Quaid-e-Azam while addressing officers at Staff College Quetta stated 'the Defence Forces are the most vital of all Pakistan Services and correspondingly a very heavy responsibility and burden lies on your soldiers'. He told them that 'executive authority flows from Head of Government of Pakistan, and any command or orders that may come to you cannot come without the sanction of the Executive Head', whose powers are derived from constitution, which is supreme.

In the words of Edmund Burke 'It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy-'. It is unfortunate that this trust and confidence received a blow in recent incident involving ANF and controversy that followed after allegation that an opposition politician was arrested with 15 Kg of heroine. The officers of our armed forces must abstain themselves from getting involved in such assignments like ANF, given nature of the job and its sensitivity when in words of Lahore High Court 'political victimisation is an open secret of our country'.

It is not just ANF but also ASF which has been deeply rooted in controversies like their use of fake bomb detector Khoji, derived from banned ADE-651, whose founder James McCormick was sentenced to 10 years in jail by London High Court, after proven guilty of manufacturing and selling fake bomb detectors to countries like Iraq etc. There is also another controversy involving DHA Valley in Islamabad which advertised allotment of plots in 2008 to general public measuring 5/8 Marlas and even after all instalments were paid, yet unfortunate beneficiaries have not received the land

© Pakistan Press International, source Asianet-Pakistan