Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [92]
Although Ghazi was a veteran of the Mujahidin jihad against the Soviets, he was not, on the face of it, the kind of man to go down fighting in a desperate last stand, until you remember that many dedicated Communists in the old days looked just the same. In fact, in the view of a Pakistani journalist who interviewed him not long before the military assault, he himself by the end would have chosen to surrender; but this would have meant that international militants in the building would have been handed over to the USA (eighteen of them were among the dead, according to official figures); and for him this was too much of a humiliation. His brother tried to escape dressed as a woman and was captured, only to be released two years later on the orders of the Supreme Court. Ghazi himself was killed in battle.
Peter and I were taken to the office across the broad courtyard of the complex, crowded with male and female volunteers whom we were not allowed to interview. There were few obtrusive signs of defence, but during the attack on the mosque it was discovered that the militants had burrowed a set of tunnels and concrete bunkers beneath it. The army showed an array of weapons that it had captured there, including heavy machine-guns, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers, sniper rifles and belts for suicide bombs.
The office where we met Ghazi was small and dingy, with grubby cream-coloured walls, a row of computer screens on a long table, and broken, uncomfortable chairs on which we perched awkwardly. It all felt very far from the luxurious mansion where I had lunched that day with a leading pro-government politician – and the contrast was perfectly deliberate. All the Islamist leaders I have met, militant or otherwise, have lived with a kind of ostentatious modesty.
Ghazi’s background helps explain how the movement at the Red Mosque got off the ground so easily, and why the government was so slow to try to stop it. His father, Maulana Mohammed Abdullah, the founder of the mosque, had been at the heart of the Pakistani establishment, and the mosque itself was the first to be built in Islamabad when the site was chosen for the new capital in the 1960s. ‘In those days, around here was just jungle. This mosque is older than Islamabad,’ he told us. In 1998, his father had been shot in the courtyard that we had just crossed, something that Ghazi blamed on the ISI (even as Pakistani liberals were accusing the ISI of backing Ghazi).
The overall line that Ghazi put across to Peter and me was very close to what I had heard from Jamaat leaders over the previous days, and indeed since. His words, in certain respects, also reflect those of the leaders of the notorious anti-Indian militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (see below). Concerning America’s role, Ghazi’s statements would indeed be agreed with by the overwhelming majority of all classes of Pakistani society. This indicates the greatest opportunity for the more intelligent, non-sectarian Islamist militants. This is not that they will be able to win a majority of the population over to their theological and ideological revolutionary agenda, which is shared by only a small minority of Pakistanis. Rather, they may be able to exploit US and Indian actions to mobilize much larger numbers of Pakistanis behind their Islamic and Pakistani nationalist agendas, which have some degree of sympathy from the great majority of their fellow countrymen.
Unlike the JUI, the Jamaat refused to condemn the Red Mosque movement, and the attack on the mosque was one factor in driving the party into more radical opposition to Musharraf. Ghazi’s views also illustrate the very great differences between different strands of Islamism in Pakistan – except on one point: hostility to the US, India and Israel. Thus, like the Jamaat, Ghazi laid great emphasis on his family’s commitment to women’s education, though partly on pragmatic grounds. He said that he had argued with the Taleban in Afghanistan about this:
My father established