Afghanistan Watch: Islamist split in Pakistan

January 07, 2008

Islamist split in Pakistan

Nicholas Schmidle writes on the split within the Islamist movements in Pakistan in this week's New York Times Magazine. The hard-line Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, reportedly the political front for jihadi groups including the Taliban, seems to have toned down its anti-American and pro-jihadi rhetoric, as it prepares to contest the upcoming Pakistani parliamentary elections. This issue of whether to participate in the elections or boycott them has caused the powerful Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal alliance to split. This alliance won 10 percent of the popular vote last time around and formed provincial governments in two of the four Pakistani provinces.

In the past year, the J.U.I. chief (Maulana Fazlur Rehman) has tried to disassociate himself from the new generation of Taliban wreaking havoc not only across the border in Afghanistan, as they have for years, but also increasingly in Pakistan. At the same time, Rehman has been trying to persuade foreign ambassadors and establishment politicians here that he is the only one capable of dealing with those same Taliban. In the process, some Islamists maintain that Rehman has sold them out. Last April, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rehman’s house from the main road before crashing into the veranda of his brother’s home next door. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rehman’s name on it.

[snip]

Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto.

Posted by Bipasha Ray on January 07, 2008 at 10:28 AM in Pakistan, Politics, Taliban | Permalink

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January 07, 2008

Islamist split in Pakistan

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