I Have Heard Those Words Before

I read Illia Weisser’s piece about Germany from Karachi, and one sentence stayed with me.

Trust us. We have intelligence.

I have heard versions of that argument for much of my life.

In Karachi, politics once changed the physical mood of the city. A strike could empty roads that had been crowded an hour earlier. Certain neighbourhoods became tense after sunset, while people adjusted work, travel and family routines around political violence they could neither control nor properly understand.

Security agencies operated inside that world.

So when the German government says intelligence points to Russian responsibility for the attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, I do not immediately conclude that Germany is wrong.

Russia may indeed be responsible.

My reaction is different.

What evidence has been independently tested before political consequences follow?

The distinction matters.

Pakistan taught me that possession of secret information and entitlement to public trust are not the same thing.

Pakistan Already Ran This Experiment

One episode from Pakistan’s political history explains why I react this way.

The 1990 general election eventually produced the Asghar Khan case, one of the clearest judicial records of intelligence involvement in Pakistani politics.

Retired Air Marshal Asghar Khan went to the Supreme Court alleging that money had been distributed to politicians to influence the election against Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party.

The case remained unresolved for years before the Supreme Court finally delivered its findings in 2012.

The court found that the 1990 election had been subjected to corruption and corrupt practices. It also found that an election cell had operated to provide financial assistance to selected political forces.

More important for my argument, the court made clear that intelligence agencies had no constitutional role in building electoral alliances or supporting preferred political actors.

Those findings did not come from a columnist attacking the establishment. They entered Pakistan’s official record through a Supreme Court judgment after evidence had been examined.

The institutional lesson is uncomfortable.

An organisation created to collect intelligence and protect national security became involved in determining political outcomes.

Once citizens discover that such boundaries can be crossed, future demands for unquestioning trust become harder to accept. Institutional memory changes how people interpret secrecy.

The problem is not that every later intelligence claim must therefore be false.

The problem is credibility.

When an institution has previously entered political territory, citizens acquire a rational reason to ask who is checking it now.

Karachi Made the Lesson Personal

The argument becomes less abstract when I think about Karachi in the 1990s.

The city was violent. MQM faced serious allegations involving armed activity, while rival groups competed for political control and territory. Any account that presents one side as innocent would badly distort what Karachi endured.

State conduct still deserves separate scrutiny.

Operation Clean-up began in Sindh in 1992 and soon moved heavily into Karachi. Amnesty International later documented reports that raids against MQM offices were conducted with assistance from the dissident MQM-Haqiqi faction.

Human Rights Watch also reported allegations that state intelligence agencies supported the Haqiqi faction as the conflict developed.

Those reports need careful wording.

They do not amount to a Supreme Court finding equivalent to the Asghar Khan judgment. Nor do they erase MQM’s own record of violence.

They do show why Karachi became such a powerful case study in the risks created when security operations become entangled with political rivalries.

People living in the city did not experience these developments as abstract institutional questions.

They experienced shutdowns and fear. They saw neighbourhoods shaped by political affiliation, while security operations could alter the balance between competing factions in ways ordinary citizens were unable to examine.

Karachi paid the price.

For people of my generation, the phrase national security therefore carries history with it. Security threats were real, yet the methods used to confront them sometimes raised questions that lasted far longer than the operations themselves.

That memory affects how I read events outside Pakistan.

The Supreme Court Warned Us Again

Anyone tempted to dismiss the Asghar Khan case as an artifact of the 1990s should look at Pakistan’s Supreme Court judgment on the 2017 Faizabad dharna.

The judgment came in 2019.

The court again addressed the role of intelligence agencies in political affairs. It referred to the principle that intelligence organisations must remain inside their lawful mandates and argued that clearer legal definitions would strengthen transparency and the rule of law.

The judgment also reaffirmed constitutional restrictions on members of the armed forces supporting political parties or individual political actors.

One part of the judgment dealt with information and media freedom.

The court criticised interference that could pressure journalists or restrict independent expression beyond constitutional limits.

For me, the importance of the judgment lies less in one protest than in the institutional question behind it.

Pakistan’s highest court still found it necessary, decades after the controversies of the 1990s, to remind powerful state institutions where their constitutional boundaries lay.

The problem therefore cannot be dismissed as ancient history.

It concerns the permanent tension between secrecy and accountability.

Secret Intelligence Cannot Mean Blind Trust

Every serious state needs intelligence services.

Germany faces genuine security threats. European governments have repeatedly accused Russia of cyber operations and sabotage activity. It would be foolish to pretend that hostile states do not use covert methods.

Intelligence agencies also cannot publish everything they know.

A disclosed source may never provide information again. Revealing a surveillance capability can make that capability useless the next day.

Absolute transparency would damage national security.

But secrecy creates a second problem.

A government can make a serious accusation while controlling much of the evidence needed to assess it. Ordinary citizens may never see the material because disclosure could compromise operations.

The answer cannot be blind trust.

A democratic system needs institutions capable of examining classified evidence without placing every operational detail in the public domain.

Parliamentary oversight can perform part of that function. Courts may also test evidence under protected procedures when the legal system allows it.

The public does not need access to every intelligence file.

Citizens need confidence that someone outside the executive has examined the material and has enough independence to challenge the government when the evidence does not justify its certainty.

That is the real safeguard.

Germany possesses far stronger democratic and legal restraints than Pakistan has historically enjoyed. Comparing the two countries as though their political systems were equivalent would make little sense.

Pakistan is not a forecast for Germany.

It is a warning about institutional mechanism.

Secrecy becomes dangerous when the people possessing secret information also expect their interpretation of that information to become unquestionable political truth.

I Am Not Defending Russia

This distinction matters because questioning an intelligence attribution can quickly become a political identity test.

Ask for evidence involving Russia and someone may accuse you of carrying water for Moscow.

Pakistanis know a version of this method.

Question a security decision and the discussion can shift from the evidence to the loyalty of the person asking.

I reject that logic because it prevents serious institutional scrutiny.

Russia could have organised the Leipzig/Halle operation. German intelligence may possess compelling evidence that cannot safely be published.

If independent scrutiny confirms the case, Germany would have every reason to respond.

My question remains the same.

Who tested the evidence before the government asked citizens and allies to accept the attribution?

The strength of an accusation should come from evidence that survives scrutiny, not from the prestige of the institution delivering it.

Pakistan learned this lesson painfully.

The Asghar Khan judgment established that institutions associated with national security had crossed into electoral politics. Years later, the Faizabad judgment again had to discuss the limits of intelligence and military involvement in political life.

Karachi supplied its own harsher memory.

Security policy became intertwined with political conflict during one of the most violent periods in the city’s history, while citizens struggled to know where legitimate security measures ended and political engineering began.

Those experiences do not prove that Germany is wrong about Russia.

They explain why I refuse to treat secrecy itself as proof.

Who Checked the Intelligence?

Illia Weisser asks why people should believe officials when they say intelligence supports a serious accusation.

From Karachi, I would change the question slightly.

What institution has independently checked them?

That is more important than asking citizens to decide whether every intelligence officer is honest.

A functioning democracy should not depend on personal faith in officials.

It should build procedures that test power.

Germany may ultimately produce evidence strong enough to remove reasonable doubt about Russian responsibility. The intelligence behind the attribution may already be compelling.

I do not need every classified document published to accept that possibility.

I do need confidence that someone with institutional independence has examined the evidence and possesses the authority to say no if the case is weaker than the government claims.

Pakistan taught me why that distinction matters.

Karachi made the lesson personal.

So when a government says, trust us, we have intelligence, my response is no longer automatic disbelief.

It is something more demanding.

Who checked the people asking us to trust them?