Pakistan Pledges to Curb Militants

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Pervez Musharraf vowed Saturday that Pakistan will dismantle the structure of extremism in mosques and religious schools that he said has bred violence and perverted Islam in this country. He also banned five militant organizations, saying Pakistanis are tired of a “Kalashnikov culture.”

In a 70-minute address to the nation, the four-star general did not make any major concessions on the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, where India and Pakistan are facing each other in a tense standoff, but he said the threat of war could be ended by dialogue. He pledged that he will not allow Pakistani soil to be used for terrorism aimed at India or anywhere else.

Then, switching from Urdu, the national language, to English, Musharraf said: “To the United States I say, as I have said before, Pakistan rejects terrorism in all its forms. You must play an active role” in bringing New Delhi and Islamabad to the negotiating table.

The two countries have already fought two wars over Kashmir, and the military buildup underway there is the biggest in 15 years.

In a statement released in Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell praised Musharraf’s “bold and principled stand” and particularly “his pledge that Pakistan will not tolerate terrorism under any pretext, including Kashmir.”

Powell, who is scheduled to visit India and Pakistan this week, called Musharraf’s assertion that the two countries could still resolve their differences through dialogue “encouraging” and added: “This speech reconfirms Pakistan’s role as a front-line state in the war against global terrorism.”

Not every listener was so impressed, however.

“There was a lot of hype that this was to be a groundbreaking speech, especially with regard to India,” said Iffat Malik, a political columnist with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. “It wasn’t. Most of what he said, he has said before. It was reiterating his existing policies.”

India’s government deferred its public response to a news conference scheduled for today.

Although the speech may have reiterated existing policy, few leaders in the Islamic world have been as publicly critical of religious extremists as Musharraf was Saturday. Extremists “have destroyed our international image,” he said. “We are projected as an ignorant and backward nation. Our economy has been hurt. Export orders have been canceled. Factories have closed, and workers have lost their jobs.”

All Islam has suffered because of extremism, he said, paraphrasing a speech he gave last June: “The ulema [religious scholars] say Islam is tolerant. And how does the world judge our claim? It looks on us as terrorist. We are killing each other, and we want to spread violence and terror abroad. Naturally, the world regards us as terrorist. Our claim of tolerance is phony.”

‘Kashmir Runs in Our Blood’

Musharraf again condemned attacks from Kashmir on India--calling those involved terrorists--but he said Pakistan will go to war if its sovereignty is violated.

“Kashmir runs in our blood,” he said, promising to continue moral and political support for Kashmiris in the divided region.

The Indian buildup in Kashmir started after five gunmen, believed to be Pakistani-supported Kashmiris, attacked the Parliament in New Delhi on Dec. 13, killing nine people before being killed. Musharraf began a crackdown on militants in August, but India maintains that he has not gone far enough and that Pakistan continues to support terrorist training camps in Kashmir.

Musharraf, 58, a former commando who came to power in a bloodless 1999 coup, delivered the speech that the government said he wrote himself with a portrait of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, over his right shoulder. Jinnah was a secular Muslim who preached the tolerance and compassion of Islam, and Musharraf gave every indication of intending to return to that spirit by wresting power from religious zealots and silencing the inflammatory rhetoric that flows from many mosques.

The president said that mosques that have been used for nonreligious purposes will be closed and that no new mosque will be allowed to open without a government permit. The political messages that have blared forth on loudspeakers from many mosques will be banned.

Religious schools, he said, will be reformed and no longer permitted to teach only religion. Mathematics, science, history and English will be added to their curricula, he said.

Additionally, he banned five groups involved with sectarian violence, including two of the most notorious, Sipah-e-Sahaba and Tehrik-e-Jafria. More than 250 of their leaders and supporters were detained before his speech during raids on mosques and religious schools in the port city of Karachi and southern towns.

The two groups India accuses of being behind the Parliament attack, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, were also banned, as was Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, a group operating in northwestern Pakistan that reportedly sent thousands of followers to Afghanistan in October to fight alongside the Taliban.

Still, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and his ministers have repeatedly said they will judge Musharraf by his actions, not his words.

Previous Pakistani leaders have promised to crack down on terrorism, but terrorist attacks have escalated recently not only in Kashmir but also elsewhere in India. New Delhi claims that Pakistan’s military spy agency, known as Inter-Services Intelligence, secretly arms and trains the terrorist groups.

By banning the Kashmiri separatist Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba--the Indian military considers the latter especially dangerous--Musharraf took a major step toward meeting India’s demands for an end to what it calls cross-border terrorism.

But Kashmiri separatist militias based in Pakistan have splintered and changed their names before, and India insists that the leaders must be put on trial and imprisoned as one step toward ensuring that the groups are not allowed to re-form.

India’s top spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, has identified what it says are at least 17 training camps in the one-third of Kashmir under Pakistani control and in Pakistan proper. As New Delhi checks Musharraf’s rhetoric against reality, it will want to see those camps closed--and not replaced by new ones.

Musharraf has detained hundreds of suspected terrorists, including the leaders of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. But so far, Pakistani police have accused the leaders only of making inflammatory speeches, not of terrorism, Indian officials complain.

And although he insisted that “terrorism has no place in the Kashmir cause,” Musharraf said nothing about at least two other Kashmiri separatist groups that India considers terrorists. One based in Pakistan, the Harkat Moujahedeen, was named on the State Department’s list of “designated foreign terrorist organizations” in 2000.

Group’s Leader Signed ’98 Fatwa Against West

The group’s former leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, co-signed a fatwa, or religious edict, that Osama bin Laden issued in February 1998 “calling for attacks on U.S. and Western interests,” the State Department report said.

The organization is linked to another Kashmiri group, Al Faran, that kidnapped six Western tourists in July 1995, the State Department report added. Five were killed; one escaped.

Last week, a senior Indian intelligence source said in an interview that Harkat Moujahedeen trains its cadres in at least seven of the 17 alleged training camps in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

A second, much larger Kashmiri separatist group, the Hezb-ul-Moujahedeen, also apparently escaped Musharraf’s ban.

Syed Salahuddin, also known as Yousuf Shah, is the leader of the Hezb-ul-Moujahedeen and one of 20 men whom New Delhi has demanded that Pakistan extradite for trial. That is one of the main conditions Vajpayee’s government wants met before it will agree to discuss pulling back any troops in Kashmir.

India has accused Salahuddin of carrying out several terrorist attacks.

Musharraf insisted that he will never hand over any Pakistani citizens for trial in India, but he left the door open to discussing the extradition of Indian citizens.

At a briefing for reporters Friday, a senior Indian government official said that 14 of the 20 men on New Delhi’s list are Indian nationals but that some are believed to have acquired Pakistani citizenship.

The senior Indian intelligence source said it would be a significant victory if Musharraf sent Dawood Ibrahim, the alleged mastermind of a string of bombings in Bombay, back to India. The terrorist attacks on March 12, 1993, killed 257 people and wounded 713.

Dawood is a potential gold mine of intelligence information on Pakistani military intelligence’s support for terrorism and has strong links to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, the intelligence source charged.

Despite their demand that Pakistan eradicate terrorism, some high-ranking Indian officials acknowledge privately that Musharraf is in a dangerous position.

India’s government is “extremely mindful that rogue elements may well wish to destabilize the situation” by secretly continuing the Pakistani military spy agency’s support for terrorists, a senior Indian government official told reporters Friday.

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Lamb reported from Islamabad and Watson from New Delhi.