NYT : Behind a Siege in Pakistan, Rumblings of Wider Dissent

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Behind a Siege in Pakistan, Rumblings of Wider Dissent

By CARLOTTA GALL | Published: July 8, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, July 7 — With the rattle of gunfire and boom of explosions, the standoff at the Lal Masjid in the center of the capital, dramatic as it is, is but one part of the far larger challenge facing the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, nationwide.

The immediate problem for the general remains how to end the siege with minimum loss of life, and how to contain any backlash, particularly in the event of a bloody denouement.

The government has done its best to avoid such an ending and appears to be winning the high ground. The militants, it now seems clear, precipitated the fighting by firing first and killing an Army Ranger. The mullahs and their students have earned little public sympathy in their own neighborhood or around the country with their campaign to impose Shariah law, raiding shops and smashing CDs and music tapes.

The arrest of the leader of the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who tried to escape in a burqa while leaving behind hundreds of his students, many of them female, has brought ridicule in the news media, which have largely supported the government. Neither the public nor the religious parties have protested the actions of the government, which has won praise for its relative restraint.

But the standoff is far from over, and several bombings in the North-West Frontier Province this week, including a suicide bombing, and gunfire as the president’s plane took off Friday, are a reminder that the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, is only the most visible bulwark of Islamist militancy that is lodged in cities and districts across Pakistan and appears to be growing.

Questions are already being raised over why the government waited so long to move against the clerics of the Lal Masjid.

Government officials are privately saying they hope that the government will next go after another radical cleric, Fazlullah, the acting leader of the extremist group Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, who has been vocal in his support for the Taliban and suicide bombing as well as the clerics in the mosque.

But going after individuals may not be enough.

An investigation published Friday by The News, a national daily, found that 88 seminaries belonging to various sects were giving religious education to more than 16,000 students in the capital. Moreover, the number of students here attending religious schools belonging to the Deobandi sect, an anti-Western, pro-jihadi fundamentalist school of thought that inspired the Taliban, among other movements, has doubled in the last year alone.

The newspaper cited figures for students taking exams, using information collected from unidentified government agencies. In 2006, 5,039 students from Deobandi seminaries took exams conducted by the sect’s central examination board, with about 3,000 of them coming from the two seminaries attached to the Lal Masjid.

Today those two seminaries hold 10,700 students, the report said. “The reason for this big surge in the number of students is still not known to the government,” it said.

The number of students at the Lal Masjid’s two madrasas, or religious schools — 5,039 — is not far short of the total in the whole province of Baluchistan. It also is almost equal to the number of students in the 74 schools belonging to other sects in the capital, which together have 5,400 students.

The spread of madrasas in the capital has been steady since the 1980s when Gen. Zia ul-Haq, then in power, promoted the madrasas as a source of mujahedeen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the report said.

Seven madrasas were founded in the capital during his 11-year rule, 15 more during the 11 years of civilian governments under Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from 1988 to 1999, and 14 during General Musharraf’s eight-year rule.

Certain lessons must be drawn from the Lal Masjid episode, the national daily Dawn wrote Friday in an editorial. “Characters like the two Lal Masjid brothers are to be found all over the country,” it wrote. “They have money and arms and brainwashed followers willing to do their bidding.”

While their followers may be innocent and sincere in their belief, their leaders often operate with impunity, it said. “It is, thus, the brains behind them that the government should go after.”

“The Lal Masjid drama is a symptom of a deeper malaise,” it said. “The nation expects the government to move against terrorism until it no longer becomes a force.”

A successful end to the Lal Masjid showdown will provide a much-needed lift to the Pakistani government and General Musharraf himself, Teresita C. Schaffer, a former assistant secretary of state for South Asia and the director of the South Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said in a speech this week.

Failure to act earlier was a reflection of the severe erosion of the government’s authority, she said.

“But Musharraf and his government are not out of the woods,” she said, listing major problems confronting the general, who faces elections this year, and the country. The militancy issue alone is daunting.

“Fighting between government forces and groups friendly to the Taliban in the provinces bordering Afghanistan, is still going on, with at least two suicide bombings in the last 24 hours,” she said. “Sympathizers of the Red Mosque as well as Afghan-oriented parts of the militant movement may be looking for more opportunities to make their presence felt.”