But Why Gun Down Your Embassies?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
The tirade was brutal and in bad taste. Worse, it took place on live television.
A PM, head of the government, giving a tongue- lashing to his own ambassadors, posted overseas, is an unusual thing, in the first place. What’s more humiliating for the poor targets of their boss’ harangue is that it was administered, live, on the airwaves where the world was its audience, and listener.
That PM Imran Khan has an attitude problem is quite well-known, even to those who may know him remotely. An only, and pampered, son of his parents that he’s, IK could be a lot more spoiled brat than he’s. But what miffs many is that he can fly off the handle where one would least expect him to.
His public rebuke of our ambassadors abroad and a dressing-down befitting a master scolding his minions, was prompted by alleged mishandling of some Pakistani laborers by the Embassy in Riyadh. In a knee-jerk decision, days before the public humiliation of ambassadors, the ambassador in Riyadh was recalled, peremptory, and quickly replaced by a retired Lt General. Which set off a train of speculation that the notorious ‘deep state’ engineered a situation to make the career ambassador in Riyadh guilty of mismanagement in the eyes of PM.
IK, as he did in his harangue to the ambassadors, too, is in a habit of reminding all and sundry that he has spent years in the West and knows all about how our embassies behave there.
To begin with, he may have spent years in UK playing professional cricket but this fact doesn’t make him an expert on the West.
Secondly, his ‘expertise’ of the West was limited to the English upper class—from which he, subsequently, chose his first of three wives, Jemima Goldsmith. He may have acquired their stiff upper-lip syndrome to look down upon the common man as being of no significance. But other than that, he has precious little knowledge of how our embassies have to deal, for much of their time, with the common man and his mundane, every-day problems, of which the hedonistic upper class has absolutely no inkling.
In his hectoring mode, IK lectured his impugned audience to shed off what he derided as their ‘colonial’ attitude. Well, the earlier crop of our ambassadors—many of whom had joined civil service during the British Raj—may have suffered from the colonial syndrome to look down upon the native ‘wogs’ as creations of a lesser god, but the younger generation of our diplomats have no such affliction.
In fact, IK’s own harangue of ambassadors had glimpses of the colonial syndrome of the ‘gora sahib’ talking down the ‘wogs.’ That may have come naturally to IK because of his own schooling in the so-called Chief’s College—Lahore’s Aitchison College, a symbol of the Raj which has schooled scions and wards of the feudal class nurtured by their colonial masters.
The debris of IK’s demolition work of our pride Foreign Service and its elite corps of professional diplomats fell, entirely, on career ambassadors and officers. That fact alone betrayed how little IK knows about our embassies and their mechanism.
In any given embassy, especially the large- ones operating in places of high-density Pakistani expatriates, the presence of professional Foreign Office officers is very little compared to officers belonging to other ministries and departments of the government. These officers belong to Ministries of Defense, Labor, Commerce, Information and, lately in this digital age, of NADRA.
These officers are only nominally under the ambassador in that embassy but they report to their respective departments and operate according to instructions received from their parent department. Another fact, typical to Pakistan’s feudal-infested or feudal-influenced, bureaucracy—that may have escaped IK’s radar—is that most of these non-FO officers have patronage of powerful politicians and, in some cases, of generals. They are arrogant to core and think they aren’t answerable to their ambassador.
IK’s ire was triggered, in the first place, from complaints from some Pakistani laborers who had pointed their finger at the embassy in Riyadh for not delivering the goods during the Pandemic, which had gripped Saudi Arabia as much as any other part of the world.
IK, if he had really hands-on knowledge of how our government departments worked, would have known that the embassy can’t act without the help of departments operating out of Islamabad. Our official machines churn but slowly. Those, like this scribe, who may have worked at embassies abroad know how grinding it’s to get a response in time from uncaring and unresponsive ministries in Islamabad.
An embassy is also dependent on the machinery of the host government. Those with knowledge and experience of the Gulf Sheikhdoms and States would tell IK that Arabs, the rich ones in particular, have their own sense of timing and priority. Mountains may move but it’s hard to force an Arab Gulf government to appreciate the urgency of a matter. It may be urgent to you but that doesn’t move your host.
The charge against the ambassador recalled from Riyadh is that he’d blocked access for Pakistanis to their embassy. But that decision—this scribe knows from his own experience of Saudi Arabia where he was stranded during the peak of the Pandemic last summer—was of the Saudi authorities. What was the fault of the ambassador in it? He was as much a victim of the Saudi red tape as any other diplomat or expatriate.
What IK fails to appreciate is the jarring ground reality that the Pakistan Foreign Service is managing its obligations in the outside world with a cadre strength of less than 500 officers. It’s the smallest of Pakistan’s elite Services.
Out of this miniscule number of its officers, at least 180 are stationed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad at any given time. So, the FO is running 120 of Pakistan’s diplomatic and consular missions, world over, with just about 320 officers. It’s a tall order, given the ever-growing roster of these missions’ duties and obligations.
Instead of understanding and appreciating the heavy odds against which our professional officers work and overcome their handicaps, IK made a mockery of their work. He not only belittled their performance but, adding insult to injury, glorified Indian diplomats by showering their performance with accolades.
There couldn’t be a more grievous wound than that on the body-politic of our Foreign Service, which has generally received rave reviews and comments from our friends. Even Indian leaders have praised our diplomats as being a cut above most others. But IK had no remorse in denigrating his own envoys and officers.
The Indian news media—which is currently in the line of fire because of its subservience to Modi’s diktats—lapped up IK’s nefarious insulting of Pakistani diplomats and praising of Indians. They screamed it out in ear-shattering sound bites, and bold headlines, in print.
Yes, our working classes, our expatriates of all shades and stripes abroad, deserve to be treated with respect—and they are, mostly and more often.
Yes, embassies should deliver what’s expected of them because the country is a major beneficiary of remittances sent by our workers abroad. IK knows it, better than others, because the economy, otherwise made beleaguered by his government’s mismanagement of it, is barely keeping itself afloat thanks to these precious remittances from the Pakistani diaspora overseas.
Yes, there’s room for improvement, a lot of it, in the working of our diplomatic and consular missions abroad. No pundit would disagree with that. But improvements demand more input of resources. Missions would perform better, and in less time, if they were provided resources they have badly needed and clamored for long.
IK is in a position to do something constructive for our diplomatic presence in the world. But for that, he needs a positive frame of mind, and not the impulse of a typically over-ambitious politician looking for cheap publicity, to target a harassed class of our professionals who have, long, been in the cross-hairs of myriad adversaries.
One can sense that IK has his eyes set on the 9-million strong Pakistani diaspora in the outside world, more than half of which inhabits the countries of the Gulf.
Except for his cussed and petty-minded puny political rivals—from PPP and the Nawaz League—no right-minded Pakistani would begrudge IK for salivating over the potential of much of the votes from this diaspora falling in his lap. So be it. But the route to garnering these votes shouldn’t lead him down the nihilistic path of making punching bags of our diplomats abroad.
It’s good that he has, subsequently, tried to make amends in his outrageous behavior.
But that sobering after-thought didn’t come off his own bat. He was forced into recanting his conduct by a strong, and principled, across-the-board protest by former ambassadors of Pakistan, this scribe included. There are two on-line groups of us, retired ambassadors, who rose, with one voice, in defense of their serving, junior, colleagues and left IK in no doubt that he was way out of line in heaping such an unwarranted baggage of scorn on ambassadors and officers serving abroad in challenging circumstances.
That IK accepted his wrong-doing should go to his credit. It’s rare, indeed, for a Pakistani leader to apologize, publicly, for stepping out of line. But recanting alone isn’t enough. It’s his call, now than ever before, to make positive amends and beef up Pakistan’s diplomatic presence abroad with quantifiable inputs of long-overdue resources.
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
