Daily Times

It sure seems like late President Nixon must be turning in his grave. He had no idea that the term coined for the demise of his presidency, ‘Watergate’, will get different twists and names in a faraway country called Pakistan.

The infamous ‘Memogate’, which involves the infamous Mansoor Ijaz and former ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, has been played over and over in the local and international media. It has been analysed and beaten to death by analysts, pundits, and so-called political leaders alike. It seems a lot has been said and now the matter is supposedly in the hands of our Supreme Court.

There have been so many allegations traded between Mr Ijaz and Mr Haqqani that one is totally lost in the rather murky details. Both have accused one another of fabricating information.

Although this writer is a complete layperson, but like most laypersons, can come to at least one conclusion. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. I have the utmost respect for both parties and wish them well. As a total layperson again, one has to take the essence of the memo into consideration and determine what the intent was.

Let us, then, assume that Mr Ijaz is accurate in his assertion that a memo was written and sent to Mr Mullen. If the intent was to thwart a coup by the military, then there was nothing foul about it. The idea was to make sure that the major stakeholder is on board with the idea of continued civilian rule.

If the recipient of the memo had been the king of Saudi Arabia instead of the US, there would have been zero reaction. A point to note, however, is that Saudi Arabia and other countries are stakeholders as well and have direct involvement in Pakistan’s internal affairs. Would the television anchors and opposition parties have done their chest thumping exercises of sovereignty and its violation? Perhaps not. A grim reminder, then, that Saudi Arabia is considered a ‘friendly nation’.

Getting back to the swift action of the Supreme Court, we have to be grateful to former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Mr Sharif has filed a constitutional petition and the Supreme Court has quickly taken it up for hearing. Mr Sharif’s memory may have erased an event, but it is fresh in many minds. The year was 1999, and Mr Sharif as the prime minister of Pakistan was going through similar fears, when he decided to make a dash to meet the then US President Bill Clinton.

If newspaper reports were correct, Mr Sharif was trying to plead his case with the usual stakeholder, the US. This was post-Kargil and there were signs that the military was about to topple his government. At least a few of the astrologically gifted political leaders were predicting that a martial law was on the horizon. It was a pretty similar scenario, but back then going to the US to plead the case for one’s government was not considered a matter of sovereignty, I guess. Do we need to jog our memories for the pardon granted to Mr Sharif at the behest of the Saudis? That pardon saved his life and took him to exile in the holy land.

Now taking a totally different point of view, if what Mr Haqqani is saying is completely accurate and Mr Ijaz is fabricating the whole story, then why did Mr Haqqani resign from his post? He could have easily taken an administrative leave and let the matter be investigated thoroughly.

I hope that he is right and has given an accurate account of events, but to resign just because of pressure from the opposition and a right-wing media puts him in a precarious spot. Agreed, he is an extremely talented individual and as they say, sometimes being talented can become an obstacle. Speaking of resignations, we have had a few other fiascos this year, but somehow no one seems to be in the line of fire for those incidents. I think I would let the readers make their own wild guesses on those.

Whatever the truth, it will come out soon, and somehow I have a faint feeling that it is somewhere in the middle. I am waiting, like many others, to determine what really transpired between Mr Ijaz and Mr Haqqani.

This takes us to hot off the press, Veena Malik’s nude pictures appearing on the cover of Indian magazine, FHM India. Again, the truth may be buried somewhere in the middle. According to Ms Malik, she was not nude and these pictures were morphed. The magazine denies this and asserts that Ms Malik had signed an agreement to be photographed in a rather unusual pose.

The people on our side who were up in arms about her objectionable pose (whether true or morphed), ought to get a life. While I am certainly not a proponent of such photographs, an adult female is mature enough to consent to whatever she wishes. Secondly, with utmost respect to Ms Malik, she is not the foreign minister of Pakistan and does not represent the country in any capacity. When she decides to perform in any Indian game show or movie, she is just an actress. The only people that Ms Malik is really answerable to are her direct family members. This is again assuming that the pictures were taken as they appear. Also, if movie audiences or magazine readers do not like something, they have the right to express their dislike. No one has put a gun to their heads to watch or read objectionable material. Self-restraint is the most powerful form of condemnation and it works very effectively.

There is an agency embroiled in both these scandals. The agency mentioned in the infamous memo appeared as a tattoo on Ms Malik’s arm. Come to think of it, from a layperson’s perspective, it is all about the agency. Is it not?

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker by profession. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar