Book Review of MEMORIES & REFLECTIONS OF A PAKISTANI DIPLOMAT by Sultan M. Khan (2nd. revised edition, 2007].





The Foreign Service has always been a second choice, a career option often for a younger son or, as happened during the mid 1940s in India, for demi- or dispossessed royalty. Kunwar Natwar Singh (later Foreign Secretary of India) belonged to the royal house of Baharatpur, our own Prince Shahryar Khan was from Bhopal, and his earlier predecessor as Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary – Sultan Muhammad Khan – being a cousin of its ruler came from the tiny, 700 square mile Central Indian state of Jaora.


Sultan M. Khan’s 'Memories & Reflections of a Pakistani Diplomat' are a bitter-sweet recollection of the twenty-nine years he spent representing the country he opted for in June 1947, despite being interviewed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (then the de facto Interim Prime Minister) for the Indian Political Service.


Inevitably, such memoirs run the course of a chronology of the author’s career, in this case from the time he joined the incipient Pakistani High Commission in Delhi, his movement to the fledgling headquarters located in those green days in Mohatta Palace at Clifton in Karachi, through postings in Cairo, Rome, Beijing, Ankara, London and then as High Commissioner in Canada, before returning to Beijing as the Pakistan’s Ambassador in June 1966.


But diplomacy, as any foreign service novice will tell you, is not about representing your own country but about understanding your hosts, and out of all the numerous ambassadors Pakistan has sent to China - its most allied of eastern allies – none has ever achieved such a sensitive understanding of China, of its history, its tortuous emergence as a communist kingdom into the 20th century, and above all of its sage leadership, than Sultan M. Khan.


From a unique vantage point of privileged familiarity with Premier Zhou Enlai, Mr Khan reciprocated Zhou’s mandarin subtlety with a South Asian regal finesse. Anxious to present his credentials soon after his arrival as Ambassador in June 1966, Mr Khan was nevertheless made to wait. After ten days, he resorted to the stratagem of calling a meeting of his subordinates in the Embassy to whom he complained about the delay, which would inevitably be interpreted as a sign of cooling in Sino-Pak relations. The very next morning, Mr Khan was informed by the Chief of Protocol that he was invited to present his credentials to President Liu Shaoqi the following day.


Mr Sultan M. Khan spent two and a half years between June 1996 and December 1969 in Beijing as Pakistan’s Ambassador, and it was during this period that he endured, as every resident of Beijing had to (including Zhou Enlai himself) the raucous mayhem of the in-disciplined Red Guards, unleashed by Chairman Mao Zedong on his own revolution.


On one occasion, Mr Khan reported the desecration of a mosque in China to Zhou Enlai. The Chinese premier remained silent for a while, and then replied that ‘out of fourteen of his vice premiers, eight had been spirited away by the Red Guards and he was trying to locate them and get them released. He could not say when this would be possible. In other words, he was admitting the limitations of his own authority.’


And when on another occasion, Mr Khan complained about the ceaseless barrage of propaganda broadcast by the Red Guards near the Embassy, Premier Zhou visited the Pakistan Embassy and over dinner said that the Ambassador should visit the area where he lived. ‘It was ringed by groups of Red Guards who were camping there, and each group had its loudspeaker which was active non-stop for twenty-four hours of a day.’ Even Zhou Enlai could not stop them.’


The good that Premier Zhou Enlai did for China lives after him, and he comes alive again in the pen-portrait Mr Khan etches of him as a ‘very exceptional person, a rare combination of a revolutionary, military leader, outstanding administrator, negotiator, diplomat and very sophisticated, suave person,’ adding that he ‘combined physical grace with a razor-sharp intellect and … a man of great sensitivity and compassion.’


Like any truly busy leader, Zhou Enlai appeared to have all the time in the world for whoever was in front of him at the time. During their innumerable meetings, Mr Khan noticed that ‘the room in which we were meeting had no clock, no aides came in bringing messages, [he] never looked at his watch, and the phone by his side never rang.’


The strength of any ambassador is that he is the apex representative of his country. The weakness of every ambassador (no matter how competent he may be) is the government he represents. No one was more aware of this dichotomy than Mr Sultan M. Khan, for during his service he found himself serving civilian and military governments, democrats and autocrats, and having to defend them all.


One can sympathise even today with his sense of exasperation at shoals of delegations descending on him and making demands that ranged from the petulant to the impossible. Shopping and a meeting with Zhou Enlai for Begum Shahnawaz or the front cover story in Time or Newsweek (preferably both) for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The lists were endless, appetites insatiable, and disappointments fatal to one’s career.


Mr Sultan Khan closed his with a second tenure as Ambassador to Washington, this time under President General Ziaul Haq. Earlier, he had been there during Nixon’s time and enjoyed a rare accessibility to Dr Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor. The 1971 crisis over East Pakistan had begun to boil and spill over into the international arena. Nixon titled towards Yahya Khan and West Pakistan, and the State Department backed India and by association the nascent Bangladesh. As Sultan Khan recalls of one meeting with State Department officials: ‘Shortly afterwards, Dr Kissinger also dropped in, and much to the annoyance of State Dept. officials, asked to speak to me alone and made it plain that his talks with me were not to be known to the State Dept.’ With such dubious support, it is not surprising that we won the battle for the White House but lost the war fro East Pakistan.


Sir Anthony Eden, as consummate a British Foreign Secretary as he was a failure when Prime Minister, was once asked by a reporter what would be the impact of Stalin’s death on international politics. His response was: ‘That is a good question for you to ask, not a wise question for me to answer.’


No wonder bureaucrats and politicians and diplomats wait until they retire before providing the answers that Mr Sultan M. Khan does with such insight, flair and benign humour in this remarkable memoir.








Printed in DAWN Books & Authors, 10 June 2007.