President gets it wrong

President Asif Ali Zardari is the legitimate leader of a nation of 172 million people. Perhaps this fact is lost on his speech and op-ed writers. The high expectations of the over ten million Pakistanis that voted for the PPP in the February election this year require the president to be well-advised. His trip to the US, and three incidents in particular, demonstrate this is not quite happening.

In New York, the president called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, "the father of modern India". That's no way for Pakistan to prepare for a return to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that is set to take place when Rahul Ghandi takes oath as prime minister next year. Manmohan Singh is a nice old man, but he is simply a more capable and credible version of Shaukat Aziz. He's got no political legitimacy other than what Sonia Gandhi affords him. If anything, it should have been Singh singing President Zardari's praises, a man whose wife was murdered, who served over 11 years in jail, and who is maligned for unproven corruption charges that still weigh over him like a ton of gold bricks. Singh has no such record to his credit. He's a decent economist, and an accommodating bureaucrat to the Royal Family of India, a modern munshi at best. President Zardari, blemishes and all, is the head the Royal Family of the Pakistan, Fatima Bhutto's seething anger notwithstanding. There's no comparison. More importantly, there is only one father of Modern India, and his name is Jawaharlal Nehru, any insinuation otherwise is an insult to the Indian first family, and more importantly an utter misrepresentation of history. It is bad enough that young Indians have forgotten the debt they own to Nehru, bad enough that the mass-consumption Bollywood culture has no time, or space to recognize the enormous imprint Nehru has left on the world, and on statesmanship. Pakistanis need not exacerbate things.

Earlier the same day, President Zardari made headlines during a meeting with the utterly disturbing Sarah Palin, calling her "gorgeous". The fact that the nearly senile John McCain chose her as a running mate is bad enough, but whatever compelled President Zardari, head of a country of 172 million people, to meet with her, head of a state of less than 700,000 people, in the first place? He should have refused to meet her altogether. Such meetings are better left to leaders of small countries like Columbia and imaginary places like Henry Kissinger's foreign policy expertise. The only reason for meeting Palin would be to provide her ammunition to fight back against Joe Biden at the first vice-presidential debate next week. But with Barack Obama already having started the whole dirty business of cross-border attacks on Pakistani soil, did Pakistan really need to irk the Democratic Party any further? The meeting itself may have been excusable, but President Zardari's charm offensive on Ms Palin was, well, offensive. The neoconservatives don't mind being rife with institutional sexism, which is why they continually deny free press access to Ms Sarah Palin--but what excuse does the husband of a global feminist icon have for his faux pas? Imagine what would have happened had President Zardari used the lines he used on Ms Palin, on a real politician, with real credibility, like say Hillary Clinton?

The hyper-effusive praise in meetings with Manmohan Singh, and Sarah Palin, however, pales in comparison to President Zardari's enthusiasm for prosecuting a war on terror. He and his PPP leadership keep insisting that the Marriott attack was Pakistan's 9/11. On Thursday, President Zardari wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe insisting the same point yet again. The script writers for Pakistan's recursive horror film can only wish that was the case. The truth is that while the Marriott attack was indeed a 9/11 for me, for my columnist colleagues who live in Islamabad, for the businesses that used the conferencing facilities of the hotel, and for the diplomatic and development sector buddies that I dined there with on a regular basis, the Marriott's significance is limited to this miniscule world of Pakistani bling. The loss of life at the Marriott is truly tragic, and its economic impact will be enormous, but the only way an event qualifies as a 9/11 is that it mobilizes a mass tsunami of public opinion that empowers and enables dramatic military action, even if it is reckless and fallacious adventurism (as 9/11 did for Dick Cheney and his administration).

Whoever is interested in having Pakistan dive further into the abyss that is FATA, had better find a different 9/11. The Pakistani people are nowhere nearly as united in their grief about the Marriott as I and my English-speaking urban and expat friends are. And for us, 9/11 itself was Pakistan's 9/11. Pakistan was perhaps more profoundly affected by the original 9/11 than any other place on the planet. So that's a redundant PR victory, it was won about seven years ago.

The Pakistani people are, unfortunately, merely shaken by the Marriott explosion, not stirred. There is no yellow ribbon, or wear-red-on-Friday campaigns to support the troops in Bajaur, no USO-type delivery of Eid care packages for the soldiers, no emotional send-offs of Chakwal, Attock and Jehlum's finest sons to the front-lines of war. Pakistanis are more swayed by the rhetoric of politicians on all sides of the PPP--right, left and center--than they are by President Zardari's op-eds. The PPP used to be a dirt-under-the-nails gritty party of the people. This op-ed politics and diplomacy is reminiscent of retired Gen Musharraf. The enlightened moderate paid a heavy political price for putting the Beltway establishment above the tandoor wars at home. The PPP's slow dance with the Washington DC war agenda in Pakistan is costing the party the kind of political capital that the PPP may never be able to renew the way Shaheed Mohtarma did.

The Marriott was no 9/11. The sooner Pakistan's first legitimately elected government in a decade understands that, the better the country will be able to prosecute the war against terrorists and the enemies of civilization.



The writer is an independent political economist. Email: mosharraf@gmail.com