Creating a Haven for Al Qaeda

LONDON, Dec. 30, 2007— -- The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto added yet another tragic chapter to the country's turbulent and violent political landscape. Mystery also continues to cloud how exactly Bhutto died.

The fact that the regime of Pervez Musharraf then tried to blame her death on what they described as al Qaeda was met with much scepticism both in Pakistan and throughout the world.

However, whether her tragic demise came at the hands of a terrorist group or -- as her supporters claim -- members of the Pakistan military establishment, there is a fine line that now separates terrorism and elements of the military where there is a degree of ideological sympathy with al Qaeda and affiliated groups.

There has long been a symmetrical relationship between Pakistan's military and the religious extremists. It's important to remember that the military was concerned about the return of Bhutto and her political rival Nawaz Sharif, as they both wanted to limit its overbearing and suffocating influence over Pakistani society. This meant taking away the military's monopoly on counter-terrorism and allow there to be a degree of civillian control where there would be no question of divided loyalties regarding al Qaeda.

Pakistan has become beset with numerous and conflicting security challenges resulting in intractable, and also quite discernible dilemmas. The ongoing conflicts often spill over ethnically and geographically, fuelling ethnic and communal problems and bringing greater misery to the people. The growth of radicalism during the Musharraf years has severely compromised and weakened the position of the Pakistani state and damaged the democracy movement.

Until recently, Pakistan had a strong civil society, an independent judiciary and a vibrant active press. With all these portents, one would assume that the threat of terrorism would not become a feature of the country's political scenery.

However, the continual military interference in the political process under Musharraf has resulted in weakened and almost impotent civilian institutions that have allowed groups like al Qaeda to thrive. The decision by Musharraf to suspend the constitution on Nov. 3, 2007, resulted in the sacking of several Supreme Court judges, muzzling the media, arresting and locking up human rights and civil liberty groups, all of which deepened the erosion of civil society. The great irony was that Musharraf claimed that he acted to protect Pakistan from the threat of terrorism, but the only people who were not being arrested were the terrorists themselves.

The Musharraf government's policy lies in Pakistan's political history, in which the military has retained state power at the expense of democracy and socio-economic development. To prolong their rule, military governments have formed domestic alliances with the radicals. In this process, civil society has been undermined and bigotry has flourished.

In the past, faced with the threat of military intervention in politics, civilian politicians all too often concentrated on using public office as a positional good to extract resources from the wider society that in turn fuelled popular cynicism and discontent, and created a constituency for the messages of purification that Taliban-like forces set out to articulate in the 1990s.

Today, Pakistan has fallen victim not to terrorism directed against it by external forces, but rather to the corrosive effects of extremist groups, many with a trans-national ideological orientation, that have flourished within its own borders, and often with the tacit support of military intelligence elements. Therefore, the remedy for the security dilemma must and can only lie primarily within Pakistan itself.

The problem of terrorism in Pakistan has a paradoxical character, since its manifestations spring from two seemingly contradictory features of the political system.

On the one hand, the weakness of the state has permitted sectarian terrorism to flourish in recent years. On the other hand, elements of the armed forces have played a role in nurturing terrorist groups committed to advancing Pakistan's geopolitical interests with respect to its eastern neighbour India in relation to Kashmir, and its western neighbor Afghanistan. As a result, the challenge of terrorism in Pakistan is intimately related to the debilitating centrifugal forces that afflict the country more generally.