Everybody’s writing about the General

But these days not all the barbs about Musharraf’s Pakistan in the US media are sheathed in humour. Especially not since The New York Times led the way in identifying Pakistan as the source of North Korea’s uranium-enrichment process.

A secret barter arrangement, it is being said, was suspected during the Clinton administration, it continued after Musharraf came to power in 1999 and, according to US officials, was finally confirmed last summer.

The Pakistani connection, wrote The Wall Street Journal, is seen in the type of centrifuge programme North Korea has been working on, a model that US intelligence suspects is ‘‘consistent with what the Pakistanis did 15 years ago’’.

While US Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was assured ‘‘400 %;’’ by General Musharraf in a telephone conversation that Pakistan was not participating in such activity and ‘‘…I take his word for it’’, many in the US media are loudly unwilling to do the same.

Mounting a remarkably frontal attack on what he termed as ‘‘Musharraf’s pattern of lies and evasions’’, influential columnist Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post recently that ‘‘Pakistan today is the most dangerous place on earth’’. A base from which ‘‘nuclear technology, fundamentalist terrorism and life destroying heroin are spread around the globe’’, a country that is ‘‘in part ungoverned, in part ungovernable’’.

Hoagland was equally scathing about the Bush administration’s response. He said official Washington will not tell the truth to or about ‘‘President-for-life Musharraf’’, much less hold him accountable for his ‘‘lies and subterfuge’’. Secretary Powell, he said, knows ‘‘Musharraf lied publicly when giving pledges last spring to end cross-border terrorism (in Kashmir)… even lied about whether President Bush had talked to him about that subject in a September meeting in New York’’.

US policy today amounts to ‘‘giving money to Pakistan, which agrees to take it’’. To Hoagland, the tableau of Bush officials and the Congress ignoring warnings that are in ‘‘plain sight’’, invoked the spectre of the first Bush administration and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Hoagland’s jabs drew immediate blood. In an indignant letter to the Post, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington Ashraf Jehangir Qazi railed at the ‘‘character assassination’’. It was particularly ‘‘deplorable’’, he complained, to heap abuse on Musharraf who, according to Time magazine, has ‘‘the most difficult job in the world’’.

Qazi denied it all. No export of nuclear weapons, technology, or materials has taken place from Pakistan, ‘‘…in particular, nothing of the sort has happened on President Musharraf’s watch’. The crackdown on terrorist organisations has been ‘‘systematic and effective’’. Pakistan has been ‘praised for its cooperation’ in ‘‘eliminating’’ poppy cultivation and heroin laboratories in its territories. And President Musharraf’s term, he protested, was only for five years.

There have been forewarnings of such a brittle exchange between the US columnist and the Pakistani ambassador. In the waxing and waning relationship of the US media with Washington’s Most Favoured Dictator since September 11, there have been signs of a new downswing. Even before the revelations on North Korea, the draining of ardour was visible in the US media’s openly disbelieving reaction to Pakistan’s recent polls. Among others, USA Today signalled a growing impatience with Musharraf’s ‘‘political abuses’’ that deserve ‘‘loud condemnation’’. It wrote that at a time when the Bush administration is calling for a friendly regime and democracy in Iraq, Pakistan is a reminder of ‘‘how difficult both goals are to achieve’’.

Dire references to Pakistan have peppered the editorials written on Indonesia after the bombings at Bali. The Washington Post, for instance, warned the Pentagon against reacting to President Megawati’s relatively weak political position in Indonesia’s fragile democracy by trying to restore close US ties with the Indonesian army: ‘‘As the worsening situation in Pakistan demonstrates, the challenge of engaging with a complex civilian political elite, though formidable, may prove more fruitful over time than the simple embrace of a willing general’’. Pakistan finds dishonourable mention in most pessimistic assessments of the US-led War on Terror.

For many in the US media, Pakistan is becoming emblematic of the lack of fit between the Bush Doctrine and the complicated challenge ahead. Queried Time: ‘‘If everyone is either with us or against us, what does Bush do now about Pakistan, our ally in the war on terrorism, if it was the source of North Korea’s nuclear equipment’’?