Pakistan Maddrassa head - Musharraf "an agent of America."

yahoo/AP: In a posh district of Pakistan's capital, down a leafy street from the homes of officials and foreign diplomats, hundreds of bearded Islamic students donning prayer caps scurry barefoot to their next Quran lesson at the Red Mosque madrassa.

The government has little clout inside the seminary walls despite President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's latest bid to control religious extremism by regulating the country's estimated 13,000 religious schools, long regarded as a recruiting base for "holy war."

"We will not stop teaching jihad (holy war) just because America does not like it," said the madrassa's head, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who derided the Pakistani military leader as "an agent of America." Read more

This week, an umbrella group representing most of the madrassas said they would reject a government campaign launched last month to register the schools by the year's end, amid concern they would have to reveal their sources of funding. The government has threatened them with closure if they fail to register.

"It's our job to see what goes on inside (madrassas), not the government's," said Abdul Malik, a cleric and opposition lawmaker who chaired a meeting Monday of the leaders of the five main schools of Islamic thought taught at the seminaries. Read more

db: Pakistan is one of those corners of the globe where democracy is not on the [US] agenda - the march of freedom would not immediately benefit US interests, so why bother?