Author: Seth Mydans
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: April 28, 2002
Three months after President Pervez
Musharraf announced a major crackdown on violent Muslim groups and on the
religious schools that breed them, doubts are rising here about his commitment
to follow through.
Of nearly 2,000 people arrested
in a sweep of Islamic radicals, as many as 70 percent have been set free.
After five militant groups were banned, many of their members reorganized
under new names. The reform of religious academies has met strong resistance,
and the schools continue to operate much as they always have.
The most volatile issue the president
addressed, a military standoff with India over the disputed territory of
Kashmir, persists along the border.
The reasons and motives involved
vary from issue to issue, and they are the subject of debate among Pakistani
and foreign analysts.
General Musharraf has not backed
away from his major policy reversal of choosing to support the United States
in its war on terrorism. Joint police operations have been carried out
to arrest militants, and the two countries are cooperating in intelligence
gathering.
But on the most sensitive and entrenched
domestic issues, the direction of his policies is not so clear.
The general, who seized power in
a coup in 1999, is seeking to extend his rule in a referendum next week
and may be treading softly against militant groups to minimize opposition.
The laws of Pakistan do not allow
for indefinite detention without charge, and security officials say it
is the least dangerous detainees who are being released, after signing
pledges of good behavior. But many members of violent militant groups are
now free again.
The religious schools have been
required to register and regulate the admissions of foreign students. But
the poorly financed government education system has few alternatives to
offer, and it is next to impossible to require religious teachers to change
their beliefs. There have been no changes in their curriculums.
Radical religious groups represent
a minority in Pakistan, and General Musharraf's crackdown on militants
has broad public support. But there is some resistance, even within the
government, to taking strong measures against the religious schools.
It is Kashmir that worries many
analysts the most. Since the general's speech, there has been little sign
that substantive steps have been taken to ease tensions there.
Half a million Indian troops have
massed in the area to reinforce a demand that Pakistanis stop crossing
the demarcation line to carry out acts of violence, and they remain in
what Pakistan says is an aggressive posture. Tensions escalated in December
when a group of terrorists mounted a suicide attack on the Indian Parliament.
India blamed Pakistani militants, although American officials said they
did not believe that General Musharraf was involved.
The general seemed to be announcing
a new policy in his speech on Jan. 12 when he said, "No organization will
be allowed to perpetuate terrorism behind the garb of the Kashmiri cause."
He also seemed to be taking action
in the arrests that followed. About half of the detainees belonged to groups
involved in the Kashmir conflict. Two major groups blamed for violence
in Kashmir and India were banned: Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.
The United States had already declared both to be terrorist groups and
had frozen their assets.
But many of those arrested have
now been released. The leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed,
has been freed. Masood Azhar, who heads Jaish-e-Muhammad, has been moved
to house arrest.
Turning Pakistan against the Taliban,
which it had supported and helped to create, was General Musharraf's first
major change in policy, and it aroused a much weaker and less violent response
here than had been feared.
Taking the next step - backing away
from confrontation in Kashmir - is a much more difficult political step
to take.
In his speech, the general put the
issue starkly. "Kashmir runs in our blood," he said. The territory has
been the cause of wars and rebellion since the partition of India and Pakistan
in 1947, and what India may call terrorism, many in Pakistan see as holy
war.
Analysts are now waiting for the
winter snows to melt in the mountains of Kashmir to see whether there will
be a genuine thaw in the standoff.
At the time of General Musharraf's
speech, the Indian defense minister, George Fernandes, said, "Any efforts
at de-escalation can come only - I repeat, only - if and when crossborder
terrorism is effectively stopped."
Since then, according to one Pakistani
security official, a sense of grievance has emerged here over the absence
of any peace gesture by India in response to the speech.
As the warm weather of spring approaches,
it is not clear that Pakistan is prepared to act to halt the infiltrations.
There is considerable sympathy for the militants within the army, sentiments
that the president must take into account and may not find entirely alien.
"On Sept. 10, these guys were virtually
the auxiliaries of the armed forces and some of their internal activities
were sort of winked at," said M. A. Niazi, a columnist for The Nation,
a daily newspaper. "So having picked them all up, there's obviously some
indication that they've been told to lie low like Br'er Rabbit and say
nothing for the time being."
In Pakistan's new antiterrorism
stance, analysts see a distinction between the government's attitude toward
groups that pose the kind of broad threat that concerns the United States
and those that focus on Kashmir. Some of the groups associated with Kashmir
do, however, share the anti-American ideology prevalent here among Islamic
fundamentalists.
The release of Mr. Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba
may involve an agreement that his group will limit its activities to Kashmir,
one security official said.
Another group, Hezbul Mujahedeen,
which is based in the Pakistani area of Kashmir and has focused all along
on that conflict, escaped the government ban entirely. According to one
theory among both foreign and Pakistani analysts, the government might
now shift to a posture of greater deniability, reducing the holy war movement
in Pakistan and painting the conflict as a purely local insurgency.
"They are running a freedom movement
and they have the backing of the local people," said a Pakistani intelligence
official. "They have every international right to do this."
Whatever may be happening on the
ground, there does not seem to be an easing of this hard-line viewpoint.
Hamid Gul, a former head of the
intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence, is one of the don't-get-me-started
voices defending militancy.
"Kashmir is divided along the line
of control," he said. "That's worse than the Berlin Wall. Why should there
be a hue and cry if some people are scaling this Berlin Wall and fighting
on the other side? They are a divided nation, they are oppressed, subjugated
and held under the tyranny of the Indian gun."
His remarks may sound extreme, but
they are almost routine here. Newspapers print sentiments like this almost
every day.