The Stiff Upper Lip

The Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have been maintaininga discreet silence on the assassination of Mrs.Benazir Bhutto by as yetunidentified elements at Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007. Gen.Ashfaq PervezKiyani, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), was on a visit to Armyestablishments in Karachi  at the time of her assassination. He immediatelycancelled his engagements and returned to Rawalpindi. He and his officers in theGeneral Headquarters (GHQ) as well as in the ISI have avoided any comments orstatements or background briefings for the media on her killing. Gen.Kiyani iskeeping a tight control over his officers in order to ensure that they do notadd to the messy sequel as a result of the loose talk emanating from theMinistry of the Interior, which was responsible for her protection.

Most of the controversy relating to the circumstances surrounding herkilling, the cause of her death and  the alleged responsibility ofBaitullah Mehsud for her death, which has been denied by a spokesman ofBaitullah, has been caused by the retired Army officers, who were inducted intothe Ministry of the Interior and the Police by Gen.Pervez Musharraf after heseized power in 1999.After coming to power, Musharraf had inducted a largenumber of retired military officers into the police of the provinces as well asinto the Intelligence Bureau (IB), which is part of the Interior Ministry, andinto the Ministry itself. He appointed Brig. (retd) Ijaz Shah, who was the HomeSecretary of Punjab at the time of the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl,the US journalist, in January-February,2002, as the Director of the IB. OmarSheikh, the principal accused in the Pearl case, had surrendered to him inLahore when he was the Home Secretary.

Musharraf also inducted Brig. (retd) Javed Iqbal Cheema, another crony ofhis, into the Interior Ministry and made him in charge of the crisis managementcell in the Ministry, which also co-ordinates counter-terrorism actions andinvestigations. Many other retired military officers were inducted at differentlevels of the Ministry and the IB. Of course, Mr.Nawaz Sharif also, as the PrimeMinister (1990-93), had made Brig. (retd) Imtiaz, a highly controversial retiredarmy officer known for his dislike of Benazir, as the DIB, but there was nosystematic militarisation of the IB under Nawaz, similar to what one had beenseeing under Musharraf.

As a consequence of Musharraf's policy of militarisation of the Police andthe IB, there was a steep fall in the professionalism of these agencies. Theywere neither able to prevent the increasing number of acts of suicide terrorismnor successfully detect them. The number of acts of suicide terrorism  haveshot up from six in 2006 to 55 in 2007, including the one involving the murderof Benazir. Most of them have so far remained undetected.

The police in Rawalpindi, where she was killed, come under the dual controlof the Ministry of the Interior and the Punjab Government, both hotbeds ofZia-ul-Haq loyalists. Chaudhury Pervez Elahi, who was the Chief Minister ofPunjab till December,2007, and his cousin Chaudhury Shujjat Hussain, who is theleader of the pro-Musharraf Pakistan Muslim League (Qaide Azam), have alwaysbeen bitter enemies of the Bhutto family. Ijaz Shah and Lt.Gen.(retd) Hamid Gul, who was the Director-General of the ISI for some months  during her firsttenure as the Prime Minister (1988 to 90), are also known Zia loyalists.

There are presently not many remnants of the coterie of Zia loyalists among the serving senior officers (Lt.Gens. and above) of the Army and the ISI.Most of the remnants are to be found in the Ministry of the Interior, the IB andthe Punjab administration. That is why Benazir apprehended a threat to hersecurity to emanate from these elements. In a letter to Musharraf written beforeshe returned to Pakistan on October 18,2007, she had allegedly named three inparticular-- Ijaz Shah, Pervez Elahi and Hamid Gul. Musharraf disregarded herallegations and concerns and entrusted the responsibility for her security tothe very elements from which she apprehended a threat to her security.

A careful reading of the comments of Mr.Asif Ali Zardari, her husband, andother leaders of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), known to have  been closeto her, would indicate that they have been taking care not to implicate the Armyand the ISI as institutions in her murder. Instead, they have been directing theneedle of suspicion at the persons named by her.

There has been a steady infiltration of Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda elements atthe lower and middle levels of the Army and the Air Force and into the GHQitself. Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda organisations were unhappy with her statementsthat she would allow US troops to hunt for bin Laden in Pakistani territory andthe International Atomic Energy Agency at Vienna to interrogate A.Q.Khan, thenuclear scientist. Benazir and her associates were aware of the threat to hersecurity from these Al Qaeda and pro-Al Qaeda organisations such as the Jaish-e-Mohammadand the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), but they strongly believed that theseorganisations would not be able to carry out their threat without the complicityof the Zia loyalists in the physical security apparatus.

While there is no evidence so far of any active complicity by the Zialoyalists, there is clear-cut evidence of glaring  negligence in physicalsecurity, which made the assassination possible. In their frantic efforts tocover up their responsibility for her death,  the retired military officersin the Interior Ministry and the Police--particularly Javed Iqbal Cheema-- havebeen disseminating one contradictory version after another. During aninteraction with the media on December 31, 2007, Mr.Mohammadmian Soomro, thecaretaker Prime Minister, is reported to have indicated his embarrassment overthe clumsy manner in which Cheema had handled the sequel to her killing. But,intriguingly, Musharraf has remained silent in the midst of all this controversyand not taken any action against these officers.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. ofIndia, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies,Chennai.