Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
arrested after a shoot-out in the house of another leader of the party’s
women’s wing in Karachi. Dr Khawaja Javed, a leading physician, and
his brother were arrested for harbouring senior al-Qaeda operatives
and their families in their sprawling residential compound outside
Lahore. Both had close links with the party. 42
Pakistan’s most powerful Islamic political party, JI, was the original
face of jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s and saw its rise under the
patronage of General Zia’s military rule. The group was the secondlargest
component of the six-party right-wing Islamic alliance, Muttehida
Majlis Amal (MMA), that had swept the polls in two key provinces
bordering Afghanistan in October 2002. In terms of organizational
capability, media skills, political experience and influence within
state institutions, the JI was the most powerful religious lobby in the
country. It traditionally had close ties with the military and had played
a major role in the Islamization of the state and society.
In many ways, JI had been the main architect of official Islam in
Pakistan. Founded in 1941, the party has wide international contacts.
It had very close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The
party’s founder, Abul Aala Mawdudi, is the best-known South Asian
Islamic scholar, whose influence was visible in revivalist movements
across the Muslim world. JI’s politics are pegged around an extended
structure of subsidiary organizations. Mawdudi had forbidden women
participating in public life, but the party boasts the most active
women’s wing of any political party. They had been at the forefront of
the protests against the arrest of al-Qaeda leaders, and many al-Qaeda
operatives were arrested from the houses of JI women activists.
Those incidents brought the party under close scrutiny for its links
with terrorist networks. Security officials maintained that JI activists,
who had actively participated in the Afghan war against Soviet
occupation, developed close contacts with the Arab fighters and
the links continued after the war was over. While senior JI leaders
disassociated themselves from al-Qaeda, others defended the Arab
fighters, describing them as ‘Islamic heroes’. 43
On 24 June 2003, President Bush and President Musharraf jointly
announced at Camp David that the al-Qaeda network had been
dismantled and many of its chief operators captured. But the claim
appeared to be premature. Despite these successes, the terrorist
network was still very active in Pakistan. Three months later, Al-
Jazeera aired a new videotape tape of bin Laden walking through
mountainous terrain with al-Zawahiri. In an audiotape accompanying