Kamran Shafi

The writer is a retired army officer and a freelance columnist

kshafi1@yahoo.com.uk

Whilst Pakistan is a country that excels in making complete schemozzles and bloody great tamashas of the simplest things, the one to do with the kidnapping of the journalist Daniel Pearl really takes the cake. Pearl, as we all know, belongs to a rather important and influential newspaper and the airwaves have therefore been full of him and his story. We have been right royally entertained, watching the government of Pakistan and what are euphemistically known as its "Law Enforcing Agencies", go about in circles chasing their own tails. Even I, a great believer in Pakistani governments and their line departments almost always doing the wrong thing in exactly the wrong way, am dumbfounded when I find how much worse they really are.

I mean, here is a crime of unimaginable proportions, and what does our (Sindh) police do? Instead of going about its business quietly and diligently, it not only exposes its Inspector General to the glare of the world's media on a daily basis when he has absolutely nothing to say, several of its officials talk to the media every day too, turning a bad public relations exercise into a veritable fiasco. As per usual, everyone was saying whatever came into their heads, until someone in Islamabad, probably the Interior Minister for once doing the right thing, told them to shut up.

Leave the verbose officials for a bit, and look at the pictures on the world's media of policemen searching Karachi's graveyards last week for Pearl's body? What was the whole point of allowing cameramen and journalists there? Has no one in the Karachi police heard about "crime scenes" where the public is not permitted? What awful images Karachi's finest presented to the world: fat bellies protruding; shirt buttons undone; huge big chappatti-looking things masquerading for berets askew on their heads (for which the Sindh police is readily forgiven, for it is the Army which first started the fashion: turning the smart and snug beret which ended at the top of the right ear, into the huge and ugly and floppy thing it is today). They were not a pretty sight, our policemen; even more than that they looked lackadaisical and lazy and very bored.

So then, exactly a day after the arrests of two former ISI operatives, Ahmed Omar Shiekh, the LSE dropout-turned-Mujahid and the main accused in foreign correspondent Daniel Pearl's kidnapping, was run to ground in Lahore. He has to-date changed his story twice - first saying that Pearl is alive, then that he is dead. All the while, whatever this man says has been leaked to the press, making a confused situation even more confounded. There is nothing of the confidentiality one should see in investigations of this kind, the overall impression being that everyone involved in the case is most completely at sea, nobody knowing whether they are coming or going.

Be that as it might, what may one ask of the brave Mujahids who have kidnapped this innocent man, have they achieved by this "brave" act? Has it made them look more courageous, more principled? What does it take to kidnap someone, other than a hard and unfeeling heart, a pistol or two, and a hiding place of which there are many in the "soft" city of Karachi, the greatest city of the "soft" state of Pakistan? What did these great Mujahids hope to achieve anyway? Did they really think that the Americans would be blackmailed into doing their bidding specially after what happened to them on 9/11? Did they really think that America could be panicked into making deals with them? Leave America be, did they not think that all across the world this kidnapping of an unarmed civilian, more than anything else a guest in our country; one who has written reams of news stories recounting the situation of the down-trodden Muslims, would be considered a cowardly act?

They have achieved nothing. If Pearl is "recovered" alive, as I pray he will, he will soon be on his way to well-deserved wealth and fame. President Bush will welcome him to the White House, the TV news networks will line up to hire him as their in-house consultant and newest "expert" on militant Islam; Islamic Jihad; Jihadi outfits; you name it. He will write a book which will only be one among the several that will come out inside of three months; there will be a made-for-TV movie out within weeks; and a Hollywood block-buster will be released at the end of the year, in time for the Oscar nominations, 2003. If, God forbid, the poor fellow is killed, all of the above will happen anyway, the only difference being that his widow (may God prevent that) will be the honoree at the White House. The movie and the books will sell more copies, and in the final analysis it will be our hapless and "soft" country that will get it in the neck, earning even more of the world's loathing and derision for being softer than "soft". All in all, Mein President will be proved right yet again, and very loudly: Pakistan will come out tops among all of the "soft" countries in the whole wide world where anyone can do anything and get away with it. And while the rest of the world marches in one direction: that of peace and stability and investment and education and culture, our poor land will limp in completely another: towards more anarchy (if it is possible), more pain, more suffering - a pariah in the comity of nations.

The question to ask is, when will we ever learn? When we see the light? When will we realise that not only are all of the world's people God Almighty's creation, animals are too? That there are good and bad amongst all peoples; that a God-fearing Jew or Christian is, surely, dearer to the Creator than a bad Muslim? When will we join the rest of the world; when will we come in from the cold?

A little about the cracking of the case: the arrest of Omar Shiekh just as soon as the former ISI operatives were arrested. I do hope Mein General now realises the extent of the roguishness of many who were the controllers of the Afghan Jihad. I hope he will now take a stiff broom and clean out the agency of all of them, at whichever level they operate. Indeed it would be instructive to investigate Pakistan's new Envoy-at-large (I ask you!), and hopeful Prime Minister of Pakistan (I ask you!), Ijazul Haq, to see what light he can shed on these rogues - it is well known is it not, that Afghan refugees were his father's storm-troops, ready to be brought out whenever any goonda-gardi was required, or whenever thousands of "mourners" were to be bussed to Faisal Mosque every August 17, paid for every time by the governments of the worthless Nawaz Sharif who had made the "completion" of Zia's mission his own mission? The investigation could also involve the other golden boy, Actuary Humayun Akhtar, at whose table even the American ambassador sups, and whose father was the Godfather of those that controlled the controllers of the Afghans. It's a crazy old world, what? But then Pakistan is a "soft" state!

Speaking of Actuaries, Mein General's son is one too. Yet, young Bilal's home in Boston is a mere two-bedroom affair, his salary according to news reports is a mere 60,000 Dollars a year and he's been working as one for some years now. How come, then, that Golden Boy who reportedly didn't work as an Actuary for even a day, has untold hundreds of millions of dollars stashed away?