Pakistan Dawn
In at the deep end Kamran Shafi Tuesday, 09 Dec, 2008 | 11:23 AM PST |
First and foremost the matter of that mysterious (and threatening) telephone call to the President of Pakistan, allegedly from someone at the Indian Foreign Office, said between the lines to have been Pranab Mukherjee, the foreign minister, himself.
Needless to say, Mr Mukherjee has denied the report vehemently, which denial has been more vehemently rejected by Pakistan through its spokespersons, Farhatullah Babar weighing in too. Mr Babar is reported in the press as having said that 'President Asif Ali Zardari was phoned up from the Indian foreign ministry's authentic number and evidences in this respect have been imparted to India.'
Information Minister Sherry Rehman has spoken on the matter too, saying that the 'threatening phone call made to President Asif Ali Zardari had been processed, verified and cross-checked under an established procedure.' She is quoted as saying: 'In fact the identity of this particular call, as evident from the caller-line-identification device, showed that the call was placed from a verified official phone number of the Indian ministry of external affairs.'
Really now? Boggles the senses, what!
First my own personal recollection of the person of Pranab Mukherjee. I had the pleasure of calling on him three years or so ago, when he was defence minister and I was part of a delegation of Pakistani ex-soldiers visiting India as part of the India-Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace (IPSI), then so brilliantly run by that sterling man Brig Rao Abid Hamid, also of the HRCP.
I found Mr Mukherjee to be a thoughtful, very bright and very well-spoken man who chose his every word with great care. He maintained eye contact with us; addressed every question fully and with deliberation. There was no shilly-shallying in his manner. Most of all, he arrived for our meeting in his ministry's conference room exactly on time. Could a person such as he, having spent a lifetime in politics and government, have made such a call to the president of a country with which his had very difficult relations?
An aside: all the chiefs of the armed forces were also in the defence ministry at the time as we found when we saw three Ambassador staff cars, all with four-star plates in navy blue, light blue and red denoting the three services parked at the rear of the ministry building from whence enter ordinary mortals.
But back to the famous telephone call that made us go to Amreeka Bahadur for reassurances, et al. It may well be the case that in a fit of anger Pranab Mukherjee did indeed do the wrong thing and call our president. The onus of providing incontrovertible and undeniable proof is entirely on us.
It simply is not enough for Farhatullah Babar, good man though he is, and Sherry Rehman, as bright a person as she is, to say what they have said. In Mr Babar's case the 'evidences in this respect' are not only to be 'imparted' to India but to the rest of the world too, in every little detail so that some of the bashing that we are getting these days can be deflected towards India. In Ms Rehman's, it is important to tell the world the methodology that went into identifying the telephone number. Saying it was the 'caller-line-identification device' is simply not enough.
Indeed, the presidency, the Mother of All Agencies at any rate, should have a recording of the telephone call. It should be a simple matter to identify the voice speaking to Asif Zardari using existing state-of-the-art technology that can detect even the smallest inflection/speech pattern and match it with Mr Mukherjee's. If our government is right, it would hand a huge PR coup to Pakistan! If it is wrong, it would be another matter and add to the discomfort already being felt. From what seem like repeated kicks in the teeth administered so cruelly by high officials of our non-Nato ally, to open declarations of accepting India's version of the Mumbai events, to a newspaper like the Observer carrying a report that the Mumbai accused caught alive was indeed from within us, our country once again finds itself in at the deep end.
But how in God's name do we even attempt to keep our heads above water when we do not confront our own devils? How can we get out of the deadly and vicious cycle of events that are driving us, when we simply will not admit that there is filth under our own beds? We yell and scream at the world to believe us when we say we too are the victims of terror and yet we simply will not do enough to protect ourselves and the world from the evil that exists, and grows, among us.
As just one example, what earthly reason was there for the inadequate security of the Nato supply terminal right outside Peshawar which was blown up just yesterday, destroying 170 loaded trucks including 62 APCs? What the devil is going on?
I have said repeatedly that I am completely against the method in which the so-called war on terror is being waged, heartlessly and wantonly, by the American administration aided and abetted by us. But the government is completely on board, and has therefore allowed Nato supplies access through Pakistan. So why does it then not do its all to protect those supplies?
How difficult is it to station an infantry company and an armoured squadron around the terminal, and provide armed mobile escorts to the convoys? Why is there not even a wall around the privately run terminal, dash it all? Why are the pickets, situated on commanding positions all along the Jamrud-Landikotal road (along which Nato supplies have been hijacked repeatedly), not manned to keep an eye out for those intent on harming the convoys? Is this government too running with the hares and hunting with the hounds like the Commando?
When will we wake up; when will we realise that the final reckoning is here? And then we have the gall to suggest that we will move our troops from our western borders to face a belligerent India?
Stop press: news reports coming in as I write this suggest our security forces have attacked camps of the Lashkar-i-Taiba and its sister organisation in Azad Kashmir. We will never do the right thing on our own; we will only act after having our arm twisted.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges