The Lal Masjid is a seminary that provides religious education based on Deobond curriculum to about 7,000 students in the male and female sections.

The mosque, constructed and funded by the Pakistan government, was originally the main mosque in Islamabad, patronized by government officials including top army brass.

Its central location placed it within close proximity to various government offices, the ISI among them. A senior government official originally served as the Imam of the mosque. But that was Pakistan before the incursion of religious extremism into Pakistan politics, led by General Ziaul Huq.

With General Ziaul Huq leading the country in the heady days of the US assisted fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, the Lal Masjid turned into a madrassa, training students who would be cannon fodder for the holy war. This happened during the time when Abdullah, the father of the current Lal Masjid imam Abdul Aziz, was the mosque prayer leader. General Ziaul Huq was reportedly a great admirer of Abdullah, who was known for his fiery "jihadi" speeches.

Abdul Aziz succeeded his father as the Imam of Lal Masjid after the demise of Abdullah in a sectarian strife in 1990 or thereabout. Trained in a renowned madrassa in Karachi, and having worked closely with the Afghan mujhaddin that his father's madrassa had trained, both Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdur Rashid became fireband radicals who would later use the Lal Musjid to train young minds in their school of thought. However, the clash with the government would not occur until much later. Abdul Aziz, his brother and his wife, would carry on their agenda under the very nose of ISI.

The first brush with the government occurred in 2005, when Abdul Aziz issued a fatwa against the army officers who were fighting against Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas close to the Afghan border. For this reason he was dismissed from his mosque position by the government, but he refused to vacate the mosque.

With his baton-wielding acolytes (men and women) in the madrassa he turned the mosque and the adjoining seminary into a fortress, daring any law-enforcing agency to oust him. The government relented.

Next came protests by the madrassa students against the government's campaign to demolish illegally constructed mosques in Islamabad. They followed these protests along with their teachers, threatening the owners of video and music shops in Islamabad to close down their businesses or face dire consequences.

The female students of the seminary, assisted by the male students, raided an alleged brothel house and kidnapped three women from there. They held them hostage for three days before releasing them, after securing confessional statements saying that they were involved in "immoral activities." All this happened under the watchful eyes of Pakistani and international media.

The most egregious of the unlawful activities was, however, when the students and their teachers abducted three policemen when they were going in search of students who were breaking the law. This time also, the government relented. Instead of carrying out any massive attack the police negotiated the release of the three policemen. Another victory for the radicals and their leader.

It took several months for the Pakistan government to realize that it was time to take the bull by the horn. The demon it was nurturing close to its core was giving birth to hundreds of radicals who were being shipped to fight its army and botch its war on terrorism from within.

Ironically, it was fighting the very elements that were born out of direct government subsidy and, later, of sheer neglect. At the time of writing, the siege of the mosque was still on, with uncertain outcome.

Still, action taken now will be far better than taken later, when the radicals bred by the seminary would have spread much wider, preaching and practicing their violence all over the country to implement their goals.

Is there a lesson to be learnt from all this? Use of religion for short-term political gains is not unknown -- at least that we know from the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the 60s, Ayub Khan gathered the support of the ulema for his regime.

General Ziaul Huq not only indulged the religious elements, but considered himself as the new messiah. Pakistan is still reaping the harvest of the seeds that he had sown. In Bangladesh in the mid-seventies, General Zia was blessed in a national gathering of the Mudarreseen (Association of Madrassa teachers). Later, we saw the repetition of the blessing of the dictatorship of General Ershad by the same elements.

Ironically, where military leaders had stopped short of embracing the religious elements as their political partners, the political leaders who followed the military dictators sought them as allies to spurn their opponents. This dangerous gambit of political opportunism later supported the growth of the kind of religious extremism that we would see with shock and disbelief. We came out this time paying a low price for this political shenanigan, but we may not be so lucky the next time around.

Our political party leaders often speak of conspiracies against our democracy. Few of them seem to realize that these conspiracies do not come from without, but from within the party.

These come from their inability to recognize that the forces that seek to usurp state power with violent means first work silently with connivance of allies that they set up in powerful quarters. We need to be watchful that the Lal Masjid experience is not repeated elsewhere.

Ziauddin Choudhury is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star.