development Policy Institute of Islamabad (SDP) had carried out a detailed study in 2002-2003 on what was being taught in Pakistan’s schools. They called their report The Subtle Subversion and their findings are alarming. Gen Musharraf had himself referred to this malaise in his August 14 2002 speech when he spoke of “misconceived views of Islam and fanatical acts of terrorism.” Apart from distortion of history, which is always a matter of debate, the more worrying aspect of the curriculum worked out by the Curriculum Wing is that right from kindergarten through to Class V children are taught to become life-sacrificing mujahids, and told simple stories eulogising jehad.
Linked to the Ideology of Pakistan Studies is an essential component of hate-hate against India and Hindus. Toddlers in Classes I to V, were as late as March 2002, being taught that ‘Hindu has always been the enemy of Islam’, ‘India’s evil designs against Pakistan’, ‘the religion of Hindus did not teach them good things’, ‘ignoble Hindu mentality’. The common theme throughout for students of all ages is jehad and shahadat. Space constraints prevent a fuller account but the scope of the study is vast and thorough and the examples cited are innumerable and frightening.
The SDPI report referring to the problems identified by Musharraf “have in large part been the result of children being educated into ways of thinking that makes them susceptible to a violent and exclusionary worldview open to sectarianism and religious intolerance.” As Dr. Rehman says “If Pakistan is to become a moderate country living in peace with its neighbours, its children cannot be brought up on hate material” (The News, April 1004).
The problem is not just the madrassas but of mainstream schools in Pakistan. Most of the graduates from the madrassas usually end up in the caves of Tora Bora or somewhere equally inhospitable. Those from the mainstream schools go to mainstream colleges and end up with main line jobs at home or in foreign lands. And if we assume that 3 million school children are added to Pakistan’s school going population every year there will be 60 million children who will have imbibed some of these teachings in another 20 years.
Thus we have a mixture of events, thought processes that have resulted in the present situation in Pakistan. The initial political infirmities, the feudal structures, the rise of the military led to a mutual reliance on each other and on religion and an educational structure that taught obscurantism and hatred all combined to make modern day Pakistan. Each misadventure with India was an opportunity for the fundamentalists to strengthen their hold because they diagnosed that the Armed Forces lost because Pakistan was not Islamic enough. The Arm’s excuse was that they too were not strong enough to take on the Indian Army and needed to be strengthened to defend the country. Each adversity strengthened the fundamentalists and the Army and they strengthened each other.
The Afghan jihad had provided the foot soldiers, the training ground and experience to the ISI along with weapons and funds. We mishandled Kashmir in 1989 and Pakistan got the opportunity it needed to settle old scores. The story has been repeated so often that it need not be recounted here. The ‘freedom struggle’ in the Valley morphed into a jihad led by the Pakistani military establishment in the Nineties. They were confident that this would succeed because the Chinese had allowed or helped them test the nuclear bomb in Lop Nor in 1990,the Clinton Administration was harassing India for human rights violations in Kashmir. The jihad in Kashmir just kept getting more vicious and the bond between the Pak Army and its surrogates, old and new kept getting stronger. The culture of jihad simply kept growing.
The Pakistani rulers gave Islamic names to their outfits equipped and trained to fight the Hindu infidel. Thus it was the Lashkar e Tayyaba, (Army of the Pure), Jaish e Mohammed, (Soldiers of Mohammed) Harkat ul Jihad e Islami, (Movement for Islamic Jihad) Harkat ul Mujahedeen (Movement of the Martyrs) ; the terrorists they trained were mujahids and fidayeen. All of this had strong Islamic symbols and association with Prophet Mohammed. Then they equipped them with A-47s and taught them how to use IEDs and rocket launchers. The symbolism and imagery was blood curdling and unfortunate. If there is any organisation in the world which has depicted Muslims as violent and Islam as a religion that encourages violence it has been the Pakistan Army.
As the Indian state did not wither away in the face of jihadi onslaughts, the jihadis and their mentors only became more vicious. By now a kind of Stockholm syndrome had set in with the handlers of the jihadis. There was genuine sympathy for their cause replacing the earlier tactical requirement to bleed the enemy without having to fight him. The jihadis had been a cheap easily dispensable option, there were no casualties to the Pakistan Army and the Indians were tied up in Kashmir. However, unknown to itself each year the Pakistani establishment kept getting deeper into the quagmire but remained oblivious or as usually happens remaining in denial and instead hopeful that victory was round the corner.
Till September 11, 2001 when Pakistan was asked to turn around and it found it was nearly impossible to do so. For some years Musharraf tried to fine tune his compliance to Washington but there were obvious limits to this. He could not launch into his western surrogates without angering them and his own Army; and he could not keep the confidence of the US until he co-operated fully. There was no getting away from having to fight the Taliban even while the jihadis on the eastern front were kept under wraps. The US would accept that. As the battle for Waziristan gathers momentum, ultimately the Pakistan Armed Forces may overwhelm the Taliban foot soldiers but the real danger to Pakistan today is the Talibanisation of the mind that has occurred over the years. The danger is not that the country’s nuclear assets will one day fall into the hands of the Taliban brigands. The danger is that the nuclear assets will one day be controlled by a Talibanised Army.
The Future
For nearly eight years now Pakistan has played a deft game at trying to pretend to help in the US led war on terror by pretending to help against Al Qaeda in short bursts, keeping the Taliban under wraps and doing absolutely nothing to control the jihadis facing India. It has nurtured the Taliban in FATA and there are some who still believe that that the present operation against the Taliban in FATA and NWFP is a carefully crafted charade. The myth of the moderate Taliban and the extremist Taliban has to be sold to the Americans and NATO anxious to find a way out of the mess before Bush’s war becomes Obama’s quagmire.
The reluctance of some Pakistani soldiers to engage the Pushtuns in battle should have worried the essentially Punjabi Army; the manner in which counterinsurgency campaigns have been launched in NWFP and FATA would only create more terrorists than it will eliminate. The Army may pretend it is being anvil to the US forces as it pushes the Taliban towards the Afghan border, but there are confirmed reports to show that many of the Taliban have slipped away to other parts of Pakistan. There have been no reported arrests or killing of any main leader of the Taliban. The only one killed so far has been Baitullah Mehsud’s government sponsored rival.
Pakistan is today acknowledged as the epicentre of terrorism globally. It is also in financial ruin. It is once again listed among the first ten states that are failing or will fail. Its Army is untutored in countering insurgencies. Pakistan’s internal terrorism has spread across the Indus into the Punjab and the two and half million internal refuges will aggravate the situation further. The Durand Line has ceased to be even more irrelevant as the Pushtun Taliban movement acquires nationalistic hues. The picture gets even murkier if one considers that apart from the Taliban, there are followers of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the Haqqani networks, the Uzbeks and Chechens still taking shelter and occasionally making forays into Afghanistan. As the US begins its so called surge, the next year or so will be important. Casualties will rise, so will the campaign by the terrorists.
As Selig Harrison a known authority on the south Asian region, very rightly observed in his article in the Boston Globe, (June 17, 2009) “The danger of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan is real. But it does not come from the Taliban guerrillas now battling the Pakistan Army in the Swat borderlands. It comes from a proliferating network of heavily armed Islamist militias in the Punjab heartland and major cities directed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a close ally of Al Qaeda, which staged the terrorist attack last November in Mumbai, India.” Harrison goes on to say “Under a new name, Jawad-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba has continued to operate its militias, its FM radio station, and hundreds of seminaries where jihadis are trained, in addition to its legitimate charities and educational institutions. When the UN designated Jawat-ud-Dawa as a terrorist group, the Pakistan government issued another ban and Jawat-ud-Dawa changed its name to the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. The “foundation’’ now has 2,000 members doing relief work in war-torn Swat with the approval of the Pakistan government, amid credible reports that it is using its humanitarian cover to recruit new members as it did after the 2002 Kashmir earthquake. Lashkar-e-Taiba is on the Sunni side of the Sunni-Shia doctrinal divide in Islam and has its deepest roots in a 20,000-square-mile swath of southern Punjab between Jhang and Bahawalpur, where it champions the cause of landless Sunni peasants indentured to big Shia landowners.” Punjab is crucial to Pakistan. It has the largest concentration of jihadi organisations, the largest concentration of the country’s armed forces, who recruit from the same pond and all the country’s nuclear assets are in Punjab. For India this is of greater importance than any other factor.
Speaking about Pakistan, he says “Sunni extremist groups have been active in the Punjab since the creation of Pakistan and became the nucleus of Lashkar-e-Taiba when the ISI, with US funding, built up a jihadi movement to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba and key allies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi still get ISI support and have close ties with other intelligence agencies, but how much and how close remain uncertain.”
Bruce Riedel’s commentary (National Interest for the July August 2009 edition) is even more spine chilling. He says “The growing strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has raised the serious possibility of a jihadist takeover of that country. Even with the army’s reluctant efforts in areas like the Swat Valley and sporadic popular revulsion with Taliban violence, at heart the country is unstable. A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future.” He ends his essay about what might happen, appropriately titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” with these words “Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later.” Riedel has advised four sitting US Presidents on Pakistan and was on President Obama’s review board for AfPAk. But the point is how do you help a country that refuses to help itself nor are there enough disincentives to coerce it to fall in line.
If the momentum swings the way of the Taliban/Al Qaeda and the casualties mount the Europeans and even the American public will seek to end this engagement. This is what the Al Qaeda and the Taliban are hoping will happen. Neither the US forces, NATO or the Pakistan Army has the ability to win, clear and hold territory. Unless this happens, there can be no confidence and no reconciliation. The insurgent does not have to win battles; he only has to survive. The Americans won their battles in Vietnam but in the end they had to leave by helicopters.
Despite all the dangers of the present policy, Pakistani establishment will find it extremely difficult to give up its jehadi option. Instead it may seek to diversify and expand through Nepal and Bangladesh. Hence also the need for Pakistan to take shelter with the US and China and function as the former’s surrogates in the region and the latter’s cat’s paw in India. Yet it might end up being what Field Marshall Ayub had once offered to the US -- the Pakistan army is your army. Lately, Pakistani military leaders worry that a secular economically successful and democratic India will raise questions in Pakistan. The fear is that the query will be Why Pakistan? instead of Why not Pakistan ?
Vikram Sood
June 29, 2009
Has since been published as a chapter in the recently published book - “India’s National Security-Annual Review 2009”
By
Vikram Sood
‘See what a scourge is laid upon your hate’
William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet
Some might suggest that this may not be the most appropriate way to describe the tragedy that is being enacted in Pakistan today. Years ago many lamented that places like Jhang, in southern Punjab, the home of Heer Ranjha had become the home of sectarian hatred where Shias were described as kafirs. Sadly this is the story of today’s Pakistan.
Pakistan’s development into a highly Islamised society today can be divided into five periods. From the time of independence till 1971when it was period of search for a non-India identity and a desire to be India’s equal and if not that then to reduce India to its own size. The Seventies were a period of reflection and recuperation and marked by the brutal repression of the Baloch and the arrival of Zia. The Eighties were the heady days of the Afghan jihad where Afghanistan helped acquiring skills and the Indian Punjab theatre was for testing the enemy. The jihad had reaffirmed the power of the faith. The Nineties, having acquired nuclear technology under the benign neglect of its western allies and having tested the bomb kind courtesy the Chinese in Lop Nor in 1990 and confident it could now cut India asunder, Pakistan launched its Kashmir jihad. Not satisfied with this, it also felt strong enough to open a second jihadi front by mentoring the Taliban. It was this arrogance that led to the Kargil misadventure in 1999. We are today witnessing the fifth period of Pakistan’s Islamisation in the post September 2001 where the Pakistani establishment is having to battle its own surrogates. Jihad had become a foreign policy instrument, a force equaliser with India, a means to seek strategic depth in Afghanistan and today it is also a means to acquire financial and military assistance from an anxious West.
There are many in Pakistan who shudder at the thought of what their country has become and the direction in which it is heading but their voice is weak and drowned by the coarseness of the opposition which is armed and dangerous that is willing to kill other Muslims in the name of Islam. They are worried that the rise of religious intolerance is a threat to their fundamental rights and liberties and what is more worrying, they are frightened that if they assert this too strongly they will be declared apostates.
The Early Years
The seeds of this were sown right in the beginning. Pakistan had to be invented almost overnight for the millions and its identity and nationhood imagined. In the early days Pakistan was conceived by a group of elite Muslims who had never lived in the part that eventually became Pakistan. The campaign was on behalf of Muslims who eventually opted to stay behind and on behalf of millions others who were not interested and even opposed to the idea of Pakistan. Thus, one morning many millions woke up in Quetta Peshawar and elsewhere to discover that they had a new address but were not sure of their identity.
And that has been a major problem ever since. From the very beginning, everything had to be non-India, non-Hindu. Pakistani leaders would deny their Indo-Gangetic heritage and seek recognition elsewhere. Instead of being home to Muslims of the subcontinent that it set out to be, a succession of leaders, political and military made it the centre for religious bigotry, sectarian hatred and ethnic divisiveness.
Convinced and therefore fearful that the much larger India would one day swallow Pakistan, the country became a national security state. The Pak policy making elite, encouraged by the Armed Forces in their self serving interests defined threat to Pakistan in terms of the Indian peril. India’s actions were consistently considered hegemonist, its attitude arrogant and designs threatening. Thus any possibility of India acquiring a prominent role in the region, given its comparative military advantage, was seen as a potential threat.
Pakistan’s tragedy was that the feudal politician relied on the army and the mullah to shore his position against this rivals and the Army got rid of the politician from whom he had little respect and relied on the mullah to fill the vacuum and seek justification for its rule and role. Thus, invariably always the Pak Army has aligned itself with the Islamic right after having got rid of the mainstream political opposition because the mainstream politician tended to be too devious and there was always the fear that a popularly elected politician would seek to either curb the Army or make peace with India or both. The military mullah nexus has grown stronger over the years and it has been the Army that has nurtured them to the point that today they threaten to run out of control. Each time a politician has tried to control the Armed Forces or to vaguely attempt some reform, he has suffered for instance, ZA Bhutto (1977), Benazir Bhutto (1991 and 1996) and Nawaz Sharif (1999). In between Bhutto and Sharif were allowed limited freedoms in running the country but the nuclear option, India and Afghanistan were out of bounds for them.
Pakistan’s political leaders were ready to give in to religious demands or pander to the Mullah. It was not the religious or sectarian parties that have pushed Pakistan towards fundamentalism. Islam sat easily with the politician and the people after all it was a Muslim homeland but the politician was pushing it towards a more fundamentalist path. Everyone thinks of Field Marshall Ayub Khan as the epitome of modernity and secularism with his Sandhurst background. A careful reading of his speeches on national integration suggests that these were addressed to the religious lobbies. In 1962 he declared: `Pakistan came into being on the basis of an ideology which does not believe in differences of colour, race or language. It is immaterial whether you are a Bengali or a Sindhi, a Baluchi or a Pathan or a Punjabi - we are all knit together by the bond of Islam.` The Council for Islamic Ideology was established during his rule to scrutinise laws for their conformity to religion.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great leftist and socialist was the one who agreed to the demand to declare the Qadianis non-Muslims in 1974. He also capitulated to the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement by taking certain symbolic measures towards Islamisation and Pakistan became an Islamic Republic in his time. The National Education Policy of 1972 declared that Islam is woven firmly into Pakistani society and latter day education policies only ente3nched this further.
It was Benazir Bhutto`s Home Minister Gen Nasirullah Babar who invented the Taliban and it was during her second tenure that the Taliban gained control of Kabul in 1996 and her government was the first to recognise their rule. Again, during Nawaz Sharif’s first tenure, instituted the death penalty for blasphemy, a law which was then abused by religious zealots against the Ahmadiya and Christian communities. In his second tenure he introduced his infamous Shariat Bill which would have effectively made him Amir-ul-Momineen, for it was designed to gain power by deciding virtue and vice and imposing it upon the country. Most recently, the ANP has entered into a desperate agreement with TNSM for Shariat in return for peace - an expensive peace which may or may not come about! Liberal, centrist and Left-oriented leaders and parties have contributed heavily to the rise of religious fanaticism in order to maintain their hold on power.
Thus it was not Zia ul Haq alone who is responsible for the Islamisation of Pakistan. Each Pakistani leader, from Jinnah to Musharraf contributed although of course Zia was the main contributor in all spheres of Pakistani society especially the Army and the civil service. It was the Zia years that provided the additional fervour for Islamisation. The General went around with the single-mindedness of a zealot to turn the threat of Soviet Russia into an opportunity for grafting his brand of austere Islam on the people. The maulvi of the regiment, till then the butt of many jokes became an all important person; the tenets of Islam had to be rigidly observed. All this is very well documented so one need not repeat all that happened in the Zia years.
The Army Acquires a State
The initial weakness and factionalism of Pak politicians, the desire of the Punjabi and Karachi bureaucrat to control the new state led to an excessive reliance on the military for support where the latter two combined against the politician. From then on to a series of military coups is now a well-documented history of modern Pakistan.
Today, the Pak Army, in particular, is the strongest political force in the country, although under some pressure currently. Its power and influence, built steadily over the last few decades, remains all pervasive despite the fact that nominally there is civilian government in Islamabad. It has been helped in this by both the US and China in pursuit of their strategic interests. Pakistan has been a willing surrogate for the former and a cat’s paw for the latter.
It has acquired enormous economic and financial interests in the country. The Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare trust are the two largest conglomerates in Pakistan.
Along with the Shaheen Foundation and the Behara Foundation, they delve into diverse ventures varying from bakeries, farms, schools, private security firms, commercial banks, insurance companies, radio and TV stations, fertilizer and cement factories, and cereal manufacture. They collect toll at highways, manage PSUs like the PIA and WAPDA, gas stations and shopping malls. Its officers and to a lesser extent, its men receive favourable treatment and largesse by way of land allocations and sinecures in the civilian sector as well as plum posts. The latter has been curbed by General Kayani but this could easily be reversed at any time.
Talibanisation of the Mind
Today Talibanisation is a metaphor for obscurantism and intolerance; it is the Pakistani version of Wahabbism that replaces the soft Sufi Islam of the subcontinent by a medieval rigidity. Babar Sattar (The News May 9, 2009) describes it best in a recent article when he says “Simply put it [Talibanisation] is bigotry, intolerance, obscurantism and coercion practiced in the name of religion that feeds on (a) the fear of change being ushered in by modernity, (b) confusion about the role of religion in the society, and (c) the failure of the state to provide for the basic needs of citizens, including means of subsistence the absence of which renders people desperate and a balanced education without which they lack the tools to question and resist extreme intolerant ideas. The message of the Taliban or other religious bigots can be simple and appealing to a majority of the population that is deprived of basic needs, disempowered and consequently disgruntled. The contract between the citizens and the state is not being honoured by the state and thus the system neither provides for the basic needs of a majority of the citizens nor offers them any real prospect for upward social mobility. This problem of governance is then presented by the maulvi as a consequence of lack of religion.”
The Taliban of today are different from the ones that the Pakistanis sent into Kandahar in 1994 in terms of reach and composition, but retain their essential extremist tendencies. They are not just Afghans from the madrassas of the NWFP and Balochistan. One could call them fragmented or a conglomerate depending upon how they were shaping out. Typical of Pushtun behavioural patterns, there have also been shifting alliances of convenience. The southern Afghan Taliban are more or less unified under Mullah Omar and based around the Quetta Shura. In the east however, facing Pakistan and inside Pakistan, the groups are more diffuse. Pakistan’s hitherto India specific groups like the Punjab- based Lashkar- e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are rendering service with the Taliban of Waziristan. So also are Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the Jalaluddin Haqqani network very popular with the Pakistan ISI and an associate of the Al Qaida and Taliban at different times, and now we have the Waziristan Shura of the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan of Baitullah Mehsud while others also describe Maulana Sufi Mohammed’s Tehrik e Nifaz Shariat Muhammedi as the Malakand Shura of the Taliban. There are now reports of a Punjab branch of the Tehrik Taliban Pakistan. There is thus a wide choice and the Pakistanis would like to convince the world of the existence of the moderate Taliban (those who battle Afghanistan) and the extreme Taliban (those who battle Pakistan). It is difficult to estimate the strength of the Taliban insurgent forces in the Afghanistan and Pakistan; the estimate could be upward of 40000 to 50000 but the hard core would be much smaller. Some estimates put this figure of hard core as 10000 in Afghanistan and about 5000 in Pakistan. The rest are on call in different districts.
Over time the Taliban have acquired experience, skills and weapons along with newer means of communication. They still do not have the strength to conquer territory in mainland Pakistan but the danger is that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban together threaten Pakistan and Afghanistan with their desire to form an Islamic emirate of greater Pushtunistan. It has to be remembered that by 2006 on a resurge, some of the slogans of the Taliban have been very ethnic cum religious. For instance some of the slogans have been, “Our party, the Taliban”, “Our people and nation, the Pushtun”, “Our economy, the poppy,” Our constitution, the Sharia,” “Our form of government, the emirate.” We have had the sharia implemented the Taliban way in Malakand and there has been frequent reference to the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. Their strategy has been one of attrition and exhaustion of the counterinsurgent forces, not conquering of territory in non-Pushtun areas as they do not have the means to overthrow the government through use of force but have the capacity and local popularity to move in where the government is absent or corrupt, unjust and negligent in the extreme. The threat to Pakistan is perhaps less from the Taliban but infinitely more from the Talibanisation of the mind.
The image of Pakistan lies not just in the sophisticated salons of Lahore as many here naively believe. It is the villages that have begun to change drastically where huge loudspeakers at village mosques propagate hard Salafi Islam, oppose Barelvis, Sufis, Shias and other sects as none of these are considered to be Muslims. Even the Punjabis, long considered to be more liberal towards women, are now adopting the Taliban line. Classical music is disappearing, teaching music is violently opposed by the Islami Jamaat-e-Tulaba at the Punjab University, there are few kathak teachers– once the favourite dance at the Mughal courts –available today. Girls at the Kinnaird College Lahore cannot wear jeans to college and head scarves are compulsory in many schools. Again according to Sattar, “Be it warnings delivered to the medical community in NWFP to wear shalwar qameez, or edicts issued to music shops and barbers, or threats communicated to schools, or reports regarding women being harassed in bazaars and public spaces more generally, there has been a surge in vigilante action being carried out by our self-styled moral police. The worst justification for the Nizam-e-Adl regulation comes from liberals within the ANP and the PPP claiming that this legislation doesn't set up a parallel system of justice, as it is merely procedural law adorned with Islamic nomenclature. Accepting the demand to 'enforce' religion legitimizes the discourse of bigots and their obscurantist project of personally stepping into God's shoes to judge fellow Muslims, taking a measure of their sins and delivering divine justice in this world on God's behalf. The growing intolerance that our society is witnessing with mute horror is fuelled by our odious brand of hypocrisy that encourages double-speak in the name of protecting and preserving tradition, culture and religion.” But these are outward signs yet no longer isolated incidents. Pakistan has moved away from the salons of Lahore and the soirees of Karachi.
What has been happening is best described by Pervez Hoodbhoy in his article “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan”. He says “Pakistan’s self inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.” Hoodbhoy describes the education curriculum that is prescribed as “a blue print for a religious fascist state.” This curriculum has been in existence from the time of Zia ul Haq and successive governments including that of the self-proclaimed moderate Musharraf, have merely tinkered with it and today the young minds are fertile grounds for fanaticism.
The country that Jinnah thought of did not move from his version to what it is today in a flash but has been moving towards it for decades but has gathered rapid momentum today, a momentum that is so strong that many wonder if this can at all be stemmed, if not reversed. In its early years Pakistan’s leaders portrayed their country – and the West championed this – that theirs was modern Islamic nation even as they surreptitiously used religion to advance their political fortunes.
Some like Rubina Saigol (The News February 21, 2009) have even questioned Jinnah’s intentions about secularism and modernism. Her essay ‘Myths versus Facts About Fundamentalism’ is to dismantle eight of the most common myths about Muslim fundamentalism and extremism ‘(in our part of the world) by juxtaposing such myths against observable facts.’ One of the myths she dismantles is the belief or the claim that fundamentalism is the result of mental and moral backwardness, attitudes religion and beliefs. Her argument is that ‘Fundamentalism is about geopolitics, involving power, money, and control over territory, people and resources. If we examine the actions and pronouncements of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or the Swat Taliban - actions that include beheading, rape, murder, public display of dead bodies, public executions, suicide bombings killing scores of innocent people - it is not hard to discern that such actions have little to do with religion or a moral order. Through brutal means and barbaric methods, the Taliban have gained control over territory in Swat and Waziristan. They have forced the government to accept their power over people and resources through the Nizam-e-Adl agreement reached between the Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi`s Maulana Sufi Muhammad and the provincial government of the ANP. Apart from drug trafficking, the money is raised from donations received from Saudi Arabia and other countries and goes to pay Rs15,000-20,000 per month to about ten thousand militant followers of Maulana Fazlullah’.
Ms. Saigol also corrects the common myth that only religious parties and sectarian outfits support or forge fundamentalism. The history of Pakistan shows that ‘Fundamentalism has been supported or encouraged as much by the so-called secular elite as by religious parties to maintain class power and privilege. The common assumption that only parties like the JUI-F, JUI-S and Jamaat-e-Islami and sectarian and Jehadi outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan or Harkat-ul-Mujahideen support fundamentalism in Pakistan overlooks the constant capitulation to religious extremism by seemingly secular and liberal parties. Most analysts like to quote Jinnah`s August 11, 1947, speech to argue that he envisioned a secular state, but in several of his other speeches he catered to the religious lobby`s sentiments to justify the two-nation concept. In 1940 he declared: `It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian nation has troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literature. They neither intermarry nor inter-dine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.`
One aspect though that bears repetition is because it is quite often overlooked or at least not fully appreciated. This is that all jihadis were not the products of the NWFP/Balochistan madrassas. On the contrary, many of the jihadis were students at the mainstream schools of Pakistan where too the syllabus was one of distortion of history fed on a diet of hatred for the non- Muslim.
Undoubtedly, madrassas in Pakistan and the madrassa culture as it is commonly referred to, have been the symbols of Islamisation. They were the recruiting grounds and universities for the jehadi foot soldiers for the Afghan and the Kashmir theatre with their own sectarian beliefs and affiliations to different schools of Islamic thought. No one really knows how many madrassas there are and where and exactly what is taught in all of them. Pakistan’s Minister of Religious Affairs told the Brussels-based International Crisis Group in 2002 that the number was 10,000. There has not been any appreciable change in the number. The total number of students at these madrassas is estimated to be more than 1.5 million. Of course not all madrassas teach jehad.
Rubina Saigol says that today the largest recruitment for Afghan and Kashmir Jehad is from the Punjab followed by the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan. Amir Rana`s study reveals that Punjab contributes about 50 percent of the Jihadi workforce, followed by the NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan. Punjab has the largest number of deeni madaris (5459 according to a 2002 study). The NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan have 2,483, 1,935 and 769, respectively. Karachi alone accounts for about 2,000 madrassahs. Statistics collected by the ministry of education show that FATA has 135 while Islamabad alone has 77 deeni madaris. According to Rana, the great majority of militants from the Punjab were sent to fight in Kashmir by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, while most of the Pakhtoon and Balochi youth from the NWFP and Balochistan were sent to and killed in Afghanistan. Most belonged to the JUI-F and the TNSM (which has now entered into an agreement with the ANP government of the NWFP). A large number of organisations, such as Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Jabbar wal Islami, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Al Badr and Lashkar-e-Islam have participated in the Kashmir and Afghan Jihad getting their poor foot soldiers killed while the leaders enjoy luxurious lifestyles that include Pajeros, expensive mobile phones, large houses and frequent air travel.
Research conducted by the Liberal Forum Pakistan some years ago on the kinds of subjects taught at some of the madrassas found that books published by the Lashkar-e-Taiba were distributed to institutions and madrassas run by the Lashkar’s ideological master the Jamaat-ud Dawa. The theme or the message was that, “Muslims alone have the right to rule the world and are allowed to kill infidels that stand in the way of Islam.” Seven-year old students continue to be taught that infidels are cowards who run away in fear and terror when a holy warrior attacks them; those that kill Hindus are super-heroes; children are taught to beat non-Muslims mercilessly. All second graders are advised that every student should become a holy warrior. Games are about guerrillas and infidels; poems are about the glory of waging jehad and fictitious letters from jehadis are circulated among children. These books are given free of charge to the students. This is where the country’s impoverished mostly send their children, hoping more for food and shelter rather than education.
But where do the country’s middle class send their children and what do they learn? It is usually assumed that if the madrassas were taken care of the problem would eventually be solved. This is not so. Only one-third of the children go to madrassas for education. The rest go to mainstream schools where the curriculum is fixed by the Curriculum Wing of the Ministry of Education. This wing formalises the national curriculum and thus has total monopoly. It functions rather like a Mind Control Brigade.
It is well known that Islamisation of schools began in real earnest during Zia-ul Haq’s time but rewriting of history began in 1971 with an Islamic fervour attached to it even then. Yvette Claire Rosser in her monograph Islamisation of Pakistani Social Studies Textbooks brought out by the Observer Research Foundation refers to what Pervez Hoodbhoy and A.H. Nayyar had said in their article ‘Rewriting the History of Pakistan’ way back in 1985. Referring to Zia’s efforts to Islamise education, they feared that “the full impact of which will probably be felt by the turn of the century, when the present generation of school children attains maturity.”
The Sustainable Development Policy Institute of Islamabad (SDP) had carried out a detailed study in 2002-2003 on what was being taught in Pakistan’s schools. They called their report The Subtle Subversion and their findings are alarming. Gen Musharraf had himself referred to this malaise in his August 14 2002 speech when he spoke of “misconceived views of Islam and fanatical acts of terrorism.” Apart from distortion of history, which is always a matter of debate, the more worrying aspect of the curriculum worked out by the Curriculum Wing is that right from kindergarten through to Class V children are taught to become life-sacrificing mujahids, and told simple stories eulogising jehad.
Linked to the Ideology of Pakistan Studies is an essential component of hate-hate against India and Hindus. Toddlers in Classes I to V, were as late as March 2002, being taught that ‘Hindu has always been the enemy of Islam’, ‘India’s evil designs against Pakistan’, ‘the religion of Hindus did not teach them good things’, ‘ignoble Hindu mentality’. The common theme throughout for students of all ages is jehad and shahadat. Space constraints prevent a fuller account but the scope of the study is vast and thorough and the examples cited are innumerable and frightening.
The SDPI report referring to the problems identified by Musharraf “have in large part been the result of children being educated into ways of thinking that makes them susceptible to a violent and exclusionary worldview open to sectarianism and religious intolerance.” As Dr. Rehman says “If Pakistan is to become a moderate country living in peace with its neighbours, its children cannot be brought up on hate material” (The News, April 1004).
The problem is not just the madrassas but of mainstream schools in Pakistan. Most of the graduates from the madrassas usually end up in the caves of Tora Bora or somewhere equally inhospitable. Those from the mainstream schools go to mainstream colleges and end up with main line jobs at home or in foreign lands. And if we assume that 3 million school children are added to Pakistan’s school going population every year there will be 60 million children who will have imbibed some of these teachings in another 20 years.
Thus we have a mixture of events, thought processes that have resulted in the present situation in Pakistan. The initial political infirmities, the feudal structures, the rise of the military led to a mutual reliance on each other and on religion and an educational structure that taught obscurantism and hatred all combined to make modern day Pakistan. Each misadventure with India was an opportunity for the fundamentalists to strengthen their hold because they diagnosed that the Armed Forces lost because Pakistan was not Islamic enough. The Arm’s excuse was that they too were not strong enough to take on the Indian Army and needed to be strengthened to defend the country. Each adversity strengthened the fundamentalists and the Army and they strengthened each other.
The Afghan jihad had provided the foot soldiers, the training ground and experience to the ISI along with weapons and funds. We mishandled Kashmir in 1989 and Pakistan got the opportunity it needed to settle old scores. The story has been repeated so often that it need not be recounted here. The ‘freedom struggle’ in the Valley morphed into a jihad led by the Pakistani military establishment in the Nineties. They were confident that this would succeed because the Chinese had allowed or helped them test the nuclear bomb in Lop Nor in 1990,the Clinton Administration was harassing India for human rights violations in Kashmir. The jihad in Kashmir just kept getting more vicious and the bond between the Pak Army and its surrogates, old and new kept getting stronger. The culture of jihad simply kept growing.
The Pakistani rulers gave Islamic names to their outfits equipped and trained to fight the Hindu infidel. Thus it was the Lashkar e Tayyaba, (Army of the Pure), Jaish e Mohammed, (Soldiers of Mohammed) Harkat ul Jihad e Islami, (Movement for Islamic Jihad) Harkat ul Mujahedeen (Movement of the Martyrs) ; the terrorists they trained were mujahids and fidayeen. All of this had strong Islamic symbols and association with Prophet Mohammed. Then they equipped them with A-47s and taught them how to use IEDs and rocket launchers. The symbolism and imagery was blood curdling and unfortunate. If there is any organisation in the world which has depicted Muslims as violent and Islam as a religion that encourages violence it has been the Pakistan Army.
As the Indian state did not wither away in the face of jihadi onslaughts, the jihadis and their mentors only became more vicious. By now a kind of Stockholm syndrome had set in with the handlers of the jihadis. There was genuine sympathy for their cause replacing the earlier tactical requirement to bleed the enemy without having to fight him. The jihadis had been a cheap easily dispensable option, there were no casualties to the Pakistan Army and the Indians were tied up in Kashmir. However, unknown to itself each year the Pakistani establishment kept getting deeper into the quagmire but remained oblivious or as usually happens remaining in denial and instead hopeful that victory was round the corner.
Till September 11, 2001 when Pakistan was asked to turn around and it found it was nearly impossible to do so. For some years Musharraf tried to fine tune his compliance to Washington but there were obvious limits to this. He could not launch into his western surrogates without angering them and his own Army; and he could not keep the confidence of the US until he co-operated fully. There was no getting away from having to fight the Taliban even while the jihadis on the eastern front were kept under wraps. The US would accept that. As the battle for Waziristan gathers momentum, ultimately the Pakistan Armed Forces may overwhelm the Taliban foot soldiers but the real danger to Pakistan today is the Talibanisation of the mind that has occurred over the years. The danger is not that the country’s nuclear assets will one day fall into the hands of the Taliban brigands. The danger is that the nuclear assets will one day be controlled by a Talibanised Army.
The Future
For nearly eight years now Pakistan has played a deft game at trying to pretend to help in the US led war on terror by pretending to help against Al Qaeda in short bursts, keeping the Taliban under wraps and doing absolutely nothing to control the jihadis facing India. It has nurtured the Taliban in FATA and there are some who still believe that that the present operation against the Taliban in FATA and NWFP is a carefully crafted charade. The myth of the moderate Taliban and the extremist Taliban has to be sold to the Americans and NATO anxious to find a way out of the mess before Bush’s war becomes Obama’s quagmire.
The reluctance of some Pakistani soldiers to engage the Pushtuns in battle should have worried the essentially Punjabi Army; the manner in which counterinsurgency campaigns have been launched in NWFP and FATA would only create more terrorists than it will eliminate. The Army may pretend it is being anvil to the US forces as it pushes the Taliban towards the Afghan border, but there are confirmed reports to show that many of the Taliban have slipped away to other parts of Pakistan. There have been no reported arrests or killing of any main leader of the Taliban. The only one killed so far has been Baitullah Mehsud’s government sponsored rival.
Pakistan is today acknowledged as the epicentre of terrorism globally. It is also in financial ruin. It is once again listed among the first ten states that are failing or will fail. Its Army is untutored in countering insurgencies. Pakistan’s internal terrorism has spread across the Indus into the Punjab and the two and half million internal refuges will aggravate the situation further. The Durand Line has ceased to be even more irrelevant as the Pushtun Taliban movement acquires nationalistic hues. The picture gets even murkier if one considers that apart from the Taliban, there are followers of Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, the Haqqani networks, the Uzbeks and Chechens still taking shelter and occasionally making forays into Afghanistan. As the US begins its so called surge, the next year or so will be important. Casualties will rise, so will the campaign by the terrorists.
As Selig Harrison a known authority on the south Asian region, very rightly observed in his article in the Boston Globe, (June 17, 2009) “The danger of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan is real. But it does not come from the Taliban guerrillas now battling the Pakistan Army in the Swat borderlands. It comes from a proliferating network of heavily armed Islamist militias in the Punjab heartland and major cities directed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a close ally of Al Qaeda, which staged the terrorist attack last November in Mumbai, India.” Harrison goes on to say “Under a new name, Jawad-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba has continued to operate its militias, its FM radio station, and hundreds of seminaries where jihadis are trained, in addition to its legitimate charities and educational institutions. When the UN designated Jawat-ud-Dawa as a terrorist group, the Pakistan government issued another ban and Jawat-ud-Dawa changed its name to the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. The “foundation’’ now has 2,000 members doing relief work in war-torn Swat with the approval of the Pakistan government, amid credible reports that it is using its humanitarian cover to recruit new members as it did after the 2002 Kashmir earthquake. Lashkar-e-Taiba is on the Sunni side of the Sunni-Shia doctrinal divide in Islam and has its deepest roots in a 20,000-square-mile swath of southern Punjab between Jhang and Bahawalpur, where it champions the cause of landless Sunni peasants indentured to big Shia landowners.” Punjab is crucial to Pakistan. It has the largest concentration of jihadi organisations, the largest concentration of the country’s armed forces, who recruit from the same pond and all the country’s nuclear assets are in Punjab. For India this is of greater importance than any other factor.
Speaking about Pakistan, he says “Sunni extremist groups have been active in the Punjab since the creation of Pakistan and became the nucleus of Lashkar-e-Taiba when the ISI, with US funding, built up a jihadi movement to fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba and key allies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi still get ISI support and have close ties with other intelligence agencies, but how much and how close remain uncertain.”
Bruce Riedel’s commentary (National Interest for the July August 2009 edition) is even more spine chilling. He says “The growing strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has raised the serious possibility of a jihadist takeover of that country. Even with the army’s reluctant efforts in areas like the Swat Valley and sporadic popular revulsion with Taliban violence, at heart the country is unstable. A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future.” He ends his essay about what might happen, appropriately titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” with these words “Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later.” Riedel has advised four sitting US Presidents on Pakistan and was on President Obama’s review board for AfPAk. But the point is how do you help a country that refuses to help itself nor are there enough disincentives to coerce it to fall in line.
If the momentum swings the way of the Taliban/Al Qaeda and the casualties mount the Europeans and even the American public will seek to end this engagement. This is what the Al Qaeda and the Taliban are hoping will happen. Neither the US forces, NATO or the Pakistan Army has the ability to win, clear and hold territory. Unless this happens, there can be no confidence and no reconciliation. The insurgent does not have to win battles; he only has to survive. The Americans won their battles in Vietnam but in the end they had to leave by helicopters.
Despite all the dangers of the present policy, Pakistani establishment will find it extremely difficult to give up its jehadi option. Instead it may seek to diversify and expand through Nepal and Bangladesh. Hence also the need for Pakistan to take shelter with the US and China and function as the former’s surrogates in the region and the latter’s cat’s paw in India. Yet it might end up being what Field Marshall Ayub had once offered to the US -- the Pakistan army is your army. Lately, Pakistani military leaders worry that a secular economically successful and democratic India will raise questions in Pakistan. The fear is that the query will be Why Pakistan? instead of Why not Pakistan ?
Vikram Sood
June 29, 2009
Has since been published as a chapter in the recently published book - “India’s National Security-Annual Review 2009”
