Javed Jabbar’s book ‘A General in Particular: Intonations with Pervez Musharraf’ launched

Former federal minister and former senator Javed Jabbar on Thursday launched his latest political memoir “A General in Particular: Intonations with Pervez Musharraf” at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, revealing the closed-door dialogue between former American present Bill Clinton and the late former president and army chief Gen Musharraf.

Addressing the book launch ceremony, Jabbar uncovered every aspect of Pakistan and US relations and also shed light on the dialogue and prospects for the future of both countries. “We should stop supplicating before the US. We have to establish strong diplomatic ties with the US rather than demeaning ourselves,” said Jabbar, adding that the reality is that the US helped us on various occasions but not that much which we were expecting.

He suggested that we should make collective efforts to transform Pakistan into a strong and stable state, and we have to stop blaming India, IMF and others.

Highlighting the role of the military, he said that the military has strong interference in the internal affairs of Pakistan, but this is not an exception, as the militaries of power countries also have a say in foreign relations and policies of their countries.

Talking about former US president Bill Clinton’s visit to Pakistan in 2000, Jabbar said that India had tried to create hurdles in the visit of the US president to Pakistan. For this, India even staged an attack on the Sikh community in Kashmir and started blaming Pakistan, but that idea didn’t work.

He said that before joining the camp of the war against terror, Clinton held a series of meetings with Musharraf and discussed various issues in a very tentative way. The former US president, at that time, informed Musharraf that terrorists can pose a serious to Pakistan. “A meeting between Clinton and Musharraf was scheduled for 35 minutes only, but when it started both the leaders took around 85 minutes ignoring all the reminders to end the meeting.”

Jabbar said Musharraf had no intention to execute Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif because he knew that General Zia had committed a mistake by executing Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The former senator, while speaking about Musharraf’s progressive polices, said he brought massive reforms to the electoral system and one of them was that the minorities got the right to contest elections on general seats. This was the reason that three people from minority groups in Sindh won the general elections against their opponents.

He said Musharraf also tried to strengthen the Election Commission of Pakistan and introduced local governments. In addition, he said, the former president increased the number of seats for women and established several cultural centers. Above all, private TV channels flourished during the Musharraf era. “The electronic media enjoyed unprecedented freedom in Musharraf era.”

Jabbar, however, said that many unfortunate things also happened during the Musharraf regime. They were the tragedy of Lal Masjid, the dismissal of then chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, the issue of missing persons, and the killing of Nawab Akbar Bugti in a military operation. “Musharraf had no intention to kill Bugti.”

He said Musharraf was a president in uniform and also some of the generals became part of the cabinet, which created difficulties for him and the people around him. “I joined Musharraf because I thought there was a possibility to implement something positive and make reforms. I believe that Musharraf was a man with a constructive personality.”