Newest friends on Facebook? Pakistan militants.

It’s official. Everyone is using Facebook.

Extremist groups in Pakistan are joining the social networking site – and tweeting on Twitter and sending text messages – to share notes on upcoming conferences and post videos on the West’s agenda against Islam.

They also spread provocative views and encourage attacks against Pakistan’s Ahmadi religious minority. And they often do so without fear of crackdown by authorities.

“its now time to implenet islam [sic] and hang black water, rehamn malik and zardari till death,” posts one user, referring to the private American security firm, Pakistan’s interior minister, and Pakistan's president.

That post appeared on the page of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a global Islamist party that denounces democracy and campaigns for the establishment of a global caliphate (akin to an empire) based on Islamic Law. The user goes by “Commander Khattab,” the name of deceased Chechen guerrilla leader.

“The Ahmadi community is responsible for civil-war within the Muslim community, what do you think?” posts another user on the Facebook page of Khutum-e-Naboohat. The organization, which is dedicated to denouncing the Ahmadi sect of Islam, organized street demonstrations against them ahead of a massacre of 95 Ahmadis in May. Other groups maintain websites dedicated to condemning Shiites.

A wider audience

The shift to new media reflects the groups’ attempts to reach younger, more educated followers among Pakistan’s growing middle class.

With more than 100 million mobile phone users in Pakistan – viral text-messaging campaigns (called, ironically, "SMS blasts") that are sent out en masse by the group and forwarded on by their followers – have proved far more useful than the group’s previous means of communication, paper leaflets.

“Nothing is more effective for spreading our message than technology: the era of speech and literature has gone,” says Maulana Sahibzada Rashid Ahmad, who heads the Khutum-e-Naboohat movement out of a small mosque and learning center in the posh Gulberg neighborhood of Lahore.

The surge in web and SMS activity comes as Pakistan is facing an upswing in sectarian violence. More than 40 worshippers were killed at the bombing of a Sufi shrine in Lahore last week, and in recent months half a dozen Shiite doctors have been gunned down in Karachi in what police believe are targeted killings.

Soon after the blast in Lahore, Hizb-ut-Tahrir sent a mass text message blaming the “bloodbath” on “the union of Blackwater and the Pakistani government.”

“After creating a fresh blast in Lahore, America is paving the way for a fresh [military] operation,” the text message read.

Little government response

Despite such provocative claims, the government appears to be unable – or in some cases unwilling – to monitor or block sectarian content on the web. Naguibullah Malik, the federal information technology secretary, told the Monitor that there are “no plans” at present to act against sectarian websites.

Badar Alam, editor of Pakistan’s Herald magazine, says that the authorities are taking laissez-faire approach partly to avoid picking too many fights with the religious right. Already they have come under fire for cooperating with the United States to fight pockets of militancy.

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