ISLAMABAD, Jan 25: The long-awaited plan of the Foreign Office for postings in 13 world capitals, including important stations like Riyadh, Tehran, Canberra and Doha, is finally out. However, there are no surprises for anyone, except for the naive who don’t know that in the country’s diplomatic headquarters merit is not the only factor that counts.

Ideally these appointments should have been made late last year and by now the ambassadors should have had their agreemas (diplomatic consent) from their host countries in their hands. But the postings got delayed due to the “political factor” involved.

However, what can be said with surety is that the final shape of the plan was certainly not the same as the one that had left the foreign secretary’s desk for the foreign minister’s office sometime in December.

From the ambassadorial appointments that were announced one could infer that being an outstanding officer was not sufficient to be appointed. One also required a military background or at least a Multan connection.

A breakdown of the 19 top diplomatic appointments shows that eight officers posted at headquarters were made ambassadors; another eight diplomats, already serving abroad, were reshuffled; two envoys got extensions; and one political posting was made.

Political appointments and extensions were always made on political considerations, similarly reshuffling is more or less a routine rotation, but what make the favouritism story really intriguing are the new postings.

Four of the eight new appointees are ex-service men, who long ago after getting disenchanted with their uniformed jobs, opted for foreign service. The fifth belongs to Multan and two others have been close aides of the two topmost Multanites -- Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.

Without discrediting the professional accomplishments and qualifications of the newly-selected envoys, many of these appointments have caused doubts that the foreign service, widely believed to be operated on merit, isn’t fair anymore.

The cause of this cynicism among the diplomatic service officers is that not only ‘first in-first out’ policy was dumped, but many of the new envoys haven’t completed their mandatory two years stay at the headquarters either before being assigned a new mission.

Officers who have spent lesser time at the headquarters than special secretary Haroon Shaukat, additional secretary Hasan Javed, spokesman Abdul Basit and chief of protocol Ghalib Iqbal, all of whom have been left out, managed to get ambassadorial positions.

One glaring instance was that of Anayatullah Kakar nominated for Baku (Azerbaijan) posting. Mr Kakar, who served at the National Assembly/Senate Affairs section -- something that gave him a chance to interact more closely with the foreign minister -- would be proceeding for new assignment after having only served at the headquarters for six months. He, however, clearly fell short of the record set by one of his colleagues earlier, who became envoy after just three months stay at the headquarters prior to becoming an envoy.

Additional Secretary Administration Ishtiaq Andarabi, posted to Riyadh, bagged one of the most coveted assignments with less than two years stay in Islamabad before the new appointment. Same goes for director general (headquarters) Sarfraz Khanzada -- the envoy designate for Doha. Both the officers have military background. The other two appointees having military services history are Amjad Majeed Abbasi (ambassador designate for Damascus) and Khalid Aziz Babar (ambassador designate for Tehran).

Director General (South Asia) Afrasiab Mehdi Hashmi (posted to Dhaka), Maalik Abdullah (the new high commissioner in Canberra) and Muhammad Aslam (Algiers) are the other officers moving out from the headquarters. Mr Hashmi hails from Multan, while Mr Abdullah was the prime ministerial aide on foreign relations being the Foreign Office representative in Mr Gilani’s office.

It appears quite out of the ordinary and certainly not a coincidence that the entire brass of the FO’s administration division, which technically makes all these postings, not only got ambassadorships, but probably the deepest purple of plum assignments.

Among those reshuffled include Ambassador Tasneem Aslam who has been posted in Rabat, Ambassador Humaira Hassan in Brasilia, Ambassador Jauhar Saleem (Manama), Rizwan-ul-Haq Mahmood (Copenhagen), Ghulam Dastagir (Tripoli), Muhammad Salim (Havana), Ambassador Raisani (Muscat) and Amjad Siyal (Dushanbe).

Gen (retd) Jafari is the lone political appointee in this list and has been nominated as ambassador to Bosnia. The two envoys, who have been given extensions, are Masood Khan (Beijing) and Shafkat Saeed (Paris). Interestingly, two important European capitals Rome and Madrid have been left unassigned.

Nepotism and favouritism isn’t the case only in ambassadorial postings at the FO. It is allegedly happening in all appointments be that of junior diplomats or low-ranking cadres.

An exception was recently created in case of a junior diplomat, Tipu Usman, who was transferred directly from his first foreign posting in Europe to a second posting in Turkey. The normal practice is to post diplomats back to headquarters after their first overseas assignment.

A few months earlier Consul General in New York Faqir Syed Asif Hussain got a consecutive second stint in the US even though he had defied previous transfer orders from the ministry and refused to move either Ankara or Tehran.