Let's Hope

By Claude Rakisits, *Pakistan's political cancer grows* - The Australian - Australia
Thursday, July 8, 2010

The government is under intense pressure to avenge the recent attack on a Sufi shrine.

Pakistan is once again in the headlines and, as is often the case, mainly for bad reasons. Last Thursday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up at Lahore's Data Gunj Bakhsh, Pakistan's most famous Sufi shrine, killing 50 worshippers and wounding more than 200.

No one has claimed responsibility for the latest attack. However, the Pakistani authorities suspect it is the work of the Punjabi Taliban - a grouping of religious extremists based in Punjab - which is associated with the Waziristan-based Pakistani Taliban (known in Pakistan by its acronym TTP) and is known to have al-Qai'da links.

What makes this latest attack particularly significant is that the majority of Pakistanis adhere to Sufism, the softer, more mystical form of Islam. So this was a real blow to the cultural heart of Pakistan. Accordingly, the reaction to this devastating attack was profoundly different to previous attacks.

Forty religious leaders from different Islamic schools of thought issued a fatwa, declaring that suicide attacks were against the spirit of Islam and humanity and that whoever killed a Muslim had nothing to do with Islam.

Thousands of people took to the streets in several cities demanding that the government do something about this ever-growing terrorist threat.

The Pakistani government is getting worried, and rightfully so. President Asif Ali Zardari's spokesman has stated that Pakistan is a nation at war. Accordingly, the Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, with the ostensible support of the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, agreed to convene an emergency security summit to try to hammer out a strategy to deal with this threat.

Let's hope they come up with a credible plan because this political cancer is growing fast and has infected the Punjab, Pakistan's heartland and most populous province. And that's the big worry.
As long as the terrorist attacks were limited to the northwest of the country and the tribal areas, the authorities could pretend that it was only a Pakhtun problem, which could be contained in a remote part of Pakistan.

Unfortunately, the contamination has spread elsewhere.

Worryingly, many of the Punjab-based religious extremist groups - most of which have had the covert support of the military as proxy jihadists to fight the Indians in Kashmir - have increasingly turned their attention to the home front, targeting the pro-West army and government and anyone not toeing their strict version of Islam.

The Pakistan government will be under intense pressure to be seen to be doing something to avenge this latest attack. The Americans have been telling the Pakistanis they need to do something about this growing terrorist threat before it gets out of control. However, there will be limits as to what they can do.

Conducting military operations in highly populated Punjab would not be the same as the ones conducted in the sparsely populated tribal areas. Moreover, the army is not trained for counter-terrorism operations. As we have seen when it went into the Swat Valley to oust the TTP last year, the army's heavy-handed methods tend to cause a lot of collateral damage. In that case, more than 2.5 million people were forced to flee their homes, making it the world's worst sudden movement of refugees since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The government doesn't want a repeat of that disaster.

Complicating the Pakistani government's options to manoeuvre is that the Punjabi government, which is headed by Nawaz Sharif's brother, is not at all keen to use force against these religious extremists. On the contrary, the Sharif brothers are advocating talking to the Punjabi Taliban instead.

The problem with that approach is that it doesn't work: all the peace agreements the Pakistani government has signed with the Pakistani religious extremists in the past have been broken by the militants.

But Nawaz Sharif doesn't care. He wants to regain power in Islamabad as prime minister from which he was ousted by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. So he wants Gilani to take all the blame for turning on fellow Punjabis, hoping to make it easier for him to win the next parliamentary election.

What is happening in Pakistan should deeply worry the international community.

It is a well-known fact that the key to victory in Afghanistan is Pakistan. That is why the Americans have been putting so much pressure on the Pakistan army to launch a fully fledged military operation against the Taliban's safe havens in North Waziristan along the border with Afghanistan. But a Pakistani government distracted and weakened by its internal troubles cannot focus on fighting in the tribal areas.

In the meantime, the US continues its drone attacks against the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. But these drone strikes have negative repercussions: they fuel rampant anti-Americanism, give a boost to the recruitment of new terrorists and result in more TTP attacks against ordinary Pakistanis.

They also weaken an already very weak and less than credible Pakistani president who is perceived as simply being a stooge of the Americans.

And here is the snag: the deeper Washington gets involved in Pakistan, the weaker the Pakistani government becomes and therefore the more difficult it becomes for the Pakistani leaders to deal effectively with an ever-expanding home-grown terrorist threat which has claimed the lives of 10,000 people in the past four years.

Claude Rakisits is a senior lecturer in strategic studies at Deakin University