Husain Haqqani

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Husain Haqqani is the current Pakistani ambassador to the United States. He was formerly the director of the Center for International Relations and an associate professor at Boston University, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-chair of Hudson Institute’s Project on Islam and Democracy" and a scholar with Hudson's Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. [1]

Background

Haqqani "has previously served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka, and as a political advisor to Pakistani prime ministers Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, Nawaz Sharif, and Benazir Bhutto." [2]

"He has contributed to numerous international publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Financial Times. He regularly comments on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Islamic politics and extremism on BBC, C-Span, CNN, NBC, Fox News and ABC. He has also written and spoken extensively on U.S. relations with the Muslim world." [3]

Neocon Nexus

Haqqani is presently a co-Chair at the Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World established at the Hudson Institute by the neoconservative Hillel Fradkin.

Previously he has collaborated with another neocon pundit, Stephen Schwartz on the Institute for Islamic Progress and Peace, a project of the notorious Islamophobe Daniel Pipes[1]. While on a tour Schwartz to promote the think tank, both were reported attacking mainstream American Muslim organizations. They claimed that "[e]xtremists dominate all of the major Muslim advocacy groups". According to the Cleveland Jewish News, Haqqani said:

There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world and only 18% of them are Arabs, Haqqani points out. In the U.S., only 200,000 of the 4 million Muslims are Arabs. Furthermore, only one-third of the Arabs in the U.S. are Muslim. A little more than half of one percent of American Muslims are Palestinian.
"Yet Muslim leadership in America focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its core issue,"...

Haqqani and Schwartz then went on to say:

The Jewish lobby has to organize, write letters, and continue to contribute to politicians to counter the Saudi lobby, which has extraordinary influence in Washington [4]

Hosting anti-Iran fundraiser for a Neocon think-tank

In December 2010, Foreign Policy magazine revealed that Husain Haqqani had used the Pakistani embassy in Washington to host an anti-Iran fundraiser for the ultra-hawkish neoconservative think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. As part of FDD's "Countering the Iran Threat" conference, attendees at the fundraiser were made to pay $5000 a head and were treated to 'brief remarks' by Haqqani among others. Embassy officials denied that the event reflected official policy and suggested that the facilities were being used toward personal end. In a diplomatically worded statement embassay spokesman Imran Gardezi told Foreign Policy: "It was just a coincidence that this happened like this because the Ambassador has his personal friends."[2]

Affiliations

Books

  • Husain Haqqani, America's new alliance with Pakistan: Avoiding the traps of the past (Policy brief), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 1, 2002. ASIN B0006S10M8
  • Husain Haqqani, Pakistan Between Mosque and Military, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 2005. ISBN 0870032143
  • Hillel Fradkin, Husain Haqqani, "Islamism and Terrorism: The Ideological Dimension", Introduction to Current Trends in Islamist Ideology vol. 1, Hudson Institute, May 19th, 2005.
  • Husain Haqqani, "The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups", in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology vol. 1, Hudson Institute, May 19, 2005
  • Hillel Fradkin, Husain Haqqani, "Islamism and Terrorism: The Ideological Dimension", Forward, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology vol. 2, Hudson Institute, September 12, 2005.
  • Husain Haqqani, "India's Islamist Groups", in Current Trends in Islamist Ideology vol. 3, Hudson Institute, February 16, 2006.

Contact details

Pakistani Embassy

Washington, DC

Email: haqqani AT bu.edu

External links

  1. *Jim Lobe, "US: From nation-building to religion-building," Asia Times, April 9, 2004
  2. Ali Gharib, Pakistani Ambassador hosted fundraiser for neocon think-tank, Foreign Policy, 10 December 2010

Biographical Profiles

Articles by Haqqani

General Articles