Educating the extremists: President Musharraf has failed to act against extreme religious schools, writes Peter Murtagh
The disclosure that one of the young British Muslim suicide bombers recently attended a religious school in Pakistan will strain relations between that country and Britain. A second bomber may also have attended such a school.
Shehzad Tanweer, the 23-year-old from the Beeston area of Leeds in West Yorkshire whose bomb killed him and at least six other people on the Liverpool Street to Aldgate Underground train, spent two months in Pakistan, his parents' country of birth, earlier this year. According to his uncle, Bashir Ahmed, Tanweer went to Lahore to study religion. Mr Ahmed denied reports that Tanweer also travelled to Afghanistan and took part in training camps.
"There is no way, I have seen his passport," Mr Ahmed was quoted saying yesterday.
There are believed to be at least 10,000 madrassahs, or religious seminaries, in Pakistan, some of which are propaganda centres for fuelling hatred of the West and of Jews, and some of which are reputed to go much further - offering terrorist training.
The madrassah organisation claims there are 13,000 schools, and that between 1.5 and 1.7 million students are enrolled in them.
Pakistan, which shares a frontier with Afghanistan and is a key ally of President Bush's war on terror, has a long history of Taliban-inspired Islamic radicalism that, for years, has been reflected in many of the madrassahs.
Following the overthrow of the Taliban regime by the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on America (the Taliban gave succour to al-Qaeda), many Taliban fled to the northern frontier region where the Hindu Kush mountains straddle the border. It is in this region that US forces suspected Osama bin Laden was hiding.
One side-effect of the Afghanistan conflict was to deepen the penetration of Islamic radicals into Pakistan. Partly reflecting this, in June 2003 Pakistan's northwest province of Peshawar introduced Sharia law. This, according to its proponents, is Allah's, or God's, law, and it seeks to end any distinction between religious and secular life by applying strict Islamic code to everyday life and the criminal justice system.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, President Musharaff promised sweeping reforms to modernise the madrassahs, primarily to ensure that they were not used any further to propagate extremist Islam and as recruitment centres for some terrorists - which may have been the case with Tanweer from Leeds.
In January 2004, the International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent, non-governmental organisation which seeks to prevent and resolve deadly conflict, published a report, Unfulfilled Promises: Pakistan's Failure to Tackle Extremism and stated: "The failure to curb rising extremism in Pakistan stems directly from the military government's own unwillingness to act against its political allies among the religious groups. Having co-opted the religious parties to gain constitutional cover for his military rule, Musharraf is highly reliant on the religious right for his regime's survival."
The ICG report observed that Pakistan's failure to close madrassahs and to crack down on jihadi (holy warrior) networks has resulted in a resurgence of domestic extremism and sectarian violence.
"If the US and others continue to restrict their pressure on Musharraf to verbal warnings, the rise of extremism in Pakistan will continue unchecked," the ICG stated in its concluding paragraph.
At the end of 2004, the United States Congressional Research Service told US Congress that: "Although General Musharraf vowed to begin regulating Pakistan's religious schools, and his government launched a five-year plan to bring the teaching of formal or secular subjects to 8,000 willing madrassahs, no concrete action was taken until June of that year, when 115 madrassahs were denied access to government assistance due to their alleged links to militancy...
"According to two observers, most madrassahs remain unregistered, their finances unregulated, and the government has yet to remove the jihadist and sectarian content of their curricula."
Last night, the Reuters news agency was quoting an unnamed Pakistan intelligence official saying Tanweer had been in the Lahore area from December 2004 to February 2005 and had stayed at a madrassah of the type widely seen by security agencies as breeding grounds for militancy.
The official said Tanweer was believed to have been the mastermind of the bomb plot, and that the British government had requested information about two of the four men.
If Tanweer and an accomplice were trained - in effect brainwashed - in Pakistan, British police will want to discover what links connected them to the madrassah. And the British government will want to know what President Musharraf is going to do finally to put such places out of business.