Born to Jihad

As Afghan president Hamid Karzai and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari huddled with President Barack Hussein Obama at the White House last week, Taliban jihadis extended their inexorable advance into Pakistani territory. General David Petraeus was quoted as warning that Pakistan could be mere weeks from falling to their onslaught.

What nobody seems willing to say out loud, however, is that Pakistan was created to be an Islamic state governed by Shari’a and dedicated to the objectives of jihad. Its 20-year quest for the first Islamic bomb ended in success largely because the U.S. and rest of the Western world allowed it to happen. Three decades of American administrations enabled Pakistan to arm itself, train thousands of youngsters to terrorism, and then export those weapons, jihadis, and ideology to its neighbors. That the forces of Islamic jihad should now be mounting what may be a final assault for domination of the nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan should surprise no one.

Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, the 20th century founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (the Islamic Congregation), urged his followers to “seize power by the use of all available means and equipment” in order to establish Islamic rule and instill an “Islamic way of life and morality” — in other words, impose Shari’a on Pakistan. Neither did Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Father of modern-day Pakistan, leave any doubt about what was intended when he addressed the All-India Muslim League in 1946: “If we fail to realise our duty today, you will be reduced to the status of Sudras (low castes) and Islam will be vanquished from India. I shall never allow Muslims to be slaves of Hindus.”

Born the following year in a bloodbath of religious hatred, Pakistan has always been ruled by its army and intelligence service, which enjoyed the virtually automatic support of its ally in Washington for the next 60 years even as they increasingly identified with hardline Islamists. Today, that army and its Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are so thoroughly infused with jihadist sympathies that their will to win against Muslim co-religionists is in serious question.

Continue Reading…

Claire M. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies. She is the author of Rise of the ‘Iran Lobby,’ a Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper.