PAKISTAN: the gathering storm
by B.Raman
At the end of one week of relentless American
and British air strikes on Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, there
have so far been no signs of either demoralisation in the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda or of an abatement of the anti-US/UK
and anti-Musharraf anger amongst the rural and tribal masses in Pakistan.
The clerical leaders of the Taliban, including its Amir,
Mulla Mohammad Omer, and Osama bin Laden and other members of the brain
trust of his International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the US and
Israel remain as elusive as ever, with unconfirmed reports that they have
now been operating from the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),
protected by the strongly anti-US tribal leaders of the region.
Despite the claims of the military junta of having
effectively sealed the border in order to prevent the religious elements
of the mosques and the madrasas from crossing over into Afghanistan to
reinforce the ranks of the Taliban's militia, a large number of students
from the madrasas, ex-ervicemen and ex-officers of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have managed to cross over into
Afghanistan to help the Taliban resist the American and British troops, if
they launch ground operations in the coming days.
Amongst the retired officers of the Pakistan Army and
the ISI, who are now acting as advisers to the Taliban and the
International Islamic Front, are Lt.Gen.Hamid Gul and Lt.Gen. Javed Nasir,
both former Directors-General of the ISI.
It was on their advice that the Ulema council of the
Taliban, which met in the FATA on October 13, 2001, decided to allow a
group of journalists, Pakistani and non-Pakistani, working for the foreign
media, to visit Jalalabad and possibly other places too to see for
themselves the civilian casualties caused by the US/UK air strikes.
As against US claims of only one incident in Kabul on
October 13 resulting in civilian casualties, the Taliban has been alleging
that at least 300 civilians, many of them women and children, have been
killed by the bunker-burster bombs dropped by the US planes to smoke out
Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, who might be taking shelter in the bunkers.
Lt.Gen.Gul and Lt.Gen.Nasir reportedly told the Taliban
leadership that independent accounts of the casualties filed by the
visiting journalists could bring pressure not only on the US and the UK to
stop the air strikes, but also on Musharraf and the regimes in other
Islamic countries to re-consider their support to the so-called US-UK war
against international terrorism.
Rumblings in Pakistan---in the civil society as well as
in the Army and the Air Force---- against Musharraf's action in supporting
the US and UK air strikes and providing them with base facilities for
emergency purposes in the remote Pakistan Air Force (PAF) bases at
Jacobabad in Sindh and Pasni in Balochistan have intensified.
The military junta was surprised by the number of
protestors that the religious parties were able to mobilise and
clandestinely bring to Jacobabad on October 14 to demonstrate against the
US presence, despite the sealing of the area by the Security Forces.
Ant-US and anti-Musharraf demonstrations, which were
till now confined to provincial capitals such as Karachi, Peshawar and
Quetta, are now spreading to District capitals and other small towns,
thereby taxing the respources of the Security Forces. The tribals of FATA
are practically in a state of rebellion against the Musharraf regime.
In Karachi, there have been at least three incidents of
grenade attacks on Security Forces patrol and, taking advantage of the
preoccupation of the Security Forces with the ant-US and anti-Musharraf
demonstrations, Sunni extremists belonging to the Sipah-e-Sahaba have
assassinated 20 leaders of the Shia community since September 11, the
largest number in a single month since Musharraf seized power on October
12,1999.
The most active in the violent incidents have been the
students of the Binori Mosque madrasa in Karachi from where many of the
leaders of the Taliban and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) had passed out, the
Jamaat-ul-Ulema Islam (JUI) of Maulana Fazlur Rahman of Balochistan, who
is looked upon as the mentor of the Taliban, and the Tehrik Nifaz
Shariah Muhammadi (TNSM) of Soofi Mohammad in the FATA.
Of all the Islamic organisations of Pakistan, the TNSM
has the largest number of ex-servicemen, including many retired
Commissioned Officers, in its ranks and poses the greatest concern to the
military junta. Many serving senior officers of the Army are related
to these ex-servicemen. The Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Qazi Hussain Ahmed
has been strongly condemning Musharraf, but has so far avoided mobilising
its street power against him.
Islamabad and Rawalpindi continue to be rife with
rumours of a split amongst senior Army and Air Force officers. The
serious fire in the GHQ on October 9, which lasted nearly five hours, has
been compared by the rumour-mongers to the fire in the Ojheri arms depot
in the 1980s. An Army Court of Enquiry had allegedly held that the
fire in Ojheri was deliberately caused by some ISI officers in order to
conceal their clandestine sale to Iraq of arms and ammunition supplied by
the US for use against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In 1988,
Mohammad Khan Junejo, the then Prime Minister, who insisted on the enquiry
report being released to the public, was sacked by Zia-ul-Haq.
It is now being alleged that the GHQ fire was similarly
caused by the military-intelligence establishment in order to
destroy all records relating to its links with the Al Qaeda and the
Taliban. The junta has, however, claimed that the fire was due to a
short-circuit.
It is believed that some of the Punjabi Lt.Gens.
had secretly met to consider their options, if the public anger against
Musharraf continued to mount. Amongst the options reportedly considered
was one to press him to resign after transferring power to
Lt.Gen.Mohammad Yusef Khan, the newly-appointed Vice-Chief of the Army
Staff, a Sindhi, who, in his turn, will transfer power to a national unity
coalition Government to be formed by the political parties.
Musharraf has been trying to cool the anger by claiming
that Pakistan's support to the US against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda
would bring in not only financial and military assistance, but also
strategic gains in the form of a more favourable Western attitude towards
Pakistan on the Kashmir issue and the induction into Afghanistan, after a
collapse of the Taliban, of a UN peace-keeping force led by Pakistan from
which India would be excluded. He has been claiming that the Bush
Administration has come to accept that Pakistan should have a determining
role in Afghanistan after the Taliban and that India would have no locus
standi there.
Despite the picture of confidence projected by him to
the outside world, Musharraf's position continues to be increasingly
shaky.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: corde@vsnl.com
)
