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Military-Mullah Alliance
EFL
There have been at least three attempts by religious fanatics to knock off General Musharraf. The intelligence agencies know that the would-be assassins are members of, or have strong links to, well known militant religious organisations based in Pakistan. Yet the leaders of these groups are free to roam about and make virulent speeches against General Musharraf’s “enlightened” policies. What’s stopping him from shutting them up? The evidence suggests that the historical Military-Mullah Alliance (MMA) is alive and kicking. It was actively nurtured in the 1980s by General Zia ul Haq to flog the establishment’s regional ambitions in Afghanistan. But this was at the expense of the Pakistan Peoples Party and civil society at home. In the 1990s, the MMA’s regional ambitions were focused on jihad in Indian-held Kashmir. Thus the Bhutto government was dismissed at its behest in 1990 for being “soft’ on India and the Nawaz government met the same fate in 1999 for objecting to Kargil.
If they hadn't both been utterly corrupt it would have been harder to get rid of them...
Since then, the MMA has been flushed out in the open: both Bhutto and Sharif have been banished, their parties cut to size and the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) not simply enabled to form governments in two provinces but also to preach and practice its version of “fundamentalist Islam”. In the latest deal, the MMA’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman has been chosen by General Musharraf to be the “loyal” leader of the opposition, prompting the good maulana to claim at a rally in Karachi that “the MMA is the alternative government-in-waiting”.

The government has broken every rule in the book to foist the Maulana as Speaker of the National Assembly. But the Rules of Business in the NA say that “ Leader of the Opposition means a member who in the opinion of the Speaker is for the time being leader of the majority of the members in the opposition”. Thus the Maulana’s claim of 68 votes currently should have been matched against 79 by the PPP-PMLN’s Amin Fahim. Instead, the Speaker accounted for Maulana Rehman’s 87 votes 14 months ago during the election of the prime minister and not the PPP’s largest tally of 81 at the time of oath taking. Why this hanky-panky? The answer is that the Military-Mullah Alliance in 2002 had to be micromanaged into becoming the Musharraf-Maulana Alliance in 2004 to ensure one key objective by each player: General Musharraf needed the support of the MMA for the 17th amendment and Maulana Fazlur Rehman wanted to become leader of the “alternative government in waiting”. That deal has now come to fruition by hook and by crook.

But the underlying tension between General Musharraf’s “vision and reality” — his abhorrence of the fundamentalism of the mullahs and fanatics versus his personal-political need to make alliances with them – is bound to become acute over time. Just as the jihadis who are part of the MMA are out to get General Musharraf, the MMA continues to attack him relentlessly. In short, the religious parties are all for the institutional Military-Mullah Alliance but against the person of General Musharraf while General Musharraf is personally against the mullahs and all for the Musharraf-Maulana Alliance! That is why General Musharraf rails against religious extremists while making alliances with them and that is why the mullahs rail against General Musharraf and seek fresh alliances with the military at the same time.
Posted by: Paul Moloney 2004-05-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=34105