Wikileaks: Militancy in Punjab, circa 1998

Benazir Bhutto said military intervention could avert fundamentalist takeover.

KARACHI:

While militancy in Punjab has rarely been taken seriously by successive governments, the US sought insight on the issue in 1998.

According to a US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks, the political counsellor assessed in October 1998 that while recruitment by militant groups was increasing in Punjab, there was no evidence by then of a “mass fundamentalist movement”. The assessment was based on discussions with parliamentarians in Punjab and the Lahore Consulate’s observations.

The diplomat stated that the danger was not that rural Punjab was “turning fundamentalist, but that radical religious groups are making inroads here just as in urban areas, fraying gradually, but inexorably, at the stability of the state”.

A couple of months prior to the discussion with Punjab MNAs, the political counsellor also met with then-opposition leader, late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Benazir was concerned that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government was playing into the hands of “extremist Islamic religious parties”, particularly the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam. She said if the deteriorating economy brought people out on to the streets, these elements would spearhead a “fundamentalist Islamic takeover” with sympathetic retired generals from the late General Ziaul Haq’s era.

Benazir also thought that while the top military leadership was solid and moderate, there were “plenty of active duty mid-level officers sympathetic to the Islamic fundamentalist cause”. In her second term as prime minister, there was a failed coup attempt by army officers who wanted to install the caliphate system.

Benazir also conceded that “army intervention of some sort could be the only way to avert a fundamentalist takeover if the Nawaz government began to crumble”.

Benazir said she favoured shutting down madrassas that were “churning out so many young fundamentalists” and declared she was no fan of the Taliban.

Support for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban was also on the increase, according to politician Akram Awan. Bin Laden had become a “celebrity and something of a folk hero” in his district since the US missile strikes in Afghanistan. The then-MNA Mumtaz Ahmed Tarar said: “Bin Laden is the hero of the moment in Pakistan and would win any election by a landslide”.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 10^th,  2011.