What He Said (And Leaked Beforehand)

For the last five or six days I had been contemplating how best to present the information contained on a website that someone had stumbled upon and forwarded to me. Not because one did not believe the authenticity of the information on it but because it left unanswered a number of questions. Not least of which was who was behind the website and to what end. I could make a fairly straightforward and educated guess about the persons behind the site even though the site's owners had chosen to disguise their ownership while registering it.

Zulfiqar Mirza swears on the Quran (Photo: PPI)

After today's "atom bomb" presser by the redoubtable former Sindh Home Minister / PPP Senior Vice President / Sindh MPA Zulfiqar Mirza, I think it is quite obvious who is behind the site.

The site of course is the imaginatively titled terroristleaks.com and contains pretty much all the information Mr Mirza spoke about and brandished in his presser today.

Not only does it have the facsimiles of the "secret" reports of the Joint Investigation Teams (JIT) on arrested target-killers (all of them allegedly connected to the MQM) in Karachi, it also contains the video-ed professional interrogations of some of them, such as the notorious Ajmal Pahari...




Who else would have had access to this highly classified information and have the motive and the guts to "leak" it on the net. Not a bureaucrat or policeman who feared the wrath of the government for disclosing official info, that's for sure.

These confessional statements make for fascinating (and of course chilling) reading and watching no doubt. And they also provide an insight into the mindsets of professional killers as well as those who control them. There is plenty here to damn the MQM's top leadership. But without, in any way, trying to sound like I am defending the indefensible, one must add a couple of caveats about the information contained here.

For one, keep in mind that this website does present only a selective version of the truth. The only information leaked here is of those terrorists alleged to be part of the MQM. Yes, the MQM's hit squad is apparently the most well-organized, most feared and most talked about. But in recent years the PPP, Sunni Tehrik and the ANP have also managed to cultivate their own nexus with the mercenary underworld (which Zulfiqar Mirza brushed off as "tit-for-tat" in answer to a question on Geo's Capital Talk tonight). And let's also not forget the hit squads of outlawed organizations such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Sipahe Sahaba (which have links with other legitimate political parties), the MQM-Haqiqi faction, and on a different level, state-controlled institutions such as the police and intelligence agencies themselves. We do know that at least some of those killers are also in custody. Why is that information not here on the website? Does that justify the MQM's killers? No, not at all. But reading the lawlessness of Karachi without factoring in the political and economic turf wars which breed it or understanding how various communities perceive and react to the state would be slightly simplistic and even perhaps dangerously naive.

Secondly, purely from a legal (i.e. not moral) point of view, these documents and confessions do not necessarily establish guilt. They have yet to be proven in a court of law. We may choose to believe them (or not believe them) but they have the same legal position as, say NAB's accusations of corruption against Mr Asif Zardari. That is not to say that they are not true, just that one's belief in their authenticity does not equal legal proof for conviction.

Of course, as pointed out by a number of people already, this information and Zulfiqar Mirza's press conference also begs the question why, if this information was available with the government, have these terrorists not yet been prosecuted in the courts of law. If, as Mr Mirza claims, witnesses crucial to the prosecution are being eliminated, is it not the government's responsibility to protect them?

But even bigger questions hang over the whole drama today. Who benefits from this rhetoric and these disclosures at this time? Is it a mere coincidence that what occupied Pakistanis' entire evening came on the same day that the Rangers claimed to have unearthed ammunition stockpiles and torture cells in Lyari raids, and managed to push that news off the news channels?  On the face of it, Zulfiqar Mirza may be claiming that his newly awakened conscience dictated today's "straight-talk", but has he not also driven a stake through the heart of his close friend and "benefactor" President Zardari's political manoeuvrings for the PPP's future? For weren't what Federal Interior Minister Mr Rehman Malik (the target of Mr Mirza's wrath) and current Sindh Home Minister Mr Manzoor Wassan doing to keep the MQM on board part of Mr Zardari's strategy?

Mr Mirza may also have wrested the initiative from Sindhi nationalists who had been chipping away at the PPP in Sindh after the party's U-turn on the Commissionerate system. But would that really help the PPP if Zulfiqar Mirza is considered to be at odds with the party leadership? And was there something more to Mr Mirza's fullsome praise for the ISI and military than meets the eye? Who benefits if the PPP government at the centre comes under strain?

I confess I do not have the answers to these questions. At least answers that make immediate sense to me. If someone has a coherent explanation, I would love to hear it.

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?

'Raymond Davis' - FAQ

Continuing moronic statements by trolls on this blog and some no doubt military establishment-goaded television anchorpersons have forced me to address - hopefully for the last time - certain basic issues to do with the whole 'Raymond Davis' saga. Unfortunately, such is the deterioration of our national discourse and perhaps of our educational system that not only are people often unable to grasp simple arguments but are willing, immediately and without understanding the nuances of the points being made, to ascribe ulterior motives to anyone presenting facts that go against popular opinion. So for the sake of clarity, I will attempt to make my points as questions and answers in bullet form (no pun intended). Roughly the same questions have come up repeatedly in earlier comments.

The man known as Raymond Davis in custody

1. Do I 'support' 'Raymond Davis'?

No. I hold no brief for him or others like him. Nor do I wish to see 'security contractors' / yahoos like him roaming around in Pakistan.


2. Do I think US interventionism is okay in Pakistan?

Personally, I think crying about US interference in Pakistan's affairs after the 'Raymond Davis' affair is not only cretinous but also hypocritical - there has been American interference in this country's internal affairs almost since it was created and which has been welcomed wholeheartedly by our establishment which benefits handsomely from it. Moreover, it will continue to benefit from it in the foreseeable future as well irrespective of the public stances it takes. Nevertheless, no, I don't think it has generally been a force for good in the past and it has usually been counter-productive in the present.


3. Do I want Raymond Davis to walk free after killing two Pakistanis and being involved in the death of a third?

It really does not matter what I, or anyone else, may want. There is a small issue of diplomatic conventions that Pakistan is a signatory to. If he does have diplomatic immunity, Pakistani courts cannot try him unless the US gives its consent. I do think he should have a fair trial for the killings but, if he does have diplomatic immunity, the best Pakistan can do is ask the Americans to try him in the US.


4. Am I still claiming 'Raymond Davis' has immunity after all that has come to light about him?

I am not claiming anything beyond pointing out what is already there in the legal conventions and whatever evidence has so far appeared. The basic question on which this hinges, as far as I can ascertain and as has been pointed out earlier, is whether 'Davis' was a member of the US Embassy staff in Islamabad - in which case the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 applies to him and he has blanket immunity - or a member of the US Consulate staff in Lahore - in which case the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations of 1963 applies to him and he does not have blanket immunity. That determination is, in my opinion, the main one that needs to be made.


5. But he's an acknowledged spy! And he is a contractor, not a diplomat!

As I pointed out in one of my earlier posts on this issue, long before the shocker (not!) of the acknowledgement that 'Davis' works for the CIA, it does not matter as far as the legal standing of diplomatic immunity is concerned. The Vienna Convention of 1961 (not the 1963 Convention on Consular Relations) grants the same privileges to an embassy's "technical and administrative staff" as diplomats. Of course there are spies working on 'cover posts' in all embassies and anyone who has any doubt should go ask the Pakistan Foreign Office about how many intelligence personnel are deputed in our foreign missions on cover posts. Should they all go round killing people and claiming immunity? And does diplomatic immunity confer the license to kill? Obviously not. But that doesn't change the legal position.


6. But what about Shah Mahmood Qureshi's claim that the Foreign Office had determined that 'Raymond Davis' did not have blanket immunity?

Mr. Qureshi or the Foreign Office has yet to state the evidence on which this claim was based. Indeed, the Foreign Office has yet to make that claim officially itself. They may have valid reasons, especially if the US had 1) not actually notified 'Davis' as a diplomat to the Foreign Office (contrary to what the Americans are now claiming which would mean also that their official letter is fabricated) or 2) If the US had notified him as attached to the Lahore Consulate rather than the Islamabad embassy. However, we have yet to hear of the reasoning. The Pakistan Foreign Office does indeed have the right to determine diplomatic status under Pakistan law, but obviously this has to be based on solid reasoning.

There have been some in the Pakistani press who have pointed to lacunae in the Pakistani law that the Foreign Office must 'approve' diplomatic status even after another state notifies someone as a diplomat (an approval that 'Davis' had apparently not received), and which do not grant diplomatic status to 'technical and administrative staff' of embassies. Moreover, they have claimed that Pakistani law takes precedence over international law (i.e. the Vienna Conventions). The Vienna Convention applicable to embassy staff (1961) itself only needs the 'sending' state to notify (there is no clause for approval) and, as pointed out before, applies equally to an embassy's technical and administrative staff. The common sense understanding of international law is that if a state ratifies an international treaty, it must ensure that its own laws comply with it. However, this is a matter of legal haggling and should this matter (of whether local law takes precedence over ratified international law) become a real issue, it would seem the International Court of Justice would have to be referred to, where in my humble opinion, if this is all that Pakistan's position is, its case would be weak.


7. Don't you think the US has been lying about 'Raymond Davis'? And don't you think the US media has been equally hypocritical by hiding facts it knew about him?

Yes and yes. Absolutely. The US government's response in the immediate aftermath of the incident was especially muddled and led to suspicions in the minds of most Pakistanis that it was trying to hide its guilt (which it probably was). The US media's capitulation to American government pressure to withhold information about 'Davis'' real activities has been particularly shameful. The Pakistani media should not be emulating it.


8. Don't you think there is more to this issue than what we already know?

Almost certainly. My analysis is based purely on what is already in the public domain. But it needs to be pointed out that so are the claims of almost everyone else in the media and my criticism of some of them is predicated on simply pointing out the flaws in their arguments.


9. So what should Pakistan have done? Do you want Pakistan to take this lying down?

There were a couple of recourses available to Pakistan before this sorry saga unfolded. One, it should not have given 'Raymond Davis' a visa if it had any doubts about him. Even after it granted him a visa, it could have expelled him from the country if it found his activities incompatible with diplomatic norms. However, if 'Davis' indeed has diplomatic immunity, all it can do now - aside from asking the US to lift it - is to declare him persona non grata and expel him and request the US to try him in its courts.

 Everybody hates 'Raymond'

What we are seeing, unfortunately, is a whipping up of emotionalism and fanciful conspiracy theories to cover up the dire incompetence and / or collusion of our security services. There are claims now that the visas were granted without proper checks because the security services were cut out of the loop in foreign capitals by the political establishment. First of all, if this is even true, why was this not raised as an issue at the time? 'Davis'' first visa was issued in 2009. He received two subsequent visas in 2010, both from Islamabad. Were our security services sleeping? Or are they so riddled with bureaucracy that their flagging of a violation of norms took until 2011 to trickle up to the relevant officers?

Secondly, even if one accepts that our security services were cut out of the loop in the grant of visas, what about the entire time 'Davis' and others like him were living in Pakistan and conducting their "subversive" activities? Are we to take it that, in the almost two years he kept coming in and out of Pakistan, our intelligence was so incompetent that it never once spotted his activities and flagged them? Shouldn't they have paid particular attention to people who allegedly bypassed normal security clearances? It would seem that all this hoopla now is to cover up the fact that our security services had dropped the ball.

We are now hearing all sorts of stories about 'Davis' - from the silly story in The News by Marianna Babar about his addiction to niswar (as if chewing tobacco or snuff is a rarity among US servicemen particularly from areas like Virginia state), to claims in the Express Tribune that 'Davis' was orchestrating bombings by the Pakistani Taliban (sourced to anonymous intelligence personnel) to claims on Geo and in The Nation (sourced from some alleged Russian intelligence report) that he was involved in supplying nuclear material to Al Qaeda in order to frame Pakistan. We should be clear about one thing. Regardless of the authenticity (or likely not) of these stories, they are basically a smokescreen that obscure the real issues of this case. They matter not a whit in whether 'Raymond Davis' is tried in Pakistan or whether we are forced to expel him without a trial.


10. Should Pakistan reassess its ties with US intelligence and its covert operations programme?

By all means. But Pakistan's establishment should do so in a cool, logical manner, having weighed the consequences of its actions. This should not be done by whipping public opinion into a frenzy through post-facto planting of stories and side-tracking issues. You want to kick out Xe (nee Blackwater) operatives from Pakistan? Absolutely do so. Why wait until they cause damage?


Footnote: You may want to read this piece from Foreign Policy that came in as I was writing. It deals with what may have allegedly been agreed between the Pakistani and American military's top officials particularly regarding this case in a closed-door meeting in Oman yesterday. If this report is correct, you may actually very soon see a complete change of tone in the media as well.

Cutting Through the Emotionalism

Can we just express how refreshing it was to watch Najam Sethi's first appearance on Geo tonight? In the middle of the hyperventilating cacophony surrounding the shooting to death of two men in Lahore by a contractor of the US embassy (and the death of a third in a hit and run accident apparently at the hands of an American consulate vehicle), Sethi began his new programme Aapas Ki Baat with the warning that he wanted to put emotionalism aside and analyse the incident only in terms of the facts. That in itself is an all too rare approach on our television screens these days. But what followed was close to a masterclass for other television anchors on how to impart clear, precise information with a logical, rather than emotional, analysis.

Not only did Sethi cite the actual clauses of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity (which Pakistan has ratified) that have been furiously talked about but never actually specifically referenced, but also put into context the whole issue in light of contemporary history and geopolitical realities. Now, others may question his interpretations of the Vienna Convention or the heretofore unknown 'facts' he presented as definite realities (we have no way of determining their veracity but he did stake his reputation on their authenticity), but I hope such challenges, if they do come, will be based on proof rather than vague emotionalism. His main contentions were:

1) Irrespective of a non-diplomatic visa (which seems to have become the main issue for some channels), a diplomatic passport - as the US claims the killer has - may still grant the man known as Raymond Allen Davis* diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention. [*This is assumed to be a fake name.]

2) The Vienna Convention actually grants immunity to diplomats (and their technical staff) from ALL criminal prosecution. No diplomat or foreign mission operative may be arrested by a host country, no matter what their crime (except in cases of property). (You may verify this from Clause 29-31 of the Convention.)

3) Since the American government has claimed diplomatic immunity for Davis, the Pakistan government must either accept their claim or the Pakistan Foreign Office - as the constitutional authority to decide such matters - must dispute this status. The courts are not the arbiters of the Vienna Convention under Pakistan's own constitution.

4) By claiming to leave the matter in the hands of the courts or the Punjab government, the Pakistan Foreign Office - and by extension the Federal government - is in violation of Pakistan's own constitution which details how issues of diplomatic immunity are to be handled. The Punjab police and Punjab government were wrong only to the extent that they should have referred the matter immediately to the US Consulate or the Pakistan Foreign Office before arresting Davis.

5) There are some 50-60 such contractors working for the US Embassy in Pakistan, who are all Blackwater-type operatives and whose job involves spying and ferreting out leads to trace Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. Under a secret treaty signed by the military government of General Pervez Musharraf, a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) allows such operatives to work in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. The important thing to remember here is that the military and the intelligence agencies are fully on board about this and know full well the mandate of these operatives. (This claim by Sethi, if true, of course flies in the face of those who have recently been painting Pakistan ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani as the principal villain in granting visas to these operatives, as if such visas are not overseen and approved by the ISI. It also means that those who point out that the Vienna Convention applies only to the discharge of official duties by diplomats and that Davis could obviously not be on any official mission at Mozang Chowk in Lahore, could be countered by the simple assertion by the US Embassy that he was.)

6) In case the Pakistan Foreign Office does decide to dispute diplomatic immunity to Davis, it will probably have to bear the brunt of reciprocal action from the US for reneging on a bilateral / international treaty.

7) Even if diplomatic immunity is denied to Davis, he will most probably be acquitted by the courts since his plea of self-defence will be very strong. As evidence for this contention, Sethi cited his own information that the two men killed by Davis were indeed brandishing weapons, that they were actually shot in the chest or on the side (contrary to news reports of their being shot in the back) and the context of previous attacks on foreigners in Pakistan and the atmosphere of fear that they have created.

Incidentally, Sethi does not address the death of the third man who was run over but it bears recalling that Davis is not charged in that case and the US Consulate has refused to acknowledge that its vehicle was involved. Sethi was also at pains to clarify that he neither condoned Davis' actions nor that he supported such infiltration of secret American agents into Pakistan. In fact, he also condemned such commandos roaming freely around Pakistan under the guise of diplomatic cover. But the solidity of his programme rested on the fact that he was able to separate out a dispassionate analysis of a given situation from the patriotic impulse that seems to overtake our other television analysts.

This does not mean, in any sense, that this issue will not become a hot political issue, particularly serving as a lightning-rod for popular disaffection with American policy but also helping political actors from making opportunistic capital off it. Or that the Peoples Party government is not now stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sethi himself acknowledges this. But it is good to have more than just one side of the debate, particularly when that one side is often also misinformed.

For those who missed the programme, I am attaching the clips below. But first it might also be useful to see how another programme on the same channel, Aaj Kamran Khan Ke Saath, dealt with the issue, just in the previous hour, and which trotted out that doyenne of hyperventilation and hyper-patriotic confused thinking, Ms. Shireen Mazari, to make its point (the segment begins around 1:10 and ends around 11:30).

Don't miss how Ms. Mazari fudges the issue of diplomatic immunity by referring to a waiver in other cases (which obviously implies immunity). Remarkably this was not even the worst fudge of an analysis on our screens.

In stark contrast, here's the full Najam Sethi programme:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

I suppose kudos to Geo are also in order for finally bringing some rationality to their programming. See? It's not all that bad.

Leaking Away (Updated)

Reading through the top story in today's The News and Jang, my eyes grew progressively wider and wider. Not so much from the latest Wikileaks revelations about India as from sheer incredulity.

 The News Karachi's front page today

Titled "Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Waziristan, Balochistan" (aside: how much is 'enough'?) in The News, the main story deals with a slew of information allegedly from US diplomatic cables sent from Delhi as well as other missions around the world about India. They confirm everything Pakistanis (or at least certain types of Pakistanis) always said about India: it's direct involvement of India in the anti-state activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan, the weakness of the Indian dossier on Ajmal Kassab, the manipulated nature of Indian evidence about the ISI's involvement in the Mumbai attacks, the sissyness of India's generals who do things out of personal ego and petulance rather than well-thought-out strategy, the internal rifts in the Indian army, the similarity of the situation in Kashmir with that in Bosnia in the 1990s, the involvement of Indian intelligence in promoting Hindu extremists to conduct false flag attacks against India itself to implicate the ISI and Indian Muslims etc etc etc.

 Jang's front page today

But I think where my incredulity reached a tipping point was when the cables claimed well regarded Indian policeman Hemant Karkare - who had been following leads about the involvement of Indian right-wing Hindutva organizations in the Samjhota Express bombing and about whose death there has already been plenty of controversy within India - was "eliminated in a pre-planned ambush during the Mumbai attacks", the implication being 'by the covert operatives of the Indian army.' According to the report in The News:

"The cable suggested that Hemant Karkare held a secret meeting with a senior US diplomat in New Delhi during the national day reception of a friendly country and briefed him about the gravity and the growing depth of the nexus between top Indian Army leadership and the militant Hindu fanatic groups. Karkare sought security for him and his family from the said American diplomat as he feared that the army and establishment would eliminate him as he intended to move further to expose the network. He had further briefed the said US diplomat that a former commander-in-chief of the Central Command of the Indian army, Lt Gen PN Hoon, was heading the militancy wing of the Hindu extremists and was getting full tactical, logistic and financial support from senior army officers. The day, Karkare was eliminated in a pre-planned ambush during the Mumbai attacks, a cable sent to the US read “we have lost an important link and a vital evidence”."

 

This was HUGE. This was BEYOND huge! Surely the world would be going mad with this new revelation!

Imagine my bewilderment then, when I turned to other papers and discovered that there seemed to be no mention of this story anywhere in any other Pakistani paper... not Dawn, not Express Tribune, not the Daily Times et al (Okay, so The Nation and Nawai Waqt did have it, but who believes anything they run?). Did the Jang Group and Majid Nizami's vanity projects just scoop everyone else? So I went online to check the Indian papers. No mention. Cowards. But what was really strange was that I couldn't seem to find these incredibly incriminating cables anywhere on the Guardian Wikileaks website or even mentioned anywhere in a Google News search.

In fact, the only other place which seemed to have the story were those redoubts of journalistic integrity, Rupee News and the Daily Mail Post type sites. Ah. And this absurd plant is your top story, Jang Group? Really?

Small wonder The News and Jang give the source of the report as "Agencies."

Question: How stupid do the "Agencies" really think Pakistanis are?


: : : UPDATE : : : 

So, the Express Tribune did in fact run a similar story. On page 8. Datelined Washington and sourced from the wire agency Online. I had mistakenly thought they had had better sense but it seems they didn't have much faith in the revelations to put them on the front page or somewhere else more prominent. Which of course begs the question, then why run them at all?

Incidentally, here is a link to the cheerleader Ahmed Quraishi's page, making the most of his imagination. And here is the Daily Mail Post basking in his reflected glory. Thanks to @Rezhasan and Shahid Saeed for the links.

Connecting the Dots

So, after quite a while, I was once again checking out the website of The Dawn because somebody asked me about it. And no, I don't mean Dawn as in the newspaper; in fact, I think the Dawn Media Group once even threatened, or at least contemplated threatening, them with legal action (I have no idea what became of it). And suddenly, something caught my eye that made bells go off in my mind. It was quite a Eureka! moment.

"The prophetic Sunrise in the East"?

But before I tell you what my Eureka! moment was, let's all just take a moment to understand what The Dawn really is.

Its flowery tagline proclaims it as a "News digest of the prophetic Sunrise in the East." If that's not enough to impress you, in its 'Why The Dawn News?' section, it clearly implies that the Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was somehow involved in its founding (even though it exists only as a web-paper and the web didn't actually come into being until about 46 years after the founder of Pakistan passed away). It talks about Jinnah founding Dawn and The Pakistan Times prior to Partition before cleverly (and grammatically incorrectly) sidestepping the issue and adding "This Newspaper is inspired the founding father of Pakistan [sic] and revelation of the Shair e Mashriq Alama Iqbal." It even uses the following famous photograph of Jinnah to bolster its credentials:

Jinnah reading some other paper with a "similar sounding name"

It then goes on a tangential rant about the warped world view of communists, socialists and secularists before concluding, right at the end, with:

"This site has nothing to do dawn.com"

Prepositions, it seems, are not its strong point. But you may already have surmised that this is not the most widely circulated English paper in Pakistan from the vitriol it spews against alleged "5th columnists" (many of whom write for Dawn) such as Asma Jahangir, Ayaz Amir, Irfan Husain, Ayesha Siddiqa, Imtiaz Alam, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Hasan Nisar, Ardeshir Cowasjee, Najam Sethi, Dr. A.H. Nayyar, Nadeem Farooq Paracha and Huma Yusuf (see Wall of Shame on right of the site's page). Far more hilariously, however, it adds the following disclaimer in its 'About Dawn News' section:

"The Dawn News makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness [sic], suitability [sic], or validity of any information on this site & [sic] will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use.All information is provided on an as-is basis. The Dawn News does not accept any responsibility for sites with similar sounding names."

Right then. Aren't you glad you have that sorted out?

Anyway, now that you all understand what I am talking about and I have (hopefully) set up the context, here's what provoked my Eureka! moment. The website says this about itself:

"The Dawn News is owned and operated by Sapartese Management. There are several editors, Moin Ansari, Amardeep Singh, and Lisa Bernstein."

Now why did this catch my eye and set off chimes in my head? Well, mainly because the juxtaposition of these important sounding but unknown names seemed vaguely familiar. The combination of one alleged gora/ gori, one alleged Indian and one alleged Pakistani name reminded me of something I once read.

Remember this post about a (well-funded) rag called The Daily Mail? Remember what I had written about the story featured in that post, authored allegedly by "Cherry Ferguson in London, Kapil Verma in Mumbai and Ambreen Nadeem Janjua in Islamabad"?:

"One word to the wise: don't believe any of the bylines. I doubt any of these people actually exist."

Incidentally, our persistent friend Marvi Sirmed had actually called up the Mumbai Press Club after that post, only to discover that no journalist by the name of Kapil Verma is known to anyone there. Big surprise. Not. Another of The Daily Mail's regular ace reporters named Christina Palmer, a foreigner based ostensibly in Delhi, apparently does not exist either according to the Indian government (which did try looking for her). The Daily Mail's editor Makhdoom Babar even admitted as much, claiming it was a pseudonym "to protect her identity." (Since she stopped writing soon after the Indians arrested one of their Islamabad-based diplomats, Madhuri Gupta, for spying, there was even speculation that Ms Palmer was actually Ms Gupta... which, if true - Babar denies of course - might give you a little more insight into The Daily Mail.)

In any case, I was intrigued enough by the names to Google them. And guess what I discovered? These are some busy journalists! The exact same combination of names (with some minor additions here and there) appears on at least six other separate sites as editors. Here's something called Daily Mail Post:

Here's the Pakistan Ledger:

Here's Rupee News:

Here's Pakistan Patriot:

Here's Today's Views:

And here's Pakistan Independent, which actually ends up getting confused (can you blame them?) and talking about Rupee News in it's own 'About' section:

In addition, I found another 4 sites where at least one of the above illustrious personalities were listed as editors. These included The Pakistan Times (or New Pakistan Times), the Khalistan Times, the Times of Kabul and the Hindustan Globe. All these sites have the exact same description about their 'team' of contributing authors which always includes the following list in exactly the same order, typos and all:

"Moin Ansari is a 50-something US-raised Pakistani American living somewhere in the US. His political background is well to the left of centre,  and is very interested in investigative history, international relations, immigration, cultural integration and language policy issues. He is presently working on a long term doctorate in history

Jason Miller is a tenacious anti-capitalist and vegan animal liberationist. He is also the founder and editor of Thomas Paine’s Corner, associate editor for Cyrano’s Journal Online, blog director for The Transformative Studies Institute and associate editor for the Journal for Critical Animal Studies.

Isha Khan

A Bangladeshi activits who regualrly posts on Rupee News

Dr. Fawzia Khan

A professor based in New Jersey who writes for various magazines including Counterpunch.

Dr. Abdul Ruff

Prolific writer from Delhi who regularly contributes to Rupee News

Dr. Koncha

A Dalit activits from Hydrabad India who highlights Dalit issues in Dalit Freedom Network

Jim Mondavi: 27 year old  economist and journalist, center-left.

Riaz Khan

An American freelance journalist who lives in the US

Munir Khan

An Indian activist who writes on politics

Ahmed Quraishi

A Pakistani nationalist who has his own site www.ahmadquraishi.com

Andaleeb etc. etc."

Do note the second last name and the "etc. etc." at the end (that's how it reads on all the sites). Actually finding Ahmed Quraishi listed on ALL these sites probably was not altogether unpredictable since even The Dawn, in its description about itself, throws in a reference to the infamous obsession of his mentor Zaid Hamid, i.e. Ghazwa-e-Hind.

I also noticed that all these sites were "owned" by the company called Sapartese Management (sometimes misspelled as Sapertese). Digging further, I discovered at least another 8 sites / papers that were owned by this little-known-but-apparently-massive player in the media market (Rupert Murdoch, watch out!). The 'editorial boards' (always multiple editors) were slightly different than the ones in the first 11, but all still counted the same writers as their contributing authors. Their names? Times of Bombay, The Delhi Times, Dacca Times, The Daily Mail Times, Bharat Globe, Pakistan Akhbar, Musalman Times and Views Times. Interesting collection, isn't it? And I'm not even listing a number of other blogs also managed by the same company. Unsurprisingly, all sites seem to have the exact same political world view, i.e. hawkishly pro-Pakistan, virulently anti-India and suitably ambivalent about the Afghan Taliban.

Have a look at what all these different sites - which, incidentally cross-reference and promote each other constantly - look like:

 Notice anything?

But perhaps you're saying, so what? All this proves is that the same bunch of high-energy people are very enthusiastic about writing for different blogs and papers. And that the company that runs all these sites, even if it's going over the top with so many titles, is well within its rights to standardize the look of its various publications.

Well, then let's take a look at the 'company' that allegedly owns all these sites: Sapartese Management. There's one thing quite curious about it. The only place it seems to exist is on these websites; Google it: there is no separate website with any listed office. For a company running at least 19 'prestigious' publications all over the globe, wouldn't you think it would have a bustling office somewhere?

So I began to pay attention to the contact details for these various publications and the addresses listed for them as well as for, sometimes, Sapartese Management. It proved remarkably difficult to pin down where the company's offices actually were, mainly because they seemed to be moving around quite a bit. For example, according to The Dawn, Sapartese was located at "1013 Gates Court, Morris Plains, NJ 07950" but according to Pakistan Ledger its parent company was located at "3333 5th Avenue, New York, NY." Other publications listed a number of other addresses, often also in New York.

But there was something funny about these addresses too, as some might have already gathered. As anyone who has walked around or looked for directions in New York can tell you, there's critical information such as ZIP codes and Suite numbers missing. In fact, there is no building number 3333 on 5th Avenue in Manhattan, the boulevard numbers actually end in the mid-2000s. Look it up on Google maps, I am not kidding. There is another 5th Avenue in Queens but the houses there are numbered in the single digits. Neither is there, it seems, a 1013 Gates Court in Morris Plains, NJ.

 The far end of 5th Avenue: not that difficult to see where it ends, is it? (Source: Google Maps)

Some of the other office addresses are equally absurdly manufactured. For example, the offices of the Times of Bombay are listed as "76543 34th Street, New York, NY" and The Delhi Times as "5555, 15th Street, New York, NY." Neither exist. If you actually Google these addresses (obviously someone forgot about the extensive mapping of addresses in the US), some land you up in parking lots, others in the middle of the highway. Even the address Mr. 'Moin Ansari' - who owns at least 21 domain names - provides while registering domain names is seemingly fictitious.

Incidentally, who really is this mysterious Moin Ansari who lives "somewhere in the US"? I have no idea if he is either this man or this man or someone entirely different altogether. It must be said, however, that the interview in the second link refers to him as "an executive in the Information Technology industry" and the person under whose name Rupee News is registered also lists a company by the name of Crestech in his registration details. A software company owned by the Crescent Group is also called Crestech but I have no idea if it's the same one being used here. Perhaps I'll leave that for another time or for others to probe.

Do I really need to spell out who I think has the resources and the motivation to spin this elaborate web of fake publications and yet be so incompetent about it? And what does that tell you about Ahmed Quraishi and the people associated with papers like The Daily Mail?

Eureka?