An elusive goal?
A lot of furore has been created about the leaked Abbottabad Commission Report on the raid by US Special Forces killing Osama bin Laden more than two years ago. Ostensibly the prime minister with his brother Shahabaz Sharif and Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan in tow visited the ISI headquarters in a morale-boosting exercise.
Starting from the Hamoodur Rehman Commission to probe the causes of the East Pakistan debacle, the fate of such commissions has invariably ended up in the realm of an exercise in futility. Invariably their findings are never released but leaked overseas. Their recommendations are without exception ignored. No lessons have ever been learnt.
The Hamoodur Rehman Commission’s report was leaked in India more than a decade after the tragedy that had truncated Pakistan in 1971. The Abbottabad Commission report, until recently in wraps, was scooped by the Qatar based al-Jazeera news channel.
The report bemoans the collective intelligence failure that led to the successful US Navy SEALs raid on Osama bin Laden’s lair in the early hours of 2 May, 2011. It singles out the military and the ISI for its peculiar mindset that allowed Osama a safe haven for eight years – literally a stone’s throw away from Pakistan’s Sandhurst, the Kakul Military Academy.
Without specifically saying whether it was mere incompetence or complicity on the part of our security-intelligence combine, the report repeatedly laments military hegemony over our state apparatus emphasising strengthening of democracy.
The Commission suggests establishment of an agency on the lines of the US Department of Homeland Security to synergise the working of eight spy agencies in the country. It also recommends some sort of civilian control over the intelligence agencies, in the form of parliamentary oversight.
Judging in the backdrop of stiff resistance by our security–intelligence combine to even most rudimentary civilian scrutiny, the Commission has done a commendable job. When feeble attempts were made by the PPP government to bring the ISI under civilian control in November 2008 in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai carnage, there was an outrage on the part of the military establishment. And the attempt was abandoned even before it was initiated.
After this the PPP government adopted the path of least resistance throughout its tenure.
The hurt and outrage over the US trampling over Pakistan’s sovereignty and its embassy in Islamabad playing a meddlesome role flouting all diplomatic norms is justified. Islamabad perhaps became the biggest CIA base with express knowledge of the ubiquitous establishment.
Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani claims that he had nothing to do with en masse issuing of visas to the CIA sub-contractors. Nonetheless the fact remains that they were issued by our embassy headed by Haqqani.
On the flip side this also brings into sharp relief our war gamers making Pakistan a safe haven for terrorists of all hues and colours in the name of a dubious and obsolete strategic doctrine. The ISI chief at the time of the Abbottabad raid Lt Gen (retd) Ahmed Shuja Pasha’s deposition betrays this peculiar mindset.
The former spymaster blames everyone except the agency he headed for the systematic failure that led to the Abbottabad raid. He laments the role of the PPP government for being incompetent and not providing leadership and former President Musharraf for kowtowing to the Americans.
In the past Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has had an uneasy relationship with the military. Understandably so, he will carefully tread the tricky path of bringing the security-intelligence apparatus under civilian control.
His interior minister, soon after assuming the post, in a television interview had lamented ‘Bonapartist tendencies’, still present (according to him) in the military. While pressing the army leadership to curb the adventurists he specifically named Lt Gen (retd) Pasha.
Perhaps Nisar’s views were his own. That said, providing leadership and bringing ownership to a comprehensive anti-terrorism policy as interior minister is squarely now on his watch. Hence he has to be doubly careful about what he says.
The much-touted moot to evolve a comprehensive policy to curb terrorism has been postponed. PTI chief Imran Khan has deliberately avoided attending it on the pretext that he had to visit UK for treatment.
The very next day of his arrival in London he was seen attending a royal charity ball, all smiles, feeling at home in a trendy tuxedo. Perhaps to keep his own options open, he has nominated Shah Mehmood Qureshi to attend the proposed moot.
Both the PTI and the ruling PML-N while in the opposition had an ambivalent attitude towards the Taliban and its allied outfits. Perhaps they naively thought that once in power the militants would somehow give them space.
Their oft-repeated mantra to talk to the Taliban has run aground in the wake of big upsurge in violence in the past month. How one can talk to those who want to dismantle the Pakistani state in the name of their own narrow-minded interpretation of Sharia?
Whatever has been leaked of the contents of the Abbottabad Commission report underscores the need for civilian and military leadership being on the same page to counter internal as well as external threats plaguing Pakistan.
Sharif’s declared intention of fixing the economy will remain a pipedream if Karachi, the hub of economic activity, keeps burning. With the US threatening to completely withdraw from Afghanistan by 2014, the Taliban blowback from Kabul can be devastating for already terror-devastated Pakistan.
The PML-N leadership is keen to mend fences with India. In the past such efforts including those made by Sharif were strongly resisted by the military leadership. Like the Afghan policy the army considers India policy its domain. Hence Sharif will have to again tread carefully on this path, even to achieve minimal results.
The recent terrorist incident in a Lahore food street after an interregnum of three years is a rude awakening that the PML-N provincial government’s ‘ceasefire’ with the militants no longer holds. In this context Shahbaz Sharif must come out clean on the charge levelled by Pasha before the Commission that the Lahore police protected those who attacked Qadianis in 2010.
That the Abbottabad Commission report should be officially released and its recommendations taken seriously is stating but the obvious. Launching an inquiry to determine who leaked the report is a noble aim. But if such reports are released and in real time, whistleblowers will automatically go out of business.
The writer is Editor, Pakistan Today.