Pakistan's Tweedledum & Tweedledee Arrive In UK With Ill-gotten Booty
nkdat...@bigmailbox.net
DAWN, Karachi, Pakistan
Tuesday, 30 Jun, 2009
Brass of a very special kind
By Kamran Shafi
ksh...@yahoo.co.uk
THIS past week the Commando, and his sidekick the Private Banker, or
shall we say Tweedledum and Tweedledee, were interviewed by a private
TV channel in London, where they live in the lap of luxury after
shoving the country into the pit it is in. By gad, do they have brass,
the both of them!
The most interesting part of the Commando’s interview was the Kargil
misadventure. As usual, he stood the matter on its head and, again as
usual, fibbed away to glory with panache, and flair that only the very
brazen have, and asserted that he never advised Nawaz Sharif that we
should withdraw from Kargil.
On the July 3, 1999, the Commando tells us, he briefed the defence
committee of the cabinet on the ‘military aspects’ of Kargil. He says
he told the DCC that of the five ‘places’ (whatever the term means),
the Indians had only taken one back; had taken two or three posts in
one, and that three were completely ‘untouched’ because they did not
even know we were there — ‘un ko pataa hee nahin tha’.
He also ‘analysed a limited war with India in Kashmir’, whatever that
means, as also the air and naval aspects of a ‘total war’ with India.
According to himself, he told Nawaz Sharif and 15 others present
there, including the air and navy chiefs, that ‘we were militarily
alright’ and that the Indians were on a ‘very, very weak wicket’. They
were ‘weak’ said the Commando because they had ‘moved all their forces
to Kargil as also all their artillery’. ALL their forces; ALL their
artillery?! Little wonder that we got ourselves in the sort of trouble
that we did under his able command, what?
Throughout the briefing, says the Commando, Nawaz Sharif kept asking
him if we should withdraw from Kargil to which he replied that he had
given his ‘military assessment’ and that it was now for the prime
minister to take the ‘political decision’.
Then he goes into the details of how, a day later, he was called back
from a weekend in Murree with his family — this weekend at a time that
our poorly equipped and poorly fed soldiers were dying in Kargil
please note — to meet Nawaz Sharif at the Islamabad airport where the
PM told him he was off to Washington, and asked him yet again if we
should withdraw from Kargil. To which he answered as theretofore.
Of course, the Commando conveniently forgot to tell us poor Pakistanis
who were witness to the Kargil disaster these many years ago, and who
were now listening agog to this nonsense, that his tight buddy Marine
Gen Anthony Zinni, then commander US Central Command, had visited
Pakistan in the third week of June and had met him first and then the
PM.
In Gen Zinni’s own words in his book Battle Ready (GP Putnam’s Sons):
‘I was … directed by the administration to head a presidential mission
to Pakistan to convince Prime Minister Sharif and General Musharraf to
withdraw their forces from Kargil. I met with the Pakistani leaders in
Islamabad on June 24 and 25 and put forth a simple rationale for
withdrawing: ‘If you don’t pull back, you’re going to bring war and
nuclear annihilation down on your country. That’s going to be very bad
news for everybody’.
‘Nobody actually quarreled with this rationale. The problem for the
Pakistani leadership was the apparent national loss of face. Backing
down and pulling back to the Line of Control looked like political
suicide. We needed to come up with a face-saving way out of this mess.
What we were able to offer was a meeting with President Clinton, which
would end the isolation that had long been the state of affairs
between our two countries, but we would announce the meeting only
after a withdrawal of forces. That got Musharraf’s attention and he
encouraged Prime Minister Sharif to hear me out.
‘Sharif was reluctant to withdraw before the meeting with Clinton was
announced (again, his problem was maintaining face); but after I
insisted, he finally came around and he ordered the withdrawal. We set
up a meeting with Clinton in July.’
Again, exactly a year later (June 20, 2000) this is what Gen Zinni
said in Abu Dhabi: ‘I talked to Mr Sharif and the chief of staff and
convinced them to take steps to ease tensions and to withdraw from
Kargil. They agreed. There was no interest I found in the Pakistanis
to see the situation escalate beyond control from either side and they
cooperated, making the decision on their own,’ he said.
If this doesn’t prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the Commando
played fast and free with his office and the authority flowing from it
then nothing will; from first starting Kargil, and then lying about
how well we were doing. Nor was this the only misstatement of facts
indulged in by him during the interview which the interviewer should
have pointed out. In the matter of the mayhem in Swat, and the delayed
action of the security establishment, he has tried to put the main
blame on the elected government that was nowhere on the scene when he
and his cohorts were making a mess of things.
Whilst what he said on Swat was mostly nonsense, the matter of the FM
radio station really took the cake. He puts the time of its setting up
after the 2008 elections. Nothing could be further from the truth for
the FM station was set up by Fazlullah (aka Mullah Radio) in the
beginning of 2006 when the Commando was still master of all he
surveyed.
As for Tweedledee, suffice it to say that all it took to expose him
was the wheat export scandal, when his government first exported wheat
and then, within a few months, imported the staple food at many times
the price of our exported wheat! As if that was not enough, he too
indulged in fantasy when he said his government added 3,000MW to the
national grid. Wrong! Not one electricity-producing plant was set up
in the eight years that the Private Banker was finance/prime minister.
Two thousand, eight hundred megawatts were added, but only as part of
the existing IPPs’ own expansion programmes.
There is only one way out of the clutches of the establishment and its
‘agencies’ (and their boys) which are the prime reason of our
travails. And that is the coming together of all the political forces,
the trashing of the dictatorial parts of the 17th Amendment, and
complete command and control of the security establishment by elected
leaders. Are you listening, President Asif Ali Zardari?