Opinion The Abbottabad omissions

The report holds the state institutions responsible for the clandestine stay in Pakistan of the world’s most dangerous terrorist and head of al-Qaeda. It doesn’t name any one institution but uses blanket expressions,indicting everyone responsible for national security. That is normal. When an incident involves the army or its intelligence agencies,commissions use periphrasis and end up in further mystification,which is followed by a gag on their findings by governments scared of being overthrown.

In the case of the murder of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad in 2011,a commission headed by Justice Saqib Nisar of the Supreme Court took six months instead of the mandated six weeks to say it didn’t know who killed him. Most journalists,who were too scared to appear before it,thought that an intelligence agency had beaten him to death for revealing too much about the infiltration of al-Qaeda in the military.

Well-known journalist Zahid Hussain,writing in the Dawn (July 7,2013),says: “[The report fails to answer the critical question of how the world’s most wanted militant managed to stay undetected in Pakistan for so long. The focus of this report is mainly on the US military action and the security agencies’ failure to prevent the ‘humiliation’ caused by the intrusion.” His contention is that the commission deliberately avoided going into the support system bin Laden enjoyed while he lived and moved around in Pakistan for nine years.

The commission,like everybody else,was bitten by the populist bug and didn’t want to offend the Urdu-reading section of the population,which has internalised a narrative that no one,including the army,can contradict. Since this narrative is embedded in the agitprop of al-Qaeda,there is also the fear of being killed by a suicide-bomber. Of course,there is the lunatic fringe of “security experts” such as Zaid Hamid who think bin Laden was not killed by the Americans and wasn’t even present in Abbottabad.

Brigadier (retd) Shaukat Qadir,an outspoken ex-chief of an Islamabad thinktank,who is usually quite outspoken about national strategy and tactics,has dropped a bombshell by telling The Friday Times (July 19,2013) that the army chief,General Ashfaq Kayani,too,got scared of the national al-Qaeda-driven Urdu narrative and decided to hide the truth,just as he had in the case of the drones: “Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was tracked by the army,but ironically it was not in a position to claim the credit. We have seen what happened when Musharraf took credit for the 2004 drone attack in which Nek Mohammad was killed. The attack was carried out by the US on Pakistan’s request. But owning it triggered a Taliban backlash against the army. Since then,we are unable to take a clear position on drone attacks despite the fact that they are carried out with the army’s approval.”

Shaukat Qadir was believed by the Pakistani press to have been charged by General Kayani to investigate the “support network” of bin Laden in Abbottabad. Therefore,his statement deserves serious consideration.

Two other “hot button” issues are likewise obfuscated by populism or the sheer Stockholm Syndrome-like Pakistani tendency to adhere closely to the al-Qaeda narrative on the Aafia Siddiqui and Lal Masjid affairs. Those who read English and don’t make their thoughts public know that,one,Aafia Siddiqui,serving an 86-year sentence in America,was a member of al-Qaeda,which has asked the US to free her in exchange for an American it kidnapped from Lahore,and two,Lal Masjid was a den of al-Qaeda terrorists attacked by army commandos in 2007 — after which al-Qaeda formally announced the establishment of the Tehrik (Movement)-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

About the jihad-ISI interface,then Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh (May 12,2011) quoted ex-ISI chief Javed Ashraf Qazi thus: “Senior ISI officers had jettisoned their uniforms for shalwar kameez; their subordinates would disappear off to the mosque for hours on end. The ISI had bought a hotel in Bangkok,probably to facilitate gun-running. The outgoing spy chief,General Javed Nasir,was a playboy-turned-zealot who had grown a scraggly beard and refused to shake women’s hands. On his first day in the office Qazi found him running out of the door to a Muslim missionary conference. When people say the ISI is a rogue agency,it was true in those days.” Walsh was expelled from Pakistan last year.

According to Foreign Affairs,using a report from Reuters (February 27,2012),WikiLeaks hacked into five million secret emails of the security firm Stratfor — at times called thhe “shadow CIA” — some of them conveying the following “strategic information” about bin Laden’s stay in Abbottabad to relevant agencies in the US: “Up to 12 officials in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) involving mid- to senior-level ISI,with one retired Pak Mil General,had knowledge of the OBL arrangements and safehouse.”

The pro-al-Qaeda narrative in Pakistan will someday be examined on the basis of the English-Urdu divide. I have no idea if such a divide exists in India between Hindi and English. In Pakistan,facts expressed in Urdu can get you in trouble with al-Qaeda and its affiliates among the Taliban and religious seminaries. English is still the vehicle of factual-rational and liberal discourse because al-Qaeda and its local network are not able to read English. This may,however,change in the coming days.

If the English press predominantly scrutinises the state and its institutions,the Urdu press predominantly scrutinises the state of the nation. Pakistani nationalism is more effectively expressed in Urdu than in English. Pakistani nationalism includes a large dose of religion and its basic precepts,like jihad,which is supra-state. Emotive topics under the rubric of nationalism are most appropriately expressed in Urdu. The same exercise often does not succeed in English because of the latter’s origin in another culture,with which our nexus is still not completely broken. Urdu remains an effective vehicle for pro-al-Qaeda agitprop because of its “non-sequential” discourse.

Pakistani TV is exclusively Urdu,which means the Urdu discourse is dominant,while those imbibing “enemy thoughts” from English may be described as “liberal fascists”. Also,TV-watching results in even the English-reading population becoming indoctrinated in the Urdu discourse. If these liberal fascists come on TV and express themselves,not only are they castigated by people who phone in to express their anger,but they also run the risk of coming on the terrorist radar. There is no doubt that all this is happening because the writ of the state is almost absent in the country. Populism normally runs counter to state interest,but populism in Pakistan — embraced by the army and politicians alike — strengthens terrorism and,more dangerously,suppresses the truth.

Pakistan,as most of the Muslim world,is in the grip of a discourse that must force the Muslim mind to ignore such non-populist phenomena as the national economy and the globalisation late last century. This means that the Muslim mind is steeped in isolationism as a way to achieve self-respect and honour. Al-Qaeda exploits it with uncanny expertise.

The writer is a consulting editor with ‘Newsweek Pakistan’

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