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Pakistan's Hard Line on Terror Shows Signs of Softening

Pakistan's Hard Line on Terror Shows Signs of Softening

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.
 


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