Opinion Understanding a memorandum

To those with attention spans long enough to keep track of the bewildering array of crises that grip Pakistan ever so often,Memogate is the peculiar story of a memo sent by Mansoor Ijaz,an American of Pakistani origin,to the then US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen in May 2011,days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad,pleading with American officials to intervene and prevent a coup against the civilian government in Pakistan in return for some national security concessions to the US once the threat from the army was seen off by the civilian leadership.

Confused? So was Pakistan when the story quickly gained traction in the country after an Op-ed by Ijaz in The Financial Times last October mentioned the now infamous memo written by him and delivered to Mullen. Within days,the focus turned to Husain Haqqani,who Ijaz eventually accused of instigating him to write the memo on behalf of the Pakistan government.

To those familiar with the long and sordid history of civil-military relations in Pakistan,the story reeked of score-settling and hinted at another internecine round of warfare playing out. Was the military out to simply remove Haqqani,who has transformed himself into a strident critic of the security establishment,from his influential post in Washington as Pakistan’s ambassador,or was Memogate an attempt to bring down the civilian government itself?

Obvious as the political nature of Memogate was,an activist Supreme Court in Pakistan could not resist jumping into the frame: it held hearings on the matter on the grounds that the memo suggested a conspiracy to compromise Pakistan’s national security and sovereignty and then set up a high-powered commission of three senior judges to determine the “origin,authenticity and purpose” of the Mansoor Ijaz memo.

That was December 2011. Six months is a lifetime in Pakistani politics. While the commission grappled with the facts relating to the memo,the civilian as well as army leadership moved to repair their relations after Haqqani’s forced resignation.

The prime minister,who had decried a “state within a state” at the height of the crisis,and the army and ISI chiefs,who had submitted hard-hitting affidavits in the Supreme Court and lashed out at the civilian government through the army’s public relations arm,had found a new area to work together: putting up a strong united front against the Americans in the wake of the killings of Pakistani soldiers in the tribal areas last November.

That the Memo Commission’s work has been conducted against a backdrop of improved relations between the army and the civilians and a deteriorating Pakistan relationship with the US is rich with irony: after all,the commission was investigating if the civilians had reached out to the Americans for help against the army.

But if the army and civilians were content to let bygones be bygones after the ouster of Haqqani,the Memo Commission seemed determined to deliver a historical record against Haqqani.

After months of fractious hearings,the Memo Commission’s report has been delivered just as an unrelated controversy is swirling around the Supreme Court concerning allegations of corruption and bribery against the son of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry,the chief justice of Pakistan.

Unhappily,with its 121-page report,the Memo Commission has only underlined the superior judiciary’s increasingly politicised approach to the law and further tarnished its reputation as an even-handed institution.

The report spends page after page dissecting the controversial history of Haqqani in very unflattering terms but goes out of its way to give Ijaz a free pass. At one point,the commission states: “We also could not envisage what possible motive [Ijaz could have had to make up the whole story regarding the memorandum,if it was not true.”

The very obvious answer — that disliked as he is in military and intelligence circles and following several attempts to oust him from the ambassadorship in Washington,Haqqani could have been drawn into the memo affair to strip him of his position once the memo was made public by Ijaz himself — did not appear to merit the Memo Commission’s consideration.

For all intents and purposes,however,Memogate is dead as a political scandal of consequence. The military has claimed the scalp it wanted: Haqqani’s. The former ambassador is in the US and unlikely to return to Pakistan.

The only clear lesson for Pakistan’s fragile democracy: the army’s power may be on the decline,but sworn enemies will be taken down no matter what the cost.

The writer is an Islamabad-based assistant editor with ‘Dawn’,express@expressindia.com