Mosque attack adds to Musharraf woes

The showdown between security forces and militants, holding out in the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in Islamabad, could not have come at a worse time for President Pervez Musharraf.

The gun battle in the heart of the Pakistani capital Tuesday, which left 16 dead, comes as the president reels from a series of crises: a judicial challenge to his continuing rule, an unprecedented unified political opposition movement, a hostile popular media, and floods along the southern coast that have displaced over 200,000 people since last week.

Yet the continuing crisis and its attendant media coverage also left commentators ambivalent as to whether Pakistan's secular liberals or religious extremists will emerge emboldened from the government crackdown.

"How this will play out in the months to come is subject to the grand ending of this episode," says Syed Talat Hussain, a journalist and commentator. "If religious parties see dead bodies and blood on their television screens, they will take a hard stand. If this is somehow negotiated peacefully, the extremists will lose out."

The standoff appeared to be heading towards a peaceful conclusion after the head imam, Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, was arrested as he tried to escape the mosque dressed in a burqa late Wednesday evening. When the Monitor went to press on Wednesday, the remaining few hundred extremists in Lal Masjid were still negotiating terms with the government through intermediaries and appeared to be willing to settle the standoff without further violence.
The violence in Lal Masjid that finally burst open this week has festered for months in an acrid and delicate political environment.

The mosque and adjacent women's madrassah, Jamia Hafsa, have been the base for some five thousand religious students who have operated under the leadership of two brothers, Ghazi Abdul Rashid and Maulana Aziz. Their aim: to "Islamize" the Pakistani capital under their interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, and then carry the movement to the rest of the country.

Their campaign had involved vigilante moral policing operations like busting prostitution rings, raiding video stores, burning pornographic and other "immoral" media, and establishing a symbolic sharia court in the mosque. But when the "Lal Masjid Brigade" kidnapped half a dozen Chinese nationals from a massage parlor in an upscale neighborhood of Islamabad, "the government drew a red line," says Rasul Baksh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Special army forces surrounded the mosque compound this week, and a few students finally launched an offensive with high-grade military weapons, instead of the wooden poles they had wielded in public thus far. "The government managed to reach clarity by accident," says Mr. Hussain. "The president didn't have this on his agenda right now, but finally his hand was forced."

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