The game politicians play

Political, military elite took it for granted that sovereign parliament would adopt proposed package without much ado.

Even after many months of directly engaging and pampering Admiral Mullens of this world, the praetorian masters of our state could not stop the drone attacks on Pakistan-controlled tribal areas. These meetings did not prevent the killing of Osama in Abbottabad after an overwhelming intrusion into our airspace on May 2, 2011. Finally, we suffered the shocking killings of Pakistani troops in November last year at the hands of our super ally. In a visibly angry reaction, we blocked the supplies to NATO forces stationed in Afghanistan via our land routes. Only after succeeding in managing the said blockade, the praetorian masters suddenly realised that Pakistan had a ‘sovereign parliament’ as well. It should be guiding the state institutions, when it comes to dealing with foreign countries.

The Parliamentary Committee on National Security was asked to furnish directions for resetting the Pak-US relations. After many weeks of focused deliberations, the PCNS that has representatives from all political parties having big or small presence in either of the two houses of parliament, unveiled its 8-page and 40-point guidelines on March 20. Shrewdly drafted, the PCNS package did facilitate the reopening of NATO supplies, notwithstanding tough sounding ‘caveats’ attached to it. The political and the military elite took it for granted that the sovereign parliament of Pakistan would adopt the proposed package without much ado. They were wrong to presume this.

As the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan opted to play the role of an ultimate spoiler, ruthlessly using his status of the leader of the opposition. First he maneuvered a week’s delay in holding general discussion on the PCNS package and in the end decided to keep his party legislators out of the business of speech making on it. Maulana Fazlur Rehman and his party supported him fully and the praetorian elite had to wake up to the reality that foreign policy formulation was too serious a business to be ‘outsourced’ to public representatives. Zardari-Gilani government did seem too perturbed, however. It had all the intention of adopting the PCNS proposals with a simple looking majority, come what may, during the Friday sitting.

Meanwhile, two US Generals flew into Rawalpindi to have exhaustive meetings with our generals throughout Wednesday. These rounds of talks followed the discreet and underreported one-on-on meeting between the US President and Pakistan’s Prime Minister in Seoul and the even more underreported meeting earlier in the week between President Zardari and Marc Grossman, the US Af-Pak representative in Dushanbe. Some workable understanding had certainly been reached for restoring the NATO supplies during these meetings. How to make it sound as if the same had also been ‘approved’ by our sovereign parliament remained the question, however?

Backdoor wheeler-dealers and messengers worked overtime and eventually a five-hour long very high-level meeting was held at the Prime Minister’s Office Thursday evening. Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Maulana Fazlur Rehman attended that meeting even after throwing nationalist tantrums during the joint parliamentary sittings on the PNSC report. Both the Chief of Army Staff and newly-appointed DG ISI were present there as well. It was during the same meeting that public representatives were persuaded to appreciate the reality that the US was not the one and only country that had stakes and forces in Afghanistan; there are forty-seven other countries as well and Pakistan could just not afford to alienate all of them while asserting its sovereignty vis-à-vis the arrogant Americans.

We also should not disregard the fact that foreign troops in Afghanistan operate under the umbrella of ISAF and this cover had the ‘UN sanction’. If Pakistan continued with denying its land route access to land-locked Afghanistan, some countries would have visibly legitimate grounds to summon a session of the UN Security Council, with the clear idea of putting sanctions on us for making life difficult for the ISAF troops in Afghanistan. The alarmist arguments seemed to have worked for sure. The Parliamentary Committee on National Security would now have two successive sittings over the weekend to insert amendments that the opposition demanded must be put in clear words in the final draft of the PCNS. After furnishing a face-saver for them, the ‘consensus resolution’ can now be adopted sometime by next weekend.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st, 2012.