WASHINGTON: Senior Pakistani officials will meet in Islamabad on Tuesday with their envoy to the United States as controversy mounts over a mysterious memo that underscores the fraught ties between Pakistan's civilian and military leaders.
A former US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's influential ambassador in Washington, would meet one on one in Islamabad with intelligence chief Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
Days after offering to resign, Haqqani will also meet with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Pasha, and army boss General Ashfaq Kayani, arguably the country's most powerful man, in a separate meeting that could determine whether the diplomat keeps his job, the former official said.
The high-level deliberations highlight the tensions between Pakistan's powerful military and its weak civilian government.
“Haqqani is not your average career diplomat. He's quite a player,” said Kamran Bokhari, Middle East and South Asia vice president at STRATFOR intelligence firm.
Other Pakistan watchers, however, said Haqqani's effectiveness had been limited by that very closeness to Zardari and his strained relationship with military leaders who have at times tried to shut him out of US-Pakistan dealings.
If he leaves, a successor might include a diplomat with a less complicated relationship with the military, perhaps Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir or Pakistan's envoy to the United Nations, Hussain Haroon.
Bokhari suggested the flurry of high-level meetings in Islamabad may mean the Pakistani military will not push for the removal of a Zardari ally in part because the military-civilian balance was changing, if gradually.
“The army's monopoly on foreign policy decision-making is not what it used be,” he said, following the rise of Pakistan's judiciary and civil society in recent years and after the unprecedented public outcry over the bin Laden raid.
“The civilian class is no longer a pushover,” Bokhari said.
“That doesn't mean they've gotten the upper hand, but they have some room to maneuver.”
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.