General under fire, or for a few dollars more?

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS:

General under fire, or for a few dollars more?

Sharon Melder: Research Intelligence Unit - www. riunit.com

If Pakistan’s Gen Musharraf is a superstitious man and relied on astrology in order to map out his days, he would have braced him self well for a rather bumpy ride ahead. While also secretly being content at the added publicity and the spot in the limelight, having recently released his autobiography, ‘In the line of fire’, the South Asian leader will find it increasingly difficult to balance his conflicting interests.

Visiting the US last week in order to promote his new book Musharraf was bombarded by the media on the contents of his book. The general unwisely fly’s his own kite in his memoirs stating that, every time Pakistan got into trouble with Washington, it would suddenly discover “one of al-Qaida’s top commanders” and deliver him to the Americans. So far, almost 700 have been transported, in each case for rewards of millions of dollars. While the biggest trouble Musharraf has gotten into yet is with the Dr. Abdul Kadeer Khan affair, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, the pioneer of its nuclear arsenal, who was caught red-handed selling centrifuges and other nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya.

Even though U.S. satellites picked up Pakistani Air Force C-130’s delivering equipment to North Korea, Musharraf denies he or anyone else in the government was aware about this extensive black market operation. Such claims sound implausible, given all nuclear operations and material are under rigid military control. General Musharraf has rejected the demands made by the U.S. that Dr.Khan be turned over to them. The scientist is a national hero in Pakistan, and remains under house arrest after having admitted to passing nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya. It has long been assumed that one of the reasons he has never been put on trial - or interrogated by the CIA - was because of who he might be able to implicate.

Rights violation

A hornet's nest was stirred up when Amnesty International released a 106 page report while the Pakistani leader was on his visit to the United Kingdom, on detaining hundreds of alleged terror suspects without legal process. Some suspects are said to have been held in Pakistani interrogation centres, but many were handed over to U.S. custody and held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bagram Airbase or other secret detention facilities. While a spokesman for the government of Pakistan denies the allegations of torture but detentions without legal process are taking place, the BBC was told, the attacks which took place on September 11 on the United States had required new measures to be taken. Amnesty states that some of the missing were known al-Qaeda suspects, but others included women and children as well. A government spokesman further told the BBC that he denied the allegations of torture and enforced disappearances. The accusations documented by Amnesty International are based on testimonies from former detainees, who have since been released without charges as well as evidence from the families of those who have disappeared at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The report further goes on to say that the clandestine nature of the detentions means it is impossible to know how many are still being held in secret locations.

In many cases it is reported that U.S. agents paid a bounty of $5,000 to those, usually intelligence agents, who simply declared people terrorists, seized them and handed them over for interrogation with no legal process, Amnesty said. The Report further cited Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan as saying in June this year that 500 terrorists had been killed and more than a 1,000 have been arrested since 2001. The humanitarian agency has demanded that President Musharraf end arbitrary detention and publish a list of all places of detention as well as a register of all its detainees.

The Hairy Issue

Pakistan’s public relations disaster started with controversy at the Oval which opened the gates to what will go down in history as a very dark day for Pakistani cricket not to mention the ICC. On that day, the Pakistani cricket team had allegations of ball tampering hurled at them by the ever charismatic Umpire Hair and the less so Billy Doctrove. This was only a glimpse of things that were yet to come. Nevertheless we are all too familiar as to how the Oval controversy unfolded, not to mention the many colourful incidents which lead up the ICC hearing, mainly being on the part of Umpire Hair. So lets not make it anymore painful than it already is.

Inzamam's camp talked of a "victory" after he was cleared of ball-tampering charges, even though he was handed out a four-match ban for bringing the game into disrepute. A ruling that has former Australian captain and cricket commentator Richie Benaud pulling out his hairs (no pun intended). The Pakistani captain Inzamam was dealt with a ban for four one-day internationals, which effectively rules him out of next month's ICC’s Champions Trophy tournament in India. Benaud on Monday expressed his anger about the sentence imposed on Inzamam to Sydney's Daily Telegraph asking "why didn't he get a Test ban?....his proven offence was committed in a test….instead, he got the minimum one-day ban of four matches when the minimum test ban was 10 days of cricket". The reasoning that it would have had a more immediate effect in the Champions Trophy was lame. ‘He could captain Pakistan in the final’, Benaud was quoted as saying. While on the other side of the coin Benaud’s fellow commentator and former England batsman Geoffrey Boycott last week criticized Umpire Hair for attempting to "play God" in his handling of the forfeited Test. "Hair is the first man to apply the five-run penalty for ball-tampering and he got it wrong," Boycott wrote in an English newspaper. "He is also the first man to call a test match forfeited, and I believe he got that wrong too."

On the Payola?

Adding to the general’s woes, an unnamed British analyst has revealed in a British Ministry of Defence think- tank paper that has been consequently been disowned by London, that the United States is bankrolling Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf to the extent of $70-80 million a month, adding fuel to the dictator's already blazing fire which seems to be stalking him while he visits the west this month. The Ministry of Defence has stated that the finding do "not representing the views of the MoD or the government." of the United Kingdom.

A mortified Washington, which is already brushed from General Musharraf's own admissions that the US paid bounty money to the Pakistan government for handing over wanted Al Qaida terrorists as reported by BBC, has taken front stage over the arguments drawn by the analyst implicating, that Pakistani’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is supporting terrorism. The analyst wrote "Musharraf knows that time is running out for him...at some point the US is likely to withdraw funding (and possibly even protection) of him estimated at $70-80 million a month," adding, "Without US funding his position will become increasingly tenuous."

If the report about General Musharraf being on the payola for the US is proven to be accurate, the monies he would formulate from his memoirs would prove to be peanuts in comparison. Having said that, General Musharraf, has never been accused of corruption for all the criticism thrown at him. He evidently lives well within his means, although the Pakistani army typically lavishes enormous perks and privileges on itself, as reported by the Times of India. The General, if found as proclaimed will also go on to join the infamous index of third world dictators from Jordan's late ruler Hussein, Iraq's Saddam Hussain, Panama's Noreiga, and Dominican Republic's Trujillo of whom which have been reported one time or the other to have been on the CIA’s funding list.

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Earlier this year 10 Downing Street suffered a leak in which cabinet documents indicating that three months before invading Iraq in 2003, U.S. President George Bush mentioned to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair that once he finished off Iraq, he planned to “go after” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan was merely a sitting duck in America’s crosshairs.

In consequence General Musharraf faced a atrocious choice of either abandoning Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan, for which it had faced down the mighty Soviet Union in the 1980s and allow a hostile regime to be established there dominated by Pakistan’s blood enemies, the Afghan Communists, Iran and India, and abandon Pakistan’s most cherished national cause, the 50-year struggle for Kashmir. Or else stab Pakistan’s anti-communist ally, the Taliban, in the back, by giving the US military bases and face the wrath of Pakistanis crying out that he had sold out to the Americans. This is of course what has happened. President Musharraf has bent over so far backwards to comply with Washington’s highly unpopular demands that he has intensely enraged his own people, which has left Musharraf increasingly isolated and out of favour among his citizens. However seven years and two assassination attempts later, Musharraf still runs Pakistan.

Copyrights Reserved (RIU 2006) Prepared exclusively for the Business Standard.