The Abbottabad incident has shaken the whole nation in the same way as the American nation was shaken after 9/11. All TV stations, anchorpersons, analysts and journalists commented on the incident in accordance with their knowledge and understanding. New theories and guesswork, all played a big role. Newspapers were, and still are, full of all kinds of comments. Politicians could not resist the temptation to jump into the arena. The opposition parties bitterly criticised the president, the prime minister and the army chief. Naturally, government cronies showered praise on the president and the prime minister for their actions in the wider national interests.
One should realise that the presence of an individual and a few family members going undetected in a population of 180 million is not a cause for shame for the government or the intelligence agencies. If Osama bin Laden confined himself to the house, nobody would even know he was there. Moreover, only those ignorant of local custom could show surprise at the design of the house. Such houses are quite common in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. To say nothing of one man, hundreds of people could easily go anywhere in cars, busses, etc., in the darkness of night and disappear into such houses. But hold on! Are there not thousands of illegal, untraceable immigrants roaming around in the US, Europe and other countries? As long as they don t run into law enforcing agencies or become careless and conspicuous, nobody knows about them. Hence, to blame our agencies is totally out of place.
Our air force and army failed to detect the intruding helicopters. The army has its own Air Defence Command and should be able to deal with such emergencies. The US helicopters hovered in the air for about 40 minutes while the commandos went on a shooting spree, and yet there was no reaction from our guards or forces in the PMA or around it. We all know how much noise a helicopter makes and we certainly wake up at night if one passes overhead. Here there were many helicopters hovering. Then they landed in the compound, removed dead bodies and flew away (undetected) over hundreds of kilometres. If the air force learnt of the raid a bit late, its planes should have rushed in and shot down the invading helicopters. After all, how could we know what the origin and mission was? We were neither informed nor taken into confidence. (Or were we?)
The president, the prime minister and the defence minister are totally ignorant of defence matters and rush to give statements based purely on whim and speculation. The army s own radar is supposed to detect intruders and take prompt and appropriate action. Gen K M Arif and Gen Mirza Aslam Beg had put in place a defence system at Kahuta which no enemy could penetrate. Despite all their sabre-rattling, neither Israel nor India ever dared to make the attempt. The air force is partly to blame for this incident. More to blame is the army, which has almost one hundred thousand personnel in Abbottabad and the incident occurred in the backyard of the Pakistan Military Academy.
Even worse than this disgraceful incident itself is the behaviour of our rulers and opposition parties. Altaf Hussain organised a referendum (what a joke!) in Karachi with more than a dozen questions to be answered about the incident and there was a street show of MQM members casting their votes into a box. For his part, Nawaz Sharif came up with a totally illogical and impractical suggestion for the formation of a judicial commission under the chief justice. He should have realised that the honourable judges are not warfare experts and could thus easily be misled by wise people. It would have been more appropriate to have appointed a commission consisting of a former army chief (Gen Beg or Gen Abdul Waheed Kakar), Air Chief Marshal Farooq Feroz Khan or Air Chief Marshal Jamal Ahmad Khan and Admiral Fasih Bokhari or Admiral Saeed Mohammad Khan, together with a retired Supreme Court judge. This commission could have asked for assistance from former intelligence chiefs. Such professional people could definitely have done a good job.
The statements made by the prime minister and his colleagues are not worth commenting upon. The accusation that Nawaz Sharif was a supporter of Osama bin Laden is rubbish. Starting from Gen Ziaul Haq right until 2001, the Taliban were supported by the rulers. They were treated as VIPs. Bin Laden and his followers were also the blue-eyed boys of the West. When the Russians left Afghanistan, the Taliban took over and after 9/11 they were, rightly or wrongly, blamed for this cruel act and the Americans declared war on them. Then the killing of innocent Muslims started.
The statements made by Prime Minister Gilani were useless, and the joint session of the National Assembly and Senate was no more than eyewash. The purpose of all in-camera briefings is always to fool the public and hide the facts. It will be just the same old story: we can t talk about it; it is all secret. Fool the 180 million people by charming the few ignorant representatives. We will be seeing nothing more than a fuzzy, ambiguous statement and we will again be stuck with the Americans drinking, laughing and making pleasure trips.
My point here is to bluntly state the fact that I miss the decisive actions of Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Gen Ziaul Haq, Mr Ghulam Ishaq Khan and, above all, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg and Gen Abdul Waheed Kakar at this critical and disgraceful moment in our history. There is no doubt in my mind that, had something like this happened during their tenures and had our sovereignty been violated, every single undesirable American would have left Pakistan within three days of its happening. They would have been simply thrown out. We survived for more than two decades without aid (1969-1980 and 1990-2002) and we were neither starving nor dying. As a matter of fact, those times were 100 times better than now and we had our self-respect and dignity in tact. The current corrupt, selfish rulers have sold our sovereignty and turned us into a starving, bankrupt nation.