Prosecutor investigating Benazir Bhutto’s murder is killed

Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali (Credit bbc.co.uk)MULTAN, Pakistan, May 3 — Gunmen on Friday killed a Pakistani prosecutor who had been investigating the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Assailants opened fire on the prosecutor, Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali, as he drove to work from his home in a suburb of the capital, Islamabad, for a court hearing in which the former military leader, Pervez Musharraf, faces charges in relation to Ms. Bhutto’s death in 2007.

The police said that gunmen traveling by motorbike and in a taxi sprayed Mr. Ali’s car with bullets, lightly wounding his bodyguard and killing a woman who was passing by when his car veered out of control. Television footage from the scene showed a bullet-riddled vehicle crashed by the roadside.

Mr. Ali died before he reached a hospital in Islamabad, where a doctor said he had been shot 13 times. The police said that Mr. Ali’s bodyguard returned fire and managed to wound one of the attackers. The police are searching for the attackers, all of whom escaped.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, and the police said it was too early to comment on a possible motive. But few doubted that it was linked to Mr. Ali’s work as a state prosecutor in some of the most sensitive cases in the country, and his death reinforced the vulnerability of senior government officials who challenge Islamist militants and other powerful interests.

Mr. Ali represented the Federal Investigation Agency, which has implicated Mr. Musharraf in the death of Ms. Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007, just before the last election.

After the previous hearing in the Bhutto case on April 30, Mr. Ali told reporters he had “solid evidence” that connected Mr. Musharraf with Ms. Bhutto’s death.

Prosecutors and Bhutto supporters accuse Mr. Musharraf of failing to provide adequate security to Ms. Bhutto after her return from exile in October 2007. Mr. Musharraf has denied those accusations.

Since Mr. Musharraf’s return from exile in March, investigators have questioned him about the security arrangements for Ms. Bhutto in 2007. He insisted that, as head of state, he was not involved in administrative matters such as security arrangements.

Mr. Ali was also involved in another sensitive case: the trial of seven people from the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba charged with involvement in the attacks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, which killed more than 160 people.

Seven Lashkar activists have been on trial since 2009, accused of orchestrating the slaughter from Pakistan, and one of the defendants is the group’s operational leader, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi. But the hearings have been characterized by opacity and a lethargic pace.

The trial is taking place at Adila jail in Rawalpindi, ostensibly on security grounds, and the news media are barred from proceedings. Hearings have been repeatedly adjourned because of the absence of lawyers or the presiding judge.

Currently, defense lawyers are cross-examining the prosecution witnesses. Mr. Ali was scheduled to appear in court on Saturday in relation to the case.

Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded with help from the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s spy agency, in the 1990s, and its presumed leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, lives openly in the eastern city of Lahore. The spy agency says it has cut all links with the group.

Mr. Ali’s death comes at a sensitive time, with Pakistanis scheduled to go to the polls for a general election on May 11. Campaigning has been marred by widespread Taliban violence against candidates from secular parties.

In the latest attack, gunmen shot dead a candidate from the secular Awami National Party, which has borne the brunt of attacks, along with his 6-year-old son, in the port city of Karachi on Friday.

Although Islamabad suffered a number of militant attacks in 2008 and 2009, it has escaped major violence in recent years. But several prominent figures have been assassinated on its streets, including the former governor of Punjab Province, Salman Taseeer, and a minister for religious affairs.

Mir Hazar Khan Khoso, the interim prime minister, addressed the nation Friday evening and reiterated his government’s resolve to hold free, fair, transparent and peaceful elections, and he said a special security cell had been established in the Interior Ministry to coordinate with the national election commission.

“This cell will collect intelligence reports and share it with provincial government and law enforcing agencies, and this cell is also empowered to take decisions for timely action if needed,” Mr. Khoso said. “All resources will be used to improve security of the sensitive polling stations and their effective monitoring,” he added.

Mr. Musharraf returned from exile with a plan to run for Parliament in a general election. He faces charges in several cases related to his time in power, including the murder of Ms. Bhutto, the killing of a Baloch nationalist leader, and the firing of senior judges.

Mr. Musharraf, a retired general, has been disqualified from contesting the election, and this week a court banned him from politics for life. He also faces possible treason charges.

In the court hearing in nearby Rawalpindi, lawyers for Mr. Musharraf argued that he should be exempted from appearing in person in the case, Pakistani television stations reported. The hearing was adjourned until May 14.

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

 

Obama to Seek Closing Amid Hunger Strike at Guantánamo

Guantanamo prison (Credit guardian.co.uk)
Guantanamo prison (Credit guardian.co.uk)

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday recommitted to his years-old vow to close the Guantánamo Bay prison following the arrival of “medical reinforcements” of nearly 40 Navy nurses, corpsmen and specialists amid a mass hunger strike by inmates who have been held for over a decade without trial.

“It’s not sustainable,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “The notion that we’re going to keep 100 individuals in no man’s land in perpetuity,” he added, made no sense. “All of us should reflect on why exactly are we doing this? Why are we doing this?”

Citing the high expense and the foreign policy costs of continuing to operate the prison, Mr. Obama said he would try again to persuade Congress to lift restrictions on transferring inmates to the federal court system. Mr. Obama was ambiguous, however, about the most difficult issue raised by the prospect of closing the prison: what to do with detainees who are deemed dangerous but could not be feasibly prosecuted.

Mr. Obama’s existing policy on that subject, which Congress has blocked, is to move detainees to maximum-security facilities inside the United States and continue holding them without trial as wartime prisoners; it is not clear whether such a change would ease the frustrations fueling the detainees’ hunger strike.

Yet at another point in the news conference, Mr. Obama appeared to question the policy of indefinite wartime detention at a time when the war in Iraq has ended, the one in Afghanistan is winding down and the original makeup of Al Qaeda has been decimated. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried,” he said, “that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

But in the short term, Mr. Obama indicated his support for the force-feeding of detainees who refused to eat.

“I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said.

As of Tuesday morning, 100 of the 166 prisoners at Guantánamo were officially deemed by the military to be participating in the hunger strike, with 21 “approved” to be fed the nutritional supplement Ensure through tubes inserted through their noses.

In a statement released earlier, a military spokesman said the deployment of additional medical personnel had been planned several weeks ago as more detainees joined the strike.

“We will not allow a detainee to starve themselves to death, and we will continue to treat each person humanely,” said Lt. Col. Samuel House, the prison spokesman.

The military’s response to the hunger strike has revived complaints by medical ethics groups that contend that doctors — and nurses under their direction — should not force-feed prisoners who are mentally competent to decide not to eat.

Last week, the president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jeremy A. Lazarus, wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel saying that any doctor who participated in forcing a prisoner to eat against his will was violating “core ethical values of the medical profession.”

“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Dr. Lazarus wrote.

He also noted that the A.M.A. endorses the World Medical Association’s Tokyo Declaration, a 1975 statement forbidding doctors to use their medical knowledge to facilitate torture. It says that if a prisoner makes “an unimpaired and rational judgment” to refuse nourishment, “he or she shall not be fed artificially.”

The military’s policy, however, is that it can and should preserve the life of a detainee by forcing him to eat if necessary.

“In the case of a hunger strike, attempted suicide or other attempted serious self-harm, medical treatment or intervention may be directed without the consent of the detainee to prevent death or serious harm,” a military policy directive says. “Such action must be based on a medical determination that immediate treatment or intervention is necessary to prevent death or serious harm and, in addition, must be approved by the commanding officer of the detention facility or other designated senior officer responsible for detainee operations.”

On Monday, Colonel House also said that some detainees on the “enteral feeding” list were drinking the supplement.

“Just because the detainees are approved for enteral feeding does not mean they don’t eat a regular meal,” he said. “Once the detainees leave their cell and are in the presence of medical personnel, most of the detainees who are approved for tube feeding will eat or drink without the peer pressure from inside the cellblock.”

Medical ethicists and the Pentagon also clashed during the Bush administration over hunger strikes at Guantánamo.

The current protest began in February and escalated after a raid this month in which guards confined protesting detainees to their cells. The impetus for it is disputed. The prisoners, through their lawyers, cite a search for contraband on Feb. 6, during which they say Korans were handled in a way they found offensive. The military says the Koran search followed routine procedures.

But both sides agree that the root cause is frustration over the collapse of President Obama’s effort to close the prison, which drew Congressional resistance, and the fact that no prisoners have been transferred because of restrictions on where they can be sent.

Congress has restricted the repatriation to countries with troubled security conditions, helping to jam up 86 low-level detainees who were designated for potential transfer three years ago; most are Yemeni. But since 2012, lawmakers have given the Pentagon the ability to waive most of those restrictions on a case-by-case basis, and it has not done so.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantánamo, everything that we can do administratively.” It was not clear whether that was a signal that the administration may be considering using the waiver power to revive the transfer of low-level detainees.

Ramzi Kassem, a City University of New York law professor who represents several detainees, said he had talked to a Yemeni client, Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, who said a guard had shot him with rubber-coated pellets at close range during the raid. Since then, Mr. Kassem was told, the prisoners have been denied soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and their legal papers.

Mr. Alwi said he had not eaten in 80 days and stopped drinking after the raid, Mr. Kassem said. He also said he was being force-fed twice a day after being tied to a restraint chair.

Mr. Kassem also quoted Mr. Alwi as saying: “I do not want to kill myself. My religion prohibits suicide. But I will not eat or drink until I die, if necessary, to protest the injustice of this place. We want to get out of this place. It is as though this government wishes to smother us in this injustice, to kill us slowly here, indirectly, without trying us or executing us.”

In his statement on Monday, Colonel House said the prisoners would not be allowed to die.

“Detainees have the right to peacefully protest, but we have the responsibility to ensure that they conduct their protest safely and humanely,” he said. “Detainees are given a choice: eat the hot meal, drink the supplement or be enteral fed.”

 

Will Pre Poll Violence Usher in the Taliban from the Back Door?

ANP president Asfandyar Wali Khan (Credit: pakistantoday.com.pk)
The 2013 elections in Pakistan are critical for setting a clear goal post for the nation. However, the short time frame in which they are taking place has left the caretaker administration and security institutions scrambling to clean up a nation wracked by terrorism, poverty and inequality.

With the simmering insurgency on the Pak-Afghan border, the caretaker administration has tried to beef up security in the violence stricken areas of FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — as well as Karachi, where former incumbents from the secular PPP, ANP and MQM are under attack by a determined Taliban enemy.

But given that militants in Pakistan’s north have consistently targeted secular candidates, especially Awami National Party, while allowing rallies by Imran Khan’s Tehrik-i-Insaf, Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam (Fazlur Rehman group) and even the Pakistan Muslim League (N) — has led to questions about the outcome of the election.

In particular, civil society is questioning whether the relentlessness with which militants are killing secular incumbents and their supporters, while facilitating political parties who have a soft corner for them – will bring pro Taliban legislators into parliament.

In many areas of the KP and FATA, the poor security situation has already deprived incumbents from hoisting party flags or holding rallies. Apart from contesting as independents or putting up proxies, the ANP and PPP have not nominated candidates to many seats in Waziristan and the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan.

The anti US sentiment in Pakistan, accelerated by drone attacks and military operations… combined with increased poverty, income gap and poor governance, is a big factor that has caused the incumbents to lose ground among voters.

But the ANP – which lost many key leaders while stopping the onslaught of the Taliban in the last five years – has been worst hit. Its rallies have been repeatedly attacked and its rank and file killed and wounded across Pakistan. The party leadership has clearly spelled out the Tehrik-i-Taliban as the perpetrators. The TTP has also become the MQM’s worst enemy – kiling their candidates and attacking their election offices.

Time and again, the caretaker administration has taken note of the terrible security situation and beefed up security. The visible effects of greater law enforcement has been a drop off in mass terror attacks (like the one planned by the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi against Hazaras late April in Balochistan) and a slight drop off in violence in Karachi.

But it is a situation that has caused the PPP to hunker down and avoid public rallies. That is changing the face of the once populist party, which even refrained from kicking off its election campaign on April 4, the death anniversary of PPP founder, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The election scenario does not look good for the Zardari led PPP, whose primary achievement seems to have been the completion of five years in power. To its detriment, the PPP government has left behind a nation that is hungrier, violent and more unstable — and still out of sync with the modern world.

Come May 11, voters across Pakistan will likely vote on the basis of feudal and tribal loyalties. Still, the government’s lack luster performance over the last five years is bound to cost them a big percentage of the votes.

This is bound to hurt the party even in its home turf in Sindh, where it is now pitted against all political forces that exercise influence in the province. The Pakistan Muslim League (N), joined by Pirs, tribal and feudal chiefs, religious parties and even nationalists have formed an anti PPP front that is almost reminiscent of the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) — funded by the intelligence agencies in 1993 to prevent Benazir Bhutto from returning to power.

That is where the similarity ends.

Two decades ago, when Benazir led the PPP, her being a woman necessarily changed the party’s image. Keeping up the populism espoused by her father former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, she led a party of the masses that touched on the promised goodness of the socialist rhetoric `roti, kapra, makan,’ (food, clothing and shelter) — even if it did not deliver. But the image of millions of people looking for change did not jive with the establishment — and contributed to her murder in 2007.

Thereafter, the default president, Asif Zardari — hands untied, amassed wealth and privileges for a coterie of supporters at the expense of the majority “have-nots.” He used the classic methods he knew of getting opponents out of the way — sweet talk and bribe.

The situation has not gone unnoticed by the Supreme Court, which recently moved against some of the political appointments made by the departing PPP government. The superior court has also moved against the “life time of perks and privileges” bestowed by the PPP’s departing prime minister to former government functionaries just before the National Assembly term concluded.

Come May 11, tribal loyalties and to some extent the background of the candidates will influence the results of elections in rural Sindh. In so doing, voters may still choose the lower middle class Sindhis from the PPP as opposed to larger feudals. Still, the situation remains dicey and not altogether in the PPP’s favor.

Midway between Karachi and Hyderabad, the coastal town of Thatta promises to be a test case in the electoral contest between the PPP – where the Shirazis and Malkanis (head of the tribal Jats) – have announced the withdrawal of support from the PPP to their own nominee. In so doing, they have put up their own candidate, Zardari’s nominee and a shadowy muscle man – Owais Muzzafar (Tappi) – accusing him of usurpation of lands and the promotion of a coastal town of Zulfikarabad, being opposed by the locals.

It has opened up the situation for an independent candidate for provincial assembly – Mohammed Ali Shah – to step into the election. Shah is president of the Pakistan Fisher folk Forum and espouses an idealistic program to fight for the rights of fisher folk as well as agricultural and livestock communities.

Shah, who opposes PPP’s Owais Muzzafar for provincial assembly, claims his candidature has caused the Thatta feudals to break away from their support for the PPP.

Whichever way the situation pans out, a sense of disillusionment with the incumbent parties as well as the existing culture of the provinces is bound to redraw its political scenario.

Till then, the candidates deserve a level playing field instead of the life and death threats they confront in their quest to represent the people.

Living Through Terror, in Rawalpindi and Boston

Chechen brothers identified in Boston massacre (Credit: sandrarose.com)

Boston, April 16: I WAS in the middle of having Chinese food with my wife and friends yesterday afternoon when we heard the dull and deathly reverb. The water in our plastic cups rippled. We looked at one another, and someone made a joke about that famous scene in “Jurassic Park.” We tried to drown the moment in humor. But then a rush of humanity descended upon us in the Prudential Center on Boylston Street, right across from where the second bomb blast had just occurred, near the marathon’s finish line.

People gushed across the hallway like fish in white water rapids. It was a blur of bright clothes and shiny sneakers, everyone dressed up for Patriot’s Day weekend on what was moments ago a beautiful spring day. Instantly, images of the shootings in Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Tucson came to mind. I felt my thoughts reduced to singular flashes. My life, all of it, was the first. My wife, sitting across me, was the second. I yelled out to her to run, and we did, not knowing what had happened, only that it had to be something terrible.

We ran out of the food court and onto the terrace overlooking Boylston Street. We could see people fleeing from the finish line even as, in the distance, other weary marathoners kept running unknowingly toward the devastation. What was left of the food court was a land frozen in an innocent time, forks still stuck in half-eaten pieces of steak, belongings littered unattended. I felt fear beyond words.

This was not my first experience with terror, having grown up in Pakistan. But for some reason, I didn’t think back to those experiences. Looking onto to the smoked, chaotic Boylston Street, I forgot about cowering in my childhood bedroom as bombs and gunfire rained over the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, close to our house. My mind did not go back to when I stood on the roof of my dormitory in Karachi as the streets were overrun with burning buses and angry protesters after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. None of the unfortunate experiences of growing up in the midst of thousands of victims of terror, personally knowing some of them, helped me in that moment. Nothing made it any easier.

Perhaps, if I had been thinking more clearly and hadn’t had my wife with me, I might have gone down to try to help the wounded. But at that moment all I could think about was getting us out of there. We lost our friends, then found them again. Our cellphones weren’t working. And then, as we worked our way through the dazed throngs in Back Bay, I realized that not only was I a victim of terror, but I was also a potential suspect.

As a 20-something Pakistani male with dark stubble (an ode more to my hectic schedule as a resident in the intensive-care unit than to any aesthetic or ideology), would I not fit the bill? I know I look like Hollywood’s favorite post-cold-war movie villain. I’ve had plenty of experience getting intimately frisked at airports. Was it advisable to go back to pick up my friend’s camera that he had forgotten in his child’s stroller in the mall? I remember feeling grateful that I wasn’t wearing a backpack, which I imagined might look suspicious. My mind wandered to when I would be working in the intensive care unit the next day, possibly taking care of victims of the blast. What would I tell them when they asked where I was from (a question I am often posed)? Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell people I was from India or Bangladesh?

As I walked down Commonwealth Avenue, I started receiving calls from family back home. They informed me about what was unfolding on television screens across the world. I was acutely conscious of what I spoke over the phone, feeling that someone was breathing over my shoulder, listening to every word I said. Careful to avoid Urdu, speaking exclusively in English, I relayed that I was safe, and all that I had seen. I continued to naïvely cling to the hope that it was a gas explosion, a subway accident, anything other than what it increasingly seemed to be: an act of brutality targeted at the highest density of both people and cameras.

The next step was to hope that the perpetrator was not a lunatic who would become the new face of a billion people. Not a murderer who would further fan the flames of Islamophobia. Not an animal who would obstruct the ability of thousands of students to complete their educations in the United States. Not an extremist who would maim and hurt the very people who were still recovering from the pain of Sept. 11. President Obama and Gov. Deval L. Patrick have shown great restraint in their words and have been careful not to accuse an entire people for what one madman may have done. But others might not be so kind.

Haider Javed Warraich is a resident in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

 

How Drone Attacks First Began in Pakistan

Drone strikes in Pakistan (Credit miskweenworld.blogspot.com)
On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.

Mr. Brennan, who began his career at the C.I.A. and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signaled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of C.I.A. officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.

Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.
Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the C.I.A. into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.

As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”

From Car Thief to Militant
By 2004, Mr. Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Mr. Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.

Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans — who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.

Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Mr. Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.

When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.

For Mr. Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.

C.I.A. officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Mr. Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Mr. Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.

But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.

A cease-fire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Mr. Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.
Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Mr. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”

The peace arrangement propelled Mr. Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Mr. Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.

Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed C.I.A. Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Mr. Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Mr. Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.

The C.I.A. had been monitoring the rise of Mr. Muhammad, but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.

As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?

In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

The ISI and the C.I.A. agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the C.I.A.’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.

Mr. Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one C.I.A. officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”

A New Direction
As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.

The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.

Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”

The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.

The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.

Before long the C.I.A. would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.

Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.

The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.

A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.

The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Mr. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.

John E. McLaughlin, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the C.I.A.’s being in charge of the Predator, said: “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.

“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ ” he said, “I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the C.I.A. to kill were quickly swept side.

The Account at the Time
After Mr. Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.

Any suggestion that Mr. Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”

This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The C.I.A., a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.

Pakistan’s Caretaker Setup Tackles Violence Across Nation

For those whose hearts beat with Pakistan, the preparations for elections under a caretaker set-up has given rise to hopes of a new spring for the 65 year old  – which, in sympathetic terms, still ranks as an adolescent in the life of nations.

Granted it takes a good deal of optimism to see change coming any time soon. Presently, UN reports put Pakistan’s poverty levels at 49 percent and a human development index only slightly higher than the least developed African nations. With rampant corruption, that includes political appointees and funds paid off to win support, institutions have gone in decline. To top it all, a  fierce Taliban resurgence threatens to bomb, kill and maim potential voters in upcoming polls.

It is a situation that worries the armed forces — whose  India centric policies of “strategic depth” have now forced it to attempt to keep  the ‘Good Taliban’ (Afghan fighters) separate from the `Bad’ Pakistani Taliban. Despite that, with ideologically charged militants blowing hot on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border, the Tehrik-i-Taliban has kept up suicide attacks  against law enforcement targets, sectarian groups and individuals that conflict with their interests.

In Karachi, the TTP have added to the toxic mix of political parties – PPP, MQM and ANP – which even while in coalition furthered their party interests through militant wings and patronage of criminals – including the land mafias.

Just when it seemed that the situation could not get worse, the PPP government completed its five years –  and it is now almost time to vote again.

The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel has come with the nomination of Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim to head the Election Commission of Pakistan. As Chief Election Commissioner, he has made the right moves, including appointing a caretaker prime minister from Balochistan – Mir Hazar Khan Khoso and using his powers of persuasion to get Baloch nationalists to participate in upcoming elections.

Balochistan is ripe for representative government. Given that the nationalists boycotted 2008 elections, Islamabad had resumed governing the province through remote control. What better example than the fact that Balochistan’s dissolved parliament comprised of ministers, without any opposition. It led to a situation where even some members of the Balochistan parliament were implicated in crime, including `kidnappings for ransom.’

With the backslide set in motion during Musharraf, the last five years saw state agencies and nationalists locked in battle. The problem of “missing persons,” that peaked under the former general, remains Balochistan’s dark reality.

Taking advantage of jungle law, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi ensconced itself in Mastung. Here they drew on the conflict between state militias and Baloch nationalists to kill hundreds of Shia Hazaras in horrific terrorist attacks.

Given the deterioration of law and order across Pakistan, good news became rarer than rainfall in the Tharparkar desert. That is starting to change, thanks to  decisions taken by the Election Commission — and at times  judgments by the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

Taking the bull by the horns, the caretakers governments have foremost assessed that Pakistan needs to step up security. Little surprise that without any Western pressure, Pakistan has begun to crack down on  ideological militants that have for over a decade terrorized the nation and attempted to push it back into the medieval ages.

Earlier this year, the army made a paradigm shift in its `Green Book,’ when it deemphasized  the “Indian threat,” to declare that the real threat lay “within” – from sub-conventional warfare waged by the Tehrik-i-Taliban and Afghan militants crossing its porous borders.

Indeed, with platoons of young soldiers wiped out by suicide attacks along the Pak-Afghan border, the army has come to realize that it has little choice than to defend the state from attack.

In Karachi, the deployment of Rangers and Frontier Corp against Taliban influx is beginning to yield results. Although Rangers are in the first line of fire – as seen in the toll on their lives – the army has had success in raids conducted across TTP strongholds of Mangophir, Sohrabgoth, Baldia and Orangi town.

In Balochistan, the Inspector General of the Frontier Corp has taken credit for the reduction in terrorist violence and horrific levels of crime seen in Quetta. Even while nationalists are not convinced about laying down their arms, some have shown an inclination to participate in upcoming polls.

Meanwhile as the Election Commission scrutinizes 17,000 plus nomination papers, cleared candidates are already in the field rallying for votes for the elections next month.

Today, elections have become Pakistan’s biggest hope for change. In this backdrop, the deployment of adequate security at sensitive polling stations is incumbent to yield a good turnout — and grant legitimacy to the elections.

With almost 50,000 people killed in terrorist attacks in Pakistan since September 11, 2001, the nation seeks relief from interminable wounds. For that, it  foremost needs to stop the hemorrhage . Only then, can it begin to address long standing issues of governance — which when combined with jumpstarting the economy can take Pakistan down the road of a more representative democracy.

 

 

 

Taliban Spread Terror as New Gang in Town

Taliban in Karachi (Credit: nitcl.com)

KARACHI, March 28 — This seaside metropolis is no stranger to gangland violence, driven for years by a motley collection of armed groups who battle over money, turf and votes.

But there is a new gang in town. Hundreds of miles from their homeland in the mountainous northwest, Pakistani Taliban fighters have started to flex their muscles more forcefully in parts of this vast city, and they are openly taking ground.

Taliban gunmen have mounted guerrilla assaults on police stations, killing scores of officers. They have stepped up extortion rackets that target rich businessmen and traders, and shot dead public health workers engaged in polio vaccination efforts. In some neighborhoods, Taliban clerics have started to mediate disputes through a parallel judicial system.

The grab for influence and power in Karachi shows that the Taliban have been able to extend their reach across Pakistan, even here in the country’s most populous city, with about 20 million inhabitants. No longer can they be written off as endemic only to the country’s frontier regions.

In joining Karachi’s street wars, the Taliban are upending a long-established network of competing criminal, ethnic and political armed groups in this combustible city. The difference is that the Taliban’s agenda is more expansive — it seeks to overthrow the Pakistani state — and their operations are run by remote control from the tribal belt along the Afghan border.

Already, the militants have reshaped the city’s political balance by squeezing one of the most prominent political machines, the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party, off its home turf. They have scared Awami operatives out of town and destroyed offices, gravely undercutting the party’s chances in national elections scheduled for May.

“We are the Taliban’s first enemy,” said Shahi Syed, the party’s provincial head, at his newly fortified office. “They burn my offices, they tear down my flags and they kill our people.”

The Taliban drift into Karachi actually began years ago, though much more quietly. Many fled here after a concerted Pakistani military operation in the Swat Valley in 2009. The influx has gradually continued, officials here say, with Taliban fighters able to easily melt into the city’s population of fellow ethnic Pashtuns, estimated to number at least five million people.

Until recently, the militants saw Karachi as a kind of rear base, using the city to lie low or seek medical treatment, and limiting their armed activities to criminal fund-raising, like kidnapping and bank robberies.

But for at least six months now, there have been signs that their timidity is disappearing. The Taliban have become a force on the street, aggressively exerting their influence in the ethnic Pashtun quarters of the city.

Taliban tactics are most evident in Manghopir, an impoverished neighborhood of rough, cinder-block houses clustered around marble quarries on the northern edge of the city, where illegal housing settlements spill into the surrounding desert.

In recent months, Taliban militants have attacked the Manghopir police station three times, killing eight officers, said Muhammad Aadil Khan, a local member of Parliament.

In interviews, residents describe Taliban militants who roam on motorbikes or in jeeps with tinted windows, delivering extortion demands in the shape of two bullets wrapped in a piece of paper.

A factory owner in Manghopir, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, said that several Pashtun businessmen had received demands for $10,000 to $50,000. The figure was negotiable, he said, but payment was not: resistance could result in an assault on the victim’s house or, in the worst case, a bullet to the head.

Mr. Khan said he had not dared to visit his constituency in months. “There is a personal threat against me,” he said, speaking at the headquarters of his party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which represents ethnic Mohajirs, in the city center.

The militant drive has even distressed Manghopir’s most revered residents: the dozens of crocodiles who inhabit a pool near a Sufi shrine here.

The Muslim pilgrims who come here to pay homage to the shrine’s saint have long also brought scraps of meat for his reptile charges.

But lately, as visitor numbers have dwindled from hundreds per day to barely a few dozen, the roughly 120 crocodiles here have grown hungry, according to the animals’ elderly caretaker.

Police officials, militant sources and Pashtun residents say that three major Taliban factions operate in Karachi — the most powerful one, which is rooted in South Waziristan and dominated by the Mehsud tribe, and two others from the Swat and Mohmand areas.

A senior city police officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that militant commanders with those factions send operational orders to Karachi from the tribal belt; while some captured militants have tried to justify their activities by citing the authorization of religious clerics in the northwest.

In cases, he added, regular criminal groups have posed as Taliban fighters in a bid to increase their power of intimidation.

Just why the Taliban are adopting such an aggressive profile in Karachi right now is unclear. Some cite the greater number of militants fleeing Pakistani military operations in the northwest; others say it may be the product of dwindling funds, as jihadi donors in the Persian Gulf states turn to the Middle East.

In any event, it has shaken the city’s bloody ethnic politics.

Since the 1980s, armed supporters of the Mohajir-dominated Muttahida Qaumi Movement have engaged in tit-for-tat violence with those of the Pashtun-dominated Awami National Party. In the worst periods, dozens of people have died in a day. Now, faced with a common enemy, figures in both parties say they have declared an uneasy, unofficial truce.

As well as the attack on the Awami party — which have seen it close 44 of its district offices across the city — the Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for two attacks on the Muttahida Qaumi Movement — first, a bombing that killed four people, then the assassination of a party parliamentarian.

In a recent interview with The New York Times in North Waziristan, the Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said the group was targeting both parties — as well as President Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party — for their “liberal” policies.

The security forces, shaken out of complacency, have begun a number of major anti-Taliban operations. The latest of those occurred on March 23 when hundreds of paramilitary Rangers raided a residential area in Manghopir, near the crocodile shrine, confiscating a cache of more than 50 weapons and rounding up 200 people, 16 of whom were later identified as militants and detained.

“I don’t think the Taliban would like to set Karachi aflame, because they fear the reaction against them,” said Ikram Seghal, a security consultant in Karachi. “The police and intelligence agencies have very good information about them.”

Other factors limit the Pakistani Taliban’s ingress into Karachi. One of the more provocative ones is that allied militants — particularly the Afghan Taliban — might not like the added publicity. The Afghan wing has long used the city as place to rest and resupply. There are longstanding rumors that the movement’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is taking shelter here, and that his leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, has met in Karachi.

In such a vast and turbulent city, the Taliban may become just another turf-driven gang. But without a determined response from the security forces, experts say, they could also seek to become much more.

Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud contributed reporting from North Waziristan, Pakistan.

 

Fall of Tirah Valley

Tirah Valley falls to Militants (Credit: nation.com.pk)

The fall of the Tirah Valley to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) is not sudden; the valley, which remains excommunicated from the rest of the country, has been a war zone for three militant outfits — the TTP, the LI and the Ansarul Islam (AI). The LI and the AI have been battling each other for over seven years in the Bara tehsil of Khyber Agency, with turf wars being waged based on sectarian grounds. The area became a stronghold of the TTP after operations were launched in the nearby Orakzai and Kurram tribal agencies. The LI then sought an alliance with the TTP and the AI, previously a banned outfit, which was later considered a tribal militia that was protecting boundaries of the valley from “foreign influence”. In June last year, the TTP took over the majority area held by the Kukikhel tribe, while reports of the presence of the Taliban from as far as the Mohmand Agency also surfaced. Hundreds of people were reportedly killed; however, because of the area being isolated, little information made it to the mainstream media, till almost 90 per cent of the valley went into the TTP’s hands.

On March 16, two press conferences were held at Peshawar Press Club. While the AI spokesperson demanded that the surrounding areas of Peshawar be handed over to the AI because they could protect them “better”, the head of the ANP’s jirga for the tribal areas claimed that there were Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs who had their bases in the area. Ironically, two days later, the TTP took over the Tirah Valley.

As general elections approach, security officials are now concerned that the routes that lead to Peshawar are also under the control of militants. While opening up a new front for a renewed operation in Tirah is inevitable, there is a serious threat that elections may not be held in a peaceful manner. Even though the Peshawar High Court has ordered the election commission to hold election at the IDP camps, the recent bombing at the Jalozai camp is a grim reminder of the volatile security situation.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 28th, 2013.

 

 

My Last Meeting with Slain Parveen Rehman

Tribute to Parveen (Credit: blogs.tribune.com.pk)

“Did you find that religious extremism has grown in Pakistan on this trip?” asked Sheema Kirmani, sitting cross-legged in the front of the crowd, after I had finished presenting my book at a session of the Karachi Literary Festival.

“Oh yes,” I responded. “But its not just religious, but also ethnic extremism that’s taken hold of Karachi. I think that the more violence permeates society, it causes individuals to fall back on the groups that give them a sense of identity.”

Sitting in the audience was Parveen Rehman. She had promised to attend after I went to her sister, Aquila Ismail’s presentation of her book “Martyrs and Marigolds,” a couple of hours before my launch.

During Aquila’s presentation, the moderator mentioned her family was also present in the audience, I  turned to meet Parveen’s glance. She waved back to me enthusiastically, with that warm smile that I knew from back in the 80s, when I visited the Orangi Pilot Project to report for Dawn.

After her sister’s presentation, we went outside, where Parveen hugged me and we exchanged notes. “I thought you resembled Aquila,” I had said, as we parted… not knowing it was for the last time.

Barely a month later, March 13, Parveen was murdered at a roundabout in Orangi Town, Karachi. The administration has since claimed to have arrested her killer – a Tehrik-i-Taliban commander – whose party affiliates have ensconced themselves in this outskirt of Karachi, where Parveen worked for 25 years.

Unlike Malala – who rose to world fame – had the bullets missed Parveen, she might have become known to the world for her pioneering work for the voiceless poor.

There was no shortage of death threats for Parveen, who grew to become director of the OPP — begun by  late Dr Akhter Hameed Khan. Amongst her pioneering work was to take a stand against land grabbing mafias – patronized by city officials.

Under Parveen, OPP compiled a report on 1500 Sindhi villages where the inhabitants were forcibly evicted by the land mafia – – and their land divided into plots for commercial usage. Although she shunned the limelight, Parveen took a clear stand against forced eviction of indigenous Sindhi and Baloch from their native villages and worked to enable them to acquire tenant rights.

The land grabber mafia even had an eye on the prized land on which OPP was built. Only a year ago armed gun men had burst into its building with the aim of occupying it.

Parveen told an interviewer that in order to save the building they engaged a “thug,” who scared off the occupants by threatening retaliatory fire.

Despite death threats, Parveen characteristically dismissed them, saying, “At the most what will they do. Kill me?”

And kill her they did.

In losing Parveen, the world has lost a courageous woman who fought for justice under the most difficult circumstances. The next government needs to pause and reflect on the tentacles being wrapped by land grabbing mafias on prized land in urban settings — where they will not stop even if it means killing an innocent woman like Parveen.

 

Parveen Rahman – Pakistan Loses a Courageous Woman Working for Upliftment of the Poor

Sketch of Parveen (Credit: tribune.com.pk)

KARACHI, March 15: A media-shy social worker who devoted her life to the development of the impoverished neighbourhoods across the country, was gunned down near her office in Orangi Town on Wednesday. She was 56.

Parveen Rehman was born in Dhaka in 1957. She did part of her schooling in the former East Pakistan and migrated to Karachi after the fall of Dhaka.

She received a bachelor’s of engineering in architecture from Karachi’s Dawood College of Engineering and Technology in 1981 and joined a private architect’s firm.

A few months later, she left the job and joined the Orangi Pilot Project initiated by Akhtar Hameed Khan to bring healthy changes to the lives of impoverished residents of Orangi.

“The late Akhtar persuaded her to join the OPP. We both joined the OPP in 1982 and since then we worked in close association,” said Anwer Rashid, co-director of the OPP-RTI (Orangi Pilot Project-Research and Training Institute).

Mr Rashid choked on words as he described his working relationship with Ms Rehman.

Noted town planner Arif Hasan, who is member of the OPP’s board, briefly visited Ms Rehman’s home and left early as he was deeply distressed like dozens of her friends and colleagues who had gathered at her house in Safari Boulevard in Gulistan-i-Jauhar.

“She was a courageous and brave lady. She was a true pupil of Akhtar Hameed Khan who worked in an environment where most people will avoid to work,” said Mr Rashid.

Soon after the private TV networks flashed news of her death, a large number of people flocked to the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, where her body had been shifted.

Eyewitnesses said those who gathered in the hospital and outside her home, where she was living alone with her octogenarian mother, included dozens of residents of Orangi who were mourning her death.

“She was a great help for us. She was just like an elder sister to whom we would go whenever a problem struck us,” said a middle-aged man who identified himself as Azmat Ali.

Arif Pervez, development professional and a friend of hers, said Ms Rehman had been receiving death threats for a long time, apparently from the mafia involved in grabbing precious land on the fringes of the city.

“She had been receiving threats on her life for a long time. We had discussed this several times but every time I advised her to take care of herself, she smiled, waved her hand and said what will they do, I have to work a lot and that too in the middle of the people,” Mr Pervez said.

Ms Rehman was an ardent compiler of the record of precious lands, which were on the fringes of the city in shape of villages but were speedily vanishing into its vastness because of ever-increasing demand by thousands of families who were shifting to Karachi every year from across the country.

She said on record that around 1,500 goths (villages) had been merged into the city since 15 years. Land-grabbers subdivided them into plots and earned billions by their sale.

“She documented everything about the lands that have been grabbed. Another sin of her was to help those whose lands had been grabbed. Yet, she never hesitated to go to the area where her life was constantly under threat,” Mr Pervez said.

“Many people certainly have lost their elder sister,” he said.

Noman Ahmed of NED University said Ms Rehman’s great achievement was to get involved and empower communities in development work.

“She involved communities in development work and her cautious endeavour was to empower people and lessen their sense of deprivation. Her motto was way forward. She saw it as a defeat to terrorists by not changing her routine to help people,” Mr Ahmed said.

Besides her mother, Ms Rehman is survived by her two brothers and a sister, living abroad.