Senior US officials today expressed concern that Tuesday’s military coup may be the next step in the “Talibanization” of the Pakistani government. They linked the coup to growing fundamentalism within the army since US military aid was cut off in the early 1990s.
Deepa Ollapally of the US Institute of Peace shared their concern that the military government will follow in the footsteps of the Taliban, the ruling terrorist regime in neighboring Afghanistan, by using a distorted and militant version of Islam to gain support from the military and civilian Islamic-Right.
The key, said Shirin Tahir-Khely of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, is “what role the Islamic-Right will take on in the coming days.” Although fundamentalists have always had supporters in Pakistan, she said, they have never before been respected in the political institutions.
