John Lancaster 

The Washington Post

Arab News

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, 28 June 2003 — As Pakistan consolidates military control for the first time over a rugged area along the border with Afghanistan, leaders of one of the country’s main Islamic parties have expressed support for armed resistance by local tribal groups, posing a fresh challenge to the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

In statements over the past few days, leaders of a faction of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-iIslami party — one of the main partners in the coalition of six radical Islamic parties that lead the political opposition in Pakistan’s Parliament — have challenged the army’s right to operate in Mohmand Agency, one of six autonomous “tribal areas’’ on the Afghan border.

“This will ignite a civil war in Pakistan,’’ Hafiz Hussein Ahmad, the party’s second-ranking leader and the deputy parliamentary leader of the religious coalition, said in an interview. The coalition is known as the Majlis-i-Amal (MMA).

“When the Pakistani Army or police will go there and besiege and surround their houses and violate their women’s right to purdah (separating men and women), definitely they will have the right to self-defense,’’ Ahmad said.

Pakistani officials say deployment of regular and paramilitary forces in Mohmand Agency will complete the process of establishing federal control in the lawless border region and will help prevent attacks on US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan by remnant Taleban fighters who use the area as a refuge.

The public challenge by the party, which has wielded growing political clout since the MMA’s unexpectedly strong performance in national election last fall, underscores Musharraf’s precarious political position. The president, an army general who took power in a military coup in 1999, has been hesitant to confront religious radicals with long-standing ties to the military and intelligence services, yet he remains under pressure from the United States and other foreign powers to make good on promises to curb terrorists.

Diplomats and analysts say Musharraf has barely begun the process of dismantling a legacy of Islamic extremism rooted in government policies of the 1980s, when Pakistan — with US backing — armed and trained guerrillas fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

In announcing a $3 billion aid package during Musharraf’s visit to Washington this week, President Bush praised the Pakistani leader for “productive and constructive’’ efforts to reform Pakistan’s system of madrassas, religious schools seen as breeding grounds for Islamic radicalism. But the government has yet to introduce a new curriculum for madrassas, citing opposition from conservative clerics in Parliament and elsewhere.

While Musharraf has taken some steps to curb infiltration by Pakistani-based militants into the Indian-held portion of the Kashmir region, diplomats say he has yet to make a strategic choice to shut down the groups, which from Pakistan’s perspective have proved useful in maintaining pressure on India to resolve the dispute over Kashmir.

The religious parties had never performed well before last fall’s parliamentary election, and they owe much of their newfound strength to Musharraf, who used his authority to tilt the playing field in their favor during that vote.

Analysts say Musharraf expected the fundamentalist leaders to fall into line once comfortably ensconced in Parliament, but the past few months have demonstrated otherwise.

“You get all kinds of distortions when you manipulate the political system,’’ said Samina Ahmed, director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a pro-democracy organiziation based in Brussels. “That is the problem the military is facing now.’’

The effects are evident in Parliament, where the MMA is disrupting legislative business as a protest against Musharraf’s military rule; in North-West Frontier Province, where the religious coalition controls the provincial legislature and is seeking to enforce strict Islamic laws; in the province of Balochistan, where the coalition is a partner in the provincial government; and in the latest challenge to the troop deployment in the tribal areas.

The challenge followed reports last week that Pakistani forces had moved into Mohmand Agency in coordination with US and Afghan forces pursuing Taleban fighters on the other side of the border. The Pakistani incursion met resistance from local tribesmen that resulted in the death of a paramilitary trooper on Monday, military officials said. On the same day, Fazlur Rahman, who heads the faction of Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islami supporting the armed resistance and is one of three main opposition leaders in the national Parliament, said such action was justified.

“I want to make it clear that the resistance of the tribesmen in Mohmand Agency against the joint operation carried out by Pakistan-US forces would be a legitimate one,’’ he said, according to one of Pakistan’s major English-language newspapers, the News. Rahman’s party, like the Taleban, draws its main support from the Pashtun ethnic group that makes its home on both sides of the ill-defined border.

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, declined to comment on Rahman’s statement. He disputed reports that the operation had been undertaken at the behest of the United States, saying that the primary purpose was to assert federal authority in the area and that the situation was now calm.