EVEN those of us who have grown accustomed over the decades to Pakistan’s perennial state of crisis, impending if not actual, have gradually succumbed to a sense of foreboding as this year has unfolded. It was the faceless female seminarians, shrouded from head to toe in a forbidding black, who first exacerbated our unease back in January by occupying a children’s library in Islamabad.

It was literally a walkover for the forces of obscurantism as the self-proclaimed repository of enlightened moderation turned the other cheek.

Then Dick Cheney invited himself to the capital for a censorious stopover on his way to the mini-gulag at Bagram, during which he is believed to have berated Pakistan’s leadership for not pulling its weight in the so-called war on terror. They must be used to it by now, but Democratic control of both chambers of Congress enabled the US vice-president to add a new menacing edge to the customary threat of dire consequences: should the Democrats decide to cut off aid, the White House might not be able to do anything about it.

Cheney’s visitation produced immediate results with the capture of Mullah Obaidullah, and was followed within weeks by the outbreak of clashes in South Waziristan, ostensibly between suddenly unwelcome Uzbek militants and local tribal lashkars. Reports suggest hundreds of lives have been lost on both sides, with Islamabad hailing the success of its much criticised strategy of striking deals with Islamist tribal chiefs. The scale of the carnage is apparently irrelevant.

Last Sunday, a BBC report headlined “Deadly clashes rage in Pakistan” prompted the expectation of further bloodshed in the vicinity of Wana; it came as a bit of a shock to discover that the news item related to Parachinar, where Sunnis and Shias have been at it again, resulting in dozens of deaths.

It would obviously be an exaggeration to say that Pakistan is travelling down the Iraq road without the “benefit” of a foreign occupation. In prospective terms, however, the notion does not seem entirely preposterous. And that is truly frightening.Some of the results of caving in to the Jamia Hafsa horde have been evident in recent weeks. The kidnapping late last month of three women and an infant on the charge of conducting immoral activities was a brazenly unlawful act.

Shamim Akhtar and her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter were freed only after “Auntie Shamim” publicly vowed to henceforth lead a pious life. “I could only escape after telling reporters what they (the Lal Masjid brigade) wanted me to say,” she later confessed, adding: “We would prefer to turn to Christianity. At least the Christians would be able to provide us some protection.”

That’s a perfectly understandable reaction to crude intimidation by a mob with indubitably fascist tendencies. Since then, the situation has markedly deteriorated. It may be possible to dismiss the threats against the owners of music and DVD shops as yet another stupid attempt to emulate the Taliban — although even limited success could lead to copycat tactics across the country.

The vow to authorise suicide bombings, however, is tantamount to criminality on an altogether different plane. The plainly advertised attempt to institute a parallel judicial system falls in the same category.

The latter conceit was compounded this week by a purported fatwa against Nilofar Bakhtiar, the federal tourism minister, demanding that she be sacked from the cabinet and punished. Her “crime”? Being photographed hugging a fellow paraglider in Paris, which can be construed as “obscene” only from a pathologically perverted point of view.

The complaint against the minister acquires a particularly menacing aura in view of Punjab provincial minister Zille Huma’s murder by a religious fanatic in February. That particular homicidal misogynist, unpunished for a previous string of murders (perhaps because the victims were alleged to be prostitutes), may have had nothing to do with Lal Masjid and the madressahs associated with it, but women in public life attract a broadly similar hostility across the narrow fundamentalist spectrum.

Suicide bombings have already been taking place in Peshawar and its environs, where Talibanisation has also manifested itself in various other forms. Schoolgirls, for instance, have been warned to veil themselves or stay at home and threats have been made against English-medium schools.

The majority of students at Islamabad’s Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Faridia, which have thus far provided the shock troops for Lal Masjid’s defiance of established authority, hail from the NWFP, and reports suggest that some of them are being retained in the madressahs against their own will and that of their parents. There appears to be no dearth of evidence on the basis of which measures aimed at preventing maulanas Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi from doing further harm could be instituted.

However, the government has thus far restricted itself to statements, apart from a visit to Lal Masjid by the president of the official Pakistan Muslim League, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, for a meeting with the brothers Aziz and Ghazi, which apparently took place in a spirit of bonhomie but produced no results.

General Pervez Musharraf said last week that “stick-wielding activity leads to lawlessness and it will never be allowed to happen in this country”, but his announcement came after the aforementioned activity, reminiscent of scenes from some far-fetched ninja movie, had already occurred more than once.

His advice to the perpetrators to “shun narrow-mindedness and ... open their minds for new ideas” will almost certainly fall on deaf ears. He had previously claimed that Lal Masjid’s management had been known to harbour suicide bombers. That being the case, wherefore the inaction?

At the weekend the religious affairs minister, Ijazul Haq, was quoted as saying that no operation had been launched against Lal Masjid out of the fear that the militants hiding therein would harm the female students and blame the government for it. He appeared to admit his role, however, in obtaining the release of Aziz and Ghazi less than three years ago, after they had been arrested for abetting terrorists.

In some countries, ministers are obliged to resign for much less consequential errors of judgment than this. Ijazul Haq was also instrumental in Islamabad’s effective acceptance of the demands of the Hafsa students after they occupied the children’s library. That show of force was ostensibly a protest against threats to mosques constructed on illegally occupied government land.

Now, there may well have been grounds for sympathising with someone who had utilised a government plot, without appropriate permission, to construct a dispensary, a hospital, a school, or houses for the homeless. But there is surely no dearth of mosques in Islamabad, or for that matter anywhere else in the country.

At the same time, one can understand why Ijazul Haq may have a soft spot for the sort of activities that flourished — to Pakistan’s enduring detriment — during his father’s regime. Whether he should be allowed to do so from the vantage point of a cabinet post is a different matter.

The slow but steady Talibanisation of Islamabad is obviously not a good look for someone whose chief selling point is his supposed efficacy as a bulwark against aggressive obscurantism. Musharraf’s image has also taken a battering in the wake of the spectacular own goal he scored by arbitrarily dismissing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Whatever the merits of the complaints against Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, the impression that has been created is that the action was prompted by his legal position on crucial matters such as the disappearance of people taken into custody by the security services, and the constitutionality of the head of state simultaneously holding the position of army chief.

The ongoing agitation by lawyers across the country has helped to reinforce the perception of a contest between an autocrat and a judicial activist. It does not necessarily follow that the charges against Chaudhry are risible, but there can be little question that the entire affair has been appallingly handled from the outset. And the legal fraternity’s protests have coincided with a growing dissatisfaction with the increasingly ineffective status quo.

Whether or not the general’s days are numbered, the absence of a promising post-Musharraf scenario constitutes yet another complication. The choice between a return to civilian democratic rule and full-fledged martial law is a no-brainer: the latter would be disastrous and quite possibly destructive.

At the same time, unfortunately, the available political forces of the non-fundamentalist variety offer few grounds for complacency. The third option is accelerated Talibanisation and, quite conceivably, civil war. It is the worst of the lot and, thankfully, also the unlikeliest. At least so far.

Perhaps the national malaise is best summed up, after a fashion, by the cricketing debacle in the Caribbean that culminated in the death of Bob Woolmer. The team’s media manager, P.J. Mir, confirmed widely held suspicions last week when he attributed the pathetic performance of Inzamam and his men to an inordinate focus on “preaching and praying”. “It was beyond limits, this religious influence,” he was quoted as saying. Pakistan, too, appears to be suffering from the same ailment.

It has persisted in a serious form for three decades; having lately taken a turn for the worse, could prove terminal in the foreseeable future. It seems democracy alone won’t suffice as an antidote. We also require a strong dose of the secularism that Mohammed Al Jinnah so clearly cherished.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com