The ISI's ambitious director, Lieutenant General Mehmood Ahmed, has been sacked, one reason apparently being that he tried to double-cross the President, General Pervez Musharraf. He is said to have told him that he had tried to persuade Mullah Mohammed Omar to hand over Osama bin Laden when, in fact, he had not done so.His more moderate replacement, Ehsan ul-Haq, toes the anti-Taliban line, but it is unclear how many ISI agents have severed their old loyalties. The ISI today, like Pakistan itself, is a house divided – with potential consequences for the Allied forces of enormous peril.Meanwhil, Peshawar fills up with anti-Taliban forces of every stripe: the atmosphere of skulduggery grows thicker by the day. But who, in this steaming morass, will give the Allies a clear picture? Last week, a senior American official offered a clue. Speaking in Delhi, he said: "The intelligence sharing [between the US and India] is unprecedented now ... contacts have intensified at an extremely rapid rate."Pakistan has always feared RAW, India's military intelligence body, because its agents can melt seamlessly into the Pakistani scene Today that fear is solidly grounded.. Four protesters were shot dead by Pakistani police yesterday during a nationial strike called by extremist religious parties trying to consolidate opposition to General Pervez Musharraf's pro-West policies.
Four protesters were shot dead by Pakistani police yesterday during a nationial strike called by extremist religious parties trying to consolidate opposition to General Pervez Musharraf's pro-West policies. Three of the men, members of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, an organisation with Taliban sympathies, died instantly after being shot in the Punjab town of Dera Ghazi Khan. The fourth man died in hospital.Police fired into a crowd of about 1,000 protesters who had poured on to railway tracks to prevent a train leaving the station. They said they were responding to violence at the site in which stones were thrown and shots were fired.But while in places the demonstrations were noisy and violent, the largely deserted streets of the country's big cities suggested that, among the majority of people, anger with the war in Afghanistan has yet to ignite.General Musharraf, the Pakistani leader, is away in the United States and, in an attempt to ensure that nothing boils over while he is gone, his government has clamped the tightest controls on protests since the start of the present crisis. The leaders of the two most vociferous religious parties, who are already under house arrest, were locked up and kept incommunicado so they could no longer feed incendiary messages to their followers over the telephone.Policing was heavy in the main cities all week, as the authorities tried to pressure the Afghan Defence Council, a coalition of 35 Islamist groups, to call off the strike held one week before Ramadan.In Quetta, machine-guns were installed on rooftops behind sandbags overlooking the main streets.
Distribution of literature offensive to the government was banned in the capital, Islamabad. Five hundred activists were picked up across the country on Thursday and held overnight.The well-polished apparatus of the police state, which General Musharraf has been thrifty in deploying during the two years since he seized power in a military coup, was rolled out to impress would-be law breakers.And it worked – or something worked. Just as in previous protests in the past few weeks, yesterday's protests fizzled by Pakistan's inflammable standards. In Karachi, police fired tear gas to disperse about 2,000 demonstrators, some of whom were throwing stones. The protesters were a fraction of that port city's population.A few thousand demonstrators also gathered in Peshawar, but no disturbances were reported in Quetta.In addition to the ostentatious policing, the government played a clever hand by declaring yesterday a public holiday. The date of 9 November is the birthday of Mohammad Iqbal, Pakistan's national poet, who died in 1938. In recent years, the day has not been marked officially, but by abruptly making it a holiday the authorities hindered the protesters' efforts to muster support, because few buses were running.
