Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [173]
I am seriously worried about the spread of militancy from Jhang to the rest of Punjab. It is true that so far LeJ and SSP have been only sectarian, but they can switch. The same is even true of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, even though we have backed them all these years. We have to worry that if we do what you say and crack down on them that some of them at least will turn to terrorism against Pakistan in alliance with the Taleban. After all, they have the ideology and the training. The last thing we need now is yet another extremist threat.
The fact that despite crackdowns by successive Pakistani regimes the sectarian extremists have been able to survive is another reflection of the weakness of the Pakistani state, and especially of the police and judiciary. In the words of a police officer in Jhang district in 2002:
There are hundreds of thousands of SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi sympathizers in this region and we aren’t America – we can’t arrest them all and send them to Cuba. We have to stay more or less within the law. It’s different for the hard-core terrorists who we know have killed people – them, we can sometimes just kill. But there are so many more people who may have given them shelter, or who may be going to become terrorists, but who haven’t actually done anything yet. Under the anti-terrorism laws, we can hold people for three months, but after that we have to go to the High Court, and the court will demand evidence that we usually don’t have, because witnesses just will not come forward – you can understand why. Only very rarely do the courts allow us to hold people permanently in preventive detention. And of course the judges are also frightened. That is why they let out Azam Tariq, though everyone knows he has ordered God knows how many murders ...
Everyone says that it is because the police sympathize with the militants, but I can tell you that is definitely not true at the senior level – junior policemen, yes, in some cases. But you know twenty-two policemen have been killed by these bastards in Jhang alone in the past ten years. The superintendent of a jail where SSP prisoners were being held was even kidnapped in front of his own jail and killed. That kind of thing scared the police, and for a time we became quite inactive in this part of Punjab. That was especially true in the early ’90s, but in recent years we have become much tougher.
As he freely admitted, the difficulty of getting convictions means that if the police get an order to deal firmly with some sectarian leader, their response often is to kill him. Several leaders of the SSP have indeed been killed, either with or without official complicity. In 1990, one of the group’s founders, Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, was killed by Shia terrorists, as was his successor Maulana Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi. In October 2003, after attempts to convict him for terrorism had failed, SSP leader Maulana Azam Tariq was shot dead by unidentified gunmen a hundred yards or so from a police checkpoint in Islamabad where he had been stopped for half an hour.
Officially, the killing was blamed on Shia militants, but both the private accounts of my official friends and the circumstances of the killing make it clear that the Pakistani state was involved. This was also almost certainly true of Azam Tariq’s successor, Allama Ali Sher Haideri, who was killed in an ambush in Khairpur, Sindh, in August 2009, once again ostensibly by Shia militants. The killing came two weeks after an anti-Christian pogrom orchestrated by the SSP in the Punjabi town of Gojra, which killed eight local Christians and severely embarrassed both the national and provincial governments. Private claims by intelligence officials that this was official retaliation for Gojra therefore seem credible.
When covering the 2002 parliamentary elections in Pakistan, I travelled for a while with a Shia politician in central Punjab. According to both official and unofficial sources (speaking off the record), the SSP had made