Kerry – Lugar Bill -------- PPP caught off – Guard

All past week has been a Kerry Lugar bill week. There has been a series of discussions regarding the bill on electronic and print media. The issue was fist voiced by Shaheen Sehbai of The News on 27th September 2009 in his article named “Are all Stakeholders on Board?”

My observations: If you study the clauses of KL bill, on the face of it you may NOT find something unusual, considering the fact that the bill has been compiled and approved by US Senate (for their own people) and now it is in the US president’s office for final sign off.

However, if you dig deeper into the clauses you find out that the overall tone of the bill is intensely dictatorial. With the continuous reminders to Pakistan to protect US interests in the region by “Doing more” to curtail terrorist activities specially related to Al Qaeda, Taliban, Laskar e Taiba and Jaish e Mohammad (Section 6 Caluse “c”). Overall focus of the bill is to assure that Pakistan’s soil is not used as base to wage attacks on India, NATTO and US forces in Afghanistan along with security of the supply lines to the forces sitting in Afghanistan. It is notable that inclusion of Laskar e Taiba and Jaish e Mohammad are successful execution of Indian lobby in US since we all know that both these militant organizations have an anti Indian agenda related to Kashmir. Why haven’t they included groups like Sipah Sahaba, Lasker e Jhangvi and Jundullah. Simple answer, they are involved in local terrorism (mostly sectarian) and thus US is least bothered about them. Jundullah, however, is a CIA funded organization and mostly involved in sectarian violence in Iran while their roots lie in Pakistan.

I will not go into further detail regarding the other questionable clauses in the Bill since they have been in the news throughout the past week. However, I would like to highlight some domestic political implications of the bill that has evolved subsequent to approval of the Bill.

Immediately after the approval of bill by US senate: Hussain Haqqani came out with the statement justifying the bill by quoting that the restrictions are on US government imposed by US senate and not on the Pakistani Government.
President Zardari advised his party members to aggressively support the bill. While the foreign ministry and presidential spokesman were congratulating the nation on their success, the prime minister remained silent on the issue. Naseer ullah Babar, president’s spokesperson came on the media criticizing the analyst over blowing up the issue and alleged them for unnecessary criticism without understanding the English of the document.

Clearly here the Government intended to dominate the public opinion prior to the discussion of the issue in the general assembly.

Why army did come out with their discontent over the Bill: Hussain Haqqani and his aides in Washington played key role in the inclusion of the clauses under Section 6 and 7 of the bill related to military assistance. Meanwhile, the army was kept ignorant regarding the stipulations in the bill. Peoples Party clearly had an agenda of controlling army through the bill with the support of Americans. The PPP representatives came out with Charter of Democracy (signed between Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto back in 2007) as an argument to support the military control by civilian government as written in the CoD.

There are two things worth mentioning here:

Firstly, CoD does not require American intervention to fulfill the objective
Secondly, someone please tell this bunch of idiots to stop fooling the nation. After approximately two years into the government they suddenly recalled CoD and that too for this single issue. What about all the other clauses in the CoD that remain forgotten and unattended.

The army therefore responded by voicing their reservations on some clauses of the bill after the corps commander meeting chaired by General Ishfaq Pervaiz Kiyani. The message was clear: “Don’t get US involved to guarantee your Government”

PPP caught off- guard once again: Yet again the ruling party was completely caught off – guard and faced humiliation and embarrassment. After when the US ambassador, Anne W Patterson accepted that the tone of the bill was aggressive and objections on certain clauses were justified, the Zardari party ended up in no man’s land. They had to retreat and revisit their stance on the issue. Result was that yesterday Shah Mehmood Qureshi, before leaving for the US talked to the media and stated that Pakistan has some objections on certain clauses that will be raised and communicated to the US.

On the other side, Zardari, Huqqani , Rehman Malik and Farhatullah Babar who had pictured this bill as one of the greatest successes of current government , turned out to be a big diplomatic mess.

For the US, it is only possible to amend the bill if and only if the President of US vetoes the bill and resend it to the Senate. This will be for the first time in US history and will also take a lot of time to redraft and approve the modified bill. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that President Obama vetoes the bill and will try to console the Pakistani Nation during the signing speech of the bill.

Hussain Haqqani, according to different sources is under serious criticism, both from within and outside the Peoples party for creating such a mess that led to embarrassment to the Peoples Party. He is being replaced by Dr. Maleeha Lodhi according to Ahmed Qureshi. The rating of PPP for sure has slid down further while President Zardari once again has made a fool out of himself.