Haqqani walks the tightrope

Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani will formally appear before President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani today, with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Director General Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha also likely in attendance, to face the allegation of conspiring against state institutions with his involvement in the memo controversy.
Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, the man who implicated Haqqani in the scandal, has claimed that Haqqani had hinted at President Zardari’s hand in the memo, which warned of and sought assistance against a possible military takeover after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in a covert US raid on May 2. “The meeting will take place on Tuesday (today) afternoon,” a source confirmed to Pakistan Today, adding that the prime minister was expected to return to Islamabad from Lahore on Monday night. As speculation about the fate of Haqqani was rife in the federal capital throughout the day and all eyes remained trained on the Presidency to notice any extraordinary movement to and from the Aiwan-e-Sadr, quiet in-house consultations continued for the second day on Monday as President Zardari held several brainstorming sessions with his close aides and legal experts to examine the situation, which has posed a huge challenge for the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led coalition government.
A source privy to the developments said the president did not attend his office on Monday despite it being the first working day of the week, and rather his scheduled meetings with two federal ministers, Ghulam Ahmed Bilour and Mir Israrullah Zehri, were rescheduled for the evening. It is interesting to note that Prime Minister Gilani was not involved in the consultation process. Gilani, who spent his day on Monday sitting idle in Lahore without any specific agenda apart from a single meeting, did not travel to the federal capital despite his usual schedule of meeting around half a dozen delegations every day during the National Assembly session. The source said the focus of the deliberations was whether or not to go for legal action against Ijaz for making serious allegations against Haqqani. The source said one of the options under consideration was to take the matter to court once the government got to the bottom of the controversy.
GENERAL JONES: The controversy refuses to die down and is taking a new twist with every passing day. On Monday, Former US national security adviser James Jones said he was the intermediary who delivered the controversial memo to former US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen.
However, Jones said he was neither a serving US government official nor associated with the Obama administration in any way when he delivered the memo to Mullen. Jones was the national security adviser of President Barack Obama from January 2009 to October 2010.
Jones said he had confirmed his role as the intermediary to The Financial Times four days ago. The arrival of Haqqani in Islamabad has, however, rubbished the reports and media hype that he might not come back in order to avoid an investigation. While Haqqani’s fate hangs in the balance, insiders say the situation has gone beyond repair and, whether guilty or innocent, he is not likely to continue as the country’s envoy to Washington for having become controversial at a time when relations between Pakistan and the United States are at the lowest ebb. Similarly, they argue that it is not now that the ambassador has lost the confidence of the military establishment, as he had already been in the mired in controversy over the Kerry-Lugar bill and the Raymond Davis issue.
ZARDARI’S HAND::Meanwhile, Ijaz told an Indian TV channel that Haqqani had hinted at President Zardari’s hand in the memo. The businessman said Haqqani reached out to him saying he was a “plausibly deniable channel” for them. The ambassador is seen as a close aide of President Zardari and has played a key role in resolving several recent crises in bilateral relations. He has, however, always had an uneasy relationship with the military. Elaborating on the reference in the memo to President Zardari’s readiness to hand over the Mumbai attackers to India, Ijaz told NDTV this was among several proposals “designed to win the confidence of the US administration”.