As far as foreign services go, we’ve got a half decent one. In fact, relative to the rest of the civil services, they can even be said to have, despite competing schools of thought within, a collective brain, of sorts. A sentient organism, the cadre has – and debates about – an overall grand plan. Internationally, our ambassadors haven’t done too badly either. True, they can make a gaffe or two. But as one former Indian foreign service member after another mentions, either in post-retirement books or in casual conversation, that the Pakistani foreign service is just about the only thing that has kept the cause of Kashmir alive in the global stage.
Couple this professionalism with the moral authority of the representatives of the people guiding the envoys and you have a firm footing in the international comity of nations. Alas, that isn’t the case in Pakistan. Because major foreign policy issues here is framed not by the career diplomats or politicians but by the military. The latter have been quite frank about it. America, India, China, the Arabs, Afghanistan and Iran are their province. The rest, whenever they want to. True, these countries do have scores of Pakistani diplomats dedicated towards them but their work entails damage control for any policy that goes haywire – which it ever so often does.
As the parliament debated the budget of the foreign ministry, the opposition benches demanded an end to what it termed as military intervention in the ministry. If the people are going to pay up for a foreign relations apparatus, they should get their best value for money and have them do their job.
Clemenceau might have quipped about war being too important a matter to be left to the generals – and there is a case for this – but about diplomacy, there are no two views. We have entered in a complex era in international diplomacy, with trade blocs that are more powerful than nations themselves, multilateral entities that negotiate conflict and, through technology and the international capital markets, a blurring of borders in all manners but physical – in some cases, even those. These need the attention of career diplomats. Under the control of the representatives of the people.
