“I must give you a favour. We have recently arrested a terrorist and have recovered a lot of data, dairies and other material during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him. If I find your name in the list, I will certainly let you know.”
Reportedly, these were the words of DG Media Wing ISI, Rear Admiral Adnan Nazir, quoted by Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief Asia Times Online, in his e-mail to Human Rights Watch on October 17, 2010.
These chilling sentences were said to him at the end of his meeting with the DG and the deputy DG Media Wing ISI, Commodore Khalid Pervaiz, after his refusal to divulge his sources for the story (‘Pakistan frees Taliban commander’, Asia Times Online, October 16, 2010) he did on Mullah Baradar’s release by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, essentially for reasons of, yes, ‘strategic depth’. The rear admiral had asked him to retract the story, as it was a cause of embarrassment for Pakistan (no, not because the story was not true, but because it was true), which Shahzad refused to do.
The fearless Shahzad carried on his excellent investigative stories on the underbelly of terrorism. You read that correctly — the underbelly of terrorism in the AfPak region. His latest story, ‘Al Qaeda had warned of Pakistan strike’ published on May 27, 2011 outlined the navy’s negotiations with al Qaeda for the release of al Qaeda’s infiltrators, the failure of which led to the devastating attack on PNS Mehran Naval Base.
Today he is not with us. Brutally tortured, the brilliant and brave journalist’s body was found washed up in a canal near Head Rasool in Mandi Bahauddin on Tuesday, May 31.
How is Pakistani society still putting up with the people and institutions whose grotesque paradigms have brought us to this? What is ‘this’ you might ask. ‘This’ is the situation where for the last several decades the military inc has run amok with the nation’s hard produced wealth and spent it upon itself and upon the actualisation of the myths (Indian, Hindu, Jewish and Israeli bogies) it created to perpetuate its iron grip on Pakistan.
Today, we find our population largely uneducated, without healthcare, without security — is that not ironic, without electricity, without industry, without anything but the grass Z A Bhutto promised. Even he could not have imagined how prophetic his words would turn out to be.
When will the Beasts of England and Beasts of Ireland rise up against Man? Let me quote a little here from George Orwell’s epic Animal Farm. The similarities in actual conditions bring tears to my eyes whenever I think about it.
Old Major: “Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilises it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.”
He continues all too poignantly, “and even the miserable lives we lead are not allowed to reach their natural span…no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end…to that horror we all must come…all evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings…only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own…pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious.”
We need to struggle to put the ‘Man’ back in the barracks, to insist that it work on catching the rabbits and not ruling and enslaving us, to ensure that it allows our miserable lives to reach their natural span.
One Saleem Shahzad is one too many; as is one PNS Mehran; as is one Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad; as is one Hafiz Saeed at large; as is one Mullah Baradar released; as is one child out of school for lack of budget allocation; as is one woman who commits suicide for lack of food for her children; as is one Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sent to the gallows; as is the fateful Wahabiisation of Pakistan; as is…the list rather reminds me of Carl Sagan’s, Billions and Billions.
The Military Inc and military supremacy, not the military, needs dismantling. And the time is now, as Ali Nadir Syed wrote (‘It’s prosperity, stupid!’, Daily Times, May 27, 2011). For us Pakistanis, the real war is against the ‘gorilla in the room’.
Should we fight the only real war we ought to be fighting, one day the
“Rings shall vanish from our noses,
And the harness from our back,
Bit and spur shall rust forever,
Cruel whips shall crack no more.”
The writer is a journalist and can be reached at [email protected]