The moral ambiguities of our time

Having seen such affairs in the past, the first question in the ‘memogate’ business is this: who has the story?

“I would have preferred an assassin’s bullet,” roared the man nominated to be a judge of the US Supreme Court. It was the fall of 1991, and I recall being struck by the intense, and often vicious, questioning that Clarence Thomas was put through as part of his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court of the United States.

The last time I had seen such rigorous public scrutiny of the actions of a single man was during the hearings of Oliver North, during the so-called Iran-Contra scandal that was investigated by Congress in 1987. I remember those hearings, which were televised, in which North was questioned repeatedly about whether or not he lied to Congress, about whether or not his actions violated US law, about whether or not he undertook his actions in connivance with higher officials, like John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane.

Intense and rigorous scrutiny of this sort carries some merit: it lays bare the operations of government for all to see and opens a window into the moral ambiguities of the time. Oliver North’s televised depositions before Congress may not have bagged us a villain, but they certainly exposed the villainy of Reagan’s team and the depths to which they were willing to sink to carry forward their paradoxical fight against the USSR, paradoxical because it broke and circumvented and subverted the very laws that it was fighting to protect. None of the participants who were touched by that scandal could ever serve in public office again, and for what it might be worth, America’s reliance on covert wars — on ‘plausible deniability’ — as a tool of statecraft was rolled back in the wake of the affair. All of America’s wars subsequently would be fought out in the open, in the full light of day.

Thomas’ hearings, and the Anita Hill affair, exposed the complex play of identity politics that would come to define the 1990s so much. The hearings saw the politics of race pitted against the politics of gender. A race orthodoxy borne of the civil rights movement was challenged by a newer — some would say upstart — generation of black men who had made it within the system and now sought respectability as men, and not ‘black men’.

Having seen such affairs in the past, the first question I want to ask in the ‘memogate’ business is this: who has the story? And here, at the very first question, Mansoor Ijaz fails, because he has changed his story so many times now it’s hard to keep up.

Why did he first choose to participate in such a mission, only to go public later? At one point he tells us it is because he was offended by the treatment being given out to Admiral Mullen by the Pakistani media. How exactly this disclosure helps Admiral Mullen he does not explain. At another point, he tells us he went public to protect democracy in Pakistan, although his actions and allegations have damaged democracy more than anything else. At yet another place he tells us that he hates the ISI, he calls on the Americans to stop the dealings with the Pakistani government, to adopt more robust terms of engagement than aid and persuasion. And then he has a secret meeting with the DG ISI in London, to ‘share the evidence’ in his possession. Did he take the opportunity of this private meeting with the DG to share his views on the infamous S section?

In this case, as in every case of this sort, the stories told by accuser and accused must dovetail with existing political currents for the drama to become a national affair. Just like North’s invocation of ‘patriotic duty,’ and Thomas’ invocations of race dovetailed with the political battles taking shape in America in those days, so the story told by Mansur Ijaz in his accusation, and the one told by Haqqani in his defence, have dovetailed with the political currents taking shape in pre-election Pakistan.

Haqqani says he is being targeted for his vigorous defence of civilian democracy in Pakistan. If this is the case, then we have a fiendishly diabolical plot on our hands. We know that a memo containing hair-raising offers was sent to the highest levels of the American military in the immediate aftermath of the Abbottabad raid. Did somebody sit down and plot Haqqani’s downfall in those heady days? I doubt it.

If the memo was not sent at the initiative of the civilian government, then whose initiative was it, and what did they hope to achieve? We know that the memo was delivered the day before a meeting at the White House between the national security team of Pakistan and the US government. Perhaps those who remained blissfully ignorant of Osama bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad were now desperate to know what was in the mind of the American government following the raid. Lacking any other channel through which to test the waters, maybe a fiendish plot of this sort was concocted, a willing go-between found in the person of Mansoor Ijaz, and the infamous memo was sent just to see what response might come back down the same channel? If so, then Mullen and Leon Panetta showed admirable sagacity in thinking “nothing of it” rather than biting the bait.

The stories coming out of the memogate affair have dovetailed neatly with the moral ambiguities of our time. The story told by the accuser gives us a civilian democratic government, desperate to bring Pakistan into the fold of international law, breaking every covenant of its own oath of office in order to carry forward its paradoxical fight. The story told by the accused, on the other hand, gives us an establishment desperate to remain in the shadows, caught harbouring the world’s most-wanted criminal, and seeking to settle domestic scores in order to maintain its grip on the country’s destiny.

Unfortunately for us though, the affair is hardly likely to shed any new light on the operations of our government. All it does is reveal, for the umpteenth time, who is guided by what prejudice in this decades-long struggle that has become the defining feature of our polity.

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