Pakistan’s Islamist press has thrown its weight behind a group of mid-level and senior officers in the armed forces, who have been pressuring Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant-General Pervez Ashfaq Kiyani to terminate counter-terrorism operations in the North West Frontier Province and resume support for the jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. Last week’s air-strike on a Pakistan border post in the Mohmand Agency, in which several soldiers were killed, led jihadist leaders and commentators to call an end to Islamabad’s cooperation with the United States and to demand that it wind down the détente process with India, which they claim is working to exterminate Pakistan.
Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, chief of the Lashkar-e-TaibaÂ’s parent religious body, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, called on June 12 for Pakistan to give a tit-for-tat reply to the United States. It could do this, he suggested, by dissociating itself from the war on terror and joining the mujahideen to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir.