The Red Mosque Falls

WASHINGTON -- The storming of the Red Mosque in Islamabad was a Pakistani action, undertaken for Pakistani reasons. Critical actions of future Pakistani governments, civilian or military, will be taken for the same basic reasons -- and not at the desire of Washington. American presidents can of course bring great pressure to bear on Pakistan, but for obvious reasons, they are unlikely ever to get a Pakistani government to commit suicide on their behalf.

It is important to point this out because so much American commentary seems based on the unconscious assumption that a Pakistani government’s first moral duty is to serve the United States. Coupled with this is the equally strange and dangerous assumption that democracy in Pakistan can automatically be coupled with increased support for the United States in the "war on terror."

The attack on the mosque complex was ordered, very reluctantly, because the actions of the group based there had come to be seen as a threat both to the government of President Pervez Musharraf and to the prestige of the state in general. As senior officials told me in May, the growing opinion in government circles was that, left unchecked, these actions would embolden more militants to defy the authorities and the police, until public order would be seriously threatened.

Equally, however, these same officials -- like the vast majority of ordinary Pakistanis -- strongly opposed any new military offensive against Taliban supporters in the tribal areas of Pakistan, as demanded by Washington. They feared that an offensive would risk inflaming wider Pashtun sentiments and lead to a civil war in the Pashtun regions. The deep unpopularity of such an operation in the military would also risk dangerous splits in the officer corps.

This in turn leads to a critically important distinction in the attitudes and political behavior of most Pakistanis. As every election has demonstrated, the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis do not support the political, social and ideological agenda of the Islamist parties, and a majority of the Islamists themselves do not support militancy of the type shown at the Red Mosque.

Even in the circumstances of heightened emotion following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamist coalition, known as the MMA, gained less than 15 percent of the vote, and that was heavily concentrated in the ethnic Pashtun areas of the country. A majority of the MMA parties themselves denounced the Red Mosque militants. There is therefore no risk of an Islamist revolution in Pakistan as a whole for many years to come.

On the other hand, as every opinion poll demonstrated, the great majority of Pakistanis are bitterly hostile to U.S. strategies in the "war on terror" and in neighboring Afghanistan. As initial public responses to the storming of the mosque seem to indicate, this distinction leads in turn to support for the government against extremism, which threatens to destabilize Pakistan, but opposition to government actions on behalf of the United States, which are seen as humiliating and destabilizing Pakistan.

The greatest immediate threat from the storming of the Red Mosque is a considerable increase in terrorism within Pakistan -- a danger that Western commentators barely bother to notice, since most victims will be Pakistanis, not Westerners. This fear is indeed one reason why the government hesitated to launch the attack.

Such terrorism, however, is unlikely to increase mass support for the extremists. On the contrary, it will most likely increase public calls for tougher measures against them. This may be true even in the North West Frontier Province, where many in the Islamist-dominated government would see such actions as a threat to themselves.

On the other hand, when I talked in May to ordinary people in the North West Frontier capital, Peshawar, every single person was opposed to large-scale military action against Taliban supporters in the Tribal Areas. And as every one of them stressed -- including supporters of Benazir Bhutto’s opposition Pakistan People’s Party -- their hostility to this would hold whether the Pakistani government was military or civilian.

Too much of American political and media opinion is deceiving itself with the belief that there exists some kind of magic key that will make Pakistan an unconditional ally in the "war on terror" -- whether it be Musharraf showing more "resolve," or a "democratically elected" Pakistani government gaining the legitimacy to crush the Taliban in Pakistan. Astonishingly enough, it is also assumed that a democratic Pakistani government would be willing and able to show complete contempt for the will of a majority of Pakistanis on this issue.

The truth is that every Pakistani government will have to perform a complicated dance between the threats from their own extremists and the threats from Washington, between the expectations of Washington and the expectations of their own people. I rather think that Western leaders would behave exactly the same way if they found themselves in such a position.