The truth about 'Dawn leaks'.

IT was, much like many manufactured crises in the country's history, a case of overweening ambition and untrammeled power. According to part three of an interview that former army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa reportedly gave journalist Shahid Maitla, the furore over a Dawn story published in October 2016 was deliberately played up by his predecessor, Gen Raheel Sharif, in an effort to wrangle an extension from then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

The ploy did not work, and Gen Sharif retired in November. But it set in motion events that undermined the government, as such schemes are designed to do; unjustly maligned this newspaper, which was simply doing its duty to inform the public accurately and objectively; and put a journalist's life in peril.

The article in question, published only after the information was verified from multiple sources, was an account of what had transpired at meetings between the PML-N government and the military high command. In an unusually blunt warning, the civilian leadership told the top brass to act against militant outfits or risk the country being isolated internationally.

Instead of discarding the myopic strategy regarding militants, the episode was used to cut 'down to size' a civilian leadership that was telling the establishment to change tack, and to humiliate a prime minister refusing to acquiesce to the chief's desire for an extension.

Buckling under intense pressure from the powers that be, the Prime Minister Office issued denials of the report's contents and placed the writer, Cyril Almeida, on the ECL. 'Dawn leaks', as it came to be...