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There have been two noteworthy events this week: the launch of the Clinton book ‘My Life’ which right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh has dubbed ‘My Lies’, and the release of Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing documentary ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’

While the first has been good news for the president and his campaign team, the second can only do immense and incalculable damage to his bid to get elected to a second term. For Bush, the simultaneous release of the book and the movie is reminiscent of those fairy tales that feature characters who, on being encountered first, laugh and then cry and when asked why, begin to tell the strangest of stories.

The Clinton book, all 900-plus pages of it, has already sold 400,000 copies. The number would have been 399,999 if I had slept on and not pulled myself out of bed half an hour before midnight and driven to a Borders bookstore in Tyson’s Corner in Virginia where, contrary to my expectations of running into a large crowd, only about ten people in various states of wakefulness were hanging around. At one minute past the stroke of midnight, the first copy of the book, cover-priced $35 and discounted by 30 percent, was handed out to the first buyer which happened to be I, having earlier placed myself strategically close to the cash-register. I drove home, sat down at my desk and looked through the index for Pakistan. What I found has already appeared in this newspaper, topped with my cautionary advice that the book contains nothing about Pakistan that was not already public knowledge.

The book has had dreadful reviews, starting with the demolition job performed by the stately New York Times. The Associated Press followed suit a day later and others have been equally uncomplimentary. Nobody these days has the time to read 900-plus pages of anything, unless it is perhaps Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ (which is far thinner than Mr Clinton’s say-nothing tome). And even with ‘War and Peace,’ there are more people who plan to read it at some point in their lives than those who actually read it.

Those who were looking for saucy passages featuring Miss Lewinsky and other ladies who have provided kiss-and-tell accounts of the president’s attentions, must feel cheated. Instead of sauce, there is contrition and most people have wondered if Mr Clinton’s remorse is genuine. One of them was Jonathan Dimbleby of the BBC, the best interviewer in the business, who kept prodding the former president on this point. Mr Clinton finally blew his top — or as they would say in Lahore ‘Phir unka meter phir gya’ — a moment the camera was waiting for. It zoomed into the president’s tomato-red face, giving his enemies yet another stick to beat him with. However, none of that matters: what matters is that Mr Clinton has walked all the way to the bank laughing. He has already pocketed his advance of $10 million and where that came from, there is more to come. All praise, therefore, to the angels who preside over such matters.

‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ Michael Moore’s devastating portrayal of President Bush and his fatal intellectual limitations that have dragged this country into a war that it did not need, has been released to 900 theatres across the country, a record for a documentary. It will do more damage to the president’s image than all that the Democratic party can throw at him in this election year. A report in the Washington Post says the movie “will be received like a two-hour campaign commercial aimed at President Bush and his war on terrorism.” Fahrenheit 9/11 has already won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and it is destined to win many more.

Moore, who does not mince his words, and who is probably the most irreverent man in this country, said this of the President of the United States, “It’s so easy to say that Bush is an idiot. But I don’t say it. You just let his own words and his own pictures do it.” In one such scene, the president is shown sitting before a class of school children on 11 September 2001, reading to them a story called ‘My Pet Goat,’ when he is told that the second plane has hit the other World Trade Centre tower. He continues to sit there for seven long minutes “looking tense but inscrutable.”

But nobody should hold that against him. After all, there was no Dick Cheney around to tell him what to do.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

There is no shortage of people in America who believe that the United Nations is a vast, and sinister organisation set up with the express purpose of taking over their country. If someone were to tell them that the United States played the leading role in the establishment of the world body that they now believe is about to destroy America’s independence and sovereignty, they will refuse to believe it. They will see the person who tells them that as “one of them.” Them, of course, are the conspirators out to get America and take control of its government.

Since I began to get bombarded with such far out theories, I have stopped calling Pakistanis the world’s leading conspiracy theorists. We are still in the minor league of that game. Timothy McVeigh who was executed for the April 1995 Oklahoma city bombing that killed 168 people believed that there was a conspiracy against the United States hatched by those who wanted to establish a world government. He went to his death convinced that he was right. His partner Terry Nichols, who was found guilty on more charges last week by an Oklahoma court, heard the verdict without showing any emotion. No doubt, he is still convinced that what the two of them did was right.

However, since 9/11, it is Islam that has been the favourite whipping boy. While there have been a number of commendable attempts by respected scholars to understand Islam and to show that it is wrong to hold its teachings responsible for the actions of a few, on a more popular level, Islam and Muslims have become interchangeable with terrorism. Millions in this country believe that the Muslims of the world are on the warpath against the West in an attempt to destroy the Judaeo-Christian way of life. The tabloids, certain cable TV networks and a number of Christian evangelist groups have played a major role in spreading this myth.

Every other day, there is something new on the “great Islamic conspiracy.” This week’s winner is a gentleman by the name of Robert Spencer who is making a special reduced price Memorial Day offering of his book ‘Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West’. He advises his would-be readers that after winning “victories” in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is no time to rest on our laurels. His publishers claim that “this shocking new book reveals why jihad terrorism is still a potent threat to our nation and the world.” Included among the “startling revelations” are “details about the numerous footholds that jihad warriors have already established right here in the US,” “radical Muslims’ open contempt for our free society and their plans to destroy it” and the bad news that the “the clash of civilisations — which many would rather ignore — is already upon us.”

Mr Spencer is also said to reveal “the motivations, goals and actions of radical Muslims in the United States and around the world, and details.” The author takes the view — which is not correct by a long shot — that Muslims living in the US have failed to “disavow terrorism and condemn the 9/11 attacks with a clear voice.” He claims to have established that “the traditional Islamic concept of jihad does sanction — even require — violence against non-Muslims. While many Muslims today ignore these exhortations to violence.”

The author is identified as “an adjunct fellow with the Free Congress Foundation,” who is credited with uncovering “materials full of naked hatred and intolerance.” He warns that these “poisonous texts, freely available for purchase by Western Muslims, are ignored or explained away by Muslim spokesmen and the establishment media.” While calling on the Muslims of the world to “forthrightly acknowledge these elements of their religion and set to work to reform it,” Mr Spencer calls for the monitoring of America’s mosques (that every American Muslim believes it is already being done), dismissing the objection that it would be “a violation of anyone’s civil rights.” He also comes up with the observation — perhaps the first person to do so in defiance of established history — that “the ‘tolerant’ Muslim Spain celebrated today by academics and Muslim apologists is more fiction than fact.” In addition, he makes the startling claim that the Left has formed an “unholy alliance” with radical Islam.

How one can fight such ignorance, I am unable to say. So over to you, Khaled Ahmed.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

More than ten years ago Vanity Fair published what remains the best investigated report on the air crash that killed Gen Zia-ul-Haq and everyone else on board minutes after their C-130 took off from Bahawalpur on August 17, 1988, for Islamabad. The report by Edward Jay Epstein has never been printed in Pakistan as far as I know.

Having ruled out Benazir Bhutto and her brother, the late Murtaza Bhutto and his Al-Zulfikar, as being behind the crash, Epstein examined the case against the then Soviet Union. Earlier, in August 1988, the Soviet Union had temporarily suspended troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in protest against what it said were Zia’s violations of the Geneva accords. Zia, charged Moscow, was not only continuing to arm the Afghan mujahideen in blatant disregard of the agreement but was directing a sabotage campaign in Kabul. The Soviets took the extraordinary step of summoning US ambassador Jack Matlock and informing him that the Soviet Union intended to teach Zia a lesson. The KGB had trained and effectively run KHAD, the Afghan intelligence service which was responsible for bombings in Pakistan that had already killed 1,400 people. Epstein absolved Moscow because in his view it would not have risked killing the American ambassador Arnold Raphael as it could have jeopardised its detente with Washington. It should be noted however that neither Raphael nor Gen Wassom, head of the US military mission, was supposed to fly back with Zia. So a question mark hangs over Soviet involvement.

What about the Indians? Rajiv Gandhi had warned Pakistan on August 15 that it would have “cause to regret its behaviour” in arming Sikh separatists. Ijaz-ul-Haq, then living in Bahrain, told Epstein that Zia had been persuaded to go to Bahawalpur for the tank demonstration despite misgivings. Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman’s sons said their father had been “manipulated” into going. This, the writer concluded, raised the possibility that it could have been the work of a “faction in the army bent on an invisible coup d’état”.

The United States too was unhappy with Zia for diverting a good deal of aid and weapons to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar whom it considered an anti-American extremist. They were also worried about Zia’s nuclear programme. After the crash the FBI was told to “keep out of Pakistan” by Secretary of State George Schultz, though it had the authority to investigate suspicious plane crashes involving US citizens. The special team it assembled to look for forensic evidence was not deployed. The US experts assigned to the official board of inquiry appointed by Pakistan included six air force accident investigators but no criminal, counter-terrorist, or sabotage experts. Epstein thought the reason behind the US decision to “stay away” was its fear of the “uncontrollable consequences” of the investigation, such as the involvement of a superpower, a neighbour or elements from within the house. The US even distanced itself from the official Pakistani finding of sabotage by saying that “the Pakistani findings were not the same as findings by American experts” who said it was a “malfunction” that caused the crash. This story was leaked to the New York Times on October 14, 1988, three days before the official Pakistani report was released.

Interestingly, the head of the US team, Col DE Sowada, told a congressional committee later that no evidence of a mechanical failure had been found. The official Pakistani report had said the same thing, that section having been written by the American experts. Epstein said the US findings were contained in a 365 page report, sections of which were read to him by a Pentagon official. The report established that the plane had not exploded in midair but hit the ground intact. It had not been hit by a missile either, nor had there been an onboard fire. No autopsies were performed, except one on the US general who was sitting with Zia. The Pakistani report also ruled out engine failure or the use of contaminated fuel. The plane’s electric power was found working normally and pilot error was ruled out. Mechanical failure was also discounted.

The Pakistani inquiry found traces of certain chemicals used as explosives by saboteurs. Or it could have been poison gas which incapacitated the pilots. The report recommended a criminal investigation and suggested the handing over of the case to a competent agency. Epstein wrote that when he met Gen Hamid Gul, then head of ISI, he told him that “at the request of the government, the agency had called off its inquiry” and transferred it to a “broader-based” authority headed by FK Bandial, a senior civil servant.

When the crash occurred, there were three other planes in the area whose crews Epstein interviewed. The last words heard by the control tower were “Stand by” and then a faint voice saying “Mash’hood, Mash’hood”, the name of the captain. The voice was that of Zia’s military secretary, Brig Najib Ahmed, as one of the pilots told Epstein. It is impossible that if the plane was in trouble, the captain would not have communicated with the tower or one of the three planes. There was a long silence between “Stand by” said by Mash’hood and Najib calling the pilot’s name. Tapes of the crew’s last minutes may exist with the US National Security Agency which routinely sucks in radio and electronic signals from all parts of the world, but they have not surfaced. Eyewitnesses saw the plane pitching up and down as if on a roller coaster. Lockheed told Epstein that this phugoid pattern was characteristic of a pilotless plane, which meant that the pilots were either dead or unconscious. This could have been caused by a gas bomb placed in the air vent in the C-130 which went off when pressurised air was fed into the cockpit.

Epstein, who went to Bahawalpur, also concluded that it would not have been difficult for any of the mechanics, including civilians, who worked on Pak-I’s door for two hours to have planted a gas bomb. A chemical warfare expert told him that chemical agents which could instantaneously knock off a crew were “extremely difficult” to obtain but not beyond the reach of an intelligence service. Such a gas had been used in Afghanistan by the Soviets. There was also VX, a US-made gas, which could cause paralysis and loss of speech within 30 seconds. If used, it left behind phosphorus. Intriguingly, traces of phosphorus were found in Pak-I. Autopsies could have determined the cause, but were not carried out on the grounds that Islam required the dead to be buried within 24 hours. However, the bodies were not returned to the families until two days after the crash. A PAF doctor told Epstein that autopsies were routinely performed on pilots after crashes. The remains came to CMH, Bahawalpur, in plastic bags but before US and Pakistani pathologists could arrive on August 18, they were put into sealed coffins and sent away.

Police investigation of those who had access to Pak-I was also curtailed. Their questioning was not “methodical”, said a Pakistani official who was present. No one was interrogated. The American team only asked technical questions through a translator. A policeman at the airstrip was found murdered after the crash. This was not investigated nor was the mystery solved. The theory that it was revenge against the killing of a Shi’a cleric in Peshawar – the pilots of both Zia’s plane and the standby C-130 were Shi’a – was abandoned after a couple of months during which Flt-Lt Sajid, the other pilot, was interrogate and, wrote Epstein, even tortured. The PAF protested that even if the pilot had crashed Zia’s plane deliberately, he simply could not have caused it to behave the way it did. “The Shiite red herring theory was only one of several efforts to limit the investigation into the crash and divert attention from the issue of sabotage,” wrote Epstein. The families said that the records of calls made to Zia and Akhtar Abdul Rehman prior to the crash were destroyed. Military personnel in Bahawalpur at the time of the crash were transferred.

“Taken together, these details add up to a well-organised cover-up. And if this is so, then the crash of Pak-I has to have been an inside job,” Epstein argued. “Only powerful elements inside Pakistan had the means to orchestrate what happened before and after the crash. But the eeriest aspect of this whole affair is the speed and effectiveness with which it was consigned to oblivion. No matter how well intentioned this cover-up might have been, the one uncounted casualty in the crash of Pak-I was the truth,” he added sardonically.

Now that Ijaz-ul-Haq is a minister and can gain access to classified information, is it not incumbent upon him, first as a son and then as a citizen of Pakistan and an elected official, to determine once for all who killed Gen Zia-ul-Haq?

It was Nixon who was called Tricky Dick. Since he passed on, the title has gone without its rightful claimant, though it occurs to me that no one deserves it more than the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. It always struck me that he has a name that could well be that of a private eye of the kind Raymond Chandler wrote about. He is a quiet operator and unlike vice presidents of the past, not a great deal is seen or heard of him.

This being the age of the Bush-led war on terrorism, the vice president is said to receive as much protection, if not more, than the president himself. A whole book could be compiled of jokes and cartoons about where Dick Cheney is on a given day or night. Does he sleep in his own bed at home or is he whisked off by the secret service to locations across the country that no one knows about?

On the day of the World Trade Centre attacks, the vice president was taken to a hitherto undisclosed location, just in case someone was out to get him or in case, the president fell down from his bicycle while trying to keep both wheels on the track. No one now doubts that the man behind the president is the vice president. The two are like a ventriloquist and his dummy. You can work out who the ventriloquist is — or the dummy. A couple of weeks earlier, when the president finally agreed to appear before the commission investigating 9/11, he did so on the condition that he would bring his vice with him. This was welcome news to cartoonists and the White House joke industry. They had a field day.

You have to admire the man though for his tenacity and never-say-die attitude. He has had four heart attacks and he wears a pacemaker which makes the X-ray machines he walks through go crazy. Despite these infirmities, he is the man who runs the more serious of this administration’s operations. Everyone is agreed that the decimation of the Taliban regime, the invasion of Iraq and things we will only find out after this crowd has taken its leave of us, are to the credit/discredit of Dick Cheney. He is also the one who is the grand patron of the neocons and he it was who was the principal proclaimer of the myth that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. And although none have been found and are never going to be found, the vice president has not considered it necessary to make a retraction. I once suggested that the mission of finding those weapons should be handed over to the Punjab Police which can find whatever it is told to find. It is very simple. You place what you are looking for where your are looking for it, and then you go there with all the TV cameras and you find it.

Let me at this point turn to The Onion, the most entertaining magazine from among the many oddball ones published in this country. I may be partial to it because during Zia-ul-Haq’s time, I published a book called ‘Please Give us Back our Onions.’ (need one add that to date the onions have not been returned; further confirmation may be obtained from GHQ, Rawalpindi). Last week, The Onion wrote that since President Bush’s public-approval ratings had hit an all-time low, Vice-President Dick Cheney had announced that he had been ‘forced’ to throw his hat into the ring for the 2004 presidential race. “Enough is enough,” the visibly annoyed Cheney said at a morning press conference. “George blew the whole Iraqi prison-abuse speech, and he barely did better with his Nicholas Berg reaction. Now he’s below 50 percent in the polls. I’m sorry, but I can’t allow him to drag me down with him in November.”

According to The Onion, “While Cheney has not yet chosen a running mate, he said it ‘certainly will not be the President.’ ‘I ordered him not to get up there and talk about gay marriage last week, but he insisted,’ Cheney added. ‘He said, ‘This will work.’ Yeah, it worked to alienate a ton of voters. I’m sorry, but he’s out.’ Cheney said that while he would rather not run for President, Bush has left him little choice. ‘I was perfectly happy letting George take the spotlight,’ Cheney said. ‘If things didn’t look so grim, I would’ve continued to direct the re-election campaign from the wings. But I could see that it was time to get out — now, before the first debate.’”

Cheney said, The Onion goes on, “I’ve been mulling this over ever since the last State Of the Union address, to be honest. I decided to go through with it last night, when I stopped by the President’s office to discuss a speech I’d dropped off earlier that day and caught him sitting on the couch, watching Fox News and eating Fritos. He hadn’t even picked the damn thing up. I exploded. I said, ‘That’s it. Next year, I’m running this country myself.’”

The Onion gave the best line in the piece to House Speaker Dennis Hastert. It has him say, “Frankly, he’s been very patient with the President. He’s given him every chance to get his act together, but you can’t keep your money on a losing horse.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Every now and then, in one Western capital or another, instances of the brutal treatment of domestic servants at the hands of their masters from the Third World - always from the Third World - surface, make a bit of a splash in the media for a day or two and then sink without trace. Meanwhile the exploitation and inhuman treatment of these poor people, mostly young women, brought over with promises that were never meant to be kept, continues. It is a shame, and what makes it even more shameful is that these helpless people suffer at the hands of those who (usually being diplomats) hold forth at international forums and lecture Western countries on the injustices visited upon the developing world. The developing world - an appellation as absurd as it sounds - should be judged by the way its rich or ruling classes treat the poor and the powerless. I hope next time one of our diplomats from the Arab world or South Asia or Latin America stands up in the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva and begins the same old clichi-ridden speech that everyone is now sick of hearing, he is told to take an honest look at how human beings with no power and no redress are treated in his own country.

There are horrible stories of mistreatment, violence, blackmail, insensitivity, arrogance and criminal negligence involving domestic servants, who are brought over to foreign capitals from Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Indonesia with false promises. Only a few manage to escape or have their plight become known. If the capital involved is a non-Western one, it will not be considered worthy of notice anyway, because that is how the poor are treated in such parts of the world as a matter of course. If it is a Western capital, and if the domestic being mistreated can muster the courage to go to the police or a charitable organisation, or a group that takes up such causes, there may be hope of rescue.

I have myself known of cases of inhuman treatment of domestic servants by Pakistani diplomats, almost always by the wives rather than the men. I recall meeting a middle-aged Pushtun woman in Washington about twenty years ago who told me of her harrowing experience. The diplomat in question rose to the top of the heap in later years and the “lady wife” is now a hotshot TV producer of costume extravaganzas about decadent times when courtesans ruled the courts. The woman put in 18-hour days and was always being screamed at. Her teenage son, who had been promised gainful employment, was being used as a spare domestic. As is usual, the passports of the servants had been confiscated by the masters “for safekeeping”. The money they had been promised back home never quite materialised. The domestic servant of a Pakistani ambassador in Canada went berserk and ran out of the house stark naked on an arctic night. The tongue lashing he had suffered at the hands of “Her Excellency” had finally blown his fuse. He was picked up by a police cruiser and ultimately sent home to Pakistan.

Over a year ago, Rita, an Indian diplomat’s domestic who was made to work 16-18 hours a day, all seven days of the week, while “Madam” screamed at her and sometimes beat her up, finally ran off and was rescued. She recounted that she was called names (”kutya” or bitch), not allowed to use the phone, once locked out during winter and threatened with deportation if she did not “straighten up”. Her family in India was paid $100 a month. More than 4,000 domestics are brought to the US every year by diplomats and World Bank and IMF officials. Under US law, they have to be paid the minimum local wage - about $6 an hour - and treated in all respects in accordance with local laws. That unfortunately never happens. In 2001 Human Rights Watch issued a devastating report on the treatment of domestic servants by diplomats, but there is nothing to suggest that it changed anything.

The latest horror story carried by the Washington Post on May 3 concerns two Ecuadorian women who were rescued from their Latin American employers by CASA, a workers’ rights group. Alexandra Santacruz, 24 years old, had worked 80 hour weeks cooking, cleaning and babysitting for an Ecuadorian official at the Organisation of American States for two dollars an hour. Her passport had been taken away and she was afraid that if she left, she would become an illegal and the police would come after her. The Post report said, “Stories like hers are increasing among the thousands of women who are recruited every year from impoverished countries as live-in domestic help.” The good news is that a growing number of organisations are reaching out to mistreated domestic workers, helping them leave their employers and providing emergency housing and legal assistance.

A 14 year-old girl from the Cameroon worked for three years under unspeakable conditions in a Washington suburb and besides frequent beatings and tongue lashing, she was also sexually abused. A Bangladeshi maid working for a Bahraini diplomat in New York, who was never paid and never allowed to leave the apartment, was finally rescued by the police. An Indian maid working for an Indian diplomat in the posh Washington suburb of Potomac was only paid $100 for 4,500 hours of work. Another group named Break the Chains says, “People can’t conceive of the fact that modern-day slavery exists here in our own backyards, in the shadow of the nation’s capital.”

Muka, an Indonesian live-in maid in Alexandria, across the river from Washington, put in 19 hour days and was given leftovers to eat. Her employer was a UAE diplomat. He put her in the service of an Arab woman named Princess Halla, the diplomat’s common-law wife. Muka was made to work from five in the morning to one hour past midnight. She was not allowed to bathe because the “Princess” did not want “your germs in my shower”. She often slapped and kicked Muka wearing boots. Once after she detected a scratch on her baby’s face, she pulled out a knife, ran it across Muka’s throat and promised to slaughter her next time she found another scratch on her baby. Muka’s passport had, of course, been confiscated. Finally, after another beating, Muka fled and was rescued. The diplomat is since gone and the “Princess” is nowhere to be found.

But why am I going on and on about slavery in America? What about Pakistan and the inhuman manner in which servants are kept and treated there? Under the law, child labour is banned, but every other house has child servants and it bothers nobody. George Orwell wrote that the poor are invisible to the rich. I hope Ms Asma Jehangir will find time to look into the exploitation of her country’s domestic workers.

Gen. Anthony Zinni, who ran the US Central Command at an eventful time in our history, has just published a book, co-authored with novelist Tom Clancy. What it establishes is something that has always been suspected, namely that regardless of the state of relations between Islamabad and Washington, the two armies have always had a one-on-one equation.

Gen. Zinni writes that in 1998 after India carried out its nuclear test, the US was deeply concerned about Pakistan following suit. In an effort to persuade Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to desist, it was decided to fly a delegation to Islamabad made up of Zinni, Strobe Talbot and Karl Inderfurth. Pakistan, he recalls, was bitter because of US sanctions and the F16 issue. “Our treatment of Pakistan was working against our interest,” he writes. The three men were about to take off from Tampa for the direct 22-hour flight to Islamabad when word reached them that they were not welcome. In desperation, Zinni phoned Gen. Jehangir Karamat, whom he calls a “man of great honour and integrity, and a friend.”

“Relations with Pakistan hung on a thin thread of a personal relationship that Gen. Karamat and I agreed to maintain,” he writes. Karamat “promised to take care of the problem and a few minutes later we were in the air”. This means that the army chief had overridden the decision of the prime minister. The delegation met several times with Sharif and his ministers but was unable to convince them.

At his last private meeting with Karamat, the Pakistani COAS shared with him “his frustration with his corrupt government”. Karamat also assured him that though his military colleagues had urged him to take over, he could “never do it”. Zinni’s next reference to Pakistan takes him to April 1999 when he went there to meet the new army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whom he found “bright, sincere and personable … a fervent nationalist who leaned toward the West”. Zinni recalls that Musharraf was “as appalled as Gen. Karamat over the ever-worsening corruption within the civilian government”. He says “we both agreed to stay in close touch”. They also exchanged home phone numbers, thus forming a “friendship” that would prove to be “enormously valuable to our two countries”.

Then came the conflict with India where “the Pakistanis waylaid the Indians and penetrated all the way to Kargil” threatening Indian communications and support up to Siachin. The Indians came back “with a vengeance” and the situation began to worsen, bringing the two countries to the brink of war. Zinni was asked to rush to Pakistan and make it withdraw from Kargil. Zinni held meetings in Islamabad on June 24 and 25 and told his hosts, “If you don’t pull back, you are going to bring war and nuclear annihilation down to your country. That’s going to be very bad news for everybody.” He writes that no one quarreled with his “rationale” but no one wanted to “lose face”. Withdrawal to the LoC was seen as “political suicide”, so a face-saving device was found in the form of a meeting with President Clinton, but only after a “withdrawal of forces”. Zinni writes, “That got Musharraf’s attention; and he encouraged Prime Minister Sharif to hear me out.”

In other words, the man who had brought about Kargil was prepared to back down. Sharif, Zinni adds, was “reluctant to withdraw before the meeting with Clinton was announced, but after I insisted, he finally came around and he ordered the withdrawal. We set up a meeting (with Clinton) in July”. Does anyone remember that Musharraf came to see Sharif off at the airport. Zinni’s account reveals that the army pulled out of Kargil willingly and not because of Sharif. In fact, if there was any resistance to pull back, it was on the part of the prime minister not the army chief who later made many heroic claims about Kargil, accusing Sharif of “surrender”.

Washington did not like the Musharraf coup and told the Pentagon to scale down contact with Rawalpindi. It was Musharraf who called Zinni and told him what had led to the coup and why “he and other military leaders had no choice other than the one they took”. He told Zinni that in Pakistan democracy was a sham as everything the government controlled was “up for sale”. He said he wanted a democracy, not of form but substance (I suppose that is what we have four years later). Though Zinni tried to talk his superiors into resuming contacts with the new government in Islamabad, they were not convinced.

In December 1999, Zinni was asked to call Musharraf and ask him to arrest certain terrorists whose cohorts had been picked up in Jordan. Musharraf obliged, but when Zinni asked the administration to “reconnect” with Musharraf, he was refused. Zinni called Musharraf and gave him the bad news. Musharraf answered, “I don’t want or expect anything for what I’ve done. Tony, I did it because it was the right thing to do.”

The moral of this tale is that had there been no 9/11, the US would have continued to ignore Musharraf, but what it did not realise was that Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Chief of Army Staff, was born under a lucky star.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

When Shahryar Mohammad Khan was picked up and asked to take the place of Gen Tauqir Zia, so relieved were those of us who had been praying for the general’s ouster, followed by his speedy dispatch to Guantanamo Bay’s local counterpart, that we could not stop celebrating. Messages of goodwill flowed out to the new chief, including one from the repentant writer of these lines. “We wuz wrong and we wuz took,” is all that I can say now, considering that the old chief hadn’t done anything that the new chief isn’t doing. Maybe chiefs, all chiefs wherever they are, should be abolished altogether.

Before celebrating the general’s stumping, perhaps one should have recalled Pakistan’s history which has repeatedly shown that the earlier king is to be preferred to the one who follows. Ayub Khan’s eleven years in office, most people saw as divine punishment for our failings, but look who replaced him. Not the archangel Gabriel, but Gen Yahya Khan whose time in office was one unending cocktail party, with the host knocking back all the cocktails, leaving none for the rest.

Gen Tauqir Zia, who chose to ignore the very public-spirited suggestion that if he must continue to preside over cricket, he should at least modify his name by adding the prefix “Bay-” to his first name, in the end fell on his sword, but not willingly. He was pushed. There is no such thing as a heroic exit in Pakistan. Had the disasters Pakistan cricket suffered under Gen Tauqir Zia’s command been on the field of battle, he would have been court-martialled.

In our entire history of 57 years, no one has ever taken responsibility for a disaster or a mishap, and resigned. They have all had to be sacked. Years ago I heard someone say, “In Pakistan a rascal’s rope is long.” Sporting disasters have one saving virtue: there are no lives lost. But what about railway and road accidents that cause death and destruction? Has any minister or senior official in charge ever stepped forward and said, “It happened on my watch and I must, therefore, go.” Never. There have been civilian governments; there have been military governments; there have been military-civilian governments. They have all been the same. The botched South Waziristan operation has seen no heads roll. One Peshawar-based gentleman thumped his chest and declared, “Mission accomplished”. Obviously, what he saw as his mission, the rest of us saw as a disaster. So why should cricket be any different? And yet…

Shahryar Khan’s managerial skills were put to the test once when he took the team to India and he was found wanting. A man of high culture, who would have ruled the princely state of Bhopal had there been no 1947, he has had a distinguished diplomatic career. He has also had a lifelong love affair with cricket, but has unfortunately proved ill-equipped to deal with Pakistan’s cricket establishment after years of mismanagement. One expected that a man with his fine credentials and great personal decency would be gallant enough to accept full responsibility for Pakistan’s disastrous performance against India on our own soil and resign. He did no such thing, thus disappointing many who otherwise admire him.

Instead he did the classic Pakistani thing: look for scapegoats. The brilliant but temperamental Shoaib was the first suspect. The humiliation he was subjected to through uncalled for medical examinations that seemed at pains to establish that he was merely pretending he had a cracked rib, said very little for the good judgment of the chief and those who advise him. OK, Shoaib is a bit off sometimes and bowls too many wides, so what? There is no one in the whole world who can match his gift. Skipper Abdul Hafiz Kardar once told me to remember one thing about fast bowlers. “No man who is hundred percent ‘normal’ can be a fast bowler.” When I asked why, the Skipper said, “What normal man will run 22 steps and a hop seven times in three or four minutes in an effort to smash the skull of the person standing at the other end with nothing more threatening than a wooden bat?” I had to concede that the Skipper had once again got the middle stump.

When you take over a place that has gone to the dogs, the first thing you do is change the principal supervisors. Shahryar Khan being the gentleman he is, did no such thing and retained a chief executive who has absolutely no experience of running anything and who is under contract to a foreign TV channel as a high-money commentator. If the chief executive had, for some reason that is not clear, to be retained, why was he allowed to keep his TV contract? Does this not constitute an unacceptable clash of interests? It does not matter if the chief executive does not draw any money for his “services”. If you are not paid by the organisation you work for and indeed, in this case, run, you cannot be expected to feel any responsibility for it. And why was the coach retained? Anyone who has followed cricket knows that he is not a unifier but a divider. A great batsman Miandad certainly was, but where is the evidence that he is also a great coach? Even he has not resigned or been sacked after this spring’s Indian disaster.

I asked someone in Lahore what was going on. This is what he wrote, “The PCB is a bulls…t circus – there is no difference between them and the hotrod general – cricket is a mess. You should read Shahryar’s first press conference and the six or so things he was going to do. He has gone back on everything. There is a big scandal on the One Day Indian series in Lahore, where the chief executive gave 2,000 Rs 1,500 tickets to a friend who flogged them for Rs 2,500 each and made Rs 20 lacs overnight. RR gets US$1,800 a day from Ten Sports and charges nothing for his ‘services’ to PCB. That is the state of cricket in Pakistan, circa 2004.”

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