The government, the military and the US, Islamabad, Oct 20.

No suspense novelist could have invented the events Pakistan lived through in 2011

An ambulance carries President Asif Ali Zardari through a dark and unsure Islamabad to a flight to Dubai in November. The image brings to mind the most grotesque Zardari removal scenarios. His departure follows the surfacing of a mysterious memo calling for Washington’s help against a Rawalpindi-led takeover. Rumours of a coup ensue.

Not quite the end, perhaps, but it was a rather befitting crescendo — or near-crescendo, as the script continued to unfold over the limited remainder of 2011 — to a year that brought the loudest theories out of conspiracy-tellers to feed the addicted. It left many praying for an anti-climax.

An ever-suspicious lot raised on mysterious or simply unexplained developments, Pakistanis were at their creative best in 2011 and had no shortage of actual incidents for inspiration. As the March 2012 election drew closer, the suspicion of secret plots being afoot grew constant.

In late December, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani asked in the National Assembly who had granted Osama bin Laden a Pakistani visa. By doing so he took the country on a trip down memory lane through the old transit lounge where exits are summarily stamped on elected government’s passports and interventionists are prone to take their own flights of fancy.

As it turned out, however, this was no farewell speech.

The army chief travelled to the tribal areas to support his soldiers and while there announced that he also supported democracy. The chief justice reassured the country that the days when courts would validate a coup were gone. The opposition leader advised against a step that could derail democracy.

But as trains came to a halt, stoves turned cold for want of energy and thousands turned out at political rallies chanting for change, the government was left to grapple with demands for an early election.

It was time for the administration to rediscover its reconciliatory streak, and the PM did so on the eve of Benazir Bhutto’s fourth death anniversary. He showered platitudes on opposition chief Nawaz Sharif for his efforts for democracy and dismissed talk of the removal of the army and intelligence chiefs.

But these latest palace intrigues were only the culmination of a year that began on a sordid note and was packed with one plot after another. Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer was gunned down as an alleged blasphemer on Jan 4. Three weeks later, American citizen and Central Intelligence Agency contractor Raymond Davis was arrested for shooting two Pakistanis dead in Lahore. He later bought his freedom.

Also in January, the series of gory killings of missing people in Balochistan resumed, many of them blamed on security agencies, and the year ended with dire warnings from Baloch leader Sardar Ataullah Mengal. But Pakistan’s attention was focussed on national security and foreign policy dramas.

And there was no shortage of these: the extermination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad by American soldiers; the terrorist attack on the PNS Mehran naval base; the murder of journalist Saleem Shahzad; the shenanigans revealed by the WikiLeaks Pakistan series; American accusations of support for the Haqqani network; the Nato air strike that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in November. They provided a tiny glimpse into the worlds of geopolitics and global terrorism and counter-terrorism, areas wrapped in layers upon layers of secrecy.

Few of those at the helm could escape suspicion or blame, especially after the Nato strike. So Pakistan cut supplies to Nato forces, boycotted the Bonn conference on Afghanistan and made the Americans vacate Shamsi airbase.

Meanwhile, October had formally launched Imran Khan as a legitimate alternative. But Imran’s, too, could not have been a simple story. He was an agencies’ man, cried out the Sharifs as they took time from defending themselves. Nawaz Sharif was in turn accused of being beholden to a secret deal with President Zardari and, alternately, a sell-out to Indo-American interests.

From among the more easily recognisable Zardari friends, both the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Awami National Party were identified as actors in the deal-making that went on behind the open battles in Karachi that killed over 1,700 people this year. But an angry Zulfikar Mirza launched an open diatribe against relatively new Zardari pal Rehman Malik and the MQM before leaving dramatically for London with a vow to expose the party as a terrorist organisation. He left the ever-suspecting wondering whether he had kicked up the storm on his own or if the man behind most controversies — Zardari — was behind this one too.

London also provided another outlet for Pakistani emotion when three of our cricketers were jailed in England for spot-fixing. We may have initially taken to the cricket field for love of the game, but 2011 proved that after years of rigorous coaching, we are hooked enough to want to spice even sports with a generous sprinkling of conspiracy.

— Asha’ar Rehman is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore

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