Word: musharraf
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Pakistan's President, General Pervez Musharraf, is stumbling from crisis to crisis. His standoff with the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has galvanized the middle class against his regime. Doubts are growing about his ability to root out al-Qaeda and Taliban militants on Pakistani soil, in the West as well as at home. (On June 4, Pakistan's Interior Ministry issued a report saying the military was losing the fight against extremists.) And, perhaps most dangerously for him, Musharraf faces growing opposition from conservative Pakistanis unhappy with the country's pace of Islamization and his alliance with U.S. President George...
...locus of local anger against Musharraf is the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in the capital Islamabad. For months the clerics of the mosque and the students of its two madrasahs, or seminaries, have openly defied the authorities: they have occupied a nearby children's library to protest government plans to raze illegal mosques built on state-owned land; set up their own Shari'a court; and have even kidnapped policemen and terrorized neighboring areas with a Taliban-like vigilante campaign against anything they consider un-Islamic. On July 3, that defiance erupted into a bloody clash between security forces...
...Come on, we are going out to protest," says Aman, now recognizable only by the glasses perched on the outside of her burqa mask. I follow her outside the madrasah gate where a hundred or so black-robed women chant in unison against Musharraf and Bush. A crack, a small explosion, and a cloud of acrid tear gas drifts our way, fronted by a pack of stampeding men. Apparently they tried to occupy the neighboring Environment Ministry...
...explosion shakes the windows of one of the classrooms. A rumor that one of the male students has detonated a suicide bomb whips through the corridors. Last week, after the students abducted six Chinese masseuses for being prostitutes, Musharraf announced that he was ready to storm the mosque. But then he said that suicide terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda had infiltrated the men's madrasah, that going in would provoke a bloodbath. One of the female students laughs at the idea of an al-Qaeda link: "We ourselves are willing to die for our school; we don't need...
Given that Daniel died in Pakistan, what do you think about President Pervez Musharraf? -Dave Smith, ATLANTAMy view about him and politics is that I just don't trust anyone. He does not have as much power as we think, and I have never thought that any [help] would come from the Pakistani government...