Editorial
Lal Masjid endgame
The News, July 5, 2007.
The 30th anniversary today of Gen Ziaul Haq’s
coup d’etat finds a central part of the capital
of Pakistan a virtual battlefield. Tuesday, the
first day of what is being described as the
government’s “countdown” to its long-promised
operation to end the armed rebellion of the Lal
Masjid-Jamia Hafsa clerics, saw ten people dying
during exchanges of fire. Residents around the
mosque-seminary complex are fleeing their homes
and there is a curfew in the area. It is a
frightening thought what kind of situation the
operation itself would produce. While the death
toll so far is most unfortunate, the fact of the
matter is that the government seems to have
little choice but to act in the manner that it
did since Tuesday. It is a sign that the
government of President Pervez Musharraf has at
last decided to grasp the nettle and started a
process it was needlessly putting off. One can
only hope that the matter is now resolved without
any further loss of life or injury.
Despite the wide welcome the government’s
reaction has received among ordinary Pakistanis,
questions are being raised as to why the basic
measures that are being adopted at this late
stage were not taken before. If it had been
imposed before, the curfew would have prevented
the entry of terrorists and their supporters into
the complex, with their gadgets and their
fearsome weaponry whose very procurement by
civilians is a mystery; Maulana Abdul Aziz is a
remarkably modern man for someone who is such a
strong believer in omens and divinations he bases
his jihadi decisions on them. The government has
moved only now to disconnect water and
electricity to the mosque and seminary. An
earlier discontinuation of these would have
forced most of those inside to leave sooner or
later. It’s surprising that the government didn’t
know that, as is apparent now from the interviews
of the bewildered pupils leaving Lal Masjid, a
large number of the occupants were virtual
prisoners, or at least didn’t know exactly why
they were there or were being held, more or less,
against their will. Their victimisation lends
another unfortunate aspect to the authorities’
dragging their feet.
Among the critics, there are those who see the
delay as part of a government plan to use the
operation as a kind of a diversionary tactic —
away from other pressing problems, some of which
had been hogging the media spotlight of late.
Their argument is that it is not exactly a
coincidence that the operation came a day after
the government took a severe battering before the
Supreme Court’s 13-member full court (which also
resulted in a blanket ban on intelligence
personnel from the superior courts). However,
there is no proof really to lend any validity to
their standpoint. Other criticisms though,
especially those that question how and why the
government permitted the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa
students to occupy state-owned property for
months on end and how the complex managed to
build up a sophisticated weapons arsenal (given
that it is situated in the heart of the federal
capital and at a stone’s throw from the
headquarters of the ISI) are valid.
As for Lal Masjid itself, a little bit of a
history lesson would help contextualise what has
happened. The father of the two brothers who run
Lal Masjid, Maulana Abdullah, was close to Gen
Zia and many a senior politician and military
man. During the time of the Soviet occupation in
Afghanistan, Lal Masjid became a favoured conduit
for sending ’mujahideen’ to Afghanistan, and also
Kashmir. It is also widely believed that he was
patron to several sectarian groups such as the
banned Sipah-e-Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and
Harkatul Mujahideen. Even now, and as publicly
stated by President Musharraf, several members of
the banned Jaish-e-Mohammad, for whose leader’s
(Maulana Masood Azhar) freedom Maulana Abdullah
had publicly spoken many a time, were said to be
hiding in the compound and helping the two
brothers. The question that should be foremost on
everyone’s minds and which governments past and
present need to answer is why the situation was
allowed to come to this. Why wasn’t the jihadi
manufacturing machine fuelled by extremist
seminaries and mosques such as Lal Masjid not
reined in and kept a tight leash on? Also, the
issue of Lal Masjid and what has been happening,
especially the revelations that many of the
students were not exactly willing residents,
should hopefully attract public and media
scrutiny on the role played by madressahs towards
fostering extremist views in the country. Of
course, a solution to this problem is not easy
since it involves the decrepit and crumbling
mainstream education system, but these are all
questions and issues that need answers and
introspection.
EDITORIAL
Wages of late action against extremism
Daily Times, July 05, 2007
President General Pervez Musharraf’s decision to
start a military operation against Lal Masjid at
11 pm on Tuesday was right but late - late in two
timelines: the first opportunity was offered six
months ago when the trouble started; the second
on Tuesday as Lal Masjid students opened fire on
the Rangers deployed defensively after the
kidnapping of Chinese citizens by the Lal Masjid
vigilantes. As soon as the army was deployed, the
so-called jihad of Lal Masjid leader, Maulana
Abdul Aziz, collapsed and the “suicide-bombers”
began to surrender. Late action cost Pakistan 21
lives in two days.
The Lal Masjid phenomenon has not been
sufficiently understood. No intelligence agency,
if it had a clue, made it known that action by
Maulana Abdul Aziz was taken six months ago after
he started seeing “sacred dreams” - numbering 300
by the time the operation got under way - in
which according to him, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)
personally ordered him to raise the standard of
revolt, declare jihad and implement the sharia on
his own. Timely information on this daily
proclaimed phenomenon, if it had been provided to
the public, would have prepared the ground for a
quick operation.
In the event, the government became divided over
how to deal with the phenomenon of Abdul Aziz -
followed slavishly by his brother Rashid Ghazi -
and his cult following. Lack of any psychological
study by any of the educational institutions kept
the cult hidden from the public gaze and made it
appear as the normal “ideological manifestation”
that people and politicians alike accept without
questioning and to which they submit with
satisfaction.
The illegality of the cult was treated in the
PML’s usual style of softness towards clerics of
all stripes. The PML chief Chaudhry Shujaat
Hussain negotiated with the Lal Masjid clerics
and put together a “package” that simply could
not be accepted without a retreat of the state in
the face of such a challenge to its sovereignty.
The “package” was not implemented because of its
impracticality. In fact, there was a clear split
between him and the minister for religious
affairs, Mr Ijazul Haq, who declared that it was
no use negotiating with the clerics. In the
event, the party offered a minister, Ms Nilofar
Bakhtiar, as its burnt offering to Lal Masjid.
Unfortunately, the minister of state for
religious affairs, MQM’s Mr Amir Liaquat Hussain,
ignored his own party line on the mullahs to give
a most ill-advised interview to a TV channel,
indirectly defending the Lal Masjid revolt on the
basis of sharia backslidings of the government.
His line was taken by the MMA too which refused
to support Maulana Abdul Aziz but taxed the
government with failing to implement the sharia.
Funnily, Mr Amir Liaquat Hussain pointed to lewd
signboards as moral backsliding of the
government, in unison with the MMA.
President Musharraf’s hands could have been tied
because of the “reluctance” and “disunity” of the
PML in the face of the crisis. An operation was
also impeded by the intelligence he was
receiving. He was told that Lal Masjid had old
contacts with the Taliban and that Maulana Abdul
Aziz could call in help from Waziristan in the
shape of suicide bombers and could count upon the
help of acolytes from other seminaries in the
vicinity and other vicinities. (The demonstration
carried out in Lahore by Jamia Ashrafiya was a
result of the lack of an operation rather than
because of it.)
President Musharraf was also off the mark in his
assessment of the risk to public life and the
coverage of it by the electronic media. A simple
stratagem of turning off the electricity in Lal
Masjid quickly forced the 6,000 militant boys and
girls to start surrendering. The “hundreds” of
suicide bombers reported by some “agencies” also
evaporated quickly. Once the operation was afoot,
curfew declared and the army deployed, the
dreaming mullah of Lal Masjid was disabused of
his divinity in short order.
The delay in the operation inclined a lot of
people to speculate that the government had
actually used the clerics to divert attention
from the judicial crisis unfolding in the
country. Almost the entire opposition used the
“convenient” interpretation to rubbish the
government. Even after the operation began most
opposition politicians were recommending
“negotiations” in a situation that no longer
brooked negotiation. Only the PPP chairperson Ms
Benazir Bhutto appropriately asserted that upon
coming to power she would wipe out religious
extremism in Pakistan.
Finally, the instinct behind the operation was
right even if the operation itself was full of
holes. This was mainly because the people who
handled the situation in the past were not in
Islamabad. That meant almost the entire interior
ministry including the IG police. The "Rangers
phase", had it continued, would have ruined the
prospect of resolving the crisis forever. In the
after-the-action assessment, the inability of the
“agencies” to offer any meaningful "inside
information" on Lal Masjid, and their inclination
to put out alarmist advice should be investigated
by the government. *
Little stopping the mullahs
by Murtaza Razvi
Indian Express, July 05, 2007.
After violence erupted around the Lal Masjid in
Islamabad, the question is: will it become a
litmus test for Musharraf to prove that he can
enforce the writ of the state? And the question
once again is: does he want to?
Former dictator Ayub Khan’s Islamabad -
literally ’city of Islam’ - is coming full
circle. The obsession with religion and allied
nomenclature has shaken Pakistan to its roots.
Ayub, the founder of Islamabad, was by far more
secular than any military chief who succeeded
him, but the institution he headed was fed on a
strange mix of Pakistan ideology which equated
this country with being the ’citadel of Islam’
and its soldiers, defenders of the faith. The
rhetoric espoused by Pakistan’s largely secular,
if publicly very Musalman, rulers has relied
heavily on Islam as the identity of the nation.
The result is that the mullahs have now come to
reclaim what is their territory, and there is
little stopping them.
This is the context informing the sordid episode
of the Lal Masjid, as it unfolds in the heart of
the capital. Even General Musharraf’s belated
decision late Tuesday night of finally approving
military action against the two mad mullah
brothers, the maulanas Abdur Rashid and Abdul
Aziz, holed up inside the Lal Masjid, and using
women and children as a human shield of sorts,
was a tell-tale continuation of mixing religious
lexicon with administrative decision-making. His
ministers were at pains to explain to the media
that the action being contemplated against the
militant mullah squad was to save Islam and
Pakistan from a bad name. As if...
At a time when more than a dozen people,
including paramilitary personnel, have been
gunned down by Kalashnikov-wielding bearded goons
who ran rounds of gun battles with the security
forces in the streets of Islamabad and torched
government offices all of Tuesday, the suggestion
that Islam and Pakistan will be blamed for their
madness is bizarre, to say the least. But this
perfectly reflects the confusion plaguing an
embattled government on several fronts, and the
dilly-dallying on the Lal Masjid since January
when women students of the seminary occupied the
adjacent children’s library building.
This was followed by vigilante religious students
shutting down music shops, the setting up of a
summary court, abduction of women accused of
prostitution, hostage taking of policemen and
abduction of a massage parlour’s Chinese
employees last month. State-sponsored seminaries
and their governing board have dissociated
themselves from the two mad mullahs and their
antics aimed at imposing Islamic rule of the
Taliban variety, challenging the writ of the
state.
Parliamentary leader of the opposition Maulana
Fazlur Rahman who heads the Devbandi sect’s
representative religious party, the
Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, too, has rejected the
mullah brothers’ plan of forced Islamisation. The
seminary run by the Lal Masjid brigade adheres to
the same sect. The only ally the brothers have
found among mainstream religious parties is Qazi
Hussain Ahmed of the Jamat-e-Islami, who, in a
rather outlandish statement, has blamed Jews for
the fiasco in Islamabad. Talk about sanity, shall
we, in the land of the pure led by those with a
divine mission?
The madness emanating from the Lal Masjid and its
countdown to military action being broadcast on
TV screens across the country since Tuesday
morning has found some resonance among madcap,
homegrown breed of Taliban, mostly in the
Frontier province. The cities of Abbotabad and
Mansehra have seen demonstrations by Taliban
sympathisers. In Bannu, a town close to the
troubled Waziristan along the Afghan border, an
army convoy was hit by a suicide car bomber,
killing four soldiers and two civilians.
The Lal Masjid clerics had repeatedly warned of
suicide attacks across Pakistan if attacked,
prompting Musharraf last week to say that if the
media were not to cover the military action and
show bodies, he would order action against the
Masjid right away. The government’s pussyfooting
on the issue is in sharp contrast to the military
actions the Saudis took in the 1980s and 1990s
against militants holed up in Islam’s holiest
mosque in Makkah. The king thereafter conferred
on himself the title of ’The Custodian of Two
Holy Mosques’. Today, nobody even has a faint
memory of the militants’ takeover of the Ka’aba,
nor the bloody military action taken to oust them.
Granted, Musharraf’s no king, but then the Lal
Masjid is no holier than the Ka’aba. Closer home,
everyone’s been citing Indira Gandhi’s military
action in the Golden Temple which finally cost
her her life, and that’s a prospect probably
haunting the general in his inaction, or belated
action at best. He does preside over an army
raised to defend the faith, not to attack its
house of worship, after all.
Razvi is an editor with ’Dawn’, Karachi.
EDITORIAL
Government must enforce order
Daily Times, July 04, 2007
What has happened at Islamabad’s Lal Masjid on
Tuesday should worry the government immensely,
not least since this is a government already
under siege. Consider.
The only thing worse than using force is not to
use it when using it becomes inevitable. But the
worst is for a government to be seen as employing
force when it is not ready to do so. This
explains Tuesday’s events at Lal Masjid.
First, the government allowed the sore to fester
for this long, tucking tail in the face of
excesses committed by the Lal Masjid cadres. Then
it half-heartedly began deploying the Rangers
around the complex after the mosque’s zealots
kidnapped some Chinese women and accused them of
running a brothel. Many of us thought at that
point that the mosque cadres might have crossed
the red line. This view was strengthened when, a
few days ago, speaking to media representatives,
General Pervez Musharraf said that he would deal
with the problem if the media promised not to
show footage and pictures of dead bodies. Shortly
thereafter the Rangers were deployed, the first
batch taking positions last Thursday. The
mosque’s administrator, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, gave
a sermon the next day, warning the state against
taking any action against the mosque and
reiterating that they would move against any
brothels regardless of who might be running them.
Then Mr Ghazi fulminated against a yet-to-be
released film in Pakistan because he thinks it is
blasphemous. The film, to be shown on a TV
channel, depicts a post 9/11 confrontation
between fundamentalists and liberal Muslims. By
doing so he threw another gauntlet to the
government. He is a man who has become used to
throwing challenges and seeing the state shy away
from confrontation. The retreat of the state in
the face of extremism, as should now be obvious,
will not solve anything.
Tracing the events of Tuesday to what sparked off
the violence, it is clear that it began at the
barricades with some students from the mosque’s
seminary trying to wrest weapons from some
Rangers’ personnel. Mr Ghazi says this might have
happened because the Rangers were closing in on
the mosque. But some accounts tell a different
story: the students decided to take on the
Rangers and do unto them what they have become
quite adept at doing to the police - kidnapping
security forces’ personnel and then using them as
bargaining chips. Only this time the scuffle led
to an exchange of fire in which one Rangers
personnel was killed and two others injured. Thus
began the exchange of fire on a larger scale
which, until we went to press, had claimed about
20 lives according to incoming reports and
injured about a hundred people. The dead and the
injured included seminarians, security personnel
and citizens and journalists caught in the
crossfire.
This is not the stuff of any military operation.
However, now that this has started, what should
the government do? Backing off at this point
would only complicate matters and add to the
impression that this government is feeble and
uncertain about its priorities. In plain English
this means the government has to now go in and
finish the job. But it has lost any element of
surprise and direct use of force will play to the
advantage of the mosque. Already, religious
leaders have begun confusing the issue by calling
it a grand conspiracy against Pakistan and Islam,
with some accusing the government of resorting to
the same extremism as the mosque. This view is
wrong and the government would do well to ignore
it. While it is important to keep the number of
casualties down in such an operation, neither
should the commanders shy from taking and
inflicting casualties because the first priority
is to ensure that the operation succeeds.
What has already happened should make it very
clear that half-hearted measures are more
dangerous than inaction. But the very fact that
the first stone has now been cast, there is no
going back to the earlier state of inaction.
Mr Ghazi will try to use the media in his support
and he will use “Islam” to justify his actions
but that should not deter the government from
taking action which is now absolutely necessary.
The media also has a role to play. It has been
calling for action and insisting that the writ of
the state should be enforced in this case. Now
the die is cast and it must not shy away from its
responsibility. There are times when governments
have to take unsavoury decisions in the larger
interest of the nation-state. In 1979, the Saudi
government had to take just such a decision when
some extremist elements took over the Ka’aba. In
1984, the Indian government decided to storm the
Golden Temple because such an action, despite the
dangers inherent in doing so, had become
inevitable and absolutely necessary. The
government in Islamabad too cannot avoid taking
the difficult decision now. *
Lal Masjid theatrics: mob rule or ’topi drama’?
by Prof Adil Najam
The News, June 26, 2007
The standoff created by the attack on a ’massage’
centre in Islamabad by the Lal Masjid militia and
the abduction of a number of Chinese nationals
lasted less than a day. The criminality of this
shameful act notwithstanding, the matter was
thankfully resolved and the ’pious posse’ from
Jamia Faridia and Jamia Hafsa released the
kidnapped individuals. However, far from
resolving the larger crisis of puritanical
vigilantism, this episode has only deepened it.
The government has succumbed, yet again, to the
militant tactics of the Lal Masjid leadership who
have, in turn, declared victory. This episode
will further embolden the already violence-prone
brigands at the two madressahs and we are likely
to see an escalation in their demands as well as
their tactics. Meanwhile, with the government has
once again demonstrated an inability and/or
unwillingness to act decisively. The
much-cherished ’writ of the state’ continues to
rot in tatters.
This loss of control by the state apparatus —
not only in the far reaches of the tribal belt
but in the very heart of the federal capital —
is much more than a spiralling ’law and order’
situation; it is an erosion of state sovereignty.
The militants from Lal Masjid have been acting
not just with impunity, but in equality to state
functionaries. With all the pretensions of a
state within a state, Lal Masjid ’authorities’
are now negotiating as equals with government
’authorities.’ And they have been doing so with
increasing frequency and with amazing success.
What is even more surprising than the abdication
of control by the state is the lack of outright
outrage amongst the public. Somehow our national
passions are far more likely to be flared by the
award of meaningless honours to unimpressive
novelists by foreign governments thousands of
miles away than by the spectacle of crumbling
state sovereignty in the very heart of our
national capital. This lack of public outcry is
partly — but only partly — explained by the
political savvy of the Lal Masjid leadership.
Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and his comrades have
shown great ingenuity in their choice of issues
and in operational execution. By focusing on
issues of public morality and highlighting the
government’s failures in enforcing its own laws,
they have been able to present themselves as
reformers rather than as bullies and as guardians
of social virtue rather than as promoters of
intolerance.
Much more than that — and even amongst those who
fully recognise the gravity of situation — one
finds a pervasive feeling that there is more to
the Lal Masjid theatrics than meets the eye. Even
members of parliament have been suggesting that
the government and its intelligence agencies are
manipulating the Lal Masjid militancy. There is a
widely held view that even if the intelligence
agencies are not actively ’managing’ the Lal
Masjid, the government is choosing to tolerate
and possibly encourage its antics for its own
short-term goals. The common refrain is that
everything happening at the Lal Masjid is part of
an elaborate ’topi drama’ — an intricate,
carefully calibrated, stage-managed confrontation
which is not a confrontation at all.
But why would the government (either directly or
through its intelligence agencies) collude with
the leadership of the Lal Masjid to produce or
tolerate situations — the continuing capture of
a children’s library, abduction of alleged
brothel workers, hostage taking of policemen, and
now the kidnapping of Chinese nationals — that
are clearly embarrassments for the government?
That the government, despite all the instruments
of force at its command, has been repeatedly
caving in to the demands of the stick-totting
madrassah students has fuelled rumours of secret
deals and devious deceptions. But it also makes
the Lal Masjid crowd look like heroes even as the
government comes out looking ineffectual.
What possible benefits does the government derive
that would outweigh this embarrassment? Two
reasons are commonly given. First, there is the
theory of domestic payoff. It is argued that
strategically timed eruptions from Lal Masjid can
provide valuable respite and distraction from
other irksome political crises, especially the
continuing saga of the chief justice debacle. The
second theory posits the possibility of
international payoffs. In this case, the argument
is that since each eruption from the Lal Masjid
is quickly contained, but never fully resolved,
the military regime is sending a message to its
US patrons that (a) Pakistan remains a country at
the brink of fundamentalist fervour and (b)
military control is needed to keep such militant
groups in check.
Even if there were some in the realm of power who
once actually believed in such ideas, neither of
these theories is empirically defensible today.
In relation to the first, it is now abundantly
evident that Lal Masjid woes add to, instead of
distracting from, the domestic political mess.
Quite clearly, nothing that has happened by or in
the Lal Masjid has made even the slightest dent
in the public or media enthusiasm for following
the minutia of the chief justice story. The
second theory stands equally discredited. Instead
of viewing the Lal Masjid skirmishes as evidence
of just how bad things are in Pakistan, most
analysts in Washington now see this unending
drama as proof that the military government is
increasingly unable to contain the rebirth of
Talibanism in Pakistan. In short, the
continuation of the Lal Masjid crisis is not
merely an embarrassment for the government, it is
actually dangerous for the regime; both
domestically and internationally.
I am, of course, not privy to the inner thinking
of the intelligence apparatchiks in Pakistan.
However, it is at least likely that this is less
of a ’topi drama’ than people seem to believe.
That whatever the relationship between
intelligence agencies and the Lal Masjid might
have been in the past, today the ’movement’ (as
Maulana Ghazi likes to call it) has assumed a
life all its own as a very potent — and ugly —
manifestation of self-sustaining vigilantism and
mob rule. If so, the government’s inaction
against this ’movement’ can be explained either
as a gross miscalculation of the lurking dangers,
or it could be based on a real fear that touching
the hornets nest at Lal Masjid would unleash
demons so horrific that our already divided
society will be further torn apart. The
government’s own statements suggest that it is
the latter.
Just like standing still in the middle of the
road at the sight of the blinding lights of a
truck speeding towards it does not save the life
of the stunned deer, doing nothing about this
escalating crisis out of fear that doing anything
will only make things worse is not going to help
the government, or Pakistan. Something needs to
be done, and done fast.
Contrary to popular logic, there may be important
payoffs for the government if it does act to
judiciously dismantle militancy at Lal Masjid.
Internationally, it will be seen as an important
victory and a real step against rising
Talibanisation. Domestically, it will mean one
less crisis to worry about and could rally
support from the moderate majority in Pakistan
who once supported General Musharraf but have now
become disenchanted. Ultimately, however, the
most important reason to dismantle the militancy
is that it is the right thing to do.
The writer is a professor of International
Negotiation and Diplomacy at The Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, US, and
the founding editor of Pakistaniat.com Email:
adil.najam@ tufts.edu