Al Qaeda-linked militants in control of Lal Masjid posed a threat to the very fabric of Pakistan and President Pervez Musharraf could not allow such a challenge to his authority.Analysts said the fight for Lal Masjid had become a battle for the future of the extremist-hit nation. They said that Musharraf faced a crunch decision – take on the most serious militant threat to the country in years at the risk of a bloodbath or to bow to the militant strain in society and thereby strengthen it. Rasool Bakhsh Raees, professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management and Sciences, said the mosque symbolised a wider confrontation. “The trend (of extremism) has been more than menacing, it has been genuinely threatening the internal security of the country,” Raees said.
The mosqueÂ’s hardline presence in the moderate city of one million people came to embody widespread concerns about the spread of militancy from the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
The vigilante campaign by its students for the introduction of Islamic law put the mosque on a collision course with Musharraf. It also put MusharrafÂ’s anti-terror credentials under the microscope at a time of intense pressure from multinational forces in Afghanistan for Pakistan to curb Islamic militants operating in the tribal belt.
After clashes at the mosque on July 3 turned into an eight-day siege, the news that senior insurgents with links to Al Qaeda were inside made the standoff a potential turning point for the country, analysts said.
The mosque’s deputy leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi demanded that the army should let him and other militants go in return for the release of women and children inside the mosque compounded the situation. One senior government official told AFP during the decision-making process: “You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
“If they had allowed him and other extremists safe passage, it would have raised the morale of the militants and damaged Musharraf’s image in the West,” said Jaffar Ahmed, head of Pakistan studies department Karachi University.
But others said the mosque conflict was partly the government’s fault. Pakistan’s former policies of using Islamists to project itself in Kashmir and Afghanistan were to blame, said Tauseef Ahmed, a professor of Urdu University in Karachi. “Its a tragic end for the years-old policy of the military establishment.