Pakistan and the Perils of Secrecy

The latest from Pakistan:

Last week, a prominent Pakistani investigative reporter published an article alleging that al-Qaeda had infiltrated Pakistan’s navy and carried out the recent attack on a naval air base. On Tuesday, the journalist’s body — his face severely beaten — was found 100 miles from his home in this capital city, two days after he disappeared.

Syed Saleem Shahzad’s killing, other journalists and human rights activists said they suspected, was payback — not from militants, but from Pakistan’s fearsome spy agencies. Shahzad had written before about their dealings with Islamist insurgents, and he had said that intelligence officers had warned him.

I don't know if this allegation is correct. The things is, the CIA, the Pentagon, and even the President of Pakistan probably don't know, either. Who was sheltering Osama bin Laden? Who was behind the terrorist attack on Mumbai? Who is setting off bombs at Pakistani military facilities? Are there al Qaeda cells in the Pakistani navy? Is the army fighting insurgents in Waziristan, or arming them? Does anybody, beyond the few people actually involved, know the answers to these questions?

Pakistan's crazy politics are a case study in what militarization and security mania can do to a country. Pakistan's leaders are obsessed with an imagined military threat from India, and this had led them to create grotesquely large, powerful security forces that act through layers of secrecy, proxies, middlemen, and deniability so dense that they have become impenetrable. I do not believe that the senior generals control all their men, and I find it perfectly believable that some elements of the security apparatus work closely with the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other militant groups. Or maybe the generals know this is going on but look the other way, out of some twisted desire to play the game at ever deeper levels. Maybe some generals know about some contacts, and some don't but know about others.

The death of Syed Saleem Shahzad serves many purposes. It discourages citizens from prying too closely into the security services and their secrets, while spreading the fear and confusion that justify the existence of the whole security state. Powerful people are no doubt behind it, but we don't know which ones, and that is part of the point.

Secrecy is always anti-democratic, and people who want to keep their government under their control should insist that it operate in the open.