Word: islamists
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Going after al Qaeda in the Philippines will be even more difficult than hunting the terrorists in Afghanistan. The 650 U.S. soldiers who have been deployed on the southern island of Basilian to help the Philippine armed forces rout the fighters of a radical Islamist group known as Abu Sayyaf are stepping onto sometimes treacherous turf. That much was made clear Wednesday in neighboring Jolo province, where three Marines of the Philippine army were killed in a firefight - by Philippine police. (The guilty policemen were former guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front, a Muslim secessionist group that had been...
...quite conceivable that a number of the Pakistani militants trained to spread terror across the border will respond to Musharraf's crackdown by launching a campaign of domestic terrorism against Musharraf's own regime and its secularist supporters. Or, if they were to take their cue from the radical Islamist opposition to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, they might refrain from directly targeting the Pakistani authorities but instead launch dramatic terror strikes inside India, hoping to provoke a full-blown...
...radical Islamist challenge in Pakistan originates, in its current form, with the regime of General Zia ul Haq, who ruled from 1977 until his death 1989. General Zia overthrew the elected leftist government of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and began cultivating Islamist groups as a counterweight to the challenge from the left. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 made General Zia the key U.S. ally in the region, providing a staging ground for efforts to assist the Afghan mujahedeen - a process that dramatically expanded the conservative Islamist infrastructure in Western Pakistan with massive Saudi funding...
...politically unstable Pakistan to the north with its basket-case economy and its close links with the Taliban. And as the regime that Pakistan had nurtured in Afghanistan came increasingly into conflict with the U.S. over the export of terrorism, Islamabad found itself the odd man out as the Islamist infrastructure it had cultivated partly in service to Cold War objectives now came increasingly into conflict with the West. September 11 finally forced a decisive choice on General Musharraf. Indeed, even after the Taliban's defeat, Washington's own interests in pursuing al Qaeda elements fleeing Afghanistan have prompted...
...India too has a substantial interest in General Musharraf's success. Failure would see the general ousted and replaced by a leadership more prone to Islamist adventurism. And while India's military superiority would almost always prevail, New Delhi's long-term interests in attracting growth and investment and realizing its potential in the global marketplace are imperiled by the specter of continued conflict with a hostile and nuclear-armed neighbor. Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes may have repeatedly warned that if Musharraf fails to rein in the Islamists, India will have to do the job itself - but military confrontation...