The aftermath

How does Asghar Khan’s letter, Bhutto’s ISI notification absolve those who committed crime of stealing 1990 polls?

I was not surprised at General (retd) Mirza Aslam Baig’s graceless reaction to the judgment in the now-celebrated Asghar Khan case. What, however, intrigued me were his attempts at confounding the gross episode by kicking up a lot of unrelated dust. Some spin doctors, who perhaps, are not his fans but pathological haters of the PPP, have even tried to send the entire nation on a wild goose chase by recalling Asghar Khan’s letter to the armed forces during the Pakistan National Alliance movement of 1977; by citing the real or imaginary ISI notification issued by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and; by assuming that former ISI chief Asad Durrani had sold a ‘national secret’ by handing over the affidavit to the Benazir government for an ambassadorship. But can anyone explain how Asghar Khan’s letter , Bhutto’s ISI notification and Durrani’s alleged ‘betrayal of national interest’, even if all these were true, absolves those who committed the crime of stealing the 1990 polls?

Actually, the practice of robbing mandates in the post-Bangladesh Pakistan was institutionalised by Hamid Gul, the self-confessed creator of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) — an alliance of right-wing parties — which he put together just before the 1988 elections ‘to keep the PPP from sweeping the polls’. He is also known as the ‘Fateh-e-Jalalabad’ — a nickname which my colleague Nusrat Javeed used to mock him within his columns in the early 1990s. On the advice of his then CIA masters, Gul led an ill-trained Mujahideen force, plus a few hundred ill-equipped Pakistani volunteers, against the then Kabul ruler Najibullah’s war-hardened troops. The purpose was to occupy a part of Afghanistan, set up a parallel government in Jalalabad and challenge Kabul. We not only lost our face but also 400 to 500 men.

In the television talk shows in which Gul has appeared lately, he has been heard implying that Benazir had to be stopped because she had returned to Pakistan to implement ‘the US agenda’, as if he and his superiors were doing anything contrary to what the US had been ordering them to do since the day they toppled Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and hanged him. And in one of his television talk show appearances, one retired brigadier, who was also involved in the sordid mandate-stealing episode at the lowest level, has charged that the late Benazir Bhutto had criticised the army for crossing the nuclear red line. The poor lady was never admitted into the nuclear loop. Here is what had happened according to a close aide of the then prime minister. In June 1990, while travelling through some Middle Eastern countries trying to mobilise support for the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, she received a message from the then CIA chief’s office that he would like to call on her in Cairo. She waited but he did not turn up. The CIA chief, in a surprise change of venue, instead landed in Islamabad and met president Ghulam Ishaq Khan and accused Pakistan of crossing the red line. The evidence was irrefutable, GIK unable to give any satisfactory explanation is said to have passed the blame on Benazir and that is the reason why the US is said to have not protested when after two months Benazir’s government was dismissed.

The brigadier has also blamed her for packing important public sector organisations with former Al-Zulfikar activists, alleged to have been trained in India, supporting India in crushing the Khalistan movement and criticising the army for conducting military exercises in Sindh without the government’s permission. Both Al-Zulfikar and Khalistan narratives have been so fashioned by the establishment so as to appeal to the sense of patriotism of the majority of Pakistanis for the purpose of garnering mass support for its persecution campaign against the PPP. Most of those who were given jobs in public sector organisations by the then prime minister were those who had suffered from this campaign during the 11 years of General Ziaul Haq’s rule. And you only have to read once again the ISPR press release in response to Benazir’s objections to military exercise in Sindh to know who was calling the shots then. The ISPR press release said: “… under the law, the COAS was not obliged to seek anyone’s permission for conducting training exercises in any part of the country.” The arrogance of power that drips from this sentence is too blatant to miss.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 7^th, 2012.