Show of strength in Pakistan, or mere anti-US posturing ?

As Akira Kurosawa, one of the giants of Japanese cinema, showed so tellingly in his 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon, our perception of truth depends on who is telling it to us. This has always been the problem for historians who have to painstakingly sift between the grain and the chaff when trying to reconcile differing versions of the same event or period or personality from different sources — diarists, balladeers, hagiographers, documenters etc.

This came to mind when the same event was portrayed with two radically different interpretations in India and Pakistan. Indian newspapers carried on March 18 a small news item from Associated Press, a US news agency, which stated that a day earlier, missiles from a US unmanned aircraft struck a building in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan and killed 39 millitants who were holding a meeting there.

The version in Pakistani newspapers, a mixture of despatches from British and French news agencies as well as local reporters, said that the missiles hit a meeting between two tribes who had gone to the Taliban for help in mediating a dispute over a local chromite mine. Most of those killed were innocent tribals.

The news hardly created a ripple of interest in the Indian media, preoccupied as it was with scams, politics, the cricket World Cup and the unfolding Japanese tragedy. But there was an uproar in Pakistan. Besides the foreign office issuing a tough demarche to the US, even prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, taking an unusually strong stance, condemned the drone attack. Pakistan has boycotted a trilateral meeting on Afghanistan convened by the US in Brussels on March 26.

In a rare statement, the first during his second term in office, the usually taciturn general Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of the army staff, added his own bit of condemnation regretting that a gathering of peaceful citizens was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life.

This is a bit rich considering that the CIA relies considerably on inputs from the Pakistan army-controlled Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) in deciding the location and timing of its drone-operated strikes in northwest Pakistan.

In fact, it is strange that official Pakistan has shown such belligerence about this drone hit. After all, the CIA’s Special Activities Division has been carrying out attacks on so-called al Qaeda and Taliban targets in mountainous northwest Pakistan using pilotless drones since 2004, killing over 4,000 persons till now.

Cynics dismiss all this official outrage by Pak authorities as a bit of posturing necessitated by the need to offset the public rage against the abject capitulation to US pressure by Pakistan’s authorities in the Davis case. It may be recalled that the CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who was on trial in Lahore for shooting down two locals in the city on January 27, was released on March 16 after he was pardoned by the heirs of the men killed by him on payment of $2.3 million in blood money (a Sharia provision).

No one in Pakistan is taken in by the blood money subterfuge. Pakistan is economically anaemic and the real blood money is US aid. The Americans are known to protect their own, and had threatened to cut off the aid pipeline if Davis was not freed. Pakistan had to capitulate, hence the smokescreen of Sharia and blood money.

Then again, the ISI had a long-standing grouse about the CIA deploying an independent network of agents in Pakistan to gather intelligence on militant moves in the northern border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US has always suspected that the Pak army was in cahoots with the Haqqani network, which has its base in North Waziristan.

According to the Pakistani press, the deal on Davis’ release materialised only after successful negotiations between the CIA and ISI over the scope of the former’s operations in Pakistan. Some say the ISI won the tug-of-war, though in the game of intelligence, there is never an outright victory or defeat.

It is quite possible that the public ire over the release of Davis would have died down on its own. After all, the Sharia was brought in to bolster the judgment. In fact, the numbers in the various agitations had started coming down. Unfortunately, for the Pak government, the US did not have the grace to wait for the embers to cool before letting loose their latest and deadliest drone attack. It remains to be seen whether the play acting of the Pak government and army will douse the conflagration once again.