Education for all

  ON one of his trips to Karachi towards the middle of 2000, Pakistan’s ‘chief executive’ and army chief Gen Pervez Musharraf agreed to a meeting requested by one the country’s most prominent business figures known for his services, and close ties, to the military top brass. The meeting, in the VVIP lounge of Karachi Airport, just before Gen Musharraf was to take off on his return flight by a special aircraft to Rawalpindi, had a one-point agenda. The business figure asked for the general’s help as he was being ‘unfairly hounded’ by NAB. NAB, or the National Accountability Bureau, was set up soon after Musharraf’s October 1999 coup with the avowed task of rooting out corruption in the country and the repatriation of ‘looted’ national wealth in cases where it had been taken abroad. Lt-Gen Syed Mohammad Amjad had been named the first NAB chairman. He belonged to a rare breed of officers. Very rare in recent decades. His colleagues and juniors talk of a man committed to princi...