The short answer is: Yes.
How certain am I of this: Absolutely.
On what is my certainty based: On material uncovered before and after Operation Clean-up, Karachi, 1992.
And how do I know this: I had a ring-side seat at this operation.
Before going further, I need to introduce Lt Col Obaidullah [ late], who conceived and executed this operation and was the moving spirit behind it.
He was an officer of high intelligence, completely free of the taint of prejudice, both ethnic and religious. He was one of those rare birds who either had no fear, or could mask it to perfection. And in his personality, what competed with his patriotism as a defining trait, were his flights of emotion, which often tended to fly him off the handle.
It was one such emotional outburst which got him superseded as a major, and he got posted to Headquarters ISI, for the last leg of his service. Gen Hamid Gul was D.G ISI at the time. He had introduced the the practice of personally interviewing all freshly posted officers to the organization.
I drove Obaid for the interview, dropped him opposite the HQ and went on to Aab para, giving him the telephone contact of the travel agent where I would await his call, to pick him up. I was expecting his call in about an hour’s time, but he called a good three hours later.
When I picked him up he explained that there were about four officers who were interviewed ahead of him, about ten minutes each. But his interview went on for nearly an hour, after which the General informed him that he would be assigning him to an important slot. ” And sir,” Obaid confided to me, ” the General told me that I should henceforth consider myself promoted to Lt Col! ” I advised him not to set hopes too high on the issue of promotion, because that was not about to happen.
A week or so later he called to inform me that his promotion had indeed come through, specifically for appointments in the intelligence set-up.
One day, a couple of months later he came over and asked me if I would like to interview three MQM members who were on the run from Altaf Hussain, but whom he had squirreled away in an ISI safe house. Those days I was writing for the papers, but I told him I was not interested. He insisted that I should not give up this opportunity. I replied that I would be interested only if he could give me one good reason to take time out to talk to these three unknowns.
Obaid thought for a while, and then said, “sir, you must interview them because Altaf Hussain is sh-t scared of them.”
” And you would have me believe this–Altaf Hussain who makes the whole of Karachi tremble, is himself “sh-t” scared of these three chaps whom no one has ever heard of, and who have no roof over their heads?? OK you first give me proof of this, and I will go along with you.”
Obaid twiddled his thumbs for a while and then asked to use my phone. “. and tell him on the special line that you will be in Karachi tomorrow,” he ended his instructions to the person on the other end. And then he explained to me that he had instructed the leader of the “three unknowns” to give the message I had heard, to a person who was a known double agent, which would ensure that this message would get to Altaf as well.
” And what will happen then?” I asked.
“Tomorrow you will hear, sir, that Altaf has got admitted to Abassi Shaheed Hospital.” said Obaid. He then explained that whenever Altaf feels threatened he holes out in a room in this hospital, which had only one access, and so is very easy to guard.
Before leaving, he advised me to be certain to hear the news on the TV the next day. And sure enough, one of the headlines informed the audience that Altaf Hussain had been unexpectedly taken ill, and was thus shifted to Abassi Shaheed.
I called Obaid and told him I would like him to schedule an interview with his Johnnies that evening.
That is the first time I met Afaq, Amir, and Wasim. They were mere lads like many others, in jeans T-shirts and joggers. I found them very polite, but with Obaid they were absolutely reverential.
I had gone prepared with a lot of questions and asked them all. My only interlocutor was Afaq. The other two just stayed out of the conversation. It has been many years now, and I remember little about this interview, but the following I have never forgotten:
- Afaq was very adamant that they had broken ranks with Altaf on account of his corruption. He explained that MQM members were making tons of donations to Altaf, but he was misappropriating the money and building a personal fortune and property for his family. He gave the example of property bought for his sister in Chicago.
- He never accepted my suggestion that a fat portion of the funds collected by them, were in fact the fruit of extortion.
- He informed me that the real leader of MQM was Azim Tariq, whom Altaf had arranged to be murdered. Azim, he insisted was a natural leader, cool under pressure, graceful, patriotic, and clean as a whistle, compared to Altaf, who was corrupt to the hilt, and basically a coward, whose frayed nerves showed when there was pressure on him.
- I told him that I knew that he [Afaq] could put real fright into Altaf, and suggested that this could only be so if Afaq was a ruthless hitman of the party, of whose efficacy Altaf needed no proof. I tried to have him confess to this suggestion. I tried a myriad angles, but he parried me each time and vehemently denied it.
It took me six months of trying to get my interview published, hawking it from one paper to the other, till at last Frontier Post picked up the courage to publish a heavily edited version of it. Talk of being “sh-t” scared!
Sometime later Obaid informed me that he had been transferred to take up an undercover appointment in Bangkok, but that he had requested Gen Asad Durrani to have this cancelled, and to have him sent to Karachi instead, as the ISI detachment commander there. I had served with General Durrani in the Pakistan Military Academy and knew him to be one of our better officers. I was certain he would appreciate the spirit of Obaid’s request and get the needful done. It was no surprise therefore when Obaid packed his bags for Karachi. On his request Capt Zia Shah [ later Lt Col] was posted as his number two.
A month later I got a call from Tubby. sorry, I forgot to tell you that we all referred to Obaid as Tubby. And this because he was all of 5 foot 4 1/2 inches, though he always insisted that he was “at least” 5 foot 6, and had a little paunch which he tried manfully to hide all his life, but sadly, never quite succeeded in doing so.
Tubby informed me that he was coming to Islamabad the next day and would be staying with me. I could feel that he was excited. When he arrived, he told me that he had called his D.G and told him that he had information which he was only willing to divulge to him personally, and that it was this what he had come for. By this time General Javed Nasir had taken over the ISI and the next day Obaid was to give him a presentation.
It was then that Tubby informed me that things in Karachi were much worse than he ever suspected, and that the MQM was a potential fifth column thoroughly infiltrated by RAW, and was getting a Mafia-style hold on Karachi, through organized terror, murder, torture, and extortion. He said that he had evidence of this which was irrefutable, and that Altaf Hussain was a primary enemy agent. Although I always suspected this, but when my suspicions were authenticated by a man whose job it was to know, and whose integrity and ability I could swear on, I was stunned.
Similarly stunned was General Javed Nasir the next day after Obaid had got through his presentation of the evidence he had gathered. The General told him that he better stick on in Islamabad, and be prepared to give the same presentation to Asif Nawaz Janjua, the Army Chief, and Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister.
A couple of days later this follow-up presentation took place in GHQ with both these gentlemen present, with a whole panoply of lesser beings. For the Army Chief, who had commanded the Karachi Corps, this presentation was merely a confirmation of what he already knew, or strongly suspected. Gen Asif Nawaz took little time to order an operation to clean Karachi up, and break the nefarious power of Altaf Hussain and his organization. Caught between him and the D.G ISI, Nawaz Sharif could merely nod an assent, his poker face not betraying any conviction or the lack of it .
A couple of weeks later I got a call from Tubby to come over to Karachi. When I met him he told me that he had asked me to come over because the operation was going in the day after, and he wanted me to play the role of a sounding board.
The next morning Maj Gen Afzal Janjua S.J, from the ISI, a very close friend of mine, came over. Not known to be an officer who took pressure badly, it was odd to see him distinctly uncomfortable. Over a cup of tea he confessed–” I am sorry Tubby, of the thousand AK-47s you asked for, I have only been able to get hold of about 80.”
Tubby fixed him with a long look of concern, and slowly shaking his head, told him that this was not good news, but that luckily, he had managed to get hold of a good number 12 gauge shotguns, and operation having been planned for an urban area, perhaps the shotguns would prove to be a better choice. The General asked him if he was absolutely certain, and when Tubby said ” absolutely, sir,” I beheld a most relieved General.
After he left, I could not hide my concern: ” but Tubby how can you plan on a thousand Kalashnikovs, and settle for just 80 of them, and hope that shotguns will do the trick. How can you allow the operation to go ahead with such a great shortfall in resources??” I was appalled, and showed it.
” Its O.K sir,” he said most nonchalantly, ” actually, I dont need any weapons.”
” But then why did you ask for them and put Gen Afzal up to procuring them?”
” Well sir, if I had not got him busy on that front he would be here 24 hours a day, breathing down my neck, and micro-managing me!”
Having served in such a rank conscious organization, I could only wonder at Obaid’s presumptuousness and effrontery, but had to grant him his wit.
Next to turn up was Capt Zia Shah. Tubby plied him with some routine questions about the preparations for the operation, got his answers, and nodded with great seriousness at each one.
I had known Zia very well over the years. He was some years junior to my youngest brother at Lawrence College. I had grown to like him, but if I was to give him marks for grey matter, and been honest about it, I would have to be niggardly. So, when Zia left, I could not help asking Tubby, if Zia had the stuff to be number two in an operation which could have vital consequences for the whole country?
By this time Tubby had started looking considerably taller. By the time he informed me that for this operation he needed no great brilliance in his subordinate, but total trust, he seemed to grow at least another inch. He was looking more and more like a man in total control who knew exactly what he was doing.
And then it was evening, and the Corps Commander called. Tubby put on the speaker phone. ” So, youngster, I hope all is in place for the operation.” General Nasir Akhtar’s voice came through crisply, but not I suspected, entirely free of some concern. Tubby assured him that all was in order.
” I hope,” said the General, ” the casualty count will be no more than the 750 you said it would be.”
” Dont worry a bit about this sir. I am very certain about this one. Hopefully they will be about a hundred shy of this figure.” Tubby was at his most reassuring best.
When the General hung up, I could not help asking Tubby how could he be so certain about the expected casualties.
” I am not sir,” he said. ” As a matter of fact I don’t have a clue.”
“But then, how could you give such a precise figure to the General?” I asked.
“Well sir, he had asked me if I expected the casualties to be any more than 750. I thought long and hard, and assured him that this would just be about right. And this had put the General at ease, so that I could move on to more important things.”
“But still,” I said, ” how could you give him such an off-the-cuff assurance on a figure, about which you don’t have clue?”
“Well sir, it is he who gave the figure, and I merely agreed with it, and reduced it by an acceptable number. Look sir, asking me about the number of expected casualties was a stupid question in the first place, and if I had given any figure higher than that which was considered ‘acceptable’ in the commander’s mind, we would not have been going in for the operation tonight. We would still be arguing about numbers. I know perfectly well though, that if they consider the operation a success, they will take all the credit for it, and if it fails in any dimension, the blame will be heaped upon me, and I would have to bear the consequences. I could not care less. This operation is very important for Karachi, and for Pakistan. We have a very well organized fifth column here, and we have to demolish it. That is the only thing that matters.”
I had great respect for many of Tubby’s individual qualities, but this was the first time I was in a “working” environment with him. I was seeing a man I had never seen before. “”Tubby” was a nickname about which there was an inherent facetiousness. But what I was seeing now was a pocket dynamo. He was so clear about what he wanted to achieve, and how he would go about doing so, even if he should fall in the process. And if I needed any further confirmation of this, I got it when Afaq came over late evening.
Obaid was on the phone in the bedroom when I opened the front door to Afaq. When Obaid came in, Afaq promptly got off the sofa, and sat down on the carpet. Not all our joint entreaties could cajole him off the rug and on to the sofa. He told me he had recognized the Colonel early for one who was worth giving one’s life for, and after that day he had vowed never to sit on par with him, as the students used to do with the “ustads” of old. He said he was never treated by the colonel in any manner short of respect, and that he was merely reciprocating. I could not trace any hint of a “put on” in this exchange.
After Obaid and Afaq had discussed matters, and Afaq left about 10 p.m, I finally got the full briefing on the operation:
Not a single soldier or policeman was to be used. All the men were Afaq’s.
Not a single government weapon was to be used. All the weapons needed; Afaq’s men had already collected.
No reconnaissance was to be done, because Afaq’s men knew the den of every Altaf thug.
The only thing needed from the government was transport. No army or police vehicles were to be asked for, except a few from the municipal corporation of Karachi.
The operation would start at midnight, and the only help needed from the government was that strict instructions be given to all police stations that post-midnight, they were not to respond to ANY emergency call, till instructed otherwise.
And then we waited, and midnight came and went. Calls started to come in. First few and far between. But as minutes ticked by, their frequency increased, all reporting success.
At about 7 a.m. Obaid thought it was about time we had a round of the “no-go” areas. Thus we drove through broken barriers where none but the chosen few were allowed to venture just a few hours earlier.
We inspected their torture chambers, with hooks on walls, and splashes of dried blood about them, which told a grisly tale.
At about 9 a.m. we got home for breakfast.
At about 10 a.m. Obaid got a call from the D.G. The operation was to be immediately halted. Obaid was no longer in command of the ISI Karachi detachment, could not go to the office, nor give any orders to his subordinates. He was not to remove any documents, nor move out of his house.
He was to pack up his family and move them “home”.
He was then to report for attachment to a unit in Quetta, from where he could only move out on leave by special permission from GHQ but would not be allowed to come to Karachi under any circumstances!!
So, what happened??
What happened was that everyone and his aunt was on board for this operation. All except Ghulam Ishaque Khan, the President of Pakistan. Altaf Hussain’s SOS calls from London all missed their mark. None except Chaudhary Shujaat, who was then Interior Minister, and probably a little more intelligible than he now is, took his call. Baffled at what Altaf Hussain broke to him, he honestly [perhaps for the first time in his life ] told him that he had no idea what was going on.
And then Altaf hit the right button. He called the President’s son in law, Irfanullah Marwat. Altaf, Marwat, and Jam Sadiq, the Home Secretary of Sindh, had fed heartily at the same trough, and each had done wonderfully well for himself in this partnership of thieves.
And Marwat came good. He called the President. And this “honest’ President folded to the entreaties of the man whose sole discernible credit was that he was married to his daughter. The President called the Prime Minister, whose backbone’s prime employment thus far had been to hold his belly up. At the first real call of duty, it dutifully folded. And with it folded an operation for Karachi’s life and Pakistan’s health. But in the mere six hours for which the operation had run unimpeded, it broke the MQM’s back, with just about 20 casualties instead of the “allowed” 750. Except of Altaf’s thugs who were shot, others went to hiding, or escaped to India or Dubai on launches run by smugglers.
Three quarters of this criminal MQM enterprise would still have lain broken but for Musharraf of the NRO fame, who validated everything nefarious to stay in power. He resurrected MQM, and put in place governor Ishrat ul Ibad, the extremely soft-spoken but ruthless torturer and MQM killer, now in office for over 12 years. To Musharraf, who became President should go the credit for the resurrection of MQM, exoneration of Asif Zardari and his gang of thugs, and the rape the country by the hoodlums of today! This is not so much a commentary on Musharraf’s addled brain, as it is on the hopes this broken country still arouses among the witless uniformed aspirants to power.
When I was taking leave of Obaid, I thought I would be seeing someone crushed. But I did not. I merely saw someone immensely sad whose idealism had not for the first time received a blow. But the blow received from reality this time was not one from which he would easily recover. He told me that whether he ever came back to Karachi or not, he was certain that all the material he had collected would survive in the archives of the ISI. But that if they had left him in place just another two weeks or so, he was in the process of uncovering the money trail from RAW to MQM, but now that would never happen–the agent he had taken months to cultivate, would never trust the “organization” again.
There was just a meek sliver of saving grace in all this. The unit to which Tubby was going to be attached in Quetta was in the Division being commanded by Gen Asif Riaz Bukhari-a friend and a brother with a heart bigger than a house. Ironically, he was a “mohajir” officer, and like most of the mohajir officers with whom it had been my privilege to serve, he well transcended the national average. I called and told him that Obaid was coming to him, the circumstances in which this transition had taken place, and I requested him to make his landing as soft as possible.
At Quetta airport, Tubby was received by the General’s ADC, and driven to his mess in his staff car. And so the fall was broken. But MQM survived to extort, murder, kidnap, and sell Pakistan out in partnership with one political party or the other.
P.S As the Rangers have started the current operation clean-up of Karachi, their task is much more arduous than was Obaid’s in 1992. Though this is an across the board operation against the criminals and hoodlums of all political parties, it appears to be directed primarily against the MQM, because most of the high value targets picked up, or disposed off belong to this party. The reason for this is simple. It is quite apparent that the Rangers make their moves on the basis of inside information, and most of these insiders seem to belong to MQM. And when the smoke finally lifts, it will become clear that much of this information is being given by Afaq’s men, who suffered much at the hands of Altaf’s muscle men. It should already be quite apparent that the most important raid which the Rangers conducted against Nine Zero Azizabad was the result of a tip-off by Amir Khan, the same I had interviewed with Afaq so many years back.
This operation has ignited a glimmer of hope among the people of Pakistan, in that, that the last functioning institution of the country has finally risen to its defense, instead of abandoning it. The worst that could now happen was if the generals allowed the pace of this operation to slacken, instead of expanding it to other dens of miscreants spread all over the country. They should also realize that this operation is attacking the lesser arm of the pincer enfolding our country. The more vicious arm, which is the existential threat to Pakistan, is mega corruption and the total immunity of the perpetrators that goes with this. This is what this country cannot survive.
The army, being responsible for national security, should formally cite mega corruption as a national security imperative, push to have the national security council reformed and resuscitated, and openly discuss mega corruption cases at this forum and confront the perpetrators, so that there is no need for intrigue, and use such cases as an alibi to strangle the political process. Instead, they should use their considerable heft to clean this process up.
The start should be made with the taking back of public land from adverse possession in Karachi, and then to investigate the LNG deal. But this will not be easy to do, unless the army’s own house is first subjected to cleaning. So let the guilty among generals, all very well known, be the first to hear the sound of the gavel, and then the party can start.