An election year in US means a bad time for terrorists in Pakistan. Already there were reports coming out that the Bush Administration is putting lot of pressure on our greatest ally to capture some High Value Targets. Our ally is doing exactly that while denying everything in the local press.
The opposition in Pakistan says Islamabad is bending too far backward to obey the election-related fiats coming from the United States. They accuse President Pervez Musharraf of making war against his own people on the orders of George Bush. No one believes the government??s version of the Wana Operation and everyone tends to ignore the latest flurry of arrests of the so-called Al Qaeda agents in the country. The government says that the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party of the chief of the religious alliance MMA, has been found sheltering the terrorists, which hardly anyone believes because of the general impression that everything Islamabad says is usually dictated by the United States. What is the truth?The editorial in the Daily Times argues that similar to how George Bush needs show some progress in the War on Terror to get elected, Musharraf is taking on the extremists in Pakistan to make sure that he too stays in power.
Equally, it may not just be American pressure that is compelling General Musharraf to take up arms against religious extremism in Pakistan. Surely, these moves fit in nicely with the medium-term objectives of President Musharraf himself. His own ??uniform? issue deadline of December is in many ways tougher than George Bush??s November electoral deadline. There is a bipartisan consensus in the United States on the usefulness of Pakistan as an ally in the war on terrorism. Thus, whether President Bush is returned or not, President Musharraf has to be in power beyond 2004. That is what has been very clearly implied in some of the interviews he has recently given. How will he achieve that? What will become of the commitment given in the agreement he reached with the MMA over the Legal Framework Order (LFO) that he would take off his uniform before the year was out? There may be a clue concealed in the latest allegation (so far awaiting effective proof in a court of law) that the toughest of the MMA components has been harbouring the Al Qaeda terrorists. Does it mean that the ??pressure? will finally persuade a not-too-harmonious MMA to agree to an extension in his tenure as army chief?But then here comes the revelation at the end. While he cannot fool the Americans with his doublespeak, he sure can do it to the Indians.
Those who say that the sincerity of his commitment against Islamic extremism should be assumed after the attempts on his life by the erstwhile jihadis should remember that he also repeated his commitment to jihad in Kashmir in a recent interview to a Pakistani English daily.[EDITORIAL: Pressure on Musharraf?]