Musharraf’s Islamist Challenge

of the earthquake that ravaged northern Pakistan on 8 October. There are neat rows of crisp white tents, providing medicines, orthopaedic care and blood infusions.

In the three weeks since the quake, 6,000 Pakistanis have had their wounds treated here. Ninety doctors have worked in the khaki- green operating theatres stacked with state-of-the-art medical equipment, donated mostly from abroad (including a nine-tonne shipment from the UK). The camp is run by the Jamaat i Islami (JI), the oldest and best organised of Pakistan's many Islamist religious groups.

The camp stands in sad contrast to Balakot, once a thriving mountain resort, now a desolation that resembles an ancient ruin. It also stands in contrast to the District Headquarters Hospital in Mansera, the government's nearest public hospital. Here 40 doctors tend 300 patients in filthy, unlit tents, amid a chaos of crying children. The beds were provided by the JI, the food by local residents and the operations by outside surgeons. "The public health system has collapsed," says Mohamed Shoaab, a doctor at the hospital, wearily.

There is nothing new in this. In Pakistan -- as elsewhere in the Muslim world -- Islamist groups like the JI have always used their extensive welfare networks to give succour to peoples failed by their governments as a fundamental part of their strategy to achieve political power.

What is new with the Pakistani earthquake is that political parties like JI have been joined by militant Jihadi groups, movements that historically spurned welfare in favour of jihad in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Iraq and whose anti-Western ideology is at one with Al-Qaeda's.

Outside Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, I ran into Yawa Saleem, a fighter with Hizbul-Mujahideen, a Jihadi militant group. He has spent the last few years on the other side of the border, fighting an Islamist insurgency in and against Indian-ruled Kashmir. Today he is scaling mountains to rescue stranded earthquake survivors. He sees no contradiction between war and relief. "This is Jihad 100 per cent," he says. "If you're serving the people in a natural disaster, that's a Jihad".

The new Jihadi line is having an impact. Prior to the earthquake many Kashmiris resented the Islamist militants in their midst -- on the Pakistan side because they stole precious resources, on the Indian side because they invited Indian repression. But the perception has changed. "What the mujahideen (holy fighters) have done, no one else would do and I will always pray for them," says an old man. He had just been lifted down the mountain by the Hizbul-Mujahideen group.

The earthquake's sheer human misery is also having an impact on others. On 23 October Al-Qaeda's second-in-command to Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahri, broke cover from his mountain redoubt on the Pakistani-Afghanistan border to "call on all Muslims in general and Islamic charities in particular to help their Pakistani brothers," even though President "Musharraf's government is an agent of the United States."

Musharraf has admitted that Islamic groups, including ones banned by his government, have exploited the collapse in government to provide relief to the worst hit areas. He has also admitted he is reluctant to prevent them. "Everyone is motivated to help the quake victims. I am not going to prevent anyone from helping the people," he told CNN on 20 October.

So has the earthquake provided a seismic opportunity for Pakistan's Islamist movements to increase their political capital and threaten Musharraf's regime, since 11 September a key American ally in the "war against terror"?

No, says Samina Ahmed, director of the International Crisis Group in Pakistan.

"The Islamic religious groups are not an 'opposition' to Musharraf's regime. They are its natural allies. It's true that since 9/11 the US has forced Musharraf to crack down on Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, and he has done so. But he has left the domestic Pakistani Islamic groups alone. He and his army needs them to further their regional policies in Afghanistan and Kashmir and to marginalise Pakistan's secular opposition at home, an opposition that still has more popular support than Musharraf and the Islamists combined," she says.

This is why, she adds, Musharraf has given a free hand to Islamist and Jihadi groups to deliver their services in the earthquake zones while preventing parliament and the secular political parties from having any oversight over the relief effort as a whole. "The Federal Relief Earthquake Rehabilitation Centre is run by a general. And all aid goes directly into Musharraf's presidential fund. The whole thing is a military run show, and it's not accountable to anyone," says Ahmed.

Another Pakistani analyst, Zaffar Abbas, is less categorical. He believes the JI as well as the more militant Jihadi groups are opposed to Musharraf and his pro- American policies. But they are at the moment unwilling to risk a breach with the Pakistan army. Rather the Islamists through their earthquake welfare work want to "isolate Musharraf from army" so they can return to the 1980s and 1990s when they acted as the military's surrogates in Afghanistan and Kashmir, unhindered by the "war on terror".

There is certainly liaison on wrecked mountains of Kashmir. There the army is working side- by-side with activists from the Jaish Mohamed and Jamaat Al-Daawa militias, two groups that formally have been banned by the government for their ties to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. "It suggests to me that the Jihadi groups still want to work under the army's patronage," says Abbas. "They will keep things quiet as long as the army wants them to. But they will also keep their guns".

An Islamist activist says the same thing in a different way. "We have no problems with the army. But we will have no dealings with the government".