By By Tariq Butt
“We intend to ask the government to come clean on several contentious issues and ensure and protect the national interest and take parliament and the people of Pakistan into confidence,” he said while talking to The News.
The opposition leader said in spite of all the controversies that have of late been generated, the people of Pakistan are no wiser as to the exact status and role of the Blackwater (Xe Services, being its new name) in Pakistan and the precise nature and scope of the expansion of the US embassy in Islamabad.
He said there had been clarifications from the American embassy but in all democratic countries it is the government of the day, which takes the responsibility and clarifies its position on the issues. In the absence of such clarifications, the impression gains ground that the government has something to hide, he said. This further extenuates the rumour mills.
Chaudhry Nisar said it was a bad reflection on the part of the government that it had been unable to make its position clear and deliberately let several issues go unattended. He said most of what was happening now was a legacy of Pervez Musharraf’s era. The dictator sold off the vital and strategic interests of the nation in return for Western acceptance of his military rule, he said.
The opposition leader said dictators had indulged in these sorts of arrangements before in order to secure some kind of sanctity and support for their extra-constitutional rules. “But the depths through which the Musharraf regime went in bartering off our national sovereignty has never occurred before,” Chaudhry Nisar said, adding there was a great opportunity in the post-February 2008 parliamentary polls scenario for the new democratic government to strike a new line and pull the country out of this quagmire.
Furthermore, he said, Pakistan has the new US administration that was willing to address excesses of the Bush era and ready to listen to Islamabad’s sensitivities. But unfortunately, the opposition leader said, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led coalition government either did not have the commitment or the sense of direction or was playing timid in reasserting Pakistan’s sovereignty.
This has put Pakistan in a very awkward position, he said and added reports were surfacing every second day of some new developments, which marginalise and put into doubt the independence and sovereignty of Pakistan.
The sad part, Chaudhry Nisar said, is that the government refuses to take parliament, the people of Pakistan and the opposition into confidence as to what was happening. He said several Pakistani politicians and public opinion leaders have raised questions about the Blackwater activities in Pakistan but nothing substantial and satisfactory had been heard from the government.
Blackwater is a private military company founded in the United States in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. In October 2007, the company was renamed Blackwater Worldwide and was colloquially referred to as “Blackwater”. Blackwater has a wide array of business divisions, subsidiaries, and spin-off corporations but the organisation as a whole has courted much controversy.