Pakistan: from 200 to 10,000 madrassas since its founding
Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn have an interesting piece in the Weekly Standard on the burgeoning problem that Pakistan now poses for India, all of its region, the US and the new administration
Wahhabism, the official state religion of Saudi Arabia. In time, a Pakistani variant evolved into its own strain of radical Islam called Deobandism. While this made some inroads among Pakistanis, it was not until the late 1970s that Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq made it the official policy of the Pakistani state to support the Deobandis, and radical Islam blossomed.
As Charles Allen notes in his masterly work God’s Terrorists, there were only 200 madrassas, or religious schools, on Pakistani soil at the time of the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. By 1972, this figure had grown to 893. Of these Pakistani madrassas, 354 (40 percent) openly espoused Deobandism. After President ul-Haq threw the full support of his military behind the movement and turned on the spigot of Saudi petrodollars, radical Islam really took off.
In 2002, Allen notes, Pakistan’s minister of religious affairs “put the total number of madrassas in Pakistan at 10,000, of which…no fewer than 7,000″ are Deobandi. It was the proliferation of Deobandi madrassas that led directly to the birth of the Taliban, which follows the Deobandi creed and continues to find new recruits among students of Islam. The most radical madrassas instruct more than 1 million students each year and provide a comfortable abode for terrorists planning attacks.
One result is that today the president himself is not safe. The jihadist hydra nearly killed Zardari on September 20, when a truck bomb leveled the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. Zardari had stopped off to chat with an old friend, narrowly avoiding death. The assassins were more successful with Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was killed by jihadists in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on December 27, 2007.
All of this has important ramifications not only for India and Pakistan, but also for the United States and the rest of the free world. There is no question that Pakistan has played an instrumental role in the war on terror. President Musharraf’s regime, including friendly elements within the ISI, killed or captured hundreds of al Qaeda operatives in the wake of September 11. But it is now clear that the ISI’s long-term strategy for seizing power throughout South and Central Asia by sponsoring jihadist proxies remains undeterred.
Moreover, this strategy conflicts directly with American interests. Just as the ISI created the LET and its sister organizations, the ISI has also been the primary benefactor of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even as Pakistan gave the United States vital assistance in the war on terror, the ISI continued to sponsor America’s enemies behind her back.
The Christian Science Monitor reported, President elect “Obama says resolving the Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir will be a goal of his presidency, ending eight years of silence on the issue.” It is hard to see how any resolution can take place when Pakistan seems to be to some extent at war with itself.