Pakistani Regime’s Views Rankle Islamic Hard-Liners

AKORA KHATTAK, Pakistan — Of all the ways to measure the Islamic zeal of this country’s new rulers, one of the most popular is the counting of beards.

The presence of a long beard on a Pakistani male is often regarded here as a crude but quick way to spot an adherent of an extreme interpretation of the Islamic faith. Experts watching the Pakistani army, which seized power in a coup Oct. 12, are relieved to find that the number of beards among senior officers is still decidedly low.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who led the effort to topple Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, sports a mustache but no beard--and is generally thought to hold moderate religious views. Of the army’s 23 brigadiers, only two have the telltale beards.

“The leadership and officer corps of the Pakistani army is still predominantly secular,” said a Western diplomat in the capital, Islamabad. “The army is a highly professional institution, and the leadership is firmly in control.”

Indeed, the preponderance of moderates among the country’s new leadership is prompting a new fear--that of a confrontation between Musharraf and Pakistan’s burgeoning fundamentalist groups.

Western diplomats here have long expressed concern over the growing strength of extremist Islamic groups, which are believed to harbor militants and which have sent fighters into neighboring Afghanistan, whose Islamic leaders are harboring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden. Pakistan’s testing of nuclear weapons last year has given these developments a new urgency.

In his only speech since declaring emergency rule, Musharraf hinted that he might change course on a number of issues dear to the extremists. The general suggested that Pakistan might cool its support for the Taliban, the ultra-orthodox Islamic group that controls most of Afghanistan. He ordered a unilateral pullback of Pakistani forces along the international border with India and said he wanted to start a dialogue over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. In his most surprising remark, Musharraf chided religious groups who he said are tarnishing the image of Islam.

“Islam teaches tolerance and not hatred, universal brotherhood and not enmity,” Musharraf said in the speech, broadcast across the nation. “I have great respect for [the Islamic clergy]. . . . I urge them to curb elements which are exploiting religion for vested interests and bringing a bad name to our faith.”

Islamic Extremists Trouble New Leader

In private conversations with Western diplomats, Musharraf has indicated that he is troubled by the growing strength of extremist religious groups. Upon taking power, the general prohibited political speeches in mosques and cut the phone lines of one of the country’s largest schools of militant Islam.

On Saturday, a Muslim cleric was arrested for violating the ban on political speeches, while police prevented the leader of the country’s most influential Islamic party from entering North-West Frontier province after he attacked Musharraf for being too secular.

“The general said that things had gone too far,” the Western diplomat said. “How he is going to sort all this out is very murky.”

Members of Pakistan’s hard-core religious parties and militant groups, who are thought to number more than a million, passionately support some of the country’s most divisive policies: the imposition of Islamic law, continued military backing of the Taliban and support for the 10-year-old guerrilla war to expel the Indian army from Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistan’s religious parties played a crucial role in organizing the opposition during Sharif’s final days, and they say they would not hesitate to do the same against the army.

“It’s no joke taking us on,” said Mulana Sami ul-Haq, the leader of the Madrasa Jamia Haqqania, an Islamic school here in Akora Khattak, about 75 miles west of Islamabad. “That would lead to bloodshed and civil war.”

With about 2,500 students, the Madrasa Jamia Haqqania is the largest of Pakistan’s estimated 6,000 private religious schools run by Muslim clerics. While many of the madrasas in the Islamic world teach a moderate version of the faith, others preach holy war and religious fanaticism. Pakistan’s madrasas have supplied thousands of Pakistani and Afghan volunteers to the Taliban army in recent years, and others have sent fighters into Indian-held Kashmir.

At the Madrasa Jamia Haqqania, students come from as far away as Turkey and Azerbaijan. Bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of last year’s bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, passed through here in the 1980s, as did Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban.

Many of the madrasas are thought to have received funding from the Pakistani government. The Pakistani army and intelligence agencies are also believed to be providing substantial support to the guerrillas operating in Kashmir. Some Kashmiri guerrilla groups, such as the Army of the Pure, which has guerrillas operating inside Indian Kashmir, boast that they perform military training on Pakistani soil.

“We will carry on the jihad,” Abdullah Mundazir, a spokesman for the Army of the Pure, said last week. “The Pakistan army is sympathetic to us.”

Experts here and in the West say that the character of the Pakistani army is changing--the debate is over how much. Gen. Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler from 1977 until 1988, launched a campaign to transform an army that had been created in the British tradition and that had been drawn from the country’s upper classes. Zia wanted to make the army more Islamic. These days, some of its top leaders are known to interrupt meetings to pray.

“The recruiting base of the army has changed,” another diplomat in Islamabad said.

By many accounts, Musharraf is a religious man and also a tolerant one, with a brother and son in the United States. In a country where alcohol is strictly prohibited, he is said to enjoy an occasional tumbler of whiskey. He is an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and keeps a set of his speeches at hand.

In a deeply conservative society where the sexes do not often mix, many Pakistanis say that Musharraf views women with respect. At parties in the capital’s palatial homes, he often bucks the custom whereby men and women gravitate toward separate sides of the room.

“He just walks right over to the women and engages them,” said Haroon Akbar, a family friend.

Hard-Line Views on Issue of Kashmir

But others, including some Western experts, say the general, while a religious moderate, holds hard-line views on Kashmir that he is not likely to shed. Musharraf is widely believed to have planned and orchestrated this summer’s operation in Kargil, in which a force of about 1,000 Pakistani soldiers disguised as Kashmiri guerrillas seized a string of mountaintops inside Indian territory. The venture sparked the bloodiest fighting between India and Pakistan in 25 years. It ended with a humiliating retreat by the Pakistani army.

“He is committed to making life absolutely miserable for the Indian security forces,” said Michael Krepon, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center think tank in Washington. “If he runs the country the way he ran the Kargil operation, there is going to be a problem.”

Musharraf is expected to unveil the lineup of his top advisors soon.The early word is that the group will include civilian experts and military men. Their priority will be to revive an economy that has been ruined by corruption and mismanagement. Ghazi Salahuddin, a prominent newspaper columnist in Karachi, the country’s commercial capital, said Musharraf has already begun a task more important than putting people to work.

“He has given the country a sense of hope,” Ghazi said in an interview. “When people have hope, they begin to believe that the system can work.”