 President General Pervez Musharraf has admitted that previously his hands were tied when it came to reining in extremists in Pakistan, but says he is now "much stronger". In an interview to British newspaper The Telegraph, Gen Musharraf said that previously his hands were tied, either because of the 10-month-long confrontation with India in 2002 or political insecurities at home and abroad. "The situation is now far different from what I faced before," he said. "Now I am much stronger."
| I wonder if that's apparent to anybody but Perv? We refer to him as a dictator, but he's not a dictator in the Baathist-Fascist-Peronist sense. There's no party structure other than the military at his beck and call, no brown-shirted street gangs, not even a particularly good propaganda machine; Pakland's press is pretty lively, across the entire political spectrum. What we don't see is the internal machinations within the military. Has he in fact consolidated his power base? I dunno. We don't see a parade of officers trooping out to sing his praises, but we didn't see any parades of officers trooping out to damn him, either — except for guys like Hamid Gul and Aslam Beg, who've been moved out of their jobs. |
Gen Musharraf said he had made it clear to the police and government ministries that they must crack down on banned extremist groups which have re-emerged under new names, close all "hate" publications, create a new syllabus for the madrassas and register them by December.
| The coppers, as we've seen, often claim not to have gotten the memo. Perhaps Perv needs to crack down on the coppers, too... |
"This time those madrassas who don't register by December will be shut down," he said. Now the government would no longer distinguish between "terrorists", Pakistanis linked to Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups, and Islamic "extremists" who fought in earlier jihads considered legitimate, such as that in Kashmir.
| Good move, since they're now an amalgamated whole. Qaeda tasks Lashkar-e-Jhangvi just like it does al-Tawhid, and probably more directly. |
Improving relations with India weighed heavily on the president's mind. "I see the sincerity of the Indian leadership. But if we can move faster towards Kashmir resolution my hands will be stronger to deal with extremism," he said. "I have told the Indians we can only control the extremists to a degree."
| I think the entire world's noticed that. The entire world's noticed that Pakland is in a mess that Pakland got itself into. |
He insisted that ISI officers dealing with Afghanistan had been changed "two or three times" since 2001 and nobody was left from the old guard who might have ideological affiliations with the Taliban, he said. "All this talk about the ISI being a government within a government is wrong."
| In that case, the gummint is pretty deeply implicated in some pretty scuzzy thing. Best to continue to maintain plausible deniability. For instance: |
Much of the Taliban resistance was being generated from inside Afghanistan, he said, but admitted that there were some Taliban elements clandestinely based in Pakistan. He accused the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam of allowing Taliban to use sanctuaries inside Pakistan.
| That's an encouraging sign. As we've pointed out before, the Taliban is a Pashtun phenomenon that's being driven from safe havens in Pakistan. I don't even regard it as a native Afghan thing anymore — the Afghans have their own form of lunacy, and it's not the Taliban. So it's not being "generated from inside" Afghanistan. We've made the assumption that it's being run by the ISI, but I suppose pushing it off on the JUI is pretty plausible. Certainly Fazl and Sami have historically been deeply involved with them. |
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