By Shashi Shekhar
June 02, 2011
The outrage in Pakistan over the death of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad is predictable. But the significance of his death will be registered most outside Pakistan for his reporting that offered a rare window into the murky world of Pakistan's military-jihadi complex. Will the truth behind his murder ever see the light of day? Or will Pakistani media now tow the line of least resistance?
Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Editor of Asia Times Online, was found dead near Islamabad. Shahzad’s body was discovered more than 48 hours since he was reported missing on his way to a TV studio in Islamabad. He is survived by his wife and three small children. There is predictable outrage within certain sections in Pakistan over his death under murky circumstances. A probe has also been ordered by that country’s Prime Minister, according to some reports.
But the significance of this death will be registered most outside Pakistan for Shahzad’s reporting offered a rare, if not always accurate, window into the murky world of Pakistan’s miltiary-jihadi complex. For a whole a class of Pakistan watchers and jihad analysts across the world, Shahzad’s reportage was most often the first-hand account of the inside story with its many distortions and embellishments.
This writer’s tryst with Shahzad’s columns started in the aftermath of the November 26, 2008 attack on Mumbai. When much of the Indian reportage of 26/11 was mostly an amplification of the official line with little original investigation or reporting, it was interesting to note that Shahzad’s articles during December 2008 had revealed much on what we would learn only in late 2009 through the arrests in Chicago of David Coleman Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana. For example Shahzad had in December 2008 laid out the contours of what we now call the ‘Karachi Project’ that saw elements within the ISI and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba collaborating with elements within Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and Al Qaeda’s ‘313 Brigade’ and Karachi-based criminals of Indian origin.
Shahzad shot into fame in mid-2009 with his interviews of the 313 Brigade’s Ilyas Kashmiri that appeared in Asia Times Online right after it was suspected that the terrorist had been killed in a drone strike in North Waziristan. Shahzad’s interview was the first confirmation of Ilyas Kashmiri’s resurgence. This close proximity Shahzad was able to strike with murky elements of the jihadi world saw him have two near-death experiences earlier, including his abduction in 2006 and an attempt on his life earlier this year.
It is said Shahzad played all sides to cultivate sources. Ultimately this trait, it appears, imperilled his life with his death coming on the close heels of an expose on the recent attack on a Pakistani Naval Air Station in Karachi. In that expose, Shahzad had alleged Al Qaeda infiltration of Pakistan’s naval ranks thus attributing the attack to the underlying conflict between Al Qaeda sympathetic elements within the Pakistani military-jihadi complex.
A curious aspect of Shahzad’s reporting has been his glorification of Ilyas Kashmiri’s record, often attributing responsibility for many attacks to Kashmiri’s genius. One instance where Shahzad’s reportage was off the mark was the December 2009 suicide bombing at a CIA base in Khost. Shahzad’s initial reportage which attributed the responsibility to Kashmiri was focussed on the role of an Afghan Intelligence officer when subsequent reports and eventually a martyrdom video with Hakeemullah Mehsud revealed the role of a Jordanian double agent.
Much can be learned from Shahzad’s columns on the shifting contours of conflict within the Pakistan military-jihadi complex right since the September 2001 attacks in the United States if one is able to sift fact from what perhaps was an occupational hazard — fiction.
This columnist owes a special gratitude to Shahzad’s columns for therein lay much of the insight and background into our understanding of the Karachi Project. Shahzad’s columns also offered this columnist a view into the duplicitous role played by the ISI in recruiting Lashkar operatives and then turning them in as Al Qaeda operatives whenever opportunity so demanded. In Shahzad’s columns we also see the many raw faces of jihad in Pakistan, the many betrayals and mutinies. Unfortunate but perhaps fitting that Shahzad managed to release his book titled ‘Inside Al-Qaeda and Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11’ a week before his death.
We may perhaps never know who killed Shahzad. But in the larger picture that question is irrelevant for we are talking here of a country that is incapable of being honest with itself on even the death of a person no less than its former Prime Minister. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently remarked that a stable and strong Pakistan was in India’s interests. Shahzad’s death reminds once again on how Mr Singh misses the point so completely. A nation that lives on lies cannot be at peace with itself, forget being at peace with its neighbours.
Shahzad in a way was Sanjaya reporting on the Kurukshetra war within Pakistan with the entire Pakistan state for a Dhritarashtra, blind to reality and in deep denial. Pakistan’s tragedy, of course, is there is no side fighting for dharma in its Kurukshtera war. But for us on the outside the smaller tragedy, of course, is we just lost Sanjaya.
URL: http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarOnTerror_1.aspx?ArticleID=4759
12:46 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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