Remember all of those predictions of the muslim world exploding against the west and how the US would only make things worse? Here's a situation where the opposite happened. No one likes to lose. The US just has to make sure they win much more than they lose.
Turns out these Pakistanis are not happy with the mullahs. They directed their anger where it belongs.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46916-2002Jan27.html" target="_blank">Religious Radicals Facing Backlash in Pakistan</a>
Families Bitter Over Fate of Recruits to Taliban Cause; Young Men Were 'Betrayed by the Mullahs'
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 28, 2002; Page A14
CHAKDARA, Pakistan -- The trucks rumbled through this dusty town in late October with a harvest of men reaped from the fervor of the countryside. Others rushed from shops and fields to clamber aboard, eager to trade the poverty of their lives for the honor of being a hero -- or martyr -- in Afghanistan's holy war.
Some say 5,000 joined the caravan; others say twice that. Wives and fathers sent them willingly. Ata Ur Rahman, 28, was among them.
Three months later, Rahman is languishing in a squalid jail in Afghanistan while his family laments its enthusiasm. "He was betrayed by the mullahs who took him," spat his younger brother, Sayed Ur Rahman.
Their anger reflects a widespread disillusionment with religious leaders who rallied Pakistanis to the side of the Taliban, and a souring of the Islamic militancy that had produced volunteers for the cause and threatened to undermine the Pakistani government's support for the United States.
Interviews with people in villages and cities, and with analysts, officials, mullahs and journalists indicate that the Taliban's lopsided defeat in Afghanistan and the abandonment of its Pakistani followers -- scores of whom were rounded up following the Taliban's collapse -- have dealt a blow to religious radicals here, who have lost much of their public support.
"The Taliban lost their credibility when they didn't stand and die for their cause. They just fled and left the foreigners there to die. People here who lost youngsters in Afghanistan feel misled," said Shireen Mazari, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies, a think tank in the capital, Islamabad.
"There is a lot of anger. The people who went just were sent in chaos," agreed Ahmad Shah, the imam, or religious leader, of a tiny farming village in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has seized on this shift in mood to crack down on Muslim radicalism in his country, a move that observers here say would have been much more difficult a few months ago. His campaign still faces troublesome opposition from a strong minority of strident mullahs and their followers.
Some here argue that radical Islam never had a large following in Pakistan, as shown by the low turnouts at anti-government demonstrations in October. They say the influence of mullahs has been exaggerated by 25 years of government policy that gave religious figures disproportionate power.
But they agree that a decade-long souring of relations with the United States and the lure of a bold Islamic cause in Afghanistan produced a sympathetic swell of support here for the Taliban. And the mosques' call to jihad, or holy war, was a clarion for volunteers from the poor countryside and tribal areas of Pakistan.
"In the early days of the war, there was a tremendous movement to Islam. The liberals were looking for caves to hide in," chortled Hamid Gul, a conservative former Pakistani intelligence chief who had directed clandestine support to the Taliban to help bring it to power in the 1990s.
But the enthusiasm for the movement waned when the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters were defeated, he acknowledged in an interview.
"It became clear that the Americans were so ruthless, they would spare nothing" in their bombardment, he said. "The movement that was picking up in the world suddenly collapsed."
That movement was most visible here in the recruitment caravans organized by Sufi Mohammad, a religious party leader who drew much of his support from hardscrabble villages tucked in creases of the mountains rising in northern Pakistan beyond this town.
The government tried -- halfheartedly, complained the Americans -- to stop Sufi Mohammad's trucks full of fired-up volunteers from crossing into Afghanistan in the early weeks of the war. But thousands breached the porous border with him. A smaller number of volunteers -- no one knows how much smaller -- have limped back into Pakistan, leaving behind the dead and captured.
Sufi Mohammad was arrested at the border. The government says he will be charged with entering Afghanistan illegally; others say he sought arrest to avoid being lynched by angry families of his former followers.
"Sufi Mohammad let down the people," said Khisda Rahman, 35, in Chakdara. "He took all these guys and now they are dead or in prison. But he ran away and came back. People are asking why he didn't sacrifice himself."
When Sufi Mohammad organized the convoys that passed through Chakdara, "the whole town was celebrating," Rahman said. "Now they are sad they did. They will never follow him again."
In Gulibagh, a tiny village of 80 mud houses surrounded by vegetable and wheat fields, the father of Abdul Saleem, 23, said he learned of the death of his son from a newspaper. After sneaking away from home to join the jihad, the young man was killed by a missile strike on a bus full of volunteers.
Abdul Saleem's identity card shows a baby-faced man with a fringe of a beard. A few weeks after he left home, his parents got a letter from him: "I have completed my training and I am now going to the front line," he said. On the folded, lined school paper, he had written: "We will be buried in the mountains and ice will be my dress."
"We didn't know he went," said his father, Ziarat Gul, 60, a man with a creased face and rough hands from a life of prodding the earth for succor. "We are religious people and we think he has gone for a good cause. But if you ask me my feelings on the death of a son -- if you are a father, you can imagine. There are no words."
"It wasn't a proper jihad. It was a mess," scoffed Qari Saqib Shah, a teacher at a nearby religious school. Shah's 21-year-old nephew was killed -- not gloriously in battle, but riding with other volunteers in a bus that was struck by a missile near Mazar-e Sharif, he said. "People went to Afghanistan with no proper training, no strategy, no supplies, no food, not even proper accommodations."
But there still is a "seething discontent, an anger at America" in Pakistan, said Khurshid Ahmad, a leader of the Jamiat-i-Islami religious party.
This claim is key to understanding the appeal of the Taliban cause for a broader spectrum of Pakistanis, even those who would not volunteer to fight or even embrace the austere brand of Islam practiced by the Taliban, argues Najam Sethi, editor of Friday Times, a weekly paper based in Lahore.
"The people are not terribly pro-Taliban, but they are anti-American," he said. "People feel Americans abandoned Pakistan, and we became the most sanctioned country in the world. So they hoped the Americans would find themselves in another Vietnam," and cheered the Taliban.
With the Taliban defeated, that attitude has been replaced by "a heavy dose of realism," he said. "The people quickly retreated into their cynical sense, saying, 'Oh yes, America is a superpower and it was foolish to go up against the superpower.' "
The success of Musharraf's crackdown on radical mosques and religious schools, say observers here, will depend on the ebb and flow of anti-Americanism, religious fervor, moderation and realism.
"Somebody had to teach the United States a lesson," said Abdul Aziz, the mullah of a mosque in the center of Islamabad who said he still preaches in support of the Taliban. "America is the main terrorist. They look down on everyone else."
But an imam at a mosque not far away brushes aside a question about continued support for the movement in Afghanistan.
"That issue should be forgotten," said Qazi Zain Ul Abideen. "The Taliban government is dead and buried. Islam says we should not speak ill of the dead."
Musharraf insists he is tapping the majority vein of moderation in Pakistan by pursuing his crackdown.
"Whatever extremists are here are a very small minority," agreed Khalid Ulmar, an army officer-turned-historian. "All religions have their extremists, but this is not an extremist country. I can listen to Jennifer Lopez and still be a Muslim."
Mazari, the head of the think tank, said Musharraf cleverly resisted ordering a heavy-handed clampdown on the October demonstrations called by religious groups opposed to his decision to support the U.S. war campaign.
"Musharraf allowed the demonstrations to go ahead, and the low turnout showed the people didn't support" the extremists, she said. "The numbers in the demonstrations just went down and down, and then petered out."
Many here said Musharraf correctly judged that Pakistanis were weary of both the international complications brought to Pakistan by radical Islam and the deadly gunplay that has often accompanied disputes between radical factions in the country.
"Musharraf is right that people were sick of all this violence," Sethi said. "They are sick and tired of being portrayed in the Western media as a 'goner' country, with all the negative images of a radical, fundamentalist country."
"People say, yes, well look what happened to Afghanistan," he said. "We don't want that."
Turns out these Pakistanis are not happy with the mullahs. They directed their anger where it belongs.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46916-2002Jan27.html" target="_blank">Religious Radicals Facing Backlash in Pakistan</a>
Families Bitter Over Fate of Recruits to Taliban Cause; Young Men Were 'Betrayed by the Mullahs'
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 28, 2002; Page A14
CHAKDARA, Pakistan -- The trucks rumbled through this dusty town in late October with a harvest of men reaped from the fervor of the countryside. Others rushed from shops and fields to clamber aboard, eager to trade the poverty of their lives for the honor of being a hero -- or martyr -- in Afghanistan's holy war.
Some say 5,000 joined the caravan; others say twice that. Wives and fathers sent them willingly. Ata Ur Rahman, 28, was among them.
Three months later, Rahman is languishing in a squalid jail in Afghanistan while his family laments its enthusiasm. "He was betrayed by the mullahs who took him," spat his younger brother, Sayed Ur Rahman.
Their anger reflects a widespread disillusionment with religious leaders who rallied Pakistanis to the side of the Taliban, and a souring of the Islamic militancy that had produced volunteers for the cause and threatened to undermine the Pakistani government's support for the United States.
Interviews with people in villages and cities, and with analysts, officials, mullahs and journalists indicate that the Taliban's lopsided defeat in Afghanistan and the abandonment of its Pakistani followers -- scores of whom were rounded up following the Taliban's collapse -- have dealt a blow to religious radicals here, who have lost much of their public support.
"The Taliban lost their credibility when they didn't stand and die for their cause. They just fled and left the foreigners there to die. People here who lost youngsters in Afghanistan feel misled," said Shireen Mazari, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies, a think tank in the capital, Islamabad.
"There is a lot of anger. The people who went just were sent in chaos," agreed Ahmad Shah, the imam, or religious leader, of a tiny farming village in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.
Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has seized on this shift in mood to crack down on Muslim radicalism in his country, a move that observers here say would have been much more difficult a few months ago. His campaign still faces troublesome opposition from a strong minority of strident mullahs and their followers.
Some here argue that radical Islam never had a large following in Pakistan, as shown by the low turnouts at anti-government demonstrations in October. They say the influence of mullahs has been exaggerated by 25 years of government policy that gave religious figures disproportionate power.
But they agree that a decade-long souring of relations with the United States and the lure of a bold Islamic cause in Afghanistan produced a sympathetic swell of support here for the Taliban. And the mosques' call to jihad, or holy war, was a clarion for volunteers from the poor countryside and tribal areas of Pakistan.
"In the early days of the war, there was a tremendous movement to Islam. The liberals were looking for caves to hide in," chortled Hamid Gul, a conservative former Pakistani intelligence chief who had directed clandestine support to the Taliban to help bring it to power in the 1990s.
But the enthusiasm for the movement waned when the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters were defeated, he acknowledged in an interview.
"It became clear that the Americans were so ruthless, they would spare nothing" in their bombardment, he said. "The movement that was picking up in the world suddenly collapsed."
That movement was most visible here in the recruitment caravans organized by Sufi Mohammad, a religious party leader who drew much of his support from hardscrabble villages tucked in creases of the mountains rising in northern Pakistan beyond this town.
The government tried -- halfheartedly, complained the Americans -- to stop Sufi Mohammad's trucks full of fired-up volunteers from crossing into Afghanistan in the early weeks of the war. But thousands breached the porous border with him. A smaller number of volunteers -- no one knows how much smaller -- have limped back into Pakistan, leaving behind the dead and captured.
Sufi Mohammad was arrested at the border. The government says he will be charged with entering Afghanistan illegally; others say he sought arrest to avoid being lynched by angry families of his former followers.
"Sufi Mohammad let down the people," said Khisda Rahman, 35, in Chakdara. "He took all these guys and now they are dead or in prison. But he ran away and came back. People are asking why he didn't sacrifice himself."
When Sufi Mohammad organized the convoys that passed through Chakdara, "the whole town was celebrating," Rahman said. "Now they are sad they did. They will never follow him again."
In Gulibagh, a tiny village of 80 mud houses surrounded by vegetable and wheat fields, the father of Abdul Saleem, 23, said he learned of the death of his son from a newspaper. After sneaking away from home to join the jihad, the young man was killed by a missile strike on a bus full of volunteers.
Abdul Saleem's identity card shows a baby-faced man with a fringe of a beard. A few weeks after he left home, his parents got a letter from him: "I have completed my training and I am now going to the front line," he said. On the folded, lined school paper, he had written: "We will be buried in the mountains and ice will be my dress."
"We didn't know he went," said his father, Ziarat Gul, 60, a man with a creased face and rough hands from a life of prodding the earth for succor. "We are religious people and we think he has gone for a good cause. But if you ask me my feelings on the death of a son -- if you are a father, you can imagine. There are no words."
"It wasn't a proper jihad. It was a mess," scoffed Qari Saqib Shah, a teacher at a nearby religious school. Shah's 21-year-old nephew was killed -- not gloriously in battle, but riding with other volunteers in a bus that was struck by a missile near Mazar-e Sharif, he said. "People went to Afghanistan with no proper training, no strategy, no supplies, no food, not even proper accommodations."
But there still is a "seething discontent, an anger at America" in Pakistan, said Khurshid Ahmad, a leader of the Jamiat-i-Islami religious party.
This claim is key to understanding the appeal of the Taliban cause for a broader spectrum of Pakistanis, even those who would not volunteer to fight or even embrace the austere brand of Islam practiced by the Taliban, argues Najam Sethi, editor of Friday Times, a weekly paper based in Lahore.
"The people are not terribly pro-Taliban, but they are anti-American," he said. "People feel Americans abandoned Pakistan, and we became the most sanctioned country in the world. So they hoped the Americans would find themselves in another Vietnam," and cheered the Taliban.
With the Taliban defeated, that attitude has been replaced by "a heavy dose of realism," he said. "The people quickly retreated into their cynical sense, saying, 'Oh yes, America is a superpower and it was foolish to go up against the superpower.' "
The success of Musharraf's crackdown on radical mosques and religious schools, say observers here, will depend on the ebb and flow of anti-Americanism, religious fervor, moderation and realism.
"Somebody had to teach the United States a lesson," said Abdul Aziz, the mullah of a mosque in the center of Islamabad who said he still preaches in support of the Taliban. "America is the main terrorist. They look down on everyone else."
But an imam at a mosque not far away brushes aside a question about continued support for the movement in Afghanistan.
"That issue should be forgotten," said Qazi Zain Ul Abideen. "The Taliban government is dead and buried. Islam says we should not speak ill of the dead."
Musharraf insists he is tapping the majority vein of moderation in Pakistan by pursuing his crackdown.
"Whatever extremists are here are a very small minority," agreed Khalid Ulmar, an army officer-turned-historian. "All religions have their extremists, but this is not an extremist country. I can listen to Jennifer Lopez and still be a Muslim."
Mazari, the head of the think tank, said Musharraf cleverly resisted ordering a heavy-handed clampdown on the October demonstrations called by religious groups opposed to his decision to support the U.S. war campaign.
"Musharraf allowed the demonstrations to go ahead, and the low turnout showed the people didn't support" the extremists, she said. "The numbers in the demonstrations just went down and down, and then petered out."
Many here said Musharraf correctly judged that Pakistanis were weary of both the international complications brought to Pakistan by radical Islam and the deadly gunplay that has often accompanied disputes between radical factions in the country.
"Musharraf is right that people were sick of all this violence," Sethi said. "They are sick and tired of being portrayed in the Western media as a 'goner' country, with all the negative images of a radical, fundamentalist country."
"People say, yes, well look what happened to Afghanistan," he said. "We don't want that."
