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The Embassy of Pakistan on 2315 Massachusetts Avenue NW in the heart of Washington’s diplomatic enclave has been abandoned in favour of a vast, sprawling, soulless concrete behemoth with an incongruous Shish Mahal entrance off the southern reaches of Connecticut Avenue. That is an area I normally visit once every few months to got to a place called Calverts which dispenses at comradely prices the stuff that has for the hundredth time been banned by the piety-intoxicated mullahs of the Muttihida Majlis-e-Amal in Peshawar.

The old chancery building, an elegant home purchased with the approval of Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, still stands there and will probably be sold by the merchants in charge of Pakistan’s fortunes and finances who specialise in disposing of family silver. The Quaid was not only a wise judge of men, he also had a keen eye for prime properties, going by the homes he built and bought over the years, from the magnificent Malabar Hill one in Bombay to the residence on Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi, to the Flagstaff House in Karachi, not to mention the magnificent property in front of the old Globe cinema in Lahore’s Cantonment.

The first ambassador personally appointed by the Quaid, was M. A. H. Ispahani. There is a myth that since the new government in Karachi did not have enough money, it was he who paid for the chancery’s purchase. Great story though that is, true it is not. The Ispahanis, in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement though they were, could not be accused of generosity. Qazi Mohammad Isa, whom the Quaid liked immensely, once told K. H. Khurshid that when he suggested to his leader that the Muslim League could ask the Ispahanis for some money it needed at the time, the Quaid replied that while such a sum would be trivial for them, what they did not have was “this” – and he put his hand on his heart.

The old chancery always remained in a state of either disrepair or under-repair-in-progress, thanks to the generosity of the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs, both of which should one day be tried in a people’s court for the long list of things they have done and for the even longer list of things they have not done. About twenty years ago the State Department and the District of Columbia authorities offered plots of land to foreign missions in the area where the new Pakistan embassy now stands. While they were “encouraged” to construct their own chanceries as they deemed fit, there was no compulsion for them to either purchase the plots or to move.

Pakistan decided to move. A plot of land measuring 46,982 sq. ft. was purchased at a cost of $728,212 or about Rs 4.3 crore in today’s money. Construction began in October 2001 and was completed in April 2003. Later in the month, the ambassador and the rest of his tribe moved into the new place lock, stock and barrel, along with every moth-eaten file that, despite the opportunity, was not thrown away or left behind for the denizens of middle earth to feast on. The old chancery which was built in 1909 is a declared “heritage building”, meaning that it cannot be demolished, nor can it have its exterior changed.

The other day, I stood for a few minutes in front of it and thought of all those who had been sent here to serve Pakistan and protect and advance its interests in the United States. On the walls of the reception room at the old chancery hung portraits of the men – and women – who had served as ambassadors to Washington (these pictures have been shifted to the intestine-like corridor of the new place).

Ispahani came in October 1947, barely two months after the formation of Pakistan, and stayed until January 1952. He was followed by Muhammad Ali Bogra who arrived in February 1952 and was flown back just over a year later in April 1953 to become the prime minister of Pakistan. He was replaced by the evergreen Syed Amjad Ali who stayed from September 1953 to September 1955. He was here during the fateful year of 1954 when the US and Pakistan entered into a formal defence pact.

Syed Amjad Ali made way for Aziz Ahmed who arrived in March 1959, just five months after the country’s first descent into martial law. He remained ambassador until July 1963. One of the great civil servants of his time, he was a stickler for hard work and devotion to duty. An officer who served under him at the time told me once that the ambassador would arrive for work strictly on the dot of nine every morning and woe to those who were late. His services to Pakistan are many and, as is to be expected, they stand unacknowledged.

He was followed by his brother, G. Ahmed, a former officer of the Indian Police (IP), a much prized cadre, as Aziz Ahmed was of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). He stayed until September 1966 and was replaced by Agha Hilaly in October 1966. He had a long innings in Washington, staying until October 1971, but it was a traumatic time with the country breaking up. It is said that he did not have General Yahya’s trust. The man who replaced him was General N. A. M. Raza who is now remembered for throwing a birthday party for his daughter on the day Dhaka fell. He was removed, partly because of this, but stayed on to blight the lives of many good officers when Z. A. Bhutto made him inspector-general at the Foreign Office. Well, at least it enabled him to collect even more antiques of which he was fond. He left Washington in April 1972.

His successor, the aristocratic Sultan Muhammad Khan, came in May 1972 and remained here until December 1973. In his long and distinguished career he counted among his friends men such as Zhou En-lai. He was followed by Sahibzada Yaqub Khan in December 1973. He was replaced by Lt. Gen. Ejaz Azim, a true gentleman and a fine officer. He served from January 1981 to September 1986 and counted President Reagan and Gen. Al Haig among his personal friends. Those were the years when Pakistan, as far as America was concerned, could do no wrong (despite the rapidly progressing “bum” programme) because of the Afghan war.

Gen. Azim made way for Jamshed Marker, a better ambassador and diplomat than whom Pakistan has not produced. He was here from September 1986 to June 1989. He was replaced by Air Marshal M. Zulfiqar who stayed from July 1989 to September 1990. The post next went to Najmuddin Shaikh, a fine officer who was unfairly shifted by the Nawaz Sharif government. His replacement was the delightful Syeda Abida Hussain who came in November 1991 and resigned in April 1993 when Nawaz Sharif was sent home. The short-lived Moeen Qureshi government sent over Akram Zaki but he was recalled when Benazir Bhutto took office, not even having had the opportunity to present his credentials.

Benazir sent Maleeha Lodhi in January 1994 who stayed until early 1997. It was during her time that the dragon called the Pressler Amendment was slain. She was to serve another term after Gen. Musharraf took power, thus becoming the longest serving envoy to Washington. She was replaced by Tariq Fatimi, a conscientious officer who like Najmuddin Shaikh was unjustly withdrawn after having served only a few months. His successor Riaz Khokhar, another fine diplomat, is the present Foreign Secretary. He made way for Maleeha Lodhi who made way for Ashraf Jehangir Qazi who is still here. Allah alone knoweth until when. Ambassadors come, ambassadors go, but Pakistan remains. And that’s something all those in public service should remember.

There’s one thing you have got to hand over to Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who was in Washington last week for a night. He is his own man. A few years ago, he came to New York as part of the rotating Pakistan delegation to the General Assembly session. On arrival, after he had been checked into a hotel by a factotum from the UN Mission that Pakistan maintains, he was handed over a sheaf of papers. “What is that?” the Sheikh asked. “Sir, this is the speech you are going to make tomorrow.”

“Now look here, my dear, I am not in New York with a party of Qawwals. I am perfectly capable of writing and making my own speech,” he said, handing back the typescript which was no great loss since it was one of the four or five prototype drafts that the Foreign Office has been using in place of foreign policy for more years than a film star drops from her age when asked.

Sheikh Rashid arrived in New York last Sunday en route Chicago where a big Pakistani-American do is planned over the weekend by Shaukat Sindhu, a gentleman from the city of Faisalabad (O these Faisalabadis!) who has made good in hotelling and who, finding himself with more greenbacks than he knew what to do with, decided to lead the community. While it remains debatable if the community that he believes he leads wishes to be led, he does manage to hold a big tamasha every year, complete with specially flown guests from Pakistan, not to forget a “grand cultural evening” to round off the celebrations. The Sheikh has travelled all the way from Islamabad, which is a good place to get out off at regular intervals if you want to retain your sanity, to be in Chicago where, no doubt, he is going to be the star attraction.

The Washington Policy Analysis Group, which invited the minister to Washington and which I renamed the Kebab Masala Group because it used to meet in a restaurant by that name, has since folded (the restaurant that is), the owner having gone into the more profitable loan and mortgage business. However, the name outlives the establishment.

Earlier, attempts to make contact with Sheikh Rashid had sent us on a chase around New York hotels. The official word was that the Sheikh was going to be lodged at the dreary Roosevelt Hotel that the PIA owns but is trying without much success to get rid of. It is also the place where Gen. Pervez Musharraf has stayed every time he has come to New York. But the Sheikh is not that easy a bird to trap. Many phone calls later, one found that he was staying at Hotel UN Plaza which is bang opposite the place it takes its name from. Further inquiries revealed that while he indeed had checked in there on arrival, no longer was he on the premises. He had checked out. So where was he? More research and many phone calls to local gossips finally produced pay dirt. Sheikh Rashid was comfortably installed at Hotel Pennsylvania, next to the Penn Station, a pretty rough part of town if you ask me. And why there? Isn’t that the hotel where the PIA crews stay?

“Your answer lies in the question you have just asked,” my informant told me.

The Group in Washington had a long breezy session with Sheikh Rashid. He was in his element, dealing dexterously with everything, from the United Nations to Pakistan’s India policy to the highly complicated politics of Committee Mohalla, Rawalpindi. At the end of the evening, he produced from the pocket of his dark and elegant suit a much-prized Havana cigar and enjoyed it for the rest of the evening.

There is at least one thing he did learn from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

No Pakistani dictator has been allowed to go into civilised retirement. Come to think of it, the civilians have fared no better. Look at the record. The Quaid-i-Azam, founder of the state and its first governor general, died because of the grave illness which would have killed, years earlier, anyone other this man of indomitable will and sense of mission. His last hours were spent lying semi-conscious in intense heat and humidity on a forlorn road, miles out of Karachi because his ambulance had broken down. No provision had been made for dealing with such an emergency. It was an inauspicious, but prophetic, beginning for the nation he had brought into being.

His first lieutenant, that gentle aristocrat who died with nothing to his name, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, was shot dead in a public meeting in Rawalpindi. Typical of the man were his last words, “May God protect Pakistan”. Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, Pakistan’s first and last chance of remaining unified, died in a Beirut hotel in mysterious circumstances. To this day, there are millions who believe that he did not die a natural death. Malik Ghulam Muhammad ruled Pakistan, half paralysed though he was. The only person who could understand what he was saying was Qudratullah Shahab, and, yes, his secretary, a woman who could read him like a book. Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, whose contribution to the Pakistan Movement has never been truly acknowledged, was pushed aside unceremoniously. He may have been a civil servant, but he was a good, upright prime minister.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan, who for ten years sat like a colossus over the country, was removed from power by General Yahya Khan because he was no longer a well man and with his once robust health his will to rule had also gone. He spent his last days ruminating over the past in the house he had built on a small hilltop (which his sons sold off, bringing little credit to themselves in preferring ready money to the memory of their father). Few people visited him. The state ignored his presence while continuing to keep an eye on him, just in case. He told a friend of mine, who lived abroad but admired the fallen leader, that he had tried to do his best by the people of Pakistan who, in the end, had rewarded him by parading dogs in the streets with placards hanging around their necks saying Ayub. “If I did wrong, nobody ever told me I was doing wrong,” he observed sadly. Do they ever?

Yahya Khan was jailed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and died a very sick man in the loneliness of his Harley Street residence in Rawalpindi. He left no property, no money in the bank, no assets. His only son Ali had to struggle to support his young family. Yahya Khan may have dismembered Pakistan, but he did not steal any of its money, which is more than can be said for some of those who followed him. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was sent to the gallows. His trial remains a mark so black on the face of Pakistan’s higher judiciary that nothing will ever wash it away. The man who had him removed and executed died in a plane crash that to this day remains another unsolved Pakistani mystery. His son, who vowed to hunt out his father’s killers, gave up his search for reasons that remain wrapped in yet another mystery.

Benazir Bhutto was removed from office twice by the army, as was Nawaz Sharif, in one case directly in October 1999, on other occasions through its agents. The present holder of power in Pakistan may believe that he lives a charmed life but one day, surely, as the sun rises from the east and not west, he too will have gone. And if Pakistan’s history is any basis for making a prediction, not exactly as he might have wished to go.

What triggered this chain of thought is a book I have just finished reading. Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio decided to seek out seven fallen dictators because he wanted to know what goes through the mind of someone who has had everything, lost everything and has no time to start again. How does a one-time dictator, whom the history books describe as ruthless, immoral and power-crazed, grow old? What does he tell his children and grandchildren about himself? What does he tell himself? In Pakistan, it has not been possible to undertake such an exercise, but someone needs to set himself this task. Perhaps one could start with General Musharraf when he is no longer in power. Of the two exiled leaders, none falls in the Orizio category though they did try to run strong-willed governments.

Orizio chose Idi Amin Dada, “Emperor” Bokassa, Wojciech Jaruselski, Enver and Nexhmije Hoxha, Jean Claude Duvaliar “Baby Doc”. Mengistu Haile-Mariam, Slobodan Milosevic and his wife Mira and Mauel Noriega. Noriega, who for years has been in an American jail, did not meet the journalist, but sent him a letter that said, “With reference to your request for an interview (about forgotten people) my response is that I do not consider myself to be a ‘forgotten individual’, because God, the great Creator of the universe, He who writes straight, albeit with occasionally crooked lines, has not yet written the last world on Manuel A Noriega”.

Orizio spent weeks in Saudi Arabia and was finally able to speak to Idi Amin on the phone and also see him briefly. After surfing the many international TV channels his satellite dishes bring him, he told the journalist, “I do not live cut off from the world, as they write in the Ugandan papers. I still have my friends. I follow all the news. I’m still a man of the world.” Then he drove off in a white Cadillac. Bokassa told him, “Of all the African leaders I was the greatest. Why? Because I was the emperor. One step below me was the King of Morocco. Then came all the others, simple presidents.” Enver Hoxha’s wife, known as the Black Widow (Enver had died) told Orizio in her prison cell when he asked if she had any regrets about ordering the torture of her opponents, “No. No. Because a state has to defend itself from those who plot against it. Of course, there may have been some excesses. Trifles not worth mentioning.”

Baby Doc’s father, it should be mentioned, whom everyone called Papa Doc had the Lord’s Prayer reworded to read, “Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince as it is in the provinces. Give us this day our new Haiti and forgive not the tresspasses of those anti-patriots who daily spit upon our country. Let them succumb to temptation and under the weight of their venom, deliver them not from evil.”

All dictators, present ones and those to come, should read this prayer and reflect upon human vanity and where it leads those who consider themselves indestructible – and possibly immortal.

It is an old axiom in the trade that newspapers should print not make news, but once in a while that is exactly what happens. For the last week or so, it is the venerable New York Times which many people consider the best newspaper in the world that has been making news more than it has been printing them.

In its long and distinguished history, it has never suffered such public embarrassment and though it has had the good grace to admit that it erred, the story refuses to go away, including from the correspondence columns of the NYT itself.

The scandal, because that is what it is, is centred around Jayson Blair, a reporter, who rose rapidly through the ranks to become the newspaper’s national correspondent at the unbelievably young age of 27. A large number of stories appeared under his byline over the years, almost all of them, it now turns out, more fiction than fact. In a long front page article last Sunday, the newspaper admitted that star reporter Blair has fabricated stories, plagiarised at will, invented quotes that were his, not of the person he quoted, and even written about people who lived not in flesh and blood but in his fertile imagination.

The New York Times has always prided itself on being a “newspaper of record”. Its slogan — “All the news that is fit to print” — is a kind of touchstone that all its competitors and contemporaries around the world have envied. On the NYT desk there are fact-checkers whose job is exactly what their name says it is. They check facts, something that has become much easier since the advent of the Internet. All you have to do is click your way to Google or another search engine and all the secrets of the universe are yours for the asking.

How is it then that Jayson Blair got away with his lies and fabrications year after year after year? The last time any such thing happened was more than two decades ago at the Washington Post when an African-American woman reporter Janet Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a story that it later turned out she had fabricated. To this day, the Post has not lived Janet Cooke down. Her name keeps coming up with greater frequency than the Post would wish. And never since that scandal broke in 1981 has it come up more than in the last week. Blair has done a Cooke on the “newspaper of record” which has more egg on its face than one will find in a cholesterol paradise.

Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post Monday wanted to know how come Blair was “relentlessly promoted” despite making countless errors of fact in his stories. The NYT’s published account shows that despite several warnings, those whose job it was to act, failed to do so or Blair would have been exposed long ago. As Cohen pointed out, Blair “was deemed so serious a threat to the paper’s well-earned reputation for accuracy that in April 2002 the Times’ metropolitan editor, Jonathan Landman, wrote an e-mail message to newsroom administrators saying, ‘We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.’” Yet not only was Blair not stopped, he was promoted to the national staff and ultimately given more responsibilities. Why?

The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favouritism based on race. Blair is black, and the Times, like other media organisations, is intent on achieving diversity. Sometimes this noble and essential goal comes down to a parody of affirmative action. That seems to be the case with Blair. Supposedly a University of Maryland graduate (he never graduated), he was “offered… a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify the newsroom,” the paper said.

The young reporter did well — he clearly has talent — and also not so well. But the not-so-well part was both serious and ominous — sloppy work habits and erratic behaviour. That should have been enough to halt Blair’s career in its tracks. That it didn’t testifies to a newsroom culture, imposed from above, that cherished diversity — not more than accuracy, but so much so that journalistic standards were bent.

The Times’ senior editors defensively say that wasn’t the case. But the rigorous reporting the paper is noted for is absent here. Assertions that race played no role are made — and then left at that. Both the editor, Howell Raines, and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., are quoted, but neither gives the slightest indication that he is aware of the culture he has imposed on the newsroom. Careful readers of the paper have long discerned such a culture in the news coverage. Now we know it existed in personnel policies as well — what Landman has characterised as the top management’s commitment to diversity.

I can only imagine what the Times’ editorial page would have said if another important institution had conducted an investigation into its own misconduct. Senior editors recused themselves from supervising the preparation of the report — but the writers of it still answer to them. In fact, Sulzberger set the company line by laying the blame for the debacle on a single individual: “The person who did this is Jayson Blair,” he told his own newspaper. Yes, but he had plenty of help.

A great and invaluable newspaper has been humbled. But its inability to come to grips with what was at the bottom of the Blair affair suggests that it remains blinkered by the very political correctness that has brought about this ignominy. In this case, all the news has not been printed.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I first went to Iran during the Shah’s time. Several years later, there was another opportunity to do so. By then the Shah had been gone nearly ten years and the Mullahs were in control. Of course, a great deal had changed – none for the better – but that is another story better left for another day. Any shop or store that you entered had a prominently displayed notice in Persian that warned women visitors in stern terms that it was the law that they be fully covered and, except for the face, no part of their anatomy, hair included, should be visible. Any violation of that dress code set by the government of the Islamic republic, the notice reminded them, would be severely dealt with.

What the notice betrayed was the mindset of those who had put it there. It was they who felt threatened by women who did not look like walking mummies. Why could men who felt it was sinful to look at a woman who was not covered according to a dress code that they, the men, had drawn up in the first place, not turn away their gaze? Why was it the woman’s responsibility, in fact her legal and “religious” duty, to dress not in accordance with her wishes but those of men in authority? If there was sin, it lay with those who had issued such orders. It was they whose minds were sick. It was they whose imaginations were morbid.

If I had entertained any doubt before that the Mullah hates woman and holds her in contempt, Iran cured me of it. Let me now travel from the Tehran of the 1980s to Washington DC of the year 2003. On my weekend visit to a Pakistani convenience store, I found a set of audio tapes manufactured in Pakistan and, by all accounts, selling well in the United States. These tapes, which consisted of the khutbas of a cleric by the name of Dr Fazal Elahi Zaheer, had been produced and distributed by the Al-Kareemia Trust, People’s Colony, Gujranwala – the land of wrestlers and house flies the size of a Fokker Friendship aircraft. The themes taken up by Dr Zaheer for the enlightenment and spiritual edification of his congregation were diverse, one being “the place of woman”.

I picked it up, threw it in with my groceries, came home and put it on, keen to know what Dr Zaheer thought the place of a woman in the world might be. After listening to him, I was left in no doubt that quite a few of those Pakistani-Americans who counted themselves among Dr Zaheer’s overseas flock would, upon hearing his message, rush home and lock up their wives and daughters. The spread of bigotry and religious ignorance is obviously a global phenomenon, a feat for which the credit goes to Dr Zaheer and his righteous and rather angry brothers in designer beards, self-styled head dresses and outlandish gowns.

This is what he told his congregation the day the recording was made and this is what his overseas congregations are being told today. The real place (the word he used was “ thikana”) of a woman is her home. She is only allowed to leave home as an “exceptional case” (said in English). He quoted a hadith which stated that if a woman’s home had four rooms, the prayers she offered in the innermost one would gain her more merit than the prayers she offered in the next one, with the merit earned going down the farther she ventured from her inner sanctum. Even the merit earned by her being in a congregation led by the Holy Prophet himself (peace be upon him), would be less than the merit that would come her way were she to pray in her own home. In other words, Dr Zaheer was telling women not to leave their homes, even if they wanted to pray in a mosque. He also said that a child, a slave, a sick person and, to complete the list, a woman were not required to offer their prayers as part of a congregation.

Dr Zaheer told the faithful that an adult Muslim male should not enter a house without due notice, even if it were the house of his mother and she was there alone. “Would you want to see your mother in a naked state?” he asked. He said the increase in incidents of rape and adultery was due to men entering homes where women were by themselves. He said most such “incidents” involved family members. “Brothers in law and sisters’ husbands are like death to a woman,” he declared. Nephews, both maternal and paternal, fell in the same dangerous category. He said he was personally aware of cases where nephews had committed incest. When a man and woman were alone – and they were not husband and wife – the devil’s was the third presence. Dr Zaheer left his congregation in no doubt as to what a man and woman would do if left alone.

Dr Zaheer then moved to household help. He castigated those who employed cooks because they could spare the money. “For all they care, the sanctity of the home and the modesty of its women can go to hell,” he thundered. He said when the cook was alone with the woman of the house, the two of them would cook something other than food. He also had strong words for parents who let the young daughter of the house venture out in a car with a driver. At this point in his sermon, he asked the congregation, “And who is the third person riding with those two?” “Shaitan,” they answered in unison. He conceded, however, that God was the only One who could save “your daughter’s honour”.

Dr Zaheer said here was a girl studying to be a doctor but driving around with her chauffeur. A “million times” preferable to her was the illiterate girl who stayed inside her home with her honour intact. He said it was against Islam to permit a woman to be alone with her cook, her driver or her tutor. He also had stern advice as to how women should dress. They were only allowed to wear make up if the sole beholder was to be the husband. They were also not to speak in a suggestive voice to anyone, except the husband. To all others, they should speak in a plain voice with no intonations. He also denounced women who answered phone calls. “They ask who the caller is, why he is calling and much else. I ask you, what is the purpose of such questions? It is utterly un-Islamic and it has ruined many families. The phone is a curse. Can we even count the number of filthy scandals it has caused?” he asked emotionally. Women, he further declared, should not describe the looks of other women to their husbands because it will give their husbands ideas. He closed his sermon by lamenting the moral collapse of the West because of the licence it had given to its women who had neither shame nor modesty, one of their pastimes being giving birth to illegitimate children.

I have no doubt the Good Lord has set aside a special corner of hades for men such as Dr Fazal Elahi Zaheer.

Was it a bird? Was it a kite? Was it a shooting star? No, none of those; it was the President of the United States in combat fatigues making a dramatic landing in Viking aircraft on the deck of “USS Abraham Lincoln”. Can there be any doubt that the man in whose honour the aircraft is named took three quarter turns in his grave, the moment that plane put its wheels on the deck.

And of course it was all on television, folks, for the world to see. O what a sight! The man who managed to give the Vietnam war a slip through the kind of ruse only the rich are adept at was making up for it thirty-five later by a neat manoeuvre. But it did not quite work.

The President’s heroics have crashed landed like a chopper whose rotors have suddenly decided not to rotate. Result: Newton has been proved right once again. The White House, never found wanting when it comes to changing a story, did that one more time. Without showing the least embarrassment, Ari Fleischer — Mr Monotone if you ask me — said that the President had chosen to land on that aircraft carrier because he wanted to “see an aircraft landing the same way that the pilots saw an aircraft landing.” That was not all. According to Fleischer (which in German means a butcher), the President wanted to “see it as realistically as possible”. And that is why, “once the initial decision was made to fly out on the Viking, even when a helicopter operation became doable, the President decided instead he wanted to still take a Viking.” Mr Johnny One Note said the aircraft carrier had come hundreds of miles closer to the shore because of the weather.

If he thought that would explain away Top Gun Bush donning a flight suit and a helmet and taking underwater survival training in the White House swimming pool, he had a surprise in store. Few were prepared to accept or understand why the President chose to make that landing when he was told that the aircraft carrier could be reached by helicopter with far more ease.

There is no shortage of people in this country who begin to scream that the king is wearing no clothes if they see him in the altogether. Congressman Henry Waxman is one such. He called on the General Accounting Office to ask the White House for a full accounting of the trip in order to determine how much Top Gun Bush had cost the American taxpayer.

The most devastating attack came from the elder statesman of the Senate, Robert C Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who took the floor to denounce the shenanigans of the country’s chief executive and commander in chief. He said he was deeply troubled by the actions of the President which he chose to describe as “flamboyant showmanship”. He said Bush had used the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” as an “advertising backdrop and the military as “stage props”.

Then he added, “To me, it is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the President to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech.” He said he did not “begrudge” the President’s salute to America’s warriors abroad the Lincoln but “I do question the motives of a deskbound President who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech.”

The fact is that all that is now on the President’s mind is the next election. His eminence grise, Karl Rove, the chief of staff, according to James C. Moore, author of a book on him “led the nation to war to improve the political prospects of George W. Bush.” It may sound “surreal,” he adds, “but I also know it is true.”

So is that was what the Iraq war was all about? In politics, one may add, not everything works according to plan, no matter how carefully laid out it is. If the aftermath of the Iraq war turns out to be the royal mess it might well be, George W. Bush will have joined the ranks of America’s one-term Presidents.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Kishwar Naheed has not been known for mincing her words or prettifying the ugly. Afraid neither of the holy terrors who rule the roost in an increasing number of places, no more so than in the columns of the Urdu press, nor of the coercive agencies that run Pakistan’s inner establishment, Kishwar has had more than her share of detractors. At the same time, she has not been, and is not, short of friends who admire her for her courage, her tenacity, her work for the cause of women and the powerful poetry she has written.

To someone like me who has long known and admired Kishwar, it was no surprise, therefore, to find her in full flow in a book recently published here in America by the Iranian-born Shahla Haeri who runs the women’s studies programme at Boston University. “No shame for the sun” is a collection of five long interviews with “professional” Pakistani women, the four besides Kishwar being Quratul Ain Bakhteari (a social worker from Balochistan) Rahila Tiwana (the PPP activist who was tortured and raped in 1990), Ayesha Siddiqa (who writes every week in the TFT) and Sajida Mokarram Shah (a feminist and mystic from Peshawar).

Shahla Haeri, who spent extended periods in Pakistan in the 1990s conducting her interviews with these five women, reproduces her conversations with them as they took place. Since all these women come from different backgrounds and have undergone different experiences, collectively their stories open a whole new window on the life of the Pakistani woman, never before put together so comprehensively and with such authenticity.

Kishwar’s account of her life is the most brutally frank, something characteristic of her. She rebelled against her middle class, deeply conservative family, Sayyeds from UP, by falling in love with her university classmate, Yusuf Kamran, a Punjabi Kashmiri, and declaring to her shocked parents and siblings that she was going to marry him and marry him right away. He hesitated initially but then relented. She moved into the single rented room where Yusuf lived. When she went back home later to pick up her things, her brother said to her, “You cannot have them. You do not belong to the family. You have nothing here.” Yusuf’s family was no nicer. One of his sisters-in-law raided their room one day and took away what little she found there, including the single quilt that kept them warm and a bag of lentils that would have produced several meals.

Kishwar had already made her name as a poet. She soon found a part-time job, as did Yusuf. The first time she got paid for a mushaira, they bought a cupboard, their only material possession. Kishwar writes, “The whole night I looked at that cupboard and thought how beautiful it looked; how nice it was having it there.” If Kishwar is cynical about men, she has more reason to feel that way than most women. She writes that Yusuf never let her forget that it was because of her insistence that he had got married, otherwise he had no such plans. He also constantly suspected her of behaviour bordering on infidelity. Three months after they were married, he took off for America. Her mother-in-law offered no consolation. “This is the profession of men, to go out. There is nothing new in it. He will come back. Why are you crying?” Then she added that Yusuf was a handsome fellow (which he indeed was) and it was only natural that women would fall for him. So there.

He returned but paid little attention to her, happy with his friends and chasing women or being chased by them. But that notwithstanding, he made her bear him two children, both boys. Realising that she had made a mistake, she asked Yusuf for a divorce. But he was adamant: “I will never divorce you. And I’ll take away the children.” So Kishwar went on with the marriage. She told Haeri that she did not want people to say that she had been defeated and thrown aside and, secondly, in Pakistani society, a single woman was the butt of scandals. “It’s as if you keep a dog at the gate. Just keep the husband at the gate and stop people from making up stories about you,” she added tersely.

Meanwhile, she was doing well professionally. She was quite famous now and she had a nice government job. She had her own fully furnished house. Her family began to make overtures to her but she could not forget the way they had treated her. She says she never received any love from her mother and she felt none for her. She gave all her other children jewellery and valuables but not a red cent’s worth to her.

Kishwar told her interviewer, “Life for me is in the toil. I never wished to be a begum. I never wanted to be a person with jewellery or with cosmetics. I wanted to be myself.” Yusuf went off to Saudi Arabia and died of a heart attack there in 1984. He was just 45. When he left, Kishwar says, “I knew he was running off, and I knew this was the end of our relationship because I would never go to him and he would never ask me to do so”. He was also having a serious affair with an Anglo-Pakistani woman from Lahore. When he died and his papers were sent over to Kishwar, she found much evidence in them for the affair. He had left no money, just letters, including an unfinished one to his girlfriend. She says she did not stop crying for six months, although when she had heard that he was dead, she had felt both “pain and relief”.

But love often moves in subterranean ways. Three days after his death, she wrote a poem about him:

“From the tree on which two sparrows were wed

He chose the timber for his last journey The same silver shade Under which lovers are joined He chose for his last robe With the same blind belief Which turns trust to worship He closed his eyes In a new surrender He was an ocean Yet he appeared confined I, a small stream Spilled over the banks Till the wedding of that age of sparrows He will still live in the soul of that tree And I shall search for him On the island of my ignorance.”

 

Kishwar told Haeri in one conversation, “You see our society is not a uniform society, unlike Western societies where the process of development has been smoother and on a much grander scale. Twenty percent of our population is going towards the 21st century and 80 percent of the population is still living in the 14th century. The faces reflect the Western image but their background is rooted in their body. The dichotomy of the two systems that are in them does not let them behave as civilised people … It goes for both men and women.”

Well, as always, Kishwar Naheed hit that big nail on the head with the dainty but unerring hammer she operates with such deadly accuracy.

Country music fans all over the world are familiar with the name of Dixie Chicks, one of the most popular groups in the business. The three women who make it up are also from the same state as the President: Texas. But the Iraq war hasn’t been good to them. The price they have paid and continue to pay for one single remark by one of their members has been inordinately high. Trouble began when lead singer Natalie Maines declared onstage before a London concert audience that her group was “ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Thereafter all hell broke loose. Scores of country music stations stopped playing their records. A ritual trashing of their CDs was staged by groups that described themselves as patriotic Americans. Even children were coaxed to stomp over the group’s records and their pictures. The Chicks were accused of undermining the country when it was at war. They were charged with providing aid and comfort to America’s enemies and having mocked the sacrifices being offered for the honour of the country by American soldiers fighting in Iraq. So sharp was the reaction and so widely publicised it was that Ms Maines found herself forced to offer an unconditional apology. She even broke down on a TV show but her detractors do not appear to have felt assuaged. The group continues to be denounced and suffer some of the most painful abuse seen in print or on the air in this country for a long time.

The three women also received death threats. Completely forgotten in this mass hysteria fuelled by what are now known as the “neocons” or neo-conservatives, was that the Dixie Chicks had sold more records than any women’s group in country music history and the number of their fans worldwide could only be measured in millions. One very angry person posted the following message on a Dixie Chicks website, “Natalie, why don’t you just shut up? He (Bush) is not a warmonger or anything else. He is the President of the United States, and if you have a problem with him, get the hell out of here. Don’t go calling him names or other things either.”

Joy Anne-Lomena Reid, a Florida-based journalist, wrote that the Dixie Chicks episode had indeed been “shameful” for America. “The Republican Party and its handmaidens in the press are enforcing a McCarthyist, enforced groupthink that would put the old Soviet Union (or the old Iraq) to shame. No one — no elected official, no private citizen and certainly no member of the entertainment industry — is permitted to say an unkind word about George W. Bush. To do so is to be labelled a treasonous parasite living off the freedoms purchased for this country in blood. But don’t those freedoms guarantee us the right to criticise all we want? If not, what exactly has the blood of our fallen soldiers bought?”

Other artists reviled for their anti-war stand have included actor director Sean Penn and actress Susan Sarandon. In an hour long programme, ABC’s Diane Sawyer spoke to the three women as if they were little girls who had done something strictly forbidden. She wanted one more apology on air. It was the same programme during which Ms Maines burst out crying.

However, to his great credit, President Bush when asked by Tom Brokaw in an exclusive NBC interview what he thought of the Dixie Chicks affair, replied, “The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. I want to do what I think is right for the American people, and if some singers or Hollywood stars feel like speaking out, that’s fine.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The world is not going to be the same now after the fall of Baghdad. And nowhere more so than in Arab countries and especially Saudi Arabia or the Kingdom, as it likes to be called. In Pakistan, the media has been reluctant to print anything even mildly critical either of the country or those who rule it. That may be why even regular newspaper readers are but vaguely aware of what Saudi Arabia is and what it is not.

That it is the cradle of Islam and the fact that on its soil stand the religion’s holiest places have contributed to people’s diffidence when it comes to taking an objective look at things. Another factor is traditional Saudi financial generosity to Pakistan, including, in recent years, one billion dollars worth of free oil annually. Since 9/11 a much harder look is being taken at the Kingdom.

One such effort is a book being published this summer. Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a CIA field officer in the Middle East, comes out with some fascinating observations, many of them based on personal knowledge, about the Kingdom and what the future might hold for it.

Baer writes, “Saudi Arabia is in a mess, and it is our mess. We made it the private storage tank for our oil reserves. We reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price, and we grabbed every available Saudi petrodollar. We taught the Saudis exactly what was expected of them. We cannot walk away morally from the consequences of our behaviour - and we can’t walk away economically.”

He observes that while the US has always talked about reducing dependence on foreign oil, it has never made an honest effort to reduce its long-term consumption. Saudi oil, were it for some reason to be shut off, would have a devastating effect on the global economy, in particular on that of the United States, the world’s largest consumer. However, Baer points out Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, dysfunctional and “out-of-touch” ruling house that has little popular backing and few friends in the neighbourhood.

“Signs of impending disaster are everywhere, but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon - and the United States has chosen to look away. So nothing changes: the royal family continues to exhaust the Saudi treasury, buying more and more arms and funnelling more and more charity money to the jihadis, all in a desperate and self-destructive effort to protect itself,” he writes.

According to Baer, the Saudi oil assets are “frighteningly vulnerable to attack,” with half its proven oil reserves contained in only eight fields. A few hits at sensitive downstream points could put the Kingdom out of business for two years. The Saudis have traditionally used their surplus capacity to stabilise the international oil market. While other members of OPEC are on agreed quotas, the Kingdom has always chosen to act as the “swing producer”, which means producing exactly the quantity it will take to keep the market stable and the prices realistic.

Five extended families in the Middle East own 60 percent of the world’s oil, the Saud family controlling more than one-third of it. “This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters,” Baer argues. Washington, however, is set in its belief that all is well with the ruling house, has believed that a little democracy would cure everything and at some point Riyadh would become another Ankara. Baer thinks that is “utter nonsense” because in an open election, the people would vote not for democracy but for an Osama bin Laden and that too by a landslide because he would do what even the US wouldn’t: stand up to his country’s corrupt ruling elite.

In Baer’s view, “signs of disaster” are everywhere but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon. Per capita income in the Kingdom fell from $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. The birth rate has soared, 37.25 for every 1,000. Police is “corrupt” and the rule of law is a “sham”. The massive amount spent on defence - some say as high as 50 percent of the budget - is considered necessary for personal protection of the rulers. Local clerics call for jihad against the West - a term that includes the royals.

The Kingdom operates the world’s most advanced “non-workers’ paradise”. For the citizens, almost everything is free and about a quarter of the population is made up of foreigners. Foreigners hold seventy percent of all jobs and up to ninety percent in the private sector. The literacy rate is high but since the education system has been largely entrusted to Wahabi fundamentalists by way of “appeasement”, those who the system churns out are ill prepared to compete in a technological age. Two of every three PhDs in the Kingdom are in Islamic studies.

According to Baer, Saudi Arabia now keeps as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in US banks, an agreement going back to the Reagan years, while another trillion is invested in the American stock market. Last year, the US Defence Policy Board sponsored a report declaring the Kingdom to be part of the problem of terrorism rather than part of the solution.

Saudi Arabia, the report said, was thus “central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression.” It added, “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.” Within hours of word leaking out about the report, Colin Powell phoned Riyadh to say it did not, and could not, reflect the official Bush administration stance.

The House of Saud currently has 30,000 members, a number that will double in a generation. Would the price of oil in 2025 support even the most basic privileges of the princes, free travel anywhere on Saudia for one? Cutting back perks is easier to talk about, but hard to sell. Ninety percent of all Saudis are 64 and younger, and half the population is under 18. The presence of so many people of working age and ready to enter the workforce places enormous pressures on the economy, “particularly one designed less to accommodate those who want to work than to provide sustenance for those who would rather contemplate original intent in the Koran.”

The US-led occupation of Iraq can only trigger instability in the Middle East. The ruling house in Riyadh, perceived by the people as being inextricably integrated with Western interests, could, therefore, be facing its greatest challenge. This especially because the one man who can stem the rot, the reformist Crown Prince Abdullah is not the man Washington wants to see in charge of the Kingdom. It is Prince Sultan who is fancied because he can be trusted to keep the old arrangements in place. But hasn’t Iraq already made all old Middle East arrangements redundant?

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