One of Pakistan's most notorious homegrown terrorists was elected
to parliament — from prison. As Azam Tariq emerged from
confinement a free man, he stepped into a limousine and was driven
away by his own armed guards.
His
pro-Taliban, pro-al Qaeda outlawed party, Sipah-e-Sahaba (Guardians
of the Friends of the Prophet), was one of five extremist groups
banned by President Pervez Musharraf last January as he tried
to dulcify US concerns. The Pakistani police blame Tariq's Guardians,
the country's most violent group, for some 400 killings in the
last year alone.
The US also bustled Mr. Musharraf on free elections. The unanticipated
result was the emergence of a coalition of six politico-religious
extremist parties as a key partner in the horse-trading for a
national coalition government. If excluded, Islamist extremists
would then become a disloyal opposition dedicated to sabotaging
Pakistan's post-9/11 links with the US.
The Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA, or United Action Council) is led
by Fazul-ur-Rehman, a fiery antediluvian demagogue, friend of
both Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former Taliban leader, and the
world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rehman suddenly
became the other two major political factions' choice for prime
minister. His campaign appearances were festooned with "Osama
bin Laden the Liberator" and "US Go Home" posters
and banners.
One
of the Bush administration's ranking national security officials
confided privately, "Better to have the crazies in than out
of government." The US State Department praised the Pakistani
elections as "an important milestone in the ongoing transition
to democracy." Apparently unbeknownst to the State Department,
democracy was the big loser in Pakistan. So much for the idea
of free elections in a Muslim country with a population of 145
million that is more than half illiterate.
To call Pakistan an ally in the war against terrorism has become
an oxymoron. Mr. Rehman and his cohort Sami ul-Haq were the tutors
to most of Taliban's top leadership. Two years ago, Mullah Omar
and Osama bin Laden delivered joint commencement addresses at
the University for the Education of Truth — one of Pakistan's
principal madrassas — in the township of Khattak near Peshawar.
Now
Taliban cadres are free again to come and go into Afghanistan
as they please without fear of arrest. Because the Oct. 10 elections
also gave control of the regional governments of two of Pakistan's
four provinces — Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan
— to those who guard the friends of the prophet. The entire
length of the Pakistan-Afghan frontier is now once again the dominion
of anti-American religious extremists. From the provincial capitals
of Peshawar and Quetta, they will run police forces, border guards
and paramilitary scouts. Sharia law will be strictly enforced.
Everything appears to be in place for a rebirth of Taliban —
on both sides of the border. In Afghanistan, letters have been
found tacked to trees urging an uprising against American "occupation"
forces that have made "our Afghan sisters their servants
and slaves." Several girls schools have been attacked, two
by rocket-propelled grenades. Religious conservatives are still
the law outside of Kabul.
Warlords
use the sharia and opium and heroin smuggling to buy
weapons and consolidate their hold. Opium production, banned by
Taliban in 2000, was down to 185 tons last year. This year, opium
is expected to yield 3,500 tons, on its way up to peak production
of 5,000 tons in 1999. "Afghan brown sugar" is the country's
only cash crop that doesn't require much water, a boon in a country
that has suffered from drought for four consecutive years.
Taliban's
infamous Ministry for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention
of Vice still holds sway in distant provinces. In Kabul, Foreign
Minister Abdullah Abdullah says the Karzai government is losing
credibility because little of the $1.8 billion in emergency reconstruction
aid pledged in Tokyo last January for 2002 by some 60 nations
and 20 international organizations has made it into the country,
let alone the $4.5 billion through 2007.
The man who engineered the victory of Pakistan's fundamentalist
parties was Hamid Gul, a retired former head of the Inter-Services
Intelligence agency (ISI) who acted as "strategic adviser"
to MMA. Gen. Gul's reward: a Senate seat. Some 300 ISI officers
who had been working with Taliban prior to September 11 and were
transferred to regular army units have now been returned to the
intelligence agency.
NWFP
and Baluchistan are once again privileged sanctuaries for al Qaeda
— a clear and present danger for President Bush's war on
terror." This week, Gen. Gul publicly praised MMA's top leaders
as "saints just like [former Taliban leader] Mullah Omar"
and hailed Saddam Hussein, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Fidel Castro,
the Assads (father and son) in Syria, China and Iran for "standing
up to America's new world order, the cruelest system on earth.
But we have the nuclear capacity, a gift from God, to resist its
imposition on us."
The unholy nexus between Mr. Musharraf, the mullahs and the terrorists
was clearly not the result the president had anticipated. But
there is little doubt it was the key objective of Gen. Gul and
his ISI cronies. The two dozen arrests of al Qaeda types in Pakistan
were the result of FBI coordination with the Interior Ministry,
not ISI.
By keeping Pakistan's two most prominent political leaders —
Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — out of the political contest
and in exile abroad, Mr. Musharraf ensured major extremist gains
(from 5 percent to 20 percent; from two seats in the old parliament
to 60) as well as 116 seats for the "king's party,"
PML-QA (Pakistan Muslim League-Qaid-e-Azam), where retired army
friends and ISI officers were recruited to run. This pro-Musharraf
spinoff of Mr. Sharif's PML scored the largest single gain of
any party.
If the US goes to war against Iraq, Pakistan may well go the way
of Yugoslavia. It could easily blow into four deadly parts and
where the country's nuclear arsenal would wind up is anyone's
guess. Mr. Musharraf is not an Islamist, but a number of jealous,
ambitious generals are. The president has survived six assassination
plots. In the event of Mr. Musharraf's demise, ISI would play
a major role in the struggle for succession.
ISI's role in supplying North Korea with nuclear know-how for
its missile warheads in return for North Korean missile technology
for Pakistan's nuclear delivery vehicles had been a closely guarded
state secret. So when the New York Times broke the story,
it was yet another awkward pause in the make-believe world of
a Pakistani-US alliance. The chief of the North Korean Air Force
has been a frequent visitor to Islamabad since September 11, 2001.
He stays at the Marriott Hotel and doesn't even bother to conceal
his identity; he wears his uniform.
Scanning editorials from Buenos Aires to Bombay, it is hard to
find anyone who believes war on Iraq has anything to do with the
war on terror. They concluded months ago what Forbes magazine
headlined in its Oct. 28 issue — "Bomb Baghdad, hit
OPEC" — with this explanation: "Defeating Saddam
means opening up Iraq's oil reserves. Bad news for oil producers
and good news for everyone else."
The
writer is editor at large for The Washington Times, a position
he also holds with United Press International.
