New York- Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online’s flagship journalist, was brutalized and murdered. Though it may be some time until the details seep up from the seamy underworld that did him in, many both inside and outside Pakistan are quickly pointing fingers at the ISI for the tragedy. Here’s what I’ll say: if it were a terrorist group that assassinated him, of which Pakistan seems to have more than one can count, it is unlikely they would have used the old ‘kidnap in place x and dump body in place y’ method. That tired, vulgar routine is more in line with the country’s security services over which the supposedly reformed kleptocrat Asif Ali Zardari has virtually no influence–the Hayatullah Khan case immediately comes to mind.
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistans and Lashkar-e-Jhangvis of that dark realm tend to either employ highly targeted suicide bombings using boys often as young as 12-13 or the kidnap-and-make-youtube-hostage-video routine. Saleem Shahzad was an incomparable journalist whose bylines are irreplaceable. Other journalists often seemed envious of his scoops and placed suspicion on his sources. Some thought he was too close to the story, whether it be the ISI, the Quetta shura, the TTP, or AQ. In some people’s eyes, they believed he didn’t play by the rules because his sources were too good, dangerous, or a mix of the two. They were jealous, I supposed when I heard such talk.
What Saleem Shahzad was was someone extraordinarily interested in shining light on a dark world. Asia Times will carry on and journalism will carry on but we have lost a key interlocutor into one country’s desperately important downward spiral. A country to which 170 million souls call home and the United States cannot extricate itself from her ally’s affairs. Just before Saleem Shahzad was brutally killed by those far less civilized, he finally released a book called Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11 which will leave behind a written legacy of an era much of the world would like to forget. 