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An encore in a season of blunders

President Pervez Musharraf has got little right during the last few months. The confrontation between security forces and militant students at the Lal Masjid-Jamia Hafsa complex in Islamabad, which took 16 lives, was the culmination of another blunder in what seems to be his season of big errors. It is incomprehensible that the Pakistan government took no action over the open defiance of the law by the mosque and its affiliated madrassa all this time. From January, when th e students of the Jamia Hafsa women’s seminary forcibly occupied a public library to protest the demolition of several illegal mosques in the capital, their mentor, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the Lal Masjid administrator, has gained a life of his own. The government backed off from the demolitions. Known for his pro-Al Qaeda leanings, Mr. Ghazi routinely put out calls for jihad, once even threatening to set off suicide bombings if the government did not implement the Sharia. His students unabashedly displayed firearms for cameras. Egged on by him, they began raiding ‘vice-dens’ in the heart of the capital city, kidnapping unsuspecting women from homes, and dragging them off to the mosque for ‘moral correction.’ They even took policemen hostage, but the government remained unmoved by the challenge to its authority. There was no more glaring contradiction than President Musharraf’s frequent declarations that “no one will be allowed to challenge the writ of the state” and his inability, or unwillingness, to enforce it within three kilometres of his office.

The government, which cited the presence of women in the complex as justification for its inability to launch action to clean up the militant mosque, took the path of talks with the cleric. But this emboldened him more. The regime was discomfited when the students kidnapped seven Chinese nationals on vice charges. Following ‘negotiations’ with the government, the mosque released the six women and a man in the name of Pakistan-China friendship. Even after this, it was not clear how the Musharraf regime would deal with this festering sore in the heart of the Pakistan capital, aside from deploying paramilitaries near the mosque. Finally, Tuesday’s events left it with no alternative but to crack down. If, as the opposition alleges, the Lal Masjid saga was staged to divert public attention from the agitation over the removal of the Chief Justice, or to frighten the West into continuing its support for the general as a bulwark against extremism, it clearly went out of control. However, if the government really believed this issue could be resolved ‘amicably,’ it demonstrates unbelievable naivete on the part of the Musharraf regime.

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