December 18, 2008 ☼ army ☼ Foreign Affairs ☼ intelligence ☼ jihadis ☼ Pakistan ☼ politics ☼ terrorism
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The report that Omar Saeed was planning terrorist operations from his death row should not surprise anyone who follows Pakistani news.[See this post from July 2005] That he could do it at all shows how seriously one should take Pakistan’s claims of arresting leaders of terrorist organisations. So was his audacity that he personally threatened to kill General Musharraf and disturbed the latter enough to cause him to book a ticket to London. (Who knew that calling current and former Pakistani presidents was this easy?) Shocking as it may be to the sensibilities of gentle people around the world, even this should not be really surprising: just how does the military establishment keep its former chief under control?
No, Amir Mir’s scoop about the busting of Saeed’s plan to kill General Musharraf was not about the assassination plot at all. It was part of a character assassination plot—because it alleges that Omar Saeed call records show that he was in touch with Major-General Faisal Alavi, a former chief of the Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group (SSG), who was assassinated on November 19th. After British writer revealed in London’s Sunday Times, that General Alavi was likely to have been silenced by the Pakistani Army—for threatening to reveal its deals with the Taliban in the tribal areas—it became necessary to discredit the dead man. The use of Omar Saeed for this was a nice touch, his being a familiar name in Britain.
Dead men tell no tales. But live men certainly tell tales about the dead.
Update: Ayesha Siddiqa has more on the matter
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