LAHORE, Pakistan — In a sign of how such groups are securing a hold in civil society, a group accused of terrorism is fielding a new mainstream party with the explicit aim to make Pakistan a “real Islamic state.”
Leaders of the Milli Muslim League aren’t even bothering to soften their platform to attract mainstream voters. As party organizers marked the country’s 70th Independence Day on Monday with public rallies in major cities, they essentially declared war on Pakistan’s liberals.
“We declare our [platform] to be for the change in the ideology of Pakistan,” Saifullah Khalid, Milli Muslim League president, said at a party launch event in Islamabad last week. “We plan to make Pakistan a real Islamic state. [Because of] a nefarious plan, the country has been put on the road to secularism and liberalism.”
The league is widely viewed as a front for the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, an aid foundation that was once affiliated with the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people. The U.S. government declared the group a terrorist organization in 2010, and American officials have offered a $10 million bounty for group founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who is believed to now be living under house arrest inside Pakistan.
Mr. Khalid made it clear that Saeed’s status as an identified terrorist would be no bar to a top job in the party.
“What role he will play in the Milli Muslim League or in Pakistan’s ongoing politics will be seen after Allah ensures his release,” Mr. Khalid told reporters in Pakistan this week. Once he is released, “we will meet him and ask him what role he would like to play. He is the leader of Pakistan.”
The party’s public event illustrates Pakistan’s deeply ambivalent attitude about terrorism, observers said. Those suspected of terrorism or terrorist links roam freely throughout the country, address public gatherings and appear in television interviews, where they plead their innocence to the public.
“Pakistan has today, unfortunately, become a country where the killer of slain Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer, murdered over alleged blasphemy, has a mausoleum; global terrorist Hafiz Saeed is free to preach; and terrorists [such as] Taliban former spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan or [suicide bomber] Noreen Laghari are forgiven,” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States.
The party’s emergence has raised alarm in India, Pakistan’s longtime South Asian rival.
Gopal Baglay, a spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry, asked, “The person who traded in bullets to take lives, is he trying to hide behind the ballot?”
Pakistan’s political landscape is already unstable. Nawaz Sharif was recently forced to step down as prime minister because of corruption charges stemming from the Panama Papers revelations. Sympathy toward terrorist groups only adds more volatility to the mix, Mr. Haqqani said.
“Pakistan mainstreams terrorists,” he said. “Almost every global terror group and terrorist has a link to Pakistan, from al Qaeda to ISIS. This is a function of a state policy which defines Pakistan’s identity in Islamic terms, glorifies jihad and sanctions terrorism.”
Questionable case
On the day before Easter this year, police arrested a female Islamic State recruit named Noreen Laghari shortly before she planned to blow herself up in a Christian church.
The 19-year-old medical student at the Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences in the southern province of Sindh had been missing since she joined the Islamic State in February. Via Facebook, she told her worried parents that she was in “Syria to get training for jihad” and that they should stop searching for her.
“I used to see Facebook pages and Instagram posts preaching jihad, and I was intrigued,” Ms. Laghari told the 92 News TV channel recently. “People of banned organizations approached me and told me to come to Lahore first. The online learning videos they asked me to watch were about jihad.”
One of Ms. Laghari’s university classmates, Qainat Somoro, was not surprised. She said she is one of the few among her peers who don’t harbor jihadi dreams.
“Noreen always had extremist views. I wasn’t surprised when I heard that she had joined Daesh,” said Ms. Somoro, using the pejorative Arabic term for the Islamic State. “She was interested in joining the Islamic caliphate and was often vocal about it. I don’t want her to come back.”
Back in extremist circles
Still, authorities released Ms. Laghari a month after they apprehended her. She has since become a familiar presence in extremist circles.
“Every pious Muslim wants to do jihad, and it was unfortunate that Noreen fell in the wrong hands,” said Muhammad Saeed, a student from Sindh, referring to the military. “Yes, she is my hero.”
Since Ms. Laghari confessed to her plans, the military appears to have forgiven her. Army officials said she wasn’t technically guilty because she was caught before she could detonate a suicide bomb.
“We saved her in time from becoming a terrorist,” said Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, director general of the army’s public relations office. “If Noreen Laghari was my daughter or your daughter, would we not save her?”
Human rights activist Pervez Hoodbhoy said Ms. Laghari’s case exposed how Pakistani officials defined national security too narrowly.
“It would have been different if Noreen Laghari had said she had been recruited by [the Indian intelligence service]. In that case, no punishment would have been too severe,” said Mr. Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Forman Christian College in Islamabad. “But with Islamic State it was a case of ’friendly fire.’ A crime, or intent to commit a crime, is pardonable if it was done using the name of religion.”
Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan surrendered to Pakistan’s security agencies in April. He was wanted on suspicion of being part of a terrorist organization.
Pakistani security officials have said all terrorists face punishment. But since his “confessional statement,” as the military calls it, the government has been silent about Mr. Ehsan, who has been part of several terrorist attacks in Pakistan, including the shooting of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai in 2012 and the 2014 Peshawar school killing of 141 people.
Meanwhile, the Islamabad High Court gave Ms. Laghari and Mr. Ehsan permission to give television interviews to profess regret to mass audiences. They also have appeared on other talk shows and similar broadcasts.
Sindh police fear Ms. Laghari might have accomplices. She was among several young women in her medical school who attended private Quranic lessons, police said.
That’s not unusual: Plenty of teachers and students on Pakistani campuses hail those who fall in with terrorist groups as heroes.
“Jihad is compulsory for every Muslim, and I don’t think there is anything to feel ashamed of,” said Muhammad Ali, a teacher at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology in Sindh.
“Osama bin Laden wasn’t a terrorist for me,” he said. “He was striving to achieve an Islamic caliphate. Similarly, Noreen and [convicted Pakistani terrorist] Aafia Siddiqui, they are daughters of the nation. We should be proud of them.”
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