Dispute in Pak over authenticity of source document of US media report

The authenticity of the purported text of a secret diplomatic cable, detailing a meeting held last year between Pakistan's then-ambassador to the US and senior State Department officials, seems to have become a massive bone of contention, a media report said on Saturday.

While Pakistan's Foreign Office has refrained from commenting on the leaks, an artfully diplomatic comment by US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller during a recent briefing has piqued interest in the question of the purported leak's provenance.

US-based news outlet The Intercept, which earlier this week reproduced what it claimed was the cipher in question, said in its report that the document was provided to it by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan's party.

 

However, many people mostly Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party chief Imran Khan's critics insist that the leak could only have come from the PTI.

Khan, 70, is currently serving a three-year jail term after he was sentenced by a court in a corruption case last week.

The purported cipher (secret diplomatic cable) contained an account of a meeting between US State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Pakistani envoy Asad Majeed Khan last year.

Even the outgoing foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, believes that the document published by The Intercept was inauthentic. Pointing to the timing of the purported leak, he told the Dawn newspaper that the military did not even have access to the diplomatic cable. The Foreign Office follows a very strict protocol and shares such cables only with the prime minister, the foreign minister, the head of the country's spy agency, and a few others, Bhutto-Zardari said, adding that all cables are then returned to the Foreign Office.

Bhutto-Zardari also echoed the suspicions voiced by this cabinet colleague outgoing interior minister Rana Sanaullah saying that only one copy of the cable had gone missing, the one given to the then PM (Imran Khan), who even told the media he lost it.

So, either the leak is fake, or it came from (Imran). Perhaps, Khan said to his supporters that if I go to jail, leak this cable to claim I went to jail because America wanted it. And if it came from him, then it's a clear violation of the Official Secrets Act and he should be tried for it.

Bhutto-Zardari also noted that the publishers had not shown anything so far to authenticate the purported leak.

Anything can be typed up on a piece of paper. No one can say what was there in the telegram and what was not. Without authentication, it does not have any value. It should be verified first, he said.

According to Miller, It is not in any way the US government expressing a preference on who the leadership of Pakistan ought to be.

During a briefing held after the publication of The Intercept story, when a journalist asked whether the spokesperson was saying that the substance of this report was accurate, but it did not represent US views, Miller responded with: Close-ish.

Describing the close-ish comment as a diplomatic term of art, the journalist asked him what it meant.

I'll explain what I mean by that, which is I cannot speak to the veracity of this document. What I can say (is that) even if those comments were hundred per cent accurate as reported, which I do not know them to be they do not in any way show a representative of the State Department taking a position on who the leadership ought to be, Miller said.

In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), George Mason University associate professor Ahsan I. Butt also notes that the cipher does not suggest the US was pushing for regime change, only that it would be happy/happier when it happened. There is a significant difference between those positions.

In addition, Pakistan's former ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, also tweeted: How does a US diplomat telling a Pakistani diplomat that my government does not like your prime minister & relations might improve once he goes, constitute pressure to remove' him? [And] what is the threat?

Even Michael Kugelman, the Wilson Centre's outspoken Pakistan scholar, noted that the document merely proves what's already been reported: The US said ties with Pakistan would improve if Khan lost power.

As for the PTI's claim that Washington orchestrated last year's no-confidence vote that ousted Khan, Bhutto-Zardari told Dawn: On January 5, 2022, we discussed the long march and the vote of no confidence at our central executive committee. I announced the planned vote at my long march (held between February 25 and March 7), and on March 8 we moved the no-confidence motion.

He said the plan to table the no-trust vote had already been made public and was discussed in the Pakistani media long before Donald Lu met Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan. So, it could not have been a conspiracy, as it was already public knowledge, he added.

Khan was ousted by the National Assembly after he lost a vote of no confidence in April 2022, a development he alleged that Washington got involved in after he visited Moscow and met Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Asked if the leaked cable could influence voters in the forthcoming elections, the outgoing foreign minister said: Those who trust this narrative will vote for it. Those who do not, they will not.

The leaked document, he said, could give the PTI narrative a second wind before it dies down again.

"While the text of the cable the veracity of which has not been denied either by the US or Pakistani authorities does not strengthen the PTI's narrative that a grand conspiracy was hatched to dislodge it from power, it does speak of the massive power imbalance between Washington and Islamabad, with the former using a tone more suited to an imperial overlord threatening his vassals," the Dawn newspaper said in an editorial.