THOSE of us who still get our news from the newspapers first thing in the morning (and not from the 24/7 news channels) have to believe, like Alice's White Queen, six impossible things before breakfast. What else is one to make of some of the news that has been sent our way?

The fully fledged military operation launched in Swat to rid the valley of the dreaded militants ends without the capture of a single culprit. Peace has returned, it seems, and Independence Day is celebrated with fervour but those who held the valley hostage for years are still at large. Is it not too early to declare victory or was the capture of the leadership never a goal to begin with? Only this conspiracy theory of sorts could explain the present complacency.

Waziristan, on the other hand, continues to be a no-go area and so far the Pakistani state has made no final decision for when an operation will be launched there. Nevertheless, the Taliban leadership based in the out-of-bounds agency is in sight and under attack. Baitullah Mehsud has been taken out. Better still, his organisation is in disarray with his various heirs apparent bogged down in an internecine conflict ala the Mughal offspring of yore to grab the entire empire. Even his spokesman has been captured.

The feverish excitement over the last is a bit hard to swallow for it is akin to the PML-N celebrating a parliamentary resolution to try Mohammad Ali Durrani, the information minister under Pervez Musharraf, for the emergency imposed on Nov 3. It truly is a case of killing the messenger. And in between all of this comes the news that security forces have arrested Qari Saifullah, the 'lieutenant' and 'right-hand man' of Baitullah.

But since when did Saifullah's utility to Baitullah become his claim to fame? Let us not forget that the former's high-profile scandalous past predates Baitullah's jihadi career by leaps and bounds. An offspring of the country's Kashmir jihad, as far back as 1995 he was ar

rested for dabbling in the Maj-Gen Zaheer Abbasi-led conspiracy to overthrow the then PPP government.

Details of what followed next are ominous as well as hazy he managed to get released, take over as the head of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami before moving to Afghanistan to train recruits. But with a perfect sense of timing he left the country shortly before the US troops arrived and appeared in Dubai in 2004 only to be nabbed and sent back to Pakistan. Three years later he was once again 'freed' till his bad old habits led to his arrest — once again — for involvement in the bombing of Benazir Bhutto's homecoming parade on Oct 18, 2007.

With such a track record, however, it is still difficult to figure out if he is part of the evil Taliban that the state is gunning for or the good ones, which some ruling elements still want to hang on to as some cling to jewellery — insurance for a rainy day when they may be left high and dry by those who provide them sustenance and shelter.

Perhaps such events and such people are not worthy of a Lewis Carroll reference. It is far better to stick to clichéd and hackneyed Hollywood for parallels or analogies. And Saifullah's capture does bring to mind the kitschy Casablanca and its immortal dialogue “round up the usual suspects”.

But then why stop with Saifullah? Take for instance the recent travails of Swat's Sufi Mohammad. The man was arrested in 2002 on his return from a country that he had crossed into illegally to fight an invasion that Pakistan was bound to support under the United Nations charter. He then skulked in custody for the next six years while his son-in-law charted his own course, which apparently gave Sufi's a second lease of political life.

The elderly man was released in early 2008 ostensibly to give dialogue a chance — as if the Musharraf regime had been all about fighting the Taliban and not deal-making. But within months of coming into power and weeks of talking to Sufi, the ANP-led provincial government 'discovered' that father-in-law had little control over the Fazlullah-led Taliban (so what if most observers and journalists had been saying this since the son-in-law had started his FM broadcasts back in 2006?) and held direct talks with the latter, which led to a short-lived ceasefire.

Why then later the same party decided to sign a peace accord with the ineffectual Sufi, based on the faulty assumption that he would get the Taliban to disarm and bring the valley to peace is a question few have asked and no one has answered! How he acquired these miraculous powers to control the Swat Taliban within the short span of a year is probably a matter for science as were Superman's superhuman powers under the yellow sun of the earth.

So the deal was signed and then ditched because not only did Sufi fail to stop the rampaging Taliban, but he said in public things that he had been saying in public since he became a public figure — that he doesn't believe in democracy or the constitution. This was followed by an unexplained cross-country tour (he disappeared from Maidan and spent some time in Punjab before he returned to Peshawar and interacted with the media one day, which was when the authorities decided that enough was enough and arrested him) while a battle was raging on in his political home-ground.

As a result he is now the only tangible arrest from Swat after four months of fighting. If this is what a happy ending looks like, it is only so in the movie world of Casablanca where the orders of rounding up the “usual suspects” are given by the captain of the local police who in his own words, “[blows] with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.” (The film is set in French controlled Morocco during the Second World War.)