Leak upon leak?

It would be difficult for the state to more completely botch its handling of the Dawn leak controversy. The day began routinely enough when the PM’s Office issued a notification or a directive or some such thing for the removal of foreign affairs adviser Tariq Fatemi for his alleged role in the leak and the start of disciplinary proceedings against Rao Tehsin Ali, the principal information officer of the Ministry of Information. It also called on the All-Pakistan Newspapers Society to investigate Dawn’s conduct. This directive soon turned into an eruption after the ISPR took to Twitter and said the ‘notification’ was both incomplete and not in line with the recommendations of the inquiry board. Most incendiary of all was his curt assertion that the notification had been rejected. Then, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, speaking to the media in Karachi, appeared to try and clear up the issue. But only another layer was added to the confusion when he denied that the directive issued by the PM’s Office was a notification at all and said that it was his constitutional role as the interior minister to issue the notification. He implied he would do so soon. More importantly, he said all the recommendations made by him to the PM would be included in the notification. What then are we to assume? That the ISPR reacted ‘angrily’ to a document which shouldn’t have been in the public domain in the first place? Are we looking at another leak? Nothing can be said with certainty at this point because, even after hours of this fiasco, as these lines are written, the degree of clarity from the government that is needed is lacking. Directive, notification or whatever it is or was, the unpleasant episode makes us wonder what the level of communication and contact is between the different organs of the state. The government has claimed that it was investigating the Dawn leaks thoroughly and competently, but this display, where not a single agency seems to be on the same page as any other agency, tells us otherwise.

Quite apart from the bumbling on display, and much more importantly, it is, as Nisar said in his press talk, extremely harmful to the state if its institutions choose to communicate their concerns through tweets. Political analaysts and media commentators have agreed. The state of Pakistan is old enough to have evolved mechanisms to deal with such matters as maturely as the rest of the world does. It was completely inappropriate for the ISPR to use Twitter to publicly break with the prime minister. That it did so shows that there are differences between the civilian set-up and the military and that these divisions may now play out publicly. There is no justification for what the ISPR did and one can’t help but wonder what it thought it would gain by laying bare the army’s disagreement, if any, with the government in this manner. Undermining the credibility and authority of the government has ironically ended up doing the very thing that Dawn was accused of doing through that “leaked” report. The report was lambasted for publicly revealing, or giving an impression of, civilian-military tensions. This was alleged to have worked against the national interest. But there can be no more public way to demonstrate those tensions than to use Twitter to effectively rebuke the prime minister or his government.

The opportunistic and shameful reaction from the opposition parties is disheartening. One would expect no better from the likes of Sheikh Rasheed and the Chaudhrys, but for the PPP and its parliamentary leader Khursheed Ahmed Shah to forget or ignore the true nature of what is at issue here shows the party is now concerned only with short-term political gains at the cost of long-held principles about democratic supremacy. Imran Khan and the PTI have once again and quite predictably shown that there is no extent that they will not go to in order to undermine the government. What has truly defined PTI politics all along is its myopic efforts to either drive a wedge between the civilian setup and the army to get to power or use the already existing tensions between civilian and army institutions for the same purpose. Imran Khan may have played great cricket, but his politics has yet to become politics. The question for the government now is how it handles this entirely avoidable crisis in the next few days. It perhaps needs to clear the confusion over the notification/directive and make public as much information as possible about the leak investigation so that we have a better understanding of the issue. The army and the government should be able to sit together and save the country from further embarrassment that can be a source of pleasure only for foreign foes or local political adventurers.