"Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world" is one of those cliches that you often hear when people discuss world affairs. The basic equation is: unstable country + nuclear weapons + mad mullahs + base for al Qaeda = Big Trouble.

For the past few years, the west’s backing for President Musharraf has been based largely on the idea that,  for all his flaws, he remains a reliable ally in the "war on terror" and the best insurance against the radicialisation of Pakistan. It is a policy reminiscent of Hilaire Belloc’s advice to "Always keep a hold of nurse/For fear of finding something worse".

The storming of the Red Mosque will bolster Musharraf’s reputation as a bulwark against Islamist extremism. When I visited Pakistan a couple of months ago, western diplomats in Islamabad were clearly nervous about the development of a Taliban-style mosque just down the road. Many middle-class Pakistanis didn’t seem too delighted either.

But the picture is more complicated than it might first appear. It is not just that the bloodshed at the mosque may spark an unpredictable backlash. It is also that Pakistani governments - Musharraf’s included - have long had a very ambiguous relationship with Islamists.

Like the United States, Pakistan struck a Faustian bargain with the fundamentalists who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, training, encouraging and equipping them. But unlike the US, the Pakistani authorities have never renounced fully this relationship. The Pakistani intelligence services (the ISI) has maintained links with the Taliban, partly because it fears that a stable, democratic Afghanistan (distant, as that prospect seems) might move into India’s orbit. It may not be entirely coincidental that the Red Mosque is rather close to ISI headquarters in Islamabad.

But Taliban-style fundamentalism is now becoming a threat to Pakistan itself. The Islamists do not seem to have huge electoral support, they are still well below 20 per cent. But suicide-bombings are now a regular feature of life in Peshawar, the largest Pakistani city near Afghanistan, which is just a couple of hours drive from Islamabad. The Pakistani army’s ability to operate in the frontier provinces with Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda has been re-building, has also been steadily eroding. Some western analysts think the situation is actually even worse than that. The cover story in Foreign Affairs last May pointed out that "Many senior Pakistani politicians say privately that they believe that the ISI still has extensive links to bin Laden; some even claim it harbours him."

The increasing radicalism of the Red Mosque signalled that the Islamists were establishing a real foothold in the Pakistani capital. Some western analysts despaired of President Musharraf’s willingness ever to take on the Islamists. This school of thought may be grimly encouraged by the decision to storm the Red Mosque. I suspect that President Musharraf would still like to avoid an all-out conflict with the Islamists and al-Qaeda forces in the frontier provinces. But that may be where he is now heading, come what may.

View a picture gallery of the raid on the Red Mosque

July 10th, 2007 in Uncategorised | Permalink