Pakistan’s ambassador designate to the United States Masood Khan is being made to wait longer than usual for an agrement, a diplomatic term that means the host government’s acceptance of his appointment. He was nominated by the Pakistan government to the prestigious post in November 2021, but is still awaiting word from the Biden Administration to take up his new role.
Within the Pakistan establishment, concerns over the delay could have only increased after Republican Congressman Scott Perry’s reported letter to President Joe Biden, calling Masood Khan a “jihadist” and “a bona fide terrorist sympathiser” and demanding the nomination should be rejected, as Khan was working to undermine US interests as well the “security of our Indian allies”.
Who is Masood Khan exactly?
A diplomat who joined Pakistan’s foreign service in 1980, the 70-year-old Masood Khan is a Pashtun who was born in Rawlakot in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir.
His first high profile assignment came just two years after 9/11. Masood Khan found himself in the hottest seat in the Pakistan Foreign office at the time – that of the spokesperson. But Khan carried off the challenge with aplomb, and won praise from the media for his easy approachability. Unflappable, there was no question he would refuse to answer, including from the two Indian journalists present in the room during the weekly MOFA briefings. “He was not just good, he was excellent,” said one journalist who attended the briefings regularly, describing him as “amiable and accessible at all times”.
But bigger assignments were waiting for him, indicating that he was considered a safe pair of hands. Pakistan’s military considers the country’s foreign policy as part of its remit, and senior officials in the ministry of foreign affairs are deep rooted establishmentarians. He was also the rare “Kashmiri” in Pakistan’s foreign service. He had wide political acceptability in Pakistan. After his stint as spokesman, he was sent by the Musharraf government as Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations at Geneva. In 2008, the Pakistan People’s Party government headed by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani dispatched him as ambassador to China. Four years later, he was named Permanent Representative to the UN at New York.
On his return to Pakistan, he ran for President of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir towards the end of Nawaz Sharif’s abruptly interrupted term as Prime Minister. The PML(N) had won the elections in the region – officially Pakistan does not include PoK as part of its territory — and Masood, as the party’s nominee, romped home with a comfortable margin.
A Khan in PoK
Just as diplomat Masood Khan was always on message – those who interacted with him in those years were surprised at his stridency even in the heyday of the India-Pakistan peace process, even if it was amiably delivered — as a politician in PoK, Khan was expectedly one with the establishment’s view on Kashmir. In this view, India is an “illegal occupying force”, Kashmir is an international dispute, and India’s position that the 1972 Simla Agreement turned it into a bilateral matter is sheer “manipulation”, as India does not wish to discuss Kashmir with Pakistan even bilaterally.
Khan’s election as PoK president came two months after the killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani by security forces, when Kashmir erupted in protests.
In September 2016, in his speech at the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Sharif praised Burhan Wani as the symbol of the “new intifada” in Kashmir, and called the protests a peaceful resistance that had inspired young and old living under the “illegal occupation” of Kashmir by India. Masood Khan in turn called Burhan a “hero” who had passed on the baton of resistance against India in Kashmir through his “martyrdom”. In 2021, on the fifth anniversary of Wani’s killing, he put out a special message hailing the JeM militant.
As his country’s top man at the UN, he would have also worked with the Chinese for blocking the designation of Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, for which India campaigned for years. The designation finally came in 2019, soon after the Pulwama attack on the CRPF bus, for which India named JeM.
Anti-Modi statements
Khan has closely mirrored Prime Minister Imran Khan’s statements against Hindutva and Prime Minister Modi. And he has made it known that as envoy to the US, he will push the Biden Administration for the release of Afia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted and imprisoned in the United States on terror charges, and for whose release, successive government have pushed, some more strongly than others.
Late last year, weeks after he was named the envoy to Washington, Masood Khan tweeted that “the US Government can find a way to free Aafia Siddiqui. Washington has negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban, once considered inveterate enemies. Room must now be created for Aafia’s freedom. Long overdue. Will be a bonanza for winning hearts and minds.”
In an interview to the Turkish news agency Andalou in May 2019, Masood Khan said a “catastrophic” new chapter had begun in Kashmir, and that Kashmiris had become “fodder” in the election victories of the Indian leadership.
Grey shades
More recently though, Masood Khan has written about peace with India. On January 22, days after Pakistan released its first National Securoty Policy, in an article titled “Balancing Geo-economics with Geo-politics” on a website called Narratives that says its aim is to project Pakistan’s case abroad, Masood wrote that Pakistan “should not envisage a future of perennial hostility with its eastern neighbour, though the settlement of outstanding conflicts is necessary for economic co-operation with it”.
He also made a case for a fresh look at the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline “in which Russia is a tacit guarantor, if not a partner”, adding that livelihoods would eliminate terrorism rather than a military response.
Earlier in his career, there was also enough bonhomie between him and the Indian embassy at one of his important postings as the Pakistani ambassador, for him to attend a reception hosted by the Indian ambassador at his home.
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So why no agrement yet
After the Perry letter, much of the speculation in India has swirled around his alleged “jihadist” links. But Masood Khan’s views on Burhan Wani or JeM are not extraordinary by the standards of the Pakistani establishment. Many in Pakistan’s officialdom hold stronger views.
But the wait has come at a time when the ties between the two countries have lost energy. After withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden seems to have lost interest in Pakistan. Even a year after taking over as President, he has not yet had a conversation with Prime Minister Imran Khan, a snub that Pakistan could not have imagined just three years ago.
The jury is still out on whether a 10-week wait for an agrement is normal. A report in Dawn said the “longer than usual” delay had given an impression of “a pause in the process”.
The newspaper quoted an unnamed US diplomat saying that the delay might have been caused by the Omicron outbreak that saw new restrictions at the workplace, and also due to the December holiday season.
But the report also quoted an unnamed Foreign Office source in Islamabad saying the delay could be due to his stint as president of PoK. Technically, Masood Khan was head of state of a region that Pakistan has not officially integrated within its federation. The Biden Administration may be considering this anamoly, especially as it has potential to muddy the pitch with India.
In October 2019, a few months after the Modi government made sweeping changes doing away with the special status of Kashmir, Delhi prevented Khan, who was still president of PoK then, from addressing a programme organised by the Pakistan Embassy at the French parliament. India sent a demarche to the French government that an invitation to him was a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India.
It is also quite possible that the Biden administration is making Khan sweat for the agrement, just like it’s making Imran Khan wait for the Biden phone call.
Delhi would be watching to see how this ends.
Khan was elected PoK president two months after the killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani by security forces. (Twitter/Masood_Khan) 
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