Vol. 71/No. 29      August 6, 2007

The troop deployment comes on the heels of the July 10 storming by Pakistani military units of the Red Mosque religious complex in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The Red Mosque was held by heavily armed Islamist forces for more than six months.

The eight-day siege of the complex broke into a 35-hour battle that left more than 100 dead. Those occupying the mosque fought with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and grenades.

“The [Red Mosque], established in 1965, has long been at the centre of Pakistan’s officially encouraged jihadi culture,” the Financial Times reported July 11. “It played an important role in raising mujahideen—holy warriors—for the CIA-backed battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and its two leading clerics, known as the Ghazi brothers, were long considered untouchable by the authorities, protected by their supposed ties to the intelligence services.”

In recent months these forces tried to use the mosque as the organizing center of a push to carry out an “IslamicRevolution” in Pakistan, according to press reports. Clerics conducted a “Taliban-style anti-vice campaign,” the Financial Times reported, abducting women accused of violating Islamic law and handing down a religious edict against the country’s female tourism minister after she was photographed receiving a congratulatory embrace from a parachute instructor in France.

Demonstrations against the attack called in cities across Pakistan Saturday drew a couple thousand people—a smaller turnout than anticipated by the religious schools and coalition of bourgeois religious parties that called them. A wave of anti-government bombings and other attacks spread through Pakistan’s northern region near the Afghan border over the weekend.

Tribal leaders in the border region announced they were ending a 10-month “peace” agreement with the administration of President Pervez Musharraf. Under that agreement, tribal leaders agreed to use their militias to police the region and prevent cross-border raids into Afghanistan in exchange for the Pakistani government withdrawing its military troops.

“Extremism and terrorism will be defeated in every corner of the country,” Musharraf said in a nationally televised address July 12. He also said that he would “never allow a mosque or a madrassah to ever be misused in the future.”

In the last several months leading to the clash at the mosque, pressure had been growing on the Musharraf administration to take action against Taliban militias and other forces operating within Pakistan.

In an attempt to counter a growing opposition to his eight-year rule by bourgeois forces that have mobilized many in the middle classes, Musharraf has allowed Islamist groups to function largely unchecked to garner support from religious parties.

The Musharraf regime—once the protector of the Taliban—was transformed into an unstable but staunch strategic ally of Washington following the toppling of the Taliban regime in the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Washington has been pressing Islamabad to take greater control of the border region in the recent period, complaining that it’s used as a safe haven by Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.

“We have seen the Taliban pooling, planning and training in the north-west territories. There was an agreement with the tribal chiefs that president Musharraf did. It is not working the way he wanted, it is not working the way we want it,” said U.S. president George Bush’s national security advisor Stephen Hadley

While expressing support to the troop deployment, Hadley said, “We are urging him to do more.” In the three years since the invasion of Afghanistan, Washington’s military aid to Pakistan soared to $4.2 billion compared to $9.1 million over the three previous years.

“Whether Gen Musharraf’s deployment of force against the mosque marks a turning point in the government’s approach to combating violent extremism is unclear,” read an article in the July 11 Financial Times. “If that were to prove the case, it could consolidate international support for the beleaguered general, alleviating the pressure he is facing to exit politics and restore democracy.”
 
 
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