Obaidullah Released: Musharraf’s Strange Love For Taliban

Mullah Obaidullah Akhund (shown above) — the highest-ranking Taliban official ever captured by the Pakistanis — is among two dozen militants Islamists released from jail by General Musharraf. Taliban sources tell NEWSWEEK that Obaidullah Akhund was one of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar’s closest confidants and his defense minister until the post 9-11 invasion of Afghanistan. Obaidullah was No. 3 in the group’s hierarchy and a member of its ruling 10-man shura (council).

The Newsweek reports: “His arrest on Feb. 26 seems to have been anything but a coincidence. That was the very day that Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in Islamabad on an unannounced visit to demand a crackdown on Taliban operations in Pakistan. Washington was out of patience with Taliban commanders not only roaming free in Pakistan’s tribal lands but even being allowed to hide in plain sight in cities like Quetta–the provincial capital near the Afghan border where Obaidullah was captured, along with the Taliban’s senior Zabul province commander, Amir Khan Haqqani.

“Obaidullah, Haqqani and the others might still be in jail if not for a Pakistani military convoy that encountered a rockslide on a highway in South Waziristan in late August. The vehicles were quickly surrounded by fighters loyal to the notorious Pakistani tribal warlord Baitullah Mehsud, a veteran Taliban supporter who operates training camps for suicide bombers in his territory. More than 250 government troops were in the convoy, and they all surrendered without a shot being fired. Mehsud later beheaded several of his captives before Musharraf agreed to a prisoner swap.”

Ali Eteraz writes in The Guardian: The uncritical support of Musharraf is a slowly unfolding tragedy. It shows the US has not learned the lessons from the Shah in Iran.

“Dictators are incapable of eliminating extremism. A dictatorship is afflicted with the original sin of having seized power with violence, and therefore has no moral authority to speak against those who employ violence. A dictatorship is bereft of the psychological calm that comes from being popularly elected and lives life like an anxious little demon, spraying bullets wildly, without aim or purpose.

“Furthermore, a dictator that must pander to western democracies is caught in an Orwellian double-think because he has no way of reconciling why he denies to his own people the freedom that his allies and masters deem to be self-evident for their own populace – unless, of course, he values the lives of his own people less than the lives of his western allies. The only thing a dictator can do to resolve this tension is to create the illusion of freedom.

“A new subterranean world arises into which torture, disappearances and dirty hands, are swept. The dictator, hiding his own failures in order to create the chimera of freedom, harps on the corruption of the previous leaders, which is not wrong factually, but wrong logically. He does not realise that the only reason anyone is aware of the faults of predecessors at all is because they were not dictators.

“There is an insanity in supporting Musharraf. His western backers are Cornelius, pouring a poison called Musharraf into the ear of Pakistani civil society, creating the conditions for the Pakistani public turning into a deranged Hamlet, brooding menacingly in a dark South Asian corridor, slowly going mad, until one day he ushers in a carnival of blood and murder.

“That murder, unless remedial steps are taken now, will be in the form of an Islamic revolution like the one in Iran. Intelligent minds have already started to point out the “eerie similarity” between the state of Musharraf now and the Shah in the 1970s.”

Meanwhile Musharraf is now brazenly baring his fangs…”Pakistan’s military ruler has amended a law to give army courts sweeping powers to try civilians on charges ranging from treason to inciting public unrest, officials said Sunday, as the country’s opposition leader (Benazir) prepared to stage a massive, 300-kilometer protest march.”