Husain Haqqani is no stranger to controversy. The former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, who lives in exile in that country after the Memogate scandal, has again hit the headlines with his new book, India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends?

But first, for those who have forgotten, a bit on Memogate. In May 2011, US SEAL Team Six took out Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, a three-hour drive from Islamabad.

Days later, Haqqani, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to the US at the time, approached the Americans with a memo seeking to prevent a military coup in Islamabad, and offering Washington a carte blanche in his country if they helped bring the army to heel.

His conduit was his old friend, millionaire Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American businessman and columnist with political and security contacts including the Clintons and senior officials in the Obama Administration.

Ijaz, following Haqqani’s assurance that the memo had the support of Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, took it to former United States National Security Advisor James Logan Jones, who in turn passed it on to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

(A decade earlier, apparently with then President Bill Clinton’s blessings, Ijaz had met senior political and military leaders from India, Pakistan, and Kashmir in an attempt to broker a ceasefire in Kashmir. In November 2000, in his first full-length interview, Ijaz described himself as “reclusive thinker with a cause who seeks to help disenfranchised people wherever they may be,” and told me that “Pakistan has too much blood invested in Kashmir to ever walk away quietly.” In other words, India does not.)

In October 2011, Ijaz wrote a column for The Financial Times, London, referring to the memo by a “senior Pakistani diplomat” which he had passed on to Mullen. The initial disbelief in Pakistan was replaced by virulent rage when Ijaz backed up his claim with records of his conversations with Haqqani from his Blackberry messenger.

In November, Haqqani resigned.

“It is not congruent with the national interests of Pakistan to have a clever-by-half ambassador and a deficient-by-full president,” Ijaz told Newsweek a few days later. “OK, not everybody has to be a fucking rocket scientist in all of this but at least be honest to the people about what you’re doing and own up to your actions instead of covering them up.”