Birds of a feather

President Zardari's media blitzkrieg in the United States didn't get nearly the same degree of coverage that Gen Musharraf's trips used to. Nor did his interviews or press appearances inspire Pakistani expat pride the way Gen Musharraf's used to. It seems that offering a genuine helping hand to the struggling Republican ticket for president of the US isn't as newsworthy as the shenanigans of a loose cannon soldier with too much time on his hands.

Who can forget the Gen Musharraf's American classics? He once called Pakistani females seeking asylum in Canada "liars" who fake stories of rape and abuse. He snapped angrily at The Washington Post for asking questions during an interview (a novel concept, indeed) and charging them with editorial bias, even though the same Washington Post had earlier published his poorly written op-ed on enlightened moderation. Best of all, perhaps, was Gen Musharraf's tea-sipping and twinkie-ripping session on the venerable Comedy Central cable network with Jon Stewart.

This is part of the disabling apparatus of Pakistan's fits-and-starts democracy. It is the legacy of a system that favours the charm of the charm-your-socks-off culture of military generals over the substance of the incessantly stressed, but legitimate, politicians that are accountable to the people of Pakistan. The reason Gen Musharraf was such a delightful interview was that he had nothing to lose. A good interview wouldn't make Gen Musharraf any more legitimate as a president, and a bad one wouldn't force him to seek that legitimacy.

In stark contrast, President Zardari's performances during interviews must be seen in the light of the enormous burden he carries, as the legitimate president of the Islamic Republic, and the undisputed leader of the PPP. The pressure of being legitimate must be debilitating. Nothing else can explain the consistency with which a bloodthirsty US media attacked the President of Pakistan while he was in the US recently.

In an interview on Fox News's 'On the Record with Greta Van Susteren,' when asked about who was responsible for the bombing of the Marriott Hotel, President Zardari said, "I don't really know, but we will find them. Because I was supposed to be there with my prime minister, with my speaker, with a lot of us. Just by chance that it was changed." This may be of concern to Rehman Malik, who in fact had suggested that it was the intervention of Pakistan's efficient law enforcement agencies that saved the lives of the president and prime minister.

A few minutes after equivocating about his lack of knowledge as to who perpetrated the Marriott attack, Fox News' bias for military dictators was clear when the interviewer cornered the president, and this exchange took place:

Van Susteren: Is the Taliban an enemy of Pakistan?

President Zardari: Yes. Why would they take out the Marriott Hotel if they weren't?

This may be of concern to President Zardari himself, given that he had just said he did not know who had conducted the attack.

With Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, President Zardari bravely stared down the Western press' incorrigible references to the corruption issue (of which, by the way, he has never been convicted). This time, President Zardari pointed out that the corruption issue has "been used for a long time as a political tool," by what he called "radicals." This may be of concern to Salman Ahmed, Brian O'Connell and Ali Azmat. Although Ali Azmat has some strong views, it would be a stretch to call him a radical. Certainly, Salman Ahmed simply does not have the intellectual or physical qualities of a radical icon, and Brain would probably prefer being left along altogether. Who are these three alleged radicals? They were members of the legendary Pakistani rock band "Junoon," which was at the forefront of transforming corruption and accountability into a major public-policy issue in the 1990s, and which wrote a song called Ehtesab that, according to some analysts, was directly targeted at the new patriarch of Pakistan's first family.

Nitpicking aside, the truth is that President Zardari didn't perform as poorly as some self-conscious Pakistanis would like to think. Pakistan seems to currently represent a country with a dysfunction deep enough to inspire hopelessness, yet the country of Iqbal, Faiz and Faraz shouldn't be doing "hopeless." In the spirit of Pakistan's deep (and sadly diminishing) literary richness, here are some reasons why Pakistan's dysfunction is simply the poetic resonance of a global malfunction of integrity, reality and common sense.

"Peter Mandelson." We must, of course, begin in the United Kingdom. For reasons of Pakistani culture's self-repression at the hands of the English language, and of the UK's manifestly more workable, humane and self-conscious European liberalism, Great Britain represents that most difficult of examples. It must be followed, virtually in every way, but to embrace its example would perhaps require an embrace of demons too far from being resolved. In the throes of a financial crisis and a generational shift in the political sands, the once proud and impeccable Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been reduced to the status of a jittering and jilted teenager.

Last week, Brown reintroduced the British press to one of its favourite sons, the incorrigible Peter Mandelson. Mandelson, you may remember has been unceremoniously dumped from the cabinet by the New Labour movement for his alleged corruption, not once but twice. Brown's desperation for some sort of arrest of the persistent slide in his poll numbers is more palpable than the lashing London rain. 10 Downing Street hasn't been this sombre since John Major was living there. Peter Mandelson is back. Mandelson isn't simply a man with a tarnished reputation, he is among the small group of those that stabbed Brown in the back, when he was on the cusp of greatness. Indeed, Gordon Brown may have been prime minister many, many years earlier, had Mandelson not conspired with others to hand the Labour Party to Tony Blair back in 1994.

Mandelson's appointment is not anything like President Zardari's appointment of Salman Farooqi as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. It is much more delightfully salacious. This is like Mian Nawaz Sharif bringing back Manzoor Wattoo, not just into the party, but as chief minister of Punjab. As the British will surely tell us, and we will surely not learn, that's politics.

"Henry Paulson." If what is happening with the new economic team in the UK starring Peter Mandelson sounds bad, it is really nothing compared to the whitewash and eyewash with which reality is being treated by the Bush administration and the US Congress. Not so long ago, Henry Paulson was one of global capitalism's icons, as the head of Goldman Sachs. Much of the dismantling of oversight over Wall Street may not have been Paulson's doing, but the dismantling of common sense within Wall Street certainly was. Investment banks and fund managers have created a science of trading on nonexistent money, putting the real money that does exist (and which belongs to small investors and pensioners) at the kind of risks that are unsustainable. Paulson was at the cutting edge of this Gordon-Gekko-on-Ecstacy paradigm. This amoral paradigm is at the heart of the current financial crisis.

So who do the US Congress and US President choose to put in charge of the $700 billion bailout in taxpayer money? You guessed it. Henry Paulson. The Wall Street jinns are laughing all the way to the bank, where they will no doubt withdraw all $700 billion from the generous ATM gift card they've just got, and spend it all in an intoxicated insistence on recouping their losses.

"Qazi Hussain Ahmed." If Pakistanis are embarrassed by President Zardari, they should close their eyes and imagine the Jamaat-e-Islami in charge. The first victims of a Jamaati assault would be the English and Urdu languages. Perhaps if the Jamaat could manage to get people to come to its events, it wouldn't be forced to come up with comical names for those events. Tuesday morning marked the launch of its "Train March." This is understandable. If there were people at the event, it may have qualified as some kind of a protest march. In reality, since no one except Qazi Hussain Ahmed, a few bored journalists, and a very large Pakistan Railways train showed up, perhaps the Jamaat could do no better (and no worse) than "Train March."



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