And of course, there is the $ 50 million dollar question: Where is the Pimpernel Osama Bin Laden? Seven years after 11 September, everyone is still asking: 'Is he in Heaven or is he in Hell?' He may well be in either; he was supposed to be suffering from a serious kidney ailment that required frequent dialysis. Or is he in a pothole somewhere in Afghanistan or in a bunker in Pakistan's inaccessible northern FATA area?


Whoever does know, is not telling. Mr Zahid Hussain sensibly beggars the question. Perhaps like the grubby unkempt Saddam Hussein, Osama too may be discovered one day, bearded and unkempt, buried in a suburban cellar, nursing three quarters of a million dollars in notes, waiting for the banks to open so that he could exchange his US dollars for local currency.


Alternatively, Osama may be enjoying the protection of the ISI, the matrushka in uniform that is to Pakistan what the FBI was under Edgar Hoover - a government within the Government. Independent both in policy and in means, the ISI has a pervasive sinister presence that far exceeds its original mandate or its formal lines of authority. No more than any US President until Hoover's death in 1972 could afford to remove him, can any government in Pakistan afford to ignore the ISI. Benazir Bhutto did and paid the price; her successor Nawaz Sharif (although a brainchild of the ISI) tried and learned the cost. Tellingly, Musharraf's successor as Chief of Army Staff General Kayani was a former head of the ISI. Every Pakistani leader has learned to be as wary of the ISI as the Indians are. The latter have the advantage of knowing who their enemy is.


One of the inherent disadvantages in this war on terror is that no-one knows for sure who the enemy actually is. It is an unwritten Le Carre´ novel, in which furtive characters sport untrimmed beards and wear baggy shalwars. In such a war, which has no rules and no strategies, only battlegrounds and casualties, can one gauge who is winning or who is losing?


Ask George W. Bush and his Pentagon acolytes, and they will say that the US is winning. Ask the Taliban, and they will assert that both the moral and the guerrilla victory is theirs. Ask the Russians, and they will smirk and say that they expect the tactical victory to be theirs. Ask anyone in authority in Pakistan and he will probably dodge the question.


Regardless of which political party heads the Government, it will always be under pressure to do more to eliminate the terrorists and to contain the spread of Talibanisation. Privately, each leader will wish he could. Publicly he will like Musharraf resort to such facing ploys as controlling the madrassas, those Islamic seminaries regarded by the West as crucibles of terrorism.


How valid is such a perception of this alternative form of education? While Mr Hussain does not go into this aspect in detail beyond quoting the report of the International Crisis Group (2002) that mentions $1.5 billion being funneled to madrassas and that almost 200,000 students were enrolled in Karachi madrassas alone, it would be useful to examine some more up-to-date statistics.


Madrassas in Pakistan have grown from a paltry 272 in 1947 to almost 5,500 by the end of Zia ul Haq's rule. During Musharraf's rule since 1999, the number has risen from 8,058 in 2000 to almost 15,000 in 2007. The total enrolment is 1.5 million, taught by about 59,000 teachers. (These figures are from the National Education Census 2006 conducted by the Government of Pakistan.) The aim of Musharraf's government had been to mainstream the system of education imparted in these madrassas and to bring them closer to the National Curriculum.


Most of these madrassas are unicellular, in that although they may be allied doctrinally to a particular sect of Islam – i.e. Deobandi (8353), Brailvi (5268), Jamaat-i-Islami (531), Ahl-e-Hadith (404), and Shia (400) – they function independently of each other. They have a student ratio of 2 boys to 1 girl, and are usually residential, which is why parents from the Northern Areas dump their surplus children at these quasi-orphanages. The source of their funding is nominally from the Government Zakat Fund but primarily from private donations, both within Pakistan and from abroad. Not many of them are traceable.


Will mainstreaming these madrassas change the nature of Pakistan's internal conflicts? Quite possibly – but in the long-term, because education takes time. Meanwhile, Pakistan for the short-term remains located on inherent fault-lines – geographic, ethnic and religious. These have to be analysed and understood before they can be bridged. Mr Zahid Hussain's book is one significant and timely step in increasing that overdue understanding.





[Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan: The Path to Catastrophe and the killing of Benazir Bhutto (I. B. Tauris, London, 2008), xiii, pp.220.]