Local Jihad, Global Jihad

Pakistan sentences Islamists to death; Zawahiri taunts Musharraf; Prophet protests rage

Pakistan continues its tortured role as an ally of the West and enabler of Islamist terror. Pakistani courts have sentenced to death eleven members of al Qaeda linked Jundallah for the assassination attempt on General Ahsan Saleem Hayat in June 2004. General Hayat was orchestrating Pakistan’s military offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Wazristan. The Institute for Counter-terrorism reports Jundallah is actively operating in Waziristan and may have expanded its operations to the Palestinian territories.

Strategy Page reports Pakistani television “showed three men, in the tribal areas on the Afghan border, being beheaded for opposing Taliban and al Qaeda operations…” Meanwhile, Islamist mobs riot while the Pakistani government attempts to suppress the protests. Leaders from the radical Islamist Jamaat-I-Islami and the Islamist opposition party Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) promise to defy the bans on protests. An estimated 2,000 protested on the Afghan border, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Denmark.” Twenty-two are arrested after two Christian churches and a school is torched over “allegations that Christians had thrown pages of the Muslim holy book into the dustbin.” Reuters highlights the inherent discrimination and violence against minority Christians, Hindus and Sihks in Pakistan.

While Pakistan continues to try to keep a lid on the Islamist angst, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s deputy commander, mocks president Musharraf, and claims he escaped four separate attacks while in Pakistan and Afghanistan: – a cruise missile strike in August 1998 at an Afghanistan training camp; a missile strike in December 2001 in Tora Bora; a clash with the Pakistani Army in 2004; and the Damadola strike in January of 2005. Zawahiri taunts Musharraf and issues another threat; “Your American masters are fleeing from Iraq and Afghanistan. So, await a day of accounting for the Muslim blood you have spilt.”

In the Asia Times, Olivier Immig reviews Husain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, and neatly sums up how Pakistan’s power brokers have sought to obtain and maintain their power:

In Between Mosque and Military Haqqani instantaneously makes it clear that all military Pakistani leaders, and there have been quite a number of them since 1947, from the early days of Pakistan”s inception to the present have relied on the same ideological framework in ruling their country. This so-called “tripod” consists of: maintaining the territorial integrity of Pakistan through a strong, dominant military presence in all state affairs by continued confrontational politics versus India; maintaining the ideological “unity” of the country by promoting an Islamist nationalist ideology; and heavy reliance on continuing US economic and military support by serving as the “West’s eastern anchor” in South Asia.

While this solution has worked while the primary adversaries of Pakistan were nation-states, the advent of a global society has thrown this policy into turmoil. The policies of promoting of “an Islamist nationalist ideology” and the “heavy reliance on continuing US economic and military support” are now at odds, and Pakistan is increasingly finding it difficult to maintain the balance of power. The Islamists the Pakistani government succors has thrown in its lot with al Qaeda and now wishes to overthrow the regime, as the assassination attempts on Musharraf and his generals, the support for Islamist terrorists in Waziristan and the stoking of the fires of the Muhammed cartoons demonstrates.

In the world of globalization, there is no such thing as an Islamist nationalist ideology. al Qaeda has cleverly co-opted local Islamist groups and infused them with the ideology of global jihad. Pakistan’s ruling class has yet to grasp this reality, or if they have, is currently powerless to address the situation.

Also See:

Robert Mayer reminds us of the other danger in losing Pakistan – a nuclear Islamist state.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.