I'm sorry to see that Mehmud Ali Durrani, the former Pakistani ambassador to Washingon, was fired as national-security advisor to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
I met Durrani a few times at the embassy in Van Ness, and he was always gracious, unfailingly polite and -- if somewhat evasive, due to the nature of his job -- at least he made an effort to answer our questions.
The following is an interview with FP from November 2007:
Close observers of Pakistani politics will note that he doesn't seem to go out of his way to defend Pervez Musharraf, who was clearly on his way out at that point. Perhaps that's why Durrani landed on his feet in the new government.
But this time, too much candor did him in. Gilani says he cashiered Durrani for disclosing to the press that Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker, was Pakistani "without having taken me into confidence."
Now, Islamabad has officially acknowledged that Kasab was Pakistani. But maybe Gilani should be the one who gets fired. I mean, who's in charge here?
While the Indian television channel CNN-IBN quoted Pakistan's National
Security Adviser Mehmud Ali Durrani as saying that Ajmal Kasab's
identity as a Pakistani had been established, Foreign Secretary Salman
Bashir told the same channel that it was premature to say anything
because the investigation was continuing.
In the midst of all this, American news agency APTN quoted Information
Minister Sherry Rehman as confirming that Ajmal Kasab in fact was a
Pakistani national. The minister later confirmed it to Dawn that "he is
Pakistani" and that investigations are ongoing.
Similarly, the Foreign Office which at the initial stage appeared
either detached from reality or completely out of the loop, admitted by
broadcasting through the state-run PTV that Ajmal Kasab was indeed a
Pakistani national.
During the course of Dawn's own investigation, a number of senior
officials in the interior ministry and police said that investigations
were started soon after initial reports had suggested that Ajmal Kasab
might be a Pakistani national. But the authorities wanted to be doubly
sure about his identity because there was no record of Kasab and his
family in the national database maintained by Nadra.
To me, the most disturbing part of the whole episode is that it reveals precisely how dysfunctional the decision-making process is within the upper echelons of Pakistani government. The anti-India tendency is so strong that it is essentially reflexive: it serves as a lens through which all foreign policy (including in Afghanistan) is based. This tendency is either exacerbated or alleviated (depending on one's viewpoint) by a very large dose of incompetence.
If these people didn't have nuclear weapons, they would rightly be regarded as either a farce or an unmitigated disaster or both.
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