[5][6] General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, emerged as fiercely hostile to Washington in his final year engaging in "shouting matches" with then CIA Director Leon Panetta, cutting cooperation down to a minimum and ordering the harassment of U.S. diplomats in Pakistan.

[14][15] Pasha's prior post was responsible for planning operations against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants in the FATA and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces of Pakistan, signalling a reorientation from the ISI's traditional Kashmir and India focus.

[16][15][17] The United States government had pressured Pakistan to replace Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj, the then incumbent chief of the ISI, whom they claimed to have been "double dealing" with militants with a more acceptable candidate like Pasha.

[23] Lt. General Pasha was involved in the Memogate controversy of 2011–2012, in which an American businessman, Mansoor Ijaz alleged that a senior Pakistani diplomat, former ambassador Husain Haqqani, had asked him to deliver an unsigned memorandum to Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time.

On 10 October 2011, the London Financial Times published an article[24] in which the existence of the memorandum was disclosed,[25] arguing that Pakistan's intelligence services were responsible for fuelling jihadist insurgency in the country.

The meeting lasted four hours, and started a chain of events that ended in a Supreme Court investigation of the memorandum's origins, authenticity and purpose.

[26] During the London meeting, Pasha was presented with evidence in the form of BlackBerry handset exchanges, written notes and call logs that pointed to the involvement of the senior Pakistani diplomat in the matter.

On 5 April 2012, Pasha agreed to appear before the Judicial Commission constituted by the Supreme Court of Pakistan to examine the available evidence in the memorandum affair.

In June 2012, the Judicial Commission released its final conclusions and found that the alleged memorandum was authentic and that former ambassador Husain Haqqani was its "originator and architect".