Red line drawn By Jo Johnson and Farhan Bokhari
Early yesterday morning, General Pervez Musharraf took a decisionhe had avoided for more thansix months. Pakistan's president ordered soldiers from an elite squad ofcommandos he once led to storm the Lal Masjid religious complex in Islamabad, held by heavily armed radical Islamists with alleged links to al-Qaeda.
The crack force encountered fierce resistance. As the crump of explosions and the rattle of gunfire echoed across the capital into the early evening, any hope Gen Musharraf may have had of avoiding a massacre - one that could prompt dozens of copycat martyrdom operations - seemed to fade with the dying light.
The ramifications of Gen Musharraf's long-delayed decision to act against the clerics at the Lal Masjid, or "Red Mosque", who were believed to be using hundreds of women and children as a human shield, will become fully apparent only in the weeks to come. Whether Gen Musharraf's deployment of force against the mosque marks a turning point in the government's approach to combating violent extremism is unclear. If that were to prove the case, it could consolidate international support for the beleaguered general, alleviating the pressure he is facing to exit politics and restore democracy.
"If the government sustains this kind of momentum, this could be a watershed for Musharraf, but that's a very big if," says one western ambassador. "The problem is with Musharraf's track record. He has had time and he hasn't taken action in the past."
A senior European diplomat expects Gen Musharraf's international image to benefit only from a short-term boost "as the man who can fight militants, the leader who ordered this action". He warns, however, that a durable solution to Pakistan's problems remains, by definition, beyond Gen Musharraf: "The military and Musharraf are part of the problem."
There is a broad consensus that the government stalled over the Lal Masjid situation for too long. "This action should have been taken in January or February," says retired Lieutenant General Moinuddin Haider, a former interior minister under Gen Musharraf. Referring to the so-called madrassa belt of Islamic schools across the country, he adds: "Of course, there are many madrassas that are affiliated with politico-religious groups - and they will react. [But] in the final analysis, the government is obliged to enforce the writ of the state. Militancy cannot be tolerated, no matter how difficult the challenge."
The US is publicly backing the decision to storm the mosque. Tom Casey, a state department spokesman, said the militants were given many warnings before the commandos moved in on the compound. "The government of Pakistan has proceeded in a responsible way," he said. "All governments have a responsibility to preserve order." US officials were privately expressing the hope that Gen Musharraf would be able to ride any backlash that might result.
Since the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, Gen Musharraf has faced relentless criticism for failing to follow through on his pledges to take tough action against madrassas that promote religious extremism. Over the past six years a clear pattern has emerged: his periodic declarations of resolve, exacted in the wake of international events and under sustained diplomatic pressure, have invariably been followed by inaction and broken promises. Analysts attribute his half-hearted efforts to his lack of legitimacy and dependence on religious conservatives for political support.
But opposition politicians say it is wishful thinking on the part of a perennially deluded west to believe that the storming of the Lal Masjid represents a new determination on the part of the government to clamp down on rogue madrassas. The clerics had staged their defiance of the state at a mosque in the very heart of the capital, scarcely more than five minutes' walk from the diplomatic zone and the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
"How was it possible for such a lot of arms and weapons to be brought in? Was it the connivance of the intelligence agencies or the result of their incompetence that this situation was aggravated?" asks Senator Farhatullah Babar, spokesman of the Pakistan People's Party. "Ultimately, neither Musharraf nor the army can deal with this problem alone. Tackling militancy has to be done through allowing a credible democratic process to take root in Pakistan, which then leads to a broad national consensus."
But Gen Musharraf's struggle to stay in power following his 1999 coup has forged a complex relationship between the military and the mullahs in Pakistani politics. The country's six principal religious parties - grouped in a formation called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal - vehemently oppose many of Gen Musharraf's policies at a national level: the MMA denounces the general for "betraying" the Taliban in 2001, rejects all peaceful attempts to settle the 60-year-old dispute with India over Kashmir and opposes the presence of American troops and agencies in Pakistan.
At the same time, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam), the pro- Musharraf governing party, relies on the religious parties to prop up its weakening domestic support base and help it counter the mainstream civilian opposition, Benazir Bhutto's PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif, whom Gen Musharraf ousted as prime minister.
By repeatedly backtracking on promises to reform the jihadi content of the madrassa curriculum and curb the flows of money into radical seminaries, the government has emboldened sectarian and extremist forces, contributing to the violence that now plagues the country, the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention think-tank, argued in a recent report.
The Lal Masjid, established in 1965, has long been at the centre of Pakistan's officially encouraged jihadi culture. It played an important role in raising mujahideen - holy warriors - for the CIA- backed battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and its two leading clerics, known as the Ghazi brothers, were long considered untouchable by the authorities, protected by their supposed ties to the intelligence services. Its students hail mostly from the poor and lawless North-West Frontier province, to which they generally return, many to run madrassas along the porous Afghan border.
For the last six months, many believe, the mosque's administrators have been intent on provoking the government into a bloodbath that, in turn, would unleash religious violence across the country and create the desired conditions for an Islamic revolution and the imposition of sharia religious law.
The tactic appeared to start in earnest in January when scores of female seminary students armed with canes occupied a children's library in Islamabad, protesting at government plans to demolish mosques and madrassas that had been built without official permission.
Two months later, in the start of aTaliban-style anti-vice campaign, female students abducted three women they accused of running a brothel, then seized two policemen, all of whom were released after reportedly repenting.
In April, Maulana Abdul Aziz, one of the two Ghazi brothers and the mosque's senior cleric, threatened thousands of suicide attacks if the government tried to close the mosque's newly established sharia court. This court later provoked international outrage after it handed down a fatwa against the country's tourism minister. She resigned her post after it objected to photographs of her embracing a parachute instructor following a charity jump in France.
Emboldened by this success, students associated with the mosque in May briefly kidnapped six policemen in an attempt to secure the release of detained militants - a provocation that met with little official response.
Only last month, however, when Beijing protested at the kidnapping of a number of Chinese women, also accused of running a brothel, did the government take steps to end the moral vigilantism. In street battles around the mosque last week, at least 21 people died in clashes with security forces and some 150 were wounded, setting the scene for yesterday's denouement.
As security forces laid siege to the mosque, demanding an unconditional surrender and the release of alleged hostages held inside, Aziz was arrested while sneaking out of the mosque disguised in a burqa and high heels, leaving his brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, to take over as the mosque's chief. Yesterday, in a telephone interview with Pakistan's Geo TV conducted over the crackle of gunfire, the cleric said his "martyrdom was certain now". By early evening, Ghazi's death was confirmed.
The storming of the mosque drew fierce criticism from human rights groups. Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, is calling for a high-level independent inquiry into the operation, denouncing the "disproportionate use of brute force" and the "arbitrary action" taken to deal with the situation.
"The homage paid by government members and others over the last many years to clerics such as those running the Lal Masjid and the obsequious manner in approaching them has also quite obviously emboldened them," she says. "The situation at the Lal Masjid did not crop up overnight. The build-up of arms and the training in their use imparted to students had obviously continued for years, with the help and connivance of authorities."
Even if the government attempts to exert its authority against some of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of madrassas that are also suspected of training militants and stocking vast arsenals of arms, the danger according to human rights groups is that the government's ham-fisted handling of the red mosque has created the potential for further problems.
"The deaths of so many at the hands of state forces may act only to pave the way for greater extremism in society and support for the violent cause militants espouse," adds Ms Jehangir.
Gen Musharraf now has two main options as he contemplates his own political future. If the Lal Masjid operation is a foretaste of a new determination to clamp down on religious extremism, he could choose to abandon the conservative religious parties that, in return for his acquiescence in the Talibanisationof Pakistani society, have propped up his government.
Instead, he could seek a broader political alliance with Ms Bhutto or Mr Sharif. Both former prime ministers would insist, however, that he stepped out of uniform as part of any agreement to support his planned re-election as president.
Alternatively, it is not impossible that Gen Musharraf may be tempted to use the threat of a looming crisis in the madrassa belt as a pretext for a state of emergency. "Should this happen," warns Samina Ahmad of the ICG, "Pakistanis would perceive the US as an impediment to, rather than a supporter of, democracy and it would lose all remaining vestiges of credibility in the country."