Drone Attacks Started with the Army’s Consent

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the CIA, the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state.

In a secret deal, the CIA had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the CIA’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the CIA to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The CIA has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases.

CIA Chief Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the CIA and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of CIA officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.

Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.

Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the CIA into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.

From Car Thief to Militant

By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the ISI that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.

Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.

When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.

For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.

CIA officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.

A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.

Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed CIA Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The CIA had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the CIA director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

The ISI and the CIA agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

A New Direction

As the negotiations were taking place, the CIA’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the CIA’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in CIA jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like water boarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the UN Convention Against Torture.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.

The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the CIA were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the CIA carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.

A new generation of CIA officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the CIA chose to conduct.

After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage.

A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”

Questions Concerning the Murder of Benazir Bhutto

by Owen Bennett-Jones

In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007:

I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail … The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.

Akhtar’s story reveals much about modern Pakistan. Born in 1959, he spent two years of his boyhood learning the Quran by heart and left home at the age of 18, moving to the radical Jamia Binoria madrassah in Karachi. In 1980, he went on jihad, fighting first the Soviets in Afghanistan and later the Indians in Kashmir. In both conflicts he came into contact with Pakistani intelligence agents, who were there trying to find out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkatul Jihadal Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing about’.

In 1995, Akhtar committed a crime that in many countries would have earned him a death sentence: he procured a cache of weapons to be used in a coup. Putsches in Pakistan generally take the form of the army chief moving against an elected government. This one was an attempt by disaffected Islamist officers to overthrow not only Bhutto’s government but also the army leadership.

The plot’s leader was Major General Zahirul Islam Abbasi. In 1988, as Pakistan’s military attaché in Delhi, he acquired some sensitive security documents from an Indian contact. When the Indians found out, they beat him up and expelled him. He returned to Pakistan a national hero. Seven years later, disenchanted by the secularist tendencies of both Bhutto and the army leadership, he devised a plot to storm the GHQ and impose sharia. Akhtar’s role was to supply the weapons. He travelled to the town of Dera Adam Khel near Peshawar, a well-known centre for the production and sale of cheap weapons, and bought 15 Kalashnikovs, two rocket launchers and five pistols.

He was caught red-handed moving the weapons to Rawalpindi. No doubt cajoled by his intelligence agency handlers from Afghanistan and Kashmir, Akhtar decided to give evidence against his fellow plotters. At a stroke he was transformed from a typical jihadi into a highly trusted informant; he has been playing on his supposed loyalty to the intelligence services ever since. Many of those accused of major jihadi outrages in Pakistan have at some stage been released from detention; after Akhtar had spent just five months in prison in 1995, the chief justice set him free.

It is commonplace for the Pakistani intelligence agencies to cut deals with jihadis. In Akhtar they struck gold. While most Pakistanis never escape the class into which they are born, radical Islamists enjoy considerable social mobility. He had left his Karachi seminary in 1979 with a dream of fighting jihad; by the mid-1990s he was the leader of the HUJI and had a close relationship with Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader and de facto head of state. Indeed, he was seen as one of the few people who might have been able to bridge the growing gap between the Taliban and al-Qaida. Not only that, he expanded the HUJI’s operations to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, China and Chechnya.

Everything changed with the collapse of the Taliban regime after 9/11.

According to one account, Akhtar and Mullah Omar shared the same motorbike as they fled for sanctuary with Akhtar’s old intelligence contacts in Pakistan. He told his men to keep a low profile – the US was picking up jihadis and sending them to Guantánamo – and himself headed to the UAE, a hub for Islamists as well as Western businessmen.

By 2004 he had overstretched even the UAE’s relaxed hospitality. He was arrested on charges of plotting the assassination attempt on General Musharraf in December 2003 and handed over to Pakistan.

One might think that this time his luck had run out. But that would be to misapprehend the convoluted logic of what has been described as the ‘deep state’ in Pakistan. Akhtar, and others like him, were seen not as a clear and present threat, but as powerful, not very well educated men who simply needed to be pointed in the right direction. If they could be persuaded to aim their guns not at domestic targets but at the Americans in Afghanistan or at India they could still be useful.

Akhtar would enjoy another rehabilitation because of a growing row between Musharraf and the Supreme Court. In early 2007, the court, seeking a popular issue with which it could undermine Musharraf, started inquiring about the many prisoners being held without charge.

On 5 May 2007, it was told that Akhtar was not in government custody. His relatives insisted he was. Three weeks later, the government quietly released him and told the court, in the words of a National Crisis Management Cell report, that he was ‘engaged in jihadi activities somewhere in Punjab’.

Why had the Pakistani authorities held Akhtar for so long only to release him? In part in the hope of bending him to their will. But also because he knew too much about the true nature of the deep state’s relationship with radical Islamists. His lawyer, Hashmat Habib, told the Supreme Court that intelligence officials had explained to Akhtar that had he not been detained there was a strong possibility he would have ended up being interrogated by the FBI.

The publication of Reconciliation left the authorities little choice but to detain Akhtar yet again, but in June 2008, after three months of half-hearted questioning, he was released without charge. He went straight back to fighting jihad according to his own rules rather than those suggested by his intelligence handlers. Later that year, he was accused by the Pakistani press of being involved in the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and in 2009 was named as the key contact of five American jihadis who travelled to Pakistan with the idea of attacking a nuclear power plant. But still the ISI kept faith. In August 2010, after he was reportedly injured in a drone attack, he was taken into protective custody, given treatment in Peshawar, moved to Lahore and freed. The man formally responsible for his release, the Punjab home minister, Rana Sanaullah, told reporters in Lahore that Akhtar ‘cannot be termed a terrorist’.

Akhtar’s case is by no means unique. In a conversation with Amir Mir, a Pakistani journalist who has since tried to investigate Bhutto’s murder, Bhutto claimed that Akhtar had instructed one of his HUJI underlings, Abdul Rehman Sindhi, to organise certain aspects of the Karachi attack.[*] Like Akhtar, Sindhi had been held by the authorities for militant activity but was released without explanation. In 2012, the UN named him as an al-Qaida facilitator. We can only assume that Bhutto was given the names of Akhtar and Sindhi by a sympathiser in the deep state; their role in her death has not been established. But it is clear the state wants Akhtar’s secrets to remain secret. Despairing of Pakistan’s decline into lawlessness, the intelligence agencies cling to the hope that Islam will provide some answers. More practically, they also point to their success in controlling some militant groups, including the largest of them, Lashkare Taiba, the ISI’s model of how a militant group should behave – attacking Indian forces in Kashmir, Delhi and Bombay but causing no trouble at home. Like Akhtar, the Lashkare Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed is a man often detained and often released.

Although generally feared as one of the most powerful institutions in the country, the ISI feels itself to be weak: militants have attacked its personnel with impunity. Significant amounts of Pakistani territory are now either controlled or fiercely contested by militant groups in the North-West. The army has tried military solutions but they have cost thousands of soldiers’ lives and met with only limited success. How much easier to have a word with friends from the good old days of the anti-Soviet and Kashmir struggles in an attempt to persuade them to unify their forces and to keep them under control. Even if it won’t work in the long term it does occasionally bring temporary relief – the ceasefires that were briefly established in the Swat Valley are an example.

On 27 December 2007, with ten days to go until parliamentary elections, Benazir Bhutto addressed more than 10,000 supporters in Liaquat Park, Rawalpindi. She told them democracy was returning to Pakistan. ‘Long live Bhutto!’ they roared back. ‘Benazir, Prime Minister!’ The speech over, she moved to an armour-plated Toyota Land Cruiser built to her specifications in the UAE. Its roof had an escape hatch that, much to the annoyance of her security advisers, Bhutto used for waving to her followers. As the Toyota pulled away from Liaquat Park her supporters surrounded it. ‘I should stand up,’ Bhutto said, clambering up as one of her fellow passengers pulled the mechanism that opened the hatch. She stood on the back seat, her head and shoulders sticking out above the Toyota’s roof.

There were so many people by now that the car was almost at a standstill. Two of Bhutto’s guards climbed onto the rear bumper while others went to the front and the sides. But an assassin was waiting and saw his chance. Wearing a dark jacket and sunglasses, a Pashtun called Bilal, who also went by the alias Saeed, first made his way towards the front of the car. Then he moved to the side, where there were fewer people. He took out a black automatic and pointed it at Bhutto’s head. One of the guards clawed at the young man’s arm but was too far away to get a firm grip. Bilal fired three shots in less than a second. If you search for ‘new angle of Bhutto assassination’ on YouTube you can see what happened. As the second shot rang out Bhutto’s headscarf or dupatta moved away from her face. She then fell like a stone, through the escape hatch, into the vehicle. But the gunman wasn’t finished. He looked down at the ground, prepared himself for death, and set off his suicide bomb. Much of the press reported him as clean-shaven. In fact, he had probably never shaved at all. British scientists who later analysed what was left of his body estimated his age at 15 and a half.

Pakistan’s suicide bomb factories, located in the tribal areas, rely on child recruits for a practical reason: they are more impressionable. Recruits for suicide attacks are given immaculate white clothes, copious amounts of food, above average accommodation and hours of gently imparted one on one indoctrination. The other students are forbidden to talk to them and are instructed instead to bow with respect every time a recruit walks by. With such a regime it can take a few months to persuade an 18-year-old young man to mount a suicide attack; but a 15-year-old can be persuaded to do it in six weeks.

Liaquat Park was named after the first prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was assassinated there in 1951. In what many believe was a cover-up, the police shot his killer on the spot. One of the doctors who tried to revive him at Rawalpindi General Hospital was a certain Dr Khan. Fifty-six years later, Dr Khan’s son Mussadiq was one of the doctors trying to revive Benazir Bhutto at the same hospital. He was equally unsuccessful. On the announcement of her death, the vast majority of Pakistanis assumed that the people who ordered her assassination were senior state officials and that they would never be identified.

There are, broadly speaking, two views about what happened that day. Bhutto’s supporters maintain she was shot and that there were multiple attackers. The Pakistani authorities say the explosion knocked her head against the lever of the escape hatch.Bhutto’s supporters want to establish that there was a sophisticated, officially sponsored conspiracy; the state prefers the idea of a crude but unpreventable attack by Islamic militants.

Certainly, when Bhutto died, there were shots followed by an explosion. The pictures suggest that a bullet hit her and that she fell into the vehicle before the bomb went off. It wasn’t just that her headscarf moved after the second shot. Her movements weren’t consistent with someone ducking a bullet: it looks as if she was already dead, or at least seriously injured, when she fell. The doctors who tried to revive her failed to resolve the issue. They have given various accounts but their evidence is of limited use because they didn’t perform a proper autopsy. There were questions and conspiracy theories about the lack of a post-mortem, but the issue subsided in political terms when her husband, Asif Zardari, was offered one, but said it wouldn’t be necessary.

Under pressure because so many people assumed he had ordered the murder, Musharraf asked Scotland Yard to assist the investigators, though he restricted the terms of reference to the ‘cause and circumstances of Ms Bhutto’s death’, frustrating any hope that the British police would try to identify who was responsible. In 2008, Scotland Yard published an executive summary of its findings which backed the government’s view, failing even to discuss the mobile-phone images that suggested she had been shot. Few believed it. The full report has never been published; there it is explained that a senior radiologist from Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge who was shown the X-rays of Bhutto’s skull concluded that the explosion had forced her head down onto the escape hatch mechanism. In fact, although the precise cause of Bhutto’s death remains one of the most strongly contested issues in the case, it is largely irrelevant.

The important questions are: who was the child-assassin and who persuaded him to do it?

Some of the YouTube films of the Rawalpindi rally (look for ‘Shahenshah Bhutto’) point to another controversy. While Bhutto was speaking at the rally her chief bodyguard, Khalid Shahenshah, can be seen a few feet away running his fingers along his neck while raising his eyes towards her.

In July 2008, after much internet speculation about these decidedly strange movements, Shahenshah was murdered outside his home in Karachi. His conduct and his death have never been explained.

Bhutto was participating in the election campaign only because of a deal she had struck with Musharraf. It was always an awkward arrangement. Bhutto saw Musharraf as the latest incarnation of the military that had hanged her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Musharraf, for his part, saw Bhutto as a child of privilege who went on corruptly to enrich herself. After his coup in 1999, Musharraf had declared that no longer would the country’s richest families and biggest landowners be able to dominate politics. And Bhutto, he declared, would never hold power again.

The general may have led a coup against a democratically elected government but his message resonated throughout Pakistan. The good mood didn’t last, however. As each month passed, his popularity drained away and his ambitions shrank. By 2007, eight years after his coup, he was older, wiser and politically weaker. Like many Pakistanis, he had no doubt that the corruption allegations against Bhutto and Zardari were valid. But in 2007 he also had to accept that Bhutto had a rock solid popular base and that if he wanted to remain in power he needed her support. Swallowing his pride, he agreed to an MI6 suggestion that he attend a secret meeting with Bhutto in Abu Dhabi in July 2007. The encounter kicked off a series of meetings which, as they became more serious and focused, were taken over by the CIA. The basic proposition was simple enough: if Musharraf dropped all the corruption charges against Bhutto and Zardari and allowed her to return from exile to contest elections, she would not oppose his remaining president. To the Americans it looked like a dream ticket: military muscle combined with democratic legitimacy. It could never have worked. ‘I don’t believe in trust,’ Bhutto said at the time. ‘People just have interests that sometimes coincide.’ Nevertheless, the deal was done and she returned to Pakistan, flying from Dubai to Karachi on 18 October 2007. She was greeted by a triumph on an imperial Roman scale. There comes a point when a crowd is so big it’s impossible to count it. Many reckon that more than a million Pakistanis were there to welcome her home.

For eight hours she progressed in a massive, armour-plated truck from Karachi’s International Airport to the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, where she was due to give a speech. She stood on a deck on the top of the truck acknowledging the cheers of the crowds lining the road. The police deployed no fewer than nine thousand men to protect her but even so Zardari wasn’t satisfied. He organised a human shield consisting of more than two thousand volunteers known as the Jaan Nisarane Benazir, those willing to die for Benazir. Many were Zardari’s former jail mates; they surrounded her vehicle and kept pace with the procession.

After several hours standing on the truck, Bhutto’s ankles were swelling and she decided to sit down for a few minutes. She made her way down some steps to a secure cubicle located behind the driver’s seat. It was then the attack began: two bombs went off in rapid succession. The first killed, among others, three policemen and opened up a path through which the second bomber was able to move. The attack left 149 people dead and 402 wounded. But it missed its mark. As rescuers worked by the light of the flames, dragging bodies from the twisted wreckage, Bhutto stepped out of the vehicle without a scratch.

As soon as the smoke had cleared people were asking whether the first bomb had been remote-controlled. The issue was significant because the police had supposedly provided the convoy with two jammers to block any radio signals intended to detonate a bomb. Activists from Bhutto’s party claimed the jammers either hadn’t been provided or had been switched off. Both the Karachi and Rawalpindi attacks were investigated by Joint Investigation Teams (JITs) that brought together various police departments. The JIT report into the Karachi attack concedes that the Turkish-made jammers were not functioning at the time of the attack. According to a Sindh Special Branch memo, they failed because their batteries had been drained over the long course of the procession. It was a moot point. Perhaps anticipating that jammers would be deployed, the bombers had anyway decided against remote detonation: it was a double suicide attack.

Pakistan lacks skilled forensic pathologists but there have been so many suicide attacks now that even the most junior policeman knows that the first thing to look for is the ‘facemask’. For some reason, related to the way the shockwave moves from the bomb-laden waistcoat, the bombers’ faces – though very little of the head behind them – often survive intact. On this occasion, the JIT report states, one facemask was found 26.6 feet away from the point of detonation and another 78 feet away. To whom did they belong?

The Pakistani police rarely know whether their political masters want an investigation to be thorough or not. As a general rule they assume the politicians are hoping for a cover-up and actively investigate only when specifically ordered to do so. That would explain why the JIT Karachi report is such a remarkably poor piece of work: 138 pages long, it contains virtually no useful facts and plenty of contradictions. Page after page of police reporting from the scene establishes only that some vehicles were destroyed and that a lot of body parts were strewn about. Some of these were gathered and sent to the morgue while others (no explanation isgiven as to why) went to a DNA specialist, who concluded that the parts he had were from different people. The finding had no discernible significance. Basic, easily discoverable facts were not gathered. The various police documents give the time gap between the first and second explosions as between 30 and 50 seconds (Inspector General of the CID); under a minute (the Federal Investigation Agency); one minute exactly (an army explosives expert); and between one and two minutes (the bomb disposal unit travelling with the convoy). Some of the documents in the JIT report – presumably those from the intelligence agencies – are unattributed. Others, such as doctors’ handwritten notes on the death of a few, apparently randomly selected victims, are irrelevant. Indeed, the whole report has only two findings of any significance.

The first concerns the devices called ‘strikers’ that most suicide bombers in Pakistan rely on to detonate their explosives. Although its lot number was illegible, the striker sleeve found at the epicentre of the Karachi blast was marked MUV-2. The suicide attack in Karachi was the 28th to occur in Pakistan in 2007. MUV-2 striker sleeves had been used on 11 of those occasions, including bombings in Quetta, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and other smaller cities in North-West Pakistan. The targets in these 11 cases were all consistent with the Taliban having been responsible and included the police, politicians who had opposed jihadis and the Frontier Corps, which had done much of the fighting against the Taliban.

The second interesting entry was a summary of the interrogation of the man Bhutto had named, Qari Saifullah Akhtar. But the document had been doctored. After describing his childhood and his long jihadi career, the story came to an abrupt end in August 2007. It resumed in January 2008, after Bhutto’s murder had been carried out. It was a clumsy effort: the edited page is in one font, the rest of the document in another.

The JIT may have provided few answers, but it did inadvertently hint at the reason some in the deep state were so anxious about Bhutto. The report includes newspaper articles providing possible motivations for an attack on Bhutto. One quotes her as saying that if the US identified the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden on Pakistan soil she would consider co-operating with Washington in having him detained. That in itself might have provided enough motive for an attack. But there was something else. As part of her effort to win American support, Bhutto said that she would be willing to hand over the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan for questioning by the IAEA. At the time, Khan had accepted personal responsibility for the export of nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, although his live TV confession of his activities was always considered suspect by the IAEA and the US, both of which believed that no single individual could have exported planeloads of nuclear material without the army’s knowledge. To this date, the military, despite insistent requests, has refused to allow foreigners to talk to Khan. Bhutto’s offer to the IAEA was seen as a real threat to Pakistan’s nuclear status.

Despite their apparent lack of interest in the failed assassination attempt, the Karachi police did eventually arrest someone. In June 2010, they raided the home of Azmatullah Mehsud, seized a pistol and accused him and his brother Abdul Wahab Mehsud (who remained at large) of involvement in the attack. As so often, the motivation of the police was unclear. It seemed Azmatullah had been arrested not so much as a result of the Bhutto case but because the police thought he was going to attack one of their own officers. The senior superintendent of the Karachi CID, Umar Shahid, told a local paper: ‘We have recorded his telephonic conversation with his brother, who directed him to attack me.’

The police have leaked a few snippets of information about Azmatullah to the press. They have said he raised funds for the Taliban and provided hideouts and medical treatment to injured militants. They also said he had links to Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and the very violent anti-Shia group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Azmatullah was released the next month. But if some elements of the state wanted him free, others did not. A day later, a Sindh police anti-extremism cell re-arrested him. ‘Due to a shortage of evidence, the courts released several suspects on bail but he has been detained for further investigation,’ a police official said. His current whereabouts are not known.

The JIT report on the assassination, at under forty pages including all annexes, is slightly more conscientious than the Karachi document, though hardly what you would expect of the definitive police record on such a major crime. It did at least try to identify some culprits. The report relied on two types of evidence: confessions of arrested suspects and phone intercepts. The first breakthrough came a month after Bhutto’s death, when police in the city of Dera Ismail Khan arrested a 15-year-old boy, Aitzaz Shah, suspected of planning an attack on a Shia procession there. Shah had run away from the Jamia Binoria madrassah, where he had been placed for free religious education, and made his way to Waziristan, on the border with Afghanistan, with the idea of joining the Taliban. In his confession, he said that he had been taught how to drive and persuaded to carry out a suicide attack, and was told by his trainers in October 2007 that his target would be Benazir Bhutto. He said he had met Baitullah Mehsud four times. His confession led to other arrests and helped the police put together a picture of how Bilal alias Saeed came to be in a position to kill Bhutto.

Originally from South Waziristan, Bilal’s father was a labourer in Karachi, who later said his son had left home and not been in touch for a year. One of Bilal’s accomplices, Ikram Ullah, who was near him at the time of the attack, walked away from the crime scene unscathed and his whereabouts have never been established. There were three others in Rawalpindi that day. Husnain Gul was a madrassah student who in 2005 had received small-arms training at a camp in North-West Pakistan. The JIT report says that when he was arrested he had a hand grenade and clothes belonging to Bilal. In his confession, Gul described how a friend of his had been killed when Musharraf ordered an assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007. The attack on the jihadis who had seized the mosque was a turning point in modern Pakistani history, persuading many Islamists that the Pakistani state was not their friend but an enemy that must be attacked. Gul decided to avenge his friend’s death and persuaded his cousin, Muhammad Rafaqat, to join him.

In 2007, the pair travelled to Waziristan in the hope of finding a militant outfit to work for. They told the police it was there that they were instructed to join the group trying to kill Bhutto. Gul had actually tried to assassinate her once before at an earlier election rally in Peshawar but was thwarted by the tight security. Together with Rafaqat he then travelled to Rawalpindi. Gul carried out a recce of Liaquat Park, then went to the bus station to meet the two designated suicide bombers, Bilal and Ikram Ullah. They had travelled with a third person, Nasrullah alias Ahmed. The morning Bhutto was due to give her speech, Rafaqat and Nasrullah took another look at Liaquat Park while Gul gave Bilal and Ikram Ullah suicide jackets, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades. The plan was simple. Bilal would stand by the exit gate and try to kill Bhutto. If he failed, Ikram Ullah would try to kill her instead.

The confessions repeatedly referred to two others as having played a leading role in the plot, one of whom, Nadir Khan, otherwise known as Qari Ismail, had been given money by Baitullah Mehsud to cover the costs. His arrest would have provided the police with a vital link to the Taliban leader. But the JIT report contains a memo which states that on 15 January 2008, just 19 days after the assassination, Nasrullah and Nadir Khan had been in a car approaching a checkpoint in the Mohmand tribal agency in North-West Pakistan. For some reason not stated in the memo the two men are said to have run away from the car. Security personnel killed both of them.

For Pakistanis it is a familiar story. The euphemism ‘encounter’ is used to refer to the phenomenon of crime suspects’ being killed as they try to flee checkpoints: the understanding is that the authorities, when they want someone dead, stage a clash in which the victims are said to have been shot while trying to escape.

Although the deaths of Nasrullah and Nadir Khan left the trail conveniently cold, the confessions of their colleagues gave a hint as to how the plot had been organised. The suspects repeatedly mentioned a particular madrassah, the Darul Uloom Haqqania, located at Akora Khattak on the road from Islamabad to Peshawar. Gul first met Nasrullah there; Nadir lived there; and it was at the madrassah that the team of assassins was briefed. The accounts even included details such as in which rooms key planning meetings had taken place.

The Darul Uloom Haqqania is run by the 75-year-old former Pakistani senator, Sami ul Haq: a man generally referred to either as Father of the Taliban or as Mullah Sandwich. In 1990, when an Islamabad brothel owner, Madam Tahira, had her business broken up by the authorities, she took revenge by naming some of her clients. One of her more memorable claims was that the pious Senator Haq, who has repeatedly demanded the introduction of sharia law, particularly enjoyed the company of two women at once, one below and the other above. Ever afterwards, the senator couldn’t make a speech in parliament without his liberal detractors heckling with cries of ‘Sandwich!’

The maulana would doubtless rather be known for his role in founding the Taliban, much of whose leadership was educated at the Darul Uloom Haqqania, the only educational establishment to have awarded Mullah Omar an honorary degree. Whenever the Taliban suffered setbacks in its military campaign to take over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, it only had to ask Sami ul Haq for help and he would close the madrassah and tell his students to go and fight instead. On the one occasion I visited, an Afghan Taliban official (they were still in power at the time) was there too and Sami ul Haq explained that he was a former student turned Taliban minister who had returned for a refresher course.

Like Akhtar, Sami ul Haq has long had a cosy relationship with the Pakistani state. Of the 12 people so far named by the authorities as part of the plot to kill Bhutto, he now accepts that four had been his students. All this strongly suggests Taliban involvement. But the state believed it had harder evidence too. Shortly after Bhutto’s death, the government put online what it claimed was a phone conversation, secretly recorded hours after the assassination, between an unidentified mullah and Baitullah Mehsud. This is the transcript of the tape.

Mullah: Asalaam Aleikum.

Baitullah Mehsud: Waaleikum Asalaam.

M: Chief, how are you?

BM: I am fine.

M: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.

BM: Congratulations to you, were they our men?

M: Yes they were ours.

BM: Who were they?

M: There was Saeed; there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.

BM: The three of them did it?

M: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.

BM: Then congratulations.

M: Where are you? I want to meet you.

BM: I am at Makeen [a town in the south Waziristan tribal area], come over, I am at Anwar Shah’s house.

M: OK, I’ll come.

BM: Don’t inform their house for the time being.

M: OK.

BM: It was a tremendous effort. They were really brave boys who killed her.

M: Mashallah. When I come I will give you all the details.

BM: I will wait for you. Congratulations, once again congratulations.

M: Congratulations to you.

BM: Anything I can do for you?

M: Thank you very much.

BM: Asalaam Aleikum.

M: Waaleikum Asalaam.

People who had met and spoken with Baitullah Mehsud confirmed that the voice on the tape was his. The fact that Bhutto’s name is not mentioned has led some to believe it’s a fake, but if the Pakistan intelligence agencies were trying to frame Baitullah Mehsud they would surely have made sure his name was mentioned on the tape.

There is one further reason for suspecting Taliban involvement in the murder. In February 2008 the Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan was kidnapped in the Khyber tribal agency. The Taliban militants holding him had one demand: the release of Aitzaz Shah, Husnain Gul and Muhammad Rafaqat.

The outpouring of sympathy that followed Bhutto’s murder propelled Zardari to power. Privately, many of Bhutto’s friends were unhappy that the man who they believed had corrupted Bhutto had secured the presidency. But they had one consolation: guided by his Sindhi honour code, which sets a high value on revenge, and with the full power of the state at his disposal, Zardari would be able to bring her killers to justice. The assassinations of Liaquat Ali Khan and President Zia ul Haq had never been solved. This time it would be different. But it wasn’t. Zardari failed to make any significant progress in the investigation. Privately, he said that the murder was part of history, another chapter in the Bhutto family story: Benazir had played her sacrificial role and there was no point in looking back. Publicly, he argued that any Pakistani investigation would lack credibility so the UN should do it instead. Yet the UN’s limited terms of reference (they were to carry out a fact-finding not a criminal inquiry) and history of political caution suggested it would be unlikely to solve the case. Furthermore, the UN was blocked. In its published report it described as mystifying ‘the efforts of certain Pakistani government authorities to obstruct access to military and intelligence sources’.

The first sign that the state would not be making any effort to establish the facts came within two hours of the assassination, when fire engines were called in to wash down the crime scene. The deputy inspector general of the Rawalpindi police, Saud Aziz, who ordered the clean-up, has claimed police officers at the bomb scene told him the atmosphere had became so hysterical that her supporters were daubing themselves in Bhutto’s blood. Fearing a total breakdown of law and order, he called in high-pressure hoses. Anyone familiar with Pakistan’s political realities will find this account unconvincing. No mid-ranking or even senior police offer would take such a decision on his own initiative. It came as no surprise that two anonymous sources told the UN inquiry that Saud Aziz received a call from a senior army officer ordering him to wash down the crime scene. The car in which Bhutto died was also cleaned even though the police had secured it.

Also suspicious is the failure to make progress with the trials of the low-level operatives who have been arrested. It took a year even to charge Aitzaz Shah. Every time the court meets there is a new reason for postponement. Excuses have ranged from the unavailability of judges to the possible future availability of new evidence. The intelligence agencies have been just as inactive. While the ISI is Pakistan’s best-known spy agency, there are many others, including the 100,000-strong Intelligence Bureau or IB. In early 2008, the IB, which had a new leadership appointed by Zardari, asked the Interior Ministry to pass on any material it had about the assassination. The IB thought they were pushing on an open door: after all, the new minister of the interior, Rehman Malik, had been Bhutto’s closest confidant during the years of exile. But Malik decreed that the files should not be handed over.

Malik’s behaviour has been mysterious in other respects too. When Bhutto left the Liaquat Park rally, Malik’s bullet-proof black Mercedes was the designated back-up car in the event that Bhutto needed to be evacuated. Despite having overall responsibility for her security (something he has subsequently tried to deny), Malik reacted to the explosion by ordering his driver to leave the area and head for Islamabad. Once he got there (a 25-minute drive) he started a series of TV interviews in which he gave contradictory accounts of how he had reacted to the attack and why. His version changed from ‘I was about four feet away and I turned around and Mohtarma’s [Bhutto’s] car was trying to get out and we led that car and got away and went to the hospital and I was present in the hospital’ to ‘when the bomb blast happened there was a distance of no more than eight feet between my car and Mohtarma’s car. So I said let’s head towards Islamabad – in the meantime we called the hospital.’ His decision to flee the scene has never been explained.

Before her murder, Bhutto had written a number of emails naming people whom she believed wanted to kill her. Seemingly anticipating the story that would be constructed after her death, she said she wanted to make it clear that if she were killed the blame should be ascribed not to the Taliban or al-Qaida but to her enemies in the Pakistani establishment. And in a letter to Musharraf she accused three men: a senior opposition politician, a former head of the ISI known for his Islamist views, and the IB chief at the time of the assassination, Ejaz Shah, who had jihadi links. Omar Sheikh, the man accused of murdering the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is said to have fled to Shah’s house when he was on the run; for a ‘missing week’ Shah let Sheikh stay hidden away. Eventually, though, the case took on such a high profile that Shah was forced to arrange Sheikh’s surrender. There have been claims in the Pakistani press that Shah also had a connection with Akhtar. Neither of the police investigations dared ask questions of Shah or the others Bhutto named. All have publicly denied her accusations.

And yet despite all this conspicuous inactivity, in February 2011, more than three years after the murder, the government announced it had a new suspect. General Musharraf would be charged with her murder. So what new evidence had been uncovered? None at all. Citing ‘motive’ and ‘circumstantial evidence’ the charge sheet stated: ‘It is prima facie established that Musharraf is equally responsible with criminal “mens rea” for facilitation and abetment of assassinating Benazir Bhutto through his government’s unjustified failure in providing her with the requisite security protection her status deserved as twice prime minister.’

Although the charges made international headlines, few in Pakistan paid any attention. While it has long been accepted that Musharraf failed to give Bhutto adequate protection, the timing of the charges told its own story. They came just as he was trying to revive his political career by returning from a self-imposed exile in the UK to start a new political party in Pakistan. And it worked: he cancelled his plans.

In the weeks before her assassination, Bhutto had every reason to believe she would be killed. The failed attempt in Karachi made it clear that the jihadi leadership was willing and able to deploy its most powerful weapon – suicide bombers – against her. I and a couple of other journalists met her a few hours after that attack: the conversation was maudlin and filled with the thought that she couldn’t go on being so lucky. She fully understood her situation but accepted it. Partly she seemed to consider it a matter of fate, but perhaps she was also trying to atone for her sins. Her Swiss bank accounts were filled with millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains made during her two governments.

As for Zardari, he has said that the Taliban murdered his wife but that he is not sure who commissioned them. It’s a reasonable conclusion. But his attitude leaves many questions unanswered. Why did he allow the investigation to be blocked? Why has he not pressed his interior minister to clear up the obvious inconsistencies in his account? Why has he not objected to Akhtar’s release? And why hasn’t he moved against Sami ul Haq’s madrassah, where the murder was planned? That there are no answers to these questions doesn’t necessarily implicate Zardari any more than the clear evidence that the investigation was deliberately frustrated does. He may well fear suffering the same fate as his wife. But it does mean that there isn’t the slightest reason to believe that the people who tasked the Taliban with Bhutto’s murder will ever face justice.

The General in his Labyrinth

by Tariq Ali

If there is a single consistent theme in Pervez Musharraf’s memoir, it is the familiar military dogma that Pakistan has fared better under its generals than under its politicians. The first batch of generals were the offspring of the departing colonial power. They had been taught to obey orders, respect the command structure of the army whatever the cost and uphold the traditions of the British Indian Army. The bureaucrats who ran Pakistan in its early days were the product of imperial selection procedures designed to turn out incorruptible civil servants wearing a mask of objectivity. The military chain of command is still respected, but the civil service now consists largely of ruthlessly corrupt time-servers. Once its members were loyal to the imperial state: today they cater to the needs of the army.

Pakistan’s first uniformed ruler, General Ayub Khan, a Sandhurst-trained colonial officer, seized power in October 1958 with strong encouragement from both Washington and London. They were fearful that the projected first general election might produce a coalition that would take Pakistan out of security pacts like Seato and towards a non-aligned foreign policy. Ayub banned all political parties, took over opposition newspapers and told the first meeting of his cabinet: ‘As far as you are concerned there is only one embassy that matters in this country: the American Embassy.’ In a radio broadcast to the nation he informed his bewildered ‘fellow countrymen’ that ‘we must understand that democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain.’

Perhaps remarks of this sort account for Ayub’s popularity in the West. He became a great favourite of the press in Britain and the US. His bluff exterior certainly charmed Christine Keeler (they splashed together in the pool at Cliveden during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) and the saintly Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman published a grovelling interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were silenced and political prisoners tortured; Hasan Nasir, a Communist, died as a result. In 1962 * by now he had promoted himself to field-marshal * Ayub decided that the time had come to widen his appeal. He took off his uniform, put on native gear and addressed a public meeting (a forced gathering of peasants assembled by their landlords) at which he announced that there would soon be presidential elections and he hoped people would support him. The bureaucracy organised a political party * the Convention Muslim League * and careerists flocked to join it. The election took place in 1965 and the polls had to be rigged to ensure the field-marshal’s victory. His opponent, Fatima Jinnah (the sister of the country’s founder), fought a spirited campaign but to no avail. The handful of bureaucrats who had refused to help fix the election were offered early retirement.

Now that he had been formally elected, it was thought that Ayub would be further legitimised by the publication of his memoirs. Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography appeared from Oxford in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western press and was greeted with sycophantic hysteria in the government-controlled media at home. But Ayub’s information secretary, Altaf Gauhar, a crafty, cynical courtier, had ghosted a truly awful book: stodgy, crude, verbose and full of half-truths. It backfired badly in Pakistan and was soon being viciously satirised in clandestine pamphlets on university campuses. Ayub had suggested that Pakistanis ‘should study this book, understand and act upon it . . . it contains material which is for the good of the people.’ More than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the country. The state responded with its usual brutality. There were mass arrests and orders to ‘kill rioters’. Several students died during the first few weeks. In the two months that followed workers, lawyers, small shopkeepers, prostitutes and government clerks joined the protests. Stray dogs with ‘Ayub’ painted on their backs became a special target for armed cops. In March 1969 Ayub passed control of the country to the whisky-soaked General Yahya Khan.

Yahya promised a free election within a year and kept his word. The 1970 general election (the first in Pakistan’s history) resulted in a sensational victory for the Awami League, Bengali nationalists from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Bengalis were disgruntled, and for good reason: East Pakistan, where a majority of the population lived, was treated as a colony and the Bengalis wanted a federal government. The military-political-economic elite came from West Pakistan, however, and all it could see in the Awami League’s victory was a threat to its privileges.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which had triumphed in the western portion of the country, should have negotiated a settlement with the victors. Instead he sulked, told his party to boycott a meeting of the new assembly that had been called in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, and thus provided the army with breathing space to prepare a military assault. Yahya prevented the leader of the Awami League, Mujibur Rahman, from forming a government and, in March 1971, sent in troops to occupy East Pakistan. ‘Thank God, Pakistan has been saved,’ Bhutto declared, aligning himself with what followed. Rahman was arrested and several hundred nationalist and left-wing intellectuals, activists and students were killed in a carefully organised massacre. The lists of victims had been prepared with the help of local Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections. The killings were followed by a campaign of mass rape. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not ‘proper Muslims’ * their genes needed improving.

The atrocities provoked an armed resistance and there were appeals for military aid from New Delhi, where the Awami League had established a government-in-exile. The Indians, fearful that Bengali refugees might destabilise the Indian province of West Bengal and no doubt sensing an opportunity, sent in their army, which was welcomed as a liberating force. Within a fortnight, the Pakistan troops were surrounded. Their commander, General ‘Tiger’ Niazi, chose surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his colleagues, a thousand miles from the battlefield, were never to forgive him. In December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger and Mao had all ’tilted towards Pakistan’ but to little effect. It was a total disaster for the Pakistan army: the first phase of military rule had led to the division of the country and the loss of a majority of its population.

Bhutto was left with a defeated army and a truncated state. He had been elected on a social-democratic programme that pledged food, clothing, education and shelter for all, major land reform and nationalisation. He was the only political leader Pakistan has ever produced who had the power, buttressed by mass support, to change the country and its institutions, including the army, for ever. But he failed on every front. The nationalisations merely replaced profit-hungry businessmen with corrupt cronies and tame bureaucrats. As landlords flocked to join his party, the radical reforms he had promised in the countryside were shelved. The poor felt instinctively that Bhutto was on their side (the elite never forgave him) but few measures were enacted to justify their confidence. His style of government was authoritarian; his personal vindictiveness was corrosive.

Bhutto attempted to fight the religious opposition by stealing their clothes: he banned the sale of alcohol, made Friday a public holiday and declared the Ahmediyya sect to be non-Muslims (a long-standing demand of the Jamaat-e-Islami that had, till then, been treated with contempt). These measures did not help him, but damaged the country by legitimising confessional politics. Despite his worries about the Islamist opposition, Bhutto would probably have won the 1977 elections without state interference, though with a reduced majority. But the manipulation was so blatant that the opposition came out on the streets and neither his sarcasm nor his wit was any help in the crisis.

Always a bad judge of character, he had made a junior general and small-minded zealot, Zia-ul-Haq, army chief of staff. As head of the Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier Zia had led the Black September assault on the Palestinians in 1970. In July 1977, to pre-empt an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition parties that would have entailed new elections, Zia struck. Bhutto was arrested, and held for a few weeks, and Zia promised that new elections would be held within six months, after which the military would return to barracks. A year later Bhutto, still popular and greeted by large crowds wherever he went, was again arrested, and this time charged with murder, tried and hanged in April 1979.

Over the next ten years the political culture of Pakistan was brutalised. As public floggings (of dissident journalists among others) and hangings became the norm, Zia himself was turned into a Cold War hero * thanks largely to events in Afghanistan. Religious affinity did nothing to mitigate the hostility of Afghan leaders to their neighbour. The main reason was the Durand Line, which was imposed on the Afghans in 1893 to mark the frontier between British India and Afghanistan and which divided the Pashtun population of the region. After a hundred years (the Hong Kong model) all of what became the North-Western Frontier Province of British India was supposed to revert to Afghanistan but no government in Kabul ever accepted the Durand Line any more than they accepted British, or, later, Pakistani control, over the territory.

In 1977, when Zia came to power, 90 per cent of men and 98 per cent of women in Afghanistan were illiterate; 5 per cent of landowners held 45 per cent of the cultivable land and the country had the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. The same year, the Parcham Communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from Daud, were reunited with other Communist groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and began to agitate for a new government. The regimes in neighbouring countries became involved. The shah of Iran, acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended firm action * large-scale arrests, executions, torture * and put units from his torture agency at Daud’s disposal. The shah also told Daud that if he recognised the Durand Line as a permanent frontier the shah would give Afghanistan $3 billion and Pakistan would cease hostile actions. Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence agencies were arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy. Daud was inclined to accept the shah’s offer, but the Communists organised a pre-emptive coup and took power in April 1978. There was panic in Washington, which increased tenfold as it became clear that the shah too was about to be deposed. General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan whatever the cost.

As we now know, plans (a ‘bear-trap’, in the words of the US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) were laid to destabilise the PDPA, in the hope that its Soviet protectors would be drawn in. Plans of this sort often go awry, but they succeeded in Afghanistan, primarily because of the weaknesses of the Afghan Communists themselves: they had come to power through a military coup which hadn’t involved any mobilisation outside Kabul, yet they pretended this was a national revolution; their Stalinist political formation made them allergic to any form of accountability and ideas such as drafting a charter of democratic rights or holding free elections to a constituent assembly never entered their heads. Ferocious factional struggles led, in September 1979, to a Mafia-style shoot-out at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, during which the prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, shot President Taraki dead. Amin, a nutty Stalinist, claimed that 98 per cent of the population supported his reforms but the 2 per cent who opposed them had to be liquidated. There were mutinies in the army and risings in a number of towns as a result, and this time they had nothing to do with the Americans or General Zia.

Finally, after two unanimous Politburo decisions against intervention, the Soviet Union changed its mind, saying that it had ‘new documentation’. This is still classified, but it would not surprise me in the least if the evidence consisted of forgeries suggesting that Amin was a CIA agent. Whatever it was, the Politburo, with Yuri Andropov voting against, now decided to send troops into Afghanistan. Its aim was to get rid of a discredited regime and replace it with a marginally less repulsive one. Sound familiar?

From 1979 until 1988, Afghanistan was the focal point of the Cold War. Millions of refugees crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and cities in the NWFP. Weapons and money, as well as jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt, flooded into Pakistan. All the main Western intelligence agencies (including the Israelis’) had offices in Peshawar, near the frontier. The black-market and market rates for the dollar were exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger missiles, were sold to the mujahedin by Pakistani officers who wanted to get rich quickly. The heroin trade flourished and the number of registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few hundred in 1977 to a few million in 1987. (One of the banks through which the heroin mafia laundered money was the BCCI * whose main PR abroad was a retired civil servant called Altaf Gauhar.)

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished. During Zia’s period in power, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5 per cent of the vote anywhere in the country, was patronised by the government; its cadres were sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student wing was encouraged to terrorise campuses in the name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present on TV. The Inter-Services Intelligence also encouraged the formation of other, more extreme jihadi groups, which carried out acts of terror at home and abroad and set up madrassahs all over the frontier provinces. Soon Zia, too, needed his own political party and the bureaucracy set one up: the Pakistan Muslim League.

With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 it became obvious that the Soviet Union would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw its troops. It wanted some guarantees for the Afghans it was leaving behind and the United States * its mission successful * was prepared to play ball. General Zia, however, was not. The Afghan war had gone to his head (as it did to that of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues) and he wanted his own people in power there. As the Soviet withdrawal got closer, Zia and the ISI made plans for the postwar settlement.

And then Zia disappeared. On 17 August 1988, he took five generals to the trial of a new US Abrams M-1/A-1 tank at a military test range near Bahawalpur. Also present were a US general and the US ambassador, Arnold Raphael. The demonstration did not go well and everybody was grumpy. Zia offered the Americans a lift in his specially built C-130 aircraft, which had a sealed cabin to protect him from assassins. A few minutes after the plane took off, the pilots lost control and it crashed into the desert. All the passengers were killed. All that was left of Zia was his jawbone, which was duly buried in Islamabad (the chowk * roundabout * nearby became known to cabbies as ‘Jawbone Chowk’). The cause of the crash remains a mystery. The US National Archives contain 250 pages of documents, but they are still classified. Pakistani intelligence experts have told me informally that it was the Russians taking their revenge. Most Pakistanis blamed the CIA, as they always do. Zia’s son and widow whispered that it was ‘our own people’ in the army.

With Zia’s assassination, the second period of military rule in Pakistan came to an end. What followed was a longish civilian prologue to Musharraf’s reign. For ten years members of two political dynasties * the Bhutto and Sharif families * ran the country in turn. It was Benazir Bhutto’s minister of the interior, General Naseerullah Babar, who, with the ISI, devised the plan to set up the Taliban as a politico-military force that could penetrate Afghanistan, a move half-heartedly approved by the US Embassy. Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan once the Soviet Union had withdrawn its troops. The Taliban (‘students’) were children of Afghan refugees and poor Pathan families ‘educated’ in the madrassahs in the 1980s: they provided the shock troops, but were led by a handful of experienced mujahedin including Mullah Omar. Without Pakistan’s support they could never have taken Kabul, although Mullah Omar preferred to forget this. Omar’s faction was dominant, but the ISI never completely lost control of the organisation. Islamabad kept its cool even when Omar’s zealots asserted their independence by attacking the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul and his religious police interrupted a football match between the two countries because the Pakistan players sported long hair and shorts, caned the players before the stunned crowd and sent them back home.

After Benazir’s fall, the Sharif brothers returned to power. And once again, Shahbaz, the younger but shrewder sibling, accepted family discipline and Nawaz became the prime minister. In 1998 Sharif decided to make Pervez Musharraf army chief of staff in preference to the more senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake.

On Bill Clinton’s urging, Sharif pushed for a rapprochement with India. Travel and trade agreements were negotiated, land borders were opened, flights resumed, but before the next stage could be reached, the Pakistan army began to assemble in the Himalayan foothills. The ISI claimed that the Siachen glacier in Kashmir had been illegally occupied by the Indians and the Indians claimed the opposite. Neither side could claim victory after the fighting that followed, but casualties were high, particularly on the Indian side (Musharraf exaggerates Pakistan’s ‘triumph’). A ceasefire was agreed and each army returned to its side of the Line of Control.

Why did the war take place at all? In private the Sharif brothers told associates that the army was opposed to their policy of friendship with India and was determined to sabotage the process: the army had acted without receiving clearance from the government. In his memoir, Musharraf insists that the army had kept the prime minister informed in briefings in January and February 1999. Whatever the truth, Sharif told Washington that he had been bounced into a war he didn’t want, and not long after the war, the Sharif family decided to get rid of Musharraf. Constitutionally, the prime minister had the power to dismiss the chief of staff and appoint a new one, as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had done in the 1970s, when he appointed Zia. But the army then was weak, divided and defeated; this was certainly not the case in 1999.

Sharif’s candidate to succeed Musharraf was General Ziauddin Butt, head of the ISI, who was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. He was bundled off to Washington for vetting and while there is said to have pledged bin Laden’s head on a platter. If Sharif had just dismissed Musharraf he might have had a better chance of success but what he lacked in good sense his brother tried to make up for in guile. Were the Sharif brothers really so foolish as believe that the army was unaware of their intrigues or were they misled by their belief in US omnipotence? Clinton duly warned the army that Washington would not tolerate a military coup in Pakistan and I remember chuckling at the time that this was a first in US-Pakistan relations. Sharif relied too heavily on Clinton’s warning.

What followed was a tragi-comic episode that is well described in Musharraf’s book. He and his wife were flying back from Sri Lanka on a normal passenger flight when the pilot received instructions not to land. While the plane was still circling over Karachi, Nawaz Sharif summoned General Butt and in front of a TV crew swore him in as the new chief of staff. Meanwhile there was panic on Musharraf’s plane, by now low on fuel. He managed to establish contact with the commander of the Karachi garrison, the army took control of the airport and the plane landed safely. Simultaneously, military units surrounded the prime minister’s house in Islamabad and arrested Nawaz Sharif. General Zia had been assassinated on a military flight; Musharraf took power on board a passenger plane.

So began the third extended period of military rule in Pakistan, initially welcomed by all Nawaz Sharif’s political opponents and many of his colleagues. In the Line of Fire gives the official version of what has been happening in Pakistan over the last six years and is intended largely for Western eyes. Where Altaf Gauhar injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who edited this book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls. The general’s raffish lifestyle is underplayed but there is enough in the book to suggest that he is not too easily swayed by religious or social obligations.

The score-settling with enemies at home is crude and for that reason the book has caused a commotion in Pakistan. A spirited controversy has erupted in the media, something that could never have happened during previous periods of military rule. Scathing criticism has come from ex-generals (Ali Kuli Khan’s rejoinder was published in most newspapers), opposition politicians and pundits of every sort. In fact, there was more state interference in the media during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure than there is under Musharraf and the level of debate is much higher than in India, where the middle-class obsession with shopping and celebrity has led to a trivialisation of TV and most of the print media.

When Musharraf seized power in 1999, he refused to move house, preferring his more homely, colonial bungalow in Rawalpindi to the kitsch comfort of the President’s House in Islamabad, with its gilt furniture and tasteless decor that owes more to Gulf State opulence than local tradition. The cities are close to each other, but far from identical. Islamabad, laid out in a grid pattern and overlooked by the Himalayan foothills, was built in the 1960s by General Ayub. He wanted a new capital remote from threatening crowds, but close to GHQ in Rawalpindi, which had been constructed by the British as a garrison town. After Partition, it became the obvious place to situate the military headquarters of the new Pakistan.

One of the 19th-century British colonial expeditions to conquer Afghanistan (they all ended in disaster) was planned in Rawalpindi. And it was also from there, a century and a half later, that the Washington-blessed jihad was launched against the hopeless Afghan Communists. And it was there too that the US demand to use Pakistan as a base for its operations in Afghanistan was discussed and agreed in September 2001. This was a crucial decision for the army chiefs because it meant the dismantling of their only foreign triumph: the placing of the Taliban in Kabul.

Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless you’re the president and the highway has been cleared by a security detail. Even then, as this book reveals in some detail, assassination attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The first happened on 14 December 2003. Moments after the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the bridge, although no one was hurt. The armoured limo, fitted with radar and an anti-bomb device, courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life. His demeanour at the time surprised observers. He was said to have been calm and cheerful, making jocular allusions to living in perilous times. Unsurprisingly, security had been high * decoys, last-minute route changes etc * but this didn’t prevent another attempt a week later, on Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars loaded with explosives came close to success. The president’s car was damaged, guards in cars escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded secrets the terrorists must have had inside information. If your security staff includes angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want to blow you up, then, as the general states in his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has certainly been kind to Musharraf.

The culprits were discovered, and tortured till they revealed details of the plot. Some junior military officers were also implicated. The key plotters were tried in secret and hanged. The supposed mastermind, a jihadi extremist called Amjad Farooqi, was shot by security forces.

Two questions haunt both Washington and Musharraf’s colleagues: how many of those involved remain undetected and would the command structure of the army survive if a terrorist succeeded next time around? Musharraf doesn’t seem worried and adopts a jaunty, even boastful tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah abroad and beset by problems at home. How to fortify the will of a high command weakened by piety and corruption? How to deal with the corruption and embezzlement that had been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested. Before they could be charged, however, Washington organised an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalised the theft of public funds.

Musharraf’s unstinting support for the US after 9/11 prompted local wags to dub him ‘Busharraf’, and was the motive behind the attempts on his life. (In March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described the US-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as ‘broad and deep’.) Had he not, after all, unravelled Pakistan’s one military victory in order to please Washington? General Mahmood Ahmed, who headed the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of the Pentagon, trying to convince the Defense Intelligence Agency that Mullah Omar was a good bloke and could be persuaded to disgorge Osama, when the attacks of 11 September took place. That his listeners were freaked out by this is hardly surprising. Musharraf tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases.

Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan and if he had pushed through reforms aimed at providing an education (with English as a compulsory second language) for all children, instituted land reforms which would have ended the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes of the countryside, tackled corruption in the armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a prelude to a long-term deal with India, then he might have left a mark on the country. Instead, he has mimicked his military predecessors. Like them, he took off his uniform, went to a landlord-organised gathering in Sind and entered politics. His party? The evergreen, ever available Muslim League. His supporters? Chips off the same old corrupt block that he had denounced so vigorously and whose leaders he was prosecuting. His prime minister? Shaukat ‘Shortcut’ Aziz, formerly a senior executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal. As it became clear that nothing much was going to change a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.

Musharraf is better than Zia and Ayub in many ways, but human rights groups have noticed a sharp rise in the number of political activists who are being ‘disappeared’: four hundred this year alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a total of 1200 in the province of Baluchistan, where the army has become trigger-happy once again. The war on terror has provided many leaders with the chance to sort out their opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

In his book he expresses his detestation of religious extremists and his regrets over the murder of Daniel Pearl. He suggests that one of those responsible, the former LSE student Omar Saeed Sheikh, was an MI6 recruit who was sent to fight the Serbs in Bosnia. Al-Qaida fighters had also been sent there (with US approval) and Sheikh established contact with them and became a double agent. Now Sheikh sits in a death-cell in a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his guards and emailing newspaper editors in Pakistan to tell them that if he is executed papers he has left behind will be published exposing the complicity of others. Perhaps this is bluff, or perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for the ISI as well.

Next year there will be an election and rumours abound that Musharraf is offering Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party a deal, but one that excludes her. A few years ago she could be spotted in Foggy Bottom, waiting forlornly to plead for US support from a State Department junior on the South Asia desk. All she wanted then was a cabinet position under Musharraf, so that she could remain a presence on the political scene. Musharraf is much weaker now and she may decide not to play ball with him, but to hang on for something better.

And then there is Afghanistan. Despite the fake optimism of Blair and his Nato colleagues everyone is aware that it is a total mess. A revived Taliban is winning popularity by resisting the occupation. Nato helicopters and soldiers are killing hundreds of civilians and describing them as ‘Taliban fighters’. Hamid Karzai, the man with the nice shawls, is seen as a hopeless puppet, totally dependent on Nato troops. He has antagonised both the Pashtuns, who are turning to the Taliban once again in large numbers, and the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who openly denounce him and suggest it’s time he was sent back to the States. In western Afghanistan, it is only the Iranian influence that has preserved a degree of stability. If Ahmedinejad was provoked into withdrawing his support, Karzai would not last more than a week. Islamabad waits and watches. Military strategists are convinced that the US has lost interest and Nato will soon leave. If that happens Pakistan is unlikely to permit the Northern Alliance to take Kabul. Its army will move in again. A Pakistan veteran of the Afghan wars joked with me: ‘Last time we sent in the beards, but times have changed. This time, inshallah, we’ll dress them all in Armani suits so it looks good on US television.’ The region remains fog-bound. Pakistan’s first military leader was seen off by a popular insurrection. The second was assassinated. What will happen to Musharraf?

Statement of Former IG Police Gohar Zaman Khan on Omar Asghar’s June 2002 Death

THE DEATH OF OMAR ASGHAR KHAN IN KARACHI

ON 25 JUNE 2002 

Omar Asghar Khan aged 48 son of Air Marshal (Retd) Mohammad Asghar Khan died at Karachi some time after midnight on 25/6/02 in mysterious circumstances in house #28 B-II, Gizri Boulevard, D.H.S., Karachi. The police declared it a case of suicide in a press conference without going through the legal, medical, and investigative procedures. The chemical examiner’s report forms the basis of the legal formality as the post mortem report becomes an integral part of the findings. The police pronounced it as suicide prior to the receipt of both these documents. Furthermore, the investigative side should have examined any chance of foul play and eliminated that possibility through a study of previous conduct of the deceased. Interviews of those he came in contact with during the past day and week, his phone record and its analysis, mail received and other correspondence, his personal computer scanning, opinion of his personal doctor and the physical and medical health picture should have been taken into consideration during investigation. Furthermore, feedback from friends and relatives about his behaviour or previous history was ignored. This process of psychological autopsy goes a long way towards establishing the findings. The subsequent doubts expressed by the media should have counted as public opinion and investigated for possible homicide. The police could not find any finger prints, not even on the water glass lying on the bed side table, or the door bolt which is made of metal, or the fan blades, or the glass window, and not even the all important pen. The pillow case was not tested for stains, hair, etc. and the computer chair with a stain was not tested either.

Reference the report by Dr. Zahid Hussein, the chemical examiner to the Government of Sindh at Karachi dated 8/7/02 #4706/07 and post mortem examination by Dr. Abdul Haque #195/02 dated 25/6/02 and the supplementary medico legal report dated 9/7/02. The chemical examination report is good and almost a complete one eliminating all other options of suicide except one. Results show the deceased to be a normal healthy person. If the police had taken an air sample the chemical examiner would have commented on that. Was there any urine? In such cases there always is. But the police never traced it. There was bleeding from the nose and ears. Is that normal in suicide cases? Ofcourse there is a mention of semen stain. In all such cases semen is found not as a result of excitement but as part of the dying process through choking.

The post mortem which reads like a textbook report says the tip of the tongue is bitten and contused.  Haemorrphagic spots are seen on the lower lip. Could this be the result of use of force or pressure? Is it normal to develop such spots in the event of suicide by hanging? Furthermore, under surface of the ligature is dry and glistening, the muscles above and below the ligature mark are ecchymosed. Is this observation common to suicide by hanging with a bedsheet? The base of the tongue surface shows fine petechial haemorrhages. Is that a normal occurrence? There were marks on the wrists according to eyewitnesses but these are not shown in the medical report. However, the report says there are white marks on the forearms 12cm above the wrist and the right forearm has signs of wrapping. Were the arms tied by cloth, hence the wrapping? There was a mark on the throat, oblique in direction, measuring 29cm in length, 3cm wide in the front and 1.5cm at the ends. Could a 3cm mark be formed by a bedsheet? Would a man first suffocated to death and then suspended or hanged also develop an oblique mark? The condition of the lungs and size show the result of pressure which is caused by strangulation when an extraordinary effort is made to breathe. The cause is given as asphyxia but the tongue is not out as is the case in hanging. The eyes were also nearly closed. Is that normal in such cases? The crucial question of the ligature is tied to the substance used as ligature which was not produced with the dead body by the police, according to the doctor.

Since the circumstances do not point to suicide, it has therefore become necessary to prepare a case against the police findings. The suicide note is always a major factor. In this case the note was written on the back of an envelope. Why would the deceased do that when there was a pad lying on the bedside table? This envelope was sent to the handwriting expert along with a sample of the writing of the deceased by the police for comparison. However, an independent expert opinion is called for.

Anyone wanting to commit suicide by hanging must first tie a knot around or against the object he wishes to hang himself from. Then he prepares the “phanda” or noose to go around the neck. But there was no knot against the fan blade, the sheet was simply wrapped three times around the middle of it. Can such a single blade take the load of 176 pounds or two maunds? Did the police try this exercise?

A dying man struggles hard before breathing his last. But in this case there seems to be no struggle, otherwise the chair with wheels, which his foot was resting upon, should have moved (especially when there was no carpet under the chair) from under the fan position. The lights were off, that is important to note.

The oblique marks on the front and side of the neck (not back) is indicative of suicide by hanging while a horizontal mark is not. But what if a person is suffocated to death and then suspended? Furthermore, the size of the mark is more akin to a rope ligature rather than a bedsheet. Was the bedsheet turned into a rope around the neck? The two bedsheets were also wrapped around the body. How is that possible when the sheet is also tied around the neck plus thrown across the fan blade? In what sequence was it done?

How did the white marks of variable width 12cm above the wrist occur? The doctor clearly states that there are “no pressure signs of (wrapping) on Rt. forearm”. But what about the left forearm? The doctor does not say anything about the pressure signs of wrapping for the left forearm. Is it a wilful omission? Why does the doctor talk about wrapping and not tying when he admits he was not given the substance used for the crime? Let me here explain. The left arm was loosely tied and became nearly free during the last struggle for life but had tie or wrapping marks. The right arm was so tightly tied that it also produced signs of wrapping which were ignored by the medical examiner. The eyewitnesses state that the right arm was so hard to undo that they considered cutting the bedsheet. Also that there were tie marks on both wrists. How does a right handed man tie his right hand behind his back with the left hand with so many knots? Above all no one has ever heard of anyone committing suicide by hanging with both hands tied behind the back. The palms of the hands were pointing outward. There is more than one witness to testify to this.

It is quite obvious that the man was first strangled to death and then suspended from the fan blade. This was not done by the use of force. There are no signs of struggle in the bed or bruises on the body. He was first made unconscious and then the deed was done. The instrument of strangulation was not a bedsheet but a rope. At least two persons committed the act. I am of the opinion that it is a case of homicide. A motive has to be found by the investigators. What I have not been able to establish is the entry of the criminals. How the bedroom door was bolted from the inside is quite possible through the sliding ventilator type window which had no bolt. But the fact that a suicide note was found still remains a question mark. Is it genuine? A reconstruction of the crime can throw light on the case.

Chief Justice Should Resign

There is a reason why the figure of Justice is depicted as she is, holding a set of scales, a sword, and her eyes covered by a blindfold. The scales suspended from her right hand represent the relative strength of a case’s arguments, for and against. The double-edged sword symbolises the power of Reason and Justice. The blindfold is to spare her eyes from witnessing the trauma of what happens in her name in our Pakistani courtrooms.

The Chief Justice of our Supreme Court is being pilloried for the second time in his judicial career. The last time he stood his ground by refusing to resign. He became a cause célèbre and the sound-bite darling of the media. Today, he is again being hounded but this time for a very different reason.

His son is alleged to have taken more than 30 crores from Bahria Town’s Malik Riaz and is not outrightly denying this fact. If the son Dr Arslan has taken the money and his trips to Monte Carlo and London were sponsored by Malik Riaz there is absolutely no excuse for such a behavior and he along with Malik Riaz should be sent to the prison for indulging in corruption.

Jurisprudence has evolved over the millennia to protect the rights of man from the wrongdoing of fellow man.

It does not however offer equivalent protection to those who have been appointed to adjudicate. Their courtroom is the well of public opinion, their jury the press.

It is clear that we Pakistanis have reached a depth of insensitivity where pain knows no limits. We refuse to improve, to stand above ourselves, preferring instead to pull down those who presume to rise above us. Those who could stand outside the rest of us have demonstrated that detachment by migrating. Those who have remained in the country do so either out of necessity or out of a belief in an afterlife here on earth. There is no evidence to support that faith.

It is unlikely that the Chief Justice did not know about his son taking the money. It goes to his credit that he may not have been influenced by it but the fact that the son was taking money from Malik Riaz and perhaps from some other quarters as well like Mobilink and Ufone goes to show that corruption was taking place right under the Chief Justice’s nose. It is hard to believe that such corruption was taking place and he did not know about it.

How could one argue that the Chief Justice did not know about Dr Arslan taking money and then going on foreign trips and staying in expensive hotels, sometimes along with his mother?

If the Chief Justice did not know about it then it would be negligence on his part. He is entrusted with controlling corruption nationally by dispensing justice and how can he do justice and ascertain its presence if he cannot do it within the family.

Chief Justice’ sincerity to the nation and in opposing corruption cannot be doubted but he should accept the moral responsibility by resigning.

 

Looking back at the Lawyers’ Movement

Did the movement bring a fundamental change in the state and the society and the relationship between the two?

by Ayesha Siddiqa

The protests, rallies and demonstrations by the legal community from 2007 to 2009 took everyone in and outside Pakistan by surprise. People were impressed with the perseverance of the lawyer’s from around the country in the face of a military dictator and in forcing a political government to ensure that the chief justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was restored. However, it is worth asking whether the movement brought some fundamental change in the state and society and the relationship between the two?

The above question cannot be answered without retrospectively, though briefly, looking at this event in history that got labeled as a movement. There are scholars who did not consider this as a movement even then. It did not qualify as a movement, perhaps, in comparison to what Pakistan witnessed during the late 1960s when the under-privileged people from all walks of life came together to protest Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship. The movement of the 1960s included the farm labor, factory worker, students, and people like the small-time chaiwala who were willing to sacrifice their meager earnings for long-term political benefits.

On the other hand, the political action spearheaded by the legal community, in which others such as the media, civil society and ex-servicemen and some other groups took part, had an urban and middle class character. A lot of them such as some members of the ex-servicemen association had immense dislike for Musharraf (but not necessarily the military). This was then an event where personal interests and biases got compounded with a cause.
The real dispossessed Pakistani did not come out on the streets for two reasons. First, the lawyer’s protest did not until the very end establish any link between security of the judiciary and empowerment of the legal community, and socioeconomic uplift in the country. The economic explanation for a free and fair judiciary was a point raised in Aitzaz Ahsan’s speech at the end of the long march but it had the impact of being too little too late. Second, the legal community failed to convince the general public of their earnestness to improve the fate of the common man who sees that lawyers and the judicial system as much a part of overall elite exploitation. A visit to the katchaihrey in any big or small town bears witness to the might of a system that exploits people. The black coats were not able to distance themselves from the image of the exploiter that they become in their own sphere.

Thus, the entire notion of the lawyer’s protest representing the strengthening of the society versus the state requires a serious reassessment. Surely, the idea is not to take away the achievements of that time as it was the first fairly massive right-wing movement after the PNA movement against Bhutto in the late 1970s. The decade of the 70s marks not only the relative and systematic weakening of the left in Pakistan but also the gradual strengthening of the right-wing. The bulk of the legal community, the mainstream media and key civil society groups may have differing views on the use of religious ideology in state politics, but these are fairly centrist or right of center forces. An urban-middle class setting means a natural inclination towards the state as a symbol of power that must be controlled for furthering of personal interests. The legal community, in any case, as is very obvious from Stanley Kochanek’s work on power groups in Pakistan, is inclined towards the establishment from the early years after independence.

It can be concluded from the socio-political nature of the legal community and its behavior after the end of the 2007-2009 protest that a strengthening of the system of justice for the benefit of the common man was certainly not the core purpose. It was a means to an end denoted by the empowerment of the legal community, building up of its nuisance value and membership as a secondary partner of the powerful establishment. The lawyers in general did not demonstrate a willingness to apply the rule of law principle to themselves. For instance, in one particular case in which a lawyer tortured his 12 years old Christian house maid to death, the lawyers in general were forced not to represent the victim’s family. Similarly, lawyers resorted to physical abuse of those with opposing views and gross misconduct in the premises of the superior courts. Some of the starts of the protest also benefited by building up their personal fortunes as people were attracted to them due to their close connection with the chief justice during the lawyer’s movement. Thus, perceptions built during the protests were of great value.

The legal community-media partnership, in fact, worked out to be a great combination that created new heroes and pitched the two communities as ultimate beneficiaries of the political struggle. This is not to suggest that the struggle did not bring any change in the country. However, it did not necessarily denote a transformation of the mindset and change the overall system of governance as there was hardly any introspection by the legal community of its attitudes.

Referring to the ideological bent of the protest, it indicated a further step towards strengthening of the right wing. As a matter of fact, some of the lawyer’s used their newly acquired nuisance value to exhibit their ideological power as was obvious from the trial of Mumtaz Qadri for the murder of Salmaan Taseer. The middle class traders from Islamabad and Rawalpindi, who were also on the forefront during the lawyer’s protest, were there on Qadri’s side as well along with hundreds of lawyers.

Religiosity and militant-nationalism are two of the key traits that have evolved amongst Pakistan’s middle class in the past couple of decades. This is laced with authoritarian tendencies and inclination towards strengthening of kleptocracy. As the dust settles on the ‘lawyer’s movement’ we will realize that it ultimately resulted in further solidification of the establishment. The military, for one, is no less out of business than it was before November 2007.

KESC Privatization Responsible for the Present Power Shortage Mess in Karachi

Power crisis in Karachi — an offshoot of privatization

by Lateef Mughal

It is a fact that uninterrupted supply of electricity is the responsibility of a power utility, mostly owned by the governments across the world, but unfortunately in 2005 the Musharraf government handed over the management of one of the major institutions of the country, Karachi Electric Supply Company, commonly known as KESC, to a Dubai-based group under the garb of privatization and without taking into consideration the repercussions of the deal, saying that the utility company is in bad shape and suffering huge losses.

KESC, which is responsible for providing uninterrupted power supply to the citizens of the city, was granted transmission and distribution license in 1913 and since then it is performing its duties.

It is a practice across the world that the expenses of institutions such as KESC were borne by the government through various sources, including provision of subsidies. These institutions are established with the objective to serve the masses.

In almost 95 percent of the cases around the world, the privatization of power distribution companies has failed to deliver the purpose and the governments had to take back the management control. The main reason for the failure of the process is that the new managements take measures, including retrenchment of the staff and raise in power tariffs at short intervals, to earn huge profits. This results in strong resentment among the masses and they take to streets against this anti-people sentiment.

Likewise, KESC is passing through the same situation. General Musharraf justified the privatization saying that through the sale of KESC shares the country will receive foreign direct investment, the government will be able to end subsidies and the performance of the organization will improve. At the time of privatization, the government also promised that no employee will be retrenched and that the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) had frozen the power tariff for seven years and till then no raise would be made in the tariff.

The new owners also claimed that they will enhance electricity generation, which will help reduce power outages. It was also decided at the time that no KESC employee will be retrenched and that the foreign buyer will be liable to Pakistani laws.

The buyer had also pledged to invest $500 million in the power utility for bringing improvement in the condition of the organization. Interestingly, before its sale, KESC has a liability of around Rs 92 billion of local and foreign banks, but the government spent Rs 14.5 billion to improve its working and also took the responsibility to pay the liability and makes the organization liability-free.

On the other hand, the privatization process of KESC was also not transparent as on February 4, 2005 a Saudi Base Company Kanuz Al Watan offered the highest bid and was announced successful bidder, but later on the company refused to buy KESC without giving any reason and suffered a loss of Rs10 billion paid as guarantee money.

After refusal from Kanuz Al Watan, the government started negotiations with the second highest bidder, a broker company Hassan Associates, rather than conducting re-bidding for the same, because it has decided to sell the utility, as the then privatization minister Hafeez Sheikh had said that the company will be privatized what come may.

Hassan Associates was asked to form a consortium, which included Premier Mercantile and AKD. After negotiations, KESC was sold to the consortium at a throw away price of Rs15.86 billion, whereas at that time the assets of KESC was worth Rs300 billion.

On the one hand, KESC was sold to a broker who has no experience of running a power utility, rather it was involved in the construction business, and on the other, the power utility was sold for half the amount it worth at that time. Not only this, but the government also paid Rs14.5 billion under the FIP plan, whereas Rs4 billion were already there in the account. Other than this, the power consumers, including residential, commercial, and industrial units, owed around Rs25 billion to the utility.

In this way, KESC was sold for around Rs16 billion and the government paid around Rs43 billion. Since its privatization, the respective governments have so far paid another Rs33 billion to KESC in subsidies and in the Budget 2011/12, the government has allocated another Rs47 billion for the power utility.

After all this as expected Hassan Associates formed a consortium in which a Saudi-based company Al-Jummaiah has the major share. Siemens Pakistan was appointed technical assistant. Both Al-Jummaiah and Siemens have no experience of running a power utility as the Saudi-based company was associated with the automobile sector, while Siemens Pakistan was manufacturing switch boards, PMTs and various other electric appliances, which were already in use at the KESC as the company was the registered contractor of the power utility. Taking advantage of the situation, Siemens after becoming the technical assistant supplied all of its substandard equipment to KESC and get the contracts for setting up various grid stations under the FIP plan worth around Rs15 billion.

The then government had promised that after privatization KESC will not be provided subsidy, and the new owners will invest in the company and that power generation would be enhanced, but after passage of almost six years, none of the claims were fulfilled, whereas the electricity consumption of the city is continuously rising at an average of 10 percent per annum. From November 29, 2005 to March 2008, Al-Jumaiah management failed to improve the situation of KESC. During this period, several experiments were carried out, but to no avail.

After its failure, Al-Jumaiah decided to quit the project and in March 2008 the company management returned to Saudi Arabia. In the same month, the government again gave the management control of the power utility to another Dubai-based company, Abraaj, whose owners belonged to Pakistan.

Abraaj was registered in Caymon, Latin America, which is popular for hosting mafias. It is an island known for money laundering and black money holders who take refuge here.

Once again, Abraaj made several promises such as investment of $500 million in KESC system to improve its condition and increase in power generation by 1,000 megawatts in a year’s time, but it could not do so. Rather it intentionally reduced 1,924 megawatts installed capacity and around 1,500 megawatts effective capacity in order to mint money through less use of furnace oil. The situation is the same even today as KESC is only generating 400 to 600 megawatts and WAPDA is providing 7,500 megawatts. Other than this, around 70-80 megawatts is being taken from KANUPP, 100 megawatts from two independent power producers of 250MW capacity.

The fact is that KESC management has created artificial power crisis, which ultimately made the life of the people miserable. It is also putting the blame of this crisis on the KESC workers union, which is very unfair on the part of the management.

There is no power shortage in the city as KESC is producing the desired consumption, but unfortunately the KESC management is bent upon paralyzing the city by carrying out 16 to 18 hours power outages. The load shedding resulted in closure of several industrial estates, especially small-scale industrial units and around 0.7 million to 0.8 million people have lost their jobs.

The exporters failed to fulfil their commitments due to the power crisis, which give advantage to other countries such as India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc, and they have captured the Pakistani clients in the international markets. Owing to mis-commitment the country is suffering a loss of around $1.5 billion annually.

Likewise, the oil import bill surges by around $800 million to $1,000 million, because of the use of furnace oil in generators across the country, which is not only increasing atmospheric nuisance, but also giving rise to noise pollution.

The country has suffered a loss of around $16 billion, or two percent of the GDP since the privatization of KESC.

Abraaj Group, on the one hand, never invested in the power utility, and on the other, took a loan of over Rs100 billion from international banks and IFI by keeping the valuable land of the power utility, having Bin Qasim Power Plant and several other, grid stations on mortgage.

KESC also owed over Rs100 billion to several other local institutions and organizations, such as Water and Power Development Authority, Pakistan State Oil, Sui Southern Gas Company, independent power producers and KANUPP.

In this way, KESC has been indebted with Rs200 billion, while its T&D losses also witnessed an upsurge during this period.

The insincerity of KESC management can be gauged from the fact that, on the one hand, it had shut down several power plants, which run on furnace oil, to save money and after every few months got permission from the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority to raise power tariff, and on the other, it sent a letter to NEPRA in 2009, seeking permission to retrench 7,000 employees of the power utility, which they claimed were additional.

NEPRA gave the decision against their request and said that there is no surplus staff in KESC and the management cannot retrench a single person for the next seven years. It also gave permission to KESC management to raise power tariff by 13 paisas per unit and pay the salaries of the staff from that earning. Now, the citizens of the city are paying an additional 13 paisas per unit, meaning the amount needed for the salaries of the staff, but the management is bent upon forced retrenchment of 4,500 employees.

The KESC management is also making propaganda against the people by terming them power thiefs and earning huge amounts by sending inflated bills to the citizens of the city. When people approach the office of the power utility they were informed that their bills are correct and they should pay the bill to avoid power disconnection and arrest.

At the time of its privatization, the then privatization minister Hafeez Shaikh had said that NEPRA had freeze the tariff for seven years, and that the new management will not be permitted to raise the power rates, but on the contrary, power tariff has been raised by over 100 percent during the last five-and-a-half years.

The KESC system needs huge investment as it is over-loaded and outdated. A large number of substations switch boards PMTs, feeders, cables and wires need to be replaced on an immediate basis, but unfortunately the old copper cables laid during the British rule were replaced by aluminium wires, which cannot bear the present electricity load, resulting total collapse of the system in the next few years.

The present management has no technical know-how and it is sad to see that a purely technical entity is being run by a non-technical management.

The regular employees were also promised not to be retrenched from their jobs, but on the contrary, Abraaj Group from time-to-time continue to retrenched employees on one or the other reasons. Firstly, the group offered senior officers working on a regular basis to discontinue the same and re-appointed on contractual jobs. Some of the officers accepted the offer, but most of them rejected it. After rejection from the employees, the KESC management created a surplus pool and transferred over 300 employees into it. The employees protested against this decision, but the management never paid attention to their grievances. It also prepared new service rules in March 2010 and under its cover, forcefully sent 294 officers home, without giving any reason. Later, these officers went to court, where the case is still pending.

After the officers, the management started the same exercise with the employees and introduced Voluntary Separation Scheme on December 31, 2010 and asked the employees to avail it by January 14, 2011. On the one hand, the management said that it is not mandatory, but on the other, it started forcing the employees to avail it or face dire consequences. The scheme was targeted as the management issued letters to 4,500 lower-cadre staff by name, including drivers, security guards, bill distributors, clerical staff and naib qasid. The KESC employees did not come under pressure and 92 percent of them refused to fill the VSS form, resulting in a harsh decision from the management on January 19, fired 4,500 employees, who were issued letters with the stroke of a pen.

It is to be mentioned here that 4,500 retrenched employees also included 225 widows, deaf, dumb, disable people and minorities. After four days of continuous sit-in, the federal and provincial governments take notice of the uncalled for decision of the KESC management. The government pressurized the KESC management and succeeded in reinstatement of these employees to their respective jobs.

After finalization of the negotiations between the governments’ representatives and KESC management, Provincial Power Minister Shazia Marri, while talking to the sit-in protestors announced their reinstatement after which the sit-in protest ended. On January 24, all the reinstated employees returned to their offices. Later, the union leaders thanked the President, Sindh chief minister, governor and federal ministers, Syed Khursheed Shah, Raza Rabbani and Raja Pervaiz Ashraf for their support.

But only three days later, KESC Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tabish Gauhar addressed a press conference and said that the decision of reinstatement was taken due to the pressure from the government, but he stands by our decision and now these employees would be retrenched in a phased manner.

Not only this, but the KESC management filed terrorism, burglary, harassment, bid to kill involvement in torching of vehicles and other property like cases against 19 union leaders. Later, all the union leaders get bail before arrest from the court.

On January 26, the chief executive again announced retrenchment of the employees and started the drive from the non-technical staff by terming them non-core employees and stop paying overtime to them. Drivers were asked to hand over the keys of their vehicles. Bill distributors were stopped from performing their duties and likewise the clerical staff was also asked to stop working.

4,500 employees were once again retrenched and the KESC management replaced them by hiring laborers from Labor & Manpower Companies and started paying them salaries without assigning any duties. On the other hand, the KESC management is also paying a huge amount to these labor and manpower companies, which have ultimately enhanced the expenses of the power utility, despite tall claims by the management that it has no money to run power plants and the utility faces financial crunch.

The KESC management is also paying huge amounts to its directors, which are over 100. The salaries of these directors are in the range of Rs 1million to Rs6.5 million. This had already been published in the newspapers, which seconded our claim that there is discrimination among the employees of the power utility. Fuelling fire to the situation, the Supreme Court of Pakistan on June 2 gave a decision regarding IRA 2008, according to which the law will not be in effect from April 2010, resulting in abolishment of NIRC. At present, there is no labor law in the country. Taking undue advantage of the SC verdict, KESC started dismissing those employees who have taken stay orders from the NIRC.

The KESC management issued a circular, saying that under the directives of the Supreme Court regarding suspension of IRA 2008, no CBA union will exist from now onwards. This issue has been challenged in the court and the decision is pending.

Despite this anti-worker behavior, the representatives of the retrenched employees tried their level best to hold negotiations with the management so that the issue could be resolved, but to no avail.

___________

About the Author: Lateef Mughal, General Secretary, Peoples Workers Union (KESC) and he can be reached at mughal.lateef@gmail.com

 

Why Does Not the New NAB Chairman Start by Digging Into the NCHD Scam?

Musharraf Engulfed in Biggest Emerging Financial Scandal of His Tenure

One of the biggest financial scam of Musharraf’s tenure involves the NCHD.

The scandal involves massive wastage of almost Rs2 billion of Pakistani taxpayers’ money handed over practically to one individual, without any official oversight or accountability. The latest published statistics reveal much more than they conceal, although the money has been kept out of the searching eyes of any Government auditor.

According to a signed document, Rs 1.5 billion had been doled out by the end of June, 2004. The money is claimed to have be spent in the name of the poor, illiterate and deprived people of Pakistan but no one knows where it is going or has gone. What is being claimed on documents is simply not verifiable but it is packaged in such attractive donor jargon that it has fooled even some international agencies.

The biggest loser is the Government of Pakistan which has dished out a wholesome $32 million to a favorite of General Pervez Musharraf. The General was tricked by this soft spoken, poker faced, crafty Pakistani expatriate whose main reason to have come close to General Musharraf was that he offered some legitimacy to a pariah military dictator prior to 9/11.

“If any civilian politician had done half of what Musharraf has done in this case, he would have been hanged by the Army. But since a General has officially authorized grant of millions of dollars, without any Government audit or accountability, no one has the courage to challenge the scam, although every one knows what it is,” a senior Information Ministry official now in New York recently revealed.

The scam is brewing in the National Commission for Human Development (NHCD), a body created cleverly under law and then smartly weaved into a privately owned Pakistan Human Development Fund (PHDF). Unsuspecting eyes would never find out the difference between these two identical sounding organizations and would never know where the billions were coming from and where they were going.

The mastermind behind the whole idea is Dr Nasim Ashraf, a Pakistani medical doctor who settled inUnited Statesand for years made his living from his medical practice until he had enough money to pursue his political ambitions and become active in the Pakistani community as well as an active donor to US congressmen, thus buying some influence.

Yet Dr. Ashraf, was a relatively unknown person until he got into the hi-profile project of the film onPakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which a former Pakistani High Commissioner inUK, Dr Akbar S. Ahmed, had produced. He even persuaded some known Pakistani-Americans to donate for the film as it was being produced to match the Oscar winner feature film ‘Gandhi’.

‘Jinnah’ never took off and Dr Akbar Ahmed was financially burnt in the project at the hands of Dr Nasim Ashraf. Dr Ahmed’s wife Zeenat publicly accused Dr. Nasim Ashraf of handing over the film in London to an Indian accountant Mr. Singla, appointed as Receiver. She also alleged that Ashraf brought out the film in DVD format with an addition in which he praised General Pervez Musharraf who had nothing to do with the film. Ashraf thus used the film as a political platform to get closer to Musharraf.

Dr. Ashraf denied her charges but it was a fact that he got closer and closer to Musharraf by exploiting many other well respected names including that of former Prime Minister Moeen Qureshi, Imran Khan’s ex-wife Jemima Khan, Princess Sarwath of Jordan and even Abdul Sattar Edhi, the Pakistani social worker of international fame.

When Dr Nasim Ashraf launched the Pakistan Human Development Fund, he used all these big names and some of them even contributed up to $100,000 each, thinking that it may be a genuine project with some achievable honest objectives of helping the poor people of Pakistan. Even today the web site of the Commission claims “four persons of international repute will manage the accounts” while in fact none of these four have either the time or the will now to involve with the Fund any more. These four persons are former Pakistan Prime Minister Moeen Qureshi, Imran Khan’s former wife Jemima Khan, Princess Sarwath of Jordan and Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi.

It was the early period of General Musharraf when despite support from many Pakistanis and expatriates he lacked legitimacy abroad and was looking for help from any quarter. That was the time when he found in Dr Nasim Ashraf an attractive ally who could lend him some credibility in the Pakistani community in US and congressional leadership inWashington. Dr Ashraf marketed himself well with the Pakistani dictator looking for legitimacy.

By that time he had already conceived the Human Development Plan and in June 2001, Musharraf appointed him as head of a Task Force on Human Development which made its recommendations in June 2002. The main proposal was to create the National Commission on Human Development but all funds granted to the Commission were to go into a privately run Fund of Dr. Ashraf called the Pakistan Human Development Fund. It was a pre-planned set up to divert funds into a private company set up under the 1984 Companies Ordinance.

All kinds of false promises, disinformation and misinformation was used to get the Government grant after Dr. Ashraf was appointed Chairman of the new Commission in the rank of a Minister of State. General Musharraf was promised that if Government handed out Rs 2 billion to the NCHD (Read PHDF), Dr Ashraf will raise Rs 4 billion from theUSand other donors.

“We are initially targeting a sum of Rs. 6 billion for the Fund of which we expect that one-third each will be contributed by the Government, the donor community and private sector philanthropists,” General Musharraf said in his inaugural speech as President and Chief Executive at the Pakistan Human Development Forum on June 24, 2002 at the Convention Center in Islamabad. How could the Government just hand over Rs 2 billion to a private company was never explained.

But in his inaugural speech Musharraf did explain that: “This fund will include members from all segments of the society, in particular, leading philanthropists and important personalities like Mr. Abdus Sattar Edhi.”

“I want to assure you that government will ensure that this Fund will be managed by an independent Board of Trustees in a transparent manner and it will be audited by a firm of international repute. The Annual Report of the Trust Fund will be made public and the copies of the report will be sent to donor communities as well. I shall personally be monitoring the work of the Commission and the Fund,” the General said, taking direct responsibility of the billions he was going to hand over to his friend.

The explanation was also to pre-empt any objections to such a large grant to an unknown and untested Pakistani expatriate who just happened to have come into the good books of an all-powerful dictator.

But while the General was promising transparency, he had been cleverly set up to declare that the audit of the Fund would be carried out by a firm of international repute. That was patently illegal and against the Pakistani laws as any organization receiving Government funds has to be audited by the Auditor General ofPakistan.

Dr Nasim Ashraf never allowed the Auditor General to touch his account books despite growing resentment in the Ministry of Finance and Ministries of Education and Health. The resentment grew so much last June that the Senate of Pakistan unanimously recommended to the Lower House to get the accounts of the Commission audited by the Auditor General, but Dr. Nasim Ashraf foiled the entire Upper House by using General Musharraf’s powers who ordered the young junior Finance Minister, Omar Ayub Khan, to ignore this recommendation of the Senate.

It was a moment of shame for the Senate as the Opposition and Government both had joined hands with all the 100 Senators demanding an audit, to be defeated by one crony of the dictator.

When Pakistan’s Secretary of Information, Mr. Shahid Rafi, was asked questions at his Press conference in New York last week about the Commission and why its accounts had not been audited by the Auditor General of Pakistan, first he could not believe there could be such a Department but then he realized the sensitiveness of the issue and redirected all the questions to Dr Nasim Ashraf, who was not present at the news conference.

The basic purpose of the NCHD was declared in the hi-sounding donor jargon.

According to an expert in the Social Sector, all these attractive words mean nothing in terms of realities on the ground inPakistan. In simple words, the Commission was duplicating the work of Education and Health Ministries, both provincial and federal, but without any government oversight of the billions it would receive. It was a license to enjoy life with Government money as almost Rs750 million had been granted to the Commission to meet its expenses for something which can never be measured against verifiable performance.

Now after over three years, the Commission and its performance have nothing to show where the hundreds of millions of rupees have gone, although the official reports published at the web site of the Commission gives lots of data and statistics about the expenses. The irony is that no one on the ground can verify whether the stats are correct and whether anything actually exists on the ground. Dr. Nasim Ashraf would not let Government auditors touch his accounts or verify the claims of his web site reports.

In one place the reports claims thousands of volunteers have been raised. A picture on the web site (above) shows only three persons as ‘volunteers’. Where are these thousands is for the watchdogs and parliamentarians to find out but no one is available as far as knowledgeable people can see. Likewise the Commission claims it has taught 650,000 mothers to give ORS to their kids, as if the mothers did not know how to feed their children before.

The Chief Minister of Sindh, Arbab Ghulam Rahim was recently asked by a parliamentarian about the “great work” done by the Commission in his province. The CM scoffed at the MNA and said he had never heard of the Human Development Commission, far less any work it may have done. Some of the pictures posted on the web site are reproduced above but that is all they have.

An analysis of the Financial Report of the Commission for July 2004 to June 30, 2005 reveals a lot of pork barrel expenditure. It shows a total expenditure of Rs 757.3 million but out of this Rs 127.6 million went to Staff Cost, Rs 62.6 million to Program Support and Head Office Administration, Rs 45.9 million to Global Resource Mobilization and Rs 15.8 million to Communications.

Likewise another Rs 30 million went to Capital Expenditure and Rs 11.3 million for an unexplained head of “literacy in NWFP” while another “NCHD Literacy Project” claimed Rs 55.5 million.

There are many more heads which claims similar millions but no one can determine what they mean and whether this money ever left any bank account. At least until June 30, 2004 more than Rs 1 billion was parked in the private Pakistan Fund bank account, according to the very sketchy report of the private auditors.

The Global Resource Mobilization for which Rs 46 million were spent included a grand gala dinner for General Pervez Musharraf inNew Yorkin 2004 in which a stolen drama production “Anarkali” was shown.

But these resource mobilization efforts have produced hardly the figures that were promised to General Musharraf who had himself announced that while the Government would grant Rs 2 billion to the Fund, it would raise Rs 4 billion from other donors.

The Audit Reports and Income Statement of the Auditors shows as against the promise of Rs 4 billion, the Fund has not been able to raise even Rs 100 million in the last 3 years but has been living lavishly on the tax payers’ money.

All the assurances and explanations of General Musharraf before he gave away the billions to his crony, have now come to a point where they are falling flat and will soon come back to haunt him.

A responsible Senator was heard saying that the key Fund guy admitted at a private sitting saying: “Whenever Musharraf goes, I would be the first one to leave Pakistan.” Well. He was telling the truth this time for a change for he was definitely one of the first ones to leave.

 

Are the Militants Accused of Trying to Kill Musharraf Getting a Fair Trial?

It is first time that during a democratic government, when all organs of state are functioning under the constitution, the decisions of military courts established by Musharraf, is going to attain finality. Black period when hundreds of people went missing and still their nears and dears are on the roads with a hope to see them again.

On 14 Dec 2003, a blast took place on a bridge near Jhanda Chichi, it was such a plan blast that not a single fly was killed. Even nobody received injuries. Dozens of people from PAF along with good number of civilians were arrested in that connection. Their family members were also picked up by the agencies.

After almost one year of illegal confinement, their trials were conducted by PAF authorities at Chaklala.

At the commencement of the trial, no advocate was allowed to represent the accused Persons. Civilian Mushtaq, one of the accused could not avail the services of counsel (Advocate) throughout the trial. During mid of 2005, their family members came to know through newspapers that following  persons had been given death sentence through court martial by PAF:

Civilian Mushtaq

Chief Tech. Nawazish Ali

Chief Tech. Khalid Mehmud

CPL tech. Niaz Mehmud

Junior Tech. Adnan Rashid

They were charged for making an attempt on life of Gen Musharraf.

2nd FGCM (Field General Court Martial) was conducted at Attock Fort, Nine individuals were charged, that they seduced the Army Personnel from their allegiance to the government ofPakistan. Whereas there is not an iota of evidence that they have ever talked even against the Federal Govt.

They all were arrested during Dec 2003. Their family members were also picked up. After 15 months of their arrest their trials started at Attock Fort. Even during entire period of trial, nobody was allowed to meet them.

Again through news papers, On 28 Aug 2005, it was revealed that out of them 5 individuals were given Death Sentences:

Sr No.	NAME	SENTENCE
(I)	Naik Arshad Mehmud	Death
(II)	Civilian  Zubair Ahmed	Death
(III)	Civilian  Rashid Qureshi	Death
(IV)	Civilian Ghulam Sarwar Bhatti	Death
(V)	Civilian Ikhlas Ahmed	Death
(VI)	Civilian Rana Naveed	Life Imprisonment
(VII)	Civilian Amir Sohail	20 years
(VIII)	Civilian Adnan Khan	10 years
(IX)	Civilian Shazia Naveed w/o Civilian Rana Naveed	Acquitted

 

Rana Naveed filed an Appeal against his Life Imprisonment in the Army Court of Appeals. The court without giving him a notice, which was mandatory, enhanced his sentence of Life imprisonment to Death.

Under Pakistan Penal Code Section 131 the sentence for seducing against the Federal Govt. is 10 years but malifidely the sentence of mutiny which is death has been given to them.

Civilian Amir Sohail did not file an appeal, even no counsel appeared on his behalf in Army Court Of Appeals, and even then his Imprisonment was also converted into Death.

Shazia Naveed w/o Rana Naveed (who got death sentence on making Appeal) was never released even after her acquittal by the Court Martial.

CJP Ch. Iftikhar, took Suo moto only then she was produced before the Supreme Court Of Pakistan, where she narrated the tale of horror, the way she was kept in a underground cell along with her child of three months where she could not see sunlight for more than two years. Her case after acquittal fromMilitary Courtwas transferred to ATC  Court Rawalpindi for her illegal involvement in an Act of terrorism against Gen Musharraf.

Finding no evidence she was granted bail by the ATC Judge, but she could not be released from Adiyala Jail.

On her day of release she was picked up by Samasatta Police along with agencies people in an alleged case of Bank Dacoit registered atBahawalpur. She was taken to Bahawalpur along with her son, who by then had reached the age of 4 years behind bars along with her mother without committing any crime.

Finally she was acquitted by ATC Judge of Bahawalpur due to no evidence.

Latter she was also acquitted by ATC Judge Rawalpindi on the charges of terrorism.

But the apathy of poor family did not end at all, her father in law Rana Faqir an old man, who was pursuing the case of his son Rana Naveed (death sentence) went missing during trial of his son along with Hafiz Tahir, brother of Shazia Naveed. During the cases of missing persons, on the orders of CJP Ch Iftikhar, Hafiz Tahir was produced before Supreme Court on 4th Sep 2007 and released by the court after 4 years of illegal confinement by the agencies. However Rana Faqir was shown arrested by Civil Lines Police Station on26th Aug 2007with a typical story of police that he was arrested from GT road` by police mobile where he was waiting for a bus. Only once he was produced before ATC Judge Rawalpindi and for next two years, he was never produced before any court and kept on loitering in Adiyala Jail. He was traced out by Human Right activist but he was booked under the same the charges which were framed against his son and daughter in Law at Attock Fort.

He is now facing a trial at ATC Rawalpindi, 38 witnesses have been examined by the court, not a single witness has pointed a finger towards his involvement in the case .Police had given a list of 165 witnesses, God knows better when the evidence of remaining witness would complete and he would get Justice.

Following serious Illegalities were committed during the trials   conducted by Court Martial:

(i)              The accused persons were put to unbearable physical   torture for more than 7 months and during that period their so-called judicial confessions were obtained.

(ii)            The witnesses against them were also kept in confinement at Attock Fort and under custody their statements were recorded by Court Martial. The Prosecution witnesses admitted that they were in custody for more than one year and they had been promised that if they would give statement   they would be released.

(iii)          Accused Persons also gave lists of defense witnesses, but they were picked up by the agencies. Not a single defense witness could appear before FGCM neither at Chacklala nor at Attock Fort.

(iv)          Civilian Ikhlas at serial 18 was alleged that on 2nd Mar2001, he attempted to seduce army personals from their allegiance to duty whereas at that point of time he was not inPakistan. He produced his passport which contained the date of entry as 16th Mar2001. The military court gave observation that the passport is genuine but have not been produced by a competent witness therefore cannot be considered and awarded death sentence. The military court was duty bound to forward the passport to Immigration department for verification but with ugly haste, it pronounced death sentence. From this one can imagine how justice was administered by such type courts.

(v)            Civilians were jointly tried with the army persons, which was against the law.

(vi)          Both the trials were conducted in Camera, even their defense Counsels were never given free access to them.

(vii)        No legal and admissible evidence was before the court martial; even then the court awarded them Capital Punishments.

(viii)      At the end of trial the Army Authoritiesrefused to give them the Court Martial Proceedings, which was the Birth right of the accused persons as the Death sentences were awarded to them. It was refused to them that due to security reasons proceedings cannot be given to them. Actually the entire proceedings were conducted utter disregard to Military Law and Law of the land. It was an act of malafide as the proceedings did not contain any incriminating evidence against the accused persons.

(ix)          Against the decision of Court Martial the convict persons filed an Appeal in the High Court.  It was era of Musharraf; High Court under article 199(3) of constitution refused to interfere in the decision of Court Martial and dismissed it in limine on following grounds:

(x)            Arguments of counsels could not be appreciated in absence of record of court martial proceedings.

(xi)          Despite having sufficient time neither the petitioners nor their counsels made efforts to obtain CTCs of judgments of Army Court of Appeals.

(xii)        The ouster of jurisdiction under clause 3 and 5 of Article 199 was absolute.

Whereas it was held by superior courts at number of times that if any decision of Court Martial would be without jurisdiction, Coram non Judice or Malafide, the Superior Courts would interfere and in number of cases Superior Courts quashed the decisions of Military Courts.

Against the decision of High Court, the convicts went to Supreme Court and then Supreme Court also did not interfere. Now the parties are again before the court in a review petition, Will   the Supreme Court also follow the same beaten track adopted by High Court that it should not interfere in the decision of Court Martial delivered during illegitimate era of Pervez Musharraf. Today it is a test case for Azad Adlia.

Whether it protects the birth rights of citizens? Till date the convicts could not get the copies of their proceedings, can it be called a fair trial, which is right of every citizen?  The man, if he be called, Pervez Musharraf is still alive,enjoying all the protocols and privileges but the persons who were falsely alleged that they attempted on his life would be hanged.

Where the Human Rights Activists have gone? Where is Azad Media and where Civil Society is?

Dr. Inam Ul Rahiem,

Advocate High Court.

Cell # 03222998691

Email: inam.associates@gmail.com

Defence Of Human Rights,

3rd Floor,MajeedPlaza,

Bank Road, Saddar,

Rawalpindi

Ayaz Amir Lashes Out At the NGOs

Will ‘civil society’ please take a rest?
by Ayaz Amir 

The lawyers’ movement fostered many illusions, none more powerful than the myth that there was something called civil society in Pakistan, good people out to do good and inspired by the best of intentions. Retired bureaucrats, professors of academia in search of a cause, society girls and begums, and frustrated politicians – a politician who fails to get elected or who has nowhere to get elected from is a study in frustration – became the standard bearers of civil society.

The media which had also come into its own thanks to Musharraf’s TV-proliferation policies – TV anchors, otherwise champions of revisionist history, must never forget their debt to Musharraf – skated over the miniscule numbers of civil society and glorified its image. Civil society became a catchphrase. Everyone was using it. If you were stumped for an answer you mumbled the words civil society and tried to look profound. It was surprising how often the trick worked.

NGOs once upon a time had started saying that they could manage things better than the government. The leading knights and ladies of civil society started suggesting that whereas the political class had failed the nation, they along with lawyers, the media and a rejuvenated judiciary would help fix the nation’s problems.

All these four classes – media, lawyers, judges and civil society – made common cause with each other, feeding upon each other’s prejudices, reinforcing each other’s arrogance. They lived in a world of make-believe. The world of reality was kept firmly at a distance.
Three years down the line we are in a position to judge the consequences of that strange and heady mood. The media is on a perpetual warpath, working itself up into a lather of excitement and anger even when it is pretty obvious that the performance is rather forced and contrived. What Oscar Wilde said of fox-hunting – the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable – comes close to describing the media frenzy which is now part of everyday Pakistani existence. This is Musharraf’s revenge from beyond the seas, not diversity of news and opinion but the sameness of news and opinion delivered in a babble of 64 different voices.

We flatter ourselves by thinking that as a result of media plurality we are a more aware nation. The truth is more mortifying. We are becoming a dumber nation, feeding on trivia and endlessly dissecting it. This is a new kind of addiction which keeps us safely distracted from the consideration of issues which should be more rigorously looked into and more vigorously debated.

On display in the media generally – and this has to be a loose generalization – is the poverty of imagination and smugness of Pakistan’s lettered classes. (One exception, I think, has to be the exchange of articles and letters on economic matters between Prof Ashfaq H Khan and Meekal Ahmed which make for spirited reading, showing how a polemical exchange can be carried on without being crude and vulgar.)

In short, the media is running out of causes or is failing to see what the causes should be. To nourish its frenzy it has to sensationalise things and dig up meaning where none exists.

The lawyers’ movement has successfully transmuted itself into a near-perfect expression of legal hooliganism, leaving other forms of public hooliganism far behind. It has even managed to take on senior members of the higher judiciary and there is little that the concerned judges have been able to do about it. Their lordships having ridden the tiger of lawyerly opinion now find that they cannot get off its back. Such is the way of most movements. And to think that the more starry-eyed amongst us thought that the rampaging black-coats would be the heralds of a new dawn.

If the firebrand of the lawyers’ movement, Ali Ahmed Kurd, of all people can be abused by a section of lawyers then it only goes to show that the Pakistani malaise, born of many things but born primarily of a lack of culture, is more about a poverty of the intellect and the imagination than anything else. Culture is not just song and dance but one’s attitude towards life, one’s innate understanding of what the good life should be. Balance and a sense of proportion, the ability to engage in calm and reasoned discourse, the inculcation of tolerance, the ability to respect differences of opinion, a natural distaste for verbosity, an avoidance of mass hysteria, the shunning of slogans – these are mental attitudes grounded in the right kind of culture.

Their lordships too were affected by the times, their proclivity to indulge in a never-ending bout of judicial superactivism rooted in the belief nurtured by the lawyers’ movement that they had a near-divine duty to lead the process of cleansing the national stables. As a consequence they spread their wings far and wide touching a never-ending range of subjects , throwing things into turmoil but lacking the power to bring matters to a head or a conclusion.

To the paralysis of government many factors have contributed but this hyperactivism, for the most part conducted without bearing or compass, has also played its part. At its restoration the superior judiciary stood on the topmost peaks. Now it is inviting more than its share of cynicism.

The latest imbroglio it has found itself in is a case in point. Where in the world do judges concern themselves with rumours? Where do they go in a huddle, resembling an extended war council, on the basis of an unsubstantiated news report? This should be a sobering moment for the higher judiciary, an occasion to realise that judges allow themselves to be driven by the media only at their peril.

Agitation has its own norms but stability has its own requirements. Most of the expectations raised by the lawyers’ movement lie in ruins by the wayside. But if something is to be retrieved from the mess there has to be a soberer understanding of what the rule of law means.

Behind this mess lies the constant trumpeting and bellowing of civil society: retired grandees, assorted begums and a range of armchair warriors thundering for change even as, most of the time, they remain unclear what the elements of change should be, or how it should be brought about.

It hasn’t helped matters that the symbol of the Republic is a walking disaster, a man of few ideas and little understanding of how government works. But the answer to that is the spelling out of clear alternatives, not the constant fanning of the winds of instability.
The symbol of the Republic as much as the government he symbolises should have been weakened mortally by the burden of incompetence they carry. Ironically, however, through its ill-considered intervention into the media-generated rumour about the removal of judges, the Supreme Court, unwittingly no doubt, has extended a helping hand to a beleaguered president. The Supreme Court wanted a written assurance that nothing was on the cards but the weakness of its position was underlined when Prime Minister Gilani refused to oblige it and it found there was nothing it could do about it. Who looks discomfited and who looks comfortable?

This should be a time for everyone concerned to sit back and take stock of things. We have wasted too much time. Perhaps this was only to be expected but now is the time to leave the past behind and move forward, leaving it to historians to fight over the battles of yesterday.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com