Daily Times

The scandalous layers of the Mehrangate case are being peeled off at every hearing. On Thursday, the Supreme Court asked the government to provide it the notification issued in 1975 by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government with regard to setting up a special political cell in the country’s intelligence outfit, the ISI, giving it the mandate to penetrate into the domestic politics of the country. A three-member bench of the apex court issued this directive after General (retd) Asghar Khan, the petitioner in the case, made a claim in this regard. Asghar Khan’s claim carries weight, as there are people who can verify it from memory. However, this claim requires a little correction. On Z A Bhutto’s orders, the ISI had already been involved in domestic politics since 1973. The official notification in this regard had only been issued in 1975 after it was deemed necessary to avoid any unwanted fallout stemming from the ISI political cell’s covert activities, which included assassinations of political opponents of the government. The Supreme Court has belatedly taken a step in the right direction. The said notification should surface to clear the dust off the archival facts in order to set the record straight. Redressal of past mistakes is always good, especially if a mistake has resulted in the longstanding distortion if not eclipse of democracy, state-citizen relations and governance imperatives. This is exactly what Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s shortsighted policy regarding the politicisation of an otherwise covert intelligence gathering agency has resulted in. His decision, though aimed at the time at controlling and quelling the uprising in Balochistan, only succeeded in stiffening the resolve of the Baloch resistance that had emerged after Z A Bhutto dismissed the Balochistan government of Sardar Attaullah Mengal. During the resistance, in a notorious incident, Sardar Mengal’s son Asad and his comrade Ahmed Shah Kurd were assassinated in Karachi, and the only traces left behind were the bloodstained car they were travelling in. Suspicion immediately fell on the ISI’s newly created covert political cell. The results of Bhutto’s suppression of the Baloch through military operations and covert assassinations and disappearances of resistance cadres can be gauged by the bitter fact that even today the province is in flames.

The ISI’s political cell has infiltrated into and manipulated the country’s politics and other influential areas of social life to such an extent that it seems an uphill task to revert it to its original mandate, to its basic role of just intelligence gathering. The former ISI chief Lt-General Asad Durrani conceded in his testimony on Wednesday that the political cell of the ISI still exists. There are reports claiming that the new ISI chief, Lt-General Zaheerul Islam has suspended the agency’s political wing in March. If this is true, it deserves to be brought into the light of day and proved beyond doubt in the Supreme Court. Asad Durrani’s statements in his testimony contradicting those of former Chief of the Army Staff General (retd) Aslam Beg seem to have reinforced the truth. It has created a rift between the two, as was expected. Now it seems impossible for General (retd) Aslam Beg to come clean out of the Mehrangate mess. The right-wing duo, former president late Ghulam Ishaq Khan and General (retd) Aslam Beg used the ISI to distribute Rs 1.48 billion among politicians to build and change political loyalties and created the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) against the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1990, rigged the general elections that year, and spread corruption in the constitutional process of electing a democratic government. Many of the present political and social ills in our society are the byproducts of just such malicious intrigue. The Frankenstein monster, ISI’s political cell, has grown too big for comfort. The Mehrangate scandal has highlighted the surreptitious activities of the political cell of the secret agency to such an extent that merely its suspension will not work. It has to be abolished once and for all to support democracy and turn the page on the dark past of muddying and distorting the process of ascertaining the will of the people through the ballot. *