A report in a Hong Kong-based magazine claims that several officers of the Pakistan army have been detained by the authorities and are being interrogated for alleged links with extremist organisations, including Al Qaeda. The ISPR has acknowledged the arrests but tried to put a business-as-usual gloss over them in an effort to underplay their significance. Another report in a Pakistani newspaper says at least 16 officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers) were captured by the Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan’s Zabul province. According to the story, the captured soldiers were later taken in by the FBI which brought them to the Shahbaz Airbase in Balochistan from where they were handed over to the Pakistan army. Yet another report in another Pakistani newspaper puts the number of army officers and men arrested at 20 and speaks of two groups of army personnel, one with alleged links to Al Qaeda and the other, incredibly, with alleged links to India. Understandably, the ISPR has trashed such reports as “concocted” and “baseless”.
Meanwhile, the American TIME magazine has came out with a fascinating review of a new book “Why America Slept” by Gerald Posner which alleges that Pakistan’s late Air Chief Marshal, Mushaf Ali Mir, not only knew about Al Qaeda’s plan to attack targets in the United States but actually helped them with money and logistics. The source of this information, says Mr Posner, is a statement to US authorities by Abu Zubayda, a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, who has been in US custody since last year. Clearly, this is explosive stuff.
Unfortunately, the allegations are very damaging to the Pakistan army even if they are totally untrue. A US government official has described the contents of the book as ‘absurd’. The charge against the late Air Marshal Mir has also been denied by Islamabad, though, interestingly, the ISPR also tried to block the AFP story from being placed in Pakistani newspapers. And in at least one case, it did succeed in blocking that part of the story which dealt with Abu Zubayda’s alleged statement regarding Air Marshal Mir.
In many of these allegations, Islamabad deserves the benefit of the doubt. Even so, it is important to consider some potent facts.
Pakistan’s sustained involvement in Afghanistan, Kashmir and other “hot spots” is no secret. Indeed, a former DG-ISI, Gen Javed Nasir, proudly deposed before a court sometime ago that his credentials were impeccable because without his efforts the Bosnian Muslims could not have bled the Serb brigands. He made it possible, he claimed, by smuggling weapons to the Bosnian Muslims despite a United Nations ban on arms transfers to all protagonists in the civil war-torn region. Closer to home, in Afghanistan, the Pakistan army and its intelligence services are known to have supported, armed and reinforced the Taliban militia before 9/11. At the time, the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmed Shah Masoud had frequently accused the Pakistan army of actually infiltrating its soldiers and officers into the ranks of the Taliban who were fighting his troops in Afghanistan. Some such claims were exaggerated but not all were simply anti-Pakistan propaganda. Indeed, within the framework in which various contenders were jockeying for power in Afghanistan through their proxies, Pakistan might have found it to its advantage to induct some of its own military elements to boost the Taliban offensive, especially since the Northern Alliance was being supported equally directly by Russia, Iran and India. In fact, the five Iranian diplomats killed in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998 were Revolutionary Guard officers based in that city, liaising with the Northern Alliance. Ironically, after the United States reversed its Taliban policy, US military personnel too began contacting the NA. In fact, there is now much open information on how the US had begun to plan any future operations against the Taliban, especially following its tomahawk attacks on a camp in that country during President Clinton’s tenure.
There is therefore sufficient evidence to suggest that some Pakistan army officers did imbibe the extremist ideology of groups they were “handling” and did things that were strictly against “good order and military discipline”. It appears that over time their loyalties tended to shift from the military itself to a supposedly higher goal. This was natural. Rogue elements are an unfortunate by-product of covert operations and no intelligence agency and military in the world involved in such operations over an extended period of time can remain immune from this phenomenon. But in the case of the Pakistan army we fear that the renegade officers jumped their brief, at times in clear violation of the country’s interests, because they came to look upon this “conflict” in a “civilisational” rather than tactical or even strategic perspective. The consequences of this streak becoming more pronounced in the military should have been of serious concern to the top brass. But they were ignored for opportunistic reasons.
Fortunately, however, General Pervez Musharraf has tried in recent years to purge the army of such misguided elements. But more needs to be done. And instead of trying to obfuscate the facts and sowing the seeds of misinformation, the army’s spokesmen should come clean and allay our fears.