Jaish's new compound, approximately five kilometres outside Bahawalpur at Chowk Azam, on the main road to Karachi, is much larger, The Telegraph has reported. It said there is evidence "it could contain underground bunkers or tunnels, adding that it has a fully-tiled swimming pool, stabling for over a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children – contradicting claims by the group and Pakistani officials that the facility is simply a small farm to keep cattle. On the inside walls, extremist inscriptions are painted, including a warning to "Hindus and Jews", with a picture of Delhi's historic Red Fort." Unsurprisingly, the local administration (Bahawalpur also has a huge cantonment) has chosen to overlook the issue. Mushtaq Sukhera, the Regional Police Officer for Bahawalpur, while confirming that both facilities belong to the JeM, claimed that "there's nothing over there except a few cows and horses... No militancy, no military training is being imparted to students (at Usman-o-Ali)," he said, adding, "There is no problem with militancy (in south Punjab), there's no problem with Talibanisation. It's just media hype." Some security personnel, however, were quoted by Daily Times as stating that the new facility is a "second centre of terrorism" designed to complement the existing Jaish madrassa in the middle of Bahawalpur.
Having failed over the decades to strengthen the mainstream education system, governments are now declaring that the madrassa system is doing great ‘social service’ by providing free education to more than 1.5 million students in Pakistan, articulating the dangerous viewpoint that there is no alternative to the seminary system, both in terms of its large reach across the country and the state’s own failure to generate adequate financial and other resources for a secular and modern education system.
The failure at reforming the seminary system and the state’s inability to have a secular pedagogy also has to do with Pakistan’s power structure. It is the feudal-cleric bloc which wields enormous power and patronage across the country and this bloc has an entrenched vested interest in persevering with an education system which supports extremism and militant violence. In addition, the articulation of Pakistan’s identity in terms of an exclusivist and dogmatic religious state has, over the years, consolidated the system of madrassa education.
In July 2009, the Pakistan government informed the United States that it would not close the madrassa system of education in the country, and it has become a habit for regimes in Pakistan to whine about the lack of money for social sector reforms. However, there is now increasing evidence that Pakistan clearly lacks intent to reform a system of education that essentially teaches a brand of Islam which produces suicide bombers and militant youth. The Federal government has virtually shelved a US-aided, multi-million dollar plan to reform seminaries considered nurseries of terrorism, as it has failed to garner the support of clerics. The government had initiated the project in 2002 in an attempt to introduce a secular curriculum in the seminaries. The project sought to introduce computer skills, science, social studies and English into the predominantly religious curriculum at thousands of madrassas across Pakistan. "We had a huge budget of Rs. 5,759 million (USD 71 million) to provide madrassa students with formal education but we could not utilise it," Education Ministry spokesman Atiqur Rehman disclosed. The government has failed to meet the target of reforming around 8,000 seminaries within five years. "We reached 507 madrassas only, spending Rs. 333 million and the rest of the [money] – Rs. 5,426 million – has lapsed," Rehman said. "The Interior Ministry held talks with various madrassas... but many of them refused to accept the government’s intervention," said Mufti Gulzar Ahmed Naeemi, a senior official of the Sunni clerics’ alliance, the Jamaat Ahl-e-Sunnat.
There is a school of thought in Pakistan which fervently believes that, since government schools have not had any comparable measure of success with nation-building, and since there is also a severe ‘resource crunch’, madrassas, which purportedly fill a social void by offering free education and sustenance for the vast majority of the poor in the countryside, need to be engaged and also encouraged. The state appears to have no immediate interest in diminishing recruitment into the seminaries and has, on the contrary, decided to engage with the madrassa system, without any process of internal reform, to take advantage of its vast physical and financial infrastructure. That these schools are also the base of an intense radicalisation of impressionable minds is knowingly ignored.
For long considered a nursery for the global jihad, the madrassa system in Pakistan is closely linked to the country’s foreign policy objectives in Kashmir and Afghanistan, which have dominated the country’s historiography since its creation. Attempts to control or neutralize the growing threat from this supply line of extremism would undermine an entire spectrum of Islamists in their present positions of power, their memberships of the national Parliament and State Assemblies, and their influence across the countryside.
The failure of madrassa reform has also a great deal to do with fear. The feudal-clerical elite (with considerable help from state agencies) have captured a great deal of grass-root support and, more ominously, linkages – indeed controlling interests – in many of the jihadi groups. There is a latent threat that too hard a push release even greater terrorist violence than is already manifested across Pakistan.
The central problem of curricular reform has been ignored for decades in Pakistan. Instead of pluralistic interpretations of Islam, an exclusionary doctrine is taught in most of the seminaries. These doctrines, Mustafa Qadri opines, have developed to the extent that "today the more fundamentalist, puritanical views of Salafist Islam, while not inherently synonymous with extremism, are the most organised, vocal and hence powerful religious voices in Pakistani politics and society. They have historically been the greatest apologists for Taliban violence, especially during their rule in Afghanistan before September 2001."
Seven years after its inception, the Madrassa Reform Project has been an unambiguous failure. While there is certainly resistance and even confrontation at the ground level, ambivalence and a reluctance to implement the reforms dominate the state’s agencies and initiatives. The collapse of the seminary reform project is a clear indication that the power of the extremist infrastructure across the country has not diminished in the post 9/11 era, and that the state lacks both the will and the capacity to dismantle this radical network.