Support for the United States could spark a hardline uprising in Pakistan
Rory McCarthy
In a stuffy room on the third floor of an ageing hotel in a smart Lahore suburb sat the men who threaten to bring Pakistan to its knees.
More than 50 of the nation’s most hardline clerics met on Monday to draw up a campaign of strikes and demonstrations vowing to bring thousands of protesters on to the streets to oppose an American attack on their Islamic allies in Afghanistan.
Each in turn spoke of their support for Osama bin Laden as an Islamic hero and condemned the United States’s threat of retaliation. They announced that over the next two weeks strikes and protests will be organised first in Islamabad and Lahore and then across the country.
Their anger at Islamabad’s willingness to give limited help to a US assault represents the greatest challenge Pakistan’s military regime has faced. It is a defining moment in the country’s history. If the government refuses to help Washington it will be isolated on the world stage. If it agrees, the hardliners will march to the doors of the presidential palace in the capital.
Among the ideological kingpins at the meeting on Monday were Sami-ul Haq, who schooled many of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia in his madrassah (a mosque school); Hafiz Saeed, the head of the feared Lashkar-e Taiba, the militant outfit responsible for the deaths of thousands of Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and Hamid Gul, a former chief of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency.
“We believe that America’s target is not Afghanistan, it is not Osama bin Laden, the actual target is Pakistan. Because this is a war against the Muslim world and Pakistan is the only Islamic nuclear power,” said Haq, who sat at the head of the meeting of the Pakistan and Afghan defence council.
“They have got no evidence against Bin Laden. They want to have a war between two cultures. But the Muslims of Pakistan will not allow this. I pray to God the Americans do not come here.”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In 1947 when Mohammad Ali Jinnah led Pakistan (“The Land of the Pure”) to independence as a sanctuary for Muslims on the subcontinent, his was a secular vision of religious freedom.
Now clerics like Haq refuse to speak at public rallies if a portrait of Jinnah hangs from the wall. The change began 30 years ago under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s first elected prime minister.
Alcohol was banned, minority Islamic sects were outlawed and the lurch to the right began.
His successor, General Zia-ul Haq, encouraged madrassahs to flourish across the country and school a breed of Islamic warriors to resist the Soviet occupation of Pakistan’s long-time ally Afghanistan.
In 1979 he introduced elements of sharia law into the Pakistani criminal code. Under these new ordinances, the testimony of a woman rape victim could only be accepted if there were four male witnesses.
The Islamic clerics alone do not look powerful enough to lead an Iranian-style revolt. Their egos frequently hold them back from being a cohesive force, they have never fared well at the ballot box and they offer little hope of reform for the vast underclass of rural poor. Some observers put their popular support at only 1% to 2%.
But many in Pakistan believe the new breed of army officers could be the key threat. Pakistan risks a “false revolution” led by right-wing generals, said Syed Sikander Mehdi, professor of international relations at Karachi University.
“In the long term a group within the army might try to seize the initiative and use the right-wing elements. It would be a Talibanisation of Pakistan but it would never last,” he said.
General Pervez Musharraf, the army chief who led the assault into Indian-held Kashmir in May 1999 and then took power in a coup two years ago, looks positively liberal compared to some.
“The most significant danger to Pakistan now is not an Islamic revolution on the streets but within the army,” said one source close to the top echelon of generals.
At a key meeting last Friday the corps commanders and at least 20 other senior generals met in Army House in Rawalpindi to discuss how much support to give an American attack on Afghanistan. The meeting was supposed to last two hours but ran on for more than six as the generals argued about the dangers the presence of American troops in Pakistan would bring.
“If they allow the Americans on to our soil you will see how quickly the people will mobilise. Pakistani nationalism is rooted in Islam,” said Hamid Gul, the hawkish former ISI chief and a retired general himself.
“The army in Pakistan has traditionally been on the side of the people. If the nation abandons its leader, then the army will side with the nation. The general will be left dangling in the air.”
l Meanwhile, US officials are drawing up plans for a major economic aid package to reward Pakistan for supporting a military operation against Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.
Washington will ask donors, including Britain’s department for international development, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and the Japanese government to give Pakistan all the support they can for a significant new package.