by FASIH AHMED
The startling allegations leveled by the Pakistani-American businessman and citizen diplomat have already claimed their first casualty. Meet the man who blew the whistle on Memogate.
Musawer Mansoor Ijaz has always been willful. It was a trait that worried his late father, Mujaddid, a Virginia Tech physics professor. So one summer afternoon in 1976 at their mountain-perched home in rural Shawsville, Virginia, he organized a sort of intervention for the oldest of his five children, with some hefty help. “Abdus, can you please explain to this young man that being so headstrong is not good?” The professor’s friend, Dr. Abdus Salam, sized up the young Ijaz and smiled. “Do you remember how headstrong we were at that age? That’s how we got to where we are,” Salam told his friend, “so let him be.”
For 15-year-old Ijaz, Salam wasn’t one of the world’s most important scientists but simply the genial uncle who would bring chocolates each time he visited. Salam would eventually become Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, but despite that achievement he would die an outsider, heartlessly disowned as a heretic by most Pakistanis deeply suspicious of his Ahmadi beliefs. But the trait that worried Ijaz’s father has served the son well—as Salam knew it would.
Ijaz, the thrice-married 50-year-old Wall Street millionaire and father of five, is based in New York City but clocks up hundreds of private-jet hours a year traveling to his pieds-à-terre in Europe. And unlike Salam, Ijaz is the ultimate Beltway insider, uninhibited by false humility. He has all the gregarious, bounteous self-assurance of a self-made man and a rolodex to envy. Ijaz’s BlackBerry has numbers for former U.S. vice president Al Gore, Sen. John Kerry, former Obama national security adviser James L. Jones, Husain Haqqani. But he should probably delete that last contact.
On Nov. 22, Haqqani resigned or, according to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s office, was asked to resign his post as Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. This in the wake of Ijaz’s allegation that Haqqani, his former friend of over 10 years, was in fact the architect of the sensational confidential memorandum he had delivered to Adm. Mike Mullen, the then Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, just days after Osama bin Laden was killed by American forces in Abbottabad.
Pakistan erupted in propaganda wars after Ijaz first suggested Haqqani’s involvement in the alleged conspiracy in an Oct. 10 op-ed for London’s Financial Times, “Time to Take on Pakistan’s Jihadist Spies.” The end of Haqqani’s diplomatic career was inevitable, and Sherry Rehman—a former journalist, Gilani cabinet member, and rights activist—will now succeed him. But in a country rent by anti-Army and anti-Zardari ardor, some hope while others fear that the political blood of Husain may not be enough.
Newsweek (Pakistan) for more