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Private diplomacy
Ahmed Quraishi
The extent of foreign interference in Pakistan has turned our
country into Swiss cheese. The ostensible meeting that a US diplomat
organized at her private residence between an Indian diplomat and
several senior Pakistani government officials is the latest sign of
how dangerously soft the Pakistani state has become. The Foreign
Office was obviously pushed by other departments of the government
to issue a subtle warning to bureaucrats to intimate the government
if foreign diplomats approach them and try to conduct private
diplomacy outside regular channels. The conduct of 'private
diplomacy' has become so prevalent in the past three years – and the
profile of those involved so high – that it is bound to have serious
implications for national security.
While there is nothing strange about
foreign diplomats in Islamabad relying on cocktail parties for
information gathering because they can no longer move freely due to
security, especially for US diplomats, there is still a huge
question mark over this particular incident. Except for the Indian
diplomat, no other foreigners were invited to meet the senior
Pakistani bureaucrats, among them a senior member of the prime
minister's secretariat.
The subtle reminder by the Foreign
Office to government officials is a good idea but is not enough.
This reminder has to expand to include powerful people, party
leaders and politicians. Over the past three years, and right under
the noses of our intelligence agencies, a foreign government has
organized all-expense-paid trips for mayors and district-level
officials in Balochistan, NWFP and Sindh to the United States. These
were not your average get-to-know visits. They included meetings
with US government officials and military-linked representatives
whose jobs do not involve any mayoral or city-government concerns.
This was not limited to mayors and
district officials. Leaders from major Pakistani political parties
have been conducting private diplomacy without the knowledge of the
government, and without any protest from the Pakistani side. The
problem with these contacts is that no one knows what part of the
foreign government is organizing this effort. Last August something
stunning happened in this regard when the US State Department
discovered that Washington's envoy to the UN Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad was directly in contact with the head of a major Pakistani
political party, now our president, often speaking to him more than
once every week, without the Department knowing anything about it.
The stunning part is that while the
Pakistani government had no problem with this, it was the US
government that protested. "What sort of channel is this,
governmental, private, personnel?" A senior US government officer
questioned Mr Khalilzad. "Please advise and help me so that I
understand what's going on here." The fact that Mr Khalilzad's
answer was not made public adds to the mystery and should have
raised concerns in Islamabad as well. But it didn't.
To be fair, Pakistani politicians may
not have exactly started this. The original sin was committed by a
military man, former President Pervez Musharraf, who in late 2006
allowed two junior foreign diplomats – America's Richard Boucher and
Britain's Peter Lyall Grant – to engineer domestic Pakistani
politics. This was the beginning of overt foreign interference in
Pakistani affairs. The overt examples of private diplomacy
flourished after that.
Political parties and individual
officials have no right to conduct private diplomacy with foreign
governments. But after Mr Musharraf's indiscretion, serious
transgressions have gone unnoticed. In another serious incident, our
ambassador to Washington actually bypassed the Foreign Office to
arrange in March in Dubai a secret meeting between our president and
a much junior US government officer. Why our president consented to
this is another question but the real concern here is how a
Pakistani diplomat can do this with impunity.
The political parties act needs to be
amended to proscribe direct contact between politicians and foreign
governments without the presence of a government representative. To
do this the mindset in Islamabad needs to be changed top to bottom.
A nuclear-armed nation on a strategically precarious rollercoaster
can ill afford to become exposed like a Swiss cheese.
The writer works for Geo TV. Email:
aq@ahmedquraishi.com
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