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Haqqani on way home
On way to motherland,” the beleaguered Husain Haqqani tweeted and took off for Islamabad after being summoned over the “Memogate” controversy currently roiling the Pakistani polity.
Just hours before boarding the flight on Friday evening, the Pakistani envoy met US Special Representative for Af-Pak Marc Grossman. The memo issue is understood to have figured at the meeting, but there was no official word on it from either side.
Answering questions on the controversy earlier in the day, State Department spokesman Mark Toner had said that the US “very clearly support(s) the democratically elected Government of Pakistan, as well as its constitutional processes”.
“You asked about Ambassador Haqqani’s status. Our understanding is that he is still the Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, and we continue to have regular interactions with him, as we do with a number of people with — both within the Pakistani Government,” Toner said.
“I understand this is a big story in Pakistan. It’s partly a domestic story. We’ll all treat it as such. We remain in contact with Ambassador Haqqani,” he said.
US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon opted for a more nuanced response, saying in Bali: “We work with both the civilian government and with the military, depending on the issue.”
We have obviously a critically important relationship with Pakistan. We have a critically important counterterrorism relationship with the Pakistanis that we work on every single day. We have, obviously, the support that we need for our efforts in Afghanistan that we work on each day with the Pakistanis,” Donilon said, declining to go into the memo controversy “from this distance”.
Meanwhile, Haqqani’s stout denials notwithstanding, Pakistani American businessman Mansoor Ijaz reiterated his assertion that the Ambassador was the “architect” of the memo. A wire service quoted him as saying that “the memo’s content in its entirety originated from him (Haqqani)”.
Haqqani, for his part, told a Pakistani television channel that the memo that was handed over to former US military chief Mike Mullen through an intermediary could well have been Ijaz’s own handiwork.
The embattled envoy took the stand that as he personally knew Admiral Mullen (“who has been a guest at my home and whose home I have been guest at”), it would have been more credible for someone to say that he himself had delivered this memo, rather than use Ijaz for the mission.
“I would be very happy if Mr Ijaz said he wrote a memo and he delivered a memo which he thought was in the interest of Pakistan and the United States. That would be the honourable thing for him to do,” Haqqani argued.
It remains to be seen if there are any takers for Haqqani’s version in Islamabad, particularly in the Pakistani military establishment, which has been at daggers drawn with him over a long period.
