NEW DELHI: The past two weeks have been very eventful in Pakistani press. The blogosphere has faithfully represented this. The media frenzy in Pakistan over the revelations of Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed have both shocked and confused the nation. For the record, Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed was the director of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau between 1990 and 1993 and former senior operative in the Inter-Services Intelligence. He earned notoriety for his role in the covert Operation Midnight Jackal to destabilise the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1989. He was imprisoned on corruption charges in 2001 as part of the national accountability drive of former President Pervaiz Musharraf. The revelations follow this line:

Firstly, PM Benazir’s first term was sought to be undermined by the ISI and the military who used millions of rupees to finance an anti-Benazir coalition, the IJI. Nawaz Sharif was the chief face of the coalition.

Secondly, in 1992, the military-intelligence establishment claimed to have found maps of “Jinnahpur”, meant to be a separate homeland for Mohajirs, at the headquarters and offices of the MQM. The idea was to demonstrate that the MQM was a treasonous party, wanted secession, and thus had to be dealt with by force. A military operation was indeed launched against the MQM and thousands of MQM activists and workers were killed in fake encounters. Brigadier Imtiaz now says there were no such maps, that they were fabricated by IB (another intelligence agency, dealing more with domestic matters), and, that it was all designed only to malign the MQM. Moreover, the claim is made that then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif knew everything there was to know about these plans, and had no problems with them.

So, to the uninitiated, what do these claims

made by Brigadier Imtiaz Ahmed mean?

First, popular democratic leaders such as Nawaz Sharif are tarnished as being no better than the military dictators like Musharraf. What is unsaid is presumably that the current democratic wave is led

by people who have been engaged in extreme

anti-democratic activities and therefore cannot be

believed. Presumably another conclusion that Brigadier Ahmed and his ilk would have us come to is that Pakistan is not about to be redeemed by its current set of politicians.

Second, that the ISI and its associated intelligence agencies are diabolical in their intent to further Punjabi domination over other ethnic minorities such as the Sindhis or the Mohajirs by going to the extent of fabricating evidence so that a massive military crackdown could be ordered on the MQM. Such intolerance is not new but the official complicity to such intolerance is surely a cause of extreme shock and sadness.

The 5-rupee blog makes a general point which is worth quoting:

More than most places, Pakistan has struggled to come to terms with its past. I am not talking about admitting to war crimes (in East Pakistan in 1971) as a society like, say, the Germans have. I am not talking about specific episodes that drift in and out of the public consciousness like the ISI-backed IJI and the role Nawaz Sharif played. I am not talking about partition, and how the entire country is still divided on what Jinnah wanted for us (secularism or not, for example), or why partition happened in the first place.

Such a fractured, broken and emaciated society is in imminent danger of being consumed by its own inner contradictions.

Brigadier Ahmed only underlines what the civilised world has known for long, Pakistan has

much to fear from the Army of Pakistan.