KARACHI—The Karachi Central Jail, an elegant, 111-year-old, fortress-like sandstone building, is home to some of Pakistan's most notorious prisoners. Ahmad Omar Sheikh, one of the men who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is housed here, along with the extremists who attacked the U.S consulate in Karachi in 2006. Behind its arched, rust-colored metal gate, convicted murderers and petty criminals mingle in bare, cramped barracks that were meant for 1,800 but hold 3,800.
Despite the massive overcrowding, the jail's superintendent, Nusrat Hussain Mangan, keeps one group of prisoners in separate accommodations, with three or four per room: religious extremists. There are more than 150 of them in this all-male prison -- about 5 percent of the prison population -- confined to their quarters for most of the day. Their hearts and minds, rather than anything they can do with their hands, make them dangerous. "To save the other prisoners from the terrorists, we keep them in," Mangan says. "They have enough conviction in what they think that they can influence others who can be easily molded."
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As NATO forces are at work against the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan, Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts in recent years have centered on military offensives, with the army targeting the Taliban and al Qaeda in the northwest belt bordering Afghanistan. Little has been done, however, to tackle militancy in urban settings like Lahore and Karachi, save a few reactive gun-battles that follow after militants have already staged attacks. Less still has been undertaken to eradicate the ideology that fuels this violence.
In fact, Pakistan's prisons today achieve the opposite. Extremist prisoners, like those in the Karachi Central Jail, are instead given too much access to one another (sharing jail cells and radical ideas) and too little access to anyone -- psychologists, imams, or social workers -- who might be able to change their minds about waging jihad. Prisoners leave jail even more confident of their fundamentalist views. And that's particularly bad news, since most of those prisoners will indeed be let go.
The kind of men we're talking about are epitomized in Mohammad Shahid Hanif, an extremist inmate who has spent most of the past nine years of prison reading and re-reading the Quran and other Islamic literature. Until 2001, the 36-year-old was the imam of a small mosque in Karachi. Authorities picked him up on suspicions that he helped murder several Shiites and for inciting terrorism in his fiery Friday sermons. He had also used the pulpit to rail against then-president Pervez Musharraf's close alliance with the post-9/11 United States. Hanif denies any role in the murders, but has no qualms about admitting that he spoke forcefully in favor of an outlawed pro-Taliban Sunni extremist group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, and its radical worldview.
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