Hats Off To Abbottabad Commission
By Najam Sethi
July 12, 2013
The Pakistani whistle-blower who has leaked the Abbottabad Commission Inquiry Report has performed a great national service. The Report reveals the inefficiencies, inadequacies and complicities of our national security and Intel apparatus and shows the way forward in trying to remedy the situation. Significantly, and contrary to cynical expectations, the members of the commission headed by Justice (retd) Javed Iqbal deserve our respect and admiration for laying the unvarnished minefield of truth before us.
The Report examines the role and testimony of officials and media. It hears the story of Osama bin Laden from his wives. It records the testimony of the IB, FIA, MI, NSA, MI and ISI on the subject. And it lists 32 pages of conclusions and recommendations. But the most interesting dimension of the report relates to the observations, perceptions and personality of Lt-Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, a soldier's soldier, who was DG-ISI at the time.
Gen Pasha was rightly proud of the professional standards of the ISI and its sacrifices in "blood, sweat and time". He correctly pointed out that internal security was only one out of 24 tasks defined in the ISI's 1975 charter and mission-statement and noted the simultaneous responsibilities of the IB, CID, Special Branch, Ministry of Interior, Police, and armed services intelligence of the military, air force and navy. He told the Commission that the ISI was "neither complicit nor incompetent" in the matter of OBL and supported his arguments by mentioning the arrest and deportation of several top Al-Qaeda leaders to the CIA no less than the communication tips it had given the CIA that eventually helped it track down OBL. He was critical of the role of General Pervez Musharraf and subsequent civilian administrations in "caving" before American pressure and allowing the CIA to crawl all over Pakistan.
But Gen Pasha also made some extraordinary remarks about the critics of the ISI. He admitted "many decent people had been harmed by the ISI". But he accused his critics of "perverse frenzy" and "unbalanced criticism of the core institutions of the state" and said they rightly "feared the ISI" because it rightly targeted them. He accused significant sections of the media and NGOs of being infiltrated and penetrated by the CIA and foreign intelligence. He implied that such elements were not patriotic because they undermined the "national interest" by their actions and utterances. And, in an unusually candid moment, remarked that the reality was defined by the fact that "Pakistan was a very weak and scared state", "a failing state, if not a failed state" in which "everything boiled down to corrupt, low grade governance", of "collective and systemic failure" because Pakistani society was "deeply penetrated" and "the media was practically bought up" and the elites were "easily purchasable".
It is this rigid sense of self-righteousness, rage and paranoia that pervades Gen Pasha's testimony. Indeed, in his real life interactions with civilians from academia, media or government, such sentiments tended to erupt at the slightest challenge to his perspective. He could not understand why, for instance, pro-democracy and human-rights elements of the Pakistani media and civil society were critical of the role of the military in general and the ISI in particular in distorting the Pakistani reality as compared to their counterparts in India. It never remotely occurred to him that a democratic, popular and voluntary consensus on the role of the state and its institutions had naturally evolved in India and cemented its notions of patriotism, national security and national interest because the Indian military had never "penetrated", or "intervened" in the civilian order, while the opposite was perpetually true in pushing Pakistan in the direction of "a failing or failed state" that lacked a consensus on the legitimate limits on the power of the "core" institutions of the state.
This was one reason why elements of the Pakistan media that questioned Gen Pasha's notional paradigms - such as The Friday Times and Geo's Aapas Ki Baat program - came under unrelenting pressure, blackmail and even attack from the ISI during Gen Pasha's tenure. It also explains why those who laid journalist Saleem Shahzad’s death at the door of the ISI were hounded and harassed and "rightly feared the ISI". Indeed, it is worth recalling that the fiasco of Memogate - when General Pasha personally undertook a mission to oust Ambassador Hussain Haqqani from Washington DC on the highly dubious testimony of a highly ambitious Pakistani-American maverick - destabilized the Zardari government nearly to the point of extinction.
The airing of the Report comes at a very propitious moment in Pakistan's renewed attempt to steer a democratic course under the administration of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The foreign minister, Sartaj Aziz, and the home minister, Chaudhry Nisar, have both talked about righting the civil-military imbalance. The current DG-ISI, Lt Gen Zaheer ul Islam, has also wisely steered clear of General Pasha's angry style and controversial legacy. They should all read the recommendations of the Commission and explore ways and means of putting them into practice.
Source: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130712&page=1
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