Daily Times

“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring” — Carl Sagan.So the CIA’s Islamabad station chief has left Pakistan — the second to leave in under one year — and did so, ostensibly, for health reasons as an AFP report stated. Coming on the heels of the CIA man’s departure was the US State Department’s statement that its diplomats in Pakistan are unable to travel freely. One wondered if the health crisis at the US mission was so bad that Pakistan had decided to quarantine all the US diplomats to Islamabad. Well, whatever the state of the physical wellbeing of the people involved in diplomacy, they are dealing with a patient, i.e. the Pak-US relationship, which is critically ill.
According to Mark Toner of the US State Department, the US staffers in Pakistan now have to carry a certificate to travel outside Islamabad. Apparently, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, was recently stopped from boarding a plane as he did not have the said certificate, but was eventually allowed to travel. This was not the first episode of its kind as a senior US official, reportedly an intelligence officer, had been similarly stopped not too long ago.
Following the arrest of Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, the US-based lobbyist who headed the Kashmir American Council (KAC) and has been accused of being an ISI agent, things are not exactly a cakewalk for the Pakistani diplomats in Washington, DC. One can be sure that the Fai fiasco has been added to the list of diplomatic fires, which Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, has been putting out at the Capitol Hill, the State Department, the Pentagon and, of course, the US media, for far too long. His recent mango soiree in Chicago, marking the arrival of the heavenly Pakistani fruit in the US, was yet another vigorous attempt to add some sweetness to the souring relations between the two countries.
But imagine, if our ambassador had been stopped from travelling outside the DC area, the mango mania that gripped not just the greater Chicago area but the US leaders and the Pakistani — as well as the Indian — diasporas, would have ended with a whimper even before the party at the Palmer House Hilton got going. I am not trying to make light of a very serious matter that had the potential to send diplomatic relations into a nosedive. After Islamabad’s recent actions, Mark Toner was asked point-blank if the US would consider a reciprocal action against the Pakistani diplomats and he responded “reciprocity is always a consideration…but in this case, we are working with the government of Pakistan”.
Fortunately, sanity prevailed here because of the top civilian diplomats involved. But no thanks to the Cold War relics in Pakistan’s military brass, who persistently feel satisfied and reassured in their delusions and continue to resort to bravado in pursuit of their foreign policy objectives. Frankly, it is not even the delusions of grandeur or the savoir syndrome that the Pakistani security establishment has been persistently suffering that is bothersome. What is troubling is that the magnitude of the grandeur of this delusion keeps on multiplying logarithmically by the day. The sooner the Pakistani establishment comprehends the geopolitical universe, as it really exists — not the way it imagines it — and the fact Kakul, Aabpara and Rawalpindi are not really the centre of this universe, the better it would be for Pakistan, the region and the world.
What is really fascinating is the coterie of retired brigadiers and ambassadors, many having served at obscure stations, writing about the Pak-US relationship, especially in the context of Afghanistan. Their writings echo the Pakistani security establishment’s thought process and mysteriously precede the rolling out of the latter’s plans and the so-called ‘massive operations’ against the militants.
Brigadier (retd) Shaukat Qadir, who is the former president of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, writes: “Policy formulation is a complicated business and foreign policy is perhaps the most difficult of all policies to flesh out since it involves relations with other countries; each of which have their own policies.” Now who would have guessed that foreign policy might entail dealing with, well, foreign countries, which may actually be really diverse! The fact of the matter is that those peddling ‘innovative’ ideas like above, or their cohorts, were at the helm in the military and civil establishment, when the misadventures like Ghulam Nabi Fai were being planned and executed.
FBI Special Agent Sarah Linden’s affidavit in the Dr Fai’s case makes an interesting read. The code words allegedly used by Dr Fai and his military handlers (who have been named in the document) such as requesting ‘half a dozen Brylcreem’ meaning $ 60,000, are cheesier than a B-movie. But more pathetic is the fact that the sleuths hatched a stupid conspiracy to do something, which if legitimate, could have been done legally. In fact, the US Department of Justice had written to Dr Fai in March 2010 to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) if he was acting as an agent of Pakistan. He categorically denied any connection to Pakistan at the time and did not register under the FARA. But just as a few in the Pakistani-American community were getting ready to rally for his defence now, Dr Fai apparently admitted last week, to have received money from the ISI. The retired ‘grandmasters’ had got it wrong then and are bound to fumble again!
As the recent events in Turkey have shown, the praetorian control over the domestic and foreign affairs of a nation is untenable and incompatible with the changing geopolitical situation. Turkey’s ‘zero problem’ foreign policy aimed at harmonious relations with its neighbours as well as regional and international actors, democratic changes tipping the domestic power balance against military and withering of the national security state paradigm, culminated in consolidation of the civilian control there.
In democracies, civilian control over the military is inevitable; Turkey was not an exception and neither is Pakistan. Just as war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men, foreign policy is a concept largely foreign to the military planners — the constellation of geopolitical events suggests that they will have to cede this domain.
Postscript: As per news reports, Islamabad is already backing off its stand on restricting US diplomats’ movement!

(To be continued)

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