Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [232]
The full ‘Pashtunization’ of the JUI was above all the product of the 1980s and the jihad against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan and their Afghan Communist allies. Support for the Islamist groups among the Afghan Mujahidin, both from the Pakistani state and from Saudi Arabia and private donors in the Gulf, led to a huge influx of money to madrasahs in the Frontier where many of the Afghan Mujahidin were educated and shaped ideologically, and to an enormous growth in the number of those madrasahs. Both the JUI and the Jamaat became heavily involved in various forms of support for the Afghan jihad, and profited greatly as a result.
In one way the ANP and JUI resemble each other. They both began as ‘revolutionary’ parties in a Pakistani context: the ANP for the abolition of Pakistan itself, or at least its transformation into a very loose democratic federation; the JUI for a revolutionary transformation of the Pakistani state and society along Islamist lines. Both, however, have in practice long since become ‘mainstream’ political players, forming coalitions for political and above all patronage advantage. Both in consequence are at risk of being outflanked ideologically and politically by the Taleban.
Thus, despite its deep ideological opposition – in theory – to the US presence in Afghanistan and to Pakistani help to the US, the JUI functioned as a de facto supporter of Musharraf’s administration, and at the time of writing is a partner in government of President Zardari’s PPP – a government whose programme it says it detests for a whole set of reasons, including most of all its alliance with the US!
In July 2009 I asked the JUI spokesman Jalil Jan why in view of his party’s bitter opposition to Zardari’s policies they did not leave the government. He replied:
Our ministers stand in parliament and criticize the government of which they are part. Don’t you think that is brave of us? ... It is not kufr [disbelief, or disobedience to God] that people voted for us in order to get jobs for them. So it isn’t bad that we are in power at the centre and in Balochistan, and are able to give jobs to our people.10
Of course, like everyone else I always knew this about the JUI – but it is nice to have it confirmed from the horse’s mouth. ‘Money doesn’t smell,’ a Peshawari journalist quoted cynically when I asked about this. The JUI’s problem is that American money does increasingly smell in Pathan nostrils – in fact it stinks to high heaven. The victory of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) Islamist coalition in the 2002 elections in the NWFP and the Pathan areas of Balochistan was due in part to favouritism by the Musharraf administration in order to defeat the PPP and PML(N); and in part to the fact that the PPP and ANP simply could not agree to co-operate either against Musharraf or against the Islamists.
To judge by my own observations and public opinion polls, however, by far the most important factor in their victory was mass Pathan anger at the US invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the Taleban there. In the succeeding years, the MMA’s de facto support for Musharraf – even as he forged a closer and closer alliance with the US and abandoned the jihad in Kashmir – did not go unnoticed among Pathan voters. Repeatedly on the streets of Peshawar people told me that they had voted MMA in 2002 but