Pakistan in the eye of a media storm
Irfan Husain
IN a recent Guardian editorial, Pakistani TV anchors were referred to as “secular mullahs”. I beg to differ: I see few signs of secularism in our TV chat show hosts, barring a few honourable exceptions. But there are many indications that they are indeed mullahs.
While Pakistan has seldom been out of the news in the UK, these last three weeks have been especially bad for our image, such as it is. The discovery of Osama Bin Laden`s hiding place in Abbottabad, and the daring SEAL raid that granted him his wish for martyrdom, has caused a media storm the world over.
I`m sure screenwriters in Hollywood are busy churning out scripts to turn the whole episode into movie gold. Actors are probably being cast, and we can expect blockbusters to start emerging soon from the studios. My money is on Tom Hanks to play the lead role. Maybe Will Smith will co-star as Barack Obama. And perhaps Morgan Freeman will make a cameo appearance as General Kayani.
No matter how these movies do at the box office, one thing is for sure: they will not be screened at the officers clubs of our military cantonments any time soon. As I wrote elsewhere in this newspaper soon after the raid, the space between an admission of incompetence and criminality is filled with pain and humiliation.
In one long segment of the popular Newsnight programme on the BBC, international lawyers and human rights experts were asked about the legality of killing OBL without making any attempt to arrest and try him. The consensus was that although Bin Laden had declared war on America, he ought to have been brought to justice rather than executed. At the end of the programme, Lyse Doucet presented a penetrating examination of Karachi`s ethnic and sectarian violence. To conclude, she spoke to a number of young people for whom, despite the bouts of mayhem, life went on.
A friend invited me to Chatham House to hear Anatole Lieven speak about Pakistan. Author of Pakistan: A Hard Country, he has a less gloomy outlook than most foreign observers. An academic, a former journalist for The Times, and a frequent visitor to Pakistan, Lieven has brought a rare sophistication and subtlety to his argument on why Pakistan is so important to the West:
“… a balance needs to be struck between the economic and security benefits to the West of closer ties with India and the security threats to the West stemming from a growth of Islamic militancy in Pakistan. In the end, not even the greatest imaginable benefits of US-Pakistan friendship could compensate for the actual collapse of Pakistan, with all the frightful dangers this would create not just for the West but for India too.”
Putting things in perspective, Lieven points out that Pakistan is not alone in the region in suffering from armed insurgency: Sri Lanka and Burma have faced rebellions that have lasted far longer; and India has been fighting the Naxalite uprising in vast swathes of its territory for decades. As he writes in the introduction:
“Pakistan is in fact a great deal more like India – or India like Pakistan – than either country would wish to admit. If Pakistan were an Indian state, then in terms of development, order and per capita income it would find itself somewhere in the middle, considerably below Karnataka but considerably above Bihar. Or to put it another way, if India were only the `cow-belt` of Hindi-speaking north India, it probably wouldn`t be a democracy or a growing economic power either, but some form of impoverished Hindu-nationalist dictatorship, riven by local conflicts.”
Such a nuanced perception and clear-eyed insights are generally missing from the media blitz directed towards Pakistan. Many voices in the West have recently questioned aid to a country that allegedly sheltered Bin Laden. For instance, Kapil Komireddi wrote in the Chicago Tribune that with Bin Laden died “the myth of Pakistan as an ally in the war against terrorism.” He went on to suggest that Islamabad has been quietly “nurturing and offering sanctuary to terrorists”.
Even more damagingly, the Investor`s Business Daily charges Pakistan of “looking the other way” when it comes to terrorists while taking some $20 billion in aid from America. The daily goes on to accuse Islamabad of having the gall to complain that the US violated its sovereignty in killing Bin Laden. The article concludes by saying: “Freezing aid seems a no-brainer.”Such hostile comments have been very harmful to Pakistan`s economy in terms of overseas investments. For instance, the direct foreign inflow into our stock exchanges this year has amounted to only $50 million, or around 0.5 per cent of all external investment into Asian markets. Despite this, the Karachi stock exchange has performed well, and if it had not been for the negative perceptions about the country, we would have seen a far healthier inflow of overseas investments.
Radio 4 is the BBC`s flagship radio channel, and often carries some sparkling discussions and drama. The other evening, I listened to a talk show featuring Anatol Lieven, Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, a Bangladeshi writer and the anchor. The discussion focussed on the two South Asian countries, and I was pleased to learn how effectively Bangladesh was trying to counter extremism. But at one point, I was surprised to hear Mohsin Hamid claim that “Pakistan was a country of minorities, with no group having a majority.” As far as I know, Punjabis constitute 60 per cent of the country`s population. Perhaps he had deducted the Seraiki-speaking belt from this number.
In another Radio 4 programme on the ISI and its alleged links to jihadi groups, Owen Bennet-Jones, BBC journalist and author of a book on Pakistan, interviewed several Pakistani police officers. One complained of how easily terrorists were let off by judges even when they had been arrested with arms and explosives. He admitted that he was forced to resort to extra-judicial killing to prevent prisoners he knew were guilty from slaughtering more innocent people. This is an issue our higher judiciary has ignored while concentrating on high-profile political cases that attract more media attention.
Source: Dawn
Date:5/22/2011
” 
” 
” 
” 
” 
