For much of this week and last, I’ve noted that the Pakistani government’s action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its front group, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, would tell us much about their seriousness in rooting out the multitude of terror groups operating withing its borders. The New York Times report on how the Pakistan goverment went about shutting down the Laskhar/Jamaat officies and “detaining” its leader, Hafiz Saeed, is less than inspiring.
Despite the appearance of Pakistani resolve, the detention of Mr. Saeed was orchestrated by the government in a way to minimize what many here expect to be an angry reaction from the public, and from a broad spectrum of Islamic militant groups sympathetic to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Just before the police surrounded his mosque and other buildings in central Lahore, Mr. Saeed, who claims he no longer has connections to Lashkar, was allowed to hold a news conference, unfettered by the authorities, in which he denounced a decision on Wednesday by the United Nations sanctions committee to place Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar on a terrorist blacklist of groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “We will not accept any decision taken under Indian pressure,” a defiant Mr. Saeed told several dozen journalists. In another sign of the apprehension within the government about the domestic reaction to getting tough on Mr. Saeed and his groups, the foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, announced the United Nations decision on television at midnight when most viewers had gone to bed. The foreign minister said Pakistan would comply with the United Nations decision, but did not say the group had been proscribed, nor did he announce the house arrest of Mr. Saeed. The Pakistani police said Mr. Saeed would be detained for three months. The State Bank of Pakistan said it had frozen the accounts of Jamaat-ud-Dawa.
Suffice to say that these are not the actions of a government that is confident in its abilities to rein in the multitude of terror groups operating on its soil.
