Local Jihad, Global Jihad

Pakistan sentences Islamists to death; Zawahiri taunts Musharraf; Prophet protests rage

Pakistan continues its tortured role as an ally of the West and enabler of Islamist terror. Pakistani courts have sentenced to death eleven members of al Qaeda linked Jundallah for the assassination attempt on General Ahsan Saleem Hayat in June 2004. General Hayat was orchestrating Pakistan’s military offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Wazristan. The Institute for Counter-terrorism reports Jundallah is actively operating in Waziristan and may have expanded its operations to the Palestinian territories.

Strategy Page reports Pakistani television “showed three men, in the tribal areas on the Afghan border, being beheaded for opposing Taliban and al Qaeda operations…” Meanwhile, Islamist mobs riot while the Pakistani government attempts to suppress the protests. Leaders from the radical Islamist Jamaat-I-Islami and the Islamist opposition party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) promise to defy the bans on protests. An estimated 2,000 protested on the Afghan border, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Denmark.” Twenty-two are arrested after two Christian churches and a school is torched over “allegations that Christians had thrown pages of the Muslim holy book into the dustbin.” Reuters highlights the inherent discrimination and violence against minority Christians, Hindus and Sihks in Pakistan.

While Pakistan continues to try to keep a lid on the Islamist angst, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s deputy commander, mocks president Musharraf, and claims he escaped four separate attacks while in Pakistan and Afghanistan: – a cruise missile strike in August 1998 at an Afghanistan training camp; a missile strike in December 2001 in Tora Bora; a clash with the Pakistani Army in 2004; and the Damadola strike in January of 2005. Zawahiri taunts Musharraf and issues another threat; “Your American masters are fleeing from Iraq and Afghanistan. So, await a day of accounting for the Muslim blood you have spilt.”

In the Asia Times, Olivier Immig reviews Husain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, and neatly sums up how Pakistan’s power brokers have sought to obtain and maintain their power:

In Between Mosque and Military Haqqani instantaneously makes it clear that all military Pakistani leaders, and there have been quite a number of them since 1947, from the early days of Pakistan”s inception to the present have relied on the same ideological framework in ruling their country. This so-called “tripod” consists of: maintaining the territorial integrity of Pakistan through a strong, dominant military presence in all state affairs by continued confrontational politics versus India; maintaining the ideological “unity” of the country by promoting an Islamist nationalist ideology; and heavy reliance on continuing US economic and military support by serving as the “West’s eastern anchor” in South Asia.

While this solution has worked while the primary adversaries of Pakistan were nation-states, the advent of a global society has thrown this policy into turmoil. The policies of promoting of “an Islamist nationalist ideology” and the “heavy reliance on continuing US economic and military support” are now at odds, and Pakistan is increasingly finding it difficult to maintain the balance of power. The Islamists the Pakistani government succors has thrown in its lot with al Qaeda and now wishes to overthrow the regime, as the assassination attempts on Musharraf and his generals, the support for Islamist terrorists in Waziristan and the stoking of the fires of the Muhammed cartoons demonstrates.

In the world of globalization, there is no such thing as an Islamist nationalist ideology. al Qaeda has cleverly co-opted local Islamist groups and infused them with the ideology of global jihad. Pakistan’s ruling class has yet to grasp this reality, or if they have, is currently powerless to address the situation.

Also See:

Robert Mayer reminds us of the other danger in losing Pakistan – a nuclear Islamist state.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

3 Comments

  • Marlin says:

    Not surprisingly, the Asia Times has a second article today in which Syed Saleem Shahzad presents his opinion that Musharraf encouraged and sponsored rallies ostensibly against the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammedin order to remind the West of the dangers of extremism in Pakistan, but they have now backfired on him.
    “It is an open secret that the government encouraged and sponsored rallies ostensibly against the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The aim was to send a message to the West of the dangers of extremism in Pakistan, and that it could only be contained by the military dictatorship.
    This scheme has badly backfired, which the government was quick to realize. After a few rallies in Punjab, for example, the administration imposed the so-called Section 144 across the province and in the federal capital, under which all public gatherings were banned.
    […]
    The extent of the popular demonstrations has led the most organized and most powerful member of the MMA, the Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan, to harness this people’s power into an anti-Musharraf movement.
    […]
    In addition to the religious-political parties, the country’s hardcore religious segment has embraced the call for Tehrik-i-Nizam-i-Mustafa, and by implication the ouster of Musharraf. This includes the madrassas (seminaries) and calls from the mosques.”
    Musharraf losing his grip

  • I read somewhere that the guy who tore the Quran was a recent convert to Islam who wanted to get rid of his Christian father-in-law by blaming him for the desecration

  • Pakistan’s geopolitical schizophrenia, I think, derives from having a very traditional Islamic society warped by extensive Wahhabi indoctrination overlayed by an Anglophone elite that does share some of the values of the British heritage which are the basis for India’s democratic legal and political system. Musharraf himself practically epitomizes this, having been a supporter of jihadists in Kashmir yet having the cultivation to look beyond his surroundings and see Pakistan in a broader perspective. I think he knows radical Islam is the way to the dark ages, but is entertwined with their world. There are certainly things he has which I would question – his handling of the Muhammad cartoons is a recent example of miscalculations made with an eye to his country’s Islamic base – but I have to admire a man who has faced as many assassination attempts as this man, yet he keeps on going. He is a very brave man.

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