Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
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1 <strong>Frontline</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong><br />
arrested after a shoot-out in the house of another leader of the party’s<br />
women’s wing in Karachi. Dr Khawaja Javed, a leading physician, and<br />
his brother were arrested for harbouring senior al-Qaeda operatives<br />
and their families in their sprawling residential compound outside<br />
Lahore. Both had close links with the party. 42<br />
<strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s most powerful <strong>Islam</strong>ic political party, JI, was the original<br />
face of jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and saw its rise under the<br />
patronage of General Zia’s military rule. <strong>The</strong> group was the secondlargest<br />
component of the six-party right-wing <strong>Islam</strong>ic alliance, Muttehida<br />
Majlis Amal (MMA), that had swept the polls in two key provinces<br />
bordering Afghanistan in October 2002. In terms of organizational<br />
capability, media skills, political experience and influence within<br />
state institutions, the JI was the most powerful religious lobby in the<br />
country. It traditionally had close ties with the military and had played<br />
a major role in the <strong>Islam</strong>ization of the state and society.<br />
In many ways, JI had been the main architect of official <strong>Islam</strong> in<br />
<strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>. Founded in 1941, the party has wide international contacts.<br />
It had very close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. <strong>The</strong><br />
party’s founder, Abul Aala Mawdudi, is the best-known South Asian<br />
<strong>Islam</strong>ic scholar, whose influence was visible in revivalist movements<br />
across the Muslim world. JI’s politics are pegged around an extended<br />
structure of subsidiary organizations. Mawdudi had forbidden women<br />
participating in public life, but the party boasts the most active<br />
women’s wing of any political party. <strong>The</strong>y had been at the forefront of<br />
the protests against the arrest of al-Qaeda leaders, and many al-Qaeda<br />
operatives were arrested from the houses of JI women activists.<br />
Those incidents brought the party under close scrutiny for its links<br />
with terrorist networks. Security officials maintained that JI activists,<br />
who had actively participated in the Afghan war against Soviet<br />
occupation, developed close contacts with the Arab fighters and<br />
the links continued after the war was over. While senior JI leaders<br />
disassociated themselves from al-Qaeda, others defended the Arab<br />
fighters, describing them as ‘<strong>Islam</strong>ic heroes’. 43<br />
On 24 June 2003, President Bush and President Musharraf jointly<br />
announced at Camp David that the al-Qaeda network had been<br />
dismantled and many of its chief operators captured. But the claim<br />
appeared to be premature. Despite these successes, the terrorist<br />
network was still very active in <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>. Three months later, Al-<br />
Jazeera aired a new videotape tape of bin Laden walking through<br />
mountainous terrain with al-Zawahiri. In an audiotape accompanying