Memento mori

Mansoor Ijaz is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, shaped like the winner of a Ziaul Haq lookalike contest. The one-time recipient of All-American weightlifting status and owner and CEO of a variety of companies, all without web presences of any kind, is a confusing creature. A glance at his public stances show a pathological habit of switching allegiances. In the 90s, he was vocally pro-Benazir and shortly after was vehemently critical of her government. Up to 2000, he made sizeable campaign donations to the Democratic party before switching allegiance to the Bush government post-9/11. In between, he loved Clinton, then hated him. He has been an analyst on Fox News throughout the run-up to the Iraq War, even though none of his predictions of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda links with Saddam had any element of truth. And most recently, he has written repeatedly about how critical he is of the Pakistan military intervening in the democratic process and then has given them the tools to do just that. Given how frequently he changes his mind, it’s a miracle he manages to leave the house with any matching clothes on. So is he someone being employed by the ISI to keep contacts with the White House? Or is he one of those people the CIA and the State Department use to ‘leak’ information or plant stories that help them achieve deeper goals? Maybe he is evidence of some grand conspiracy run by the All-American Weightlifters Association to keep the meek forever off balance. Perhaps, he is a bit of all those things. A man who has carefully positioned himself in the corridors of power, to allow himself access to decision-makers so he can feel important and relevant. Once you get famous, it’s hard to go back to being not so. Given the paucity of television appearances recently, he may have just found a way to get back in the public narrative.

This makes you wonder what our now-former-ambassador Husain Haqqani was doing talking to him. Haqqani seems reasonably intelligent. At the very least, the memo that Ijaz claims is his, seems too poorly written to have come from his desk. If it did indeed originate there though, it makes sense. In the wake of the Abbottabad Incident, the army was capable of doing anything to save face. If you tell someone standing knee-deep in filth of their own making that they might drown, their instinctive reaction will be to grab something to hold on to. In the past, that’s been the reins of power. So for the civilian government to worry is understandable. To blame them would be like blaming a victim of domestic abuse for shielding her face the next time her punch-drunk husband raises his hand. So why would an intelligent man like Haqqani entrust the message to the recipient of the lifetime achievement award for Flip-flopping. Perhaps, Haqqani is just a poor judge of character. He is, after all, also a close friend of President Zardari’s. It happens to the best of us.


So what now? The ambassador has gracefully resigned, under pressure from the military leadership. The same leadership that didn’t resign when Bin Laden was found sharing blankets with them and was killed by a Seal taskforce that snuck into our country despite us giving them everything short of our teeth fillings so they can guarantee the sanctity of our borders. The next ambassador will, no doubt, be more compliant as will the civilian government come next election. America has also, perhaps, proven that it has the best interests of our military at heart by confirming the existence of the memo, thus guaranteeing a better working arrangement. Maybe there are more memos being held hostage?

All that’s left to ask is what Mansoor Ijaz thinks of all this. And then instantly putting stock in the opposite.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2011.