How come the GHQ is still meddling in state affairs instead of being a professional army?
KARACHI: How come the GHQ is still meddling in state affairs instead of being a professional army? How could the ISI chief visit a foreign nation to gather ‘evidence’ of a memo without notifying his boss’s boss, the commander-in-chief and president of Pakistan? Also, following the surfacing of the said memo, the army chief is reported to have met the president at least twice, and it appears that both these times, the military’s reservations on the whole issue were conveyed to the president. No one in the media said anything about this as if this is how things are to be done in a democracy with an elected government.
Prior to this, there was the Abbotabad raid, the attack on the PNS Mehran Base and, even before that, the Kargil misadventure. And if one wants to go far back into history, there is the fall of Dhaka and the break-up of Pakistan. Did ever a man in khaki resign when any of these things happened? Was any general sacked as a result of these incidents? The answer is a resounding no.
So why force an ambassador to resign? And that too over a memo that he said he never wrote. The only reason that comes to mind is that this happened because the ambassador in question was a civilian. It doesn’t take much to figure out what would have happened if he was a retired khaki.
A reader
Published in The Express Tribune, November 27th, 2011.
