Winning the lottery

Great. Just great. Just when you thought a Pakistani had a shot at winning the lottery, the law came and rained on everybody’s parade. It’s not every day that a man with a green passport and an address from Abbottabad is within smelling and tasting distance of $25 million. In rupees, that’s a whole lot. To put this into perspective, even all the taxes collected by the fledgling Board of Revenue (which abbreviates to BoR, all that’s missing is the last vowel and you have an adjective describing these insufferable bores) don’t amount to $25 million. In Hollywood terms, you could finance a high-budget Steven Spielberg blockbuster and still have enough money left to throw the world’s biggest movie premiere after-party in history.

Or, for $25 million dollars, you could buy your very own F-22 Raptor and fly around the world, blowing up evil do-ers and giant piñatas to your heart’s content. And all this money could’ve been yours, if you lived down the road from the most wanted man in the world.

Finding Osama, My Super-Evil Ex-Neighbour, Kill Bin and Fear and Loathing in Abbottabad are all good working titles for any major motion picture based on the daring raid on Osama’s compound in suburban Pakistan. But it would’ve been even better if the real heroes in the film were not US Navy SEALs but real-life dyed-in-the-wool Pakistanis. And it could’ve been like that too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids, otherwise known as the (in)sensitive agencies of Pakistan.

If you don’t know what I’m on about, gander over to news dot google dot com and look up the story about Pakistan ‘extending its hospitality to’ (read ‘picked up’) the people who tipped off the US of A about the presence of Senor Bin Laden El Grande on Pakistani soil. A very desi thing to do this, picking up the richest (tax-free, of course) man in the country to shake him down, in the hopes of getting him to admit that he is, in fact, an agent of Acronyms ’R’ US, or worse, the Rest and Adultery Wing from across the border. All of this, you must understand, it to get said man to rescind his claim on a large fortune that has hitherto not been seen outside of Fort Lauderdale.

So what was his fault? That he ratted out our fair country’s ‘most honoured’ guest? Or was it that he passed on sensitive information to an external state actor without first obtaining approval from the ISI, MI, IB and his local DCO office? It could also have been professional jealousy, if you buy into the whole narrative of “Even we didn’t know he was there, honest!” But none of these reasons is severe enough to justify any treatment at the hands of our (un)intelligent agencies.

The real culprits are the people who are responsible for the safe evacuation of all terrorists from bomb-making factories mere minutes before they are raided by people armed to the teeth with enough firepower to blow Spiderman into Kingdom Come. If The New York Times is to be believed, these factories were fully operational and pumping out explosive materials as of 0522 Hours on D-day. Intelligence regarding their whereabouts was shared with Pakistani authorities at, lets say, 0523 Hours. After hectic efforts and the mobilisation of a multi-million dollar taskforce at 14:23 Hours the next day, it was discovered that said factory was empty, and had been empty since 0532 Hours on D-Day. I don’t know about you, but to me it looks more like a case of bureaucratic cretinousness rather than complicity. But I’m just a newspaper columnist. What would I know about truth, objectivity or the military-bureaucratic complex?

To tell you the truth, our military is pretty fed up. For the past so many years, ever since the departure of Uncle Musharraf, the army has reinvented itself from its sleazy, vodka-swilling image to a more upright, chain-smoking one. They have also allowed the civilian government oversight and even operational authority over what gets done and when. In essence then, Pakistan’s military is currently (mostly) under the boot of the civilian administration. Unfortunately, the current administration has short-term memory issues and can’t remember where it puts its boots. So plans like a proposed operation in North Waziristan to root out anti-Pakistan militants has been on the table gathering amoebas and other single-celled life-forms since God-knows-when. It’s just a question of will: will the civilian government man up and act or will they remain as healthy and steadfast as a jellyfish with venereal disease? I think I already have the answer, and no, I can’t share it with you. If I do, I may end up losing all hope of seeing any of that $10 million that I can get for revealing Mullah Omar’s location to the French.