Chess is 99 percent tactics
Anjum Niaz
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Memo from USA
First restrain, next blockade and lastly destroy were the tactics Aron Nimzowitsch, a master chess player adopted. Would you not say that President Zardari and the apex court have played a similar game for the last 3 years? They may have reached a draw, but let’s not jump the gun. Our man on the hill can outplay any chess master. Recall how he ‘stole’ Musharraf’s job, duped Nawaz Sharif, pushed coalition partners (MQM) into a hole- and-corner, challenged the Supreme Court, and shut-out the army. He even pawned his two top jiyas – Gilani and Haqqani, leaving the third Malik Riaz dangling, ready to be sacrificed. All three fell trying to save their king (Zardari).
The king is the strongest piece in chess. Once the king falls, the game is up.
I never understood chess. Whenever I am at a leafy park in New York, I see old and young men hard at work saving their king from being checkmated. Perched on cemented stools they toil for hours moving their queens, bishops, rooks and pawns up and down the chessboard. Self-absorbed, they are lost to the world.
The Supreme Court wants to checkmate the king and end the game. Delivering checkmate is the ultimate goal in chess: a player who is checkmated loses the game. ‘King’ Zardari has been under direct attack but has avoided ‘capture’ as they call it in chess. The contest has lasted almost three years since the day all the judges at the apex court declared the NRO null and void. In practice, a king is never captured – the game ends with the losing side resigning.
But the king will never resign. He has vowed to fight till the end.
Okay, okay. The match can still end in a draw as also happens in chess. When both the players lack sufficient material to win, they settle for a tie or a draw. But let’s not jump the gun – we don’t see the two grandmasters opting for a draw.
Round four (or is it five, six, seven?) has just started. Try grabbing a ringside seat and settle down.
First: the homeless waif (the ISI political cell) is back from the wilderness. Like the abominable snowman or the Loch Ness monster, his sightings are no freak occurrences. In the past, his permanent domicile was either the presidency or the ISI Aabpara headquarters. The vagrant has shuttled between these two homes to cover his footprints, successfully throwing the nosey off his scent.
Will this love child of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the army be ever discovered? Will his anti-state activities heinously executed be brought to justice? Probably not. If the army, via its mouthpiece the defence secretary, swears that he be dead, why then are the courts not convinced? Because, as recent as 1997, the apex court was told on oath that he (the political cell) was alive and humming at the ISI headquarters.
Presently the Chief at the Supreme Court is hard on his heels. The smell test takes us all right to the door of the presidency on the hill. Therefore, the court has ordered Salman Farooqi, the bureaucrat who has outlived and outperformed just about any federal secretary – retired, dead or alive, to begin clearing the cobwebs in the foggy bottom of the fishbowl where Zardari resides. Fish out old records and show up at the Supreme Court on October 15, Farooqi’s been ordered.
Why drag in the presidency in a 16-year-old case, filed by Air Marshal (r) Asghar Khan regarding a political cell set up by the ISI that doled out funds to politicians in the 1990s? Why must Zardari pay for the sins of his fathers (predecessors)?
The answer to the above is: President Zardari is being alleged to be running a cell à la the ISI political cell to win the coming elections.
“In view of the constitutional importance of the President of Pakistan who apparently is a symbol of the unity of republic, he cannot undertake such (political) activities in pursuance whereof allegedly one particular group of the political parties was being supported in the name of national interest” reads the court order.
“Therefore, it is necessary to have the viewpoint of the presidential office through its secretary (Salman Farooqi) because we are of the considered opinion that under Article 41(1) of the Constitution the president being head of the state represents the unity of the republic and under Article 243(2) of the Constitution the supreme command of the armed forces vest in the President.”
Splendid! This tactic may yet work. So far, Zardari has come up with many tricks and pulled many rabbits (read minions) out of his hat leaving our lordships weaponless.
On a late November afternoon in 2008, I drove down to a deserted farmhouse outside Islamabad to meet General Shujaat Ali Khan. He ran the ISI’s political wing during Benazir Bhutto’s second government. When BB’s government fell in November 1996, she accused the ISI for her dismissal. Earlier that September, her brother Murtaza Bhutto was gunned down in Karachi. In her 2000 interview to an English monthly, BB blamed General Shujaat of “destabilising” her government. She said that despite her trying to get the general sacked, the big boss of the ISI, General Naseem Rana and the ministry of defence failed to dislodge Shujaat. The general has denied his involvement. He even told BB, a month before she was assassinated.
Shujaat had seen the Rafi Raza Report where in 1976, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ordered the creation of a political cell in the ISI. His orders were handwritten in one line at the margin. The ISI thus was given a green light to bug politicians’ phones. “Even Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto allowed us to listen in to conversations of politicians, judges and Dr A Q Khan.”
The former spymaster vouched that during his two plus years in the ISI as the DG internal wing, responsible for monitoring counter-terrorism and political cells, he never “bugged” the phones of Prime Minister Bhutto or President Farooq Leghari. His task was to collect intelligence on the “macro-economic indicators; the stock exchange and the financial deals” affecting the economy of Pakistan. During the intelligence gathering, Shujaat naturally came across allegations of corruption by the then First Gentleman Asif Ali Zardari and appointments based on nepotism and favouritism. He would forward his reports to Prime Minister Bhutto and she would return the files with handwritten short remarks in green ink. At times she sounded annoyed and wrote back: ‘Since when has the ISI become an economic expert?’ or ‘Oh, really!’
Nawaz Sharif was twice as corrupt as the PPP government. I reported the contents of my 2008 interview with Gen (r) Shujaat on these pages.
It is ISI’s head honchos like generals Hameed Gul, Asad Durrani, Javed Nasir, Mahmud Ahmed and Ehtisham Zamir who have “monkeyed” with political governments and brought them down, thereby sullying the image of the army. They are on record saying so themselves. Ex-army chief Aslam Beg is yet another example of the black sheep that have defiled the image of the army.
The writer is a freelance journalist. Email:
anjumniaz@rocketmail.com