Good work, Minister Khar!

One must congratulate Hina Rabbani Khar and her team for playing a good innings at a very difficult time.

I will be candid. When Hina Rabbani Khar became the foreign minister in July 2011, I was sceptical. She had already been the minister of state for foreign affairs for roughly five months and I didn’t think that period was enough to have groomed her for the top job. I didn’t doubt her smartness and her articulation — she is very sharp on picking nuances and complexities — but diplomacy is a veritable minefield and 2011 was a particularly difficult time for Pakistan.

Having steered the MFA for a year and eight months before leaving office, let me say what I have known for a long time: she did a wonderful job despite several constraints.

Foreign policy, especially in today’s world, is not made by one person. But the leader must be able to put together what Clausewitz called zweck, the purpose [of war], but which can equally be applied to other areas of leadership. The “purpose” must guide and inform the ziel, the aim or aims that in turn advance the “purpose”, creating an interactive dynamic.

Khar gave that purpose to her team. When I spoke with her for Capital TV on her last day in office, she was clear that the turn in foreign policy was owed to the PPP government, not just to her. In that, she might be right, though I have my doubts, given the policy apathy by the PPP government I witnessed on other scores. Be that as it may, it does seem that much of what she was doing she could push through the cabinet — some, she couldn’t.

Three basic postulates governed the exercise of foreign policy: zero conflict in the region; friendly relations with all neighbours in the region and with states beyond the region; and, by doing so, getting Pakistan to focus on the internal security threats, two of which — terrorism and a dwindling economy — stand out.

For once, it was the foreign policy guiding the security policy rather than the other way round. “The military is a very important part of the government and state and, of course, any government would get their professional input, but they didn’t run the foreign policy and they have no business running it,” Khar told me.

She liked to get external input and to reach out. To that end, she worked the concept of public diplomacy. She got Mosharraf Zaidi to help her and Mosharraf did a brilliant job of it. I say this not because Mosharraf is a friend, which he is and a very dear one at that, but because he really worked hard at his remit. He would constantly think up new things and try and implement them and enabled us and many others to have regular meetings with the FM and the foreign secretary for deep-end background briefings. This was a most useful exercise and helped inform our analysis even when the discussions were based on Chatham House rules.

Mosharraf is no more with the MFA, having left a couple of months before the end of Khar’s tenure, but one hopes that what he did, along with his number one, will become an institutionalised practice at the MFA. Much still needs to be done, which I spoke to the FM about, but changing the strategic culture of an organisation is never easy. It requires concerted effort over a long period of time.

Another important step was to enhance the MFA’s capacity in the area of International Law, another first to Minister Khar. She brought in a very capable IL expert, Sikander Shah, who continues to work at the MFA. One hopes the ministry will develop a larger wing and understand how important it is to have in-house expertise in the area.

Doing new things in the rusty political and bureaucratic environment of Pakistan is always difficult, and while I am not privy to all the internal battles Khar had to fight, my nuts and bolts information tells me it wasn’t a comfortable ride.

She was, of course, supported by a very capable Foreign Office. We have some outstanding diplomats, the current FS is one such, as was the previous FS. Mohammad Sadiq, our ambassador to Afghanistan, is a remarkable diplomat and helped Khar tremendously in dealing with that country after the minister declared Kabul to be the most important capital for Pakistan. Ditto for India. The idea was that either we can feel hemmed in or we can take advantage of the geographical placement.

Khar wanted to take advantage of geography rather than feeling claustrophobic and this despite the fact that it is not easy to either deal with President Hamid Karzai (the Americans should know!) or with the Indians as a general rule.

But she didn’t waver. Though let me put it on record here that while Pakistan has in principle decided to grant India the MFN status, the finalisation and the ratification of that decision had to be postponed because of India’s increasingly intransigent attitude, especially during and after the Line of Control episode.

“I strongly supported it in the cabinet meeting but Indian actions were not helpful and I don’t have the only voice in decision-making,” Khar told me, adding: “But the decision stays; it’s the timing.” The BJP, the Indian military and the Indian TV anchors can take full credit for this.

Even so, Khar is very clear that conflict is no solution and we have to normalise with India, regardless. But while we must stick to our positions, the resolution of disputes must not be a precondition for cooperation in areas of interest.

As for Afghanistan, without stability in that country, Pakistan’s western border cannot be managed; neither can our internal problem of extremism addressed. Relations with the US were another minefield, the details of which require a separate treatment.

There are areas where I disagreed with her and continue to. The government, as a whole, has no real mechanisms for policy formulation and vetting by external experts. That culture has to change. But all said, and considering the structural problems, one must congratulate Khar and her team for playing a good innings at a very difficult time.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2013.