They don’t even know for sure, a week down the line, if Baitullah is dead and where the rest of the murderers are. We need Gen James Jones, the US president’s national security adviser to tell us that Baitullah is dead? –Photo by AP

The uncertainty and utter confusion surrounding the death or otherwise of the terrorist Yahoo, Baitullah Mehsud, tells us like nothing else will, the total lack of control over the Land of the Pure by the state, its army and its dreaded ‘agencies.’

Whilst these ‘agencies,’ chief among them the Mother of All Agencies aka ‘the premier agency’ and its sister, the Military Intelligence, have been cited in the disappearance of hundreds of Pakistanis especially those belonging to Sindh and Balochistan, and for other aggressive acts against citizens, they are as putty when it comes to Yahoos of the ilk of Baitullah and Fazlullah and Muslim Khan and Shah Duran and other such.

They don’t even know for sure, a week down the line, if the Yahoo is dead and where the rest of the murderers are. We need Gen James Jones, the US president’s national security adviser to tell us that Baitullah is dead?

Given the attitudes they strike — referring to themselves as the nation’s first line of defence; not caring a damn for the elected government’s writ; and demanding special status for themselves such as their operatives not appearing in the highest court of the land — one must ask why they don’t know.

Indeed, having been at the receiving end of their silly (and very expensive!) shenanigans for decades now, ordinary Pakistanis must ask why it took so long for Baitullah to be hunted down and even then by the Americans, and why the other cold-blooded murderers aren’t in custody/dead yet.

Where are all their fancy-schmancy gadgets with which they make the lives of ordinary Pakistanis a living hell by taping telephone conversations and then blackmailing their targets into acquiescence? Why don’t they use their skills with the same gusto on the thugs above named?

They can mount aggressive surveillance at the residences of politicians considered inimical to our (venal) state — case in point, the fracas outside Sardar Akhtar Mengal’s house in Defence, Karachi, some years ago, in which while the former chief minister Balochistan’s guards who questioned the MI Havildar and sepoy why they were following Mengal’s family so aggressively were locked up, the MI chaps went scot-free. Why, pray, can’t they do likewise with the families of the terrorists who live it up in Peshawar’s Hayatabad?

There is much that does not meet the eye when it comes to the machinations of our agencies, and one has to once more ask what happened to the case of the slaughtered SSG officers and men who were so callously interviewed by a private TV channel days before they were put to the knife? What happened to that former commissioner of Malakand, who met them in the company of their executioners and then left them to their fate?

Let us remind ourselves that the prime minister, no less, had said at the time of the atrocity: ‘Let me assure you that notice of the reports about the role of the former Malakand commissioner in the beheading of four SSG commandos has been taken at the highest level ….’

Well, whatever happened to that ‘notice’? We the people demand to know. Also, whether there was an inquiry into why there was no response from the army/the ‘agencies’ when it became known just where the poor unfortunates were being held for 10 days before they were beheaded?

This is not the end of the tamasha either. There is an interview on the Internet titled ‘My boy Jonaid’ with Professor Ayaz Ahmad Khan about his son Captain Jonaid Khan of the SSG, who was kidnapped by the Yahoos on April 19 and slaughtered on June 10, fully 21 days later. Was Jonaid part of the four or was he yet another young soldier slaughtered by the murdering Yahoos? How many of our young men have been killed thus?

Will the army ever tell us or is it too ashamed to tell the truth because its brass hats are out of their depth when it comes to fighting? It is too painful to continue; one is too livid to go on …. Suffice it to say that having served in this army when it was an army and not an industrial and banking and real estate conglomerate, I hang my head in shame.

However in the world can one put into words one’s feelings at the horrific happenings at Gojra and before that in Kasur and before that in … you name it? In each of the attacks on defenceless non-Muslims there has been ample advance notice to the police, loudly shouted from the very loud pulpits of the local mullahs.

Indeed, there is concrete evidence of the mullahs actually using incendiary language to whip up a mad frenzy among their largely illiterate flock in Gojra and environs as a direct result of which, minutes later, the hysterical crowd set fire to Christian houses and churches with mad abandon, burning alive at least eight women and little children.

We know all of the above, do we not, reader, for we have lived through these painful tragedies ever since we remember, much more so after the dictator Ziaul Haq brought in his horrid blasphemy law under which the accuser can lay the most outlandish claims; the onus to clear his/her name resting only with the accused.

The police never ever investigate the matter; all they do is register an FIR, effectively throwing the accused to the wolves. Our country has become a living hell for all our minorities and nothing is going to change until the blasphemy law is repealed in its entirety and the harshest punishment given to the perpetrators of violence against our minorities.

A few more words about our ‘agencies’: As reported in the press of yesterday, our intelligence officials believe: ‘Cash pipelines emanating from RAW and Afghan secret services headquarters were terminating in Baitullah-run accounts….’

I can only refer the ‘premier agency’ to my article of July 14, 2009, and the story of Mirza Bahar Beg!

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk