Yes, please

Inquiry reports in Pakistan tend to be stowed away in a dusty file cabinet, never to be seen again. Portions of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report are still to be released publicly as are the inquiries into the Ojhri camp disaster. The Abbottabad Commission report on the killing of Osama bin Laden may never surface either, even though the person who headed the commission, Justice Javed Iqbal, has called for it to be released. The presence of the Al-Qaeda chief in a city with a large military presence and the way the US was able to launch the raid should be a source of great shame to the nation and the details of the inquiry are of national interest. While allowing for some portions to be classified in the genuine interests of security, there is no reason to keep from the public who is to blame both for allowing Bin Laden to live here undetected and for the failure to detect the US raid. Such an environment of secrecy inevitable leads to speculation.    As it is, the Western media immediately started floating theories that the security establishment was aware of Osama’s presence in the country and that Pakistan may have colluded with the US in the raid but maintained plausible deniability. Whether we released the report or not, we were never going to be able to stop others from talking about it nor were we ever going to able to stop the international media from reporting on the commission.

Indeed the first draft of the Abbottabad Commission report did end up being leaked to Al-Jazeera in 2013 and that was likely more embarrassing to us than releasing the report itself would have been. The draft, believed to be toned down in its final version, was extremely critical of everyone involved. This leads      to the inevitable conclusion that the report has been suppressed not because of security concerns but to save the civilian and military leadership from embarrassment. As the recent Supreme Court report on the Quetta attacks showed, governments will always, almost instinctively – defend their failures instead of learning from them. The Abbottabad report supposedly contains more than 200 recommendations but the only way we will know if any of those suggestions was implemented is if the report is made public. The commission itself was beset by internal fighting and one member, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, is believed to have issued a stinging dissent from what he saw as a sanitised final version. That dissent, too, should be made public since this is a debate we as a country need to have out in the      open. It is the only way to ensure to guard against being caught up in such imbroglios again.