Periscope On Pakistan: Pathology Of Self Destruction

By Author: pawan kumar
Total Articles: 25
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Pakistan has once again become caught up in the whirlpool in which the Pakistan Army is Pakistan and anything that denigrates this institution denigrates Pakistan. The Pakistan Supreme Court, itself a victim of military dictatorship, has been asked to adjudicate what has come to be called “Memogate”. If it goes by the evidence collected by the Pakistan Army Inter-Services Intelligence Chief Lt Gen Sujha Pasha to discredit the democratically elected civilian government and not the history of Pakistan it will willy-nilly contribute to the destruction of Pakistan.

Bassam Javed in NATION (26/12/12): "Pakistan continues to confront venomous propaganda against its armed forces and the ISI coming from the foreign and local media. They have joined together in efforts to discredit the guardians of Pakistan’s ideological and geographical borders. The base of the current heinous propaganda and instigations against the ISI and the army is a memo that was sent to former US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen on May 10 through the then US National Security Advisor General James Jones by a US businessman of ...
... Pakistani origin. Mansoor Ijaz. He says that he wrote the memo at the alleged behest of Pakistan Ambassador to the US Hussain Haqqani who has since resigned from his post. The memo passed to Admiral Mullen after US raid in Abbottabad on May 2 requested US backing for a proposal to install a new, Washington friendly civilian security team to assert tighter control over Pakistan’s military that would also end ISI’s relations with Haqqani network and that the memo had the approval of the ‘boss’.

"The issue however came to full light in an op-ed written by Mansoor Ijaz in 'Financial Times' of London on October 10 revealing that the memo was indeed delivered to Admiral Mullen. The contents of the memo were certainly outrageous and tantamount to conspiring against Pakistan Army the ISI and national security, besides having a great moral dimension on its population.

"The incessant anti Pakistan voices seem to have found a new lease of life in harping on the memogate scandal wherein the security establishment continues to be demonized to achieve their agendas.

"Nevertheless, to trace out the perpetrators of the memo that incidentally has a serious implication for our national security, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has been approached to determine the same. ‘There is a need to fully examine the facts and circumstances leading to the conception and issuance of the memo’, so has said the Chief of the Army Staff on the memo issue. The spirit behind writing and passing on the memo to US CJCS needs to be dispassionately investigated. Whatever the truth that comes out of the investigations, it may have the potential to push Pakistan and the US towards a dangerous confrontation. So instead of casting reckless aspersions on the Pakistan’s security establishment it would be better for opinion makers to wait for the Supreme Court’s verdict on the real authors of the memogate affair."

“The Army has based its strategy on ghairat which it conflates with sovereignty. The nation follows the Army's lead - which reminds us of East Pakistan. The Army put the world at risk through jihad and its consequence: international terrorism. Jihad has virtually destroyed Pakistan's internal sovereignty by conceding con-dominion to the jihadi militias fighting India and its new ally the US in Afghanistan. Pakistan's external sovereignty has also been destroyed by the tendency of jihad to farm out the formulation of strategy to its commanders in the field. Pakistan's strategy towards Iran, Central Asia and Russia was effectively formulated after 1996 by the Taliban commanders. It is happening once again.

"Pakistan has taken on America today because of its flawed view of India as an eternal enemy. Without a strategy that could be understood and supported by the world, Pakistan wants Afghanistan left open to a repetition of what it did there after the exit of Soviet Union in 1991. The world could not understand the strategy of the Pakistan Army in 1971 and abandoned it. It is today worried about Pakistan's path-dependent syndrome of plunging into wars but is compelled to focus on the global threat of Al Qaeda embedded in Pakistan with its variety of affiliates whom Pakistan says it will not fight 'because they are our brothers'.

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