Due process?

I hope for the good doctor’s sake his friends in the CIA can spring him. If not, this loose end may be tied up quite soon

Temperatures are soaring. Already, it is too hot to leave cigarette lighters in one’s car: they will have exploded by the time you return to your vehicle. Vegetation has already started to droop and mammals, bi-ped and otherwise, are seen panting and jostling for a spot in any form of shade they can lay their paws on. Water holes are few and far between and the whole country seems to have turned into Sibi. But the PTI and the PML(N) still persist with their nationwide jalsa campaign and there is now a widespread risk of most of the country becoming garmi mein kharaab.

In such circumstances, it is very difficult to get outraged about a particular cause. Actually, let me rephrase that. While it is easier to get inflamed, being consistently outraged over any issue other than loadshedding is just not humanly possible anymore. Under such circumstances, to see that a large chunk of Pakistanis are getting fired up over the fate of one Dr Shakil Afridi, is a terribly encouraging sign. Terrible, yes. But encouraging nonetheless.

He, for those of you who don’t follow the news religiously, is no (direct) relation to our pugnacious cricketing hero, Shahid Lala. However, he is the man who gave the CIA Osama the Terrible of Abbottabad. In the excitement of taking out the final boss from all editions of the Call of Duty series, the Marines forgot to ‘extract’ Dr Afridi from the L-Z down the road. As a result, he was captured, interrogated, incarcerated and summarily sentenced under very dodgy circumstances to about 33 years in prison, ostensibly for ‘high treason’.

Opinion at home is divided. There are those who believe that the government has rightfully locked him up, because no one should have access to so many non-taxable American dollars and live to spend them. The apologists meekly argue that, “He did help nab Osama”, while citizens of outrage-istan are quick to condemn his unscrupulous use of vaccination programmes as a cover for his clandestine activities. But violations of the Hippocratic oath notwithstanding, there seems to be no clear consensus on what the good doctor’s fate should be.

The final stab in the back for Dr Afridi can be said to have come from the US itself, in the svelte form of Hillary Clinton. Indeed, her denouncement of Pakistan for awarding a ludicrously unjust jail-term to the part-time spook and the threat to withhold a million dollars for each year he would be in prison obviously did not go down well with a lot of patriots, who are now convinced that the Democrats (who are really just an extension of the Indian state – they even adopted the elephant as their electoral symbol) are out to get Pakistan and break it apart into little pieces any-which-way they can. Whatever Dr Afridi’s approval ratings were before the sentencing took place, Hillary made sure that they sank faster than Wile E Coyote tied to an anvil.

So what is the real deal? Would Dr Afridi not have received a similar sentence had he been tried in a standard civilian court rather than a tribal Jirga? Was it really necessary to bend the Frontier Crimes Regulation law (which is draconian in its own right) like a clown would bend balloons to make latex animal shapes, just to try one man? Do crimes committed in Abbottabad really fall under the jurisdiction of a Jirga in Afridi’s native FATA? Did the military really have a part to play in the summary judgement handed out to the good doctor? While the answer to all of these questions may be far more complicated than a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘perhaps, if the circumstances were conductive’; there is a good chance that asking such questions can land you (and me) in a lot of trouble. For you see, the matter of Dr Afridi is one of ‘national security’. This, as many of you are aware, is one abstract construct that serves as the foundation of all the freedoms (hah!) that we enjoy and if removed, could threaten the very fabric of Pakistani society. Anything that attempts to sabotage our ‘national security’ must, therefore, be dealt with a swift and iron hand.

Unfortunately, no one is really buying this narrative. Let’s just say that Jack Nicholson’s performance in ‘A Few Good Men’ was far more convincing than the procedure adopted to put Dr Afridi behind bars for a goodly amount of time; and that if a trio of seven-year-olds had grabbed hold of an Ouija board and decided to conjure up spirits, they would’ve come up with a more coherent story than the one being concocted at all levels of the civilian and military leadership, with regards to the case of Dr Afridi.

Whatever else come of this case, it is clear to me that this case will mark the moment in Pakistan’s history when rulers no longer deemed it necessary to put any faith in the people of the country. While politicians and military dictators had always had a penchant for playing fast and loose with the facts, the government of the People’s is the first one to actually dispense with the formalities and the obsequious language and tell the people, essentially, to sod off.

With regards to Dr Afridi, there are more questions than answers. More half-truths than facts. As with any other story in the Pakistani media, this too shall pass from bulletin rundowns in a few days. I just hope for the good doctor’s sake that his friends in the CIA can spring him, like they sprang Senor Raymond Davis not too long ago. If not, I fear that this loose end may be tied up sooner than you could say ‘due process’.

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