Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [91]
The ambiguities of the Jamaat’s position, and the divisions among its members, were amply demonstrated when I visited Mansura in January 2009. First I spoke with the head of the party’s youth wing, Syed Shahid Gilani. The lights went out during our talk, and he turned on a torch so that I could continue to take notes, making the spectacles of his three co-workers flicker like fireflies in the dark – a pretty reflection of Jamaat intellectualism. While bitterly critical of US strategy and the US ‘occupation’ of Afghanistan, Gilani was also harsh in his condemnation of the Taleban:
We don’t accept the Taleban as a model. The Afghan Taleban offended the whole world; and in any case they didn’t believe in a political system, only in their own rule. Can you imagine the Taleban in power here in Pakistan? Impossible! The Pakistani Taleban mean anarchy – anyone with a couple of hundred men with weapons can take over cities ... So we should fight them, because we have to give protection to the people who are falling victim to their terrorism, and also because we can’t have a state within the state. We can’t accept that Pakistan is split into different zones under different parties. It would mean the end of the country. The writ of the state must run everywhere.19
Perhaps not coincidentally for these views, Gilani is a Punjabi from the great military centre of Rawalpindi. The then secretary-general of the Jamaat (elected its leader a few months later), Syed Munawar Hasan, gave a very different impression when I went on to talk with him. This was a notable meeting in that it was the only time in all my years of meeting with them that I have seen one of the Jamaat leaders – normally so calm and polite – lose his temper, because I had forced him into a corner over the Jamaat’s policy towards terrorism and violent revolution (though let it be said he apologized afterwards and offered me some more biscuits). I asked him repeatedly if the Jamaat denounced terrorism against fellow Muslims and violent revolution. He replied (in response to repeated questions):
It is because of America that these terrorist attacks are happening. America is the biggest terrorist in the world ... I do not fear the TTP [Pakistani Taleban]. I only fear the US ... Before 9/11 there was no terrorism in Pakistan. Once America has left Afghanistan our society will sort itself out ... We are not for the TTP but against America ...20
MILITANTS
The Jamaat’s ambivalence towards the violent militants probably reflects not only the party’s own divided soul, but also the fact that the party leadership is worried about being outflanked by those militants, and losing its own younger and more radical supporters to them. The leader of the single most spectacular Islamist action outside the Pathan areas – the creation of an armed militant base at the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in the capital, Islamabad – Abdul Rashid Ghazi, had indeed at one stage been associated with the Jamaat Islami, before leaving in protest at what he called their cowardice and political compromises. His whole personal style, however, remained very close to that of the Jamaat – and very different from that of the Pathan Taleban up in the hills. This gave me a very uneasy sense of the ease with which Jamaati activists might shift into violence.
Together with Peter Bergen of CNN, I interviewed Ghazi in April 2007, some two months before his death when the Pakistan army stormed the mosque complex. Ghazi was a slight man of forty-three years, with round spectacles, a spotless white shelwar kameez, and – for public consumption at least – a quiet, reserved and amicable manner. In his youth – a bit like St Augustine – he had initially defied his father’s wish that he study to become a cleric, and took an MSc in International Relations at the Qaid-e-Azam University. He later had a junior job with UNESCO. He seems to have been radicalized