Well, well well !
Looks like there is more to it than meets the eye.
See, today’s story in NYTimes by Ali Sethi
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/opinion/26sethi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
Some excerpts,
There was a highway, he explained, on a berm above the fields and towns nearby, that ran on the border between Baluchistan and Sindh Province to the south. On the Sindhi side lived a land-owning politician who wanted to cut a hole in the highway that would divert the water to this very town. The politician was claiming that he needed to protect Jacobabad, an important small city on his side of the highway, though he was obviously trying to save his 400 acres of rice fields…
“That is not advisable,” he said. There were soldiers on the highway, and they wouldn’t want to be on camera. What were soldiers doing on the highway? …
The answer came in evasive, fragmented sentences: there was an airbase on the Sindhi side of the highway. This was where the military’s newest F-16 fighter jets were parked. But local residents believed that the base also housed the notorious American drones used to kill Islamist militants in the mountains…
The armed forces were going to save the base at all costs, he explained. But they didn’t want to draw attention to their own role — or to their interest — in the diversion of the water. Hence the presence of the land-owning politician; if there was any fallout, he would take the blame, and the soldiers would appear to have acted on his personal wishes. …
Could we break the story we had just heard? “I don’t think so,” said one reporter. “You don’t want the intelligence agencies to come after you.”…
Another said, with sudden formality, “It is considered unpatriotic to criticize the security forces.”…
The story has died, and the image of Pakistan’s military as the sole protector of its people is whole again, with all those videos of soldiers rescuing people from the water playing endlessly on TV screens…