Winding up a foreign policy debate in the Senate, Shah Mahmood Qureshi said that foreign policy of a country reflect its ‘strategic interests’, which do not change every other day. Thus he ruled out chances of a drastic change in Pakistan’s foreign policy under the new government. Senators taking part in the discussion had earlier suggested that there was a need to make the policy more realistic and improve the country’s image. Nevertheless, the foreign minister was keen to point out that the government will not allow any foreign troops to operate inside Pakistan nor would it rely on use of force to deal with the militants “we want to follow the path of negotiations to sort out a permanent solution of the problem”, he said. He also claimed that the government wanted to win the hearts and minds of the people in the tribal belts and that is why it had initiated a dialogue process with the militants, but what he added thereafter was rather doubtful. “The US supports our dialogue initiative,” he said. On the question of bargaining with the Americans he said that they were not a party to what transpired between the Americans and Musharraf regime, as they were away from scene for the past eleven years but the prevailing situation was a reflection of how good or bad was the bargain with the Americans. Then he said the usual thing that every new government was obliged to reaffirm time and again -- ‘We will not sell our national interests’.
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi laid extra emphasis on what he called ‘peace, stability and improvement of country’ deterrence which he said was necessary to avoid ‘foreign aggression’. And not surprisingly, he concurred with what President Musharraf had all along been trying to highlight that the country was facing more ‘internal challenges’ than external, and thus the imperative of building national consensus to deal with the situation. “If there was internal unity, we could face external challenges’ the foreign minister said. Spelling out his foreign policy priorities, he outlined, Kashmir, war against terrorism, economic diplomacy, Pak-US cooperation, regional integration and Pak-China relations as important areas. He promised to resume and speed up the India-Pakistan composite dialogue process, as he acknowledged like his predecessors, the need to move towards making the region ‘peace-loving and free from poverty, hunger and ignorance’. And as he vowed to take the parliament into confidence on foreign policy matters, he announced a rather ambitious plan to undertake a ‘five-year development plan’ under which two ‘tasks forces’ have been set up to make the foreign policy more practical and more acceptable to the wishes of the people. A task force, he told the Senate, has been assigned the task of improving country’s image abroad, and the other would focus on ‘economic diplomacy’ as an effective instrument of foreign policy.
Foreign Minister Qureshi discourse was preceded by a two-day debate in the Senate in which several speakers from both sides of the house participated. The upshot of what most of them said was a call to review “Pro-US foreign policy chartered by military-led establishment”. The Senators from Islamic parties demanded that Pakistan should withdraw from the US-led war against terror, while others called for following a policy independent of American dictation, in particular initiatives to end Pro-Taliban militancy in the tribal areas. Although Senators from the former ruling party had words of praise for Musharraf, regarding the foreign policy they asked for a ‘change for the better’. Interestingly enough chairman Senates Foreign relations committee (who is still Secretary General of the QML) accused the foreign office of following a ‘doctrine of necessity’ vis-à-vis ties with Washington, and urged Islamabad never to accept American attacks from Afghanistan on Pakistan territory, The independence of foreign office to formulate country’s foreign policy in accordance with the national interest and the wishes of the people.
The foreign minister was lucky to escape what could have been a more damaging critique of foreign policy and the foreign office role in it. For instance it could have been said that the foreign policy was not formulated in Islamabad, but its direction came from Washington, and the foreign office has been more or less functioning as a ‘post office’ whose main job has been to sort out input made by the GHQ, or in particular the ISI whose understanding has been for years considered the last word on areas like Kashmir, Afghanistan or nuclear programme. Thus, the first task before the foreign minister is to liberate the Foreign Office from the bondage of the military establishment.