Abstract
“State of Sectarianism in Pakistan,” International Crisis Group, April 2005.
The ongoing war in Iraq has drawn the world's attention to sectarian violence between Islam's Sunni and Shiite sects. Terrorists operating under orders from Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the self-proclaimed “Slaughterer of Infidels,” have bombed Shiite mosques and killed hundreds of Shiites in attacks on civilian targets.
But Pakistan has witnessed sectarian bloodshed long before Zarqawi. In fact, during the last 20 years, almost 2,000 people have been killed in attacks by rival zealots.
As a recent report published by the International Crisis Group (ICG) notes, this sectarian strife has consequences well beyond Pakistan's borders. “The trail of international terror has often led official investigators to the madrassas [religious schools], mosques and offices of mainstream religio-political parties,” the Brussels-based nongovernmental organization observes. In their study, the authors track the origins of sectarian violence and document the linkages between sectarian terrorism and the jihadist networks spawned by the Pakistani state for regional influence–including the Taliban in Afghanistan and the militant groups fighting Indian control over the disputed Jammu and Kashmir regions.
Shiites and Sunnis have clashed throughout history. But until recently, the sectarian conflict in Islam had been far less brutal than, say, the sectarian wars in early (and even medieval) Christian history. The Sunni majority in the Muslim world largely ignored the minority Shiites until the 1979 Islamic revolution brought Shiite clerics to power in Iran. Authoritarian governments in several Muslim countries started worrying about the prospect of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution spreading through their lands. Sunnis started looking upon their Shiite compatriots as potential revolutionaries and troublemakers.
The perils of trying to co-opt extremists are all too apparent in Musharraf's efforts to confront the madrassas that indoctrinate young jihadists and instill sectarian hate.
Pakistan, then under the military regime of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, was likewise caught up in the brewing sectarian maelstrom. Fifteen percent of Pakistan's population is Shiite. The country borders Iran and has a rich Persian heritage. But Pakistan's ruling elite are close to Saudi Arabia. Under Zia, Pakistan even provided troops for the protection of the Saudi royal family in return for generous Saudi economic assistance.
Soon after the Iranian revolution, Pakistan became the staging ground for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Pakistan's intelligence service channeled around $2 billion in covert U.S. aid to anti-Communist guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states also provided billions of dollars for the Afghan war, which was fought under the banner of Islamist ideology–a banner that would then be passed to the victorious Taliban and their Al Qaeda patrons.
During this period, Zia also launched a program for “Islamizing” his own country, which had confronted an identity crisis since being carved out of British India in 1947. Pakistanis had long debated whether their nation should be an Islamic state or a secular state with a Muslim majority. (Pakistan started out on a nonsectarian track. Its first law minister was a Hindu.)
Zia hoped to end that debate once and for all. He Islamized Pakistan's laws, involved clerics in legislation, and appointed Koranic scholars as judges. This program of Islamization amounted to empowering the Sunni clergy and antagonized the country's Shiite minority. Making matters worse, the Afghan jihad had already resulted in the free flow of arms and military training for Sunni Islamists. Soon, some of these Sunni militants were attacking the Shiites in an effort to purify Pakistan of its “heterodoxy.” Shiite militias emerged to fight the Sunni extremists with similar tactics.
As the ICG report astutely notes, history is now repeating itself in Pakistan. Even as President Pervez Musharraf claims to be implementing a reformist agenda aimed at rooting out religious extremism, he is consciously co-opting theocratic hardliners as a counterweight against civilian opposition to the military regime's rule. This “military-mullah” alliance exacerbates sectarian tensions, since it “promotes an aggressive competition for official patronage between and within the many variations of Sunni and [Shiite] Islam, with the clerical elite of major sects and subsects striving to build up their political parties, raise jihadi militias, expand madrassa networks, and, as has happened on Musharraf's watch, become part of government.”
The perils of trying to co-opt extremists, even as the government aims to moderate their behavior, are all too apparent in Musharraf's efforts to confront the now-infamous madrassas that indoctrinate young jihadists and instill sectarian hate. The government pours money into the religious schools' coffers, in the hope of cajoling them to voluntarily embrace internal reforms. Yet, due to “the mullahs' political utility, the military-led government's proposed measures, from curriculum changes to a new registration law, have been dropped in the face of opposition.”
And just as the United States provided nearly unconditional support to General Zia for his role in the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, so too are the United States and other Western governments pinning their hopes on the cooperation of General Musharraf in eliminating Al Qaeda and other transnational terrorists. The ICG report rightly highlights the links between Pakistan's homegrown terrorists and transnational ones. And it urges the West to pressure Musharraf to undertake genuine reforms, such as strengthening the judiciary and closing down madrassas run by sectarian and jihadi organizations. Let's hope that someone is paying attention.