Nawaz Sharif meets top aides to douse row with Pakistan army: Media
LAHORE: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has met his top ministers and aides to discuss options before the government to defuse a simmering civil-military row over a leaked report that had angered the army, according to media reports on Monday.
The meeting in Lahore on Sunday followed Pakistan’s military rejecting Sharif ’s move to sack his top aide and Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs Tariq Fatemi. The military had demanded full implementation of recommendations by a committee which probed a story in the newspaper last October of a meeting at which civilian leaders confronted the military over its alleged reluctance to halt extremist groups in the country.
In this connection, the Sharif government is considering to either formally withdraw the contentious notification or to unofficially discard it and issue a separate ‘comprehensive’ notification through the interior ministry, the
quoted sources privy to meeting as saying.
Finance Minister Ishaq Dar, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Fawad Hassan Fawad - whose signature was on the notification in question — and Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and his son Hamza Shahbaz were part of the low-key consultative huddle in Lahore, the report said.
Ruling party sources close to Nawaz said Nisar was unhappy with the issuance of the notification by the Prime Minister’s Office.
They said the interior minister, who was directly dealing with the Dawn Leaks issue, felt he was ‘bypassed’ by Sharif ’s secretary to issue the notification.
Sharif ’s aides told Nisar that the security establishment’s disappointment over the notification stemmed mainly from the fact that it was issued by Fawad, whose own role is being questioned in the Dawn leaks episode, the report said.
On Saturday, the head of the military’s media wing had tweeted the defence establishment’s disapproval of the Prime Minister’s directives, prompting Chaudhry Nisar to observe at a press conference that “institutions don’t talk to each other (over Twitter)”. In October, a columnist for
wrote a front-page story about a rift between civilian and military leaderships over militant groups.
“In a blunt, orchestrated and unprecedented warning, the civilian government has informed the military leadership of a growing international isolation of Pakistan and sought consensus on several key actions by the state,” the report had said.