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The recent arrests of some Pakistani
Army officers for their links with the Al Qaeda should not come as a surprise.
Till the 9/11 terror strikes in the United States, religious terrorism
had virtually grown into a profitable industry in Pakistan. India bore
its brunt, but the US did not show much concern.
It is generally agreed that Sunni
fundamentalism infected the Pakistani Army during General Ziaul Haq's rule
from 1977 to 1988. It was during this period that Pakistani army officers
and the ISI got directly involved with the jihadi elements - both local
and foreign - to defeat the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But the army's
mindset for jihadi operations had long been prepared. Its root lies in
the very ideology which created Pakistan - the two-nation theory, which
was later referred to as Pakistan's ideology. The Pakistani Army's invasion
of Kashmir in 1947 was its first jihadi operation. It was from here that
armed forces began claiming that they were not only the defenders of Pakistan's
borders but also its ideology.
When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power, he was pressured by Islamic parties to declare the Ahmediyyas as non-Muslims. Hundreds of Ahmediyya officers, consequently, had to quit the Army - and ultimately the country. That drastically disturbed the sectarian balance in the army and paved the way for its Sunnisation. It is accepted by Pakistani leaders that no civilian movement in their country succeeds without the army's support. A violent movement against the Ahmediyyas failed in 1953 because, under Ayub Khan, the army did not support it. But in 1974, it succeeded when the army was trying to rehabilitate itself, after the ignominy of the 1971 defeat. During General Zia's time, Saudi Arabia, which supports Sunni fundamentalism, asked Pakistan to withdraw Shia soldiers from their land. This further damaged sectarian cohesion in the Pakistani Army.
During the US-led operations against Soviet presence in Afghanistan in 1980s, jihadi groups indoctrinated and trained by the Pakistani Army and the CIA to fight were mainly Sunni. The Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Islam and the Jamaat-i-Islami (both Sunni outfits) were assigned the job of laying a network of madarsas throughout Pakistan to provide military training to young Pakistanis and foreign soldiers, particularly from the Arab countries.
By the time the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Islamic militancy had become a flourishing industry in Pakistan. Militants who had got used to the lifestyle of the Ghazis declared that jihad had not ended with the end of the Afghan war. Thousands of Arabs, mostly Wahabis, and Afghan fighters, who had poured into Pakistan, decided to stay on, using the country as their launching pad for attacks against the "un-Islamic" Governments in their own countries. The English language journal Herald quoted some of them in 1993 as saying they had the support of Pakistani officials.
The Chief of the Services Offices for Afghanistan was quoted as saying that jihad would not end as long as a single non-Muslim was left in the world. This was the teaching of Markaz-ud Dawa in Muridke near Lahore. Markaz, established in 1986 during General Zia's rule, provided indoctrination to its pupils and took them to Afghanistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir for practical jihadi training. The then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif banned its annual conferences, but when General Pervez Musharraf staged his military coup in 1999, the ban was lifted. The General had close links with jihadi groups until 9/11. The Al Dawa University in Peshawar had become a breeding ground for international jihadis.
There are reports of General Musharraf's close association with the jihadis, the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda until 9/11. After the WTC attacks, however, he saw an opportunity to sustain himself politically with US help by discarding those very fundamentalist elements he used as a ladder to reach the top. But the recent revelations that a section of army officers are still with the jihadis show that all men in uniform are not with the General in his support to the US in its war on global terrorism. The use of the Pakistani soil by the Taliban and the Al Qaeda in their attempt to recapture Afghanistan proves this point.
(The writer is Director, Institute
for Media Studies and Information Technology, YMCA)
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