Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. offers to resign after growing controversies

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. offers to resign after growing controversies

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, has offered to resign due to a growing controversy at home over the limits of civilian and military power in the country.

Mr. Haqqani said by telephone that this week he had offered his resignation to President Asif Ali Zardari’s government. Farhattulah Babar, a spokesman for Mr. Zardari, said the president had asked Mr. Haqqani to come to Islamabad to discuss the situation.
Only after those visits will the government make a decision on whether to accept Mr. Haqqani’s offer to resign, he said.

Mr. Haqqani’s move comes amid media reports that Mr. Zardari’s government earlier this year asked the U.S. to help forestall any chance of a coup by Pakistan’s military, which civilian officials feared after the U.S. raid which killed Osama bin Laden in
May.

The growing controversy shows the uneasy relationship between Mr. Zardari’s civilian government and Pakistan’s military, which has directly ruled the country for half its history as a nation state and continues to play a powerful behind-the-scenes role.
Military officials were furious over the raid that killed bin Laden, which was conducted on Pakistani soil by U.S. Navy SEALs without Pakistan military or civilian government knowledge.

Mansoor Ijaz, a U.S. businessman of Pakistani origin, wrote in an opinion piece for the Financial Times on Oct. 10 that a "senior Pakistani diplomat" had called him soon after the raid with a request to help channel a message to Adm. Michael Mullen, then
Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to put pressure on Pakistan’s generals not to stage a coup.

In return, Mr. Ijaz claimed in the opinion piece, the government offered in a memo delivered to Adm. Mullen that it would curtail the powers of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Pakistan’s military spy agency, which the U.S. blames for supporting
Taliban militants that attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Mr. Ijaz did not disclose the name of the diplomat he dealt with. Nor did he detail who delivered the message or what his exact role was in the affair. Pakistan’s media, which often tows the military line, has speculated the diplomat was Mr. Haqqani and
the controversy has escalated in recent days.

Mr. Haqqani said he had been in contact with Mr. Ijaz but denied involvement with the memo. "I did not write the memo. I did not deliver it. I was not even instructed by anyone in the government to conceptualize such a memo," he said.

Attempts to reach the U.S. embassy spokesman in Islamabad on Thursday were not successful. Foreign Policy magazine Wednesday quoted a Mullen spokesman as saying that Adm. Mullen had received the memo but did not find it credible and took no note of it.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=3874

Posted by Ahmer Gul Khan on Nov 17 2011. Filed under National, Pakistan, Politics, USA, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry