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Glacial Surge Buried Soldiers at Siachen – Expert

Siachen Glacier (Credit: nation.com.pk)

Neither it was the cloudburst nor the avalanche but the “glacier surge” that buried the men stationed at Siachen, Arshad H Abbasi, an expert on water and climate changes, told The News.

“Glacier surge is phenomena caused either by rise in temperature or some tectonic movement, where a glacier advances substantially, moving at velocities up to 100 times faster than normal,” he said.

Keeping in view the record of tremors occurring in the last one month, Abbasi insists that rise in temperature caused “the increase of melt-water at the base of a glacier that untimely reduced the frictional restrictions to glacial ice flow and transfer of large volumes of ice on Pakistan’s Army Camp.”

“The rising temperature is directly proportional with huge number of military presence in area. That is fundamental cause of melting glacier at an unprecedented rate,” he argued. “The actual retreat is not only evident by the snout of the glacier, but the real concern is the reduction of the glacier’s mass balance, which is the difference between accumulation and ablation (melting and sublimation).”

Having received the latest images of the glacier, Abbasi says it shows “visible cracks in the midst of glacier and above all the number of glacial lakes that have formed.”

‘Voodoo Science’ practitioners are justified in saying that Indian Army is playing pivotal role in global warming, causing the fast melting of Siachen Glacier.

Those claiming Siachen is melting due to global warming are advised to look into the report titled ‘Advancing Glaciers and Positive Mass Anomaly in the Karakoram Himalaya’ published by NASA. The report says of the glaciers in Karakoram, more than 65 percent are growing. They term abnormality as “Karakoram anomaly”. Therefore, it’s just a myth that Siachen is melting because of global warming, as it’s case of direct human interference, climate change.

During Track-II dialogues, Abbasi said, he had again been raising the question of the audit of Siachen Glacier to know the reduction of its volume, which was always declined by the Indian government. The climate change is by far the biggest threat ever encountered by humankind.

“It is time that the global leadership and community work with Pakistani and Indian leaders to save Himalayan glaciers by solving the longstanding Siachen dispute. This conflict is adding to environmental degradation, sea level rise and changing climate pattern but it is also depriving the poor of both countries of close to one billion dollars every year that these countries spend to maintain troops there,” he said.

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SC Verdict Leaves Hindu Girls Conversion Issue Unresolved

Hindu Protestors in Karachi (Credit: tribune.com.pk)

ISLAMABAD, April 18: The chief justice was in a hurry for once. In just the second hearing on Wednesday of a case related to the conversion of three Hindu women, a Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, wrapped up the case and announced its judgment.

The three young women present in the court were told to express their ‘true’ feelings about what they wanted to do and Sindh police were ordered to be their ‘protectors’ — ensure their safety and their happiness.

Police were asked to submit reports every fortnight about the wellbeing of the women.

The women did not utter a word during the proceedings. Later they were sent off to the registrar’s office to pour their hearts out.

In between, they were kept apart from their parents; they were taken to the registrar’s office from a different route so that no one would run into them.

The women recorded their statements before the registrar and decided to go with their husbands.

The judgment, however, did not go down well with the hapless parents. For the rest of the afternoon, the human tragedy that is the Hindu minority in Pakistan was played out on the steps of the Supreme Court building and outside as the families spoke to media and protested the verdict. Wednesday did not bring them the justice for which they had travelled from Sindh to Islamabad.

The women who appeared before the court under the watchful eyes of Sindh police were Rinkal Kumari, 19, (now known as Faryal Bibi) of Mirpur Mathelo, Dr Lata Kumari, 30, (Hafsa) of Jacobabad, and Aasha Devi, 19, (Haleema Bibi) of Jacobabad, who earlier was missing but surfaced voluntarily.

“We gave these girls sufficient time to think about their future and we will not force them. They are grown-up and are allowed to go wherever they want to go,” the chief justice observed. He said they were sui juris (one who has reached maturity and is no longer dependent) and, therefore, fully in a position to decide about the future.

“We feel they (the women) stayed in a pressure-free atmosphere at the Panah Shelter Home in Karachi where neither of the parties was allowed to meet them,” the court observed.

The order, however, generated instant commotion inside the courtroom, prompting the chief justice to ask the counsel for different parties to urge their clients to maintain discipline.

Frantic developments were seen soon after the announcement of the verdict. Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council (PHC), called an emergent meeting to discuss implications of the verdict.

The PHC also filed a petition highlighting abduction of Hindu girls who were then forced to change their religion and married off to Muslim men. The court will take up the case after two weeks.

The disappointed parents of these women and members of the Hindu community, including parliamentarians from the ruling PPP, staged a sit-in outside the Supreme Court for some time and called for giving custody of the women to their parents.

“This is complete injustice in the name of Islam,” shouted Mohen, father of Aasha, outside the courtroom. He asked why the court did not take into consideration a demand by police for payment of Rs1.8 million for recovering the girl — a demand which was raised to Rs3.5 million and then to Rs5 million. “From where we will fetch this kind of money.”

He said the Hindu community was being forced to leave Pakistan.

The mothers of the three women kept weeping and wailing outside the Supreme Court and alleged that the court had never allowed the girls to meet their parents.

Ramesh Lal, a PPP MNA from Larkana, said minorities had lost all hopes in the country’s judiciary and today justice had been buried forever. “Why the judiciary, which never tires of taking suo motu notices against the president and the prime minister, is not taking notice about police demanding money from the victim families to recover the girls,” he asked.

Noor Naz Agha, the counsel for Rinkal, however, welcomed the verdict and said the court had rightly accepted that being adult, the girls had a right to live their lives according to their choice.

But she held the absence of legislation responsible for the rising number of complaints about forced conversions and marriages.

Mian Aslam, son of MNA Faqir Abdul Haq alias Mian Mitho, who was accused of abducting Rinkal, rejected the allegations, wondering “if we kidnapped her then why she was produced before the magistrate to record her will and later handed over to police”.

He brushed aside an impression that the girls were converted to Islam forcibly.

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Indo-Pak Civilians Renew Calls to Demilitarize Siachen Glacier

Entrance to Siachen Glacier (Credit: news.kuwaitimes.net)

ISLAMABAD, April 11 — Pakistan and India’s military standoff in the frozen high mountains of Kashmir is not only costing soldiers’ lives, experts say — it is also wreaking havoc on the environment.

A huge avalanche on Saturday devastated Pakistan’s Gayani army camp on the fringes of the Siachen Glacier, where Pakistani and Indian soldiers brave bitter conditions to eyeball each other in a long-running territorial dispute.

Environmental experts say the heavy military presence is speeding up the melting of the glacier, one of the world’s largest outside the polar regions, and leaching poisonous materials into the Indus river system.

Faisal Nadeem Gorchani of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad said the glacier had shrunk by 10 kilometres (six miles) in the last 35 years. “More than half of the glacier reduction comes from the military presence,” he said.

Pakistani hydrologist and Siachen specialist Arshad Abbasi gave an even more alarming assessment of the glacier’s decline, and said that non-militarised areas had not suffered so badly. “More than 30 percent of the glacier has melted since 1984, while most of the Karakoram glaciers on the Pakistani side expanded,” he said.

Troop movements, training exercises and building infrastructure all accelerate melting, Gorchani said. Waste from the military camps is also a major problem, harming the local environment and threatening to pollute the water systems that millions of people across the subcontinent depend upon.

“Indian army officials have described the Siachen as ‘the world’s biggest and highest garbage dump’,” US expert Neal Kemkar said in an article for the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.

The report quoted estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature saying that on the Indian side alone, more than 900 kilos (2,000 pounds) of human waste was dropped into crevasses every day.

Kemkar said that 40 percent of the military waste was plastics and metal, and as there are no natural biodegrading agents present, “metals and plastics simply merge with the glacier as permanent pollutants, leaching toxins like cobalt, cadmium, and chromium into the ice.”

“This waste eventually reaches the Indus River, affecting drinking and irrigation water that millions of people downstream from the Siachen, both Indian and Pakistani, depend upon,” the report said.

Kemkar also warned the conflict had affected wildlife, with the habitat of animals such as the endangered snow leopard, the brown bear and the ibex — a type of wild goat — all threatened.

There is virtually no chance of any of the 138 people buried by Saturday’s avalanche being found alive, so they will likely be added to the list of those claimed by Siachen, dubbed “the world’s highest battleground”, with outposts more than 6,000 metres high.

An estimated 8,000 troops have died in the glacier’s freezing wastes since conflict over the area flared in 1984. Colonel Sher Khan, a retired Pakistani officer and mountain expert, says that not a single shot has been fired in anger in at least eight years and combat deaths in Siachen have numbered only in the dozens.

The rest have succumbed to frostbite, altitude sickness, heart failure and inadequate cold weather equipment — as well as avalanches and landslides.

Military experts quoted in local media say a Pakistani soldier dies around every three or four days in Siachen, and the latest disaster has led to louder calls for a negotiated end to the standoff, particularly given the huge expense of maintaining troops at such a high altitude.

The cost of the operation is kept under wraps but Pakistani daily newspaper The News reported that Pakistan spends $60 million a year on Siachen and India more than $200 million. In two countries where millions live below the poverty line this is a lot of money to defend an frozen, uninhabitable patch of mountain, but after nearly 30 years of stalemate, no-one is expecting a swift end to the dispute.

“It’s a matter of ego. Nobody is ready to take that step, even if they want it, because elections are coming,” said retired colonel Khan.

The soldiers facing each other across the icy, inhospitable mountain wastes have one thing in common, at least.

“India and Pakistan are not fighting each other in Siachen, they are both fighting the glacier, and nature takes its revenge by killing soldiers,” said Abbasi.

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Zardari Yatra Eggs on Indo-Pak Peace Process

Pak President Zardari Meets Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Credit: ft.com)

One of the more unheralded achievements of the PPP government has been the way it has repaired relations from the nadir of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, when war seemed a very realistic possibility. Rather than try to be overly ambitious, the government has cautiously taken small steps towards lasting peace, with trade and regular high-level meetings inching the process forward.

President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to the shrine of Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, which allowed him to hold talks with Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, was yet another indicator that the two countries are moving firmly towards setting up a lasting peace between them. By all accounts the talks were cordial and Dr Singh accepted Zardari’s offer of a return visit to Pakistan. This was also the first time a Pakistani head of state had visited India since Musharraf in 2005, marking another landmark in the slow return to normalcy.

The two countries are fortunate that they both have leaders who are committed to the peace process but that does not mean that danger is not lurking around every corner. The army could easily scuttle whatever progress has been made by working around the elected government and embarking on yet another military adventure along the lines of the Kargil conflict.

In India, too, the hawks (of which significant sections of the media is a part) remains resolutely anti-Pakistan. Issues like Hafiz Saeed, who had a bounty placed on him by the US for actionable information leading to his conviction, are still unsolved. The two have so far decided to at least go ahead with lowering trade barriers with Pakistan set to grant India Most-Favoured Nation status by the end of the year. However, the rigid visa regime between the two, which makes it next to impossible for the citizens of either to visit, must be relaxed as well.

Also, as the recent landslide tragedy at Siachen has showed, both countries need to realise that perhaps the time has come to demilitarise the glacier.

Far more lives on either side have been lost to the ravages of weather than to actual combat and the cost of maintaining troops for both countries on the world’s highest battlefield should be enough to necessitate a final push for a bilateral drawdown.

 

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Turf Wars Heat up on Pak-Afghan Border

Jalozai Camp in Mardan (Credit: rescue.org)

JALOZAI, April 8 – Banmaroo stands in the dust, tears rolling down her cheeks as she recalls how her husband was killed in Pakistan’s latest battle zone on the Afghan border. “He was just a labourer. Firing started. I don’t know who killed him, but I was handed his body in the afternoon. It was in such a rough condition, just pieces,” she said, wiping her face with her green veil.

Too frightened to cope alone and worried that her children would also become caught up in fighting between the army and local warlord Mangal Bagh, she fled. “We felt danger everywhere. If the situation becomes good and our area gets freedom, we’ll go back. We need peace,” she said.

Travelling from her home in Khyber, Banmaroo and her six children arrived at Jalozai, Pakistan’s largest refugee camp, three weeks ago. She is among more than 250,000 people, mostly women and children, Save the Children says have fled the violence since January.

Khyber lies just outside Peshawar in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt, on the Afghan border, still considered the world’s premier Al-Qaeda hub despite the killing of Osama bin Laden and the impact of US drone strikes. But the war in Bara, where Banmaroo and her children remember a once-idyllic life, is far murkier than a simple fight between the state and Islamist militants who want to impose sharia law and purge communities of infidels.

Troops have struggled since 2009 to defeat Bagh, a former bus conductor who founded Lashkar-e-Islam, a militia better known for kidnapping and extortion than religion. Now soldiers are stepping up the fight, keen to quell Bara to protect nearby Peshawar, the sprawling city where an increase in bomb and rocket attacks has been linked to the fighting in Khyber.

As a result, thousands of refugees stream into Jalozai everyday. Young men queue up to register in droves, standing or squatting under the burning sun. Security guards armed with sticks swipe queue-jumpers. “Five thousand people are expected to register today. Three days back it was 2,900,” UNHCR field officer Changaiz Mataul Hussain told AFP.

It’s a scene that Jalozai knows only too well. For 26 years, it was home to Afghans fleeing Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule. Then in 2007, six years after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban and when life in Afghanistan appeared to be improving, Pakistan closed the camp. Afghans were either voluntarily repatriated or told to find new homes.

But when the Pakistani Taliban rose up against the government in late 2007, Pakistan’s own creeping conflict forced Jalozai to re-open. With a capacity of 140,000, according to Hussain, nowhere else offered temporary shelter to so many Pakistanis displaced by conflict.

In 2008, the refugees came from the tribal district of Bajaur, then from neighbouring Mohmand and in 2009 there was a huge influx from the Swat valley, where the army managed to put down a Taliban insurgency. Today, the majority of the 109,515 in the camp are from Bara. They speak of their horror at gun battles, air strikes and mortar rounds destroying houses, but few go into details, fearful of spies.

Life in Jalozai is hard. Residents say there is no electricity, particularly galling at night. Children complain of eating rice day after day. The newest arrivals are ensconced some distance from the ordered blocks of tents protected by fences of plastic sheeting, on a stretch of desolate land where children scramble across the stone-strewn landscape.

It is only in the relative privacy of a tent that Khayalzar, a wild-haired man squatting on his haunches, is prepared to be more candid. “If you’re against Mangal Bagh, you’ll be slaughtered, so everyone is afraid. One of my neighbours was selling hashish. Mangal Bagh people threatened him many times, but he kept on doing it,” he said.

“Then one day, they came, put him inside a vehicle and drove off. On the second day, a headless body was dumped outside the village. Five or six days later, we found the head.” But it is not just the army fighting Lashkar-e-Islam. The militia is also embroiled in deadly turf wars with rivals, including the Pakistani Taliban.

Two suicide attacks outside Lashkar mosques killed 27 people last month in the Tirah valley, a hashish-growing area well outside government control, where Bagh’s turf war with the Taliban is concentrated.

“It’s very complex,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a tribal affairs expert. “There is no real goal. The main factor now is to be in control.” But the outcome of the army offensive is also unclear. It is not a sweeping operation as in Swat and despite numerous claims to have cleared other parts of the tribal belt, fighting continues and violence remains a problem.

“Mangal Bagh and the government are two faces of the same coin. We’ve suffered from both sides,” snaps Salma, sitting on the side of a dusty track, a crumpled burqa obscuring her face and body. “Mangal Bagh targets us on the ground and government jets target us from the air,” she says. “Only God can bring peace.”

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REVIEW By Muneeza Shamsie

Aboard the democracy train: a journey through Pakistan’s last decade of democracy
By Nafisa Hoodbhoy, London, Anthem Press, 2011, 268 pp., £14.99, ISBN 978 0 8572 8967 4

In 1984, Nafisa Hoodbhoy became the first woman reporter at Pakistan’s leading English daily, Dawn, which had hitherto employed women journalists on its full-time staff only at desk jobs, as editors and subeditors. For a young woman reporter to travel to remote, conservative areas of Pakistan was both unusual and courageous. Hoodbhoy’s lively, and at times daring, eyewitness account provides many insights into Pakistan during her 16 years at Dawn.

In 1988, Benazir Bhutto returned in triumph to Pakistan from exile, after the mysterious death of General Zia ul Haq, the military dictator. Hoodbhoy was sent to cover Bhutto’s historic election campaign aboard her “Democracy Train” (a phrase coined by Bhutto) which was received at stations by tumultuous crowds. Hoodbhoy’s gender proved a great advantage: as the only woman reporter present, she enjoyed greater access than her colleagues to the young, unmarried Bhutto.

Over the next decade, Hoodbhoy observed at first hand the rise and fall of Bhutto’s two short-lived governments. These alternated with the equally brief tenures of her political rival Nawaz Sharif. The real power broker remained the Pakistan Army. Hoodbhoy’s chilling account reveals complex political machinations as well as the many shortcomings of the Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif governments, including flagrant corruption.

Hoodbhoy goes on to explore the terrifying miscarriages of justice created by Ziaul Haq’s notorious Hudood Ordinance, which does not differentiate between rape and adultery, and which neither Bhutto nor Sharif repealed. In the fierce battle for justice waged by women activists and civil rights groups, Hoodbhoy’s press reports played a crucial role.

Hoodbhoy reveals she met her future husband Javed Bhutto “while hunting for his sister’s killer” (115). Her harrowing and riveting tale names the murderer, a powerful politician, and also describes his ability to use power, influence and money to subvert the processes of law and have the charges dropped.

Hoodbhoy also records the ethnic tensions in Karachi between Sindhis and Mohajirs (migrants who came from India after Partition), as well as the ethnic riots of the 1990s and the rise of the controversial Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). However, Zubeida Mustafa, then assistant editor of Dawn, says in her review of Hoodbhoy’s book:

“but she [Hoodbhoy] appears to have difficulty in getting to the roots of the ethnic problem. For instance the impression conveyed is that the MQM was a party of the Mohajirs with which the entire community identified itself. Her account hints at a degree of polarisation between her Sindhi-speaking and Urdu-speaking colleagues in Dawn which is far from true. The fact is that the MQM did not draw all Mohajirs to its fold. Many intellectuals as well as politically astute Mohajirs chose not to throw their loyalties with the party. (Mustafa 7)

Mustafa also points out that Hoodbhoy’s account does not mention MQM threats to Dawn and its “Mohajir” journalists for articles that incurred the party’s displeasure. Similar elisions and oversimplifications are reflected in Hoodbhoy’s historical analysis of Partition and the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto era. The book also suffers from a rather self-conscious and, at times, self-congratulatory tone, aimed at explaining Pakistan and herself to foreigners.

Hoodbhoy migrated to the United States in 2000 and her narrative covers terrorism and violence in Pakistan thereafter. The true value of her book, however, lies in the events that she reported and witnessed and which provide the key to the discordant forces battling for control in Pakistan today.

To read the original article, click on the URL below:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.670551

Journal of Postcolonial Writing
2012, iFirst Review, 1–2
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
http://www.tandfonline.com

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Curfew imposed in Gilgit after Sectarian Violence

Shoot on sight orders in Gilgit (Credit: nation.com.pk)

GILGIT, April 4 – The authorities issued shoot-on-sight orders to the law enforcement agencies to maintain law and order situation after 17 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in sectarian violence in Gilgit-Baltistan on Tuesday.

The attacks led to an army deployment and imposition of curfew in the city, confining the inhabitants to their homes, as the situation turned violent.

Gilgit-Baltistan map (sananews)

The ISPR in a statement said the Army has been summoned to Gilgit to control the law and order situation. The casualties occurred in two separate incidents in the northern towns of Gilgit and Chilas.

In Gilgit, gunmen opened fire during a strike called by Ahl-e-Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ) over the arrest of one of their leaders, Attaullah Saqib, for his alleged involvement in a sectarian attack in February that left 18 dead.

Gilgit Baltistan (facho01.blogspot.com)

The rioters ran amok when police refused to release Attaullah Saqib. Angry protesters opened fire and pelted the anti-riot police with stones, leaving several officers injured. Some unknown men hurled hand grenades at Ittehad Chowk that injured two policemen and a passerby. “At least seven people were killed and 50 others were wounded,” said an official.

Ahle Sunnat rally in Gilgit (brecorder.com)

Senior local police official Ali Sher told AFP the gunmen opened fire on a group of Sunnis appealing to people to close their shops in response to the strike call. It is pertinent to mention here that a complete shutterdown strike was observed against the arrest of Attaullah Saqib, who is said to be chief of Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), Gilgit chapter.

A curfew was imposed in the city after the incident to bring the situation under control, the official said. Soldiers were given orders to shoot at anyone who defied the curfew order, the local media reported.

Shias protest Kohistan incident (nation.com.pk)

A total of 14 people have reportedly been arrested in the city following the clashes. In the February incident, gunmen disguised in military fatigues hauled 18 Shias off buses and shot them dead in cold blood in the northern district of Kohistan, which neighbours the Swat valley. A local intelligence official, who did not want to be identified, confirmed Tuesday’s death toll and also said a hand grenade had been used.

Noorbakshi sufi sect (siasat.pk)

“But we still don’t know who the attackers were,” he said. He added that tensions had been mounting between the Shias and Sunnis in recent weeks.

In Bonar Das area of Chilas, a Sunni-dominated town about 100 kilometres south of Gilgit, a mob blocked the main Karakoram Highway and killed ten Shias, local police official Alam Jan said.

Pakistan-Army in Gilgit (the newstribe.com)

“The mob took out ten men from buses and shot them dead,” an official said.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in Chilas protesting the killings in Gilgit, he said, adding that the rioters set four buses on fire.

A local intelligence official confirmed the death toll.

Meanwhile, a police officer and his bodyguard were also injured while driving to a bus station in the city to provide security for the passengers from Rawalpindi.

The deteriorating situation in Chilas had prompted the local authorities to impose a curfew there.

Gilgit is the capital of Gilgit-Baltistan region and is popular with mountaineers as a gateway to the Karakoram and Himalayan mountain ranges.

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Background of Sectarian Conflict in Gilgit-Baltistan

Around 75% of the region’s population follows some form of Shia Islam, almost an exact reversal of the norm in the rest of Pakistan. This makes the Northern Areas the only Shia majority political unit in Sunni-dominated Pakistan. There are four sects in Gilgit-Baltistan; Shia, Noorbakshi and Ismaili communities believe in the offices of Imamat, according to them, runs after the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) through Ali and his male successors. Whereas Sunnis believe in the office of the Khilafat and according to them Abu Bakr, Usman and Ali were the Caliphs after the death of Muhammad (PBUH).

Please click here to download the PDF document “PILDAT Background Paper: Sectarian Conflict in Gilgit-Baltistan”

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Producing Little Osamas on the Run

OBL children on right and grandchildren on left (Credit: worldblog.msnbc.msn)

HARIPUR, Pakistan: It’s an ornate but not lavish two-story house tucked away at the end of a mud clogged street. This is where Pakistan’s intelligence agency believes Osama bin Laden lived for nearly a year until he moved into the villa in which he was eventually killed.

The residence in the frontier town of Haripur was one of five safe houses used by the slain al-Qaeda leader while on the run in Pakistan according to information revealed by his youngest wife, who has been detained.

Retired Pakistani Brig. Shaukat Qadir, who has spent the last eight months tracking bin Laden’s movements, told The Associated Press that he was taken to the Haripur house last November by intelligence agents who located it from a description they got from Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada.

Al-Sada, a 30-year-old Yemeni, has been in Pakistani custody since May 2 when US Navy SEALs overran the Abbottabad compound, killing bin Laden and four other people inside. Since then, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, known as the ISI, has been trying to uncover the trail that brought him to Abbottabad villa in the summer of 2005.

The best information appears to have come from al-Sada, who was believed to be his favourite and who traveled with bin Laden since his escape from Afghanistan’s eastern Tora Bora mountain range in 2001.

Qadir, a 35-year army veteran who is now a security consultant, was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence’s interrogation of al-Sada and access to other documents on bin-Laden’s movements. He provided the AP with details in a recent interview.

The details of bin Laden’s life as a fugitive – which were first published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn – raise fresh questions over how bin Laden was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.

Yet a senior US official, who is familiar with the contents recovered in bin Laden’s Abbottabad house, said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials were aware of bin Laden’s presence.

“There was no smoking gun. We didn’t find anything,” he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the contents of the Abbottabad house.

According to the interrogation report, bin Laden lived in five safe houses and fathered four children – the two youngest born in a public hospital in Abbotabad. But investigators have only located the houses in Abbottabad and Haripur.

Al-Sada’s descriptions of the homes have been vague and the Haripur house was found only after a series of hits and misses.

She knew only that it was located on the edge of Haripur, it was two stories and it had a basement. It apparently was used by bin Laden while he waited for construction crews to finish his new home Abbottabad, a garrison town just 30 kilometers away.

Investigators scoured the area looking for properties until they found the Haripur house in Naseem Town, a chaotic suburb where relatively affluent houses bump up against sun-baked mud huts that belong to nomadic Afghans.

Like the CIA, the Pakistani agency also tracked the movements of bin Laden’s Pakistani courier who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and his brother. The two were ethnic Pashtuns from Pakistan’s Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province on the border with Afghanistan. They were bin Laden’s front men.

The ISI discovered that the Haripur house, like the land on which bin Laden’s Abbottabad villa was built, was rented by two Pashtun brothers claiming to be from Charsadda, a Pashtun dominated town about 110 kilometers away.

The AP located the Haripur house that Qadir said ISI agents had taken him to last November and found the real estate broker, Pir Mohammed, who rented the four-bedroom house to the two brothers, Salim and Javed Khan from Charsadda, for $150 a month.

At the time Pir Mohammed ran a small real estate firm called Mashallah. He said his meeting with the brothers was random.

“They must have seen my sign and come in,” Mohammed said, adding that he had met the brothers only three times – when they signed the contract, when they moved into the house and when they moved out 11 months later.

Two months ago several ISI agents took all the records of the house and its tenants since its construction in 2000, said Qasi Anis Rahman, the brother of the widow who owns the house.

“All they said was that it was for ‘security purposes,’” said Rahman.

Al-Sada is currently in Pakistani custody, along with bin Laden’s two other wives and several children. They were arrested after the raid. The US Navy SEALs shot al-Sada in the leg during the operation.

Mohammed Amir Khalil, a lawyer for the three widows, said the women would be formally charged for illegally staying in Pakistan on April 2. That charge carries a maximum five-year prison sentence.

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Pak Politics Dyed in Feudal Colors

Good lawyers are often judged by their stance when they run out of truth as well as legal arguments at the same time.  Many tend to fall back on theatrics, histrionics, distortion and even poetry as supplements to beef up the deficiency in the main menu.  Barrister Aitzaz however touched new heights of judicial decadence when he pleaded that notwithstanding the offence, his client being a ‘pir’ and a ‘gaddi nashin’ be treated differently from other ordinary citizens.  Mercifully he did not demand that the seven judges come down from their raised platform to kiss the hands and touch the feet of the accused even before beginning to hear the first argument.

Coming from someone considered a leading lawyer and a champion of democracy, such an undemocratic and dynastic statement reflects the true reality of the nature of politics and society in Pakistan.    It confirms that the change that an average Pakistani is looking forward to is surely not around the bend. Not only that the voter is inextricably bound in the chains of the landlord, the ‘Pir’, the ‘Gaddi Nashin’, the ‘Sardars’,  the ‘Biradari’, the sectarian and the ethnic influence but the ruling classes are equally  united in their manipulations  to sanctify  these undemocratic and  dynastic institutions.

In an apparently unrelated incident, a totally disgusted and disappointed acid victim Fakhra committed suicide by jumping from her 6th floor apartment in Rome.  Ironically her suicide comes in the wake of the new acid throwing legislation in Pakistan and Chinoy’s  Oscar winning film ‘saving face’.  Clearly neither the laws nor  ‘saving face’ could save the face or the life of Fakhra.   Our focus lies only in awards, ceremonies and seminars,  and not on putting an end to the tragedies displayed in the film. Somewhere in the Bar Rooms, a yet  another worthy barrister must be getting ready to defend the rich acid-thrower  Bilal Khar.  After all,  Khar is the scion of  a  powerful  political dynasty of the landed ‘waderas’ of Pakistan, and cannot be equated with those petty street acid-slingers.

Pakistan is  caught in a time warp and the prognosis is not entirely cheerful. Its masses have been kept too backward, poor and uneducated  to go beyond the dotted line and its ruling cartel too happy to exploit its monopoly.  The second and third generation of the ruling  elite is being groomed to take over and prove that their elders were novices in the art of plunder.   The educated professional  class is happy to sit on the sidelines as it can have all the fun without sharing any responsibility.   When sufficiently motivated it could even invent new jurisprudence on why a ‘Pir’ should not be punished.

So where do we go from here.  Is there a political party that is willing to be  the party of the ordinary people.  One that is willing to nominate no candidate  who is a ‘sardar, ‘wadera’, ‘pir’ or whose claim to fame is his political or spiritual lineage.    Pakistanis should not expect reforms from leaders  who are  unwilling to reform themselves or their parties.  Those who proceed abroad for medical treatment (at the state expense) in specially chartered aeroplanes are not likely to spend much time on improving the local hospitals.  Likewise those whose hands are kissed and feet are touched by the mindless millions are not likely to exhibit a democratic  or egalitarian behavior.

It is astonishing that the educated elite of Pakistan is ever so ready to defend the swampy cesspool, but not willing to organize and push for much needed reforms.  These are urgently needed in the dynastic and ‘bhatta collecting’  political parties, the atrophied Election Commission, the non-functional educational system and  the tortoisian justice system, to name a few. The  parties must declare that  henceforth they will not accept candidates who use  titles like  ‘sajjada nashin’, ‘pir’,  ‘makhdoom’, ‘sardar’, ‘gaddi nashin’, ‘wadera’ etc, or those who receive  ‘offerings’  and ‘nazranas’.  Their candidates will not have fake degrees, will not collect ‘bhatta’, will not be dual nationals and will voluntarily surrender all weapons that they hold.

The Election Commission could  learn a lesson or two from its Indian counterpart.  How come the civil society accepted  the 37 million fake-vote election without batting an eyelid or without demanding accountability or  overhaul of the electoral process.  Clearly the educated, rich and the powerful segment of the civil society has sided with the ‘status quo’ by refusing to grow out of its 5 star, foreign funded seminar mode or to push for reforms and accountability.  Not protesting to eliminate  the root causes (such as official proliferation of weapons) and hoping to achieve peace through candlelit vigils is neither rational nor likely to make the dead horse gallop again.