The month of May, part of spring in the West, has turned out an almost unbearable spate of heat for Pakistan’s august military establishment. Not since their ignominious debacle in the then East Pakistan (Bangladesh), back in December 1971, have Pakistan’s swaggering generals been so battered and beaten to ground. The people of Pakistan, once their strongest supporters, have turned against them and are up in arms.
The brutal murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad, the intrepid investigative Pakistani journalist, whose body was found in his car outside Mandi Bahauddin, not too far from Rawalpindi, on May 30, was apparently the proverbial last straw on the back of the Pakistani people to snap their patience and tolerance of the military’s omniscient and overarching role in Pakistan’s social and political milieu.
Saleem, who worked as the Pakistani bureau chief of the Asia Times Online, was known for his daring forays into those closets where skeletons were stacked. He, or anybody else, wasn’t supposed to pry open those ‘trophies’ of Pakistan’s intelligence services. But Saleem was a product of that new breed of journalists in Pakistan who’ve fought hard for their right to be bold and forthright and expose all those inconvenient truths that the country’s ruling elite would rather keep buried under their cloistered corridors of power.
The backlash against such maverick Pakistani journalists has exacted a heavy toll of their blood in recent years. It has also led to Pakistan being dubbed the most dangerous country in the world for journalists by the Paris-based press monitoring group, Reporters Without Borders. But that hasn’t discouraged the truth seekers among these valiant bearers of journalistic freedom from soldering on. Saleem’s horrible example — intended, no doubt, by his callous murderers to clip the wings of all those daring to challenge the power barons of Pakistan — is unlikely to cool their ardour to carry on his mission. The battle, according to some, has only just begun. They’re blazing a trail worth following.
Saleem apparently ruffled a lot of feathers with his May 26, two-part, report in Asia Times on the brazen breach of security at the Mehran Naval-Aviation Base in the heart of Karachi last May 22.
The details of that bizarre and daring raid into a supposedly high-security defence establishment are still murky. Apparently, a band of well-armed terrorists succeeded in making light of whatever security there was around the base and then kept the security personnel that had scrambled to evict or kill them at bay for 17 hours.
Saleem’s copy for Asia Times, which apparently sealed his fate, had said exactly what the man on the Pakistani street was saying: that it was inconceivable a handful of terrorists, no matter how well-armed, had kept the defenders tied down for such a long time unless they happened to have in-house help. If not, it reflected all the more poorly on the skills and capabilities of the much-hyped ‘defenders of Pakistan.’
Saleem had also hinted at the likelihood of al-Qaeda having links with the personnel of the Pakistan Navy that made it a piece of cake for the terrorists to breach the base. He had alluded to his brush with some big-wigs of Pakistan’s ace intelligence service, ISI, in connection with an earlier story that had raised eyebrows in ISI’s inner sanctum. Saleem had expressed fears about his safety.
Saleem’s murder has enraged the people of Pakistan who have already had enough justification to feel badly let-down by a military establishment pampered and primed at the cost of their socio-economic welfare and well-being. The army has thrived on the fat of the land while the people of Pakistan have toiled in grinding penury.
Even in the latest national budget of Pakistan, presented June 2, the defence allocation tops 500 billion rupees, compared to just 40 billion for education and public health combined. This pittance is for 180 million grovelling ‘have-nots’ in a country where education is losing out, every year, to a galloping birth rate, and where there’s just one hospital bed for every 20,000 people.
The bemused Pakistani people’s tail was up when, in spite of obvious humiliation heaped by the terrorists, the naval chief casually dismissed any notion of lax security at the base. His blinkered eyes apparently couldn’t see gaping holes in the security set-up under his watch. Or was it that he couldn’t see them from the tinted glass of his armoured, bulletproof, Series 7 BMW limo with a price tag of Rs 500 million?
Earlier, May had begun with a rude awakening for the people of Pakistan when the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed at a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s premier military academy at Kakul. How could the Pakistani layman be made to believe that the country’s pampered generals weren’t aware of his sheltering virtually under their wings? If that was actually the case, their insouciance was, simply, galling.
The generals found sleeping on their watch was a harrowing discovery for the people of Pakistan; their angst and anger was further fuelled by the daring American raid into Osama’s Abbottabad sanctuary, which exposed the military’s vulnerability against a superior force and crashed the myth of Pakistan army’s hawk-like vigilance against any perceived intruder. Is Pakistan safe in their hands, asked the layman; his concern obviously hitting the bulls eye.
They don’t mourn the pusillanimity of their civilian leadership which, in their eyes, is a refuge of rogues and scoundrels. But the army has had a place of honour in their hearts. They had even forgiven the generals — though certainly not forgotten — the haunting debacle of their surrender that fateful day, December 16, 1971, at Dhaka’s Paltan Maidan. But this May, and the series of national humiliations it brought in trail, has brought all the earlier unsavoury memories bouncing back with vengeance.
The question the people of Pakistan are asking among themselves is where do they go from here? How do they salvage national honour in an ambience where the shedding of innocent blood, like Saleem’s, is winked at by the country’s expensive and elaborate security apparatus, if not actively abetted by it? How do they convince their generals — with a one-track mind — that fighting the so-called ‘war against terror’ as the spearhead of a global military power, while remaining at odds with Pakistan’s immediate neighbours, is, in its very elements, a losing proposition?
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani
ambassador. E-mail:
[email protected]
