No crackdown likely against extremists

June 7, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

ISLAMABAD

Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province is unlikely to undertake a sweeping operation against extremist groups, despite horrific attacks that many have blamed on the “Punjabi Taliban,” analysts and officials said.

The federal government in Islamabad has been sounding increasingly shrill warnings about Islamic militant groups operating in Punjab, a region along Pakistan’s eastern border with India.

The Pakistani military is fighting the Taliban only in the northwest, where it’s taking on ethnic Pashtuns, the same group that dominates Afghanistan. Yet some analysts say Punjabi groups pose the real existentialist threat to Pakistan. Several officially banned extremist groups operate more or less openly in Punjab.

The Punjab government, in the hands of a different political party than Islamabad, flatly deny the need for a general crackdown on jihadist groups operating in the province.

More than 90 people belonging to the Ahmadi religious minority were gunned down in Punjab’s capital, Lahore, in a suicide bombing against two mosques in late May. Police and federal government officials blamed the latest terrorist attack in the province on the “Punjabi Taliban.” The Punjab government, however, rejects the notion that the Punjabi Taliban exist.

Punjab contains more than half of Pakistan’s population, grows most of its food and is the political and cultural center of the country. It is ruled by the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, a conservative religious party that appeals to voters with Islamist views.

“The Punjab government believes the [terrorist] problem lies elsewhere,” said Arif Nizami, a newspaper columnist. “They are not only complacent, there is a certain ambivalence there.”

A Western security expert said the focus of the Punjab government and its law-enforcement agencies was on small terrorist cells, not major groups.