How much can India rely on President Pervez Musharraf ending the proxy war through cross-border terrorism that Pakistan has been waging against it for over two decades? Those who say that it can do so to a very great extent, point to the steps he has already taken and his promise to do much more, including the announcement of a total plan "in a few days". They also point to his efforts to regulate the functioning of the madarsas, which are geared to mass production of fanatics who swell the ranks of fundamentalist Islamic militias. If the results of his attempts to curb the latter have not been as effective as India would want them to be, it is not because the President is not serious. It is because it is most difficult to control them; their members are well-armed, well-organised and enjoy support among a large section of Pakistan's population. Unless conducted with extreme caution, patience and finesse, any attempt to rein them in may lead to Musharraf's ouster and civil war.
It would be interesting to see how far what they say is tenable.
President Pervez Musharraf first seemed to act against the fundamentalist militias and to try to regulate the functioning of the madarsas in August last year. In a televised speech on the occasion of Pakistan's independence day on August 14, he announced the banning of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a violent Sunni Muslim group, and Sipah-e-Mohammad, a violent Shia group, both of which have been implicated in attacks on mosques, funerals and drive-by shootings. Besides, he also announced the enactment of a tough anti-terrorist law and warned two other terrorist groups, the Sunni Sipaha-e-Sahaba and the Shia Tehrik-e-Jafria. He thundered, "We want to stop this ethnic and sectarian violence. We want it stopped now". He ordered an immediate end to speeches that promoted hate and "attacked the beliefs of others."
As President Musharraf's reference to "ethnic and sectarian violence" made it clear, the banning of the two organisations mentioned had everything to do with bloody sectarian clashes between Shias and Sunnis which, like those between Mohajirs and Pathans, have been tearing Pakistan apart, and nothing to do with cross-border terrorism against India. Steps, which could be projected as constituting an attempt to address the latter, were taken on Monday, August 20, when the Sindh provincial government banned jihadi groups from displaying signboards at their offices and collecting funds by placing donation boxes in public places. Officials made it clear that the ban would apply to all groups including those active in Kashmir. An AFP report which mentioned this also quoted a source stating that the restrictions would apply to terrorist organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul Mujahideen (HuM) and Al-Badr (AL) unleashing violence in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.
On Tuesday August 21, police in Karachi raided the offices of the above organisations and the houses of their leaders, arresting over 200 of their activists and confiscating weapons. The crackdown continued on August 23 when police sealed 24 of their offices, arrested the leaders of sectarian organisations like the Sipaha-e-Sahaba and Tehrik-e-Jafria involved in terrorism within Pakistan, raided 10 seminaries and mosques and recovered weapons including pistols and a rifle.
The crackdown ended with a whimper as the affected organisations reacted in anger. All 200 persons arrested were released shortly before midnight on August 21. On Friday, August 24 night, the Corps Commander of the Sindh province, Lt-Gen Tareeq Wasim Ghazi, told a hurriedly-convened press conference in Karachi that no official campaign was going on against the jihadi organisations to stop them from collecting funds. Earlier in the day, a special meeting of the representatives of these organisations convened by the LeT at Lahore, had demanded the resignation of the interior minister, Lt Gen (Retd) Moinuddin Haider, and condemned the ban as being against the teachings of Islam and as a result of the conspiracy by Jews. It had declared that the Sindh government's action would hurt the ongoing "liberation struggle" in Kashmir and accused President Musharraf of ordering it to please the Americans.
No more successful was the attempt to integrate the over 45,000 privately-run madarsas into Pakistan's general education system through an Ordinance promulgated on August 19, 2001. It provided for the registration, regulation and standardisation of the madarsas and the enforcement of uniformity in the curricula followed by them. It also provided for the management of seminaries called dini madarsas by the Pakistan Madrasa Education board whose members were to be appointed by the federal government. The Ordinance remained a piece of paper and the madarsas remained factories for the mass production of zealots ready to die for jihad all over the world, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
The question arises whether the Pakistani government was unwilling or afraid to act. Not so long ago, it was said that the Musharraf government would be overthrown by the fundamentalist Islamic militia like the LeT and JeM and pro-Taliban and pro-Osama elements in the armed forces if Pakistan joined the US-led coalition against terrorism. It did. The Government easily suppressed the riots that broke out in several cities following US military action in Afghanistan. By the same token, it should not be difficult for it to suppress any violent campaign the jihadi forces may launch now-particularly after the crushing blows suffered by the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan have completely demoralised them and their patrons in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The conclusion that the Pakistani government's drive against the jihadi militias in August last year as well as the more recent one against the LeT and the JeM following the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, was an eyewash becomes uanvoidable from a recent report in The Sunday Telegraph of Britain. According to it, tipped off in advance, both LeT and JeM, had moved their offices, appointed new leaders in place of Prof Hafiz Mohammad Saeed (LeT) and Maulana Masood Azhar (JeM) and withdrawn most of their funds from their bank accounts, before the raids began.
The impression that Pakistan had only gone through the motions of acting against the jihadi militias and the madarsas to ward off pressure from the US and had no intention of moving seriously against them is reinforced by the record of its earlier duplicitous conduct. In his Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America Yossef Bodanksy shows how in the 1980s the ISI was diverting the bulk of the funds received from the CIA for training Afghan Mujahideen to bitterly anti-US fundamentalist Islamic groups and starving the pro-US Mujahideen of funds. India has had ample experience of Pakistan's treachery. Besides, in his Terrorist State as a Frontline Ally (Lancer Paper 7) B Raman shows how Pakistan's present proxy war is not the result of its determination to avenge its defeat in 1971 but of "an assessment made by the Pakistani intelligence community in the early 1950s that keeping India destabilised and its military preoccupied with internal security duties would be one way of neutralising, at little cost, the superiority of the Indian Armed Forces over their Pakistani counterpart." Hence Pakistan's assistance to Naga rebels since the 1950s and Mizo insurgents since the mid-1960s.
New Delhi will, therefore, have
to be very careful about whatever dramatic plan that President Musharraf
may now announce to "curb" terrorism. In all likelihood it will be meant
for sabotage during implementation. Nor should it be taken in if the announcement
is followed by a halt in terrorist violence. It will in all probability
suggest that Pakistan is only lying low for the time being, trying to protect
the jihadi militias and their infrastructure of terror to the extent possible
while American and British pressure to destroy them continues. It will
be business as usual once it is off.