Adil Najam August 2, 1999

Tags: Law , Freedom , Government , Military , Dictatorship , Democracy , Politics , Kashmir , Pakistan , Leaders

href="/tag/war">war'. The popular belief seems to be that a combination of Indian conspiracy, Western antipathy to all Muslims, and the incompetence of our media managers colluded to create such an intense anti-Pakistani sentiment in the international media that we were effectively cornered. Proponents of such a view believe that while a host of other factors may also have contributed to the situation, the single biggest determinant of our current plight was the less than friendly attitude of the international media.

Indeed, this theory is good a self-deceptional device. What is more, the circumstantial evidence supports it and gives us a convenient cop-out from what has otherwise been a grave embarrassment. After all, the international media's treatment of the Kargil crisis could not be termed as Pakistan-friendly by any stretch of imagination and seemed positively pro-India. That fact not withstanding, the point is that there was NO 'international media war'; there wasn't even a skirmish. Yes, we have utterly lost all support from the international media. But we had already lost that long before the first shots were fired at Kargil. Yes, our media managers failed us on the Kargil hills. But their failure was not in that they could not put a better 'spin' on Kargil, it was in their mistaken belief that they ever had any chance of doing so.

Consider for a moment that you are NOT a Pakistani. Now imagine a country--let us NOT call it Pakistan; let us call it Country X. Imagine, if you will, that this Country X has been under military dictatorship for half of its existence. Since resuming democracy just 10 years ago it has had four major changes of government, a parade of caretaker Prime Ministers, a flurry of dissolved parliaments, and a sequence of distrusted Presidents. Imagine that this is a country that is ranked as one of the most corrupt on the planet and where governments are regularly removed for incompetence only to be re-elected again. Assume that it is a country where governance has collapsed. No faith exists in the law enforcement. Basic services like health and education are in shambles. This is a country where the leaders of the previous government are under national indictment and international investigation for corruption. A country where the leaders of the current government flout their majority by first suppressing the judiciary, then meddling with the provincial governments in all provinces except their own power-base, then start beating up journalists and hauling workers from social welfare organizations particularly those working on issues of human rights. Imagine such a country, dear readers. If you were anyone, anyone except a citizen of this country, would you feel an affinity to it?

As a Pakistani, these are tough words to put on paper. But they happen to be true. The international media seems anti-Pakistani not simply because it is controlled by some phantom "Zionist Lobby" or because it is pro-India, but because we have never given it much reason to be pro-Pakistani. Over the last so many years--but particularly in the last four or five--Pakistan has consistently scarred its own international image through acts that can only be defined as self-mutilation. Today, in the eyes of the international media--even those we count as our friends--we appear untrustworthy and disfigured. What we have done to our international image through our own actions is worse than what all the Indian propaganda could ever have done in a hundred years. As far as our international image is concerned, we have indeed been our own worst enemy.

The tragedy is that in Kargil we had a situation where we were the 'good guys'. Where the Indians were clearly the aggressors and the suppressors. Where Pakistan had the moral high ground in its support for a just cause. Yet, the ghosts of our past mistakes came to haunt us. We lost the support of the international media not because of what was happening at Kargil. We lost it on those palatial British Estates that messers Benazir and Nawaz have been accumulating. We lost it on the way we have treated our judiciary, our press, our civic groups, our NGOs, and above all, our own people. The treatment we got from the international media was the price of all these accumulated acts of arrogance and disdain.

The rationalist will argue that the international media should not have mixed issues and should not have confused its anguish over the treatment of the press and NGOs in Pakistan with the legitimate struggle of Kashmiri freedom fighters. In a perfect world, the international media should have been able to distinguish between, and keep apart, the treatment meted out by the government of Pakistan to its own citizens with the way the Indians are suppressing innocent Kashmiris. However, our world is not perfect yet. Moreover, the long-held Pakistan view that ALL issues of India-Pakistan politics are intrinsically linked to Kashmir also has a flip-side: by the same logic, all issues related to Kashmir are intrinsically linked to Pakistan politics. At least, that is the way the international media conceives things.

Before some zealot accuses me of being un-Pakistani, let it be said that what would in fact be anti-Pakistani would be to bring disrepute and a bad name to Pakistan. This is exactly what government after government and leader after leader has done to our country. The way the world treated us on Kargil was merely a manifestation of the accumulated ill-will that our leaders have sown for us internationally. If we are to learn anything from this sorry episode it is the following. In the future, more and more issues will be played out on the global stage with the international media playing the role of arbiter. They will play this role not simply on so-called 'objective facts' but on the basis of the ill- or good-will that nations are able to generate and accumulate. Control tactics such as trying to manipulate the media, or plant misinformation and propaganda, or quoting the reports of the international press out of context (as we have been doing each night on Khabarnama) will no longer be enough. It is time that our leaders realize that there is no better way to win media support abroad than to indulge in good politics at home.