Amusement at the courts
Well, of course he was going to spill the beans. Ex-army chief Gen Aslam Beg couldn’t possibly have expected his former spymaster Gen Asad Durrani to have carried the can for him regarding the ISI’s disbursement of funds scandal of the 90s.
Earlier, the retired COAS had said he hadn’t been aware of any such plan to finance anti-PPP political parties. Gen Durrani’s emphatic statement in the court, where he all but rubbished his former boss’s claim, made clear that Gen Beg was the one who had originally given him the order.
The Asghar Khan petition, which took more than a decade and a half to be taken up seriously by the Supreme Court, has put up a wedge between the old boys’ club. Do we expect a greater set of revelations as the tumult grows?
Once the past of the shadowy organisation becomes clearer and clearer, it will also be easy to ascertain what, exactly, is its current role. The IB provides the civil government with intelligence, the MI takes care of military intelligence. The military should be asked to make a case for why there is another intelligence agency.
Moreover, even when these three intelligence agencies are not meddling in politics and staying within their “legitimate” ambits, they misinterpret their role. The job of intelligence agencies is simply to collect intelligence. If they manage to get the dirt on someone, they should present that solid evidence to the police, who should then apply the criminal procedure code.
Interference in the democratic process is merely the next step on the timeline once they forget their brief. An impression is being given by apologists that the episode in question is but a dark one in the agency’s history. But there really is no saying whether or not the practice has stopped in earnest.
Exhuming the dead is a useful exercise because it gives a clear direction for what isn’t permissible in the future. The courts should move on beyond punishing the guilty party in the Asghar Khan petition and hold the current operations of the national intelligence setup accountable.
