Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri

Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri (Urdu: خورشيد محمود قصورى; born 18 June 1941), is a Pakistani politician and writer who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan between November 2002 until November 2007.

He is the Senior Advisor on Political and International Affairs and Chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's Task Force on Kashmir and a member of the Core Committee of the Party.

He is also the author of 'Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove'.

He was born in Lahore, Punjab.

After getting educated at the Punjab University, Kasuri later studied law at Cambridge and was subsequently admitted as a barrister at the Gray's Inn.

He also went on to study French at Nice.

He started his political career with the Tehreek-e-Istaqlal (TI) led by Air-Marshal Muhammad Asghar Khan.

The TI was then the main opposition party.

He rose to be its Secretary-General.

Kasuri is an ethnic Mian Arain family, he completed his high school in St Patrick's High School, Karachi, and got accepted at the Government College University but later took a transfer to the Punjab University where he earned a BA with Honors in international relations, in 1961.

Throughout his academic career he had a uniformly excellent record, which culminated earning first position in the B.A E (Hons) examination of the Punjab University in 1961.

He left the foreign office to join the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in 1981 and was subsequently arrested.

He briefly left the Foreign Office (FO) in 1981 and joined the Independence Movement to step into national politics.

He was quickly elevated as the Secretary-General of the Tehrik-e-Istiqlal (lit. Independence Movement).

He was subsequently arrested on innumerable occasions during his long struggle for democracy.

After the military government of Zia-ul-Haq went back on its promise to hold general elections in the country, leading political parties got together under the banner of the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) for the purpose of holding general elections, restoration of fundamental rights of the citizens, removal of restrictions placed on the free functioning of the press and the establishment of an independent judiciary.

He was arrested on numerous occasions for taking part in a movement launched by the political parties in February 1981 for the achievement of the above objectives.

In 1983, he departed from the country in opposition response to Zia's purge and started his academic career in France.

He briefly return in 1988 after the mysterious death of Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash and joined the Foreign service office after being requested by his peers.

In 1990, he again joined the foreign ministry and guided Pakistan Muslim League on foreign policies issues.

He was also elected as the Secretary-General of the main opposition alliance, the Pakistan Democratic Alliance in 1993.

He went to prison on several occasions when Bhutto and General Zia ul Haq were in power for his opposition to both.

He won a seat in Pakistan's National Assembly as member from NA-142 (Kasur-V) in 1993 and later in 1997 and served on the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Relations.

He took first public participation in 1993 general elections on a Pakistan Muslim League (PML) platform, and was a provisional vice-president of PML, and successfully defended his constituency, NA-106: Kasur (now NA-142) in the 1997 general elections.

He was subsequently appointed as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Media Development (PSCIMD) and was also a senior member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Relations (PSCFR).

In 1996, he presided over the party delegation and visited the People's Republic of China (PRC).

This delegation was invited by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was received by the top leadership of the CCP.

He was elected to the National Assembly in 1997 and 2002.

He was elected as Chairman of the Standing Committee on Information and Media Development.

He has also attended the Inter-Parliamentary Union conferences held in Seoul and in Cairo in 1997 as a chairman of the Pakistan Parliamentary Delegations.

In 1998, he publicly endorsed for Prime minister Nawaz Sharif's decision for atomic tests (See: Chagai-I and Chagai-II) and was appointed as Prime Minister's Special Envoy (PMSE) to present his country's point of view, while backing the rationale of country's nuclear response.

He subsequently visited many countries to gather the support for country's nuclear testing program, including Russia, the United States, Canada, China, France, the United Kingdom, and other important countries in the world.

He left PML after the 1999 coup d'état and joined the military-backed regime to become the Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2002 and remained until 2007.

In 1999, after the 1999 military coup d'état, Kasuri had a severe confrontation with Javed Hashmi who was presiding the PML in absence of Sharif, and defected to the dissident group headed by Shuja'at Hussain in 2001.

He joined the Pakistan Movement of Justice (PTI) in 2012 and unsuccessfully ran for National Assembly in 2013.

On 23 January 2012, he openly admitted on his Twitter account, to handing over Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to the US when was a foreign minister of Pakistan under General Musharraf.

General Musharraf admits in his book (In the Line of Fire, page 237) that his government captured and handed over 369 people to the US.

He also writes that the Pakistani government received ‘millions of dollars’ as prize money from the CIA for capturing those people.

He staunchly opposed the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (‘Shariat Bill’) during the Prime Ministership of Nawaz Sharif.

He resigned from membership of the National Assembly as a mark of protest against the 15th Amendment, saying that if passed in its original form, it would negate Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s pluralistic and progressive vision of Pakistan.