Pakistan treats radicalisation as something that happened to Pakistan rather than something the state itself cultivated

New Delhi: Each July, the anniversary of the Lal Masjid confrontation returns to Pakistan’s public memory as a kind of aberration, a sudden eruption of armed clerics and stick-wielding seminary students in the heart of Islamabad, improbably defying the writ of a nuclear-armed state. That reading is comforting because it is exculpatory. 

It treats radicalisation as something that happened to Pakistan rather than something the state itself cultivated. The more uncomfortable truth is that the July 2007 siege, in which the army and Special Service Group commandos stormed the Red Mosque and the adjoining Jamia Hafsa seminary, was not a spontaneous outbreak. It was the terminus of a project begun three decades earlier: the deliberate construction of an extremist ecosystem as an instrument of state policy.

That project has an author and a date. When General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in 1977, he set about an Islamisation of Pakistan’s law and society that went well beyond rhetoric. The Hudood Ordinances, a Federal Shariat Court empowered to strike down laws deemed repugnant to Islam, state-administered zakat, and government-scripted Friday sermons fused the machinery of the state with a hardline clerical class. Most consequentially, Zia presided over an explosion of religious seminaries, many funded by Gulf money and teaching a rigid syllabus. The madrassa network multiplied from under 900 to roughly 2,800 institutions over the following years, and these schools would soon serve a purpose beyond piety.

That purpose was supplied by geography. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 turned Pakistan into the frontline of a Cold War proxy conflict. It is worth stating plainly that Pakistan did not act alone: the arms and finance flowed substantially from the American CIA and Saudi backers, channelled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). But it was Islamabad that built and ran the pipeline. 

Zia cast the Afghan resistance as a religious obligation, and the seminaries became recruitment and indoctrination hubs, producing a generation steeped in a militarised reading of faith. What is sometimes called a “jihad culture” – training camps, weapons, ideologues, and a normalised culture of armed struggle – was not an accidental by-product of the war. It was infrastructure, and infrastructure outlives the contingency that builds it.

When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, that infrastructure was not dismantled. Much of it was redirected. The winding down of the Afghan war left a pool of battle-hardened, radicalised fighters, and elements of Pakistan’s security establishment turned some of them toward Jammu and Kashmir. Skills honed during the Afghan campaign were applied to the Kashmir insurgency, and new terror organisations emerged in that theatre through the 1990s, with violence in the valley escalating over the decade. This pattern is widely described by Pakistani and international analysts alike as proxy engagement conducted as policy rather than freelance terrorism the state merely failed to suppress.

It is against this backdrop that Lal Masjid must be read. The mosque was never peripheral to this history. Its founding cleric, Maulana Abdullah, was reported to be close to Zia and an open champion of the jihad against the Soviets. Under his sons, Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the complex became a centre of confrontation with the state that had once patronised it. 

The decisive rupture came after 11 September 2001, when President Pervez Musharraf aligned Pakistan with the American-led Global War on Terror. To the terrorists nurtured for decades, this was a betrayal of the jihad they had been raised to wage. The very networks the state had built now turned against it, and the 2007 operation was, in the final analysis, a confrontation between the Pakistani state and elements of its own creation.

The consequences followed the logic of blowback. The siege became a rallying cry, and within months the scattered terror factions of the tribal areas coalesced into the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in December 2007. Instruments once directed outward were now turned on Pakistani soldiers, mosques, and markets.

Which makes Islamabad’s present posture so revealing. Pakistani officials have taken to branding the TTP, now officially designated “Fitna al-Khawarij,” along with other banned groups, as Indian-sponsored, an accusation advanced without public evidence even as these groups openly claim their own attacks. The historical record does not sustain the charge. By lineage and ideology, the TTP is substantially a product of choices made in Rawalpindi and Islamabad across three decades, not an import. India has rejected the allegations as baseless and has consistently urged Pakistan to look inward and dismantle the terror infrastructure embedded within its own security and ideological apparatus.

The Lal Masjid anniversary, then, is best marked not as the memory of an ambush by fanatics but as an occasion for reckoning. An ecosystem assembled by deliberate design cannot be credibly disowned onto a neighbour. Dismantling it begins with the harder task of acknowledging who built it, and why.