The sounds of silence from Pakistan

“Pakistan has to deal with the Mumbai mayhem, planned and launched from its soil. This requires facing the truth and admitting mistakes. The entire state security apparatus must ensure that the perpetrators and masterminds of the ghastly terror attacks are brought to justice. The case has lingered on for far too long…”

If the paragraph above makes you wonder whether Pakistan is turning over a new leaf and has decided to come clean on the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks — especially in reaction to the extradition of Tahawwur Rana to India from the US — well, then, think again, dear Reader.

This paragraph is from an August 3, 2015, article in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, by Tariq Khosa, a former chief of its Federal Investigative Agency (FIA), who in 2009 investigated the Mumbai attacks.

Mr Khosa had probably drunk the truth serum when he wrote the piece. Just like former PM Nawaz Sharif, who admitted in a 2018 interview, also in Dawn, that “militant organisations (remain) active” and asked if Pakistan should have allowed them “to cross the border and kill 150 people in Mumbai”. Mr Sharif was quickly slapped with treason.

Significantly, both articles can still be read on the Dawn website — significant, because over the last few days if you read the Pakistani press, you would be forgiven for thinking you were reading the Icelandic media. There’s not one word on Rana, the Canadian national of Pakistan origin, one of the two key conspirators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks extradited to India a day or so ago. Not a single word.

Critical articles on the manner in which the Shehbaz Sharif government is dealing with Balochistan, yes. Editorials on the Pakistan Super League, yes. Disapproving commentary on Pakistan’s economy, yes.

But on the return of Rana, and by extension, on the Mumbai attacks, when 10 Pakistani men trained by the Pakistani military, set off from Karachi to Mumbai, and proceeded to hold India’s financial centre to ransom for nearly three days in November 2008 — not a word or a phrase, leave alone a sentence.

You don’t wonder why, you know why. On the one hand, the Pakistani Government has thrown open its doors — and the people of Pakistan, their hearts — and given 6,500 visas to Sikh pilgrims, to celebrate Baisakhi in golden gurdwaras like Nankana Sahib, Panja Sahib, Kartarpur Sahib and others. The Tribune and other newspapers have carried happy photos of senior citizens clasping their hands as they have set off on what is, indeed, a joyful pilgrimage.

On the other, for 17 long years, the Pakistani military establishment that has mostly held elected governments and its own people to ransom, has decided to throw an especially tight noose around not just PM Shehbaz Sharif’s government, but also the entire media — ensuring, thereby, that nary a word on the Mumbai horror will be contaminated by the publisher’s ink.

And so the drumroll of perpetrators that begins with Hafiz Saeed and ends with Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, both co-founders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, has been blanked out. There is no mention of David Headley, the other mastermind, now lodged in a Chicago jail. No reporting on Major Iqbal or Sajid Mir or Abdul Rehman Hashim Syed or Ilyas Kashmiri — all of them chargesheeted by India’s NIA and roaming freely in Pakistan today.

The memory of those days and nights in Mumbai hangs like a shroud over Pakistan. The usually rambunctious Pakistani media, a media that has in the past challenged dictators and autocrats, from Ayub Khan to Tikka Khan — beaten up, thrown into jail, tortured, their families threatened harm — seems to have been muzzled, grown wearier, older. Perhaps their lips are sealed because they are waiting for a newer dawn to speak more freely.

Perhaps there’s something about Mumbai that ensures a blanket of silence. Besides the treason charge against Nawaz Sharif, a former National Security Advisor, Gen Mahmud Durrani, lost his job when he admitted in 2009 that Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani citizen. Only Khosa has survived.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan military’s much-coveted favour has shifted from Imran Khan to Shehbaz Sharif, Nawaz’s younger brother, and Nawaz’s daughter, Maryam, who is the chief minister of Punjab. Half of Pakistan’s elite has dual passports and therefore, one leg in the West to which they can scoot when things go wrong. The economy is in a shambles. China’s long shadow has gotten longer and larger.

And yet, every word of Khosa’s 2015 piece continues to ring true. He has never gone back on it, nor has Dawn, even if it is mutinously mum on the matter today.

Here is what Khosa said in that piece, about the investigation into Mumbai’s perpetrators carried out by his own FIA:

“First, Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani national, whose place of residence and initial schooling as well as his joining a banned militant organisation was established by the investigators. Second, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists were imparted training near Thatta, Sindh, and launched by sea from there. The training camp was identified and secured by the investigators. The casings of the explosive devices used in Mumbai were recovered from this training camp and duly matched.

Third, the fishing trawler used by the terrorists for hijacking an Indian trawler in which they sailed to Mumbai, was brought back to harbour, then painted and concealed. It was recovered by the investigators and connected to the accused. Fourth, the engine of the dinghy abandoned by the terrorists near the Mumbai harbour contained a patent number through which the investigators traced its import from Japan to Lahore and then to a Karachi sports shop from where an LeT-linked militant purchased it along with the dinghy. The money trail was followed and linked to the accused, who was arrested.

Fifth, the ops room in Karachi, from where the operation was directed, was also identified and secured by the investigators. The communications through Voice over Internet Protocol were unearthed. Sixth, the alleged commander and his deputies were identified and arrested. Seventh, a couple of foreign-based financiers and facilitators were arrested and brought to face trial.”

Khosa ends his piece by saying that Indian officials had conceded in 2009 that the Pakistanis had done a professional job in indicting seven perpetrators; but he also warned that “other missing links” still needed to be uncovered.

“Are we as a nation prepared to muster the courage to face uncomfortable truths and combat the demons of militancy that haunt our land?”

Khosa’s question looms large over Pakistan today — if only he were allowed to ask it again and the press allowed to publish.

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