Unanswered question about the Abbottabad episode

Instead of blaming the FO, we should ask how a man with a globally-known face could live here for 5 years.

The absence of ‘star attackers’ like Chaudhary Nisar, Khawaja Asif and Saad Rafique from the National Assembly on Monday, took away the fire from opposition members’ speeches. The rest of PML-N’s legislators could put up only a half-hearted show of blocking the foreign ministry’s demands. Their non-committal speeches failed to make any waves.

But far more disappointing was Sardar Mehtab Khan Abbassi. He stunned me by repeatedly stating that had “our foreign policy been heading in the right direction, we would not have endured the Abbottabad tragedy.” Although a low-key type, Abbassi is not a novice to politics. He learnt the ropes the Jamat way in his student days. Since 1985, he has been winning and losing elections for national and provincial assemblies from Hazara and eventually became the chief minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa during Nawaz Sharif’s second government from 1997 to 1999. From a politician of his status and experience, you expect a thought-provoking speech.

Instead of blaming the Foreign Office for the Abbottabad episode we should be seriously asking how a man with a globally-known face could live in a garrison town with three wives for more than five years without being discovered by our ‘ever-vigilant,’ supposedly highly efficient spy agencies.

After 9/11, both president Bush and his successor President Obama vowed to ‘smoke him(Osama) out’. After ‘tipping’ the Americans about his possible hideout, we were wrong to presume that Washington would not follow up obsessively on the leads. We have every right to feel hurt over the Americans’ decision to take him out on their own without taking us on board. Yet, the question arises, “Can the Foreign Office babus be blamed for that?”

Since the early 1950s, Pak-US relations have revolved between the Pentagon and the GHQ. The trust has now been eroded and no politician can put matters right. The wise ones amongst our politicians stay quiet on ‘strategic’ issues instead of sounding pathetically clueless like Mehtab Abbassi did on Monday evening. To be fair to Abbassi, it is not just him or his party who remain clueless on Pak-US relations. The President and the Prime Minister often expose their ‘limits’ in this context as well as when dealing with India or Afghanistan.

I vividly remember a few things that happened during former Indian foreign minister Parnab Mukherjee’s visit to Pakistan immediately after Gilani became Prime Minister in 2008. It was a prescheduled visit. During his stay, he also called on Asif Ali Zardari, who was still a few months away from being elected the President of Pakistan. After meeting Zardari, Mukherjee told a trusted journalist that Zardari sounded ‘too excited’ while flooding him with ‘out of box ideas’ for improving Pak-India relations. The Indian foreign minister believed that Zardari wanted to seek a ‘paradigm shift’ by focusing more on possible dividends from broad-based economic cooperation between the two archrivals of South Asia. I was surprised and to double check, I talked to a PPP leader who was present during the meeting. He confirmed it. Then I cross-checked with a senior Indian diplomat at a dinner hosted by a Western mission.

This diplomat had accompanied Mukherjee to Zardari’s house and had taken notes of their conversation. He also confirmed Zardari’s exciting ideas although with a dismissive proviso: “We know well who calls the shots in Pakistan when it comes to relations with India.”

The story does not end there. After becoming President, Zardari offered to give up Pakistan’s first strike (nuclear) option while talking to one of India’s popular talk show hosts, Karan Thapar. Within hours, the self-proclaimed defenders of Pakistan’s ‘security interests’ in our media lynched this offer. They portrayed it as “recklessly betraying our nuclear doctrine, articulated after years of painful introspection.” Then came the Mumbai attacks, and Zardari quickly learnt his ‘limits.’
No wonder, he is still reluctant to appoint a full-fledged foreign minister!



Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2011.