Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [171]
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, madrasahs sent many fighters first to the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, and then to the jihad in Kashmir; so groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, formerly backed by the Pakistani military to fight in Kashmir, have a strong presence in southern Punjab. Hundreds of recruits from this region were killed in Kashmir, and as in the Frontier their graves have become local places of pilgrimage. As elsewhere, association with the Kashmiri and Afghan jihads has been absolutely critical to increasing the prestige of local militants.
However, the main jihadi groups in Punjab are not yet in revolt against the Pakistani state; and, precisely because the most important extremist forces in southern Punjab are sectarian forces, it seems to me extremely unlikely that they will be able to start a rebellion that could conquer the region, as the Taleban were able for a number of years to take over large parts of the FATA and Swat. Their ideological programme is bitterly resisted not only by the Shia but by all the local Sunni who are deeply attached to their local shrines and traditions – like Data Ganj Baksh; and their social radicalism will be equally savagely resisted by most of the local elites. This picture would change only if Lashkar-e-Taiba /Jamaat-ud-Dawa were to ally with the TTP – and failing a really determined crackdown on them by the Pakistani authorities, they seem unlikely to do so. I have been told by officials that precisely because their core agenda is anti-India, this gives LeT’s leaders an especially acute sense of the Indian threat, and discourages them from taking actions that would weaken or even destroy Pakistan.
What the extremists in this region can do, however, is carry out bloody terrorist attacks, which they have been doing for many years against the Shia. By mid-2010, this extremist alliance had also repeatedly shown its ability to carry out serious terrorist attacks in Punjab against the state and the general public – though it is important to remember once again the crucial difference between terrorism and successful rebellion.
A certain latent tension has existed between Sunni and Shia in this region for a long time, owing to the tendency of successive regimes, ending with the British, to reward Shia nobles – some, like the Turkic Qizilbash, from far away – with great land grants in areas populated by a mainly Sunni peasantry. However, despite occasional denunciations of the Shia as heretics by Sunni preachers, until the 1980s this tension remained very limited.
As the Multan Gazetteer of 1923 stated: ‘Generally speaking there is very little bitterness between the Sunni and Shia sects, and in the ordinary intercourse of life there is little to distinguish the two’12 – something that could certainly not have been said of Shia – Sunni relations in other South Asian Muslim cities like Lahore, Quetta and Lucknow. But as Sunni peasants moved into local towns in the mid-twentieth century, a new Sunni lower middle class emerged which saw its access to jobs and patronage blocked by the Shia elites and their clients. A degree of resentment at Shia dominance is therefore widespread. As a (personally enlightened) head teacher in Multan told me: ‘There is a feeling among many people here that the Shia stick together, protect each other and give each other the best jobs – like the Freemasons in England.’ Anti-Shia groups also built on the successful campaigns from the 1950s to the 1960s to have the Ahmedi sect declared non-Muslim.
In the early 1980s several factors came together to create a wholly new level of sectarian violence, starting in the Jhang district of central Punjab. The Iranian revolution gave new confidence and prominence to the Shia minority in Pakistan, and raised fears in the establishment that they might become a revolutionary force. Many Shia firmly believe – though without any actual evidence – that Washington encouraged the administration to attack