Daily Times

Ambassador Husain Haqqani is a bad, bad boy! So, when he resigned following the disclosure of a non-paper allegedly dictated by him and sent by his nemesis Mansoor Ijaz to Admiral Mullen, his detractors were happy. Haqqani has indeed more enemies at home than he has friends in the US.

He is bad among the liberals because they cannot forget his affiliation with the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba during his student life. He is despised by the right wing because he crossed over to the PPP in the 1990s and, since then, has been loyal to the party. Nobody is charitable towards him, allowing for the fact that people do outgrow their initial ideological leanings as they grow older. In his case, all Haqqani critics believe that his change of heart was not on intellectual grounds but was only opportunistic for personal reasons.

He is bad for the majority of journalists who see every colleague who joins the government as an apostate and opportunist. There is also an element of middle-class jealousy, which is wrapped in statements on the lines that he could have climbed the ladder but for his love of moral and ethical values. He is bad for the establishment because he wrote Pakistan — Between Mosque and Military. This book has indeed exposed the axis of power that has retarded the political and economic growth of the country. It reads like a critique of the establishment’s political history and exploitation of Islamic ideology.

He is bad because the establishment believes he influenced the US Congress and Senate in passing the Kerry-Lugar Bill that linked military aid to Pakistan with the testimony from the US secretary of state that the military and its intelligence agencies were subservient to the elected civil government. This clause undoubtedly reflects the same thinking, which has been quite ably pleaded by Haqqani in his book. Now, asking the military establishment to work within the constitution and as subservient to the civil government is blasphemy in Pakistan. Politicians and media colleagues who are embedded with the establishment loathe this idea. For them, it is only the politicians of Pakistan who are corrupt and inefficient. So, any move to establish civil government supremacy over our Leviathan is ‘treason’ and an ‘anti-Pakistan conspiracy.’

Having said that, from the reported evidence on the dubious ‘memo’, it seems that Haqqani is not as clever and as slick as I once thought. Though it is yet to be proved that he dictated the memo — a job that cannot be done in just 11 minutes as claimed by US businessman-cum-agent Mansoor Ijaz — the text of the memo is not much different from what would be Haqqani and his ‘boss’s’ wish list.

To say that action should be taken against the officials responsible for deliberate or inadvertent intelligence failure about Osama’s whereabouts and the breach of security by the US forces on that fateful day of May 2 is not wrong. But, ideally and theoretically, inviting the US to assist the civilian government in making changes in the security establishment is indeed reckless and below the dignity of a nation. The outcry of the media and opposition parties is thus right in principle.

But let us look at it from the historical Pak-US relations’ perspective. Is it not true that one of the major reasons for removing Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin by Governor General Ghulam Mohammed was that he (Nazimuddin) had declined Secretary Dulles’s offer to join the Baghdad Pact, which was later christened CENTO? The PML-N has filed a case in the already over-burdened Supreme Court (SC) that inviting US interference is tantamount to treason. Was it not interference when Shahbaz Sharif sought US help to restrain General Musharraf when it was written on the wall that he was going to oust an elected government? Was it not US interference when the Kargil adventure of General Musharraf brought defeat to the country and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif rushed to seek US intervention on July 4? So, ideally, yes we should not be inviting the US as done in the memo and offer cooperation but the reality is that we have a long history of US involvement in Pakistan’s internal affairs and nobody ever raised the issue that it was treason.

Husain Haqqani was forced to resign because, right from day one, he was the man representing the elected government’s interests. In Pakistan, unfortunately, all democratically elected governments have been at odds with the interests of the establishment that lives on the war economy. The civil-military power balance has been heavily tilted in favour of the latter since 1954, when a mutual defence pact was signed by Pakistan and the US, and Ayub Khan took over as army chief. Everybody knows that foreign policy and national security policy are always decided by the establishment and any attempt by the civilian government to regain its due power is sabotaged by raising a hue and cry against the political government. Nawaz Sharif has suffered this so he should be careful in playing to the tune of the establishment in this case. He is respected for having clear views about civilian government supremacy over the military establishment. But, by going to the SC, he is doing damage to his own cause.

Analysing the memo, it also appears that Mansoor Ijaz’s thrust is to prove the point that even the Pakistani civilian government thinks that the Pakistani establishment is involved covertly in supporting the Afghan Taliban. This point was made by Admiral Mullen in his last appearance before the US Senate. So, Mansoor has served the US’s interest by publishing the memo in his Financial Times article. He says he is a loyal American and wants to teach Pakistan a lesson. However, the end result is that the Pakistani establishment and media have been put in a trap set by Mansoor and his American masters. It was a sting operation that bit Haqqani and Pakistan.

Lastly, the people who called for Haqqani’s resignation, and rightly so, did not show this grace when the country had to face a security and intelligence lapse on May 2 and again at the Mehran airbase. Nobody asked for resignations or actions against the people who failed the people of Pakistan. Are we not selective when demanding accountability?

The writer can be reached at ayazbabar@gmail.com