Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Asia Times sulla strage

 
 
    South Asia
     Oct 31, 2006
 
 
Another deadly blow for Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf wanted to draw
a line in the sand in his struggle for the spiritual soul of the
country by early next month, ramming through parliament a
controversial bill regarding women's rights that is seen as a move to
purge Islamic laws from the constitution.
Instead, helicopter gunships raining death on a village in the remote
Bajour agency tribal area on Monday morning significantly escalated
Musharraf's battle with militant Islamic forces fiercely
opposed to any softening of the state's Islamic legislation.
A pre-dawn attack on a madrassa (Islamic seminary) in a village in the
Bajour tribal district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) claimed
the lives of scores of people.
Pakistani authorities claimed immediately that the raid was carried
out by Pakistani forces. However, Asia Times Online contacts on the
spot are convinced that the raid was undertaken by North Atlantic
Treaty Organization forces. Recently, Islamabad agreed with NATO that
it could conduct operations in Pakistan from across the border in
Afghanistan.
Monday's attack came two days after thousands of pro-Taliban tribesmen
held an anti-US, anti-NATO rally in Damadola in the Bajour area close
to the site of a US missile attack that killed several al-Qaeda
members and civilians in January.
Authorities say information that Taliban or al-Qaeda fugitives were in
the region prompted Monday's raid. The border village lies opposite
the Afghan province of Kunar and is considered a major corridor for
militants to enter Afghanistan. In May, Pakistani authorities said a
senior al-Qaeda figure, Abu Marwan al-Suri, had been killed in Bajour
during a clash with local police.
Just as they are denying NATO involvement in Monday's attack,
Pakistani authorities also initially denied the US had carried out the
January attack.
Political fallout
Soon after Monday's raid, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the chief of the
powerful Islamic political party, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan (JI),
announced that two leading JI members had resigned their posts - a
senior minister in NWFP, Sirajul Haq, and a member of the federal
parliament from the Bajour agency, Haroon Rasheed.
The JI is a part of the six-party religious alliance the Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which has been at the forefront of agitation
against the proposed legislation on women's issues, as well as in
opposition in general to Musharraf and his pro-US stance in the "war
on terror".
Haq was quoted as saying that protests would be staged throughout the
northern tribal region on Tuesday.
Significantly, Pakistan and Taliban authorities struck a peace deal in
Bajour only two days ago and were scheduled to sign a document to that
effect on Monday. This lends credence to the possibility that it was
NATO and not Pakistani forces that made the raid.
Clearly, any peace deal in Bajour is now off the table, and the MMA
will seize on the raid to ramp up and expand its campaign against the
proposed women's legislation. The MMA has already threatened to resign
from the central parliament and all four provincial assemblies, two of
which have a controlling MMA presence.
Behind this political activism in the garb of religious issues,
though, lies the fear that any demonstrations will turn anti-West -
and violent. Under cover of violence and chaos, various smaller
underground religious groups as well as militants will mobilize for
the fulfillment of their agendas.
Militants already have immense power in the country and have forced
the government to step away from the tribal areas, notably North and
South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taliban have a heavy footprint.
The same was to happen in Bajour agency.
Bajour is home of the powerful Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammedi,
which was the group responsible which gathering more than 10,000
Pakistani youths to go to Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001.
Bajour is also the strategic back yard of the Hezb-i-Islami led by
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which is active in the Afghan insurgency. Many
prominent al-Qaeda leaders use the area while in transit in the
Nooristan-Kunar Valley.
Musharraf in the crosshairs
With the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, pockets of jihadi
groups have sprung up in Pakistani cities and villages, and to them
the symbol of hatred is Musharraf.
After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001, Musharraf came up
with a guarded approach to handle jihadis. He held many secret
meetings with their leaders at which he expressed his resolve in the
cause of Islam, as well as in jihad.
He tried to convince the jihadist leadership that Pakistan's decision
to ditch the Taliban was made under duress from the US and that as
soon as Pakistan could it would resume its support of the Islamic
forces in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, the bridge continued to widen between the jihadis and
Musharraf, to a point where Musharraf was repeatedly a target for
assassination by jihadist groups allied with disaffected military
officers.
Pakistani military operations in Waziristan further alienated the
jihadist outfits from Musharraf, even as his dependence on the US
grew. Recent Pentagon documents indicate that disbursements to
Islamabad amounted to about US$3.6 billion for operations from January
2002 through August 2005, an amount roughly equal to one-quarter of
Pakistan's total military expenditure during that period. At the same
time, as the Taliban revival in Afghanistan continues, the United
States' dependency on Musharraf has grown.
Musharraf appears to forget that Pakistan is still a traditional
society in which the majority of the people live in a tribal setup.
Traditions are generally the final word, and the true literacy rate
(which only means capability to read Urdu-language newspapers) is
hardly 25%.
In such an environment there is a blind following in religious issues,
as in the case of the Women's Protection Bill, which all traditional
clerics from north to south and from east to west are unanimous in
rejecting.
Military dictatorships, as is Musharraf's, tend to care more their
constituency (the armed forces) than the masses. Yet any development
that is perceived as an intervention against religion will have a
serious impact, as Islam is specifically the soul of the Pakistani
army, thanks to the rule of the late dictator General Zia ul-Haq and
his Islamification program.
Monday's bombing in Bajour brings Musharraf's showdown, and the line
in the sand, with Islamic forces just that little bit closer.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He
can be reached at 
saleem_sh...@yahoo.com
 .
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)

on terror".
Cioe' a favore dei talebani e dei terroristi che si nascondono e si
addestrano in Pakistan.
Figuriamoci quindi che valore possono avere le loro affermazioni.
-Stefano