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Pakistan has sent Maleeha Lodhi to UN with Mission Kashmir

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Ahmar Mustikhan
Ahmar MustikhanMar 16, 2015 | 18:55

Pakistan has sent Maleeha Lodhi to UN with Mission Kashmir

"Pakistan needs to shut down the jihad industry completely," Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador to the US, said at the India Today Conclave 2015 in New Delhi on March 13. "And shutting it down not for India's sake, but for Pakistan's sake."

Haqqani was pointing out that the jihadists have played havoc with Pakistan's political and social fabric. In recent weeks, Haqqani has been quite vocal about Pakistan's flawed jihadi policies and has even called upon Islamabad to shed its Kashmir obsession. Meanwhile, Pakistan's rogue army generals sent one of their "favourite spin doctors" from Lahore, Maleeha Lodhi to New York as Pakistan's permanent representative to the UN to beat the Kashmir drum, with the goal of blocking India's permanent membership at the UN security council. 

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Ambassador Haqqani, 59, has led a colourful and interesting political life, rising from the lower middle class suburbs of Karachi to hold the coveted post of Pakistan ambassador to the US. In an article in the Asia edition of The Wall Street Journal posted on his website, Haqqani, who was top aide to two prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and his chief nemesis the late Benazir Bhutto, publicly admits his political upbringing as an Islamist since he was 12 years old and his later personal bonding with former military dictator general Muhammad Zia ul Haq.

Haqqani was leader of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, IJT, at the University of Karachi, when many opponents, including now London-based MQM chief Altaf Hussain, came under the attack of the Islamist goons. However, the scholar Haqqani, professor at Boston University and South Asia director at Hudson Institute, did atone for his Islamist past by writing the acclaimed book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military in which he exposed how the military-mullah alliance has subverted the growth of democracy in Pakistan.  

Haqqani' services to his countrymen include: Drafting the famous notification that sought to bring the infamous Inter Services Intelligence under civilian control, facilitating the passage of the Kerry-Lugar Bill that shifted the US monies from the military to the civilian sector and tied US aid to human rights situation in Pakistan, committing "treason" against the state by allegedly issuing large number of visas to CIA agents to go to Pakistan to track down Osama bin Laden, and trying to save democracy in Pakistan by allegedly calling for US intervention after the killing of bin Laden, which ensured US President Barack Obama's re-election. For the last two cardinal sins, he was recalled to Islamabad, fired from his job as ambassador to the US and implicated in the Memogate scandal. During that visit to Pakistan in winter 2011, which was his last to date, Haqqani was reportedly in the "jaws of death". The ISI was eavesdropping on every single word he spoke even with former president Asif Ali Zardari while he was holed up in the annex of the prime minister's house in Islamabad as a guest of then premier Yusuf Raza Gilani. Because of his recognised professional skills as a writer, thinker, author and orator, Haqqani was offered an ambassadorial position forever by the "deep state", on the condition that he won't challenge the khakhi powers through his seditious writings, but he scorned the offer as a conscientious objector. 

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There are lots of similarities between Haqqani and Lodhi, who is at least two years older than Haqqani. Both once adored general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, were journalists, wrote or edited books and served as ambassadors under different dispensations. As Haqqani was calling for seeking sanity on Kashmir, Lodhi had landed in New York, according to Pakistan's The Daily Times "for creating a clear line on the Kashmir cause."  

In fact, she arrived in pursuit of the tasks handed to her by army GHQ, after general Raheel Sharif's soft coup. Preparations for her newest stint was ongoing for many months, Lodhi had openly attacked the civilian government of Nawaz Sharif for not mentioning Kashmir in the prime ministerial statement when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Hyderabad House in New Delhi during the inauguration. In a write-up in The News International, she lamented: "In an unfortunate break with tradition, there was no meeting between Kashmiri leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and the prime minister or any member of his delegation." The news of her official "nomination by premier Sharif" on December 15, on the eve of the Peshawar terror attack, stunned Lahore watchers. The city is the hometown of both Lodhi and Sharif - as Lodhi had allegedly played a dirty role in the ouster of Sharif's first civilian government in 1993, when he had famously said he will "not take any dictation" from the army. The "lion of Punjab" is said to have an elephant's memory and does not forgive anyone who causes him harm, if he has an option. Lodhi is no exception.

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After Sharif was sent packing home in fall 1993, Lodhi was sent to the US as ambassador under the Benazir Bhutto government in reward in January 1994. "Dr Maleeha Lodhi always had terrible relations with Sharif," said Arif Jamal, author of Call for Transnational Jihad: Lashkar-e-Taiba 1985-2014, who was her colleague in The News International. "She was part of an army conspiracy to remove Nawaz Sharif's first government as she published an Urdu poem in the English newspaper The News International that asked then army chief Asif Nawaz to step in to remove his government."

Sharif was apparently furious with Lodhi and had requested treason charges against her and demanded of the Jang newspaper owners, her employers, to fire her. "Sharif has always looked upon Lodhi as a pawn in the hands of the army generals. Whatever she will be doing at the UN will reflect the GHQ policy, not the civilian government's policy as she represents the men in uniform," Jamal, who now lives in New Jersey and is a fierce critic of Pakistan army's jihadi politics, said.  

In fact, Lodhi has had very close relationships with army chiefs and ISI chiefs for a quarter century, from generals Asif Nawaz and ISI chief lieutenant-general "missionary" Javed Nasir, to the "alcoholic" Pervez Musharraf, to Raheel Sharif and the present ISI chief lieutenant-general Rizwan Akhtar, and almost all generalissimos in between, for a quarter century. Even before her journalism career, she is said to have written in praise for the army and general Zia-ul-Haq while she was still a student in England. These generalissimos are real arbiters of Pakistan's destiny and the main culprits behind all the woes that have befallen its 180 million people, including repeated military misrule, extra- and supra-constitutional measures against democracy and rule of law, plus the unending bloodshed in Kashmir, Afghanistan and Balochistan as the generals pursue their strategic depth policy against India. 

Before her departure from Islamabad, praise for Lodhi came from a blue-eyed boy of the Pakistani defence establishment, Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is regarded as one of her chief mentors since their days as journalists at The Muslim newspaper. Unlike India where the press adopts an independent line, the military and the media in Pakistan have been in a state of unending romance when it comes to India in general and Kashmir in particular since the 1947 Partition holocaust and the Pakistan invasion of Kashmir two months later. "Pakistan media loves its army, and the army loves the media too," said Karachi journalist Saeed Sarbazi, who now lives in exile in Germany. Lodhi and Sayed have always dreamed about becoming the foreign minister of Pakistan, according to Islamabad journalists who have known them for long. Lodhi replaced Sayed as editor of The Muslim after he had chaperoned veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayyar to an interview with father of the Islamic bomb, AQ Khan.

Lodhi has arrived in New York with the military's grandiose designs with regards to Kashmir. Beni Prasad Agarwal, professor of political science and former Indian ambassador to Lebanon, Greece and Bulgaria, said from New Delhi the point to remember for Maleeha Lodhi is that Kashmir has only four million Muslims, while India as a whole has more than 140 million Muslims. "The future of the 140 million is linked to Kashmir remaining in India. It is a part of India de jure and de facto. Only the POK, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, has to be restored to India for the good of all," Professor Agarwal, who is also president of Association of Asian Union & Asia-Pacific Cooperation, said in an electronic communication.

"Operator and wheeler-dealer are labels Pakistani observers frequently affix to this woman, sometimes in envy," according to The Los Angeles Times, which reported that Lodhi's elder brother Amir Lodhi "was a globe-trotting liaison for the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose collapse caused losses to depositors in excess of $10 billion." The name of Amir Lodhi, whose home in Paris was raided by French police, was mentioned in the US and there was another media connection with high profile arms purchase scandals: Agosta submarines that shook the government of Nicholas Sarkozy and claimed the lives of 11 Frenchmen on the streets of Karachi, the Mirage deal and the return of the stuck monies that Pakistan paid for purchase of the F-16 warplanes to the US. His sister vehemently denies any wrong doing just like Pakistani generals deny they have ever harmed its politics, even if the country's political corpse defies a post mortem because of the rottenness of the cadaver.

One question that lingers on is how much the world can trust what the Pakistan generalissimos and their envoy Lodhi say. "They will find no safe haven, no sanctuary in Pakistan," Maleeha Lodhi told Wolf Blitzer of the CNN on December 19, 2001 about the Taliban, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden moving to Pakistan as the US embarked on Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

It is now widely known that her former boss Musharraf's bosom buddy retired lieutenant general Nadeem Taj, a former ISI chief and adjutant general at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, played a key role in providing sanctuary to bin Laden next door to the academy. Unlike the past when even then Indian ambassador Lalit Mansingh attended Lodhi's farewell reception in July 2002, this time around she will likely cut a lonely figure and will be missing her best friend Robin L Raphel, former assistant secretary of state, who is under investigation for possible links with the Pakistan spy masters - the same people who have dispatched Lodhi to New York for her latest round of politicking.

For more than two decades, Lodhi and Raphel worked wonders for all the bloody games the Pakistan generals played in Kashmir and Afghanistan and were behind President Bill Clinton's most controversial statement that the US shared Pakistan's "concerns on human rights abuses in Kashmir" from the Oval Office when he received Lodhi's credentials.

Last updated: March 16, 2015 | 18:55
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