Backgrounder on Bombing of Data Darbar Shrine in Lahore, Pakistan

The bombing of the Data Darbar shrine--tomb of the Sufi master Datta Ganj Bahksh--in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province, is a big deal.

It's like setting off a bomb in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Data Durban is at the core of Punjabi cultural identity.

When Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan from exile in Saudi Arabia to join the general election contest in 2008, one of his first acts was to pay a high profile visit to Data Darbar.  (For comparison purposes, Benazir Bhutto patronized a Sufi shrine at Qalandar in her family's power base in Sindh.)

The visit not only cemented Sharif's image as a son of Punjab--his electoral base.  It also showed that he was not in thrall to the anti-Sufi bigotry of his Saudi Wahabbi patrons.

The Deobandi school of Islam to which the Taliban subscribe view Sufi observance as a form of heresy.  Indeed, Deobandi doctrine emerged as a reaction to Sufism and still retains some Sufi elements, particularly in the areas of charismatic leadership (the Taliban expects miracles of living exemplars like Mullah Omar, not dead mystics).

Sufism also has its political element, since the guardians of Sufi shrines--the pirs--are a bulwark of the conservative power structure. 

The Data Darbar atrocity may have been committed by the little-known Punjab Taliban as part of an effort to shatter the religious and social foundations of the province.  Or it may have been a conventional Taliban operation to punish Pakistan for its acquiescence to US-led military campaigns and drone strikes on the Afghan frontier.

Interestingly, the Punjab Taliban disavowed responsibility for the attack, though this may have been simply a response the widespread revulsion the attack evoked throughout the province.  Via The News:

PESHAWAR: The Punjabi Taliban on Friday denied their involvement in the devastating terrorist attacks at the Data Darbar in Lahore and condemned the killing of innocent worshippers in the shrine and the adjacent mosque.

Also, the Urdu-speaking militants’ spokesman termed the suicide attacks as acts of intelligence agencies and the US security firm Blackwater aimed at tarnishing the image of Mujahideen.

“We cannot even think of taking the life of a single innocent human-being. This brutality to defame the Mujahideen should be expected from spy agencies and Blackwater,” Mohammad Omar, the spokesman for the Punjabi Taliban, stressed. Omar called The News from an undisclosed location to clarify the position of his militant organisation, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, about the Lahore attacks.

So did the Pakistani Taliban, according to the Daily Times:

TTP denies role in Lahore blasts

MIRANSHAH: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Friday denied any involvement in a triple suicide bombing on the Data Darbar shrine in Lahore that killed 42 people and wounded 175 others. “We are not responsible for these attacks, this is a conspiracy by foreign secret agencies, you know we do not attack public places,” Azam Tariq, a spokesman for the TTP told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We condemn this brutal act. Our target is very clear and we only attack police, army and other security personnel,” he added. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack in Lahore, a cultural hub considered a playground for the country’s elite and home to many military and intelligence top brass.
If the attack was a Pakistan or Punjab Taliban plot to spark a sectarian war inside Pakistan, they've changed their tack pretty quickly.

No denials from the Afghan Taliban yet.

In any case, AP reported a remarkable deficit in Taliban-directed outrage.  Anger has focused on the security and policy shortcomings of the Pakistan government.

It might have something to do with a Pakistan perception that they are being asked to endure the consequences of religiously-defined Pashtun extremists, while unable to deal with the root cause of the problem.

Pakistani opinion seems to believe that a successful war of extermination against extremist Pashtuns, either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan's NWFP and tribal areas, is doomed to failure.  All things being equal, I think that they would prefer to struggle against Taliban extremism by unambiguously occupying the moral and tactical high ground of religious moderation in a purely domestic political and social struggle.

Currently, the anti-Taliban campaign in Pakistan is hopelessly tangled up with the U.S. effort in Afghanistan to prop up a government perceived as pro-US and pro-Indian in order to exclude the Taliban from power.

Given the conspicuous if temporary faltering of the US effort in Afghanistan, Pakistanis might be questioning if its worth enduring such savage blowback from US drone attacks and military operations just to give the Karzai regime a few more months in office until the whole US adventure collapses or, as appears more likely, he negotiates a political settlement with the Afghan Taliban.

I think many Pakistanis feel that, if the Taliban returned to Kabul, it might be bad for Afghanistan but good for Pakistan.  The Taliban, secure in Afghanistan and no longer needing havens in the Tribal Areas, would be able to accommodate their patrons in the Pakistani intelligence services and rein in the indigenous Taliban movements inside NWFP, Punjab, and Karachi.  Taliban extremism does not travel well beyond its Pashtun heartland, the theory goes, and could be sliced and diced, divided and conquered, and rolled back to the mountains.

This may explain why Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz, Chief Minister of Punjab, have yet to weigh in with an outraged denunciation of the forces suspected of executing the bombing.  Sharif's PML-N, though secular, pointedly distances itself from U.S. policy goals in Afghanistan and has been suspected of a willingness to work with and accommodate Islamic extremist parties.

I haven't seen any statements by Nawaz Sharif in the Pakistani press similar to the rather brave condemnation  he made of attacks on Ahmadis--an Islamicist sect explicitly disenfranchised by the Pakistan constitution for some spectacular and unpopular heresies-- by extremists on May 29.  Organized assaults killed 100--twice the number of fatalities as inflicted at the Data Darbar horror--at two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore.

The dominant confession in Pakistan's urbanized heartland is Barelvi--a pacifistic Sunni sect sympathetic to Sufism--not Deoband.

However, the minority Deobands punch far above their weight in Pakistan politics, thanks to government intelligence agency sponsorship (a by-product of the whole Pashtun/Afghanistan strategy), support from Saudi Arabia, and violent tendencies that, in the context of Pakistan's impoverished society and corrupted polity, resonate with too many unhappy people.

Local media reported that the Punjab police had succeeded in apprehending some miscreants involved in the May 29 attacks.  The extremists are astoundingly well-equipped.  Police seized 100 assault rifles, 18 suicide vests and more than 40,000 pounds of explosives during their raids.

Below the fold, more background on the religious landscape in Pakistan mined from two previous posts, Things Fall Apart (covering a similar attack on the most important Sufi shrine in NWFP, that of  Rehman Baba, in March 2009) and Blood on the Moon  (a discussion on how skirmishes over how to determine the appearance of the new moon and end of Ramadan reveal dangerous religious rifts within Pakistan).  Interested readers can click on the links for the full articles and hyperlinks.