Darth Wong wrote: Yeah, Pakistan is far more conservative than it used to be. We haven't seen that as a serious problem in the West because Musharraff has been viewed as a friend of the West. It seems to me that our attitude toward other countries is that as long as the leader pretends to like us, we will overlook anything.
That isn't quite true (or, rather, its truth depends on one's definition of conservative).
There's a massive split developed in Pakistan over the last two decades, one that long precedes the current War on Terror et al. What has been happening is that the Pakistani population is splitting three ways. The first group is the urban population which has become wealthier, more secular and has adopted many of the features of western democratic modus operandi. Benzir Bhutto is very much the representative of that group and so, to a large extent is Mushy. In real terms, this is your "more conservative" group, they want to keep Pakistan as a moderate Islamic state which interacts with the rest of the world - the position which its occupied for a goodly number of years. Hence the charactization of this group as conservatives, they want to keep things as they are. It's very unwise to underestimate the strength of this group, they essentially hold the levers of power and they've got used to pulling them - hence the problems Mushy faced in getting his reign extended. In general political orientation, this group are much closer to the Democrat Party than the Republicans - and that applies to the military as well as the civilian segments.
The second group is the mass of the rural population. These are somewhat more religiously orientated than their urban counterparts but not that much more. Much more to the point, they're a lot poorer and they don't have access to the levers of power and they know it. They feel discriminated against, dispossesed and marginalized. They don't do much but they represent a seething mass of disquiet and mutinous mutterings. They also have increased a lot in strength in recent years.
Thirdly we have the Islamofascists up in Waziristan. These guys are deeply fundamentalist religious, they view the largely secular society in the cities as anathema and the rural population as useful idiots. They are the wellspring and supporting structure for the Taliban and for Al Qaeda. They essentially created the Taliban (originally the Taliban armed forces - who met with an unfortunate accident when they were convinced it was a good idea to congregate underneath an Arclight - were Pakistani religious students who had been educated in Pakistani Madrassas. Even now, the vast majority of the Taliban being killed in Afghanistan are from Waziristan, not Afghanistan).
These three groups are pulling Pakistan different ways. It is true the United States has been backing Mushy but that's pretty much inevitable. He represents the sort of society that Pakistan was and should remain. It's important to note that backing Mushy's element does not mean opposing the democratic groups and political parties - both the military government and the democratic political parties all come from the same general demographic segment and backing one gives strength to them all.
The real problem is that the Waziristani Islamofascists have been steadily infiltrating and prosetylizing the rural population. They don't have that much success but even a limited level of success generates a lot of recruits for suicide bombings (which is all the Islamofascists want; one rural peasant who agrees to blow himself up is one fewer Waziristani who has to do so). In doing this they're aided by the Pakistani ISI that has been heavily infiltrated by the Islamofascists to the point where the ISI is now out of control and is essentially a rogue agency. Add in people like Chechens and Uzbeks to the mix and we have the ingredients for an explosion.
The truth is that the Islamofascists want to totally transform Pakistani society. For example, they wish to abolish the Shalwar Kameez (the long top and trousers worn by Pakistani women) in favor of the full burka, they want to abolish all education for women (other than memorized recitation of the Koran), etc etc etc. Read the Taliban policies in Afghanistan and you'll get the message. These guys can't be defined as conservatives by any reasonable meaning of the term, they want to create a new society that has no real historical precedent. They're radical revolutionaries and when treated as such their motivations and ideology drop sharply into focus
The recent crisis over the Lal Masjid Mosque has kicked off the present mess. What happened there was that the Lal Masjid mosque, long a center for radical Islamofascist proselytization became an operating center for a direct assault on the civil administration of Islamabad. Not, note, the military authorities, the civil administration. The mosque had a madrassah attached to it (in fact, it had two, one for boys, one for girls) and students from those Madrassahs started going out into the city, kidnapping Pakistanis who did not comply with the extreme teachings of the Islamofascists and punishing them before an Islamic court. This reached a boiling point when they kidnapped seven Chinese women who they accused of prostitution (read not wearing a burka). The Chinese told the Pakistani government that if they didn't solve this problem and get their people released, Chinese troops would go to Islamabad and solve it for them (both countries deny that diplomatic exchange was made by the way).
Now, at that point the Lal Masjid authorities started to rack up the tension. They encouraged their students to go out, firebomb 'non-Islamic" businesses (like shops selling music CDs, their ideology involvs banning all music and radio/TV except for transmissions of reading from the Koran) and throw acid at women who were not wearing burkas. In addition they set up a full Sharia court in rivalry to the secular Pakistani court system. That did it; the Pakistani Army ringed off and contained the Lal Masjid mosque.
What happened next has an element of low comedy to it. The driving force behind the Lal Masjid mosque and its madrassahs were two brothers. One of them decided to escape. The Pakistani Army was allowing female students to leave so our hero dressed up as a woman (complete with burka of course) and tried to leave. Unfortunately, the Pakistani troops noted that he hadn't mastered the art of walking in high heels, detained him and placed him in custody. Oops number one. Then, negotiations having obviously broken down the Pakistani armed forces decided to storm the mosque complex. Brother number two, seeing heavily-armed Pakistani commandos coming over the walls and shooting the holy living hell out of his 'troops' gave his closest colleagues and friends a long, inspired sermon on the delights of martydom, the pleasures of dying for Allah and the absolute importance of laying down their lives for their faith. He then got on the phone to negotiate his surrender and safe conduct out. He was unwise enough to do this in front of his friends and colleagues who noted his actions and shot him. A lot. Like around 200 times. Ooops number two.
Anyway, its that storming of the mosque that has kicked off the current confrontation. The Islamofascists are using it as evidence that the urban population are traitors to Islam and apostates and are radicalizing the rural poor - many of whose children are in madrassahs. It's reckoned the Islamofascists have around 100,000 men under arms at this time. About 35,000 of these are commanded by Baitullah Mehsud (the gy who issued the fatwa demanding that Benazir Bhutto be met by suicide bombs and famously described women as "a poisonous living substance").
After the Pakistani commando raid on the Lal Masjid , the Mehsuds of Baitullah joined hands with the IMU and the Islamic Jihad Group and they started instigating suicide terrorist attacks not only in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), but also outside the tribal belt--even in places like Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Coinciding with the commando raid, the government of Pervez Musharraf sent reinforcements of security forces to North Waziristan. This was interpreted by sections of the local tribals as a violation of the peace agreement signed with them by the Pakistan Army in September, 2006, and as a prelude to attacks on the headquarters of the IMU and the Islamic Jihad Group. They kidnapped nearly 300 members of the para-military forces and threatened to kill them at the rate of three a day if their followers in Government custody were not released and the reinforcements were not withdrawn. They've been carrying out that threat, chopping off the victims arms and legs before slitting their throats and dumping the bodies.
The worsening security situation in the tribal belt has forced the Pakistani Security Forces to act against the Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs and their local tribal supporters. Reports from the NATO forces in Afghanistan of the presence of increasing numbers of Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs with the Neo Taliban forces operating in Afghan territory added to the pressure for action. Responding to these pressures, the Pakistani government started sending further reinforcements to the area. It was a jihadi attack on one of the convoys carrying these reinforcements which triggered off the latest round of deadly clashes. These have seen the security forces taking over 100 dead.
Basically Pakistan has now been left in a position where the options are a bloody civil war to eliminate the Islamofascist elements in Waziristan or accept a Taliban style Islamofascist government with all the human rights abuses that means. This confrontation is nothing to do with American actions, its been growing all on its own as a result of Pakistani internal demographics and political developments over two decades or more. The fact it happens to coincide with current American actions is happenstance.
That's weird. I think they merely want to reverse social progress from secularization into a particular dark ages form of religious theocracy. Nothing new here. Just as american paleoconservatives and theocrats can't be exactly called "revolutionaries", the society they want existed under theocratic rule in the dark ages.
