[Times photos: Jamie Francis] There have been demonstrations in Lahore, considered a stronghold of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, but they have not turned violent. Still, police were in full riot gear, including bulletproof vests, during Friday prayers.

Support amid suspicion

MARTIN E-mail: Click here Archive

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 15, 2001

LAHORE, Pakistan -- The Friday Times is about the closest thing in Pakistan to an alternative newspaper. Each week, readers eagerly await its chatty blend of gossip, columns and, of course, irreverent jabs at the famous and powerful.

This week, for instance, there's a list of the "Top 10 Books People Are Reading." Among them:

Crime and Punishment: Osama bin Laden.

Public Speaking for Dummies: George W. Bush.

Because the Friday Times tends to make people mad, editor Khaled Ahmed pays protection money to assure that he isn't beaten or killed. Every month, a collection man comes by the office, and Ahmed forks over some rupees to give to his protectors -- the jihadi, Pakistan's militant Islamic groups.

Amir Malik, 9, watches for a friend in the wedding hall of the Pearl-Continental Hotel. The flower petals on the floor were thrown at a bride and groom moments earlier.

"People like me who pay them money are making them rich," Ahmed says of the jihadi. "They drive very good cars, they carry weapons. I know one multinational company in Karachi that pays 20,000 rupees (about $320) a day to a couple of organizations not to attack their workers. These are mercenaries who have become powerful and are challenging the state."

That men of religion would engage in mob-style shakedowns says a lot about life in Pakistan today. It's also an ominous warning of where Pakistan, indeed all of Central Asia, could be headed.

Will Pakistan follow the moderate course set by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup but has proved more honest and capable than most of his democratically elected predecessors?

Or will Pakistan succumb to extremism and become a rigid Islamic state like Afghanistan, whose Taliban leaders are under U.S. attack for harboring Osama bin Laden and supporting terrorism?

"Pakistan is at the crossroads," economist Akmal Hussain writes in the current Friday Times.

"The U.S. and the world community must see that if Pakistan continues to remain in economic stagnation, poverty and illiteracy will become a breeding ground for terrorism.

"On the other hand, if its social and economic conditions improve rapidly, it can emerge as an enlightened Muslim country that would strengthen the forces of reason and stability in the world."

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, few nations have gotten as much attention as Pakistan, whose 140-million people make it one of the world's most populous countries. Musharraf's support for the "war on terrorism" has drawn the fury of Pakistan's religious groups, who see the U.S. attacks as a war against Islam.

Watching TV, a U.S. viewer might get the idea that huge, angry mobs are storming through cities all over the country, denouncing their own government as well as America's. In fact, most of the larger protests have been in the dusty, impoverished towns near the Afghan border, where many people come from the same tribe as the Taliban and have always been wary of the West.

It is in cities such as Lahore that you'll find the "silent majority," the 80 to 90 percent of Pakistanis who support the government and are far more interested in improving their own lot in life than in waging holy war against the non-Muslim world.

"I'm a Muslim but I strongly feel there should be religious tolerance," says Hina Tayyaba, principal of the Pakistan School of Fashion Design. "If there's no tolerance, how can you be a proper Muslim?"

Just 12 miles from the Indian border, this city of 6-million is often called the "Pearl of the Punjab." Many of its streets are broad and tree-lined; its architecture is a striking blend of British Victoriana and Moghul magnificence. Visit the 360-year-old Shalimar Gardens and you can imagine Shah Jahan seated on his marble throne, feasting his eyes on the reflecting pools, 400 fountains and, yes, dozens of dancing girls.

Today, Lahore is the capital of Pakistan's film industry -- "Lollywood." It is also home to the country's finest museums, biggest sports stadium and best colleges. And, 12 years ago, Jugnu Mohsin and her husband founded the Friday Times, which prints about 30,000 copies a week and gets another 350,000 visitors to its Internet site.

Young men play pool in Lahore's old city. Most residents of Lahore support the government.

Like other places in Pakistan, though, Lahore has felt the fallout of the Sept. 11 attacks. Most foreign airlines have stopped flying here, and the Pearl-Continental, the city's grandest hotel, has seen occupancy plunge to just 25 percent from the usual 80 percent.

"My job was pushing people out," restaurant manager Altaf Najmi says, recalling the time just five weeks ago when guests were begging for tables. Now the hotel's restaurants are so empty he can spend 15 minutes chatting with a single diner.

In return for Pakistan's support in the war on terrorism, the United States and other Western nations have dropped all sanctions imposed in punishment for the 1999 coup and Pakistan's nuclear arms race with neighboring India. Pakistan is also getting millions of dollars to help Afghan refugees and hopes to be relieved of some of its enormous international debt.

Although pleased with the aid, many people in Lahore remain wary of the United States and its tendency to create situations that later blow up in its face.

They note that it was the CIA that armed and trained the Afghan mujahedeen, the forerunners of the Taliban, to resist the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late '70s and early '80s.

The United States also supported then-Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, whose pledge to help the Afghans made him a hero of the free world in the fight against communism. The fact that Zia was steering his own country on a harsh Islamistic course apparently went unnoticed by the Americans, who were far more worried at the time about communism than Islamic extremism.

"America was happy to look the other way because he was fighting their dirty war in Afghanistan," says Mohsin, publisher of the Friday Times. "Zia and his top generals were happy to sit there and cream off literally billions of dollars from the CIA pipeline.

"The day the Red Army left Afghanistan (in 1989), that was the day America got out and left Afghanistan and Pakistan as though nothing had happened in the last 11 years. We screamed and shouted and said, 'Don't do this, you're leaving a festering sore that will spread to every corner of the globe.' "

As Afghanistan descended into civil war, Pakistan was flooded with heroin and weapons, creating major drug and crime problems that continue to this day. The Afghan debacle also convinced Pakistanis that the United States is a fickle ally that fails to realize the importance of loyalty in tribal societies.

"Let's face it, vast swaths of the Muslim world are still tribal," says Mohsin, who has a law degree from Britain's Cambridge University. "America doesn't know the world, doesn't understand the world and doesn't try to understand. Yet it has its finger in every pie in the world.

"Isn't that a recipe for disaster?"

Most Pakistanis also think the United States showed poor judgment when it imposed economic sanctions on Pakistan after the 1999 coup. Although Musharraf is a military man, Pakistanis consider him a big improvement over his civilian predecessors, the indecisive Nawaz Sharif and the corrupt Benazir Bhutto.

(Bhutto is living in opulent exile and reportedly has properties that include a London flat, a French chateau, a hotel in Texas, and a ranch and beach club in Florida. Her husband, dubbed "Mr. 10 percent" because he skimmed so much money from the government, is in jail in Pakistan.)

"The irony is that a man who is unelected, who is ostensibly a dictator, has shown far more vision than many of our elected leaders," Mohsin says of Musharraf. "He's set an example of probity in government and made sure that his senior ministers and generals follow it."

As a gesture of her love for Pakistan, Ayeda Khan kisses the gate that keeps Pakistanis from crossing into India after the flag-lowering ceremony at the Wagha border, about 12 miles from Lahore.

Before Musharraf took over, corruption had so permeated life in Pakistan that it was almost impossible to get a phone installed or the power turned on without bribery.

"You'd give somebody money to do something, and they'd say they lost it, and then you'd have to give them more money," says Tayyaba of the School of Fashion Design.

In one typical example of public corruption, many staff members of a technical college in Peshawar were collecting salaries from the government at the same time they were working 1,000 miles away in the Persian Gulf states. For a few rupees, inspectors in Lahore and other cities could be persuaded to ignore the most blatant violations of building or sanitation codes.

Among his first acts, Musharraf ordered government employees to report any colleagues they considered corrupt. "It got rid of a lot of dead wood," says Dr. Zafar Zaidi, who heads Pakistan's solar energy program.

Musharraf has unshackled the press even though the Friday Times and other newspapers often criticize his government. Under the previous regime, Mohsin's husband, the paper's chief editor, was jailed for a month in 1999 after attacking public corruption.

"Our house was broken into, we were both beaten up, blindfolded and gagged," says Mohsin. "It took all my resources to keep the paper going. . . . Today the press is totally free, unlike then."

However, Pakistan continues to face the kind of deep-seated problems that nurture Islamic extremism. The decline in the quality of public education has coincided with the rise in popularity of madrasas, the free Islamic schools that have done a far better job of producing religious fighters than future doctors and engineers.

The frigid relations between America and Pakistan before Sept. 11 might also have contributed, however unwittingly, to what some experts fear is the growing "Islamization" of Pakistan's army. Young Pakistani officers have had no contact with their U.S. counterparts as they come up through the ranks, meaning they have little knowledge of the West or understanding of Western viewpoints.

At the same time, Pakistani intelligence forces continued to maintain close ties to the Taliban, which Pakistan has viewed as a stabilizing force in Afghanistan.

In light of the small but vocal extremist movement in Pakistan, Musharraf found himself in a bind after the attacks on New York and Washington. He could either support the United States -- and risk destabilizing his own country -- or do nothing and risk having Pakistan branded a terrorist state itself.

Musharraf opted to go along with the United States, but he won public support in a typically shrewd way. Unless Pakistan offered assistance to America, Musharraf warned his people, India would claim that Pakistan supported terrorism and would turn world opinion against it.

"He was very clever" says Ahmed, the Friday Times editor. "If you mention India to a Pakistani, he'll go nuts. The Pakistanis have only one country they focus on, and that's India."

Musharraf's decision has prompted predictable denunciations from the religious parties, but the protests have generally been smaller and less violent than many expected. Most demonstrations seemed to be organized rather than spontaneous, suggesting limited popular support.

Musharraf also appears to be firmly in charge of the army. Last week he sacked three generals known to have strong Islamistic leanings.

Despite early fears, few think Musharraf will be toppled or that the country will slide into civil war.

"The purge of the army was not possible until the West rallied around him. He felt strengthened enough to get rid of the generals," says Mohsin, the Friday Times publisher.

"I think he is in a solid position, but he needs sensitivity and understanding from the United States, which it doesn't always show."

-- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

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