Musharraf’s Contradictory Crackdown on Radicals
As Pakistani security forces rounded up hundreds of suspected Islamic militants last week in the wake of the bomb attacks in London, Ibrahim Qazmi, a slightly built 28-year-old cleric with a wispy black beard, leaned on a pillow in his herbal remedy shop in northwest Pakistan and smiled skeptically. In 2001, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Qazmi and scores of his associates in Sipah-i-Sahaba, or Army of the Prophet’s Followers, were arrested in a crackdown announced by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, who vowed to crush the network of radical Islamic groups that had flourished in the country for years.Full Story