Reading Al Qaeda In Karachi

In the preface to his book Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11, the late Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote:

“I have never worked for any well-funded international news organizations. Nor have I worked for the mainstream national media. My affiliations have always remained with alternative media outlets. This has left me with narrow options and very little space to move around in… However, independent reporting for the alternative media best suits my temperament as it encourages me to seek the truth beyond “conventional wisdom”. ”

Available outside Pakistan

Before it led him to a tragic death, Saleem Shahzad’s quest for that elusive truth beyond conventional wisdom took him from walks on Clifton Beach with a military officer-turned-Al Qaeda strategist to nights spent in mud huts with Taliban militia men as helicopters passed overhead and drones struck in the distance. It took him from Pakistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan and back to North Waziristan to meet raw recruits and hardened militants. Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban, however, is not a book about one man’s fascination with other men who like guns. It is a well-researched, cogent argument for the need to recognize that a common tactical goal – death to America the 'Great Satan' – “does not make the two a single entity. Theirs is a unique relationship, in which Al Qaeda aims to bring the Taliban and all Muslim liberation movements into its fold and to use them to forward it’s global agenda.”


The creation and uses of the mujahideen – who helped defeat the Soviet Union – as a strategic asset to be deployed at will by the Pakistani military to help actualize its regional ambitions, has already been well documented. Shahzad’s book does, however, flesh out how exactly the transformation of some of them from idealistic Muslim youth seeking to repel invaders from Muslim lands into uber-violent jihadis thirsting for the blood of their former handlers, came about. Consider the story of Bin Yameen, also known as Ibn-e-Ameen, who the author identified as the actual enforcer behind the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) movement to declare Sharia law in Swat in 2009.

“Bin Yameen was 6 feet 2 inches tall, had a broad chest, was fair in complexion, and had a full head of hair. His looks were God’s gift, but his short temper was not inbuilt.… Born as a Behloolzai, a subtribe of the Youzufzai tribe, Bin Yameen was never the playboy of his village or a poet. He was a school dropout at the matric level. While he was still in his teens he went to Afghanistan and fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud. He was arrested in his first battle and then spent seven long years in the inhuman jails of the Northern Alliance. Bin Yameen often remembers how his fellow Taliban detainees died in the jail. Sometimes he witnessed their swift deaths while they were talking or cooking. After the Taliban defeat, he was released by the United States.

“But it was not his seven years in the Northern Alliance jails that embittered him. After his release from [a Panjsheri] prison, his manners were still extraordinarily polite. He always stood up to welcome any guest. The marriage and love life of any Pashtun has always been a very private business. No Pashtun from a village background would ever confide in anyone over matters of the heart. But Bin Yameen used to proudly say that his wife (also his relative) had fallen in love with him and that before their marriage, when they were only engaged during his prolonged imprisonment in Afghanistan, all the family members had pressed her to break her engagement to him and marry someone else. But against all Pashtun traditions, the girl defied her family and said that her name would be tied to Bin Yameen’s forever, whether he lived or died. When Bin Yameen was released and went back to his village the first thing he did was to marry her, proud that this was the girl who had steadfastly stood by him despite all the pressures put on her by her family to forget him.

“Bin Yameen always said that all the pain and agony of his days in the Afghan prison disappeared after the marriage. It was as if nothing had happened. He started his new life with a loving wife. His wife delivered a son and they moved to Peshawar.”

The turning point for this man, according to the author, came after the December 2003 attempt on then President Musharraf’s life. In its aftermath, security agencies starting rounding up the jihadis they had till then supported.

“On August 21, 2004, Pakistan’s security agencies raided Bin Yameen’s house in Peshawar. He was sleeping with his wife. In the next room were two prominent jihadis.” The two managed to escape but the police who had broken into the house captured both Bin Yameen and his wife and “literally dragged them to their vehicles. Bin Yameen was half asleep and half awake, but he saw strangers touching his wife. He attacked them like a wounded lion. He tried to snatch their guns. It took dozens of security personnel to overwhelm him... Later his wife and son were released but Bin Yameen never forgot the humiliation suffered by his wife at the hands of Pakistan’s security personnel.”

After his release three years later he went on to become Al Qaeda’s secret mole in TNSM. They recognized the value of his “unbelievable” hatred – his politeness had become an insatiable thirst to slit the throats of Pakistan army personnel – and recruited him precisely because of it. Interestingly, this is the only time a woman (Bin Yameen's wife) makes an appearance in the book as anything other than a suicide bomber, Osama Bin Laden's daughter, or a purdah-observing student of the Lal Masjid seminary. The world Shahzad wrote about is clearly a world of men, for men, and the lives of women do not in any way figure in the anecdotes, conversations, analysis or vignettes that peppers its pages.


The militants in Swat were eventually pushed back into the Hindu Kush mountains, but Shahzad suggested there was another way to look at this apparent military victory.

“Pakistan’s secularists then boldly stood up against the Islamization of Pakistan. They called for the wings of Islamic seminaries in the country to be clipped. The government arranged religious conferences led by Sufis who spoke out against the Taliban. The Taliban retaliated by killing prominent Islamic scholars like Sarfaraz Naeemi. It seemed at first that the situation had turned against the militants, but behind the scenes Al Qaeda had succeeded in exploiting the ideological contradictions in Pakistan’s society, and deepened the ideological divide.

“In pursuit of this, Al Qaeda’s dialectical process, thousands of people were displaced, hundreds of people were killed, the national economy of Pakistan was on the verge of collapse, and Pakistan became completely dependent on US aid.”

Inside Al Qaeda And The Taliban offers many other examples of Al Qaeda’s ideological opportunism. Shahhzad sketches with forensic skill the way the movement capitalized on the growing disillusionment of operatives like Ilyas Kashmiri, the brothers Captain Khurram and Major Haroon, Major Abdul Rahman (three of whom were instrumental allegedly in the planning and execution of the Mumbai attacks), and Lal Masjid's Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rasheed Ghazi, with the institutions that had once fostered them. Any questions or doubts anybody has about the chronology or motivations for the Lal Masjid incident might well be addressed by reading his take on life beyond the soundbites, the still images, the regurgitated narrative of revolutionary fervor meeting arrogant military might.


Shahzad also establishes chronologically, in detail, the character and purpose behind the umbrella group of what is today known as the TTP or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. He traces how Al Qaeda, the heart of which is a philosophy held sacred by mostly foreigners who are relatively few in number, has over time infiltrated, influenced and started controlling these 'Neo Taliban.'


According to Shahzad, both the Masjid and the TNSM takeover of Swat were meant to divert attention from the tribal areas and buy Al Qaeda more time to consolidate its position there. Its ultimate goal? Expand the theater of war to include all modern day parts of ‘ancient Khurasan’, where the prelude to the “End of Times” battles were prophesied to begin. Khurasan today includes parts of Iran, the Central Asian republics, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. Ghazwa-e- Hind, or the battle for India, is also supposed to happen. After this the Muslim armies will march to the Middle East to join forces with the promised Mahdi and do battle against the Antichrist and its Western Allies for the Liberation of Palestine.


Essentially, Al Qaeda recognized Af-Pak way before the American and Pakistani establishment did. This is because, according to Shahzad, the organization has – thanks to the inspired use of its ‘human resources’ – always remained one step ahead of the great game.

“Before October 7, 2001 – when the United States attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, most of Al Qaeda’s top minds had already left the country, their mission focused on several targets:

• to ideologically cultivate new faces from strategic communities such as the armed forces and intelligence circles

• to bring in new recruits and establish cells

• to have each new cell assigned to raise its own resources and devise a plan, but have only one cell implement the plan, while the others served as decoys to 'misdirect' intelligence agencies”

Methods for ‘raising resources’ have included robbing banks and kidnapping Hindus and Ahmedis for ransom.


Since Musharraf first allied Pakistan to the US post-9/11 and the inevitable crackdown on jihadis began – the author’s thesis goes – Al Qaeda has waited, watched, and selected the, if not brightest, at least most committed former children of the US/Pak military machine to turn on their parents. On one level, it is Freudian: kill your mother (Pakistan), kill your father (the army, any army, dates are fluid, and which parent remembers the exact moment of conception anyway?). On another level, it is frightening: we are not even targets, we are collateral damage, and the suicide bombers' strings are being pulled by a parasitic entity that spreads from host to host in less time than it takes for Ansar Abbasi to go from ‘ISI good’ to ‘ISI bad.’


Other points that the book makes:


• Al Qaeda wants to keep the US in the region, engaged and off balance, till such time as the world’s mightiest ‘military machine’ has been bled dry


• Al Qaeda does not wish for a peace deal between the US and the Afghan Taliban because they want to continue to use US occupation of ‘Muslim lands’ as a rallying call for Muslims around the world. The creation of the TTP, the ‘Neo Taliban’, could also be seen as a move to woo fighters away from purely Afghan Taliban interests, which have more to do with ending the US invasion than they do with waiting for the Mahdi


• Al Qaeda feels – correctly as it turns out – that Pakistan’s tribal areas, with their virtually impregnable mountain ranges, are the perfect bases for the global Islamic insurgency. (Sadly, the book was completed before the ‘Arab Spring’, and any opportunity for the author to comment on how that changed the propaganda context.)


• Al Qaeda accomplished what no one had been able to do in Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies before: break the back of the local sardar/ jirga system


• Al Qaeda’s “Egyptian camp” of core ideologues can be perceived as the ‘intelligentsia of fundamentalism.’ This can either mean they are highly intelligent, learned, well read scholars of history, religion, philosophy and warfare. Or that every third Friday after lights out they regroup in a forest wearing all black to drink wine, smoke cheroots and debate existentialism. Probably the former.


• Saudi Osama Bin Laden might have been the face of Al Qaeda, but Egyptian Ayman Al Zwahiri was always the brains


• Zwahiri’s strategic vision has been to divide and rule, create splits between establishment/ ruling elite and the ordinary citizens of Muslim countries, discord between rulers and people being fertile recruiting ground for pan-Islamic ideals as well as yet another way to diffuse energy that might otherwise be directed at tackling Al Qaeda itself


Like the title suggests, Shahzad’s book is more about the growth and spread of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and tracing the patterns of diversion and consolidation contained therein than it is about the merits and demerits of the policies of the United States of America. It assumes that anyone reading it already has a cursory grasp of recent history. There is, therefore, only the occasional reference to the ‘cowboy’ nature of the American state (throw a rock at it and it will charge you in a tank). It is pretty much assumed that that a particular nation’s role in getting itself into the situation it finds itself in today is understood. Similarly short shrift is paid to Pakistan’s political leadership. Despite the role of the Jamaat-e-Islami, members of PML(Q), Imran Khan and Maulana Fazlur Rehman in giving militants legitimacy in the eyes of the public, they come across as a bunch of non-entities, attached like remoras to the sharks in the water.


It is also pretty much assumed that the reader understands that the Pakistani establishment’s official policy towards the spread of pseudo-Islamic fascism is dictated largely by the aforementioned American cowboys.

“Benazir Bhutto’s murder had undone the US scheme for Pakistan. Washington was compelled to change its entire roadmap. Under the new arrangement General Musharraf was an irritant and he was bade farewell. The United States then welcomed Zardari as the new president… it was now Admiral Mullen and General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani who were central to the Pakistan-US equation.”

Shahzad listed some of the salient features of the new relationship. They included: The Pakistan Army being in sole charge of military operations while “parliament and the civil administration were there simply to provide coordination and moral support ”, a US$1 billion plan to expand the US presence in Pakistan’s capital city, Islamabad, private security firms (DynCorp aka Blackwater) setting up offices in Islamabad “where they had already rented 284 houses, besides setting up bases in Peshawar and Quetta. In addition, Pakistan was to provide land in Tarbela to the United States for its operations ”, and the ISI setting up a “syndicated intelligence service under a proxy network to provide information to be transmitted to the CIA predator drones used to target the top Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”


That plan never came to fruition though. Shahzad established how often the Pakistani national security apparatus was outmaneuvered, sabotaged or made to just look plain stupid. This ranged from things like assuming the US would be defeated in Afghanistan in five years, after which ties with militants it wanted dead could be quietly resumed, to not predicting that the deadly cadres would turn their attention to Pakistan’s cities, to not knowing Musharraf's security officer Major Farooq was a member of Hizbur Tahrir and helped Major Haroon bring night vision goggles into the country from China, to not preparing adequately to fight a guerilla war, to mistreating the wrong prisoners during interrogation, to pampering the wrong prisoners during detention, to not knowing militants were about to utilize a shelved ISI contingency plan for a terror attack in India in the tragic events in Mumbai in 2008.


To this we can now add, not knowing Osama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and not knowing who killed Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Syed Saleem Shahzad: writing with his blood

We are left to draw our own conclusions about, on a policy level, how much of that failure to recognize an enemy within was deliberate or unwitting. Khaled Ahmed, in this excellent piece for The Friday Times, lists what some of those conclusions might be: TTP does nothing without approval from Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda killed Benazir, Pakistan army has ex-officers in Al Qaeda as well as serving officers collaborating with these ex-officers, and Islamic radicalization of Pakistani society and media mixed with fear of being assassinated by Al Qaeda agents - who include ex-army officers - have tilted the balance of power away from the state of Pakistan to Al Qaeda.


The book also examines the ideological and literary inspirations behind Al Qaeda, and compares and contrasts it with other ‘Muslim liberation’ movements across the globe. These brief chapters, and the few times Shahzad felt compelled to romanticize mountain warriors as Iqbal’s shaheen(s) “Swooping, shocking, then retiring, pouncing on the prey/ I do all this to keep my blood warm”, are the only times the author’s voice deviates from the dispassionate narrator position he inhabits for most of the book.


It takes a particularly courageous, or particularly foolish, person to probe the murky world of terror outfits and ambiguously-oriented militaries in the way that the late author did. Those who do tend to either be accused of fulfilling someone else’s agenda, or dismissed as conspiracy theorists because most of what they write cannot be verified immediately. This dilemma, and the narrative sensitivity Syed Saleem Shahzad displayed when discussing abstract philosophy and human psychology, only makes one more curious about who he was, how he was able to experience people and places others have been unable to access, and which of the exceedingly dangerous positions he put himself in was responsible for his horrific murder.

Signs Of The Times?

Let's get some things straight. There are still a large number of BIG questions unanswered about the killing in Abbottabad of Osama bin Laden. Many in Pakistan are choosing to obsess over how the American Navy SEALs team managed to come in and go out of Pakistan without being detected by the vaunted and financially over-indulged Pakistani military. Others are also questioning whether one should take the US government's and the ISI's word that OBL was indeed present in the compound that was attacked and whether he was, in fact, killed as stated. These are NOT the questions I am talking about.

The question that really needs to be answered is how it was possible for the most wanted man in the world to be living literally under the nose of Pakistan's men in khaki, whose leader had declared almost at the same spot only a week ago that his men had broken the back of terrorism and that Pakistani "dignity" would not be compromised for the sake of "prosperity." The question that really needs to be answered is why we - the people of Pakistan - should take anything he says with any seriousness if, in fact, he and his boys are really that incompetent. And why the Pakistani people should continue to give up their prosperity to fund such incompetence. The question that really needs to be answered, if the boys in khaki are not to be taken as the most incompetent people on the face of the earth, is what they were hoping to gain from such brazen duplicity. Because that really is the only choice available in their defence: nincompoop-ness vs two-facedness. Thanks to whatever their defence may be, Pakistan has a choice of being considered either a failed or a rogue state.

But if any good can come out of this fiasco, it had to be what I witnessed while watching Aaj Kamran Ke Saath on Geo tonight. The tone was in remarkable contrast to what most of the Pakistani electronic media (with a couple of notable exceptions) had decided to feed the Pakistani public over the last two days. The 'line' seemed to be completely reversed from what the Pakistani public has been force-fed generally over the last decade. And if it means what I think it does, coming from the well-connected Kamran Khan, it might just indicate some sort of silver lining for a future that looked increasingly bleak.

See this clip of the first 12-odd minutes of the programme and decide for yourself (you can watch the whole programme here):




Can one still hope to dream?

Have Cake, Will Eat Too

Much can be said - and is being said - about the latest Wikileaks saga. Around the world, the two biggest issues being grappled with are the future of diplomacy - would interlocutors be open and frank with each other if they fear that what they say in private is going to find its way to the web - and the repercussions on sensitive regions such as the Middle East of some of the explosive confirmations of what people sort of suspected anyway about their leaders and American designs on the world.

Unfortunately, most of what is being said in Pakistan is terribly uninformed, and swings from one extreme of 'it's all a big CIA conspiracy to undermine the Muslim world' on the one hand to 'how can you argue with this gospel truth?' on the the other. The former position does not understand the phenomenon of Wikileaks in the first place and conveniently ignores the fact that, so far, only some 500 of the more than 250,000 confidential cables have been released in the media. The second also conveniently ignores the valid questions regarding Wikileaks' allegedly super-secret structure, how Wikileaks receives information in the first place and the potential for it to be 'played.'

With respect to the first position, the proponents of the "It's all a conspiracy" theory, fed on the idea of homogeneity in the West, are unwilling to believe that there can be ideologically motivated and principled anarchists within the Western world seeking to undermine what they see as repressive state control of information, and simply do not understand how new technological tools can be used to circumvent control. If you are interested, you can read Wikileaks' front-man Julian Assange's treatise on "destroying the invisible government" from 2006, long before Wikileaks became a household word. The conspiracy-minded also ignore the substantive point that none of the principals writing the cables or quoted in them have denied the content of the cables so far (except for Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who admitted meeting US Ambassador Anne Patterson and hosting a dinner for her but denied asking the US to support him for a prime ministerial slot as she claimed in the cable). And, as I pointed out earlier, the bulk of the cables are still yet to come. The decision to stagger the release of the information this time - unlike in July when the 92,000 plus Afghan War Logs were released in one go - is a decision taken by the mainstream media as well, such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais. 'Cablegate' will go on for months and will feature far more than the Muslim world.

With respect to the second position, I will refer you to my post in July about the last Wikileaks information dump and my ambivalence about it. Here is what I wrote at that time about Wikileaks itself:

"The second thing that makes me uneasy is WikiLeaks itself. I know this will probably sound terribly conspiratorial, but I cannot say with 100 percent surety that it is not all part of some grand psy-ops strategy: you know, build up an institution with calculated cred boosters (e.g. the leaked Iraq helicopter footage) and then use it to release info you want to release. It's not like it has never been done before, although of course never on a global level. Okay, I know I'm probably sounding like a nutter now but bear with me. Yes, I've read the wonderful profile of maverick Julian Assange (the driving force behind WikiLeaks) in The New Yorker, but I never quite understood the over-dramatized cloak and dagger stuff. Are we really being asked to believe that a man as publicly recognizable as Assange, who jets from continent to continent, can escape being tracked by international security agencies? Or that WikiLeaks, which claims to run entirely on donations (including credit card donations), does not have a single bank account or money transfer that is trace-able? Really?

Ok, forget my questions about WikiLeaks. Is it really beyond the realm of possibility for WikiLeaks and Assange, no matter how pure of heart they are, to be used by psy-op warriors wanting to put certain things out in the public realm? Are we really being asked to believe that 92,000 plus secret documents can be easily smuggled out of the Pentagon (on a Lady GaGa CD, no less, if some reports are to be believed) without anyone having any inkling? Anything is possible I guess but the probability on the other hand is a different matter.

Forgive me for being a doubting Thomas and slightly cynical. But these are the reasons I would not take the leaks at face value even as I accept the mining of the data for useful information. I hope my doubts about WikiLeaks are misplaced though."

Basically, my point is that either completely dismissing the contents of the leaked information as fake or having blind trust that nobody is feeding them to Wikileaks for their own purposes are both logically untenable positions.

But then we have Mr Kamran Khan on his Geo programme, Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath, deciding to embrace both positions. His programme tonight (December 2) was a marvel of double-speak and chutzpah. But before I come to tonight's programme, let me also run you through the recent history of this programme since the current Wikileaks saga broke, which I have been following and been amazed by every day.

Monday, November 29: On the day when 'Cablegate' was the top story in the entire world, the first cables having been released late the night before (according to Pakistan Time), guess how much coverage was given to them in Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath. None. Zero. Zilch. Cipher. Instead, Kamran Khan devoted the entire programme to an extended promotional interview of Malik Riaz, the controversial billionaire owner of Bahria Town construction, said also to have recently invested heavily in ARY. The only explanation I could come up with for this remarkable detour was that either Khan now had a home in Bahria Town or that Riaz has now invested in Geo as well.

Tuesday, November 30: Kamran Khan grudgingly does a segment on the Wikileaks expose, mainly focusing on those related to Saudi King Abdullah's perceptions of President Asif Zardari but seems still to be unsure about the news-worthiness of the story. Seems inclined to believe it's not really credible information until Professor Hasan Abbas from Washington tells him nobody's really questioning the authenticity of the cables. Manages to use the New York Times misquote about Abdullah calling Zardari "an obstacle to Pakistan's progress" and adding in "because he is not sincere to the country" of his own accord.

Wednesday, December 1: Finally realizing that 'Cablegate' is worth more than just a segment, leads his programme with the statement that the cables have caused a storm ("bhonchal") in the politics of the country. Continues to use the misquoted story and focuses almost entirely on cables related to Zardari. No mention of cables implicating General Kayani in domestic politics or ISI chief General Pasha in talks with Israel or of the alleged involvement of Arab countries in Pakistan's affairs or their instigations to the US to attack Iran, which would obviously have serious implications for Pakistan. No mention also of cables giving the lie to Nawaz Sharif's claims about his interactions with the Saudis.

Which brings us to Thursday, December 2: In an amazing display of whatever you want to call it, the first part of Kamran Khan's show was devoted to decrying the manipulation behind the leaked cables and casting doubt on their credibility. Why? Well, because they had 'tried to besmirch the good name and reputation of the Pakistan army and its well-respected leader General Kayani.' Incidentally, according to Kamran Khan, the army is "a totally uncontroversial institution." He concluded that there is a sinister game afoot to undermine Pakistan's interests through the 'selective' release of these cables. He then proceeded to 'contextualize' General Kayani's positions through "new information received", that shows how "brave" and upright the general is, which incidentally is the same 'information' presented by Syed Talat Hussain in Dawn today. (Hmmm, I wonder where both could possibly have received the information from...)

The second part of the show, on the other hand, was devoted to praising the credibility of and insight given by the leaked cables which have "documented everything" and "not one single word of which has been denied by anyone or cast into doubt." Why? Well, because they showed what a scumbag and how beholden to US interests President Zardari was. "What are the poor, powerless 170 million people of this nation to do?" cries Kamran Khan.

If that's not called having your cake and eating it too, I don't know what is.

You can watch the relevant portions of the programme below:


Having His Cake:




And Eating It:




What are the poor, powerless 170 million people of this nation to do, indeed.

Burn, Baby, Burn?

First a couple of disclaimers.

1) I don't like Asif Ali Zardari. I think he is a venal, ill-educated and ruthless man who should never have risen to the position of power he is currently in. It is the tragedy of Pakistan that it must contend with the stupidity, arrogance and insensitivity of "leaders" like him.

2) I think the government's crude attempt to muzzle Geo by forcing cable operators to take the channel off air, by burning copies of Jang and threatening newspaper hawkers who carry it is just plain wrong and needs to be resisted by all who believe in a free media.

I have explained where I am coming from for the simple reason that what I am about to say next may fly in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least the overwhelming consensus that seems to have been manufactured in the country. And make no mistake, it is a manufactured consensus.

I may not like Asif Zardari as a person but it does not take away from the fact that he is the elected president of the country. And people can say all sorts of things about the shambolic nature of a democracy that resulted in him being elected president, but those were the rules everyone agreed to play by and those are the rules we have to accept. And the reason I bring it up is that much of the manufactured consensus against him in the media is implicitly or blatantly a refusal to accept those rules.

Zardari with Cameron (Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth / Reuters)

Let's take the case of his trip to France and England which has been the source of much of the venom spewed against him. Should he have undertaken the trip at this time, with UK PM David Cameron's pointed barbs in India against Pakistan preceding his trip and the floods wreaking such devastation across Pakistan? No. The former demanded a sense of dignity from any self-respecting leader and the latter simply a sensitivity to public perceptions.

But even though we know that it was really the former issue - and Asif Zardari's ignoring of the entreaties of even his own Foreign Minister - that really pissed the establishment (read military) off, what we have been constantly hearing is that Zardari should have been taking care of the floods situation at home.

Nowshera, July 30 (Photo: A Majeed / AFP-Getty)

Really? What exactly would Zardari have done in Pakistan? This is a man who does not even venture outside his presidential palace, unless it's to his bunkered home in Nawabshah, and who has never even once visited the frontline of the battle against the Taliban in two years, and we expect him to be directing flood relief efforts? And more importantly, didn't he just hand over all executive power under the 18th Amendment, making him just a figure-head president? Isn't PM Yousuf Raza Gilani at least correct in his rhetoric that he is the chief executive of the country and it is he who is responsible for directing relief efforts? Him and the provincial chief ministers who seem to have got away pretty unscathed so far. Yes, Zardari failed miserably on the optics and in basic decency, but does anyone seriously believe that the floods' devastation and the ineffectual state response would have been ameliorated by Zardari being in Pakistan? I don't think so. But that is the constant refrain we now hear as if it is the gospel truth, particularly on Geo.

Taunsa near Multan, August 1 (Photo: Khalid Tanveer /AP)

So Zardari was an insensitive ass. But is that such breaking news that the media focus shifts entirely to undermining him? Were he not the president, would the suffering of the affectees of the biggest floods in Pakistan's history be any less? Would the administration become super-efficient? Isn't the issue of the inherent lack of capacity of the Pakistani state to deal with such crises a bigger issue than Zardari and his jaunts? Criticise him by all means but is a man chucking a couple of shoes in his direction really a bigger story than the tens of millions displaced from their homes? Or have we become so blinded by our rage and the cult of personality that we are willing to jettison all sense of proportion?

The question then becomes, to what end is this consensus being created? You only have to watch Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath to get a clear sense of the game that is cynically being played.

Here's a clip of last night's programme. Watch from 5.10.




Here's the other myth that is being perpetuated: that the flood relief efforts that the army is undertaking are somehow divorced from the government's response, almost, it would seem, in opposition of government directives. Is the army separate from government? Isn't the military hardware being used in the airlifts and food drops, as well as the soldiers, paid by the government and people of Pakistan? And to take nothing away from the brave work of the jawans who endure hardship and danger to rescue people and provide them food, but why are we being made to feel that the army is doing the people of Pakistan a favour? As if this were not really their job but are doing this only out of the goodness of their hearts?

Does the building up of the army's reputation come always as the cost of undermining civilian reputations? The tragedy for Pakistan is of course that its stupid civilian leaders play exactly according to the script. And only seem to prove their cluelessness with interventions like this:

What will such a demolition, in public perception, of everything other than the armed forces mean for Pakistan? Is that what is intended? Are we destined to go back to Square Zero every time?

But coming back to the issue of Geo's forced blackout: as much as I oppose it, I for one am not buying into the claims of hurt innocence that Geo is now loudly proclaiming. Yes, the government has responded in typical hamhanded fashion and has probably added fuel to burn itself. But was Geo simply reporting news as an unbiased and neutral observer? Does it have no hidden or obvious agenda? I think we all know the answer to that, at least in our hearts.

You could also do worse than read this assessment in The Independent by Chatham House fellow Farzana Shaikh. It is probably not something you will see quoted with relish on Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath.

Cigarette Break of the Day

From the Pakistan Post, New York.

A picture is worth a thousand words, wouldn't you say?

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day comes from PMLN MNA from Chakwal and columnist Ayaz Amir in the op-ed pages of The News:

"Punjab is the strategic depth of bigotry and extremism masquerading in the colours of Islam."

Actually, you should probably read the whole piece. Much of it re-encapsulates well-tread ground about the origins of our extremism problem. But the following concluding bit should also perhaps be translated and read out to his party members and leaders who probably find reading anything a bit bothersome (the clarifications in [square brackets] are of course my additions)...

"All the extremist outfits with whose names we are now familiar emerged at that time [under Zia whose protege Amir's leader Nawaz Sharif was]: the jaish this and that, the lashkar so and so. Most of them were Punjab-based and members from all these organisations acquired battle experience in Afghanistan. My friend Colonel Imam of Afghan 'jihad' fame -- and who, like most good people, is from Chakwal -- takes enormous pride in saying that the most fearless fighters of all were from Punjab. And he should know for he was in the thick of it.

When with the departure of the Soviet army and the victory of the Saudi and Charlie Wilson-funded 'mujahideen', the Afghan war wound down, the fighters who had gained battle experience in Afghanistan were shifted to an entirely different front: Kashmir, where in a protracted struggle they managed to tie down half a million Indian troops.

Their godfathers in the security establishment felt elated. Forgetting the role of hard-drinking Charlie Wilson and the Saudis, they wrote a self-glorifying narrative in which it was claimed that not only had the power of faith defeated the Soviets. It had also hastened the end and break-up of the Soviet empire. If a superpower could be thus defeated, zeal and the spirit of 'jihad' could work similar miracles in Kashmir.

This was the mood then pervading the top ranks of the army and the intelligence agencies. So it is scarcely to be wondered at that when after the fall of Kabul to the 'mujahideen', a Pakistani delegation was on its way to the Afghan capital, no sooner had the aircraft carrying it entered Afghan airspace when those on board, including some Americans, were startled by a loud cry: "Allah-o-Akbar". This from the then ISI chief [and a close confidante of then PM Nawaz Sharif who appointed him], the heavily-bearded Lt-Gen Javed Nasir.

Our rendezvous with our present extremist-flowing troubles did not come about from out of the blue. We had ploughed the land and watered it for a long time.

When the Americans attacked Afghanistan post-Sept 11, the theatre of 'jihad' shifted again: back to Afghanistan. The Bush administration of course screwed things up for itself by going on to attack Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan, a piece of folly sure to haunt the US for a long time to come. But Afghanistan was bad enough by itself. It reignited the fires of holy war and, given the iron dictates of geography, it was inevitable that Pakistan sooner or later would have its hands burned by another conflict raging in Afghanistan.

Once a change of course in our strategic course was forced upon us by the US -- Musharraf succumbing to American pressure without extracting the kind of bargain that would have better served Pakistan's interests -- logic and necessity demanded a clean break with the playing-with-fire policies of the past. In other words, a clean and definitive break with Zia-minded 'jihad'. But Musharraf played a double game. Even while dancing wildly to America's tune he was never serious, or he lacked the will and capacity, to seriously rethink the past.

But now that under a new sun and a new sky we are finally embarked upon a new course -- which marks a true break with the past -- we have to realise the extent and magnitude of the problem. The terrorism we are now fighting is not a provincial subject. It is not confined to any one province. It is a composite whole, organically tied together, growing not from any isolated virus but from a sickness of the mind and soul which had the whole of Pakistan, or at least its strategic quartermasters, in its grip.

If Pakistan is to become something, realising its dreams and potential, if it has to enter the real world and leave the world of dreams and fantasies behind, then there is no course open to it except to tackle this sickness, no matter what it takes and what sacrifices it entails, without ifs and buts, and without any misconceived appeals to the Taliban."

Amir's reference to General Musharraf reminded me of the time in the year 2000, when soon after taking power and vowing to restore Jinnah's vision, he had been asked a pointed question by a young journalist about the threat of Talibanization of Pakistan at a public gathering. If I recall correctly (I was witness to it), the question had raised the issue of blowback, long before it became fashionable to talk in such terms. I still recall the general's response: he claimed that people often tended to forget that the Taliban were evolving too and cited as an example the fact that when they met for dinner with Pakistani army delegations they would now use (or at least have on the table/ dastarkhwan) cutlery and crockery... whereas earlier they would simply eat with their hands out of a single thaal (dish). I'm not making this up. A few months later, the cutlery and crockery were publicly forgotten.

As for Ayaz Amir, if ever there was a misfit in a political party...

How Do You Say 'Corruption' in French, Arabic and Russian?

This report in The News about an audit of the army-administered National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad should serve to shut up those people who believe that if it weren't for the watchful eye of the military, 'corrupt politicians' would eat up this country.

Keep in mind as you read through the report, that the Board of Governors is headed by the Chief of Army Staff and the Rector (Vice Chancellor) is a retired brigadier.

NUML rector, directors caught by own auditors

University management rejects all charges

 

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

By Umar Cheema

 

ISLAMABAD: An audit report of the Army-run National University of Modern Languages (NUML) has found that its Rector, a retired Army brigadier, was also receiving the salary of a night watchman (security supervisor), getting tax rebates as a researcher and had sent his daughter and son-in-law abroad using the university scholarships.

 

While the NUML management has given some lame justifications for these acts, the auditors have found them unsatisfactory. The report finds that out of three scholarship grants, two were granted to the Rector’s family members. A grant of Rs 15.4 million allocated for setting up linkages and exchange of visits with the Utrecht University of the Netherlands was used for summer vacation in the UK, the USA, France and Turkey.

 

A hefty amount collected under the head of fine from students was kept aside for discretionary use of the management as “daily expenditures,” the audit report disclosed. Besides, dozens of appointments were made during a period of hiring ban. One such beneficiary, Maj Gen (retd) Owais Mushtaq Qureshi, has now been appointed as Federal Public Service Commission member.

 

The report finds that Brig. (retd) Aziz Ahmad Khan, the Rector, is not the only official involved in irregularities, he has many partners posted on senior positions like director administration, director finance, director libraries, registrar and director academics.

 

As for drawing money under the garb of a supervisor of security guards, other beneficiaries include his director administration Muhammad Yasin, director finance Muhammad Ashraf, director libraries Muhammad Abbas, registrar Kamran Jahangir and director academics Saeed Akhtar Malik. The Rector, together with his partners, impersonated as security supervisor to collect Rs 620,549 in extra money.

 

Defending itself, the NUML administration told the auditors that high-level security was organised for the protection of a sizeable number of foreign military students in the university. “This was the time when the security situation in Islamabad was beyond anyone’s control. It was, therefore, decided that high-level security be organised. This included security provided by the agencies and overseen by senior officers of the university. It would be appreciated that the whole night duty would definitely require compensation. Hence, the amount under observation was paid. However, as soon as these sensitive students had completed stay at the campus, the payment was stopped forthwith,” the NUML said.

 

The audit report, however, turned down the plea, saying: “Security didn’t fall under the responsibility of the officers mentioned” and directed the beneficiaries to return the money. The Rector’s daughter, Ayesha, and her husband, Waqas Hassan, are named as the two, out of three beneficiaries, who were granted M Phil leading to PhD scholarships for study in Sussex University, UK. The criteria for granting such awards were not adhered to, the audit report objected, noting that there was no provision of awarding scholarship for higher education in the NUML Ordinance 2000.

 

The university administration responding to this objection said the criteria for selection was transparent, the candidates had fulfilled all the conditions for winning the scholarship and that the Rector was not part of the selection committee.

 

The Rector’s administrative post notwithstanding, he received 75 per cent tax rebate posing as researcher as the facility is available to those involved in research work. Director planning & coordination and registrar also abused this facility, the audit objected.

 

The NUML’s reply to this charge was that PhD degree holders from foreign university, who also work as teacher and researcher, qualify for the rebate. This justification was also rejected by the auditors who observed that the facility was available only to full-time teachers.

 

As regards the use of Rs 15.4 million allocated for setting up linkages and exchange of visits with the Utrecht University, the project was intended to promote research and development at the postgraduate level. A department called “Government and Organisational Science” was to be established with similar system in currency at the Utrecht University. The staff was to be trained by the Utrecht University with its staff biannual visit to Pakistan be arranged. It was not done; instead the NUML management started using it for foreign visits.

 

“The activities of the project mainly depicts the picture that the programme was made to have foreign visits to UK, USA, France, Netherlands, Turkey during vacations of the university,” noted the audit report.

 

The NUML administration replying to this objection said that the PC-1 provides that joint faculty visits will be undertaken by the Pakistani side in May and June every year because in June and early part of July, Utrecht’s faculty and administrators are free from their routine assignments and can spare more time for research. However, the management didn’t reply as to how the visits to other countries were undertaken using these funds.

Watchmen salaries for the vice chancellor, scholarships for daughter and son-in-law, joyrides to foreign destinations, inappropriate tax rebates... how low can you go?

Clueless in Canada

Someone just pointed me in the direction of the worst article by a Non-Resident Pakistani (NRP) in the Western press. What is it about NRPs? I mean, if you're going to immigrate, must you pretend to still be clued in to what's going on back home? And what is the deal with the Western press, which is willing to accept all kinds of libelous statements from NRPs - which they would never from Westerners about their own countries - presumably simply because of the authors' "credibility", defined only by their ethnicity.



We have seen this in the past, with Tariq Ali claiming in a piece in the Guardian that Murtaza Bhutto was shot point blank in 1996 - when no such forensic evidence has ever been presented - simply taking, one assumes, daughter Fatima Bhutto's word for it. We saw it with the claims of that charlatan Ahmed Chelabi, who seemingly singlehandedly convinced the neo-con administration of George Bush and the public through op-ed pieces in the New York Times, that Iraqis were waiting to line up in the streets to welcome US troops into Iraq. I'm not saying this current piece is on that level of deceipt, but its playing fast and loose with facts and generalizations is still breathtaking in its sheer audacity.

The article in the reputed Globe and Mail of Canada, provocatively titled "A Military Coup in Pakistan?", is by Tarek Fatah, a most prolific writer on issues related to Islam, Muslims and Pakistan. According to a journalist who met him in the US a few years ago, "he is a know-it-all whose knowledge of Pakistan is firmly anchored in the '70s." The problem is not even his central thesis - that the Pakistani establishment would rather see the back of Zardari and his cronies. That has been written about with much regularity in the Pakistani press to say the least, and truth be told, the majority of Pakistanis would probably have the same views. The problem, in fact, is with the sweeping claims made about motives, the lack of substantive evidence to back libelous accusations and the propagandistic (read apologist) tone of the piece.

Right off the bat, Mr. Fatah begins with:

"A military coup is unfolding in Pakistan, but, this time, there is no rumbling of tanks on the streets of Islamabad. Instead, it seems the military is using a new strategy for regime change in Pakistan, one that will have adverse consequences for Western troops deployed in Afghanistan."

So, the parameters are set. The "regime change" is not bad per se for democracy in Pakistan or for the future of rule of law in the country. It is bad only because it might adversely affect Western troops in Afghanistan. So much for having the interests of Pakistan at heart.

Here are some other choice examples:

1.

"A year after rogue elements of Pakistan's intelligence services disrupted Indian-Pakistani peace talks by staging the Mumbai massacre..."

Wow. Clear and to the point. Except, nobody has proved this yet. Not even the Indians. Yes, Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives have been charged with the planning and aiding the crime, but they have not yet been convicted as far as I know. Not even Ajmal Kasab, the surviving gunman, whose trial in India is still going on. And while there is ample speculation about whether the attackers received help from elements within the Pakistani intelligence services, no credible publication has been as foolhardy as to claim in definitive terms that this was so. No such burden of proof for Mr. Fatah apparently.


2.

"The men who wish to replace Mr. Zardari represent the religious right-wing backers of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, adding a new obstacle in Barack Obama's war effort in Afghanistan. A change of guard in Pakistan will also place Canadian troops at a higher risk of attack from a Taliban that will get unimpeded access to safe havens across the international border."

Let's leave the pandering to the US-Canadian interests aside for the moment. Since in the previous sentence, Mr. Fatah claims that the people out to get Zardari are "the men who run Pakistan's infamous military-industrial complex", it is only fair to surmise that he is accusing General Ashfaq Kayani of being a "religious right-wing backer of the Taliban and al-Qaeda." Really? So, anyone who thinks Zardari is an unprincipled man with no vision is a Taliban and al-Qaeda backer? And the US dithering on whether it will stay or go from Afghanistan, its own willingness to include the Taliban in talks and power-sharing, and the growing influence of India there plays no role whatsoever in the Pakistan establishment hedging its bets, if it does? I have to admit I haven't read anything as unnuanced since... oh, I don't know... Bush's 'With us or against us' dictum.


3.

"In the West's war against terrorism, Mr. Zardari is probably the only politician in Pakistan who has the guts to identify the cancer of jihadi extremism and order the Pakistani army to root it out. With reluctance, the army has complied, but only half-heartedly. With him gone, it's almost a certainty that Canada and the United States, as well as Afghanistan and India, will once more face the deception and fraud that became the hallmark of Pervez Musharraf's military regime."

Yet again, wow. I doubt even the Press Information Department (PID) of the Government of Pakistan would have felt comfortable with such propagandistic drivel. The only politician? I have no love lost for the MQM or the ANP, but you know, they were saying the same thing for a much longer time, not to mention scores of other left politicians and intellectuals. Even during the time in the mid-1990s when Zardari's former spouse Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Shaheed (MBBS) was actively facilitating the formation of the Taliban in Afghanistan through her interior minister General Naseerullah Babar.

And "the army has complied [to Zardari's directive], but only half-heartedly"??? What exactly leads Mr. Fatah to believe that the current (or any) military operations are directed from the presidency without real interest from the military and that the killing of hundreds of soldiers and extremists constitutes "half-hearted" compliance, we shall never really know. It may have helped had he explained how he came to this conclusion but then that would require providing some evidence, something Mr. Fatah seems not too bothered about.


4.

"For years, the Pakistani army received billions of dollars in direct American aid while it backed the Taliban and staged faked armed encounters to deceive the Pentagon."

Such as? Come on, give us something tangible, dammit. Oh, ok, we should just take your word for it.


5.

"Mr. Zardari also is being depicted as the epitome of corruption and thus unworthy of governing Pakistan. Working from within the government, military intelligence was able to coax a junior minister to release a list of thousands of supposedly corrupt politicians and public officials in the country. Leading them was Mr. Zardari himself – notwithstanding the fact that before he was elected president, he had been imprisoned for more than a decade by the military without a single conviction."

Yes, of course, and NOBODY in the world ever accused Asif Zardari of corruption ever before. And look, it was a hassled JUNIOR minister who released the lists, not a credible SENIOR minister. And the Supreme Court and Pakistan's parliament itself never ASKED for the lists of people who benefited from the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). And the NRO only wiped out cases that were already decided in Zardari's favour anyway. You know, Mr. Fatah, you should work with Jahangir Badar. You'd make a good team.


6.

"What irks the generals is not just that they are now answerable to a civilian but that Mr. Zardari belongs to an ethnic group that is shunned by the country's ruling Punjabi elite. Mr. Zardari is a Sindhi."

No, scratch that. You should work with Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza on the next Topi Drama.


7.

"The hysteria among Pakistan's upper-class elites demanding a military dictatorship is best reflected in an article written by a retired military officer in the right-wing newspaper The News: “Military rule should … return. … The problem with democratic governments is that they remain under pressure to go with what the majority of the citizens want, not what is best for them. … People of several South American countries that have returned to civilian rule after a long time are now beginning to feel they were better off under dictatorships.”

Ah, the smoking gun! Except, this was no article in the "right-wing newspaper The News" (as opposed to left-wing Dawn?) This, ladies and gentlemen, is a quote from a Letter to the Editor by a mad fauji who keeps writing such letters regularly. The same guy sparked off a whole debate in the paper about the term "bloody civilians." If I had two cents for every loony letter to the editor published in left-wing, centrist and right-wing newspapers, I'd be as rich as Zardari now. This the best you could come up with Mr. Fatah? I mean, it's not like you had scarce material to work with.

And finally:

7.

"If Mr. Obama wishes to succeed in bringing the Afghan war to an end, he had better make sure Mr. Zardari's elected civilian administration is allowed to govern until the end of its term."

Sheesh! Talk about cringe-worthy. "Mr. Obama... better make sure"? Even Asif Zardari might find being compared to a puppet like Hamid Karzai unsettling.

Moral of the Story: Stupid, clueless friends are worse than stupid, clueless enemies. Especially if the friends are NRPs.