YouSaid · the spoken record

Husain Haqqani

lines on the record: 62
first: 2015-12-21
most recent: 2015-12-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I was detained for several days. Then eventually they implicated me in some of the investigations. They said they were doing in Bhutto and her husband's corruption. And I was moved to a facility that was not the regular prison, but it was like for political prisoners a former British error rest house, rickety rest house converted into a detention facility. I stayed there for about two and a half months, and then the high court, my lawyers had taken the habeas corpus petition, went all the way, and the high court said they had to set me free, so I was set free.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“with my brother in a car. It was very scary at that time, but right now I can laugh about it because these goons surrounded the car, came open the doors, put both of us brothers in blankets, and took us in separate cars. Now my brother was a colonel in the Pakistani army, so they couldn't keep him. They realized that. And so they let him off several miles away, pretending they didn't know who had taken him. I was taken somewhere. I remember being taken into a basement, being stripped naked, hung upside down for a little while just to throw me off balance, kicked and hit a few times. And basically they wanted me to make some kind of statement accusing Benjamin Butov and her husband of all kinds of corruption, etc., which I refused.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we will. We will come to that. So, what happened in 1999 was that the military did this Car Gill thing. Sharif was feeling under a lot of pressure. Bhutto was demanding his resignation because he had already tested nuclear weapons, but he wasn't delivering at home. And Buto had gone into exile. She'd gone to exile in Benazir Bhutto had gone to Dubai. And she called me up and she asked me to come to Dubai for consultations. First they barred me from leaving the country, which is something they do in Pakistan. They get a court order saying this person is under suspicion of this, that or the other, so he can't leave the country till that process is complete. And then they basically what they did was the intelligence service thought I'm too clever for them in that sense that I might actually be able to slip out so they kidnapped me like I'm driving in the middle of Ralpindi.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was the end of Sharif's first or second. Sharif's second stint as Prime Minister, and that was in 1999. And you might remember that the Cargill crisis had happened, Pakistan had started a war. Sharif later on claimed that he wasn't part of the plan, that the military had started it without his permission. You must understand Pakistan is very different. I don't want to get to that. The military is the real”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that point I kind of broke with him. And when I broke with him he said to me Look Hussein and this is how my second career or third career as a journalist, as a diplomat started, he said Look you and I have been close I want a interregnum between your breaking with me publicly and having been my biggest voice and I propose I was thirty two at that time I proposed that you go to Sri Lanka as ambassador so it's a nice little sinecure spend a year or two and then you can come back and do whatever you like politically we are done but I want to do it gracefully and I thought that was a reasonable option so I went off to Sri Lanka as ambassador came back and this time I came back to run Benazir Bhutto's campaign against Sharif in nineteen ninety three which brought her back to office and then Butto and I of course have a close association that goes all the way to”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work with the military with that. Well Soon after he came to office he appointed me his special assistant in a very American style appointment. I am doing things for him, etc. But then I realized that like a lot of people on the right, he kind of lost the focus on building a democracy first, which is what the idea was, and he went into persecuting Bhutto, but more important than that.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Sharif had been reading my stuff and so I was making a case for Pakistan transitioning to democracy. And Sharif made the argument which at that time seemed very plausible, he said to me that Binadir Bhutto has returned from abroad, and she is basically seen as the opponent of the army. And if the army sort of, if she wins an election overwhelmingly without a civilian alternative, then it'll be civilians versus army. So I need to be the civilian alternative to Buddha. And I thought that was an appealing argument.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I finished university and there was in 1979 the Iranian Revolution had happened and there was a search at least by some publications for Muslims who could write in English. And one of these was a new magazine that was being launched from London about Middle Eastern affairs and they said and I used to write, I used to publish in Pakistani newspapers and somebody has shown them a couple of pieces of my samples of my writing and they thought it's good he writes well so it was one of those lucky things, you know. It's my last day at university and I get a letter in the mail saying would you like to be to work for this publication? And if you would fill out these forms and we'll consider you so for an interview and the interview took place a few days later and I went off to Hong Kong as their correspondent for East Asia.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, absolutely. But then the story moves forward. So I'm now, by the time I get to college, I'm part of the Islamic students group. But my curiosity keeps me asking questions about is that the best way forward for our country, etc. We've had military dictatorship, so the whole thing was here I was reading all this about working democracies, living under a military dictatorship. And so I thought, you know, no, we need democracy like others. And to cut a long story short that got me involved, I started my career as a journalist and then when we finally had the end of the Zia military regime, we were having elections and a man called Nawasharif, who's currently the Prime Minister of Pakistan, sought me out because I was the journalist who wrote in both languages. There were very few Pakistani journalists who wrote both in Urdu newspapers and in English and who wrote in foreign newspapers as well. I wrote for American papers as early as the early 80s.”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There in my spare time started browsing through apart from doing studies for my school, I started browsing through at things and I remember reading a magazine called The National Review and I found Bill Buckley's writing very interesting but then I wanted to know what people who do not agree with him say and so by the time it was nineteen sixty eight and I was about you know in middle school I was following American politics and”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, where karachi can be like Chicago if Chicago had grown from 400,000 to 4 million within a year, Chicago would be Karachi, which is where I was born. You know, Karachi was a small city of 400,000 people, and then India got partitioned, and all the refugees ended up in Karachi, and it went from a population of 400,000 in 1947 to a population of four million, just like by 1951. So that's what happened to Karachi. But anyway, so that's how it happened. I got interested in politics. As I grew, I had a curious mind. So it used to be very hard. I used to go to something called the American Library. Americans in those days thought it was valuable to try and recruit friends by just appealing to their reason. So they built these air-conditioned libraries in third world countries. It was the only air conditioned library I could go to to study. So while I was there,”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So actually I came into politics in a very interesting way. I was born poor and in our neighborhood what happened was I was about eleven or twelve and the drains all got clogged and there was nobody doing anything about it. And so this 11, 12 year old kid was very agitated about it and started sort of looking for people who will help figure out what to do about it. And that's how I discovered there's something called local government and there was a guy who actually was our representative and I found him and he belonged to one of the Islamic parties and he was a very kind man, very nice little accountant. So he helped me solve that problem and then he kind of recruited me into political work. So as a very young boy I was like a”
2015-12-21 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 18 - Husain Haqqani · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source