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“Murder,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is the extreme form of censorship.” And I have always argued that censorship is the mildest form of political murder. The free expression of suffocation strangles the political process. In Pakistan, the country’s army practices both censorship and murder with increasing impunity.
On May 1, 2020, a prominent member of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM or Pashtun Defense Movement) Sardar Arif Wazir, was shot while walking in front of his home in Wana, in the former tribal district of South Waziristan. He later succumbed to his injuries in an Islamabad hospital. the PTM has said that the attackers were the so-called “good Taliban”. The good Taliban are apparently the ones who consider themselves the asset of the Pakistani army and do their dirty work against the ‘bad Taliban’ who had gone out of GHQ orbit and attacked the army forming the Tehrik-e-Taliban -Pakistan (TTP).
Arif Wazir’s clan, along with many other tribal elders, has stood firm as a stone against the Pakistan Army’s policy of using the Pashtun tribal areas as point d’appui launch the Taliban into Afghanistan and, in the process, create a jihadist ecosystem in the Pashtun areas that runs along the Durand line. The Taliban, both good and bad, have killed these tribal elders named Masharan by the hundreds in the past 14 years.
Arif Wazir was the eighteenth member of his family killed by the active strategic jihadists of the Pakistan Army, and the mud in my mouth may not be the last. He and his cousin Ali Wazir, a member of the region’s Pakistan National Assembly (MNA), narrowly survived an armed assault last year and the army shot and killed 13 PTM members in a separate incident.
Arif Wazir has spent almost 15 months in prison, occasionally since the start of the PTM two years ago, on undercover charges at the behest of the military. He had just arrived home from the prison and had already begun political activities with the PTM, the objective of which has been to oppose the army’s policy of rehabilitating the Taliban in the region. The PTM has been calling for an end to this practice. Over the past 15 years, the Pakistani military has launched several operations in the Pashtun tribal areas, which have now been integrated into the country’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, apparently to purge the Taliban area. However, local leaders have lamented, even from the PTM podium, that the army’s operations were highly selective: they cleverly preserved and relocated all their active Afghan jihadists and local Taliban supporters in the contiguous tribal areas and Pashtun regions of Baluchistan province.
For example, the news about the Zarb-e-Azb Army Flagship Operation was out for months before any action on the ground began in June 2014, allowing many Taliban to escape. Furthermore, the army used to impose a curfew on the region and literally eliminated the leaders and cadres of the Haqqani Network before the first shot was fired. In fact, the Pakistani military has been unable to demonstrate that it arrested or killed a single Afghan jihadist or a local “good Taliban” in Zarb-e-Azb. Writing about that operation, he had observed in June 2014: “The Pakistani calculation has always been that the United States will leave a power vacuum in which the” good “Taliban, such as the Haqqani Network (HQN), would lead the charge. indications that the HQN ringleaders, including its chief boss, Sirajuddin Haqqani, and middle-level agents have already evacuated North Waziristan. “
Fast forward to 2020 and Sirajuddin Haqqani can be seen not only finding a seat at the negotiating table with the United States, as the Taliban’s deputy emir, but also becoming the first designated terrorist to publish an op-ed in the New York Times. The Pakistan army’s calculation was correct, albeit at incalculable cost to the local Pashtun people in their sweat, blood, and treasure.
Thousands like Arif Wazir have been sacrificed at the altar of the jihadist policy of the Pakistan army and hundreds of thousands were internally displaced, becoming refugees in their own country. However, the army appears to have no regrets, and therefore the current repatriation of its jihadist assets to the former tribal districts. The only thing different this time is that there is, in the form of a PTM, a solid and organic political movement that defies the army’s narrative and denounces it for its lies.
Army lackeys, such as the governor of Punjab province, have tried to identify the brutal murder of Arif Wazir against the Afghan intelligence service.
The Governor’s verified Twitter account posted that “The NDS intended to kill Manzoor Pashteen (PTM’s top leader).” But when he hid, the corpse of Arif Wazir was turned over. (MNA) Mohsin Dawar and Ali Wazir aided and incited in this murder. “
After incessantly blaming the PTM for being an NDS proxy, perhaps the irony was lost on the Governor’s team! Still, they removed the tweet and attributed it to unauthorized account use.
There is an undeclared ban on media coverage of the PTM’s political activities and its leaders have been tacitly denied any screen or airtime. The newspapers have purged, under duress, columns and even columnists to write about the PTM. However, the PTM has been conveying its message through the skillful use of social media and its leaders have written opinion pieces for international publications. So when the brakes on the media and the coercion of journalists didn’t work, the establishment through its jihadist minions seems to have resorted to the extreme form of censorship: the killings. And Arif Wazir might not be the only one whose trail of blood leads to the army and its nasty allies.
Journalist Baloch led
A Baloch journalist, Sajid Hussain, who lived in exile in Sweden and edited an online publication, The Balochistan Times, went missing in March. His body was found in a river near the Swedish city of Uppsala on April 23, 2020. New York Times wrote: “Reporters Without Borders in a statement suggested that Mr. Hussain’s death may have followed a kidnapping” at the behest of a Pakistani intelligence agency … Taliban and Islamic State militants operate in Hussain’s home province of Pakistan, as do criminal groups. “Therefore, it is essential to understand the nature of the military’s involvement with jihadists, drug barons, and criminal groups.
Hussain had widely reported on the Pakistan Army’s dirty war in Balochistan, the Baloch separatist movement and how it challenged an international drug lord called Imam Bheel’s rule in Balochistan. In 2009, the administration of President Barrack Obama had sanctioned Bheel as one of the four drug lords of international drug trafficking under the Foreign Narcotics Drug Trafficking Designation Act. But drugs weren’t Bheel’s only act. He flirted with Pakistani politicians, including friends of the military establishment, and with the army itself. Supposedly, one of General Pervez Musharraf’s ministers, Zubeida Jalal, released him in a kidnapping case. Ironically, Bheel’s son defeated the minister in the next general election. But Bheel’s importance and collaboration with the military has been twofold: first, he worked with the army against secular militant separatists Baloch and, second, helping with the Afghan Taliban drug trade and smuggling to finance his war.
Without the autopsy report, it is difficult to say if there was any foul play involved in the journalist’s death. However, Sajid Hussain surely had many enemies, including Pakistani intelligence agencies and his narco-mafia collaborators. Although the military refrained from pursuing dissidents abroad, in 2018 US law enforcement agencies. The US, UK and Europe personally warned dozens of Pakistani dissident writers, intellectuals and activists living in self-exile against the return trip to Pakistan or certain countries in the Middle East and European countries. Before that, former Army dictator General Pervez Musharraf, who ironically escaped from the Pakistani courts and now in Dubai, had asked Killings of Pakistani dissident leaders and cadres living abroad.
Army-driven disinformation and worse
Add to this mix, the recent appointment of (retired) Lt. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa as Special Assistant to the Prime Minister for information, and one can see that the army’s control over the narrative only becomes stricter, with specific objectives in its mind. General Asim Bajwa, unrelated to the current Army Chief of Staff (COAS), General Qamar Javed Bajwa, is currently serving as president of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor Authority (CPECA), effectively securing the army’s control over the billion dollar project. . But his true claim to fame is that, as director general of Public Relations Between Services (DG ISPR), he was the architect of censorship and media coercion in the post-Musharraf dictatorship era. He urged, induced, cajoled, and coerced the media and newspapers to censor himself. In my own case, I literally ordered Pakistan Daily times, where I had written a weekly column for six years, to close it along with the weekly article by my co-columnist and Baloch rights advocate, Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur. It created a culture of purging dissident voices from electronic media through duress.
Another of his nefarious contributions was the construction of troll armies from social networks to persecute, harass, defame and drown the voices that oppose the army’s hegemony in politics. As DG ISPR, he created a larger-than-life public figure for then-COAS, General Raheel Shareef, through sheer projection and propaganda. According to respected military historian Hamid Hussain, “this was resented by professional officers and ridiculed by his colleagues as” Twitter Chief “and” Pakistan’s Goebbels. “The current army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, realized the error. and ordered to dim the projection. “
But General Qamar Bajwa had his own Goebbels, albeit rather rough and illiterate: Major General Asif Ghafoor. General Ghafoor was a volatile and often mean man, who chose personal revenge on Twitter, only to be punished and ridiculed. He, however, relentlessly continued troll farming and media control with great success. Big media and publishers were cowed, one after another. However, since General Ghafoor was released earlier this year, his replacement, Major General Babar Iftikhar, has been struggling to find his feet. It seems that while General Iftikhar is learning on the job, General Asim Bajwa has been sent as reinforcement. Another reason to reinforce the (mis) information front is that the spokespersons and information ministers of Army-friendly Prime Minister Imran Khan have stammered and hesitated. They have been replaced more times than one can remember. The brass, perennially obsessed with image and less concerned with changing reality, was not happy with his puppet’s failure to put lipstick on the pig.
Why Amendment 18 of the Constitution is a red rag for GHQ
But there is more to these attempts to muzzle the media and silence dissenters literally right now. The military is extremely unhappy with the landmark 18th Constitutional Amendment, which was passed unanimously 10 years ago and promulgated by then President Asif Ali Zardari. Amendment 18 is one of the most detailed parts of the constitution. It remedied many malicious mutations induced in the Pakistani constitution by military rulers, including discussion of the power to dissolve the national assembly, and therefore the government, before the president. President Zardari voluntarily relinquished that power through this amendment.
In 1972, when the Pakistani Parliament dealt with drafting a new constitution after the secession and independence of eastern Pakistan, it agreed on a federal structure. It was also agreed that during a certain period of time, various issues would be under the domain of both the federal government and the federal units, that is, the provincial governments. This concurrent list was to be abolished in due course, but thanks to two episodes of martial law spanning 20 years in total, and a decade of controlled democracy, that never happened. Finally, when the 18th amendment returned most of the joint issues to the provinces, that along with the National Finance Commission (NFC) award was not good for the military, and many in the civilian bureaucracy. So much so that current distributions have remained essentially frozen in what the seventh NFC award had given in 2010.
the Business recorder Columnist Rashed Rahman recently wrote: Under this seventh NFC award, the Center receives 42.5% of the divisible group, while the remaining 57.5 percent is distributed among the provinces in the stock formula determined as follows: 82% based on population, 10.3% based on poverty and backwardness, 5% in income collection and 2.7% in inverse population. “
The premise of the devolution was that the federal government would increase the tax-to-GDP ratio and cut spending on redundant ministries. With the bankrupt army’s Imran Khan project, the economic outlook remains in crisis and the tax base has shrunk, making the army, the biggest beneficiary of federal generosity, nervous. But not ready to get rid of their disastrous adventure, the army has chosen to try to recover what was duly granted to the provinces through Amendment 18. To this end, the ministers of the Imran-Bajwa regime have already been commissioned to challenge Amendment 18 and the NFC Award, with the ultimate goal of rolling back many of its provisions.
With Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan clinging to a parliamentary majority with the skin of its teeth, let alone having the required two-thirds majority, and almost all other parties opposed to a reversal, the plot It appears to be forcing major political parties such as former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan-Nawaz Muslim League (PMLN) and the Zardari People’s Party of Pakistan (PPP) to align. Both the PMLN and PPP leadership face fabricated corruption charges, for which they have been in and out of prison. They are likely to hang a carrot to get out of jail along with the stick of more cases, in case they refuse to play ball.
A very close PMLN leader, Nawaz Sharif, recently told me that they see no reason to undo Amendment 18 and that if there are delivery and enforcement issues, the provinces should be asked to review. But a camp within the PMLN allied with Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, seems a little more receptive to the army’s demands. The ethno-national parties Baloch and Pashtun and the PPP, which has its stronghold in Sindh province, are likely to resist a change in the amount of provincial autonomy and divisible allocation of funds.
While a complete reversal of Amendment 18 would be unlikely, the army through Imran Khan is likely to shake up opposition parties for maximum concessions. The army is essentially ready to regain all the political space it lost after the overthrow of General Pervez Musharraf and the restoration of democracy. He knows very well that playing with the 18th amendment effectively means weakening the federation and unleashing political chaos. But his plan appears to be to handle this: through brute force, gagging the media and blackmailing political parties already affected by fabricated legal cases. And to complete the seizure of power, the remnants of dissident voices, especially in the Pashtun and Baloch areas, must be handled with lethal force.
This not-so-surreptitious attempt at encroachment occurs amid the coronavirus pandemic, when local and global attention is focused on fighting the deadly disease. But Pakistan’s democratic forces will be well advised to close ranks and be on the lookout for virulent army movements. The mischief is underway and only a robust and cohesive political opposition can counter it. Otherwise, censorship, assassinations and the seizure of power will continue.
Mohammad Taqi is a Pakistani-American columnist. He tweets to @mazdaki
Note: In an earlier version of this article, Ali Wazir’s photo was inadvertently used in place of Arif Wazir.
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