165 Days: Prisoner of the Taliban
By Asad Qureshi
Schiffer, US
ISBN: 978-0764364266
317pp.

British filmmaker Asad Qureshi’s book 165 Days: Prisoner of the Taliban is an account of his abduction in 2010 by militants in Northern Pakistan. It tells of his time in captivity and of how his family communicated with the abductors through the ordeal.

The book’s publication comes shortly after Shahbaz Taseer’s account of his five years as a hostage and it adds to a growing collection of hostage accounts from a very troubled period in Pakistan’s recent political history.

In 2010, the campaign of terror being waged by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), along with a number of assorted militant groups, was ongoing. Much of what was happening was fallout from not just 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, but also directly from the insurgency by ‘religious’ militants in Pakistan.

This was a bloody time. From 2007 to 2009, Swat had been under a reign of terror by Mullah Fazlullah and his group; law enforcers were under attack; Army Central, that is, the General Headquarters (GHQ) was attacked and occupied by militants and police training schools and offices were bombed. The Lal Masjid siege in 2007 was yet another battleground in the fight between the Pakistan Army and the militants and the storming of the mosque resulted in more death and division.

The filmmaker abducted alongside Khalid Khwaja and Colonel Imam tells his story

Pakistan was a war zone, but one in which the military was fighting those it had previously patronised and trying to show that it had the upper hand. It was against this backdrop that Qureshi and his crew were filming.

The documentarist, whose films include The Bounty Hunter, The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl, The Battle of Swat Valley and Defusing Human Bombs — writes that he and his producer, Ahmed Alaudin Jamal, were trying to make a film on a secret peace initiative between the Taliban, the Pakistani authorities and the Western allies when a contact offered to arrange an interview with a top Taliban leader, belonging to the Haqqani network.

This contact was Khalid Khwaja, a controversial figure and one of the men kidnapped along with Qureshi and later killed by the captors. At the very last minute, Khwaja managed to persuade one Colonel Imam — actual name Sultan Amir Tarar — to accompany them. Tarar was an ex-army brigadier who had served as an ISI officer and as Pakistan’s consul general in Herat. He played a key role working with the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Qureshi, his assistant Rustam Khan, Khwaja and Colonel Imam were abducted on March 26, 2010. In the days immediately preceding, they had interviewed a Taliban leader named Ameenullah, had travelled to Chaman in Balochistan and even across the border into Afghanistan.

When Khwaja told them he had arranged the interview they wanted, they set off, minus Jamal, towards North Waziristan. However, all along the way it was unclear if the interview was confirmed. At a crucial point, they were advised to turn back, but Khwaja was enthusiastic and insisted on pressing onwards.

What followed their capture was a brutal period of incarceration and interrogation. The abductors said the name of their group was the “Asian Tigers.” One sadistic captor was called Krishan Lal, who claimed to have been “a translator at the Indian Embassy working for NATO.”

165 Days is structured so that what was happening to Qureshi in captivity is punctuated by what was happening on the outside. This includes messages from the captors to Qureshi’s family, discussions on how to respond to the messages, the question of the ransom and the various people involved in the ordeal. The two narratives, illustrated with lots of email correspondence, run parallel to each other and, although this structure makes the book a dense read, it also makes it extremely informative.

The point-person for the abductors was Qureshi’s elder brother, Farrukh. Although Qureshi is the protagonist of the story, in interviews he has described his brother as “the hero of the book” for his handling of developments that grow increasingly traumatic.

Qureshi writes how Farrukh was put in touch with one particular cleric, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, head of a madressah complex and a former leader of the Harkatul Mujahideen, a militant group operating in India-occupied Kashmir. Khalil was instrumental in securing the hostages’ release, acquiring information through his contacts and doing whatever he could to help, including sending an emissary who was himself captured and tortured by Qureshi’s captors.

This sort of networking and web of contacts highlights the extreme murkiness of the time Qureshi writes of. At one point, something the abductors said confirmed to Qureshi that they were not from the ISI and he writes of feeling immense relief because, up to that point, he had been suspecting that he was being held by the intelligence agency.

Later, when Qureshi and his assistant were released, they were facilitated and hosted by an Al Qaeda group whose good-guy role is reinforced by their — and the Afghan Taliban’s — insistence throughout the narrative that they do not condone the holding of hostages or kidnappings for ransom.

The picture emerging from 165 Days is of a state of terror and lawlessness, and also of seething intrigue within the military and the ISI’s top brass. The TTP is characterised as a loose grouping of various criminal outfits that kidnap and kill in the name of religion.

It also appears that a number of former ISI officers were in close touch with the militants and opposed to whatever policies Pakistan’s then military ruler, Gen Pervez Musharraf, was pursuing. The usual suspects — Gen Aslam Baig and Gen Hameed Gul — are mentioned as the ones communicating with Khalid Khwaja.

Khwaja is a mysterious figure. In a photo in the book, Qureshi captions him “an enigma.” What is clear from the narrative is that the militant groups he was dealing with did not trust him. A former squadron leader of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), he joined the ISI and in that shadowy world, his main tasks seemed to be liaising with jihadi and Taliban groups.

After his official disengagement from the ISI, Khwaja became involved with a group that was campaigning to recover ‘disappeared’ people, many of whom were suspected to be either militants or their supporters.

Qureshi’s account suggests that, in 2010, Khwaja was reinventing himself as a “journalist”. The murky nature of the scenario is exemplified by a telephone call reportedly involving the journalist and television anchor Hamid Mir. In the call, the voice allegedly belonging to Mir speaks to one of the abductors, Usman Punjabi, and makes negative comments about Khwaja.

Mir denounced the phone call, calling the audio a ‘cut-and-paste job’. He accepts the voice was his, but he says that the remarks were taken from his conversations with a government legislator and adviser who had asked Mir for information about Khwaja. Khwaja’s motives, according to Mir, were such that even the people leading the missing persons campaign had begun to distrust him.

That the audio of this alleged call was made public and resulted in litigation against Mir, as well as caused damage to his journalistic credibility, seems a coincidence considering that, at the time, Mir was quite critical of military policy. He had been extremely vocal about the state of affairs in Balochistan as well as about the issue of missing persons.

What is true and what is fabricated? Who is working for whom and why? Can anybody be trusted? What’s really happening? Who’s running whom? These questions spring to mind not just while reading Qureshi’s book, but also when reviewing the political events of the past year in Pakistan. It’s a very, very murky picture.

165 Days makes for very interesting reading and gives many insights into Pakistan’s state of affairs at that time. A few production points to note, though: a book like this needs to be properly indexed. Also, the drama of the prologue is slightly compromised by the unbelievably precise time stamps — how could the author know that the legal assistant awoke at 1:23am, or that Khwaja poured two cups of tea at 5:04 pm?

All in all, though, Qureshi has written a brave and detailed account of his ordeal. His resilience is also remarkable; after his release he returned to work in a short period and was soon back in Malakand to work on his film Defusing Human Bombs.

The reviewer is a UK-based journalist.

She tweets @umberkhairi

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2023