‘President may pick Gen Kiyani as new COAS’

New York—President Musharraf has decided to appoint his successor at last: Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the former Director General of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the final decision would be announced by him after winning the Presidential Election, claims New Week.
The report of US Journal News Week said that although Kiyani has always kept a low public profile, people who have worked closely with him speak highly of his abilities—more highly in some cases than his boss might like. “Kiyani is not only a strong commander,” says a Western military official in Islamabad, asking not to be named on such a delicate topic. “He’s the most competent candidate by far.”
The Musharraf’s successor as military chief will need all the skill he can muster—and on several fronts at once. The Pentagon wants him to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border, the US Journal said.
The report said that as a civilian head of state, President Musharraf will need a strong, capable top officer who can revive the fighting spirit of Army. In the past two months, suicide bombers have relentlessly attacked Army convoys, camps, mess halls and mosques.
Those who know Kiyani say he’s a smart, tough, talented commander. In 2003, after two assassination attempts against Musharraf, the President put Kiyani in charge of the investigation—and applauded the way he got the country’s rival intelligence services working together for a change, the report said.
“When Kiyani got tough, the problems of coordination disappeared and the agencies started working like a well-oiled machine,” Musharraf recalls in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire.” Within months Kiyani had unraveled the two plots and arrested most of the participants. He was rewarded in 2004 with a promotion to chief of ISI, and the next year his agency scored big with the arrest of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the senior Qaeda lieutenant who masterminded the attempts on Musharraf’s life.
Kiyani has earned his boss’s confidence, even serving as Musharraf’s personal envoy in recent talks with exiled opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Kiyani is a chain smoker with a tendency to mumble, but he speaks to Musharraf in a way few other senior officers would dare.

—Agencies