Hypocrisy Galore in Islamabad
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan

 

There are things you can’t talk about these days or the new pro-democracy brigade in Pakistan will bake you alive.  Since our politicians are dealing with one another with some civility for the first time, skeptics like me are forced to give them the benefit of the doubt. But not too much.  You see, there still is a lot of hypocrisy in the air.
You can excuse the politicians. It’s part of the trade.  But what’s eating the tongues of our otherwise sharp media pundits?  If you are anti-Musharraf, you can get away with murder these days. No one will ask you a tough question. Take Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan and his latest U-turn.
The man who campaigned to boycott the election now wants to slip inside the Parliament through the backdoor.  Five years?  No, one month and a half was enough to make him rethink.  He is ready to ditch his friend, the deposed chief justice, in return for saving his own political career. He wants his party to let him slip in through a by-election. This is the same party that the ace barrister broke ranks with – almost – last year and was confident he will never need again.
But the most overlooked fact here is that more than seventeen million Pakistanis snubbed Mr. Ahsan and turned up to vote in an election held under President Musharraf.  Is it really ethical for Mr. Ahsan now to try to get inside a Parliament whose election he so feverishly opposed?   The more honorable thing for him to do now would be to accept the consequences of his decision. Instead, he should let his client, Mr. Iftikhar Chaudhry, try his hand at politics. Especially when the judge has given a fresh signal he’d take the chance.
Which only confirms, if any evidence was needed, that the former chief justice is tainted and politicized beyond repair. The first thing he did after release from his home confinement was to rush to Zardari House to meet the new political kingmaker. Fair-minded Pakistanis should see this for what it is. The issue of the return of the politicized former chief justice is a farce that needs to end. Justice cannot be politicized.
But if Mr. Chaudhry insists he wants his job back, he should be ready, in the interest of transparency, to face the serious questions about his personal conduct in the reference filed against him last year. There is no problem in the reference itself. It is the unwarranted forced resignation that sparked a controversy.
The double standards don’t end here. Mr. Nawaz Sharif won’t reconcile with MQM as a coalition partner.  He has ‘reservations’ about the party history.  But who doesn’t have a history?  Mr. Sharif should not forget his own. He allegedly hijacked a plane carrying his homeland’s army chief and ordered it to land in India. Maybe the Charter of Democracy should have said something about elected prime ministers desisting the urge to remove army chiefs in such dramatic ways. Mr. Sharif’s record was cleared in the interest of forgetting the past. Why can’t he extend the same courtesy to others?
Talking about the charter, a clause should be added that disqualifies from politics any Pakistani prime minister who leaves office with less money in government kitty than the amount in hand when he or she took office.
And here’s one more story: Would the induction of an American Neocon in the Pakistan Foreign Office be a breaking-news story in Pakistan?  It should be. But even as Mr. Husain Haqqani gears up to become Pakistan’s new ambassador to Washington, no one is asking any questions.
Haqqani a Neocon?  I’m not saying this. The US-based Center for Media and Democracy is. The Center specializes in monitoring “the names behind the news.”  The Neocons, of course, are the same policy hawks who demonized Muslims, pushed the Iraq war and are now hungry for a war with Iran. One of them, Mr. Frederick Kagan, sees Pakistan as the next country to invade and then to divide into pieces.
SourceWatch, the Center’s online project, lists a very blunt title under Mr. Haqqani’s entry: “Neocon Nexus.”  It turns out that Mr. Haqqani has been working very closely with Neocon projects targeting Muslim political action committees in America. He joined a Neocon pundit, Stephen Schwartz in co-chairing  the nicely named Institute for Islamic Progress and Peace. Who launched this institute?  America’s “notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes,” to quote the Website.
At one point, Mr. Haqqani joined Shwartz in disparaging American Muslim organizations for their focus on the Palestinian issue. On Feb. 12, 2004, Haqqani was quoted as saying, “The Jewish lobby has to organize, write letters, and continue to contribute to politicians to counter the Saudi lobby, which has extraordinary influence in Washington.”  Oops. I guess we won’t be seeing Saudi diplomats and American Muslim groups rolling out the red carpet for the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington.
Considering how Mr. Haqqani has entertained negative US stereotypes about Pakistan on his American television appearances over the past years, not to mention his own criticial takes on Pakistan, a question arises: How will he assume the new role of defending the homeland as our envoy after years of doing the opposite? 
Maybe this is just an unnecessary alarm and Mr. Haqqani might just turn out to be our man to the Neocons. He is, after all, a talented middleman. But these are legitimate questions that no one is asking. Being a former email friend of Mr. Haqqani, I will. And in Pakistan’s interest, so should all Pakistanis. WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM aq@ahmedquraishi.com

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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