Put your newspaper on a plate, cut up your words, and eat them. That's how spoof chat-show presenter Alan Partridge taunts a critic in a memorable episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You. Eating your words isn't so easy on the web, thankfully, so I'll stick my neck out: Pakistan's latest judicial inquiry into match-fixing will clear all and sundry of wrongdoing. Here's why: 1. The investigation into Pakistan's games against India and Bangladesh at World Cup '99, and into the umpiring of Javed Akhtar during South Africa's last tour of England, is based on Ali Bacher's accusations. These were made at the height of South Africa's embarrassment over Hansie Cronje and were an attempt to deflect attention onto an easy target (Pakistan). They arise from a conversation with Majid Khan, who had recently finished his tenure as the chief executive of the PCB. Although there have been rumours from other sources about those World Cup games, there has barely been a whiff of evidence. Majid's conversation with Bacher is a tenuous justification for this inquiry as neither of them has substantiated the allegations.

2. Pakistan's National Accountability Bureau, supposedly the cleanest organisation in the land, has investigated those World Cup matches and not pressed charges. Wasim Akram, captain during the World Cup, was suspended when those investigations began but reinstated once it became clear that the NAB had no evidence.

3. Pakistani judicial inquiries do not have a proven record of unearthing clinching evidence. Fakhruddin's inquiry was in effect a whitewash. The Qayyum inquiry that followed banned Salim Malik and Ata-ur-Rehman, and fined six others, but did not base those verdicts on strong evidence. In fact most, if not all, of the players damned by Qayyum would probably have escaped any kind of reprimand in an English or Australian court.

4. Evidence about match-fixing is difficult to find however good the inquiry. It is almost all whispers and innuendo. During this year's Pakistan tour I heard sordid tales of how players have been bought by Asian mafias and continue to fix games under coercion. Two young men from Pakistan sneaked into the media centre during the one-day international at Trent Bridge and started telling me how they had been in the room with Pakistan players when the deal for the Bangladesh game was struck. Before I could get to the bottom of their accusations they were gone. That's the problem. There are plenty of anecdotes but few facts.

5. Even if this new inquiry is highly competent and exhaustive I doubt Pakistan will want to condemn its players any further. With Mukesh Gupta refusing to give evidence and the Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) rather lamely allowing Alec Stewart and Mark Waugh to wriggle away, Pakistan will consider that they have already done more than most other countries. They will believe they have already humiliated their own players on evidence that is on a par with that against Stewart and Waugh. The PCB and the Pakistan government will not make the same mistake twice.

If I am wrong I do not propose to eat my computer or Wisden's server, but I will be the first to apologise to the Pakistan Cricket Board and Justice Bhandari, the third lawman to attempt to untangle the match-fixing threads. But I doubt that will ever happen, especially since the ACU has demonstrated its impotence.

Kamran Abbasi, born in Lahore, brought up in Rotherham, is the assistant editor of the British Medical Journal.

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