Opinion

Why Humiliate Pakistan?
By Ahmed Quraishi
Islamabad, Pakistan
WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

On a talk show on Express News TV, I watched Qamar-uz-Zaman Kaira, a federal minister in the Zardari-Gilani government, excitedly defend his government’s partial admission of responsibility in the Mumbai attacks and the orders to arrest Pakistani citizens to please the Indians.

The only word that came to my mind was ‘shameless’. He was under orders from President Zardari, Prime Minister Gilani, and the national security adviser Mehmood Ali Durrani, to lie. He was lying through his teeth. He could have chosen to resign and refuse to compromise on Pakistan’s honor. But obviously he has no respect for his people and his homeland –a standard practice for Pakistani politicians who normally seek support and approval abroad, especially in Washington.

Washington, coincidentally, happens to be the godmother of this current Pakistani government. Almost all the seniors in office in Islamabad today owe their luck to a deal brokered by the US Department of State with a weak Pervez Musharraf a year ago.

Minister Kaira could have said his government had to do whatever it did under pressure; that he doesn’t like it but there was no other way. Instead, Mr. Kaira was in pain to turn an Indian problem – the Mumbai comedy of failures – into a Pakistani problem.

“How can we allow non-state actors to sideline state actors?” the minister questioned in a phony display of sincerity. Almost all the ministers of the Zardari government are following the same line, with the silliest one reserved for the world’s most courageous defense minister, Mr. Ahmed Mukhtar, who lied to reporters when he said over the weekend his government had no option but to accept the biased UN Security Council resolution to avoid being declared a terrorist state. The statement created a mini stir in Washington when reporters there besieged Bush admin spokespeople to know if Washington had actually made the threat to Pakistan. They had to deny, of course.

In the short span of ten days, President Zardari, his prime minister and his cast of ministers have led Pakistan into a series of diplomatic defeats, turning Pakistan into the main culprit in the Mumbai attacks, something that the Indians could not have achieved on their own no matter what.

Indian lies are passing without check, not even from Pakistan’s side, where the government and its media and diplomatic arms should have been at the forefront of ripping apart the Indian version of the story, which is filled with loopholes that are conveniently ignored by the British-American media, especially regarding the lone surviving attacker. The lone survivor was also the only one who was photographed by an unknown Indian photographer. The other nine attackers conveniently escaped the camera. They were all killed, fake photos of Pakistanis in Indian jails were produced as evidence, and there is no word about their bodies, fingerprints, DNA tests, etc.

Now reports are emerging from Kathmandu, Nepal, revealing that the lone survivor also happens to be someone who disappeared during a visit to Nepal in 2006. A case filed by his lawyer before the Nepal Supreme Court accuses Nepalese police of handing him over to Indian intelligence officers posted at the Indian embassy there.

On Sunday, Mr. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, had the audacity to lecture Pakistanis on how terrorist acts in Britain were traced to Pakistani soil. We are sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Brown, but you shouldn’t forget your country’s share of the problem. And it’s a huge share. A smarter and a more nationalist Pakistani President standing beside you could have reminded you of this. Sad that Mr. Zardari didn’t. London during the 1990s emerged as a global safe haven for terrorists and anarchists from countries as far away as Saudi Arabia and Russia. The British intelligence used them as political leverage. Many of the anarchists from the Middle East were religious extremists who were accorded protection by the British government despite protest from their home countries. Maybe those people radicalized your own Muslim population, Mr. Brown. And let’s not forget how your country cut and ran from Afghanistan in 1992, leaving Pakistan to deal with the mess.

Mr. Zardari’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was humiliated in New Delhi for three days, where the Indian prime minister and foreign minister refused to meet him. You would think he would turn down a second chance to meet the Indians. Not so. Mr. Qureshi rushed to attend the Paris Conference of Afghanistan’s neighbors and superpowers. Iran refused to attend the event because Tehran was angry at a statement made by France’s president. Pakistan should not have attended the conference at all. First of all, Indians are not direct neighbors of Afghanistan and Pakistan should not endorse any such conference attended by the Indians, unless of course the Pakistani government endorses the expanded Indian intelligence and military presence in that country under American protection. Second, Pakistan should have shown its displeasure at the blatantly pro-Indian positions of the British and the American governments, the parties most troubled by the developments in Afghanistan.

What a nationalist Pakistani Govt. would have done

The Zardari-Gilani-Qureshi-Durrani team could have taken a bold and clear stance from the start, based on four principles:

Pakistani sympathy for Indian tragedy victims

Help India in any way possible.
Reject accusations without verifiable evidence.
Reject any Indian attempt to exploit the tragedy for political mileage.

Ambassador Munir Akram, our staunchly patriotic and Pakistani nationalist envoy to the United Nations, was humiliatingly removed from his position by the Zardari-Gilani government and replaced by Mr. Husain Haroon, an inexperienced person who couldn’t state Pakistan’s position when the Indians and our so-called American friends pushed a biased resolution in the Security Council that reflected Indian claims without verifiable evidence. Such a move would have been artfully confronted by Ambassador Akram. No wonder the Zardari government had him removed and replaced by the likes of Mr. Haroon and Mr. Husain Haqqani, our ambassador in Washington, who continues to take defeatist stances on Pakistani issues with the main concern – both his and his government’s - being appeasing Washington and its pro-Indian lobby.

A more competent team in Washington and New York would have challenged the Indian and American attempt to include Pakistani names in the UN resolution without concrete evidence. It would have forced India to at least share the strong evidence they claim to have. A better prepared team looking after Pakistani interest and not American interest would have dispelled the impression that Jamaat al-Daawa is a front for a banned group and thereby dispel the impression that Pakistan was hiding something. The Daawa people in fact did a better job than the Haroon-Haqqani team by immediately opening their huge compound in Muridke near Lahore to foreign journalists to confirm the group’s charity credentials through actual work on the ground. If the government had any competent people, they would have been able to use this opportunity in order to defend Pakistan against spurious allegations.

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