Sunday Levity: ISI irony

Jihadis and their champions have human rights too.

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

A prominent human rights activist who campaigned for the release of dozens of people said to be held by Pakistani intelligence agencies disappeared Friday, his family and the police said. [NYT]

It is not unusual for human rights activists, even ‘prominent’ ones, to be roughed up in Pakistan. But this particular one is not your usual, Asma Jehangir type of human rights activist. Khalid Khawaja, is a veteran, well-connected ISI officer with deep links to Osama bin Laden and the Jihadus pakistanii network. His disappearance has multiple ironies. It comes at the hands of the ‘agencies’ he worked (correct tense of this verb is unclear) for and owes itself in part to his legal campaign to get the Pakistani government to account for the hundreds of people who disappeared at the hands of the agencies. That’s not all. ‘Human rights violations’ is the slogan of choice that the Pakistani establishment uses as covering fire for its proxy war in Jammu & Kashmir. How ironic it is then, that the Musharraf regime is getting a taste of its own brew from one of its own. Khalid Khawaja, for the record, is about as much a human rights activist as the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a charitable organisation.

He’s not the only former ISI official to have discovered legal niceties in recent weeks. Lt Gen (retd) Hamid Gul—a former ISI chief who remains an unabashed champion of Jihadus pakistanii—filed a ‘a constitutional petition in the Supreme Court (SC) seeking protection of the fundamental rights of citizens with special reference to a recent attack of US-led coalition forces in Shawaal area of North Waziristan agency in which a Pakistani soldier was martyred…The Federation of Pakistan, the ministries of interior, foreign affairs and defence, the chief of army staff, and the NWFP governor have been made respondents in the petition’.

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