The Case of Shakil Afridi

The hue and cry over the 33-year sentence handed down to Dr Shakil Afridi, the doctor who may have aided the CIA in tracking down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad is partly correct. Certainly, the fact that he was tried under the archaic Frontier Crimes Regulations, in secret, and without the chance to defend himself through a lawyer, makes the whole process highly suspect and against the basic principles of a fair trial. Valid questions have also been raised about the hollowness of some of the charges brought against him, including, apparently, 'waging war against Pakistan'.

Dr Shakil Afridi (Photo: Express)

However, some of the apoplectic reaction from members of civil society, which has condemned Dr Afridi being tried at all, is thoroughly misplaced. Some believe he did a great thing by helping rid Pakistan of the world's most dangerous terrorist and so should be thanked or awarded rather than prosecuted. Others have drawn comparisons between his swift trial and conviction and the lack of effective prosecution of real terrorists. Even journalist Najam Sethi, in his programme yesterday, questioned how what Dr Afridi did was any different from the Pakistani state's collaboration with the CIA in going after Al Qaeda's militants and stated that the Americans, after all, are Pakistan's professed strategic allies. All of these are false premises.

Let's be clear about one thing. No country in the world allows its citizens to freelance as spies for another country's agencies, whether friendly or hostile. Which is not to say that people do no do it, just that they know the risks of what can happen to them if they are caught. Forget being spies, the US has laws against its citizens even lobbying public opinion on behalf of foreign interests without revealing their connections. Remember the case of one Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai?  There have been a number of instances of American citizens being convicted of spying or passing information on to its greatest 'ally' Israel. Dr Shakil Afridi apparently confessed (this is a point that is yet to be proved in a fair trial) that he knowingly assisted the CIA in running a fake vaccinations programme set up to obtain DNA samples from the residents of the compound where bin Laden was eventually killed. No matter what one thinks of the outcome, Pakistan has every right to charge him for colluding with a foreign agency, and if the charges are proved in a fair trial, to convict him.

Yes, it's a real and terrible pity that the Pakistani state and Pakistani courts are criminally lax about the prosecution and conviction of far worse people than Dr Afridi, but this line of reasoning, while it scores political points, is really a false equivalence. By this reasoning, nobody should ever be tried for manslaughter in a road accident or theft or kidnapping or for any other everyday crime since they are far smaller crimes than those committed by those terrorists who have killed thousands and got away scot free. Similarly, with respect to Mr Sethi's point about whether what Dr Afridi did was any different from what the government of Pakistan has been doing for years, yes, there is a difference (whether one likes it or not) between a state sanctioned operation and a freelance operation. It is similar to the difference between the police having the right to use firearms versus ordinary citizens using firearms. But more importantly, if the state is violating the law - e.g. by extraditing people to a foreign entity without going through the due legal process - it is something that in and of itself needs to challenged; it still does not confer legitimacy to others who decide to violate the law.

The US Congress' hypocritical outrage over the treatment of Dr Afridi - er, Guantanamo, anyone? - really is not worth commenting over. They are simply looking to protect their asset, their employee.

In my personal opinion, whether Dr Afridi is charged with treason or not, what he certainly should have been charged with is intentional malpractice and stripped of his medical title for violating his Hippocratic Oath. First of all, he placed innocent children and families knowingly in harm's way by running a fake vaccination programme. As detailed by The Guardian's report linked to earlier:

"The doctor went to Abbottabad in March, saying he had procured funds to give free vaccinations for hepatitis B. Bypassing the management of the Abbottabad health services, he paid generous sums to low-ranking local government health workers, who took part in the operation without knowing about the connection to Bin Laden. Health visitors in the area were among the few people who had gained access to the Bin Laden compound in the past, administering polio drops to some of the children. 

Afridi had posters for the vaccination programme put up around Abbottabad, featuring a vaccine made by Amson, a medicine manufacturer based on the outskirts of Islamabad. 

In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived."

Secondly, he has endangered the lives of hundreds of thousands of other children in an area where there were already (unfounded) virulent suspicions about vaccination programmes. As the Associated Press reported soon after the programme was revealed:

"Pakistani health officials held meetings about the alleged CIA scheme on Tuesday and expressed concern that it could have a negative impact on immunization programs in other areas of the northwest, especially in Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region along the Afghan border, said a Pakistani official involved in polio eradication efforts… 

One of the Pakistani Taliban’s top commanders, Maulvi Faqir Mohammed, recently called on people in the northwest to avoid vaccines offered by the international community, claiming they were made with “extracts from bones and fat of an animal prohibited by God — the pig.”  

“Don’t fall prey to these infidel NGOs and this U.S.-allied government and its army,” said Mohammed over the illegal radio station he transmits from his sanctuary in eastern Afghanistan. Pakistani officials and their international partners have pushed back against these claims, but the CIA’s reported activities in the country may have made their job that much harder."

You can read more about what impact such kind of rumours have had on immunisation programmes in other places here, which also points out the following:

"[T]he allegation that a vaccine program was not what it seemed — that it was not only suspect, but justifiably suspect — has been very widely reported. This is awful. It plays, so precisely that it might have been scripted, into the most paranoid conspiracy theories about vaccines: that they are pointless, poisonous, covert shields for nefarious government agendas meant to do children harm. 

That is not speculation. The polio campaign has already seen this happen, based on just those kind of suspicions — not in a single poor slum in New Delhi, but across much of sub-Saharan Africa... 

The accusations that polio vaccination was a Potemkin cover for anti-Islamic activities almost ruined the international eradication of polio when they were false. Now, on the basis of the CIA’s alleged appalling ruse in Pakistan, they may be made again. And they will be much more believable, because this time they might be be true."

Finally, he has endangered the lives of his fellow - real - health workers. As noted here,

"InterAction, an alliance of 198 American NGOs, such as the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, CARE, ChildFund International, World Wildlife Fund, Plan International USA, Helen Keller International, Action Against Hunger and Relief International, said the CIA’s tactics also endangered the lives of foreign aid workers. “The CIA-led immunization campaign compromises the perception of U.S. NGOs as independent actors focused on a common good and casts suspicion on their humanitarian workers. The CIA’s actions may also jeopardize the lives of humanitarian aid workers in Pakistan.”"

The Guardian reported that Save the Children was forced to evacuate eight of its international workers last July over fears for their safety:

"A senior western official said Afridi told his wife he was working for Save the Children when he was in fact running the fake CIA programme. The allegation emerged during interrogation. 

A senior aid worker corroborated that account, saying Afridi may have mentioned Save the Children "during the early stages of his interrogation". Save the Children said it was horrified that Afridi had abused its name. "We are shocked by the allegations that our name has been falsely used in this way. Save the Children's work in Pakistan is helping the most vulnerable children and their families," said [SCF spokesperson Ishbel] Matheson."

So, yes, demand a fair trial for Shakil Afridi by all means. This is his and all of our right. But let's not build a mercenary rogue into a hero. And I for one would not in the least shed tears if, at the end of an open and fair trial, he were to be convicted not of treason but of unabashed medical malpractice. After all, even the mobster Al Capone was convicted only for tax evasion, wasn't he?

The Pakistanian Defence And Its Alternatives

Pakistan Today's cover May 3, 2011

It can be argued that the world’s most powerful countries are those that understand the difference between perception and reality, and attach equal importance to controlling both. Pakistan’s reality is a harsh, challenging one, but unless we move proactively and immediately to counter the further degradation of our already distorted image, it is about to get a lot worse.


Consider this, from Al Jazeera English:

“The Arab Spring has eroded many of the conventional assumptions about the relationship between dictators, Islamists and the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we heard dictators playing the Islamist card for three decades – "support us unless you want the terrorists to win".

The reality has been quite different...Today, the US continues to lavishly fund the Pakistani military, while using drones and secret soldiers such as Raymond Davis to attack the extremist forces that the same regime supports. It is up to the US to stop feeding the beast.”

Or this, from The New York Times:

“... Bin Laden’s death near Islamabad has rekindled suspicions in Afghanistan…“Pakistan is the problem, and the West has to pay attention,” said Amrullah Saleh, the former intelligence director of Afghanistan, who resigned last summer. Though jubilant at the death of Bin Laden, he said it was time for the United States to “wake up to the fact that Pakistan is a hostile state exporting terror.”

Or this, from Salman Rushdie for The Daily Beast:

“ There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations .”

Despite American and British efforts to diffuse the situation, this hard-line ‘enough is enough’ stance is being echoed across the globe. It is neither surprising nor unexpected, and in the long run questions of whether it is justified will remain, as they are now, relevant only to Pakistan’s internal dialogue, but more on that later. The world, like the mob, is ultimately uninterested in the nuances of things. Can it, like the beast, be lulled into stillness with the right tune?


I cannot comment with any authority on the PR plan our politicians, military, past/future leaders and broadcast journalists are currently following. I know that most of the politicos are sticking with the ostrich routine, most of our leaders are rechecking their visa-to-safer-climes status, most of our broadcast journalists are continuing to miss the forest for the trees, and that the ISPR is shooting a feature film, written possibly by the official behind the 'We're good, but we're not God' line featured in this BBC report. The two sole Pakistani voices who have spoken for us internationally today, then, are the rather Laurel and Hardyesque pairing of novelist Mohsin Hamid and President Asif Ali Zardari; Hamid in an opinion piece for The Guardian and Zardari in a comment for The Washington Post.


Both have chosen to follow what I would like to dub ‘The Pakistanian Defense’ (a nod to George Bush, which is also interestingly often a feature of the PD, as is the kind of ironic self referencing you see here). The Pakistanian Defense has a few standard features, some of which are listed below, which can be tweaked to accommodate word length, timing and audience.


1) More of my countrymen have died than all of yours combined.


Zardari, or his resident ghost writer, does it with: 

“Let us be frank. Pakistan has paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism. More of our soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost.”

Hamid does it with: 

“Less well known is the statistic that since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed nearly five times that number of people in Pakistan. The annual number of Pakistani fatalities from terrorism has surged from fewer than than 200 in 2003 to almost 1,000 in 2006, to more than 3,000 in 2009. In all, since 2001 more than 30,000 have died here in terror and counterterror violence; slain by bombs, bullets, cannons and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24-7-365.”

Zardari’s piece is simple in structure and word choice, much like a lot of the hostility currently emanating from the pens of opinion makers in other countries. It, like Clinton’s ‘you cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us’, outlines the outer limits of the diplomatic dance. Hamid, on the other hand, co-opts the linguistic weapons of choice of the other side (surged, counterterror, America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24-7- 365) and in doing so creates a space where nuance may one day live.


2) Pakistanis want peace, not war.


Zardari raises the facts that: 

“Radical religious parties have never received more than 11 percent of the vote. Recent polls showed that 85 percent of our people are strongly opposed to al-Qaeda. In 2009, when the Taliban briefly took over the Swat Valley, it demonstrated to the people of Pakistan what our future would look like under its rule — repressive politics, religious fanaticism, bigotry and discrimination against girls and women, closing of schools and burning of books. Those few months did more to unite the people of Pakistan around our moderate vision of the future than anything else possibly could.”

Hamid reinforces that with: 

“If Osama Bin Laden's death means that the war in south and central Asia can now begin to end, that America can begin to withdraw its forces from the region, and that Pakistan and Afghanistan can somehow rediscover peace, then one day there may be celebrations here as well.”

3) They will be gunning for us even more viciously now.


Zardari points this out with: 

“Only hours after bin Laden’s death, the Taliban reacted by blaming the government of Pakistan and calling for retribution against its leaders, and specifically against me as the nation’s president.”

Hamid says it with: 

“As news of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's death reverberates in Pakistan, embassies here are shutting down, hotels are ramping up security, restaurants are reporting cancelled reservations and public gatherings like plays, concerts and lectures, are being postponed. The feeling in Lahore is familiar: it is like the dread that lingers over the city in the days after it has suffered a massive terrorist attack. This time, though, the attack has not yet happened, and the dread spans the entire country. Pakistanis know they may pay a blood price for Bin Laden's killing. A purported mirror has been broken. Bad luck is to be expected.”

Zardari makes the mistake of sticking with the royal ‘we’, demanding an acknowledgement of worth nobody currently wants to give us. Hamid comes in from the other end and makes us ordinary, human, sketching life for Pakistanis in details The Other can understand, even if they are details actual ordinary, human Pakistanis would scratch their heads at (hotels, restaurants, plays, concerts, lectures…er…what?). A universal symbol of bad luck, the broken mirror, is weaved in too, to reinforce the pathos and significance of ‘dread’ and ‘blood price’. Zardari invites you to stick a sock on your hand and pillory his pomposity. Hamid invites you to sit down, listen and sympathize.


4) Why on earth would we want to make the most trigger-happy nation in the world angry with us?


Zardari feels the best way to make this point is:

“The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s…My government endorses the words of President Obama and appreciates the credit he gave us Sunday night for the successful operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. We also applaud and endorse the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we must “press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.”

Hamid goes with: 

“But there are other, truly frightening theories, such as that even in a town with as dense a military presence as Abbottabad, Bin Laden managed to elude Pakistani security forces, suggesting a remarkable degree of incompetence. More terrifying still would be if there were official complicity in harbouring him, putting Pakistan on a collision course with the US. Pakistanis must hope that neither of these is true.”

The royal megaphone of royalty sticks with the moving speechwriting software writs and having writ moves on. Hamid establishes the difference between the sheep and the shepherds with one fluid reference to the ‘incompetence’ of the state within a state that consistently fails to protect its charges. 


To be fair to President Zardari, this is where the difference between a novelist and a head of state is, governed by realpolitik as much as it is by style. The privilege of implying, publicly, that their nation's army is either incompetent or duplicitous rests only with one. This is evident also in the contrast between Sir Salman Rushdie's Down With Pakistan and David Cameron's more measured public stance.


5) Forget the past, it is not in our power to change it. Lets talk about what happens next.


According to our president: 

“We can become everything that al-Qaeda and the Taliban most fear — a vision of a modern Islamic future. Our people, our government, our military, our intelligence agencies are very much united. Some abroad insist that this is not the case, but they are wrong. Pakistanis are united.”

According to one of our brightest literary lights: 

“In the meantime American, Pakistani, Afghan, and terrorist commanders will go on conducting their operations, the slaughter will continue, and human beings – all equal, all equal – will keep dying, their deaths mostly invisible to the outside world but at a rate evoking a line of aircraft stretching off into the distance, bearing down upon tower after tower after tower. Bin Laden is dead. But many Pakistanis sense the impending arrival of yet another murderous plane, headed their way.”

Zardari takes the opportunity to tell people Pakistanis are united against ‘terrorism’. Hamid points out that Pakistanis are united only in being the direct target of everybody else’s cross hairs.


The defining characteristic of The Pakistanian Defense, finally, is that…


6) People are no longer buying it.


And that, really, is the point of the deconstruction. It doesn’t matter how well or how badly written our responses to this situation are, what notes we hit or don’t hit in our explanations, the rest of the world no longer gives a shit.

Consider this, from an Economics Times report on our President’s article:

“Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari defended his country on Monday against accusations it did not do enough to track down Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but made no direct comment on alleged intelligence failures…Zardari provided no detailed explanation on how bin Laden managed to live for years undetected in Abbottabad, a hillside retreat popular with retired Pakistani generals just a few hours drive from Islamabad. “

Or consider this, from one of the responses posted to Hamid’s article in The Guardian:

“I once referred to Pakistan as the classic informant, who tells the thief about the whereabout of the owner of the property and then informed the owner of the property the thief is coming…Pakistan as I have also posted before is a country the world should fence off and throw away the key. It is a country that its only contribution to the world is misery and danger to lives and limbs. In fact it is terrorist country. The most dangerous terrorist country on the planet.

Every western gov't including ours should not only cease aid to Pakistan, immigration from Pakistan should also be stopped. The world should let Pakistan sleep in the bed it made.”

Back now, to the question of whether the bile and revulsion this ‘rogue state’ and ‘terrorist sanctuary’ is currently provoking is justified. You can choose to find your answer amongst the six points of The Classic Pakistanian Defense outlined above. You can find it while channel surfing, watching someone like Ansar Abbasi holding forth on how Osama Bin Laden was a Muslim Hero. You can find it in the pages of an Urdu paper as a columnist obsesses over the burial ritual of one murderer and not the mass graves of the multitudes of innocents he, and those he was a figurehead for, killed. You can find it in the online edition of an English one detailing how the banned Laskhkar-e-Taiba held funeral prayers for Bin Laden in Karachi today.


People of that ilk make Pakistan’s image crisis worse by openly exposing their – and by extension our - tolerance for intolerable positions. If what the foreign commentators I have quoted above said offends you, and you think they are refusing to distinguish between Pakistanis and those elements within Pakistan that gave Bin Laden shelter, acknowledge the role those elements play in shaping the outside world’s refusal to make that distinction. This, from outside the bubble, is a country where a sentence is blasphemy but a murder is not, rape victims are vilified for attempting to challenge patriarchy, terrorists are sheltered after slaughtering innocent civilians, and the challenge to sovereignty by a western force is always more important than the steady, decades long erosion of sovereignty by some imported, medieval hogwash.


Once, there might have been room in the world for an ideology that thinks it is special, God gifted, exempt from the rules and norms of the comity of nations of which one commentator speaks, but that place has already been taken. Certain Pakistanis need to accept that we are not Israel. By this I mean we cannot defend an indefensible position by virtue of association with unshakeable allies because really, at the end of the day, we have none. Even Saudi Arabia had the sense to let its most notorious son slip quietly into the sea, we on the other hand built him a home in a hill resort.


Today, we have a twofold crisis. One, the incompetence, exposed, of a bloated institution that has never lost an opportunity to enrich itself and steadfastly refused to fix itself. Two, a perception that Pakistan is populated by illiterate Muslims who will come out on the street to protest Danish cartoon strips but not to protest an almost comical, internationally inflammatory misstep. How do we fix the first? The rogue state within a state needs to be broken, examined forensically, and rebuilt in the shelter of a democratically elected civilian government, never to take a step without a popular mandate again, and then only to protect our citizens not endanger them further. 


How do you fix the second? For a start, apologize. Apologize Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, to the world for not keeping your side of the bargain, to your country for letting us be shamed on your watch. Apologize even if it kills you. Because your subsequent loss of face might embolden you enough to hold others accountable. And because somebody or the other is always trying to kill you anyway and you might as well die on the right side of the line.

Screen Grab of the Day

Hmmmm. Does the Guardian know something we don't?

A screen-grab off the Guardian's Wikileaks database... Thanks to Missing Romance for sending it on to us:

Ayatollah Ali Zardari?!?

First it was the New York Times and BBC Urdu Service leading the world (and the gullible Pakistani media) to believe Saudi King Abdullah said Asif Zardari was "the biggest obstacle to Pakistan's progress", when he actually only said that Zardari was "the primary obstacle to the government's ability to move unequivocally to end terrorist safe havens" in Pakistan (okay, so the actual phrasing is far more baffling than the misquote). Now we have the Guardian trying to imply stronger links with Iran than anyone knew. Just doesn't pay to be Zardari does it? Oh wait, that came out all wrong...

What You Get When You Mix Sports With Politics

Watch this clip involving Bolivian president Evo Morales playing an exhibition football match this past weekend:

According to the report in the Guardian on October 5 and carried in Dawn's international pages today:

A knee to the groin may be more Vinnie Jones than Machiavelli, but it was no less effective for Evo Morales in asserting his presidential authority. With one deft movement, Bolivia's combative leader felled an opponent in a football match against a team of political rivals. The receiving player crumpled in agony holding, as local media put it, his "testicular zone".

The incident, during a match on Sunday to inaugurate a renovated stadium in the capital La Paz, was captured on video and last night aired on local TV stations and was uploaded to YouTube.

The friendly match started when, wearing a No 10 green jersey, Morales, a football fanatic and Bolivia's first indigenous president, led his team of bodyguards and officials on to the artificial pitch. The yellow team was led by Luis Revilla, mayor of La Paz and a political ally turned foe of the president. After smiles and handshakes the game began. Within five minutes Daniel Gustavo Cartagena, in the No 2 jersey for the mayor's team, scythed into the president after he passed the ball, gashing his right leg.

Morales, 50, a former Aymara llama herder and coca farmer, is not known for indulging critics, let alone people who foul him. He walked up to Cartagena, indicated his wound, then kneed him in the groin. The player collapsed, prompting audible whistles from spectators. The match swiftly deteriorated into a bad-tempered, foul-filled contest which arguably mirrored the Andean country's combative politics. By the end, the match drawn at 4-4, two players from each side had been sent off, including Cartagena and one of the president's bodyguards.

One bodyguard tried to arrest Cartagena after the final whistle, the newspaper La Razón reported, but he was released after Revilla intervened. Morales denied ordering the arrest but was unrepentant about his response to Cartagena's foul. "I passed the ball and suddenly I received a hammering. It's not the first time it happened," the president told reporters hours later.

Revilla also played down the incident, saying: "This was a football game and on the field we are all players." It was not clear if Cartagena was a member of the mayor's political party, Movement Without Fear. A medical bulletin from the presidential palace said Morales received a laceration on the inside of the right leg and that a doctor recommended three to four days' rest.

As a young man, Morales's passion on the field for a union of coca-growers' team helped him become union president, launching his political career. Since his 2005 election as the head of the Movement Towards Socialism, which has empowered Bolivia's indigenous people and forged leftist policies, he has become a reserve player for Litoral, an amateur second-division squad. The leader also hosted a charity match with the former Argentinian player Diego Maradona in La Paz, at 3,597 metres (11,800ft) above sea level, to protest a Fifa ban on games above a certain altitude.

Is Morales not getting a red card what is known as 'presidential immunity'?

Going For A Leak

I have such mixed emotions about the WikiLeaks expose of the Afghan War Diaries and so many strands of thought that I want to pursue that this is going to be a difficult post. But I'm going to try and present at least some of them in as coherent a manner as I can. I hope you will bear with me. For my own sake (and probably for readers' sake as well) I will break up the different strands with sub-heads.

Is The WikiLeaks Expose A Good Thing?

Generally, yes. Any puncturing of the facade of unaccountable power is a great thing in my book. But particularly when it involves exposing the reality of a conflict that very few outside the conflict zone have even a basic understanding of, it is invaluable. We are fed so many lies by governments and the hand-in-glove media that narratives that challenge those fabrications and lead to questioning among the public are the only way to challenge that hegemony.

However. There are a couple of things which also bother me about the recent leak of apparently over 92,000 previously secret files. The first is based on taking the leaks at face value. As most of us know by now, the secret documents are mostly raw field intelligence reports, that is they are the reports filed by Western soldiers on the frontline reporting incidents, interactions and intelligence culled from various sources. These were meant to be internal documents for their superior officers. Not only do they reflect the competence and biases of the soldiers writing them up as well as contain cover-ups (after all, soldiers don't want anything bad to reflect on themselves in front of superiors), they have not been verified, double-checked or passed up through a filtration process that assesses their credibility via other sources. So, yes, there is a vicarious thrill to seeing what things are like for soldiers on the frontline or how a military operates in such a situation, and there may be very useful information to be gleaned from them, but in and of themselves, they are not terribly helpful for the average reader to understand what is actually going on. Readers who take these reports at face value - as most readers are tending to do - are likely to mire themselves further in the "fog of war" rather than cut through it, to paraphrase Mahir Ali in Dawn today.

As a parallel, imagine for a moment having access to an investigative reporter's notebook that details every observation, every possible lead, every interview, every hunch, every rumour or remark heard. Many of these leads, hunches and rumours could be simply false and not all observations, interviews and overheard remarks are helpful in clarifying the story. Now imagine having access to the notebooks of thousands of reporters working on the same story and believing everything as true. That is the danger of treating these documents as gospel, just because they were classified as secret and have now been leaked.

Julian Assange: mystery man

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.



Do We Learn Anything New in the Leaks?

I guess the answer to this depends on how much you know of Afghanistan and how much you have followed the story of the conflict there. For most old hands, there is nothing sensationally new in the documents (at least from what has come to light so far). But you do get a lot of details and a very good idea of the way much of them are covered up. For example, the number of attacks on Coalition Forces (CF) and the far larger number of civilian casualties than have been reported previously. Or the almost comic attempts of American soldiers to win hearts and minds among the local populace. And most of all you understand in the minutae why this conflict will end unsuccessfully for the US.



Is This The Smoking Gun Against Pakistan?

In one word, no. The allegations against Pakistan's military establishment for playing a double game in Afghanistan may well be true (I will come back to this later) but these documents do not prove it. At best they remain allegations. Most of the documents detailing the ISI's backing for the Taliban are, as already pointed out, based on questionable intelligence sources, either Afghan intelligence operatives (who have well known hostility to the ISI) or paid informers (who have a vested interest in selling sensational stories). Some of them are plainly laughable, such as the alleged ISI plan to poison Western forces' beer supplies. According to the intel, the alcohol was going to be purchased from Miranshah in Waziristan - yeah, right! - and Peshawar, mixed with poison and then airdropped and trucked into Afghanistan for Coalition Forces to consume (it would seem from this that the CF are quite keen on the FATAbrau brand and short of their Budweisers).

One of the most respected Afghanistan experts and a former European Union deputy head of mission in Afghanistan, Michael Semple, had this assessment to make about the reports in The Guardian (by far the most level-headed assessment I have read so far in the Western press and certainly worth reading in its entirety):

"Although most of Afghanistan's trade comes through Pakistan and Pakistan was the main place of refuge for Afghan refugees during the 1980s, the most popular way of establishing credentials as an Afghan nationalist has long been to denounce Pakistan as the enemy.

 

Among the 180 reports of ISI interference, most are drawn from informants or briefings from the Afghan intelligence service, who describe in lurid detail direct involvement of ISI officers in trying to wreak havoc inside Afghanistan. The bulk of them can now be dismissed as unreliable either with the benefit of hindsight (they warn of impending disasters which never happened) or on the basis of implausibility (conveying details the source could not have known) and because they fit in with a pattern of disinformation (stories constructed from recurrent themes and familiar characters).

 

One set of informants most likely passed on these reports because they found there was a market for them. More politically motivated informants, such as those Afghan officials who supplied briefings which US personnel later wrote up as intelligence, probably wanted to strengthen US backing by turning the US against Pakistan."

It is important to reiterate that most of these intel reports have not been been verified or confirmed as correct. The one exception to this (as far as I can tell so far) may be a Polish intelligence report about an allegedly ISI-backed impending attack on the Indian consulate in Kabul a week before it happened. That intel was apparently corroborated by US intercepts of communication, which were presented to the Pakistan government by the CIA Deputy Head Stephen Kappes.

Which brings me back to the issue of whether the ISI (or at least elements within it) really is involved in backing the Taliban in Afghanistan. There has been enough chatter around the issue for one to believe that there may be some kernel of truth to the matter. I have no proof and none has been conclusively presented but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support the thesis - after all, could the insurgency succeed without backing from any quarters in Pakistan? But putting your realpolitik hat on, try and think about it slightly differently. There are two questions:

Q1. Is the ISI's double-game directed against the US or against India, whose influence it is trying to counter in Afghanistan? I am no fan of the ISI and its shenanigans but given the mindset of the Pakistan army and the agency's mandate, would it not be completely understandable for it to work to undermine Indian influence on Pakistan's western flank? And who would be a more logical partner than the opposition to the government that it believes is completely in India's pocket? And it's not as if Indian intelligence agencies do not have their own goals in Afghanistan and have not actively pursued the objective of marginalizing Pakistan's interests in the country. Now, you may argue that the problem is that by using the Taliban to undermine Indian influence, the ISI would necessarily be pitting itself against US interests as well. And you may be right. But I am willing to bet (if this hypothesis is true) that the ISI believes it can limit the fallout - it would probably be as wrong as it has been in the past with such things but it would still believe it.

Q2. In strategic terms, is Pakistan hedging its bets vis a vis the Taliban, so entirely shocking? Given past history of US involvement in the region, given how badly the US war in Afghanistan has gone, given the history of broken promises regarding safeguarding Pakistani interests in the region (vis a vis India) and given the increasing domestic pressure in the US to pull out, is it entirely surprising if Pakistan should? Especially if it feels the US will eventually leave behind a mess like the last time it pulled out? Especially if it fears that once the US forces move out, it will have to confront hostile neighbours on both sides?

Now, I should clarify that I would be the last person you would think of as a Taliban supporter. I am merely attempting to argue within the security state paradigm, the way the military probably is thinking about this. It's not something I like (because of what the Taliban represent and what the other repercussions would be on Pakistan) but given the geostrategic imperatives of the region, it is something I can almost understand.

The biggest irony about the WikiLeaks saga is that while the documents may not have provided any smoking gun of Pakistani backing for the Taliban, the dismay in Western (particularly US) audiences over the failing war effort will almost surely lead to increasing pressure on their governments to pull out forces sooner rather than later...which would help entrench Pakistani military opinion that backing the Taliban is the sensible thing to do, as an insurance policy for the coming mess.

We are screwed either way.



So, Why The Inordinate Focus On Pakistan?

I wanted to end this post with my assessment of the possible game plan around the leaks. Particularly a comparison of how a marginal media player such as The Guardian has presented the findings as opposed to the major media player, The New York Times, since the two vastly different takes tell us a lot about the stakes involved. Plus how the issue has been dealt with by other media players in interested areas such as India. But this post is already too long and I am completely exhausted. So I will defer this portion for another separate post (or perhaps an update on this one) when I am slightly refreshed. Till then.

Will The Real Comic Please Stand Up?

I like Shazia Mirza. I do. First she travels all the way to Pakistan to entertain us with live shows at LUMS and T2F. Then she travels all the way home to Ye Olde England to entertain us with her take on them. A take which, for those who happened to be present at either, doesn’t present her as a wit as much as it does a half wit. Then again, what is comedy these days if not a playing coshing of the truth while it whimpers gently and wraps its arms protectively around its head?

Shazia Mirza: striking a pose for Ye Olde England

Ms. Mirza begins by recounting the strange case of what allegedly happened to her at a Pakistani airport. Someone asked her for a bribe. This is not going to be a shock to anybody who has ever traveled to a third world country in something other than a coffin. What is shocking is that she forks over $100, thereby drastically increasing the going rate and setting an unholy precedent for any number of corrupt immigration officials in sketchy airports across the globe.


If that isn’t enough to make the rest of us angry, consider this…

"My first performance took place at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lums). The audience was made up mainly of lecturers and students, and as I arrived I was told: "Don't worry about performing – we've stepped up security because people knew you were coming.""

First of all, I’d like to humbly request the lecturers and students at the Lahore University of Management Sciences to stop fucking with their guests.

"The fact that there needed to be security at all to tell jokes indicated danger. Pakistan is a sexually repressed country and that is the root of many of its problems."

Second, I’d like to suggest to Ms. Mirza that security is not also always equal to danger. In Pakistan security is often equal to privilege. As in, a sign of privilege. As in, to demonstrate that whatever is being ‘secured’ has a lot of money to throw around. Some people would have security guards in the crapper with them at all times if they could, maybe even swirling down the drain with the turd if necessary, so that when they lose a hand at that night’s poker game they can say ‘Oh yeah? Well I don’t care because I have so much money my shit has its own security detail’. My final word to Ms. Mirza on the issue of security in Pakistan is that these days most violent crime is actually committed by security guards.


Then we move on to her claim that Pakistan is a sexually repressed country, and therein lies the root of many of its problems. This is an interesting hypothesis, and doubtless the foundation of many a thesis project on gender studies by earnest young Pakistani women who aren’t getting any at home.


Unfortunately, if it were true, countries that aren’t sexually repressed wouldn’t have problems, and leaders of nations that are fine with a bit of skirt for breakfast or the dance of the two-headed beast in public wouldn’t need to export their legions of horny young men to far climes to get off on acts of gratuitous violence.


In fact, if I might just run with this, the most evolved country in the world right now is probably Finland, which has a record number of female parliamentarians, a gay prime minister, and has just banned strip clubs. So the answer to our problems my brothers and sisters – and you may indeed quote me in your thesis papers – might not be more sex but more lesbian sex.

"The last time I performed in Lahore I was told: "You can talk about anything you like – religion, politics, drugs, you can swear and curse, just don't mention 'The Sex'." Any sexual words or connotations were banned – because in Pakistan there is no mention of sex on television, radio, or in public."

Now this is where things get really dodgy for me. Which Pakistan is it that Ms. Mirza visited exactly? The Pakistan where you put your head into a bucket of stereotypes and bob for the most worm-ridden apples? Or the Pakistan where mucho copulation has led to mucho population, where wall chalkings offer phone numbers, texts direct you to ‘a good time’, film songs find new and disturbing ways to push the boundaries of vulgarity and there is a record number of accidents on a bridge in Lahore when a billboard of Neha licking a Magnum is, um, erected?

Neha at home

Ms. Mirza then went on...

“to perform two hours away in Karachi. The audience consisted of young people, old people, women in burqas and groups of men – all sitting on the floor together. The doors were locked as soon as all the audience were in, and once again armed security guards stood outside.”

Interesting. Yes the doors were locked (so as the performance would not be disturbed by people trying to come in when there was no more space), and I saw two women in burqas – in an audience of 300 people – but I completely missed the security guards. Could it be that my jaded Pakistani eyes are so used to the sight of overgrown eagle scouts that I don’t notice them anymore? Or could it be that Ms. Mirza is unable to tell the difference between a guard and a valet? (Note to Ms. Mirza: the first has a rifle/the second a gun/the first is for shooting/the other for fun.)

"On arrival I was told by the organizer: "The Pakistani Taliban are infiltrating down to the outskirts of Karachi now, so be careful with what you say. It's best not to talk about religion, or sex, and don't mention the word "gay"." Why? "Because gay doesn't exist in Pakistan," she explained. Pakistan believes it has freedom of speech, but the only freedom you have is to comply with the speech they want to hear. She continued: "There is a law against making any jokes about President Zardari. You cannot make any jokes about him in public and you are not allowed to text any jokes to your friends about him, otherwise you will be put in prison.""

I would now like to humbly request the staff and owners of T2F to stop fucking with their guests.

"When you tell a comedian not to do something, well. I made a joke about President Zardari. The audience loved it. They laughed like they had never laughed before."

Actually, I think we laughed a lot harder when he first tried to get us to stop making jokes about him.

"All the things the audience laughed at are the things they are most repressed about. Jokes about sex, religion and politics got the most laughter."

They did. But then again Ms. Mirza didn’t really make jokes about anything else. And there were some real zingers in there too. Such as:

'Extremists are told that when they get to heaven they’ll get 72 virgins. Have they ever thought about what a woman who remains a virgin her entire life probably looks like? Do you really want to go to heaven and have sex with 72 hairy bitches?'

Or:

'Why do fundamentalists have to say ‘you will burn in hell? Is ‘burn’ really necessary? What else are you going to do in hell but burn?'

She also did a great riff on anal sex. Which I personally do not think is funny.

"After the show I was invited to a party. I walked in, to be offered a joint of marijuana, followed by a joint of opium, followed by vodka and then a discussion on porn. I was asked: "What's your favorite porn film?" I have never watched porn. I tried to lie but I couldn't think of a porn movie, so I told the truth: I've never watched porn. This was met with "You've never watched porn? Let us show you some!" A collection of 600 films was pulled out from behind the bookcase. I was then offered a male Russian hooker for the night."

At this point, the people of Pakistan are probably asking themselves two questions. 1) Why the hell wasn’t I invited to that party? 2) If a male Russian hooker goes down on you in a forest do you make a sound?


Ms. Mirza ended her opinion piece by stapling once again onto our foreheads a label reading ‘the hypocrisy of a sexually repressed, censored society’, a label that no sane Pakistani would seriously argue with. How she came to that conclusion after two evenings in the company of people who are probably anything but, I don’t know, but as a writer I can completely empathize with her need to translate experience into material. For those who are offended by it, try to remember that she also sacrificed her mother.

‘My mother is a real namazi. She doesn’t pray five times a day. She prays twenty times a day. My problem with that is, the other day she said her prayers and then ripped the rickshaw driver off.’

As I said in the beginning, I like Shazia Mirza. I do. She can come back and poke fun at us anytime she likes as far as I’m concerned. And this time we’ll make sure those uniformed men are posted inside the bedroom instead of outside, and she won’t have to worry about the extremist she’ll have to have sex with when she gets to heaven.

How To Empower Women And Then Ridicule Them

I don't really know what to say about this bit of news from across the border, other than recalling Samuel Johnson's not-oft-enough-quoted phrase, that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Here's what the Times of India reported (under the headline "Fracas at the fest") about the fallout of the 5th India International Women Film Festival, held in Delhi last December:

"There’s probably more drama surrounding this film festival now than there was in any of the films that were screened when it was going on. Three women filmmakers – Oscar winning screenwriter Jane Campion, Pakistani filmmaker Ayesha Arif Khan, and British director Lipika Pelham, who’s now based in Israel – have alleged harassment at the hands of Bhaskar Deb. He is the husband of Shyamali Bannerjee, the organiser of the India International Women’s Film Festival held in Delhi in December.

The women have alleged, in a letter to minister of state for urban development Saugata Roy, that the film fest was a sham, and that they were all harassed by Deb when he was drunk. ...A TOI report said that in the complaint sent to the UD ministry, Campion and Khan have accused Bannerjee’s husband, Bhaskar Deb, of lewd behaviour and sexual harassment. Roy said, “We have received complaints from two women who attended the film festival, Jane Campion and Ayesha Khan. The matter is now under investigation.” He added that the complaints were not the only issues connected to the organisers. The report said that in the complaint to the ministry, Khan alleged that she “was repeatedly mauled by a drunken Bhaskar and constantly offered alcohol”. Campion also called the festival a sham, saying that she only came to India because the organisers claimed that the fest was connected with the UD ministry. Roy has denied any connection between the fest and the UD ministry.

After these reports emerged, Pelham has made similar allegations. In reports, she’s been quoted as saying that she only attended the festival because she was told Campion would be there. When she finally reached the hotel in Delhi and met Campion, the latter told her that the opening ceremony, scheduled to be held in Vigyan Bhavan, had been cancelled. At the party later, “he (Deb) got up from his seat, came towards me and tried to hug me and kiss me on the cheek. He also put his hand on a Turkish director’s back. We somehow managed to move away. But he just wouldn’t let us be and tried to persuade us to have a drink with him,” is what Pelham was quoted as saying."

Director Jane Campion (Photo: Guardian)

Later on, Jane Campion, speaking to the Guardian denied she had accused Deb Bhaskar of sexual harrassment...

While she denied being harassed personally, she had other issues with what she described as a "fraudulently presented" festival.

"I was not sexually harassed by the festival director's husband and did not make that allegation," she said. "However at least two other delegates I spoke to and a third I heard about, did have bad experiences with the festival director's husband and I hear they went on to make allegations of sexual harassment.

"My own experience of the organisers of the film festival was that they made promises to me which they failed to keep: failure to meet me or any of the other delegates that I spoke to on arrival at the airport, failure to pay for my airline tickets, cancelling the premiere of my film Bright Star at the last moment."

She added: "Never in my entire experience has a film festival been so fraudulently presented and organised. It's a shame for the film-makers, the audience, the funding bodies of the countries involved as well as the Indian government who, it appears from the advertising, sponsored them to some degree."

Now, these are serious allegations, whether the well-regarded director Jane Campion (The Piano, Holy Smoke) was herself sexually harrassed or not. One could yet have been willing, however, to accept that they may all have been due to some sort of major misunderstanding. But guess how the organizers chose to respond. Aside from Deb calling the New Zealand-born Campion "a racist from Australia", this is how, from the Times of India report:

"The organisers, Bannerjee and Deb, have in turn written a letter to the MEA. It says, “Our internal investigation has revealed that this lady Ayesha Arif Khan is an ISI agent from Pakistan and she wanted to stay back in India on any precarious excuse. Her mysterious gesture and aimless roaming around the city... in 2009 was seemingly abnormal.” The letter also says that it is “ridiculous” that allegations have come from Roy two months after the festival. “During their stay in New Delhi they haven’t complained against us, if at all any such incident happened. Jane Campion had left New Delhi without notice on 16th (December, 2009) morning when we explained our situation that her film Bright Star could not be screened at Vigyan Bhawan and that the opening ceremony of the festival has been cancelled,” it adds.

The letter, which requests an ‘enquiry’, adds that Campion was trying “to create chaos inside the hotel reception”, and that filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan tried to intervene. It counters her charges that the fest was “fraudulent”, saying that they’d advertised, and that if the audience did not turn up despite that, it isn’t their fault."

What kind of "internal investigation" could the organizers of a film festival have possibly done to end up with the scurrilous allegations they end up making? Could they be any more predictably pathetic? Incidentally, twenty-something Ayesha Arif Khan, who did a master's in film from Chapman University in the US only last year is currently teaching film in Karachi. How very ISI of her.

Ayesha: drinking tea like ISI types (Photo: TOI)

And yeah, accusing one woman director of lying about sexual harrassment and another of being a racist diva for giving her the short shrift is just the right way to run a women-centred festival isn't it?

This is how the India International Women Film Festival talks about itself:

"India International Women Film Festival is not just a festival alone, rather a mirror of our society. It talks about women empowerment, very much relevant in a developing country like India where gender discrimination is a regular phenomenon in our society."

Well, we certainly know what they mean now about mirroring society. Except that they seem to mirror the worst parts of society. Suffice it to say, the IIWFF ain't getting an award for promoting inter-cultural understanding anytime soon.

And I may not be a soothsayer, but I can pretty much predict where organizations headed by such opportunistic scoundrels (gender sensitive or not) are bound to end up.