Islamabad: Musawer Mansoor Ijaz has always been willful. It was a
trait that worried his late father, Mujaddid, a Virginia Tech physics
professor.
So one summer afternoon in 1976 at their mountain-perched
home in rural Shawsville, Virginia, he organized a sort of intervention
for the oldest of his five children, with some hefty help. “Abdus, can
you please explain to this young man that being so headstrong is not
good?” The professor’s friend, Dr. Abdus Salam, sized up the young Ijaz
and smiled. “Do you remember how headstrong we were at that age? That’s
how we got to where we are,” Salam told his friend, “so let him be.”
For
15-year-old Ijaz, Salam wasn’t one of the world’s most important
scientists but simply the genial uncle who would bring chocolates each
time he visited. Salam would eventually become Pakistan’s only Nobel
laureate, but despite that achievement he would die an outsider,
heartlessly disowned as a heretic by most Pakistanis deeply suspicious
of his Ahmadi beliefs. But the trait that worried Ijaz’s father has
served the son well—as Salam knew it would.
Ijaz, the
thrice-married 50-year-old Wall Street millionaire and father of five,
is based in New York City but clocks up hundreds of private-jet hours a
year traveling to his pieds-à-terre in Europe. And unlike Salam, Ijaz is
the ultimate Beltway insider, uninhibited by false humility. He has all
the gregarious, bounteous self-assurance of a self-made man and a
rolodex to envy. Ijaz’s BlackBerry has numbers for former U.S. vice
president Al Gore, Sen. John Kerry, former Obama national security
adviser James L. Jones, Husain Haqqani. But he should probably delete
that last contact.
On Nov. 22, Haqqani resigned or, according to
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s office, was asked to resign his
post as Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. This in the wake of Ijaz’s
allegation that Haqqani, his former friend of over 10 years, was in fact
the architect of the sensational confidential memorandum he had
delivered to Adm. Mike Mullen, the then Chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff, just days after Osama bin Laden was killed by American
forces in Abbottabad.
Pakistan erupted in propaganda wars after
Ijaz first suggested Haqqani’s involvement in the alleged conspiracy in
an Oct. 10 op-ed for London’s Financial Times, “Time to Take on
Pakistan’s Jihadist Spies.” The end of Haqqani’s diplomatic career was
inevitable, and Sherry Rehman—a former journalist, Gilani cabinet
member, and rights activist—will now succeed him. But in a country rent
by anti-Army and anti-Zardari ardor, some hope while others fear that
the political blood of Hussain may not be enough, The Newsweek has
reported.
“It is not congruent with the national interests of
Pakistan to have a clever-by-half ambassador and a deficient-by-full
president,” Ijaz told Newsweek Pakistan. “OK, not everybody has to be a
fucking rocket scientist in all of this but at least be honest to the
people about what you’re doing and own up to your actions instead of
covering them up.”
The memo is a startling read. Playing up
fears of a coup in Pakistan, which Ijaz says he now knows to have been
purposefully false, the document delivered to Admiral Mullen through
former Obama administration official Jones on May 10 urges the Pentagon
to convey “a strong, urgent and direct message” to Pakistan’s Army chief
Gen. Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha “to end
their brinkmanship aimed at bringing down the civilian apparatus.” The
memo seeks U.S. assistance in forcing “wholesale changes” to Pakistan’s
notoriously tenuous civil-military relations. Alluding to the civil war
that led to East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh, the memo describes the
Army’s emasculation by Abbottabad as a “1971 moment.” It alleges the
“complicity” of the military and the ISI in the bin Laden “matter” and
claims the presence and patronage on Pakistani soil of several
most-wanted terrorists, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar and
Sirajuddin Haqqani.
The nonpaper seeks American pressure, and
names, for setting up an independent commission to investigate bin
Laden’s support structure in Pakistan. The findings, the memo promises,
will be of “tangible value to the U.S. government and the American
people” and will “identify with exacting detail those responsible” and
lead—“it is certain”—to the “immediate termination of active service
officers.” The memo is written on behalf of a “new national security
team” that will be “inducted by the President of Pakistan with your
support” and staffed with people “favorably viewed by Washington” who
would provide the U.S. “carte blanche” to operate against terrorists
within Pakistan.
The memo also commits this new
national-security dream team to bringing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons
program under an “acceptable framework of discipline” and a “more
verifiable, transparent regime.” It promises cooperation with India over
the 2008 Mumbai attacks regardless of who may have been involved, and
urges America demand the disbandment of the ISI’s “Section S,” which is
“charged with maintaining relations to the Taliban, Haqqani network,
etc.”
If this memo was Haqqani’s brainchild, as Ijaz alleges, it
is self-evident that these contents could never be relayed by him in
his official capacity without raising red flags in leak-prone U.S.
decision-making circles. And what civilian government, no matter how
besieged or bumbling (or some of its officials, no matter how crafty or
clumsy), could resist the temptation of capitalizing on post-Abbottabad
tensions between Pakistan and the U.S. to finally put the generals in
their place? Except that the memo doesn’t represent an article-of-faith
problem for its alleged ideological architects, but an Article 6
problem. That’s the treason clause in Pakistan’s Constitution which,
despite the clamor, is unlikely to be invoked.
Ijaz finds it improbable that he was the only opinion leader to be approached by Haqqani.
Far
less radical but prescriptions similar to those in the Mullen memo were
made around the same time in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “This is a
time for action, to finally push [Pakistan] toward moderation and
genuine democracy,” wrote Fareed Zakaria in his May 12 piece. “One
Pakistani scholar, who preferred not to be named for fear of
repercussions” explained the crestfallen Pakistan Army’s
violation-of-sovereignty outbursts to Zakaria thus: “It’s like a person,
caught in bed with another man’s wife, who is indignant that someone
entered his house.”
Some could say that Haqqani, who taught at
Boston University and authored a seminal critique of the military in his
2005 book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, fits the bill.
Haqqani,
55, is no stranger to controversy. One year after making ambassador, in
2009, he was accused of finagling and finessing the allegedly anti-Army
provisions in Kerry-Lugar. He responded to the most strident accuser,
The Nation, with a defamation notice. The English-language daily had
called him “an American agent”—an odious, potentially fatal label that
has somehow stuck. This year, during the Raymond Davis fiasco, he was
falsely accused of doling out visas in the hundreds to CIA operatives
like the dubious Davis. Never mind that the ISI, not Haqqani, cleared
every single visa issued from Pakistan’s Embassy in Washington. And
never mind that it was Haqqani, a former religious-right activist, who
resolved the Davis crisis by suggesting application of the Shariah
concept of diyat or “blood money.”
The accusations have taken
their toll on Haqqani and his third wife, Farahnaz Ispahani, a
well-regarded lawmaker and herself a former journalist. Ispahani is one
of Zardari’s spokespersons, and her grandfather, who served as
ambassador to the U.S., gifted Pakistan the D.C. property that has
become the official residence for its envoys. On Nov. 18, Haqqani broke
down on national television. “There is nothing more painful for a
Pakistani than having people call him a traitor,” he told Geo News. “My
mother is buried in a military graveyard, my father served in the
Pakistan Army, my brother served in the Pakistan Army. My political
views may be different from others but to accuse me of being a traitor
because of that—that hurts.” Online
