A Forced Advantage

When Pakistan foreign minister Abdul Sattar announced the ban on the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), two organisations placed on the US State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations, he told Pakistan television: "Any organisation claiming to be a militant force is illegal. There is a specific law in Pakistan that bans a private organisation from proclaiming to be a militant force."

It was ironical to hear Sattar refer to the Constitution, the same one that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf suspended with one stroke of his pen, an act which the country's Supreme Court upheld. Where was the Constitution when several militant groups were active inside Pakistan, sending their fighters to places such as Kashmir, Afghanistan and Chechnya?

Now that the groups have been banned, as directed by Washington, the challenge for Pakistan is to find a way to ensure that its Kashmir policy does not evaporate the same way as Islamabad's Afghanistan policy. Government officials are careful to differentiate between the action on the LeT and JeM and the Kashmir policy. "The freezing of accounts of the LeT and detention of the head of the JeM (Masood Azhar) has no link with our national policy on Kashmir," declared Maj Gen Rasheed Qureshi, the military spokesman.

But Yahya Mujahid, a former LeT spokesman, was more forthright when he said the group left Pakistan (to operate out of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir) in order to relieve the pressure that had been building up on Islamabad. Mujahid also shrugged off the financial action of freezing LeT's assets, saying, "The decision to freeze our assets and accounts doesn't make any difference to us because we operated from rented premises and had no money in those accounts." He, however, admitted that the "move has a great symbolic value and won't go down well among Kashmiris".

Mujahid is not the only one pondering the consequences of the recent developments. Says Dr Shirin Mazari, director general at the Institute of Strategic Studies, "It is critical to protect the mujahideen struggle in Kashmir and to deprive enemies the opportunity of exploiting the struggle using the bogey of terrorism." Dr Mazari feels there is no need for Islamabad to be defensive about this.

But so far, no voices have been raised in the country against the closure of these two militant groups. Ordinary Pakistanis welcome the disappearance of these gun-toting extremist elements.

Publicly, the government is denying that the ban had anything to do with the attack on the Indian Parliament but was instead an urgently needed measure to bring down extremism and sectarian tensions that run in Pakistan. On his return from China, Musharraf chose the occasion of the birth anniversary of Mohammed Jinnah to make the point that "no bigoted extremists will be allowed to derail us, and we the vast silent majority must vow not to be voiceless, passive onlookers to our own internal destruction". Musharraf needs law and order in order to kick-start the economy. The last thing he wants is a war situation on the eastern front when his army is already stretched thin on the western flank with Afghanistan.

But even with almost no options left, Musharraf has not resorted to brinkmanship. This has not gone unnoticed by important allies in the coalition against terrorism who still need his military regime. If anything, the recent Indian moves have only strengthened Musharraf. As the war hysteria built up, the entire country rallied around him.

Except, of course, the Pakistan People's Party chairperson Benazir Bhutto, who said, "I had called upon the military regime to take action against private militias since the October coup in 1999. Had Islamabad kept its own backyard in order, it could have preserved its pride and prestige.However, unfortunately, the regime acts only on foreign orders rather than on the wisdom of its elected leaders." But then, politicians are almost expected to take potshots at their rivals.