Shortly before he met his death in a blaze of machine gun fire, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi made a last call from his mobile phone. As the siege of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) complex in the centre of Islamabad lurched towards its denouement, Ghazi, a vice-principal of the radical mosque, reached Ayesha, one of his sisters. At 7am on Tuesday July 10, he relayed the news she most feared: that the commandos who had stormed into the compound that dawn, on the order of Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s US-backed president, had made a martyr of their mother.
“He told me he could smell a unique scent, perfume-like in its intensity, coming from her body,” says Ayesha. She is enveloped by a black burqa as she sits cross-legged on a carpet, next to her sister in the family’s house in a well-to-do suburb of the capital. “He sought a pledge from me that we would not mourn his death but celebrate his martyrdom,” she says. “Now the same scent is coming out of his burial place and people are coming from all over Pakistan to inhale this smell and to take home with them earth from his grave.”
Exactly how many people died at Lal Masjid is disputed. In a speech in July, Musharraf put the toll at “around 75 militants” and 10 commandos, but Pakistan’s religious parties maintain that more than 1,000 people perished. “The operation was carried out under mysterious circumstances,” says Saeeda Bibi, a volunteer at Islamabad’s Jinnah Sports Stadium, which is serving as a gathering point for 62 families who have provided DNA samples in the hope of tracing missing relatives who may have died in the siege. “Many bodies were buried in mass graves; others thrown from trucks or into streams. No one knows.”
What is clear is that the bloodbath widened a fault line that runs through Pakistan, between moderate and militant Islam. On July 18, as a wave of revenge suicide attacks swept the country, Musharraf, who seized power in a coup eight years ago, declared an open war on militant Islam. “It is moderates against extremists,” he said, appealing to widespread revulsion in Pakistan at the way the mosque had become a haven for militants.
“Middle-class people were fed up with the tactics of these two mullahs and felt it was none of their business to enforce their version of sharia law on the people,” says Anwar H. Siddiqui, president of Islamabad’s International Islamic University. “While they understand that some people may not approve of massage parlours, sex films and music stores, they do not want them taking the law into their own hands and forcing people to do what they want.”
Back at Jinnah Stadium, Zahid Iqbal, 28, an articulate English speaker with a trimmed beard and fashionable glasses, has taken time off from his job as a lift operator in a government office to hunt for his younger brother. There is no sign of Naveed in the jails, hospitals or morgues of Islamabad, nor any trace of his DNA. The Iqbals, like many families torn apart by the Lal Masjid siege, are migrants to the capital from the north west, a mountainous region steeped in the intense fundamentalism of the Afghan frontier rather than the moderate Islam of the plains that border India. The Lal Masjid and its seminaries had strong links to the tribal areas of Pakistan, which provided many of their students.
“He was very strict in his religious beliefs, in the Koran, and would never even let himself be photographed,” Zahid says of his brother, who had recently spent two years memorising the Koran at a madrasa back in the family’s home district of Dir, in the North-West Frontier Province. By the time the Lal Masjid standoff started in January, the 23-year-old had enrolled on an eight-year course at the Jamia Faridia, a nearby seminary, which would have qualified him for employment as a prayer leader. Like hundreds of other religious students across Pakistan, he left his madrasa to show solidarity with the mosque’s campaign to enforce sharia law on the capital.
The brothers last spoke on Friday July 6, days before Musharraf terminated negotiations with Ghazi and sent in the commando unit he had himself once led. ”I asked him to leave, but he said he would be fired upon by the Pakistan Rangers and that it was much safer inside,” Zahid says, echoing a popular criticism of the government’s handling of the siege. ”He knew that he might be martyred, but it is not possible for me to say that he wanted to die. We spoke for no more than three or four minutes and I do not know whether he was seeking martyrdom or simply trapped inside.”
Three-quarters of an hour’s drive from Jinnah Stadium lies the suburb of Hamza Town. Many migrants from the north west live here and the men out on the streets in the searing heat are all bearded. Banners hang across narrow lanes hailing the martyrdom of Ajmal Mehmood, a local boy who died in the siege. After three years of education at a madrassa, Mehmood had been running a stall selling apple, banana and mango milkshakes when he heard Ghazi’s call. On July 4, the 18-year-old walked through the mosque’s gates, ready to lay down his life.
As they watched the siege on television, the family stayed in contact with him by phone until July 9, the day before he died. “He said he was in the last stages of jihad,” says his brother, Asad, an intense young man who asks if I am a Muslim and sighs when he hears my reply. “We urged him to come back, telling him he had three sisters who loved him, but he refused, saying that he had thousands of sisters in the Jamia Hafsa [the women’s madrasa adjacent to the Lal Masjid] and that he had a responsibility towards them because they were defending Islam.” Asad says he “regrets [his] brother’s absence but rejoices at [his] martyrdom”.
The crisis came at an opportune time for Musharraf, who is under intense political pressure within Pakistan to withdraw from politics. Many of his critics believe he manipulated the protracted siege to reinforce the perception in Washington that the military is the only institution capable of forestalling a Taliban-style Islamic revolution in Pakistan. They point out that Lal Masjid had been the mosque of choice for officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, located nearby, and that the Pakistani military had long been the main sponsor of the jihadi groups that managed to smuggle arms into the Lal Masjid.
If Musharraf’s accusers are right, it is a dangerous game to be playing. George W. Bush’s congratulatory message in the wake of the operation has sent anti-American and anti-Musharraf feeling soaring in Hamza Town and thousands of communities like it. “For every martyr who died, 2,000 have been born,” says Ajmal’s father, Qazi Khalil Ur Rehman, a rheumy-eyed man who helps run the mosque that adjoins their house. “My son had no limbs when they gave me back his body. I pray that Allah brings ruin to Pervez Musharraf and his government as he is an evil, disgusting man. This is a desire shared by a large number of people in Pakistan. It is a common prayer these days.”
Musharraf’s decision to raid the landmark mosque has weakened the position of the moderate mullahs who once supported him. Leaders of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA, the United Council of Action), an alliance of six conservative religious parties, now fear being outflanked by more radical firebrands. “Liaqot Baloch [the MMA’s parliamentary leader] and Qazi Hussain Ahmad [its president] are seen as sell-outs by the Lal Masjid crowd,” says Joshua T. White, a research fellow at the Washington-based Council on Faith and International Affairs. He recently spent 10 months studying the religious politics of the North-West Frontier Province.
Although the US has called for “free and fair” elections later this year, leading south Asia experts suggest that Washington is, in reality, grateful to have Musharraf in power, satisfied with a facade of civilian rule and keen for him to co-opt popular politicians such as Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, into his handpicked government. “They’re not looking at the long-term political situation in Pakistan,” says Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The only thing that matters for the US is Afghanistan.”
On Monday, Pakistan unceremoniously deported Nawaz Sharif, bundling the former prime minister on to a plane to Jeddah hours after he had landed at Islamabad airport. The US is widely believed to have urged Saudi Arabia to intervene on Musharraf’s behalf out of a concern that his presence in the country would destabilise the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), many of whose members might have defected to Sharif if he had been allowed to lead his own party, the similarly named Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), into the forthcoming elections.
In the nearer future, US support for military rule in Pakistan – a glaring anomaly in a foreign policy that is presented as a grand exercise in the delivery of democracy to the Muslim world – will be contingent on Musharraf showing more rapid progress in extirpating Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from the tribal regions abutting the Afghan border. Without the assistance of prominent MMA leaders, it will be hard for him to enter into a dialogue with Taliban leaders, pushing him relentlessly towards a military solution to a conflict that looks increasingly like a Pashtun nationalist insurgency.
“The relationship between the government and the MMA, which is the political wing of these militant groups, has been completely destroyed by the Lal Masjid [siege],” says Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a former professor of Pakistan Studies at Columbia University and now a political and defence consultant in Lahore. “The ability of the government to use the MMA as intermediaries has diminished, which we can see from the fact that we haven’t heard a single statement from the MMA criticising the suicide attacks [avenging Lal Masjid].”
There is now a dangerous tension between the US’s demand for immediate results and the Pakistani army’s concern about its ability to deliver a sustainable military solution to these problems. US criticism of Musharraf’s failure to root out terrorist “safe havens” and threats of unilateral strikes by presidential candidates have been deeply resented. “A lot of Muslim people, including women and children, are dying because of indiscriminate bombing,” says Siddiqui, of International Islamic University. “Wherever people die because of US pressure for military action, their progeny are prone to taking revenge.”
At a July 11 House Armed Services Committee hearing on global threats, top US intelligence officials offered an assessment that the al-Qaeda terrorist network had become progressively active in western Pakistan, where they were deemed to be enjoying ”safe haven” and increased financial support. A subsequent unclassified version of a new National Intelligence Estimate on terrorist threats to the US homeland concluded that al-Qaeda ”has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership”.
A senior US official with direct experience of the tribal areas admits, however, that “there is no military solution”. The Pakistani army, which recently increased its strength along the border, has suffered unprecedented “retribution” for the operation at Lal Masjid. “The uptick in attacks has been far more significant than anything we’ve seen before,” he says. The increase, moreover, has been in IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and suicide attacks rather than direct assaults. “They’ve realised that if they want to create a lot of casualties at minimum loss, this is the way. Up until Lal Masjid, Pakistan had 450-460 soldiers killed in action since 2001. In the aftermath, it’s been almost the same again.”
Five days after the storming of the mosque, on July 15, pro-Taliban militants in North Waziristan announced their withdrawal from a controversial September 2006 truce made with Islamabad, claiming the accord had been violated by the army. On the same day, US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley told an interviewer that Washington had determined Musharraf’s policies in the region to be ineffective and said the US fully supported new efforts to crack down on pro-Taliban militants blamed for a 50-60 per cent increase in the number of foreign fighters infiltrating into Afghanistan in recent months.
Underpinning the anger in the north west is the feeling that the government, under US pressure, assumes that all of the foreign fighters who came to the region in the 1980s to fight the Soviets, and who have since settled there, marrying into Pashtun communities and integrating into local society, are now fighting the US or Afghan forces. “Many have the perception that they are innocent but find that they are being bracketed as Taliban,” says Siddiqui. “The intelligence needs to be very precise as to who is or is not a Taliban, who is or is not a fighter.”
The Bush administration has fallen into the same trap as many of its predecessors, dealing with Pakistan according to its own short-term security-driven interests and leaving deep-rooted problems to “the next administration”. Frederic Grare, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued in a recent report that Pakistan’s “lack of democratic culture is an essential problem that is too often set aside in favour of more pressing short-term objectives”. Or, as US Senator Joe Biden, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, puts it, the White House has managed to have a “Musharraf policy”, but “no Pakistan policy”.
Shafqat Mahmood, a political analyst based in Lahore, says: “With the Lal Masjid siege, a line of blood has been drawn and Musharraf will never be forgiven. We are fighting extremism in the wrong way. In a country of 160 million people, if 5 per cent are extremists, that’s 8 million people with whom Musharraf has ruled out any possibility of a dialogue. The US doesn’t care if, in fighting al-Qaeda, we kill 50,000 tribesmen and have a problem on our hands for the next 50 years. The US wants everything done in three months when our national interest is that this takes three years. Democracy gives us a much better chance of tackling extremism than military rule.”
US officials claim a Bhutto premiership would hasten educational reforms. There are now an estimated 10,000 madrasas in Pakistan, providing free religious education, board and lodging to millions of children. While only a few explicitly encourage militancy, many use textbooks that encourage religious chauvinism and leave students susceptible to romantic notions of jihad. The International Crisis Group, a think-tank with an office in Islamabad, says that madrasas’ “constrained world view [and] lack of modern civic education make them a destabilising factor in Pakistani society”.
But it would be a mistake to believe Bhutto offers a panacea for Pakistan’s problems. If she comes to power at the invitation of the military, as the beneficiary of a selective reconciliation with the country’s exiled political leadership, there is no chance that she will be able to wrest control of the country’s rogue intelligence community, nuclear programme or jihadi assets in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
“The mindset in Washington is that its relationship with Pakistan is rooted in its status as a major ally in the war on terror,” says one western ambassador in Islamabad. It is telling that of approximately $10bn given in assistance to Pakistan since September 11 2001, only $900m has gone to development, according to figures cited in a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report. “The Pakistan army’s adept bargaining with the US has helped ensure its ongoing political power,” says Frederic Grare. “This has undermined civilian government and impaired almost every aspect of Pakistan’s social, political and economic life ... Demilitarising Pakistan and setting it on the long path toward democracy are therefore prerequisites for the long-term stability of the region.”
Jo Johnson is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief
