| February 23, 2007 | Friday | Safar 5, 1428 |
Kulsoom Nawaz exposes deserters
ISLAMABAD, Feb 22: Begum Kulsoom Nawaz, the wife of PML-N Quaid and former prime minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, in her first book ‘Jabar Aur Jamhooriyat’ (Tyranny and Democracy) has exposed the role played by some of the front rank leaders and confidants of her husband in the break-up of Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) and strengthening the hands of Gen Pervez Musharraf after the October 1999 military takeover.
WASHINGTON: If, as she insists, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is determined to make concrete progress toward achieving George W. Bush’s vision of a two-state solution, one in which Israel would be required to make major territorial concessions, it appears that she faces a major foe in the White House.
No, not only Dick Cheney and the surviving members of the neo-conservative clique that surrounded him and former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld during Bush’s first term -- although the vice president’s office remains a formidable force against any concessions to a Palestinian government of national unity that includes Hamas, despite Saudi Arabia’s role in midwifing its birth at Makkah last week.
Rather, it appears that Rice’s own chief Middle East aide when she served as Bush’s national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, has become the principal foil in frustrating her efforts to resume a peace process. Until her meeting in Jerusalem last weekend with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the process had been frozen since the last days of Bill Clinton’s administration.
Abrams’ personal influence over Bush could not possibly match Rice’s, but his bureaucratic skills and political connections -- notably to the so-called “Israel Lobby” of pro-Likud Jewish organisations and the Christian Right -- give him considerable clout.
According to various sources, Abrams has been working systematically to undermine any prospect for serious negotiations designed to give substance to Rice’s hopes -- and increasingly impatient demands by Saudi King Abdullah -- of offering the Palestinians a “political horizon” for a final settlement.
“The Bush administration has done nothing to press Israel to deliver on its commitments, beyond Washington’s empty rhetoric about a two-state ‘political horizon’,” Henry Siegman, the long-time director of the US/Middle East Project at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the International Herald Tribune just last week.
“Every time there emerged the slightest hint that the United States may finally engage seriously in a political process, Elliott Abrams would meet secretly with Olmert’s envoys in Europe or elsewhere to reassure them that there exists no such danger,” he complained.
After the resignation of Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, and the departure from the Pentagon nearly two years ago of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Abrams became the administration’s most influential neo-conservative, particularly regarding Middle East policy which he oversees as Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy.
Abrams was an early protégé of Richard Perle, whom he first met, along with other prominent pro-Likud hard-liners, such as Feith, former UN Amb. Jeane Kirpatrick, and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, while working in the offices of Washington State Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Abrams rose swiftly through the neo-conservative ranks, even becoming a member of one of its most influential families as the son-in-law of the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, and his activist wife, Midge Decter, who herself published a hagiography of Rumsfeld just after the Iraq invasion.
Like his fellow-neo-cons, Abrams has never trusted “peace processes”, and not just between Israel and its Arab neighbours. During the mid-1980s, when he served as the top Latin America policy-maker in Ronald Reagan’s State Department, he worked doggedly to scuttle all regional diplomatic efforts to stop not only Washington’s “contra war” against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government (which, among other things, he charged with anti-Semitism) and the civil war in El Salvador, but even in southern Africa, where Cuban troops helped defend Angola against attacks by South Africa and its proxies.
“He opposed regional peace talks, he opposed bilateral talks between the United States and Nicaragua, and he opposed talks with Cuba,” according to William LeoGrande, dean of American University’s School of Public Affairs and author of “In Our Backyard”, a magisterial work on US Central America policy.
“He wouldn’t negotiate with adversaries, even when negotiations promised to safeguard US interests,” LeoGrande told in an interview, citing the eventual deal that resulted in Cuba’s withdrawal from Africa in exchange for Namibian independence. “He insisted on total victory, as if foreign policy were a moral crusade in which compromise was anathema.”
Badly damaged by his felony conviction for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair, Abrams, like many neo-cons, left government service under the decidedly “realist” administration of President George H.W. Bush and spent the 1990s at various think tanks. There, he helped forge the coalition -- epitomised by Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) of which he was a charter member -- of mainly Jewish neo-conservatives, the Christian and Catholic Right, and aggressive nationalists that would seize control of US policy after 9/11.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Abrams has long been identified with his hard-line patrons, such as Perle and Podhoretz, who have strongly opposed the “land-for-peace” formula that, until the younger Bush, had been official US policy since 1967.
When the elder Bush pressed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to participate in the Madrid peace conference after the first Gulf War, Abrams and dozens of other neo-conservatives organised the Committee on US Interests in the Middle East to lobby against such an effort.
Throughout the 1990s, Abrams denounced the Oslo peace process in the strongest terms -- a Likud government was engaged in it. When Palestinians launched the second intifada in September 2000, he lambasted mainstream US Jewish groups for their continued support for peace talks between Israel and the PA as “self-delusion”. “The Palestinian leadership,” he wrote, “does not want peace with Israel, and there will be no peace...”
Politically unable, due to his Iran-Contra conviction, to gain Senate confirmation to a State Department or Pentagon post, Abrams entered the younger Bush administration as a National Security Council (NSC) staffer under Rice in 2001 with responsibility for democracy promotion. But in a major coup that set off celebrations in Rumsfeld’s and Cheney’s offices, he was given the Middle East portfolio in December 2002.—Dawn/The IPS News Service
To be concluded
In her 224-page book, expected to be formally launched in London, Kulsoom Nawaz has narrated some important incidents and events that took place during her short one-year political career that started with the imprisonment of Mr Sharif in 1999 and ended in December 2000 when the members of Sharif family decided to go to Saudi Arabia under, what they termed, a forced exile.
Though Ms Kulsoom has made no disclosures in her book and simply narrated her own tale of misery, she has identified some of the main leaders of the then PML-N who, according to her, ditched Mr Sharif when he was in distress.
She has held Ijazul Haq, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Mian Azhar mainly responsible for the break-up of the party that had been ruling the country with a two-third majority at that time.
Ms Kulsoom has given a very brief account of the events and it seems that she has intentionally avoided some of the details.
Most importantly, there is no mention of the events that led to the exile of Sharif family. The PML-N still claims that Sharif family had been sent to Saudi Arabia forcibly and there was no agreement with the regime in this regard. On the other hand, the government claims that Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif were exiled under an agreement and they cannot come back for 10 years.
Quoting some statements of Ijazul Haq and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, she claimed that on the one hand, the two leaders were busy negotiating with the military regime, on the other they were praising Mr Sharif’s leadership in the party meetings.
She has particularly targeted Ijazul Haq, who, she claimed, “could not hide his happiness at the military takeover” even on the second day of the dismissal of PML-N government. She writes that the intentions of these leaders became clear on November 9, 1999 during a meeting at the residence of former governor Mian Azhar when they talked about “reconciliation with the dictatorship”.
“Ijazul Haq hosted a dinner for the members of the assembly in mid-November and not only confirmed his contacts with the dictatorship but also presented himself as a replacement for Nawaz Sharif,” writes Ms Kulsoom.
At one point, she writes: “Ijazul Haq’s role was most interesting among all these people. He would become the number one opponent of the party leadership whenever he got some hope from the dictatorship and start praising Nawaz Sharif on getting a snub from the military dictator.”
She further writes: “Mian Azhar, Ijazul Haq and Khurshid Kasuri held several meetings to give an impression that they were ready to become the B-team of Gen Musharraf.”
“Mian Azhar was constantly busy holding meetings at his residence to fulfill the dictatorial wish of Pervez Musharraf for a rift in the PML and started portraying him as the country’s future prime minister.”
Ms Kulsoom also quoted a statement of Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain which he issued during a press conference in Karachi one day before the April 16 judgment in the plane hijacking case in which he had stated that “whatever be the (court) verdict, the PML leadership would not be changed as joining the present government would be a political death.”
The book also contains text of all speeches of Ms Kulsoom and over 30 color photographs showing her attending party meetings. The book has been published by Sagar Publishers and its price is Rs400.