Pakistan Foreign Office: The Service that Was! - Part II
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

Though born in difficult and trying circumstances, Pakistan’s infant diplomatic service matured quickly, without much of a teething period. It’s baptism of fire didn’t prevent it from striking healthy roots and proliferate sturdily.

The resolute growth of Pakistan’s infant Foreign Service owed a lot to the high quality and caliber of officers selected, through a highly competitive examination, to man the Foreign Office, in the country, and represent the newly-born country in world capitals. Pakistani diplomats, because of their competence and merit, could hold their own against the finest from diplomatic services going back to decades and centuries.

The efficiency of Pakistan’s putative diplomatic service could well be attributed to the merit-based system of their selection and training. This equipped them to compete with their counterparts from around the world whose backup resources and perquisites far outweighed theirs. What qualified them to compete with their far-better resourced counterparts from rich and developed countries was the dint of their labor and acumen.

This impressive success of Pakistani diplomats was in spite of odds heavily arrayed against them. Theirs was a tough life abroad—far from the conventional wisdom of their being in the lap of luxury in glittering world capitals. They had to make do on limited resources—in terms of finances and manpower.

It wasn’t confined only to grapple with the challenge of living on limited resources, and bring up their families in often inhospitable environments. Equally daunting was an element of envy and hostility that could be discerned, from very early on, against PFS and its denizens.

PFS was—and still is, 75 years on—the smallest of what passed by under the sobriquet of Pakistan’s ‘Superior Services.’ Throughout its existence, PFS officers have consistently had to face the daunting challenge of delivering to the maximum of their human endurance, with minimum of perks and resources at their disposal. Every civilian and military ruler of the country invariably expected of the Foreign Office and its professional mandarins to promote his persona of a leader on the international stage.

But against this expectation, the resources given to Pakistani diplomats were always niggardly. Because they had no ‘constituency’ at home, the voice of Pakistani diplomats was hardly ever given any weight. There was, visibly, an unalloyed element of hostility among the bureaucratic ranks against PFS. Most of the top positions in the civil bureaucracy were hogged by CSP officers who looked down upon their PFS counterparts as something akin to ‘children of a lesser god.’ The Ministry of Finance, invariably manned in its top slots by CSP officers, sadistically vetoed even the most logical demands of our Missions abroad for funds. Envy could be the only logical explanation for such blatant hostility.

A common perception pervading the ranks of bureaucracy at home was that Pakistani diplomats led a life of luxury, which was a totally inane, naïve and ill-informed perception.

There was no understanding of difficulties that Foreign Service officers had to take in their stride in order to live in often un-salubrious climes abroad. There was no effort, ever, to try understand what challenges were faced by families of diplomats through regular and frequent dislocations—at intervals of two or three years, and in some instances even after just one year at a station. It was especially hard on children of diplomats who found themselves in totally different cultural environment, every two or three years.

The most daunting challenge to Pakistani diplomats was education of their children in capitals where the medium of instructions wasn’t English. In such capitals, English-medium schools were invariably run by developed Western countries—US, UK, Australia, Canada, et al. Tuition fees at these schools were at a premium which Pakistani diplomats, with their shoe-string foreign allowances, could ill-afford to bear.

Government of Pakistan provided no monetary assistance to its diplomats abroad by way of Education allowance for their children, while governments of other countries, as starved of resources as Pakistan, had the good sense to cater to this basic need of their diplomats and their families. India, for one, paid for schooling of its diplomats’ children in world capitals whereas Pakistani diplomats were perennially faced with this dilemma of how to ensure quality education of their children.

Personal references should best be avoided, but become unavoidable in order to highlight a point.

As the Deputy Chief of Mission, this scribe faced this problem, with three school-going children in Tokyo, one of the most expensive capitals in the world. I’d to literally beg the principals of two Canadian Missionary Schools, in Tokyo, for a discount in the fees of my daughter and two sons. It was humiliating and embarrassing. But I’d to lump my pride and self-dignity for the sake of my children.

However, even after those missionary schools had, reluctantly, extended that courtesy to me, more than half of my take-home pay, every month, was eaten up by the ‘concessional’ fees of my children’s schools. It was not until the mid-1980s, thanks to Dr Mehboob-ul-Haq, who was Finance Minister in Mohammad Khan Junejo’s Cabinet, that GOP brought in educational subsidy for up to two children of a Pakistani diplomat abroad in private English-medium schools.

But while an unabashedly step-motherly treatment was meted out to the Foreign Office and its mandarins, every soldier of fortune to ascend to power in Pakistan used the FO and diplomatic service as their milch-cow to induct its favorites into the Foreign Service cadre.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto with President John F. Kennedy. ZAB (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) had a fan-club within the ranks of FS. But ZAB was the one who treated FS and its mandarins with absolute contempt and carried out what could only be described as a surgical strike to rob it of its pristine, talent and merit-based professionalism – Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

Every Bonaparte, from Field Marshal Ayub Khan to General Musharraf, inducted their blue-eyed boys in uniform into the Service. This was quite in line with their avowed ‘mission’ to infuse military discipline into civilian services. Musharraf, in particular, was generous in the extreme in landing cushy diplomatic assignments for his cronies and wards.

However, the heaviest blow to the quality, caliber and the whole, overall, complexion of the Foreign Service came from quarters least expected to come down hard on it.

ZAB (Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) had a fan-club within the ranks of FS. He was admired and idolized by many as role-model of a suave, articulate, cultured and highly-educated person who could be counted upon to stand up with dignity and aplomb in any international forum to represent the country.

But ZAB was the one who treated FS and its mandarins with absolute contempt and carried out what could only be described as a surgical strike to rob it of its pristine, talent and merit-based professionalism.

ZAB’s Lateral Entry incentive wasn’t, at all, motivated by any intent to induct into FS men and women of quality and caliber. His intent was to bring in people chosen on the basis of their loyalty to him and his vacuous, slogan-oriented, People’s Party. In a nutshell, he wanted to politicize FS and use it as a tool of his loyalist acolytes and cronies to act according to his whims and fancies and render service to him rather than the country.

Lateral Entry did bring some very capable people into the ranks of FS but they could be counted on fingers. By and large it opened the portals of FS for people who didn’t qualify to serve any Service of Pakistan, least of all the premiere FS. They were like bulls in a China shop and behaved very much like it.

To these political favorites, their being on diplomatic assignments abroad—and they were, by and large, sent to comfortable Missions in the Western world—was a reward for their loyalty to ZAB and their fidelity to the ruling clique.

Cutting a long story short, FS hasn’t, to date, recovered, in terms of quality, efficiency and performance, from ZAB’s body-blow. A man who had been lionized for his stature as a role-model to represent Pakistan in the world—and for whom FS mandarins had toiled hard to promote his cult image as a large-than-life persona—turned out to be the “terminator’ of what used to be a Service of Pride, which had been cited by friends and foes, alike, as a model service. (Continued next week) (The writer is a retired Pakistani ambassador who served the country as a career diplomat for 36 long years. He can be reached at K_K_ghori@hotmail.com )