Shakil Afridi for Aafia Siddiqui?

There is something that rings alarm bells in the announcement by the commissioner for law in the tribal areas, Sahibzada Muhammad Anees, that a new trial was to be ordered for Dr Shakil Afridi, the man sentenced to a 33-year jail term in May 2012 for helping the US CIA determine the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, leading the way for US forces to whisk him away in the May 2, 2011 raid. The senior judicial officer has now ruled that the assistant political agent of Khyber Agency, who found Afridi guilty, had no right to do so. The case will be reheard by the political agent for Khyber, at an undisclosed date. It should be noted the imprisonment of Dr Afridi has caused grave strains in relations between Washington and Islamabad, notably last year. Despite a patch over since then, the US remains eager to secure freedom for the man who led them to a key target.

What is certainly worth noting for us at home is that the changed opinion on Dr Afridi’s sentencing coincides with a federal cabinet decision to step up efforts to secure the repatriation of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist convicted to an 86-year jail sentence on terrorism charges in the US, in 2010. At home, demands, notably from religious parties but also other groups, have continued to be voiced for Dr Siddiqui’s return. To help secure this, Pakistan is now set to sign a Council of Europe treaty. It is hard to believe we are seeing nothing more than pure coincidence. The US has for months shown an interest in Dr Shakil Afridi being handed over to it. Logic would suggest a trade-off between the two prisoners may have been planned. Otherwise, it is hard to see why a rethink on Dr Afridi’s sentence would come so many months after his conviction and it seems we are willing to play games of justice to achieve certain ends. This is, in more ways than one, unfortunate, even without going into the details of either case.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 31^st, 2013.

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