After Islamists defied an order by Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to expel foreigners enrolled in the madrasas (religious schools) by December 31, questions have been raised on the country’s future role in the US-led ‘war on terror’. Open defiance of Musharraf’s orders has come from the sensitive North West Frontier Province (NWFP) that borders Afghanistan and is ruled by the fundamentalist Muttahida Majils-e-Amal (MMA) party — which is also a partner in the provincial government in neighbouring Balochistan.

The MMA is strongly opposed to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror in Afghanistan and came to power on a promise to enforce Shariah law in territories under its control and also push for withdrawal of US troops from the region. Just how the general handles the new situation is being watched by the US and its allies which suspect that the NWFP and Balochistan are being used to harbour terrorists, including Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

According to Rahat Saeed, a political analyst, Musharraf’s hands are tied because of the exigencies of domestic politics on the one side and questions about his own legitimacy as a man in uniform and in power. “Musharraf is now on electoral mode: his term of office as president expires in 2007. He has to stay in power to ensure that no one does to him what he did to his predecessors, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif,” Saeed said. “He has to stay in power and get himself elected as president in 2007 by hook or by crook,” Saeed said.

There are signs that the government would go easy on implementing the deadline rather than confront the MMA and its strident leaders. Last Friday, interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said 60 per cent of the estimated 1,500 foreign students in the country have left. But most of the remainder are believed to be in the NWFP. Amanullah Haqqani, religious affairs minister in the NWFP, has called for a review of Musharraf’s order saying it was prestigious for Pakistan, a major Islamic country in the world, to be hosting foreign students. Currently, Pakistan is thought to have about 12,000 madrasas that impart religious teaching to boys from impoverished or orthodox backgrounds.

“Pakistan itself has continued to be a theatre of war,” says Prof. Syed Jafar Ahmed of Karchi University. “The simple fact is that the Taliban (which ruled Afghanistan until driven out by the war on terror) is a Pakistani phenomenon and a creation of this country’s madrasas.”

Musharraf and his army have created a system whereby politicians with flexible consciences have ousted and marginalised popular political leaders like Benazir Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party and Nawaz Sharif, leader of a faction of his Pakistan Muslim League. Ahmed said the system has been “accepted by the US-led coalition as adequately democratic”.

“Pakistan’s two western provinces, Balochistan and NWFP, constitute an important theatre in the war-against-terror not only for proximity to Afghanistan but also because of the presence in them of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in unknown numbers,” said Saeed. “If the intensity of the insurgencies in these two provinces increases, it may become necessary to call in foreign forces and that wo-uld bring in new factors into play with unpredictable consequences,” Saeed said. — IPS