Inside Pakistan's 'Memogate'

“This FT op-ed of yours is a disaster,” read a BlackBerry message to me on the night of Oct. 10. The sender, Husain Haqqani, was still Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington at the time. Earlier in the evening, the Financial Times had posted my column—“Time to Take On Pakistan’s Jihadist Spies”—on its website, unleashing a political firestorm in Pakistan over my disclosure of a memorandum Haqqani had asked me to help him prepare and deliver to Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the memorandum, Haqqani asked the admiral for help in calming Pakistan’s restive Army chief as fears of an alleged coup whipped through Islamabad in the tense days that followed Osama bin Laden’s death in a Pakistani garrison town. In return, he offered the United States nothing short of a wholesale paradigm shift in Pakistani governance that would transfer essential powers from the Army to civilian leaders, giving Pakistan the veneer of civilian legitimacy that has eluded it since partition from India.