Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, is facing pressure from his opponents over allegations that he sought to strike a deal with the US to help him assert control over the country's powerful military.
Pakistan's political scene has been hit by a claim that Mr Zardari authorised his ambassador to Washington to approach a top US official for help in preventing a coup in the tense days after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May.
The controversy erupted on October 10, when Mansoor Ijaz, a US businessman of Pakistani origin, wrote an article in the Financial Times claiming he had served as a conduit for a memorandum setting out Mr Zardari's plea for US backing in a showdown with the military. Pakistan's government had dismissed Mr Ijaz's claims as a "fantasy" and his account was initially met with scepticism in much of Pakistan's boisterous media.
But the affair roared back into life this week when Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, confirmed he had received a memo of the kind described by Mr Ijaz, although he did not find it credible.
That revelation has sparked a fresh political storm in Pakistan, where Mr Zardari's critics have demanded the government provide a full account of where the memo originated, who authorised it, and what it was designed to achieve.
"The government needs to come clean over whether President Zardari was somehow involved in this memo," said Khurram Dastgir Khan, one of several opposition lawmakers to raise similar questions in the National Assembly on Thursday.
"Shenanigans like this are not the way to conduct foreign policy."
The affair, dubbed "Memogate" by one columnist, has provided a glimpse into a determined but usually opaque power struggle between civilian officials and the generals who still wield enormous hidden influence after decades of army rule.
Analysts say Mr Zardari runs the risk that his enemies will seek to portray the memo as evidence that his government was contemplating an act bordering on treason by asking the US – which many Pakistanis regard as hostile – to rein in the army, which has spent decades cultivating an image as a guarantor of the country's integrity.
Mr Ijaz, a venture capitalist, initially wrote in the FT that he had served as an informal conduit to deliver the memo to Adm Mullen a week after Bin Laden's death on May 2. Mr Zardari, he wrote, felt he needed "an American fist" on the desk of General Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan's army chief, to prevent any risk of a coup following the Bin Laden raid, which humiliated the army.
In return for US support, the government offered to stop Pakistan's intelligence agencies backing militants fighting Nato in Afghanistan, according to Mr Ijaz. To do this Mr Zardari would sack key generals and introduce a civilian-led security team.
Mr Ijaz told the FT on Thursday that he had been asked to deliver the message by Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the US, and an ally of Mr Zardari.
"Husain Haqqani, whom I have known for over 10 years, was indeed the senior Pakistani diplomat who asked me to assist him in privately delivering his message to Admiral Mike Mullen," Mr Ijaz said. He also detailed phone and email contact between himself and Mr Haqqani in May as they finalised the draft of the memorandum and awaited "the boss's approval". "The boss was an obvious reference to President Zardari," Mr Ijaz said.
Mr Haqqani, who has emerged as an influence in the fraught US-Pakistan alliance since taking his post in 2008, has denied any involvement.
But he has been recalled to Islamabad to explain his position. On Thursday, he told the FT he was prepared to resign if doing so would defuse the controversy and lashed out at Mr Ijaz.
"The back and forth and media manipulation involving the businessman who started this controversy with his op-ed [article] has been exploited by opponents of Pakistani democracy to drive a wedge between our civil and military leaders," Mr Haqqani said. "The individual who started this controversy with his op-ed might consider his ego more important than Pakistan; I do not."
Pakistani officials made no comment on Thursday on whether Mr Haqqani's offer to resign had been accepted and he remained in Washington.
The furore is being watched in Washington where the US is torn by its historic reliance on cultivating strong ties with the military, Pakistan's most powerful institution, while also hoping to foster greater democracy and bolster the prospects for long-term stability.
However, those hopes are complicated by the weakness of Mr Zardari's
administration, which has been hobbled by an entrenched legacy of corruption and the triumph of personality politics over institutions.
The storm over Memogate has also pumped up an already feverish political climate with a roster of the country's best known diplomats, spymasters and politicians using the affair to push their competing agendas ahead of elections due in early 2013.
Shaukat Qadir, a retired brigadier who writes on security issues, said the military was pressing the government to sack Mr Haqqani. "The question is how much pressure there will be on Zardari, and what that pressure will get him to do," he said.
The controversy flared on Wednesday when Adm Mullen revised an earlier claim that he could not recall receiving the memo and confirmed it had been sent to his office. Adm Mullen said through a spokesman that he had not believed the memo's contents were credible.
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October 10, 2011 7:58 pm
Early on May 9, a week after US Special Forces stormed the hideout of Osama bin Laden and killed him, a senior Pakistani diplomat telephoned me with an urgent request. Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, needed to communicate a message to White House national security officials that would bypass Pakistan's military and intelligence channels. The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Mr Zardari's weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent. He needed an American fist on his army chief's desk to end any misguided notions of a coup – and fast.
Gen Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief, and his troops were demoralised by the embarrassing ease with which US special forces had violated Pakistani sovereignty. Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's feared spy service, was charged by virtually the entire international community with complicity in hiding bin Laden for almost six years. Both camps were looking for a scapegoat; Mr Zardari was their most convenient target.
The diplomat made clear that the civilian government's preferred channel to receive Mr Zardari's message was Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. He was a time-tested friend of Pakistan and could convey the necessary message with force not only to President Barack Obama, but also to Gen Kayani.
In a flurry of phone calls and emails over two days a memorandum was crafted that included a critical offer from the Pakistani president to the Obama administration: "The new national security team will eliminate Section S of the ISI charged with maintaining relations to the Taliban, Haqqani network, etc. This will dramatically improve relations with Afghanistan."
The memo was delivered to Admiral Mullen at 14.00 hours on May 10. A meeting between him and Pakistani national security officials took place the next day at the White House. Pakistan's military and intelligence chiefs, it seems, neither heeded the warning, nor acted on the admiral's advice.
On September 22, in his farewell testimony to the Senate armed services committee, Admiral Mullen said he had "credible intelligence" that a bombing on September 11 that wounded 77 US and Nato troops and an attack on the US embassy in Kabul on September 13 were done "with ISI support."Essentially he was indicting Pakistan's intelligence services for carrying out a covert war against the US – perhaps in retaliation for the raid on bin Laden's compound, perhaps out of strategic national interest to put Taliban forces back in power in Afghanistan so that Pakistan would once again have the "strategic depth" its paranoid security policies against India always envisioned.
Questions about the ISI's role in Pakistan have intensified in recent months. The finger of responsibility in many otherwise inexplicable attacks has often pointed to a shadowy outfit of ISI dubbed "S-Wing", which is said to be dedicated to promoting the dubious agenda of a narrow group of nationalists who believe only they can protect Pakistan's territorial integrity.
The time has come for the state department to declare the S-Wing a sponsor of terrorism under the designation of "foreign governmental organisations". Plans by the Obama administration to blacklist the Haqqani network are toothless and will have no material impact on the group's military support and intelligence logistics; it is S-Wing that allegedly provides all of this in the first place. It no longer matters whether ISI is wilfully blind, complicit or incompetent in the attacks its S-Wing is carrying out. S-Wing must be stopped.
ISI embodies the scourge of radicalism that has become a cornerstone of Pakistan's foreign policy. The time has come for America to take the lead in shutting down the political and financial support that sustains an organ of the Pakistani state that undermines global antiterrorism efforts at every turn. Measures such as stopping aid to Pakistan, as a bill now moving through Congress aims to do, are not the solution. More precise policies are needed to remove the cancer that ISI and its rogue wings have become on the Pakistani state.
Pakistanis are not America's enemies. Neither is their incompetent and toothless civilian government – the one Admiral Mullen was asked to help that May morning. The enemy is a state organ that breeds hatred among Pakistan's Islamist masses and then uses their thirst for jihad against Pakistan's neighbours and allies to sate its hunger for power. Taking steps to reduce its influence over Pakistan's state affairs is a critical measure of the world's willingness to stop the terror masters at their very roots.
The writer is an American of Pakistani ancestry. In 1997 he negotiated Sudan's offer of counter-terrorism assistance to the Clinton administration
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