Tribune’s Gamechangers 2011: Husain Haqqani

Memogate and the civil-military divide.

The existence of a controversial note, an alleged exchange of messages with a man named Mansoor Ijaz and an op-ed by Ijaz in The Financial Times snowballed into the country’s gravest political crisis this year.

As a result, Husain Haqqani – then Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States – resigned from his high profile position while a parliamentary committee and the Supreme Court both moved on the issue.

Since he was named ambassador, Haqqani was the scapegoat for any problem with the US – be it the cases of Aafia Siddiqui or Raymond Davis or the Kerry-Lugar/Berman bill. But even his strongest detractors admired the former ambassador’s tenacity and attitude.

Haqqani’s undoing, at the end, was by the military he had critiqued in his book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, as Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence head Ahmad Shuja Pasha took the lead in “investigating” the memo and sided with Ijaz’s claims.

Quote: “I resigned because no one can represent his country as ambassador in the middle of a media trial.”