Submitting another list of 29 mega scams before the Supreme Court, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) said on Tuesday that military authorities were not cooperating in investigation into a Rs4 billion scam of unauthorised investment in stock exchange. The Public Account Committee (PAC) had directed NAB in July 2011 to proceed against three former generals and two civilian officials of the National Logistic Cell (NLC) for illegally investing Rs4.3 billion in the stock market and causing a loss of Rs1.8 billion in the process. Complying with the order, NAB on February 23, 2012 initiated an inquiry against Lt Gen (retd) Khalid Munir Khan, Muhammad Afzal Muzaffar, Maj Gen (retd) Khalid Zaheer Akhtar, Najeebullah Khan and Saeed ur Rehman.Giving detail of the NLC scam, NAB said despite repeated reminders since January 2012, neither the NLC nor the GHQ has sent any records regarding the scam. Since July 2011, the GHQ has not allowed NAB to proceed against the former generals and decided to hold an inquiry on its own, it added.The army may well have legal reasons for acting in the manner it has done in the NLC case all along — but what about a state institution’s duty to function transparently and to enforce accountability? Consider also the wider context here. In Karachi, the military has accused the provincial leadership of corruption on a grand scale and the army-led Rangers have raided Sindh government offices in search of documents linked to alleged land grabs and sundry financial misdeeds of politicians and bureaucrats. In doing so, the military has cast itself as a force for good battling corruption wherever it is found. Yet, when it comes to its internal investigations and disciplinary measures, the military is famously opaque. The NLC scam is only one of many cases in which military officers, retired and serving, have been investigated by civilian authorities. In some cases, the military has even fought in civilian courts to have serious crimes being tried there against military personnel to be tried in the opaque military justice system. Perhaps most infamously, following pressure on the political leadership of the country to create a new system of military courts, the 21st Amendment earlier this year has even allowed for civilians to be tried in military courts on terrorism-related charges. It is rather remarkable, then, that the same institution is so set on shielding some of its own from very serious allegations of financial mismanagement.
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