Daily Times

For the last one and a half decades there is an enforced new normal in the land of the pure. If you or your loved one has gone missing, a euphemism for abduction or forceful disappearance, only silence can protect you from further devastation.

Raising voice or making noise may not only cause physical or material harms but can also subject your patriotism to incisive scrutiny. Neither the state can protect its citizens nor can it let them raise their voice and speak up against the tyranny. If it were the bad boys who disappear, abduct, kill and carry out suicide blasts, then why does the state suppress voice against such incidences. According to the new normal, your fundamental rights especially right to life and right to freedom of expression are determined by the side of the fence you are standing and the line you are toeing.

SP Tahir Dawar’s abduction from Islamabad, the capital of a nuclear armed state, on 26 October, 2018 and discovering of his body about a 100 yards away from the Durand Line in Afghanistan is another mystery which the state flagrantly strove to either put it under the carpet or turned it into a conspiracy, resultantly turning it into a controversy. When all the tricks backfired, the next and ultimate stratagem in the state toolkit was to invoke the lapses and incompetence with an ensured sense of immunity. To date no head has been rolled for incompetency whether it be the loss of half of the state or placing the remaining on the heap of gun powder.

Instead of answering such questions such as, how a senior police officer was abducted from the federal capital with no trace for three weeks or how the perpetrators transport him or his body beyond the border and pass through the meticulous and ubiquitous security measures, the government has tried to spin controversies.

Ironically three days before the news of Tahir’s death, the minister of state for interior, whose immediate boss is the prime minister, refused to discuss the issue calling it too sensitive. Hell bent to give a controversial twist to the murder he blamed the Afghan government for keeping him waiting to receive the deceased SP’s body at the border.

Does it not give currency to the claim of Afghanistan and USA that terrorists easily cross over into Afghanistan from their safe havens in Pakistan? Does it not defy the claim and purpose of border management? Would the admission of incompetence not raise eyebrows about the safety of our nuclear assets?

When the minister refused to discuss the issue due to its alleged sensitivity, the news of Tahir Dawar’s death along with pictures of a body were circulating on the social media. After verifying the body, the Mohmand tribe on that side of the Durand Line secured Tahir’s body and contacted the elders of the Dawar tribe to receive it. It is a tribal tradition that the tribe on whose soil the body is found should hand it over to the respective tribe of the deceased.

Mohsin Dawar, belonging to the Dawar tribe and an elected representative from North Waziristan, was part of the delegation to receive the body of TahirDawar. Initially, neither Afghan nor the Pakistani state was part of the effort, until the last minute. It was mostly a tribal to tribal communication. It seems the Afghan government intervened when the minister of state for interior, Mr Sheharyar Afridi announced that Tahir’s body would be received at the Pak-Afghan border at Torkham.

It was obvious that the government was trying to control the damage incurred by its apathy in the entire affair of Tahir’s abduction from Islamabad and his subsequent murder. In the ensuing press conference the minister should have explained what measures the government was undertaking to recover the senior police officer. But the minister’s focus was on why they were kept waiting by the Afghan side for hours to hand over the body. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan should have respected the wish of Tahir Dawar’s family and tribe to receive his body.

One wishes the state’s effort to take control of the body to fly it straight to Peshawar without Tahir’s close family members could only match the efforts for his safe recovery. This act of the state to get control of his body and later calling of Tahir’s son and brother by the prime minister to the PM house to offer the purported condolences further inflamed the simmering doubts in the minds of people.

Witnessing the government recklessly striving to cover the issue forced people to draw parallel with other incidences like the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, the discovery of Osma Bin Laden living in Abbottabad and journalist Saleem Shahzad’s murder after brutal torture.

More important is the silence of Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police during the entire episode which indicates which power in the state can prevail over police. And at least that power cannot be Taliban or its faction. For more than one and half decades, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police gallantly challenged and encountered them. In fact the Taliban could not succeed to get control of the provincial areas which were under the civilian and police control.

However, the state explanations to twist the issue only gave birth to more suspicions. If a terrorist band can abduct a senior police officer from the capital city and take his body or him alive to the neighbouring country without any trace, clearly showing state’s incompetence, does it not give currency to the claim of Afghanistan and USA that terrorists easily cross over into Afghanistan from their safe havens in Pakistan? Does it not defy the claim and purpose of border management? Would the admission of incompetence not raise eyebrows about the safety of our nuclear assets?

The mysterious abduction and murder of SP Tahir Dawar is a serious issue and the government should not try to twist it or brush it under the carpet by creating controversy or indulging in blame game, rather it should reach at the bottom of the issue. Tahir’s Dawar’s son demanded that an international fact finding commission be constituted to apprehend the culprits because his father was abducted from one state (Pakistan) and his body found in another state (Afghanistan). The demand for international commission is also plausible because in the face of incompetence to trace and safely recover a senior police officer, how can the power and authorities find the culprits and determine responsibility?

The writer is a political analyst hailing from Swat. He tweets @MirSwat

Published in Daily Times, November 26^th 2018.