Criminal neglect in checking of explosives

By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: While the pilferage of high explosives and detonators is risking the lives of the people, the authorities are showing a criminal neglect in checking the manufacture, distribution and use of these lethal mass killer products.

Documents reveal that the ISI found a blasting company in Qillah Saif Ullah a few months back being involved in the sale of high explosives to unauthorised persons. On the basis of the ISI ís report, the company’s license was canceled by the Ministry of Industries on the recommendation of the Interior Ministry. However, the Interior Ministry got back to the Ministry of Industries within 10 days and sought the revival of the license. The Industries Ministry revived the license, ignoring a three-page charge-sheet issued by the department of explosives against the same company. Minister for Industries Watto, however, expressed his unawareness about the case whereas the Interior Ministry spokesman was not available for comments.

Documents reveal that the ISI reported early this year that the blasting company from Qillah Saif Ullah was owned by a retired Subedar Major, who purchases explosives from the POF Wah Cantt and further supplies it to a notorious smuggler, who carries out illegal explosives business.

Sensing the gravity of the report and its possible implications, the Interior Ministry wrote to the Ministry of Industries on May 28 that the company was indulged in irregularities in explosives business and that the security aspects regarding storage/sale process of explosives as per the standard operating procedures were not being adhered and remained a source of concern.

In view of this, the Industries Ministry was requested to temporarily suspend the license of the company. While the Ministry of Industries processed the matter, the Interior Ministry, just within 10 days, wrote another letter, saying that in view of the submission made by the company’s owner before the Interior Ministry, it has no objection to the revival of the license.

Before the department of explosives could feel the heat of the powerful of the ministries of industries and interior, it issued a show-cause notice to the company along with a three page charge-sheet. Some of these charges include that 23 explosives vans were used for transportation of explosives in year 2007-2008 by the company but it had mentioned only eight on its paper; no entry of vehicle was available on the company’s stock registers in which explosives were transported to place of use against the standing instruction; the stock register showed receipt and use of explosive consignments on the same date, which was logically impossible, thus showing that the company had “made fake entries in the stock registers”; there was no entry of 20,000 detonators purchased by the company in July 2007 from Wah Nobel in the company’s record; another consignment of 20,000 detonators purchased in Sept 2007 was missing from the company’s record, meaning thereby that “this consignment did not reach at your magazine and misused anywhere”; another consignment of 20,000 detonators was delivered to the company in April 2008 but in this case too there was no reflection of this consignment in the company’s stock register etc.

Following this show-cause notice, the department of explosives canceled the company’s license on July 6 but within a few weeks time, following an appeal filed by the company’s owner to the Ministry of Industries and owing to the Interior Ministryís pressure, the license was revived though the authorities remain in dark where were the licensed explosives and detonators used/misused.

Sources said that the explosive department has received on Saturday two more FIRs of seizure of vehicles carrying explosives. The matter of concern remains that the suicide bombers and terrorists involved in subversive activities are in vast majority cases using locally manufactured high explosives and detonators.

Hersh claims US nuke team already in Islamabad

By Muhammad Saleh Zaafir

ISLAMABAD: Pulitzer prize winning American journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed that an elite US special forces squad which operates covertly and includes terrorism and non-proliferation experts from the US intelligence community — the Pentagon, the FBI, and the DOE — is already present in Pakistan and could well be housed in the US embassy in Islamabad.

The startling disclosure was made in Hersh’s candid interview with Pakistan’s most popular TV channel Geo News’ widely viewed current affairs programme ‘Meray Mutabiq’, hosted by Dr Shahid Masood. The programme was aired on Saturday late evening.

Seymour Hersh said that the Americans had been constituting such crack teams for various purposes and the team in question here was to deal with any eventuality including any fear of takeover by Taliban or any other ‘development’ with regard to Pakistani nukes.

Group Editor of The News Shaheen Sehbai taking part in the programme expressed the view that Musharraf’s remarks about President Asif Zardari, as attributed by Hersh, could not be casually ignored. He said it must be investigated why Musharraf accused Zardari of not being a patriot, because, according to Sehbai, Hersh had some inside information given to him in interviews with Musharraf and Zardari which he did not reveal in his report. But Sehbai said journalists always attribute information given to them by responsible people to “reliable sources” if these people ask them to refrain from quoting them directly.

Former Director General, Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, Lt Gen Hamid Gul also participating in the programme, verified the credentials of Hersh and gave a detailed account of US presence in the sensitive areas in Pakistan. He opined that the US wanted to delegate the role of proxy super power of the region to India and for that Pakistan had to be denuclearised.

Former Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad Khan expressed his apprehensions about the alleged activities but he ruled out any possibility of the US team being in a position to gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.

The programme (to be telecast again at 2:05pm today - Sunday), host Dr Shahid Masood had raised the question about the action that the team/squad could take in any eventuality. He referred to previous reports of Hersh which appeared in New Yorker magazine last week in which Hersh disclosed that after the US authorities received a report by their embassy in Islamabad indicating that a Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray, a highly classified US military and civil-emergency response team was put on alert. The team which operates clandestinely is reportedly under standing orders to deploy from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland (Washington), within four hours of an alert.

When the report turned out to be a false alarm, the mission was aborted but by the time the team got the message, it was already in Dubai while on its way to Pakistan. Hersh quoted a consultant of the US Defence Department in his write-up and later he discussed the role of the US embassy in ‘Meray Mutabiq’ last week, which was hosted by Dr Shahid Masood and participated by Group Editor The News Shaheen Sehbai.

It was the maiden interview of the US investigative journalist in the wake of his thrilling write-up about the US plans towards Pakistan’s nuclear programme and the controversial observations of former President Musharraf regarding his successor. Seymour Hersh while standing by his report, pertaining to the comments offered by former President General (R) Pervez Musharraf about incumbent President Asif Zardari, has disclosed that the former president had given some harsher comments about his successor but in the ultimate scrutiny he allowed the remarks that he made part of his article.

General Hamid Gul disclosed in his talk with Dr Shahid Masood that former president General Pervez Musharraf allowed the US planes to land in Pakistan to pick Osama bin Laden about whom they had an inkling that he was present in a remote village of Balochistan. He said that when Hersh visited him to verify the veracity of the information, “I requested him to publish the story and he obliged. I was of the opinion that the Americans want to get in Pakistan under the pretext of the story that had yet to appear and it could open the way for future US incursions,” the General added.

SC says NRO validation must by parliament, or else...

Zardari, others to face trials

By Ansar Abbasi



ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it absolutely essential for the government to get the NRO and all other ordinances revalidated from parliament within the time given by the court, to prevent all the cases, including those against President Asif Ali Zardari, from being revived automatically.



In the detailed judgment of its July 31 short order issued by the SC, all corruption and criminal cases in which benefit was given under the NRO after February 5, 2008, the date the NRO legally expired, would stand automatically reopened if parliament fails to validate the NRO retrospectively. Simply speaking it means that the benefits were given when the NRO was no longer in existence.



The apex court did not agree with the perception that the benefits drawn from the NRO are past and closed transactions.It instead judged: “Under Article 89 of the Constitution, an ordinance issued by the president if not so laid before the National Assembly, or both Houses of Parliament, stands repealed on expiration of four months from its promulgation.”



Under this judgment, the NRO stands invalid since February 5, 2008, when it completed its 120-day constitutional life. The NRO was enforced on Oct 6, 2007, and within 120 days had to be passed by parliament as a bill or re-issued as an ordinance, which it was not.



Much to the worry of the ruling elite particularly President Zardari, all their corruption and criminal cases were quashed because of the NRO after February 5, when as per the Supreme Court’s judgment, the NRO did not exist. President Zardari’s acquittal from all cases happened during March-April 2008. (See list)



“Only such rights, privileges, obligations, or liabilities would lawfully be protected as were acquired, accrued or incurred under the said Ordinances during the period of four months or three months, as the case may be, from their promulgation, whether before or after November 3, 2007, and not thereafter, until such ordinances were enacted as acts by Parliament with retrospective effect,” the Supreme Court ruled.



The Supreme Court did not discuss the NRO in isolation but set the same principle for all ordinances that were covered under Musharraf’s PCO, now declared unconstitutional. In case parliament validates the NRO retrospectively (with effect from February 5, 2008) as per the judgment of the apex court, the Supreme Court also made it clear in the same judgment: “Needless to say that any validation whether with retrospective effect or otherwise, shall always be subject to judicial review on the well recognized principles of ultra vires, non-conformity with the Constitution or violation of the Fundamental Rights, or on any other available ground.”



It is relevant to mention here that the NRO soon after its promulgation in October 2007 was challenged in the Supreme Court, which has yet to hear the petitions questioning the very validity of the controversial ordinance.



In para 186 of the detailed judgment, the SC said, “Proclamation of Emergency and PCO No 1 of 2007 having been declared unconstitutional and void ab initio and the validity purportedly conferred on all such Ordinances by means of Article 270AAA and by the judgment in Tikka Iqbal Muhammad Khan’s case also having been shorn, such ordinances would cease to be permanent laws with the result that the life of such ordinances would be limited to the period specified in Article 89 and 128 of the Constitution, viz., four months and three months respectively from the date of their promulgation. Under Article 89 of the Constitution, an ordinance issued by the president, if not so laid before the National Assembly, or both Houses of Parliament, stands repealed on expiration of four months from its promulgation. Similarly, under Article 128 of the Constitution, an ordinance issued by the governor, if not so laid before the concerned provincial assembly, stands repealed on expiration of three months from its promulgation.”



In its para 187, the detailed judgment said, “It may be noted that such ordinances were continued in force throughout under a wrong notion that they had become permanent laws. Thus, the fact remains that on the touchstone of the provisions of Articles 89 and 128 read with Article 264 of the Constitution and Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897, only such rights, privileges, obligations, or liabilities would lawfully be protected as were acquired, accrued or incurred under the said ordinances during the period of four months or three months, as the case may be, from their promulgation, whether before or after November 3, 2007, and not thereafter, until such ordinances were enacted as acts by Parliament or the concerned provincial assembly with retrospective effect.”



According to the details gathered by The News, President Asif Ali Zardari’s acquittal from all the corruption and criminal cases happened between March 6, 2008, to May 20, 2008. The likes of Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Suleman Faruqi, Zulfikar Mirza, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar, Usman Farooqi, M B Abbasi and many others also benefited after the ordinance lapsed.

Americans see a change in the air in Pakistan

By Dr Shahid Masood

WASHINGTON: Americans see a change fast, but smoothly, coming in Pakistan in the wake of loss of credibility of the man at the helm, following some domestic legal developments.

After meeting top political and defence decision-makers here in the US capital, where I was invited by the National Defence University (NDU) for a two-day seminar on the anniversary of 9/11, I was told in unambiguous terms that a change in Pakistan was inevitable for US policy interests, although Washington does not intend to disrupt the system.

Several important Pakistani political players have also been conveyed the same message by the US political and defence establishment, including the MQM and recently the ANP, whose chief is travelling with President Asif Zardari in New York.

The main problem being faced by the US administration, which it may never admit publicly, is that the present set-up with Asif Ali Zardari as the de facto ruler, has no credibility at home and no ability to deliver on the promises he makes, either on the military side or on the war on terror or on governance issues.

“Zardari has also abandoned the idea of political consensus which he had started to follow in the early days after the February elections,” one official said on background. “He appears to be non-serious in government and lives in perpetual fear and insecurity, preferring to stay out of the country.”

The US side thinks that they had made a sensible move by pushing an alliance between late Benazir Bhutto and General Pervez Musharraf as this team would have provided all the ingredients of a stable and cooperative Pakistan to Washington. She would have provided the political support while Musharraf would have used his military muscle against the terrorists and extremists in a stable environment.

They say Zardari has failed to provide that environment, rather he has involved himself in day-to-day business and administrative matters while his political coalition and parliament have been left looking like dumb and dummies.

Many officials say Zardari has been asking the US administration to bail him out on too many issues and too many occasions. He has sought the US help to tame the Army, keep his alliance partners, especially the opposition of Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N in check, directly or through the Saudis on sensitive issues like Musharraf’s or cutting his own constitutional powers.

All these demands are way beyond the capacity of any US administration to deliver while Zardari has almost left everything to us to handle, an agitated official said. “If we have to handle everything, his own credibility within the country will sink and has sunk to the lowest low.”

Other officials I met were even blunter. They say the US abhors corruption, kickbacks and commissions anywhere in the world as a matter of policy.

Another official said the US would keep track of the parties or persons involved and money transaction in the Pakistan’s rental power venture. There are still no roadmaps or any modality work sheets in Washington on how a change in Pakistan would occur, but the US capital is keeping its fingers crossed as to what comes out of the NRO case pending with the Supreme Court.

The impression gathered from the words of these top Americans is that the US would not intervene if the apex court starts hearing the case. The view is that if the NRO was discussed and details of who benefited, who made what deals and how serious crimes were committed and then whitewashed, start to be revealed in the SC, the moral authority of the NRO beneficiaries would erode fatally. In this scenario, the NRO beneficiaries may themselves throw in the towel seeking a safe exit.

In several informed US and Pakistani circles I moved in for several days in Washington, the same scenario was repeated, often exactly in the same tone and sequence.

A Pakistani, who knows a lot about developments in Pakistan and the US scene, said that apart from this purely legal and domestic scene, there were four possible ways through which Zardari could exit. These ways were repeated by others who had nothing to do at all with the previous source. They are: one, impeachment; two, voluntary resignation in the wake loss of credibility; three, ‘natural’ or man-made elimination of the president, and, four, an Army coup. The impeachment and coup scenarios are considered non-starter and impossibility.

US and some Pakistani circles said that a resignation after enough dirt is thrown in the public domain when the NRO case details begin to unfold is a favourite way out, as it would not, being an outcome of the legal process, disrupt the system.

I was asked many times whether a coup is a possibility in the current situation and I always said no, but the question kept surfacing again and again.

This is probably because there was some loose talk of a shuffle in the military hierarchy by President Zardari in which Army chief General Kayani was to be replaced by some other pliant general who could ensure continuity and stability for the Zardari regime.

This scenario was shot down in Washington instantly as an impossibility, since it had information that the Pakistan Army considered a coup or intervention as a total no-go area and could have brought back another October 12, 1999 type of situation. It is so also because of the fact that Gen Kayani has established, through words and deeds, that he is all for democracy.

With all these scenarios being discussed, the growing feeling is that not much time is left for the current status quo and it will lead to a period of political turmoil in Pakistan if President Zardari continues with his ways any longer.

The sudden emergence of a top MQM delegation in Washington for talks with the policy makers, officials and think tanks of Washington has also raised many questions as the official Pakistani diplomatic channels were totally cut off and I gather that this was done at the insistence of the US side more than the MQM leadership.

Not even a courtesy meeting between Governor Ishratul Ebad and Ambassador Husain Haqqani was held until four days after the arrival of the MQM delegation and meetings with top strategists, including Bruce Riedel, John Negroponte, Richard Boucher, and current State Department officials, including Richard Holbrooke.

A similar exercise has now been planned with the ANP chief while he will be here in the presidential entourage.

What happened in these meetings is known only to the MQM leaders and the US side but the tone and tenor of MQM in the coming weeks and days will give the first hints of whether the course of the PPP-MQM alliance is changing in stormy waters in the middle of the sea. How the ANP reacts is also to be seen but already Asfandyar Wali is said to be very happy with the praise for his party’s governance in the NWFP by US officials as well as the promises to give them direct financial aid. With the MQM and the ANP almost on board, I will be eagerly waiting for the first signs of the new US strategy unfolding in the days and weeks to come.

Zardari’s message to Nawaz has defeat written all over

By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: Cornered and extremely vulnerable President Asif Ali Zardari has conveyed to his political rival Nawaz Sharif that he has learnt from his past mistakes and would now like to achieve what the political forces would have achieved many months back.

Though Nawaz Sharif may have agreed to meet President Zardari, the fact is that he has completely lost faith in the PPP co-chairperson and the country’s head of the state. “He lacks seriousness,” was Sharif’s immediate reaction when told what the president had conveyed to him.

A credible PML-N source confided to The News that a PML-N senator was on Thursday told by a senior PPP leader to convey it to Nawaz Sharif that the president is fully prepared to immediately proceed on the pending issues like undoing of the 17th Amendment and the implementation of the Charter of Democracy (CoD).

The PML-N senator was told that the president has learnt the lesson from his past mistakes and is now willing to closely work with Nawaz Sharif to attain the common objectives as agreed in the CoD. The PPP leader, who besides being the member of parliament, is also a senior officer-bearer of the party, told the PML-N senator to assure Nawaz Sharif that now the president really means to do what should have been done soon after the February 2008 elections.

The source said that on Friday Zardari’s indirect message was conveyed to Mian Nawaz Sharif who, nevertheless, remained unimpressed. Instead, the source said, the PML-N Quaid’s immediate response was that Zardari is a non-serious person and is not trustworthy.

The PML-N Quaid and other party leaders remain deeply suspicious of President Zardari, who reneged on public commitments time and again during the last 16 months.

The PML-N senator, who was asked to deliver the president’s message to Nawaz Sharif, confided to this correspondent on condition of not being named that his suspicion is that President Zardari is now wooing the PML-N and its Quaid to strike a deal on the issue of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). But the senator was confident that his party would not compromise on the NRO issue and would oppose it tooth and nail both within parliament and outside.

President Zardari and Nawaz Sharif are scheduled to meet on October 26 after a gap almost a hundred days. They last met in mid-July at Jati Umra but their talks did not achieve any thing worthwhile.

The restoration of independent judiciary under Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, re-opening of the NRO issue, the Pakistan Army’s serious reservations over the Presidency-endorsed Kerry-Lugar Act, and the president’s waning popularity have weakened Zardari’s position.

President Zardari is in dire need of political support to consolidate his position but the PML-N is not prepared to trust him any more unless he immediately moves to get the 17th Amendment undone. Promises, commitments and assurances would not work this time, a party source said, adding “We would not let him (President Zardari) use us yet again”.

Justice Iftikhar rejects plot in capital’s posh area

PCO judges, bureaucrats benefited from policy made by Musharraf
By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has rejected the government’s offer of allotment of a residential plot worth Rs30 million in Islamabad, it is learnt.

GM Sikandar, former housing and works secretary and presently member of the federal services tribunal, told The News on Friday that in line with the government’s policy the housing ministry had issued an offer letter to the chief justice of Pakistan for the allotment of a 600 sq yard residential plot in I-8 Sector of Islamabad on August 10 this year but the same day the government had to cancel the allotment after Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry refused to accept it.

The housing ministry that had taken the initiative apparently to please the chief justice was given a dressing down and had to undo everything within hours.Sikandar confirmed that the ministry had also sought the list of other Supreme Court judges, who were to be provided the second residential plot in Islamabad in line with the official policy.

By surrendering his right protected under the stated government policy, Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry seems to have subtly rejected the plot politics of Pakistan, which enables a select few influential groups to get the lion’s share in state resources, leaving nothing for the poor and the needy.

Interestingly it was soon after the November 3, 2007 PCO of General Musharraf that the then ruling junta made the new policy whereby the judges of the Supreme Court were entitled to get two residential plots in Islamabad as was allowed to the federal secretaries and BS-22 officers of the federal government.

The immediate beneficiaries of the policy were all the five judges of the Supreme Court, who had taken oath under the PCO including Justice (retd) Abdul Hameed Dogar, Justice (retd) Nawaz Abbasi, Justice (retd) Faqir Muhammad Khokhar, Justice (retd) Javed Buttar and Justice (retd) Saeed Ashad. All these PCO judges were given additional residential plots within a few weeks of the November 3 episode.

Sources in the Federal Government Employees Housing Foundation (FGEHF) said that these PCO judges were even taken to D-12 sector to select the plots of their choice for their services to the dictator of the day.

A few weeks before November 3, 2007 the then Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had taken suo moto notice of the government’s decision to allot two residential plots to federal secretaries in Islamabad. While issuing notices to all concerned, Justice Iftikhar had questioned how the government could distribute the state land to a select group like sweets. But before he could decide the case, Musharraf imposed his unconstitutional PCO following which the PCO judges took no time to dismiss the suo moto notice. Consequently, they too got the additional plots.

It could be anybody’s guess as to what was the motive behind the present government’s initiative to offer on its own a residential plot to Justice Iftikhar in the posh sector whereas all others were given plots in D-12 where the value of a plot is around Rs7 million.

Justice Iftikhar’s response even surprised the mandarins of the housing ministry and the FGEHF. The housing ministry documents show that on August 10, 2009, the ministry approached Registrar Supreme Court Dr Faqir Hussain with a provisional offer letter for the allotment of plot in I-8 sector to Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. But within no time, the housing ministry got a response from the Registrar’s office, directing it to immediately withdraw the offer letter as the chief justice was not interested in the plot no matter what the government policy said.

The housing ministry immediately, the same day, got back to the Registrar informing him that the offer letter had been withdrawn as per direction of the Supreme Court. The ministry also submitted, “It is humbly clarified that the offer was made in pursuance of the package approved by the Prime Minister of Pakistan for BS-22 officers and the honourable Judges of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to remove the discrimination. Any embarrassment caused in this respect is deeply regretted.”

It might be a coincidence but the housing ministry issued the offer letter to the chief justice at a time when the Supreme Court is already seized with the suo moto case involving highly controversial allotments made by the present government through the FGEHF to a select class of bureaucrats, journalists and others.

The Supreme Court, which had referred the case to the government for an inquiry into these controversial allotments, has already been informed that most of these allotments, including those to government officials and journalists, were made in violation of the policy and in a non-transparent manner.

A senior housing ministry source said that the inquiry report also showed how a superior judiciary’s dismissal order of a writ petition seeking allotment of plots was used as a justification to make allotment of residential plots.

It should be mentioned here that in line with the government’s policy three of the Supreme Court judges who had re-joined the Supreme Court by accepting the Naek formula of re-appointment were also allotted plots in the D-12 sector last year.

People’s Party pushing favourites in cushy jobs

By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: After some highly controversial appointments of exiled friends on lucrative positions, the PPP-led coalition government is now pushing favourites and party loyalists for important jobs.

This is being done in such a hurry that in some cases, private recommendation letters on the PPP letterheads are also being forwarded, along with federal ministers’ directives, to different government agencies. Such party letters today make part of official files.

These appointments are being made in addition to those being processed through the Task Force on Recruitment, which is seen as the latest version of the previously ill reputed Peoples Placement Bureau.

The Task Force, as reported earlier, is headed by two political appointees and close associates of Asif Ali Zardari, one of them enjoying the status of a federal minister. It primarily deals with BS-1 to BS-16 appointments in the government departments.

Official documents, including directives issued by some of the federal ministers, available with The News, show it is yet another crude method of appointment, proving that favouritism instead of merit and the rule of law was being followed.

In one case, Information Minister Sherry Rehman, who is also acting as the health minister, has recommended the appointment of a PPP supporter in London as adviser, special assistant or consultant to the health minister or “against any suitable post falling under the health ministry”.

On a PPP letterhead, one Dr Mirza Ikhtiar Baig, deputy coordinator Peoples Business Forum, writes to the information minister on May 20: “Dear Ms Sherry Rehman: Dr Mukhtar Bhutto, a diehard PPP supporter, had close contacts with Shaheed Benazir Bhutto in London. Our Quaid also helped him in his medical studies in the UK. Dr Mukhtar Bhutto was a great support to me in my election campaign. I am forwarding his letter of request with his CV for your kind consideration for any suitable position with the request to kindly do the needful.”

The attached CV of the PPP supporter, which too is now part of official record, says: “I am a strong devotee of my beloved mother like the Pakistan People’s Party...” He sees the information minister as a “Roshan Meenar” for the party workers and hopes that he would not be disappointed and given the opportunity “to serve Pakistan and Pakistani, subsequently our Pakistan People’s Party”.

Following the receipt of the above recommendation, the information minister’s office formally referred the case to the secretary health under the signatures of Rao Tehsin Ali Khan, Director General, to information minister.

The recommendation letter of Dr Mirza Ikhtiar Baig and the CV of Dr Mukhtar Bhutto were also attached with the request formally referred to the secretary health. The letter issued by Sherry Rehman’s office on June 5 said: “Enclosed please find an application of Dr Mukhtar Bhutto, recommended by Dr Mirza Ikhtiar Baig, Deputy Coordinator, People’s Business Forum, requesting for appointment as Adviser/Special Assistant/Consultant to the Ministry of Health or any suitable alternative in the said Ministry....”

Since the health ministry could not appoint adviser, special assistant or consultant on its own and without the approval of the prime minister, it forwarded the minister’s directive, along with attached recommendation letter and the CV to all programme managers and project coordinators, leading health projects under the health ministry, with the request that they should indicate the position as per qualification of the PPP supporter for his appointment.

In yet another case, a PPP MNA Tasneem Ahmed Qureshi approached the health minister with a request that a serving income additional commissioner Dr Malik Muhammad Khan Awan should be appointed in any of the leading health ministry programmes.

Despite the fact that inviting such political interference into service matters by a serving bureaucrat tantamounts to misconduct under the Estacode — the book of law, rules, policies, etc, governing civil bureaucracy — still Sherry Rehman’s Director General Rao Tehsin Ali Khan wrote to the secretary health: “Enclosed please find a self-explanatory request of Dr Malik Muhammd Khan Awan, Additional Commissioner, Legal-I, Large Taxpayer Unit, Lahore, on the subject above (Requisition of services of Dr Malik Muhammad Khan Awan from Federal Board of Revenue to Ministry of Health) noted above. The minister has desired that a report may please be sent to this office for the issuance of orders of the minister.”

The health ministry in this case too, referred the minister’s directive, along with the taxman’s application, to all programme managers and project coordinators under it to indicate the vacant position as per Awan’s qualification for onward submission of a report to the health minister (read information minister).

Sherry Rehman, when contacted, denied that she had issued any such directive to any government department. When asked that the directives were issued by her office under the signatures of her DG, she expressed her ignorance, saying, “Not that I know of.”

The information minister said that MNAs and others, including journalists, bring job requests to her but she never compromises on merit and seeks appointments only through the Placement Bureau (she probably meant Task Force on Recruitment).

While there are reports of several other ministers involved in similar practices, Sherry Rehman’s case is interesting for the reason that she is one of the foreign qualified ministers, who during her journalistic carrier, has been reflecting on the issue of merit, good governance and the rule of law.

Seymour M. Hersh Article in New Yorker about Nuclear Weapons of Pakistan

Courtesy: http://www.newyorker.com

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton—whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs—added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

On April 29th, President Obama was asked at a news conference whether he could reassure the American people that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could be kept away from terrorists. Obama’s answer remains the clearest delineation of the Administration’s public posture. He was, he said, “gravely concerned” about the fragility of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. “Their biggest threat right now comes internally,” Obama said. “We have huge . . . national-security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.” The United States, he said, could “make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure—primarily, initially, because the Pakistan Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons’ falling into the wrong hands.”

The questioner, Chuck Todd, of NBC, began asking whether the American military could, if necessary, move in and secure Pakistan’s bombs. Obama did not let Todd finish. “I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort,” he said. “I feel confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands. O.K.?”

Obama did not say so, but current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis. At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities—goals that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistan Army, has long desired. In June, Congress approved a four-hundred-million-dollar request for what the Administration called the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, providing immediate assistance to the Pakistan Army for equipment, training, and “renovation and construction.”

The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust. Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India. (India’s first nuclear test took place in 1974, Pakistan’s in 1998.)

A senior Pakistani official who has close ties to Zardari exploded with anger during an interview when the subject turned to the American demands for more information about the arsenal. After the September 11th attacks, he said, there had been an understanding between the Bush Administration and then President Pervez Musharraf “over what Pakistan had and did not have.” Today, he said, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’état in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?” the official asked. “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

The ongoing consultation on nuclear security between Washington and Islamabad intensified after the announcement in March of President Obama’s so-called Af-Pak policy, which called upon the Pakistan Army to take more aggressive action against Taliban enclaves inside Pakistan. I was told that the understandings on nuclear coöperation benefitted from the increasingly close relationship between Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Kayani, his counterpart, although the C.I.A. and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have also been involved. (All three departments declined to comment for this article. The national-security council and the C.I.A. denied that there were any agreements in place.)

In response to a series of questions, Admiral Mullen acknowledged that he and Kayani were, in his spokesman’s words, “very close.” The spokesman said that Mullen is deeply involved in day-to-day Pakistani developments and “is almost an action officer for all things Pakistan.” But he denied that he and Kayani, or their staffs, had reached an understanding about the availability of American forces in case of mutiny or a terrorist threat to a nuclear facility. “To my knowledge, we have no military units, special forces or otherwise, involved in such an assignment,” Mullen said through his spokesman. The spokesman added that Mullen had not seen any evidence of growing fundamentalism inside the Pakistani military. In a news conference on May 4th, however, Mullen responded to a query about growing radicalism in Pakistan by saying that “what has clearly happened over the [past] twelve months is the continual decline, gradual decline, in security.” The Admiral also spoke openly about the increased coöperation on nuclear security between the United States and Pakistan: “I know what we’ve done over the last three years, specifically to both invest, assist, and I’ve watched them improve their security fairly dramatically. . . . I’ve looked at this, you know, as hard as I can, over a period of time.” Seventeen days later, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We have invested a significant amount of resources through the Department of Energy in the last several years” to help Pakistan improve the controls on its arsenal. “They still have to improve them,” he said.

In interviews in Pakistan, I obtained confirmation that there were continuing conversations with the United States on nuclear-security plans—as well as evidence that the Pakistani leadership put much less weight on them than the Americans did. In some cases, Pakistani officials spoke of the talks principally as a means of placating anxious American politicians. “You needed it,” a senior Pakistani official, who said that he had been briefed on the nuclear issue, told me. His tone was caustic. “We have twenty thousand people working in the nuclear-weapons industry in Pakistan, and here is this American view that Pakistan is bound to fail.” The official added, “The Americans are saying, ‘We want to help protect your weapons.’ We say, ‘Fine. Tell us what you can do for us.’ It’s part of a quid pro quo. You say, also, ‘Come clean on the nuclear program and we’ll insure that India doesn’t put pressure on it.’ So we say, ‘O.K.’ ”

But, the Pakistani official said, “both sides are lying to each other.” The information that the Pakistanis handed over was not as complete as the Americans believed. “We haven’t told you anything that you don’t know,” he said. The Americans didn’t realize that Pakistan would never cede control of its arsenal: “If you try to take the weapons away, you will fail.”

High-level coöperation between Islamabad and Washington on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal began at least eight years ago. Former President Musharraf, when I interviewed him in London recently, acknowledged that his government had held extensive discussions with the Bush Administration after the September 11th attacks, and had given State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures. Musharraf also confirmed that Pakistan had constructed a huge tunnel system for the transport and storage of nuclear weaponry. “The tunnels are so deep that a nuclear attack will not touch them,” Musharraf told me, with obvious pride. The tunnels would make it impossible for the American intelligence community—“Big Uncle,” as a Pakistani nuclear-weapons expert called it—to monitor the movements of nuclear components by satellite.

Safeguards have been built into the system. Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads (containing an enriched radioactive core) and their triggers (sophisticated devices containing highly explosive lenses, detonators, and krytrons) to be stored separately from each other and from their delivery devices (missiles or aircraft). The goal is to insure that no one can launch a warhead—in the heat of a showdown with India, for example—without pausing to put it together. Final authority to order a nuclear strike requires consensus within Pakistan’s ten-member National Command Authority, with the chairman—by statute, President Zardari—casting the deciding vote.

But the safeguards meant to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly could make the arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed the process and concluded that the triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled—at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb. A consultant to the intelligence community said that in one war-gamed scenario disaffected members of the Pakistani military could instigate a terrorist attack inside India, and that the ensuing crisis would give them “a chance to pick up bombs and triggers—in the name of protecting the assets from extremists.”

The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focussed on the warheads’ cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.

“The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads, some of their locations, and their command-and-control system,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans, so we could augment them in case of a breach of security,” he said. “We’re there to help the Pakistanis, but we’re also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile.” The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane, the former official said, and where the triggers could be sequestered. Admiral Mullen, asked about increased American insight into the arsenal, said, through his spokesman, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.” (A senior military officer added that the information, if it had been conveyed, would most likely “have gone to another government agency.”)

A spokesman for the Pakistani military said, in an official denial, “Pakistan neither needs any American unit for enhancing the security for its arsenal nor would accept it.” The spokesman added that the Pakistani military “has been providing protection to U.S. troops in a situation of crisis”—a reference to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror—“and hence is quite capable to deal with any untoward situation.”

Early this summer, a consultant to the Department of Defense said, a highly classified military and civil-emergency response team was put on alert after receiving an urgent report from American intelligence officials indicating that a Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray. The team, which operates clandestinely and includes terrorism and nonproliferation experts from the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the F.B.I., and the D.O.E., is under standing orders to deploy from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, within four hours of an alert. When the report turned out to be a false alarm, the mission was aborted, the consultant said. By the time the team got the message, it was already in Dubai.

In an actual crisis, would the Pakistanis give an American team direct access to their arsenal? An adviser to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency said that some analysts suspected that the Pakistani military had taken steps to move elements of the nuclear arsenal “out of the count”—to shift them to a storage facility known only to a very few—as a hedge against mutiny or an American or Indian effort to seize them. “If you thought your American ally was telling your enemy where the weapons were, you’d do the same thing,” the adviser said.

“Let me say this about our nuclear deterrent,” President Zardari told me, when asked about any recent understandings between Pakistan and the United States. “We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity. We’re all big boys.”

Zardari and I met twice, first in his office, in the grand but isolated Presidential compound in Islamabad, and then, a few days later, alone over dinner in his personal quarters. Zardari, who became President after the assassination, in December, 2007, of his charismatic wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, spent nearly eleven years in jail on corruption charges. He is widely known in Pakistan as Mr. Ten Per Cent, a reference to the commissions he allegedly took on government contracts when Bhutto was in power, and is seen by many Pakistanis as little more than a crook who has grown too close to America; his approval ratings are in the teens. He is chatty but guarded, proud but defensive, and, like many Pakistanis, convinced that the United States will always favor India. Over dinner, he spoke of his suspicions regarding his wife’s death. He said that, despite rumors to the contrary, he would complete his five-year term.

Zardari spoke with derision about what he depicted as America’s obsession with the vulnerability of his nation’s nuclear arsenal. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us,” he said. “The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.”

Zardari offered some advice to Barack Obama: instead of fretting about nuclear security in Pakistan, his Administration should deal with the military disparity between Pakistan and India, which has a much larger army. “You should help us get conventional weapons,” he said. “It’s a balance-of-power issue.”

In May, Zardari, at the urging of the United States, approved a major offensive against the Taliban, sending thirty thousand troops into the Swat Valley, which lies a hundred miles northwest of Islamabad. “The enemy that we were fighting in Swat was made up of twenty per cent thieves and thugs and eighty per cent with the same mind-set as the Taliban,” Zardari said. He depicted the operation as a complete success, but added that his government was not “ready” to kill all the Taliban. His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. “Money is the best incentive,” he said. “They can be rented.”

Zardari’s view of the Swat offensive was striking, given that many Pakistanis had been angered by the excessive use of force and the ensuing refugee crisis. The lives of about two million people were torn apart, and, during a summer in which temperatures soared to a hundred and twenty degrees, hundreds of thousands of civilians were crowded into government-run tent cities. Idris Khattak, a former student radical who now works with Amnesty International, said in Peshawar that residents had described nights of heavy, indiscriminate bombing and shelling, followed in the morning by Army sweeps. The villagers, and not the Taliban, had been hit the hardest. “People told us that the bombing the night before was a signal for the Taliban to get out,” he said.

Zardari did not dispute that there were difficulties in the refugee camps—the heat, the lack of facilities. But he insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson and would not “let the Taliban back into their cities.”

Rahimullah Yusufzai, an eminent Pakistani journalist, who has twice interviewed Osama bin Laden, had a different explanation for the conditions that led to the offensive. “The Taliban were initially trying to win public support in Swat by delivering justice and peace,” Yusufzai said. “But when they got into power they went crazy and became brutal. Many are from the lowest ranks of society, and they began killing and terrorizing their opponents. The people were afraid.”

The turmoil did not end with the Army’s invasion. “Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing,” Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. “They told us they hated what they were doing—‘We were trained to fight Indians.’ ” But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. “They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed—just like the Americans with their Predator missiles,” Yusufzai said. “What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.” What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day “good-will visit” to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively.

Last year, the Washington Times ran an article about the Pressler Amendment, a 1985 law cutting off most military aid to Pakistan as long as it continued its nuclear program. The measure didn’t stop Pakistan from getting the bomb, or from buying certain weapons, but it did reduce the number of Pakistani officers who were permitted to train with American units. The article quoted Major General John Custer as saying, “The older military leaders love us. They understand American culture and they know we are not the enemy.” The General’s assessment provoked a barrage of e-mail among American officers with experience in Pakistan, and a former member of a Special Forces unit provided me with copies. “The fact that a two-star would make a statement [like] that . . . is at best naïve and actually pure bullshit,” a senior Special Forces officer on duty in Pakistan wrote. He went on:

I have met and interacted with the entire military staff from General Kayani on down and all the general officers on their joint staff and in all the services, and I haven’t spoken to one that “loves us”—whatever that means. In fact, I have read most of the TS [top secret] assessments of all their General Officers and I haven’t read one that comes close to their “loving” us. They play us for everything they can get, and we trip over ourselves trying to give them everything they ask for, and cannot pay for.

Some military men who know Pakistan well believe that, whatever the officer corps’s personal views, the Pakistan Army remains reliable. “They cannot be described as pro-American, but this doesn’t mean they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on,” Brian Cloughley, who served six years as Australia’s defense attaché to Pakistan and is now a contributor to Jane’s Sentinel, told me. “The chance of mutiny is slim. Were this to happen, there would be the most severe reaction” by special security units in the Pakistani military, Cloughley said. “But worry feeds irrationality, and the international consequences could be dire.”

The recollections of Bush Administration officials who dealt with Pakistan in the first round of nuclear consultations after September 11th do not inspire confidence. The Americans’ main contact was Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the agency that is responsible for nuclear strategy and operations and for the physical security of the weapons complex. At first, a former high-level Bush Administration official told me, Kidwai was reassuring; his professionalism increased their faith in the soundness of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and its fail-safe procedures. The Army was controlled by Punjabis who, the Americans thought, “did not put up with Pashtuns,” as the former Bush Administration official put it. (The Taliban are mostly Pashtun.) But by the time the official left, at the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, he had a much darker assessment: “They don’t trust us and they will not tell you the truth.”

No American, for example, was permitted access to A. Q. Khan, the metallurgist and so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, who traded crucial nuclear-weapons components on the international black market. Musharraf placed him under house arrest in early 2004, claiming to have been shocked to learn of Khan’s dealings. At the time, it was widely understood that those activities had been sanctioned by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.). Khan was freed in February, although there are restrictions on his travel. (In an interview last year, Kidwai told David Sanger, for his book “The Inheritance,” that “our security systems are foolproof,” thanks to technical controls; Sanger noted that Bush Administration officials were “not as confident in private as they sound in public.”)

A former State Department official who worked on nuclear issues with Pakistan after September 11th said that he’d come to understand that the Pakistanis “believe that any information we get from them would be shared with others—perhaps even the Indians. To know the command-and-control processes of their nuclear weapons is one thing. To know where the weapons actually are is another thing.”

The former State Department official cited the large Pakistan Air Force base outside Sargodha, west of Lahore, where many of Pakistan’s nuclear-capable F-16s are thought to be stationed. “Is there a nuke ready to go at Sargodha?” the former official asked. “If there is, and Sargodha is the size of Andrews Air Force Base, would we know where to go? Are the warheads stored in Bunker X?” Ignorance could be dangerous. “If our people don’t know where to go and we suddenly show up at a base, there will be a lot of people shooting at them,” he said. “And even if the Pakistanis may have told us that the triggers will be at Bunker X, is it true?”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recently retired after three years as the Department of Energy’s director of intelligence and counter-intelligence, preceded by two decades at the C.I.A., wrote vividly about the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends,” Mowatt-Larssen wrote. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan. . . . Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” in America’s security.

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. “If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he’s lying,” he said. “The Pakistanis wouldn’t share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away.”

Sultan Amir Tarar, known to many as Colonel Imam, is the archetype of the disillusioned Pakistani officer. Tarar spent eighteen years with the I.S.I. in Afghanistan, most of them as an undercover operative. In the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, in the eighties, he worked closely with C.I.A. agents, and liked the experience. “They were honest and thoughtful and provided the finest equipment,” Tarar said during an interview in Rawalpindi. He spoke with pride of shaking hands with Robert Gates in Afghanistan in 1985. Gates, now the Secretary of Defense, was then a senior C.I.A. official. “I’ve heard all about you,” Gates said, according to Tarar. “Good or bad?” “Oh, my. All good,” Gates replied. Tarar’s view changed after the Russians withdrew and, in his opinion, “the Americans abandoned us.” When I asked if he’d seen “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the movie depicting that abandonment and a Texas congressman’s futile efforts to change the policy, Tarar laughed and said, “I’ve seen Charlie Wilson. I didn’t need to see the movie.”

Tarar, who retired in 1995 and has a son in the Army, believed—as did many Pakistani military men—that the American campaign to draw Pakistan deeper into the war against the Taliban would backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us,” he said. If the Obama Administration persists, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse. Every Pakistani will then be his own nuclear bomb—a suicide bomber,” Tarar said. “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage. People there will flee to the big cities like Lahore and Islamabad.”

Tarar believed that the Obama Administration had to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that meant direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Tarar knew Mullah Omar well. “Omar trained as a young man in my camp in 1985,” he told me. “He was physically fit and mission-oriented—a very honest man who was a practicing Muslim. Nothing beyond that. He was a Talib—a student, and not a mullah. But people respected him. Today, among all the Afghan leaders, Omar has the biggest audience, and this is the right time for you to talk to him.”

Speaking to Tarar and other officers gave a glimpse of the acrimony at the top of the Pakistani government, which has complicated the nuclear equation. Tarar spoke bitterly about the position that General Kayani found himself in, carrying out the “corrupt” policies of the Americans and of Zardari, while Pakistan’s soldiers “were fighting gallantly in Swat against their own people.”

A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. Shaheen Sehbai, a senior editor of the newspaper International, said that Zardari’s “problem is that he’s besieged domestically on all sides, and he thinks only the Americans can save him,” and, as a result, “he’ll open his pants for them.” Sehbai noted that Kayani’s term as Army chief ends in the fall of 2010. If Zardari tried to replace him before then, Kayani’s colleagues would not accept his choice, and there could be “a generals’ coup,” Sehbai said. “America should worry more about the structure and organization of the Army—and keep it intact.”

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the director general of the I.S.I. in the late eighties and worked with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Gul, who is retired, is a devout Muslim and had been accused by the Bush Administration of having ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda—allegations he has denied. “What would happen if, in a crisis, you tried to get—or did not get—our nuclear triggers? What happens then?” Gul asked when we met. “You will have us as an enemy, with the Chinese and Russians behind us.”

If Pakistani officers had given any assurances about the nuclear arsenal, Gul said, “they are cheating you and they would be right to do so. We should not be aiding and abetting Americans.”

Persuading the Pakistan Army to concentrate on fighting the Taliban, and not India, is crucial to the Obama Administration’s plans for the region. There has been enmity between India and Pakistan since 1947, when Britain’s withdrawal led to the partition of the subcontinent. The state of Kashmir, which was three-quarters Muslim but acceded to Hindu-majority India, has been in dispute ever since, and India and Pakistan have twice gone to war over the territory. Through the years, the Pakistan Army and the I.S.I. have relied on Pakistan-based jihadist groups, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, to carry out a guerrilla war against the Indians in Kashmir. Many in the Pakistani military consider the groups to be an important strategic reserve.

A retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who worked with his C.I.A. counterparts to track down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that he was deeply troubled by the prospect of Pakistan ceding any control over its nuclear deterrent. “Suppose the jihadis strike at India again—another attack on the parliament. India will tell the United States to stay out of it, and ‘We’ll sort it out on our own,’ ” he said. “Then there would be a ground attack into Pakistan. As we begin to react, the Americans will be interested in protecting our nuclear assets, and urge us not to go nuclear—‘Let the Indians attack and do not respond!’ They would urge us instead to find those responsible for the attack on India. Our nuclear arsenal was supposed to be our savior, but we would end up protecting it. It doesn’t protect us,” he said.

“My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted,” the former officer concluded. “The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

Pakistan’s fears about the United States coöperating with India are not irrational. Last year, Congress approved a controversial agreement that enabled India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States without joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making India the only non-signatory to the N.P.T. permitted to do so. Concern about the Pakistani arsenal has since led to greater coöperation between the United States and India in missile defense; the training of the Indian Air Force to use bunker-busting bombs; and “the collection of intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal,” according to the consultant to the intelligence community. (The Pentagon declined to comment.)

I flew to New Delhi after my stay in Pakistan and met with two senior officials from the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s national intelligence agency. (Of course, as in Pakistan, no allegation about the other side should be taken at face value.) “Our worries are about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan,” one of the officials said. “Not because we are worried about the mullahs taking over the country; we’re worried about those senior officers in the Pakistan Army who are Caliphates”—believers in a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state. “We know some of them and we have names,” he said. “We’ve been watching colonels who are now brigadiers. These are the guys who could blackmail the whole world”—that is, by seizing a nuclear weapon.

The Indian intelligence official went on, “Do we know if the Americans have that intelligence? This is not in the scheme of the way you Americans look at things—‘Kayani is a great guy! Let’s have a drink and smoke a cigar with him and his buddies.’ Some of the men we are watching have notions of leading an Islamic army.”

In an interview the next afternoon, an Indian official who has dealt diplomatically with Pakistan for years said, “Pakistan is in trouble, and it’s worrisome to us because an unstable Pakistan is the worst thing we can have.” But he wasn’t sure what America could do. “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans,” he said. “I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

India and Pakistan, he added, have had back-channel talks for years in an effort to resolve the dispute over Kashmir, but “Pakistan wants talks for the sake of talks, and it does not carry out the agreements already reached.” (In late October, Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, publicly renewed an offer of talks, but tied it to a request that Pakistan crack down on terrorism; Pakistan’s official response was to welcome the overture.)

The Indian official, like his counterparts in Pakistan, believed that Americans did not appreciate what his government had done for them. “Why did the Pakistanis remove two divisions from the border with us?” He was referring to the shifting of Pakistani forces, at the request of the United States, to better engage the Taliban. “It means they have confidence that we will not take advantage of the situation. We deserve a pat on the back for this.” Instead, the official said, with a shrug, “you are too concerned with your relationship with Pakistan.”

Pervez Musharraf lives in unpretentious exile with his wife in an apartment in London, near Hyde Park. Officials who had dealt with him cautioned that, along with his many faults, he had a disarmingly open manner. At the beginning of our talk, I asked him why, on a visit to Washington in late January, he had not met with any senior Obama Administration officials. “I did not ask for a meeting because I was afraid of being told no,” he said. At another point, Musharraf, dressed casually in slacks and a sports shirt, said that he had been troubled by the American-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. “Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud,” Musharraf told me. “He’ll do anything to save himself. He’s not a patriot and he’s got no love for Pakistan. He’s a third-rater.”

Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn’t think the Army was capable of mutiny—not the Army he knew. “There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don’t think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These ‘fundos’ were disliked and not popular.”

He added, “Muslims think highly of Obama, and he should use his acceptability—even with the Taliban—and try to deal with them politically.”

Musharraf spoke of two prior attempts to create a fundamentalist uprising in the Army. In both cases, he said, the officers involved were arrested and prosecuted. “I created the strategic force that controls all the strategic assets—eighteen to twenty thousand strong. They are monitored for character and for potential fundamentalism,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that things had changed since he’d left office. “People have become alarmed because of the Taliban and what they have done,” he said. “Everyone is now alarmed.”

The rise in militancy is a sensitive subject, and many inside Pakistan insist that American fears, and the implied threat to the nuclear arsenal, are overwrought. Amélie Blom, a political sociologist at Lahore University of Management Sciences, noted that the Army continues to support an unpopular President. “The survival of the coalition government shows that the present Army leadership has an interest in making it work,” she said in an e-mail.

Others are less sure. “Nuclear weapons are only as safe as the people who handle them,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said.

The current offensive in South Waziristan marked a significant success for the Obama Administration, which had urged Zardari to take greater control of the tribal areas. There was a risk, too—that the fighting would further radicalize Pakistan. Last week, another Pakistan Army general was the victim of a drive-by assassination attempt, as he was leaving his home in Islamabad. Since the Waziristan operation was announced, more than three hundred people have been killed in a dozen terrorist attacks. “If we push too hard there, we could trigger a social revolution,” the Special Forces adviser said. “We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two.” He added, “The Pakistani military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.” More escalation in Pakistan, he said, “will take us to the brink.”

During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown. In the past, military officers, politicians, and journalists routinely served Johnnie Walker Black during our talks, and drank it themselves. This time, even the most senior retired Army generals offered only juice or tea, even in their own homes. Officials and journalists said that soldiers and middle-level officers were increasingly attracted to the preaching of Zaid Hamid, who joined the mujahideen and fought for nine years in Afghanistan. On CDs and on television, Hamid exhorts soldiers to think of themselves as Muslims first and Pakistanis second. He claims that terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year were staged by India and Western Zionists, aided by the Mossad. Another proselytizer, Dr. Israr Ahmed, writes a column in the Urdu press in which he depicts the Holocaust as “divine punishment,” and advocates the extermination of the Jews. He, too, is said to be popular with the officer corps.

A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. “They’ve penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army,” he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.

“Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” the Obama Administration official asked. “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.”

US given a ‘computer look’: Hersh

WASHINGTON: The United States sought ‘some control, some insight’ into Pakistan’s nuclear command and control system as a means to encourage India to reduce troops at the eastern border, journalist Seymour Hersh told Dawn.

In an interview in Washington, Mr Hersh said that such an arrangement was needed to allow Islamabad to focus on the fight against the extremists along the Afghan border.

In his article in The New Yorker magazine, Mr Hersh claimed that the United States had a covert team ready to fly into Pakistan at a moment’s notice and defend nuclear installations from possible militant attacks.

Mr Hersh’s claims caused an angry reaction in Islamabad where Pakistani officials and the US Ambassador, Anne Patterson, rejected his report as ‘false and baseless’.

Mr Hersh also wrote that he had evidence the US administration had been working on ‘highly sensitive understandings’ with Pakistan’s military that would let the US military provide ‘added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis’.

Mr Hersh claimed that a ‘highly classified’ emergency response team had already been activated within the past few months in response to a report that a Pakistani nuclear component had ‘gone astray’.

He pointed out that a good look at the US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen’s recent testimonies at Congress showed that the US and Pakistan had had three years of contacts on this issue.

‘We were given access, a computer look. I am not saying Americans were running around with cameras and were checking out things with their eyes.’

Mr Hersh claimed that this computer access was given in March or April, after the Obama administration finalised its Af-Pak policy.

The policy required Pakistan to deploy more troops at the Afghan border to go after the Taliban.

The Americans, he said, wanted the Indians to pull away first, so that Pakistan could focus on the Afghan border. ‘The Indians said, no. We have 80 nuke weapons pointed at us, we cannot pull back.’

The Americans thought they could encourage the Indians to do so if somehow they had ‘some control or insight into Pakistan’s nuclear command and control system,’ Mr Hersh said.

‘The idea is to reassure the Indians that we are in a position to prevent someone from doing something crazy,’ he said. ‘If the Indians are satisfied, it will allow Pakistan to focus on the Afghan border.’

To enable the Indians to reach that point of comfort, the Americans needed to ‘reassure India that nothing crazy will not happen. After all only target of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is India, not America,’ said Mr Hersh.

The new arrangement would also allow Pakistani military commanders to ‘call us if they are worried about the loyalty of some their troops’ deployed at the nuclear installations, he said.

The Americans also told the Pakistani commanders that ‘if a group of crazies gets hold of a warhead, you can call us’.

Mr Hersh admitted that from the American point of view, it would be better if Pakistan had no nuclear bombs, but this arrangement was not about disarming Pakistan.

Mr Hersh rejected the suggestion that he was anti-Pakistan and that’s why he was writing such articles.

‘I am not anti-Pakistan. There’s a difference between policy and people. The Pakistanis are unhappy with American policies. American people are always welcomed in Pakistan.’

Asked about his claim that a Pakistani nuclear component had recently ‘gone astray’, Mr Hersh said he heard ‘about something going missing, a loose nuke, a trigger missing’.

He said there’s a special US team which provided guidance to the US ambassador in Islamabad and used a highly classified code. ‘But they are no shooters. They just provide guidance.’

Mr Hersh said he met President Asif Ali Zardari twice while he was in Islamabad working on his article, ‘once for a background talk, then at a dinner. Both meetings took place at the presidential palace in Islamabad’.

At the dinner, ‘we talked about a lot of stuff’, he said. ‘Did he confirm your findings on Pakistan’s nuclear installations?’ he was asked.

‘Obviously, at some point I discussed exactly what I was doing and what I learned. He said what he said. We have to please the big brother.’

‘But the government later rejected your story as baseless?’ ‘I understand that a story like this gets denied,’ said Mr Hersh.

The journalist, who also interviewed Gen Pervez Musharraf for the article, said he believed the former Pakistani president was ‘a disarming fellow, very direct. I liked him, liked him a lot. He is a very likeable man, straightforward. More than I thought’.

‘Did Mr Musharraf say he allowed Washington access to Pakistan’s nuclear installations?’ ‘I wrote what I wrote. Are the words that came out are the words I meant? Yes, of course.’

Nuclear Command Authority Ordinance being made law

By Rauf Klasra

ISLAMABAD: In an obvious bid to address international concerns about the safety of nuclear assets in Pakistan, the Chairman NA Standing Committee on Defence MNA Azra Fazal Pechuho, is rushing the report of her 17-member committee to the National Assembly today (Wednesday) to seek immediate legal cover to the Nuclear Command Authority Ordinance 2007.

Growing international concern over the much hyped issue of safety of Pakistan’s nuclear assets particularly in the wake of the deadly attack on the GHQ by terrorists, followed by a full blown controversy stirred by a recent scathing article by Pulitzer winner journalist Seymour Hersh, was said to have forced top leadership to urgently get the now two-year old ordinance to be immediately wrought into law to allay international fears, both real and imaginary.

According to the recommended committee draft, the president will be the chairman of the Authority with the prime minister as the vice chairman while ministers for foreign affairs, defence, finance, interior, and three services chiefs, chairman joint chiefs of staff committee, DG Strategic Planning Division (SPD) will be its members.

The nuclear command authority is being given sweeping powers under the clause of “indemnity’ as no law suite, prosecution, or other legal proceedings shall lie against the authority, its chairman, members and employees in respect of anything, which is done in a good faith or intended to be done under this law or the rules, instructions or directions made or issued.

The Authority shall implement measures and assist the federal government pursuant to any obligation on Pakistan relating to non-proliferation, safety, security, accidents, terrorism etc. The NA committee has recommended five minor amendments in the original bill. The Authority would have the powers to authorize possession and use of firearms to security force personnel who are in the service of the Authority.

The government is also tabling the “compelling reasons” in the lower house along with the report of the committee to re-emphasize the urgent need to enact this bill, which became a mandatory step after Pakistan went nuclear in 1998 and why it was necessary to bring this law to the Parliament to address the concerns of the international community.

But, the new law is silent over the important issue of who would hold the power to delay the pushing of the button in case of a nuclear threat from any country in a state of war. The law aims at protecting Pakistan’s nuclear assets and its secrets and whosoever, including uniformed or civilian functionary, will breach the security or the secrecy would be punishable with a minimum of 25-year jail term. A session judge notified by the federal government shall have the jurisdiction to try offences under this law.

All the officers and employees, advisors, consultants and any other person appointed by the Authority in connection with the affairs of the Authority and affairs of the strategic organizations coming under the control and management of the Authority shall execute declaration of the fidelity and secrecy in prescribed manner.

Under the new law, the Authority shall have the powers to perform all such functions that are necessary to implement the objects and purpose of this law. It will exercise complete command and control over all nuclear space related technologies, systems and matters. It will supervise, manage, and coordinate the administration, management control and audit of budget, programs and projects etc. It will take measures regarding employees in respect of their movement, communication, privacy, assembly or association, in the public interest or the interest of the integrity, security or the defence of Pakistan or friendly relations with foreign states and public order.

It will also ensure security and safety of nuclear establishment, nuclear materials and to safeguard all information and technology relating to said matters. The Authority will have also to carry out functions of fact finding, inquiry, investigation, prosecution, etc of offences under the law.

Meanwhile, the government has attached a statement of objective with the bill to inform the parliamentarians why it was important to enact this law. It said, “Nuclear Authority was created with a wide mandate in respect of all issues relating to nuclear and space technologies and to matters including the jurisdiction to regulate and administer the affairs of the strategic organizations and all the organization working in the strategic areas should be formally linked. The authority was also set up to ensure effective penalties under the law to deter any possibility, negligence, attempted proliferation, violation of rules etc.

It said, “The National Command Authority Ordinance provides comprehensive legal basis for the functions and powers of the NCA, persons working under it. It also said that the law demonstrated that Pakistan would continue to exercise full and complete control, security and safety measures all over the matters concerning nuclear and space technologies, nuclear establishments, nuclear system, nuclear material, relevant personnel and related information etc.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Dr Babar Awan will table the bill in the NA on Wednesday for its approval before sending it to the Senate of Pakistan before President Zardari gets to sign it into law. The committee headed by Dr Azra (sister of President Asif Ali Zardari) included Nawab Abdul Ghani Talpur, Amir Ali Magsi, Bilal Virk, Sardar Mehtab Ahmed Khan, Fasial Saleh Hayat, Ch Wajhat Hussain, Syed Haider Ali Shah, Jawad Hussain, Ayaz Amir, Talib Hassan Nakai, Begum Ishrat Ashraf, Abdul Wahid Soomro, Gulam Mujtaba Kharal and others.

Hersh stands by his article, quotes

Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who created a major stir in Pakistan, the US and around the world by his investigative article on the Pakistani nuclear programme in ‘The New Yorker’, defended his claims and observations in a major interview to Geo TV on Tuesday.

Talking to famous TV anchor Dr Shahid Masood and Group Editor of The News Shaheen Sehbai, Hersh said he had not only double checked the quotes of President Asif Zardari and Pakistani officials but he even had written proof of what was told to him.

“Not even President Zardari but even former president Musharraf was sent all the quotes that were published and they reconfirmed them. Even officials who were not named were asked and the facts were checked,” Hersh said.

He disclosed not one but many special teams had been prepared by the US to deal with any situation in Pakistan in which the nuclear weapons could land in wrong hands. He was asked by Shaheen Sehbai whether he trusted the former president Musharraf or current President Zardari more qualified to control the nuclear button in Pakistan.

Hersh jokingly said: “Shaheen, I trust you more than both of them but I will not answer this question as I do not want to commit suicide.” Dr Masood asked Hersh as to who had issued the false alarm which caused a US hit squad, as reported by Hersh, to fly out of Maryland and land in Dubai where it was stopped because the alarm was found to be false.

Hersh said the alarm about the missing component of the Pakistani nuke programme was raised by the US embassy in Islamabad but it was found to be a false alarm. Nevertheless a US team had arrived in Dubai.

Hersh did not describe the team as a ‘hit squad’ but said the team had experts who wanted to help Pakistan and there were several teams in the US which were ready for such situations.

He was asked about the quotes of former president Musharraf about President Zardari in which he was called a criminal, a fraud and a third rater.Hersh said he had not only quoted Musharraf correctly but had withheld many other comments which he found more disparaging and did not report them.

One Hundred corruption cases to reopen in 25 days

By Ansar Abbasi

ISLAMABAD: Over 100 corruption and criminal cases involving many top politicians and bureaucrats, which were settled under the controversial NRO after February 2, 2008, would automatically reopen after 25 days on Nov 28.

NAB documents and information collected from other sources reveal that not only President Asif Ali Zardari but most of his confidants and top political and bureaucratic aides benefited from the NRO after February 2, 2008, after the controversial ordinance had completed its constitutional life of 120 days.

The Presidency’s decision not to enact the NRO with effect from February 2, 2008 would reopen all the cases settled after that date as per the Supreme Court decision. Documents reveal that under the NRO reference (ref) 91/2004 against Rehman Malik, the present interior minister, for alleged misuse of authority, was closed down on March 3, 2008. On the same day, another case (ref 92/2004) against Rehman Malik for alleged receipt of two cars from Toyota Motors as illegal gratification on account of purchase of official vehicles was also closed under the NRO.

On March 5, 2008, five cases (ref Nos 14/2001, 6/2000, 13/2001, 41/2001 and 23/2000) against President Asif Ali Zardari were closed down. These cases ware about assets beyond known source of income, illegal construction of a polo ground at the PM House and loss of national exchequer, alleged corruption and corrupt practices in the Green Tractor scheme, corruption and corrupt practices in the SGS case and corruption and corrupt practices in the ARY Gold case. Former principal secretary to the prime minister Saeed Mehdi and Shafi M Sehwani (who expired several years back) were involved in the Polo ground case. PPP MNA and former federal minister Yousuf Talpur and ex-chairman ADBP Badaruddin Zaidi were co-accused in the Green Tractor Scheme case. A former secretary, A R Siddiqi, was a co-accused with Zardari in the SGS case. In the ARY Gold case, former secretary commerce Aslam Hayat Qureshi, Principal Secretary to the President Salman Faruqi and former secretary finance and Pakistanís Executive Director at the World Bank Javed Talat are the co-accused. All these politicians, bureaucrats and their civilian (mostly businessman) co-accused were also acquitted on the same date, March 5, 2007. Though Yousuf Talpur’s name is reflected in the NAB’s list of NRO beneficiaries, he told the National Assembly on Tuesday that he did not take any benefit from the law.

On March 13, 2005, Zardari got acquittal from yet another case of kickback in pre-shipment, also known as the Cotechna case. Begum Nusrat Bhutto was co-accused in the case along with a government servant, Arif Siddiqui, both of whom were cleared on the same date. The BMW case, Murtaza murder case, drug case etc were also cleared after February 2008.

Former MNA and district Nazim DG Khan Sardar Mansoor Leghari was cleared under the NRO on March 19, 2008. A government servant, Sadiq Ali Khan, too was cleared on March 19, 2008. Anwar Saifullah, former petroleum minister, got acquittal in five different cases on May 7, 2008.

PPP Secretary General Jehangir Badar, former PPP MNA Mushtaq Awan and ex-chief secretary Punjab Javed Qureshi were acquitted after February 2008 in corruption and illegal appointment cases. The same was the case with the former NDFC chairman and Pakistan’s Ambassador to Iran MB Abbasi, ex-Pak Steel chairman Usman Farooqi and former IB chief Brigadier Imtiaz.

Former interior minister Aftab Khan Sherpao and former deputy speaker Nawaz Khokhar were acquitted under the NRO in July 2008. A PML-N MNA Rana Nazir too benefited from the NRO and got cleared in April 2008. Farzana Raja’s ex-husband Pir Mukramul Haq was acquitted of corruption cases after Feb 2008.

Other such NRO beneficiaries include Ibrar Hussain, Inamur Rehman Sehri, Habibullah Tasnim, Muhammad Saeed, Raees M Irshad, Ghulam Qadir Lakhan, Shafique Siddiqi, Ahmad Hussain, Iqbal Bangash, Khurshid Anwar, M Akbar, Ikramul Haq Mirza, A D Abbasi, Kh Farooq Ahmad, Rafique Shad, Sadiq Ali Khan, Ch Muhammad Aslam, Abdul Ghafoor Aslam, Muhammad Ahmad Baloch, Muhammad Ismail, Ahmed Khan, Atta Ullah Khan, Muhammad Farooq, Muzamil Hussain, Dawood Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Muhammad Amin, Abdul Ghafoor Dogar, Mushtaq Ahmad Baloch, Muhammad Iqbal, Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Ismail, Din Muhammad, Raheel J Qureshi, Murid Ahmed Baloch, Muhammad Farooq, Salim Raza, Muhammad Anwar, Muhammad Akbar, Arshad Mehmood, Mohiuddin Jameeli, Muhammad Ashfaq, Muhammad Zaheer Ahmed Khan, Iqbal Ahmed, Sadiq Ali Khan, Sikandar Ali Abbasi, Raja Zahid Hussain, Abdul Naeem Khan, Sh Muhammad Amin, Abdul Ghafoor Khan, Muhammad Ali, Abdul Hayee Qamar, Qazi Naeem Ahmad, Jaffar Muhammad etc.

Just how many lawyers were ‘friends’ of Dogar Court?Top legal guns accused of bilking Harris Steel

By Umar Cheema

ISLAMABAD: Former attorney general Latif Khosa is facing an allegation of having received a bribe for securing a friendly judgment from the former Dogar supreme court. Well, it transpires that he may soon have some august company as three other high profile lawyers, including an influential member of the ruling dispensation, have also been accused of a somewhat similar action by a business tycoon.

Sheikh Munir, a director of Haris Steel Industries, implicated in the Punjab Bank scandal, has submitted a dossier to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), exposing the names of the three legal gurus who allegedly robbed him blind, promising him a bailout through ‘friendly judges’ in the Abdul Hameed Dogar Supreme Court.

Although he invested heavily on more than three lawyers, those allegedly lined up with pledges to pursue his petition through the agency of friendly judges include a sitting minister, the legal guru of all dictators, Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, and former attorney general Justice (retd) Malik Qayyum.

“Pirzada assured us that he would win the case in the Islamabad High Court (IHC) due to his relations with Justice Sardar Aslam (the then Chief Justice of the IHC). The litigant paid a whopping Rs 40 million for the case and seeking a favourable decision. This chunk of money is apart from the dues claimed for various other applications filed,” Sheikh Munir’s statement said. But as the case was transferred to the Supreme Court, “Pirzada left us”.

Haris Steel Industries paid to the sitting minister (who is not being named because he has not yet given his side of the story to The News) equivalent to the sum handed to Pirzada, i.e. Rs 40 million. The reason for betting on this minister was his claim that “all the judges in the Supreme Court are known to me and, therefore, I can get a favourable decision.”

The fee paid to Malik Qayyum has not been mentioned by Munir because he does not “know the exact figure as this amount was paid by his brother Irfan Ali. But the director Haris Steel Industries said in his statement that Qayyum also echoed the line of the minister that he was known to the Supreme Court judges and could get the verdict he wished.

But the minister and Qayyum allegedly disappeared after accepting their ‘fees’, Munir said in his statement. “When the minister took his oath he left us. Malik Qayyum left us due to retirement of Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar.”

Talking to The News, Justice Qayyum denied having served as a counsel of the Harris Steel Industries, let alone receiving any fee and making any promises to get a favourable judgment. When approached Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada denied receiving such a big amount. About the allegation of jacking up his fees claiming his relations with judges, Pirzada said he never said so. “I don’t care for winning or losing. You know I have 50-year practice. I have never talked to any client about anything.”

When contacted by The News, the minister declined to comment till he had first read the document allegedly implicating him in the case. As the portion relating to his conduct was read out to him, he again refused to comment unless he had first personally read the contents of the letter sent to the NAB.

Other lawyers who were hired by Haris Steel were Waseem Sajjad and Irfan Qadir, who were reportedly paid Rs20 million each. Munir’s statement however does not carry any allegation of wrong doing against this duo.