Daily Times

This newspaper of record reported on December 20, 2011 that during the so-called Memogate case hearing at the Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan, one member of the bench, Justice Saqib Nisar “while referring to the former US president Bill Clinton’s book, asked about the people who had contacted American administrators on Kargil issue”. The reference, ostensibly, was to Mian Shahbaz Sharif’s appeal, on behalf of the then Pakistani federal government, to the US authorities to save their skin in face of a potential coup d’état in the aftermath of the Pakistan Army’s Kargil debacle.

WikiLeaks has recently shown that anybody who is somebody in Pakistan loves to vent their spleen to the US functionaries hoping that the mighty Americans will intervene on their behalf to iron things out. But this habit is not restricted to politicians or, for that matter, Pakistani politicians alone. US intervention historically did indeed change the geopolitical landscape in many parts of the world while in other instances it was rightly or wrongly perceived to have done so.

From Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir to the Pakistani politicos, generals and judges, many have either directly pleaded with the US establishment to support their cause or had a surrogate do it on their behalf. The course of the Arab-Israel conflict was changed decisively perhaps by one such audience, which Chaim Weizmann had with President Harry Truman. Truman initially had stalled the meeting with Weizmann. The Jewish leaders then approached Truman through his childhood friend Edward Jacobson, a haberdasher from Missouri, to facilitate the meeting that ultimately changed the president’s mind, and thus the US stance at the UN in favour of the Israeli state.

But back to the efforts by the Pakistanis to co-opt US help. Justice Nisar’s remarks reminded me of the fairly recent movement for the restoration of the judiciary in Pakistan. Many of us had been closely associated with the movement until a point when it appeared that instead of relying on the people’s power, the lawyers leading the movement were asking for a US intervention to help restore the judges. To this effect, many lawyer leaders made umpteen tours of the US and rendezvoused, amongst others, with US lawmakers. One such trip was in June 2008 by Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, who was representing the then deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in legal matters as well as leading the restoration movement. The inimitable late Khalid Hasan writing in this paper had noted then:

“While Aitzaz may not be without his friends in the US, ‘including congressmen and senators’, he did not run in and out of more than one congressional office on a muggy Friday to discuss the Washington weather. The fact is that he did lobby for the judges with the US lawmakers. His argument ran as follows: The US-led war on terror can only be fought effectively with popular backing, something only possible if the judges are independent” (“Aitzaz’s Washington merry-go-round”, Daily Times, June 30, 2008).

Khalid Hasan further wrote that meetings had been sought with the high and mighty of the US administration on behalf of Aitzaz Ahsan before he actually arrived in the US (a fact known to many of us then). At the time Ahsan was neither representing the government of Pakistan nor the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and acted solely as a surrogate of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and the lawyers’ movement. Hasan had observed that while meetings had been sought with Senators Joe Biden, Richard Lugar and Russ Feingold, Congressmen Steve Israel, Gary Ackerman and Congresswoman Nita Lowey, he did not know how many actually took place.

Well, there was at least one such meeting that actually materialised, which we know of. I wrote elsewhere in August 2008: “After he (Aitzaz Ahsan) met (the then) Senator Joe Biden on June 26, 2008, the Senator told a room packed with Pakistani doctors that Ahsan had asked him to cut the American aid to Pakistan. Maybe the Barrister said something to this effect, maybe he did not but it begs a question what was he was doing making rounds at the Capitol Hill.” In fact, Biden took out a business card from his pocket and waved it saying Mr Ahsan (he pronounced it Eeshan) had visited him that day. Whether the whole episode was one of Biden’s famous gaffes and what actually transpired at that meeting might remain unknown.

This brings us again to the current Memogate saga in which there are many unknowns but certain interesting ‘knowns’ have also emerged. In his submission to the SC, Mansoor Ijaz stated that he has maintained relations with the military and intelligence services in scores of countries, including Pakistan. He claims to have interacted extensively with the then DG ISI General Ehsan-ul-Haq during 2003-2004. On the other hand, he claims only one recent meeting with Ambassador Husain Haqqani at a 2009 charity dinner in New York and that all his alleged subsequent communication was electronic or telephonic.

Lest we forget, Mansoor Ijaz is the same person who had attempted to set Benazir Bhutto on a collision course with General Ali Kuli Khan. Moreover, in his September 8, 2007 op-ed in the National Review Online, he proposed keeping Benazir Bhutto and the PPP out of power. He recommended for Pervez Musharraf to appoint General Ehsan-ul-Haq as the army chief and a caretaker government led by General Jehangir Karamat and including Shaukat Aziz and Aitzaz Ahsan. He had claimed: “Karamat would fuse together the support of Pakistan’s only two functional institutions — the judiciary and the army — and would carry the support of important ally countries, including the United States.”

Another major known is the London meeting between General Shuja Pasha and Mansoor Ijaz, but given the latter’s propensity to rub shoulders with spooks, the question is whether there were more meetings between the two, and when. General Pasha’s alleged sounding out the Arab rulers before nixing the PPP government and Ijaz’s sketch of the proposed caretaker setup suggests that the objectives of the two gentlemen might actually have been convergent.

Awami National Party’s Vice-president Bushra Gohar, MNA, and Husain Haqqani’s attorney Asma Jahangir are, therefore, spot-on in asking for General Pasha to step down and pave the way for a truly independent and transparent inquiry. Without knowing the spymaster’s complete itineraries and communication logs, many surrogates and their principals may still remain hidden and the Memogate probe shall be nothing but a farce.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki