Pakistan

Published in Business & Economy

As you sow, so shall you reap!


Musharraf begins to unlearn promoting insurgency and learn counter-insurgency lessons.

President Musharraf may have been the best trainee-commando during his training at the Pakistani para-commando school. He must have imbibed the lessons to engineer hostage-taking techniques and seizures of religious places (Golden temple and Charar-e-Sharif mosque) in India. Alas what the school had failed to teach him was how to defuse such situations in his own country. And that is what he is learning the hard way, during his face off with militants in Lal Masjid.
Unlike the Indians, who had displayed great restraint by offering "biryani" to the terrorists inside the Charar-e-Sharif mosque, Musharraf, much like the Russians (who used a chemical agent to diffuse the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in October 2002) is using strong arm tactics to smoke out the 1,800 to 1,900 students, both local Taliban and Islami Jamiat Talibat, holed up inside the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa. The heavy shelling of the mosque by Pakistani rangers has already claimed more than 50 lives, upsetting the rank & file of fundamentalists in Pakistan. The fear of getting killed by the Pakistani forces has already led to the escape and surrender by few students (at least 45 extremists had jumped out of mosque on the third day of the siege). Even the Lal Masjid chief cleric Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi had agreed to drop all his demands in-lieu of safe passage for him and all the students currently alive within the premises. However, seeing the humiliating treatment meted to his brother, Maulana Abdul Aziz (the deputy chief cleric), who, clad in ‘burqa’, had tried to escape the scene of action, Ghazi altered his unconditional offer to surrender.
"Musharraf had no other option but to attack the fundamentalists. He could not allow the Islamists to dictate terms in the heart of the Capital," Alok Bansal, a noted South Asia expert and author of several books on Pakistan told B&E. One certainly cannot deny that Musharraf has taken the right action by attacking the core of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. Was the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, unaware of extremists fortifying their positions in the Pakistani capital? What made Musharraf act now? Was it the domestic political pressure exerted on his regime by the growing protests over the imbroglio over the Chief Justice? According to Awami National Party (ANP) NWFP parliamentary leader Bashir Ahmed Bilour, "Lal Masjid was a planned incident aimed to deceive the world that fundamentalists had laid siege to Islamabad and it was necessary for the army to stay in power to crush them." Beyond doubt, Musharraf has been successful in convincing the Westerners that they have no choice; it's either he or the Mullahs who shall rule Pakistan.
Of his own accord, Musharraf allowed terrorism to fester right under the seat of his power for a long time. Lal Masjid is but a desparate attempt by him to contain it, lest it devours him as well.