Pakistan: Balancing Act

The 7.6-magnitude earthquake that struck Pakistan last October killed 75,000 people. But the deaths did not end there. In May, the Pakistan Army forced out most foreign relief workers from the still-devastated region of Azad Kashmir, the Pakistan-controlled part of the disputed province. Days later, 38 people in villages of southern Azad Kashmir had their throats cut or were beheaded. The youngest victim was 4 months old.

The army blamed infiltrators from India. But on the morning of May 17, two men said to be armed with Sten submachine guns and knives accosted girls on their way to school in the village of Sanghola. Alerted by the girls' screams, villagers surrounded the school and captured the men. The assailants claimed to be road workers, but body searches revealed ID cards of the kind carried by the Pakistan Army's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Around noon, villagers escorted the two men, on foot, to the local police station at nearby Rawalakot. At 11:30 p.m., six army officers, including a colonel and a brigadier, took the captured men at gunpoint from the station.

I traveled to Azad Kashmir in June to survey earthquake relief efforts. But upon my arrival, I was immediately confronted by reports of these attacks from terrified Kashmiris. The last killing I heard of occurred on June 10 in the town of Gulpur. I had to cut short my investigation when ISI agents began to follow me and interrogate my hosts, asking about my interest in the chura (“daggers,” meaning the killings) and “camps” (meaning the activities of jihadi groups). While no direct evidence links the ISI to the killings, many native Kashmiris I talked to and most nationalists–banned from elections, since they advocate a Kashmir independent from Pakistan and India–believe it to be so. Two troubling facts support this belief: First, there have been no reports of the incidents in the mainstream Pakistani press. If there had been any evidence of Indian involvement in the incidents, as the army says, it would have made the national news. Second, while the army initially promised an investigation, they have done nothing.

Kashmiris suspect that the violence was a way to divert people's attention from the fact that very little of the international relief money for the earthquake had made its way to the people. Most of it remains in the hands of the army, which dominates economic as well as political life in Azad Kashmir. Indeed, from what I saw in June, little relief money went to the villages. Basic services were still lacking, and schools and hospitals that were completely destroyed were still rubble. The Pakistani government had promised 175,000 rupees ($2,900) to every earthquake victim; only some survivors had received 25,000 rupees ($413) each, though a bit more money is now scheduled to be paid out.

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A treacherous path: Earthquake refugees in Azad Kashmir cross into the Neelum Valley in November 2005.

Some also think the killings were intended to incite public turmoil and stop Pakistan's peace process with India–an objective shared by jihadi groups and their sympathizers within the army and ISI. To be sure, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, now appears committed to a rapprochement with India and is trying to rein in the jihadi groups after their repeated attempts on his life. But he has not always been inclined toward reconciliation; in 1999, he instigated the Kargil attacks across the International Line of Control, bringing India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. Senior army commanders told me that they believe the peace process with India is a nonstarter because India will only come to the negotiating table and give up Kashmir if forced to do so.

The army's dangerous double game was apparent in repeated public announcements before and just after the earthquake, from the presidential level on down, that jihadi groups had been banned from Azad Kashmir. In fact, they were operating freely in the region, brandishing guns from army vehicles, promising relief only to people who understood as Hafiz Saeed, leader of the jihadi group Lashkar-e-Toiba (“Army of the Pure”), put it–that “the earthquake is the result of the rulers' sinful policies” and God's punishment for neglecting a particular, radical view of Islam.

But after international relief workers began getting word out about the prominence of jihadi groups in the early stages of the relief effort, Musharraf began to seriously curtail their freedom of operation. Today, for example, the jihadi banners are largely gone from Azad Kashmir's capital, Muzaffarabad, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba mosque just outside of Rawalakot stands empty. According to Kashmiri sources, the principal jihadi camps have relocated to outside of the province and to the more remote areas of Azad Kashmir. The army is also telling the jihadis that they can no longer cross the border at will into Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir, with or without weapons.

Larger jihadi groups with outside financing and manpower, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed (“Army of Mohammed,” which has been linked to those arrested for the August 2006 London plane bombing plots), maintain an active propaganda and recruiting campaign in Azad Kashmir's main cities. Sometimes these groups operate under the umbrella of a “charitable organization,” such as Jamaat ul-Dawa, which Lashkar-e-Toiba's Saeed heads. But other groups that are smaller or locally composed are being squeezed by dwindling financial and logistical support.

Army hardliners, particularly in the ISI, are unhappy about this partial demobilization of jihadi forces and nod to former ISI chief Hamud Gul's contention that “the decisions of General Musharraf do not necessarily reflect the point of view of the entire army.” Mirrored in that resentment is the conundrum of Pakistani politics: The army sees the jihadi groups as a means of pressuring India and as a way of counterbalancing the opposition of Muslim civilian parties to the military regime's rule. Yet Musharraf's decision to more closely align his nation with the United States in its war against terror compels him to occasionally rein in those very same organizations. It's a balancing act that doesn't get easier with time.