[Now, united by grief, rage and political necessity, Pakistanis from across society are speaking with unusual force and clarity about the militant threat that blights their society. For the first time, religious parties and ultraconservative politicians have been forced to publicly shun the movement by name. And while demonstrations against militancy have been relatively small so far, they touched several cities in Pakistan, including a gathering of students outside the school in Peshawar.]
By Declan Walsh
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A boy in an army uniform wept
on Friday in front of the
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LONDON
— Only a week ago, the Red Mosque seemed a nearly untouchable
bastion of Islamist extremism in Pakistan,
a notorious seminary in central Islamabad known for producing radicalized, and
sometimes heavily armed, graduates.
On Friday evening, though, the tables were
turned when hundreds of angry protesters stood at the mosque gates and howled
insults at the chief cleric — a sight never seen since the Taliban insurgency
began in 2007.
What has changed is the mass killing of
schoolchildren, at least 132 of them, slain by Pakistani Taliban gunmen in a
violent cataclysm that has traumatized the country. In the months before the
shocking assault on a Peshawar school on Tuesday, Pakistan’s leadership had
been consumed by political war games, while the debate on militancy was
dominated by bigoted and conspiracy-laden voices, like those of the clerics of
the Red Mosque.
Now, united by grief, rage and political
necessity, Pakistanis from across society are speaking with unusual force and
clarity about the militant threat that blights their society. For the first
time, religious parties and ultraconservative politicians have been forced to
publicly shun the movement by name. And while demonstrations against militancy
have been relatively small so far, they touched several cities in Pakistan,
including a gathering of students outside the school in Peshawar.
Protest leaders believe that the public will
support them. “This will become a protest movement against the Taliban,” one
organizer, Jibran Nasir, thundered into a microphone outside the Red Mosque on
Friday.
Though there is little doubt that the Peshawar
massacre has galvanized Pakistani society, the question is whether it can
become a real turning point for a society plagued by violent divisions, culture
wars and the strategic prerogatives of a powerful military.
After all, Pakistan has been here before. The
country has suffered countless wrenching tragedies — the death of Benazir
Bhutto in 2007, as well as attacks on mosques, markets and churches — only for
rage to fizzle into nothing. And after the Taliban attack on the teenage rights
campaigner Malala Yousafzai, a resulting backlash against Western support for
her made her the target of smears and vitriolic criticism.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, seemingly
paralyzed for much of the year by political opposition, has promised that this
time will be different. He rushed to Peshawar as the school shooting was still
underway. As global scrutiny intensified, Mr. Sharif vowed to eliminate the
distinction between “good” and “bad” militants — a nod to the military’s
decades-old policy of fighting some Islamists while secretly supporting others.
The army, for its part, has been buoyed by a
wave of public sympathy, as many of the children killed at the Army Public
School in Peshawar came from military families. And other forces, such as
Karachi’s M.Q.M. party, have sought to harness national anger for local
purposes.
“Crush Taliban to Save Pakistan,” read the
banners at a large party rally in Karachi on Friday.
The tide of outrage has encouraged progressive
Pakistanis, increasingly marginalized for years, to speak up.
Outside the Red Mosque on Friday, protesters
waved placards mocking the chief cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who had enraged
many by refusing to condemn the Taliban attackers during a television
interview. “Run, burqa, run” read one sign, in a reference to Mr. Abdul Aziz’s
attempt to slip through a military cordon in 2007 while disguised in a woman’s
concealing garments.
A day earlier, when a few dozen demonstrators
tentatively appeared outside the mosque, students there wielded staves to
intimidate the protesters into silence. But on Friday, the protest grew, and
riot police officers waving truncheons interposed themselves between the two
sides.
“The Red Mosque has become a factory of terror
and hatred,” said Bushra Gohar of the Awami National Party, a Pashtun political
party that has suffered countless Taliban attacks.
But for all the fighting talk, many are
skeptical that the anger and tears of this week can make a sustained change.
The most intense anti-Taliban protests this
week have been confined to the relative safety of social media such as Twitter
and Facebook, where many users have posted solid black images as profile
pictures. The extraordinary scenes at the Red Mosque would only be significant
if they were replicated in numbers across Pakistan, said Chris Cork, an
editorial writer with The Express Tribune newspaper.
But, he said, civil society is still weak and
disorganized, riven by fear of the Taliban and the harsh gaze of the
intelligence agencies.
“I don’t see a joining up of the dots across
the country,” Mr. Cork said. “There isn’t the infrastructure, the will, the
people with organization, ability and visibility to lead it.”
The wave of anti-Taliban sentiment is “probably
just a blip,” he added. “Quite honestly, give it a month and it will have
faded.”
The hard lessons of history underpin such
pessimism. Although the Pakistani military has taken the fight into the Taliban
stronghold of North Waziristan in recent months, there is evidence that
Pakistan’s generals continue to play favorites among militant groups.
The “good” militants that Mr. Sharif referred
to in his speech — those focused on Afghanistan and India, and who have
longstanding ties to Pakistani intelligence — have continued to strut the
national stage, even after the Peshawar massacre.
The most visible of such groups is
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the deadly 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Not only
does its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who has a $10 million United States
government bounty on his head, live openly in the eastern city of Lahore, but
he has also built a public profile as a media personality.
On Friday, his brother-in-law, Hafiz Abdul
Rehman Makki, delivered a sermon at a mosque in Hyderabad, the second largest
city in Sindh Province. After offering prayers for the victims of the Peshawar
attack, Mr. Makki first accused NATO of sending “terrorists disguised as
Muslims” into Pakistan, then linked the attack to India.
The group said that as he spoke, preachers
from its charity wing fanned out across Karachi, a city of 20 million people,
giving sermons at 45 different mosques — and propagating similar conspiracy
theories.
Experts say it would be naïve to expect the
Pakistani military to immediately disband groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba,
particularly given the fraught state of relations with India in recent months.
But they also say that the underground ties between militant groups — which
often share ideas, fighters and weapons — hopelessly undermine army efforts to
dismantle the Pakistani Taliban.
“It’s that old story,” Hillary Rodham Clinton
said when she visited Islamabad as secretary of state in 2011. “You can’t keep
snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.”
A cross-party political committee, formed by
the prime minister, has promised to come up with a new strategy to fight the
Taliban within a week. That is a hopelessly optimistic goal, by most
reckonings.
The bigger worry, though, is that once anger
over the Peshawar massacre has dissipated, the debate over militancy will once
again be clouded in confusion and obfuscation — which, as recent years have
shown, offers an ideal moment for the Taliban to strike again.
Salman Masood contributed reporting from
Islamabad, Pakistan, and Saba Imtiaz from Karachi, Pakistan.
