MERCIFULLY, after four long months, the memo commission tasked with investigating Mansoor Ijaz’s claim against Husain Haqqani and his political bosses has brought to an end its formal hearings. What’s left now is for the commission to compile its report and recommendations and submit them to the Supreme Court, a process that may be completed by early June. At that point, it can only be hoped that the Mansoor Ijaz memo will once and for all be confined to the dustbin of history. For in all the months of hearings held by the memo commission, nothing that can be considered serious grounds for further legal proceedings has been presented before the commission. That three high court chief justices have spent months sifting through the allegations and counter-allegations over memogate is bad enough; to waste more time of the superior judiciary on the matter would compound the original error.

To anyone willing to acknowledge it, memogate was always a political matter. And in the months since it exploded on the Pakistani political scene late last year threatening to take down the political government and etch another chapter in dismal civil-military relations, politics has moved on. In fact, for months now the political government and the army leadership has been working together to try and stabilise ties with the US — the very country that the memo purported to reach out to in May 2011 to save the civilians from alleged army machinations. Surely, the trust deficit between the civilians and the army that existed before memogate surfaced and that was compounded by the memo has far from disappeared. But the point is that managing such tensions ought to be left to the politicians and the army. By intervening in such a murky affair, the judiciary only ended up dragging itself into a controversy that it has struggled to extricate itself from long after the original protagonists have moved on to another, more cooperative, phase in their relationship.

Difficult as it may be to acknowledge that memogate was a wild goose chase encouraged by the preposterous Mansoor Ijaz, the superior judiciary must surely draw a line under the issue now. Too much time and money has been expended on the matter by a judiciary that is already stretched to deliver basic justice to ordinary citizens. If there was ever a threat to Pakistan’s national security and sovereignty, evidence of it has not been presented to the memo commission. So it’s time to focus on another, very real, threat to Pakistan: the lack of justice for the public at large.