By Saeed Malik
Sep, 09, 2026.
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Oct 12, 1999 will live in the memory of many for a long time. I got together with Lt Col Obaidullah that evening, when Gen Parvez Musharraf's flight from Sri Lanka to Karachi was in the air, trying to land. Nawaz Sharif and the Generals that had thrown in their lot with him, were trying to make this as difficult as possible. They were hoping to create a situation so that this flight would land in India, or at least not in Karachi. Or if it were to land in Pakistan, their preference was that it should land in a city without an army contingent.
One of Obaid's ex-subordinates, Maj Iftikhar Rasul, was in the Military Intelligence, manning his office in GHQ. Every half an hour or so Obaid would call him to find out the latest. Thus, the two of us were better informed than most, that crucial evening. Iftikhar had already informed Obaid that late in the afternoon Lt Generals Salim Haider [Punjab] and Akram [armoured corps] had tried to enter GHQ to physically occupy their new offices to which Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had transferred them. But the officer on duty at the main gate refused to allow them entry, making it clear to them that anything short of a direct call from Lt Gen Mahmud Ahmad, commander 10 Corps, would keep the gates of GHQ locked. Mahmud was a good friend of mine, and I knew his views. I knew therefore that these gates would would remain closed to Nawaz's generals.
As these Generals returned to be consoled by Nawaz Sharif, the round had gone to Musharraf. The second last call of the evening to Iftikhar informed us that Karachi airport had refused Musharraf's flight the permission to land, and had suggested to the captain to try Nawabshah instead. This gave the round to Nawaz Sharif. Half an hour later, Iftikhar told us that Karachi airport had been taken over by the army, and that Musharraf's flight had been informed to turn around and head for Karachi. Game and set to Musharraf. Soon the match too would follow.
This was enough for us for the moment, and we hopped into Obaid's car and headed to Islamabad to survey the scenes there. But there was little to see except small groups of nervous people trying to get the latest news on cell phones. In about an hour these small groups began to expand into cheering crowds. Apparently the eagle had landed. The further we went, the larger and more excited the crowds became, shouting slogans in favour of Musharraf, and spreading "mithai" [sweetmeats] among all and sundry. Before this, every army takeover had been welcomed by the common man, but never before had such jubilation been witnessed. This was the last such display of joy I was to see. The next time this happened was when Bajwa overthrew Imran Khan. This time crowds gathered once more, not to hail the army, but to remonstrate strongly against its action, and to deride it. Not even our defeat and surrender in the 1971 War had caused our army such grief. In a space of just a few hours, the army had lost the people of Pakistan almost completely.
But that was another day. For the moment, Musharraf had been rescued, and Nawaz Sharif was out. For a people who had been promised much but given nothing, this was a harbinger of great days to follow. So they kept cheering well into the night.
I knew Musharraf well enough for me to be able to call him, and expect him to come to the phone. He was a Brigadier then. I knew him as a positive man who had about him, plenty to be liked.
In less than a month, he promulgated the National Accountability Ordinance and created NAB. This brought great hope to many. Before him, accountability had been promised by both the elected as well as the usurping leaders. But never had any of them moved beyond the promise. Here was the first man who seemed to have decided to actually move against cancer of corruption.
A couple of days later I got a call from Maj Gen Inayatullah Niazi. He used to read my articles, and once in a while, acknowledged them with a word of praise. He had been Chairman of the Federal Investigation Agency, and since the formation of NAB, had become its Deputy Chairman. He asked me to see him.
When I went to his office, without preamble he told me that he wanted me to work for NAB. Without hesitation, I assented. He then took me to see Lt Gen S. M. Amjad, who had been appointed as Chairman NAB. I knew Amjad well enough to call him my friend. He was an officer whom I most respected for his integrity. Working under him would be an honour for me, which I told him as he welcomed me to his organization.
Office began the next day.
NAB was a tiny organization then, which would take quite some time to find its feet. Haroon and Ghumman were bankers on our staff to explain the intricacies of their trade to the investigators. Mrs Ismat Mehdi was an in-house NAB lawyer. And she was good. Then Farooq Adam Khan joined as Prosecutor General Accountability. Few worked for NAB with his dedication. He, Mrs Mehdi and Gen Amjad were the busiest among us. Each worked an 18-hour day with hardly a Sunday. Lt Col Riazuddin, Maj Taimur Shah, and Nadir Imtiaz Khan formed one investigation cell. The work they did was outstanding. Lt Col Obaidullah [NAB's pocket bull-dozer] was way out the best investigator we had. He was assisted by Maj Iftikhar Rasul, the same who had a month earlier kept Obaid faithfully informed about Musharraf's flight and its safe landing in Karachi. Brig Saghir was the head of NAB intelligence. He had done the same job earlier in our "atom bomb factory in Kahuta" and was the only head of intelligence whose tenure there had not been extended by Dr A. Q. Khan. Saghir was too honest, and therefore suspect in Kahuta.
S.P Hassan Abbas joined us later and was a credit to NAB. The last to join the original team was Brig Mohmmad Nazir [ex-commander of SSG]. When Gen Amjad asked me about him, I told him that the only thing I could guarantee about this officer was that there wasn't enough money in the world to buy him, and as far as his I.Q. and general awareness were concerned, the general would do well to interview the officer himself. Nazir was appointed Director of Investigations.
The initial team was small, but it was good. It handled a workload well beyond its numbers. Investigations were not the problem. Anyone with better-than-average intelligence who could think logically could investigate non-technical issues, provided he was not prone to bending under undue influence. The problems these teams were facing were two. They did not know whether what they thought was evidence would also be considered evidence by the court. And they did not know how to prepare the documentation needed to formally submit a case to a Court.
For this, NAB shortlisted six police officers with a request that they be transferred to NAB. All six wangled their way out. While speaking to Hassan Abbas I wondered why this should have been the case, and his interpretation was that this was a verdict. Without saying so in plain words, these six police officers had said that NAB was a temporary arrangement and so was the motivation behind it. But the enemies its members would make while serving this organisation, would be permanent. Therefore, serving in such an organization was best avoided.
However, by pure chance, a junior officer of PTCL approached Col Riaz's team to acquaint it with plans being laid for a project which would provide rich dividends in corrupt money this matured. From one such PTCL officer, it became two, and then three. The team began to follow cases pointed out by them, only to nip them at the right time. Or they began to monitor them surreptitiously. Similar was the case with CDA projects.
So it was decided that till NAB got the resources to recover loss of government funds in corrupt deals of the past, what was within its power even then was to monitor or to put an end to such projects which were rich with a promise of causing losses to the government in the near tomorrow i.e to save funds yet to be lost. This change in emphasis of puttimg the recovery of stolen assets on the back burner, while awaiting the expansion of NAB resources, and shifting to preserving the assets yet to be lost, was a higly successful one.
This began to save the state millions of ruppees in projected losses.
This experience also began to suggest a model for the organisation of NAB. Central to this was small teams of dedicated investigators bound by integrity mutual loyalty and esprit de corps, targeting projects expected to inflict huge losses on the state and monitoring them, while going slower in the direction of recovery of losses already sustained by it.
But the recovery of such losses was not abandoned. This was where the concept of "Plea Bargain" made its appearance. This was first suggested by a retired I.G of Police who was viisiting Farooq Adam. In an informal meeting Farooq pitched this idea to determine our views about it. My view was that in no case should there be any discretion in determining the amount "imposed" by the plea bargain which an alleged criminal could pay and obtain a " get out of jail card" from NAB. Such a bargain should be allowed only to a person already convicted so that he could "buy" his freedom from jail by paying back to the state what he had stolen from it. OR it should be used by a person whose case was ready to be tried, the amount due from him had already been determined, and he was willing to pay this back. Any discretion allowed in the plea bargain concept would be the shortest way to corrupting NAB itself, or at the very least in giving it a bad name.
Both Farooq Adam and Mrs Mehdi, among others, agreed with this, and yet when this provision came back from the Law Ministry, dressed as "law", there was considerable confusion about it. The early days of NAB were infested by such confusion. Much of this was caused by the Law Ministry, who repeatedly failed to do its job. What made the situation worse was government pressure on a newly formed, under-resourced organisation, to produce results at a pace well beyond its capacity. Musharraf wanted to be seen as doing something and pushing NAB was the best he could do.
The most tragic effect of this pressure was the death of Lt Col Obaidullah. He had just finished interrogating Ishaque Dar, and had got him to make a thorough confession which would have taken down the entire Sharif clan. Next, he was tasked to interrogate Khawaja Asif in Attock Fort. Because of the backlog of enquieries that had piled up he was given very little time to complete this one.After a week he came and informed me that he had found Asif innocent of the charges being investigated. I advised him to walk into Gen Amjad's office and make his report to him without holding anything back. He did so, and then went to make his report to Gen Inayat, who was given to sudden rages and could easily fly off the handle. That day he had just finished explaining to someone on the Presidential staff why NAB's progress of recovery was slow, when Obaid walked in and made his report. Inayat went apoplectic, severely rebuking Obaid for letting off criminals. Obaid walked out very agitated. As he slumped into a chair in my office, he could hardly speak a word and the colour in his face had fled. A sixth sense told me that he was having a heart attack. Brig Nazir immediately took steps to have him evacuated to AFIC Rawalpindi, and reported to Gen Amjad, who called the head of the hospital and asked him to be ready to receive Obaid. Sometime during his evacuation, Obaid had collapsed. By the time all of us reached AFIC they were tryiing to revive him. In about an hour, NAB had lost its most capable asset.
The next day, Gen Amjad had Gen Inayat removed from NAB.
My view was that we would not feel our resource constraints quite as much and also increase our pace of delivery if we had a tool whereby alleged criminals helped us by a process of "self-conviction". For example, if such a person was obligated to show a balance between his earnings, inherited wealth, present wealth, taxes paid, and cost of the lifestyle lived, he ought to be considered innocent against charges of corruption. Otherwise not. I therefore drew out a list of questions which, if correctly answered, would easily show such a balance or a lack of it. I gave this list to Brig Nazir. He took out time to "digitize" these questions. This became known as the "Form". At its very top we added a provision that if questions in this form were incorrectly answered in order to mislead, the respondent would be deemed to have accepted a five year jail term as a result.
When, to test its efficacy, the Form was handed over to the first person under investigation at the time, the result was electrifying. He collapsed in his chair and needed to be revived. One thing was immediately clear to Nazir and me, and that was that only the Chairman should have the power to issue the Form, and that too only after the guilt of the recipient had been fully established beyond any doubt.
But this happened towards the end of Gen Amjad's tenure in NAB, which came quite suddenly.
Around that time, an oldish man belonging to the procurement department of PIA walked into my office. He said that he had come to open my eyes to the daily plunder taking place in his organization. I asked him to wait so that I could introduce him to Col Riaz, but he was hurrying to the airport to fly to Karachi and promised that he would be with me a couple of weeks later with some documents. I was certain that Riaz's team could efficiently monitor two more organisations beyond PTCL and CDA. But by the time of the old man's return, Gen Amjad had left NAB.
The other organisation I was keen to infiltrate was the FBR. I was looking for an FBR man who knew his job and whom we could entirely trust. Finally, a close friend of mine introduced me to Mazhar Noorani, who was from the Customs Service. In my very first conversation, I asked him if he was a monied man. He lost little time in affirming that this was indeed the case. Before I could ask him "how", he told me that those who knew people on the "inside" managing cricket bets could end up making very good money. And these funds could be doubled and tripled in little to no time. I checked out Noorani with my friends in the Customs. None of them contradicted what Noorani had told me. In our next meeting I asked him, that if he were to become a part of NAB, how did he plan to proceed with unearthing corruption cases in the FBR. He said that this would be simple. All that one would need to be aware of were the most notorious cases concerning the FBR, and then one would need to trace the relevant files. These files alone would provide enough evidentiary material to convict the crooks.
I then went to see Gen Amjad to get his permission to take Noorani on board. After I explained the value Noorani would bring to the NAB, Amjad had no hesitation in acceding to my request.
Within a couple of days of this, I had gone to see Lt Gen Ghulam Ahmad [GA] who was Chief of Staff to Musharraf, and was the most well-liked and respected General Officer of that era. I needed some help from him on behalf of NAB when suddenly he turned around and asked me if I knew that my Chairman would be leaving NAB in a couple of days?
Because G A was smiling, I thought he was just pulling my leg. But then, he was always smiling. So, I asked if he was serious. For a moment, he let his smile fade and nodded. I returned to my office in a state of shock. I tried to guess what could be the reasons behind the suddenness of this move. Getting to the bottom of this was not difficult. Amjad had taken on his assignment with NAB due to a specific guarantee from Musharraf that both he and his office would abstain from interfering with the functioning of NAB. But during the last few months, pressure on NAB was continuous that we stop pursuing the cases against the Choudhrys of Gujrat and Saddruddin Hashwani. Despite Amjad's best efforts not to let the knowledge of these requests filter down to the rest of his officers, this had become known. This brought Amjad to the point where he felt the need to request Musharraf to post him out.
Two days later, Amjad's jeep drove out of the NAB compound for the last time. He was deeply respected by every member of NAB and his departure was felt by them as if each had recieved a personal stab in the back by the government. Each one of us instinctively felt that this signalled the end of accountability.
It had finally become clear to us all that Musharraf had no commitment to Accountability. This was merely a sop to the hopes of the people who had so wildly applauded his stepping into power, as it was also their repudiation of Nawaz Sharif and his corruption. Besides, Musharraf had needed something to show to the people and also to give the world at large a justification for why he had taken over. Results coming in from NAB would do this. From Amjad's departure onwards, Musharraf began using NAB to build up his personal political power base at the cost of Pakistan. This was as the "normal" had always been.
With Gen Amjad's transfer from NAB came the unannounced but formal end of accountability. After that it made no sense for me to stay on. Since I was not on a government payroll, I had no clearances to get, and since I had my own car I did not need a lift home either. I merely put my papers in my briefcase, and drove out of NAB an hour after Amjad.
Gen Khalid Maqbool was the next Chairman of NAB. What branded his tenure was a gift of a monthly gas quota from Mr Iqbal Z Ahmad, a Lahore businessman. This gift was inherited by some of the Chairmen that followed Khalid Maqbool. A few weeks later, he, on a push from the FBR facilitated the jailing of Mazhar Noorani, who could have proved a huge asset for NAB, had accountability still been its function. This was the ultimate proof to me that the elite masters of theft in Pakistan, were all related to each other, as surely as the interests of our people lay abandoned by them. His gas quota and the jailing of Noorani exposed the quality of General Khalid. Had he been in command of an army corps, instead of being Chairman of NAB, this would have been incentive enough for the Indian General opposite him to go on to the offensive against us even if there were no war clouds on the horizon!
Poor generals, of which we had a generous supply, were a big disaster on the field of battle, but they were often a bigger one, when off it. But when they struck up a partnership with our congenitally corrupt politians, together they form a ring of steel around the people of the country, who have no escape left, and no power to alter their destiny. All they can do then is to bang their heads against this ring so that they may break through it. This could eventually lead to civil war and bring down the state itself. This, we had already achieved in 1971, and are now moving towards in Baluchistan and KP, while the smoke rising in Azad Kashmir is yet to become a fire, but it promises to do so.
But back to NAB. Soon the only relic left over from the old NAB and its spirit was Brig Nazir. He had dug in his heels against a PTCL proposal to buy its Ufone package from Nortel at apprx 140 million dollars. Bringing pressure for this deal to go through, was our Prime Minister, Mr Shaukat Aziz. Competing with Nortel was a Chinese company offering their package for about 39 million dollars. Opposing a Prime Minister with scant help from his own Chairman, with only Mr Saeed Malik of the Planning Division supporting him, it was difficult for a retired Brigadier to keep his heels dug in. Eventually, Nortel had to bring down their price by about sixty million dollars to win the contract. This is what Nazir helped Pakistan to save in one contract.
To me this was proof enough that Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz were in cahoots as "business" partners, in which Shaukat Aziz was the front man.
What a shame.
What my year-long experience with NAB taught me though, was that military coup after military coup while promising accountability, had failed to deliver, not because this was too difficult, but because there was no commitment. Our army had failed to realize that the most lethal threat against the state was internal. This lay in theft and the hollowing out of the state. Large scale corruption should therefore have been seen as a vital national security imperative by the army. To block such corruption the army did not need to take over. A warning to the sitting government would of sufficed. But instead of seeing massive corruption for what it was, time and again the army went and joined hands with the thieves and stole the future of Pakistan. Rotating bankruptcy driven by greed and theft is all that Pakistan got from its politicio-military hybrid leadership.
But even now, should ever a day arise, when it was the committed desire of the most powerful person in the country to allow accountability to have its say in Pakistan, this could be accomplished. The model for achieving this is in place, though only in rudiments. These could still be dug out and assembled to launch an effort to rectify Pakistan's most lethal malady. And if this is ever rectified, the half of Pakistan yet left to us, would still have a chance to survive decades of rotten thieving leadership.
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