The memogate case

Remember memogate? The scandal that had whipped up a terrible political storm in the country some eight years back, with allegations of treason reaching all the way up to the then President, Asif Ali Zardari.

The scandal, surrounding a memo that had a triggered a serious civil-military rift, had been taken to the Supreme Court in 2011 by none other than Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition then — a day after it had forced the resignation of Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US at that time.

The top court had formed a judicial commission to probe the case, and the commission concluded that it was ‘incontrovertibly established’ that Haqqani had written a memo addressing a high-ranking American official and seeking the US president’s help for the civilian government against the military because of the domestic turmoil triggered by the US raid that killed al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Even though the judicial commission had recommended that Haqqani be called back to Pakistan though Interpol to face likely charges of treason, the former ambassador continued to enjoy life as usual in the US, and the case seemed to have been discarded to the cold storage. It was only on February 1, 2018 that the case was revived with the constitution of a three-member bench by the top court.

There may have been a couple of hearings in the case since then, but only to have gone unnoticed for reasons quite obvious. And on Thursday, February 14, it was time for the eight-year-old case to be wrapped up. Heading the bench, Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa remarked “why should we waste our time” in a case which had even been abandoned by its petitioners.

The fact, however, is that the judiciary remained seized with this political case for eight long years — obviously at the expense of countless other cases that truly merited the court’s attention.

Precious time of the top court was wasted in trying to fix responsibility for writing a memo which has been found insignificant by Justice Khosa with remarks that the state of Pakistan is ‘not so fragile’ as to be ‘rattled by a memo’.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2019.

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