GENERAL MUSHARRAF’s visit to the US for the United Nations summit on the occasion of the UN’s 60th anniversary was to have been the crowning glory of his six-year career as the head of his country’s military-led government. In addition to the United Nations meeting, where he also had to perform the role of head of the organization’s economic and social council, an honour that is cherished by every country and comes once in several decades, he also held important bilateral meetings with the US and Indian leaders.

General Musharraf also had a scheduled meeting with Pakistani women in New York, who were gravely concerned, among other things, about a number of recent rape cases in Pakistan. His other important engagement was the address to a meeting of the World Jewish Council, a closely guarded secret, which was revealed only recently, to the chagrin of many and the elation of some in Pakistan.

In a way, all his engagements were related to his strategy of enlightened moderation which was published on June 1, 2004, in the Washington Post. It was in the fitness of things that he chose to give the first major interview of his visit to the Post. Crafted more to earn the continued support for his regime from the United States, than the betterment of Muslim societies, especially his own country, the strategy of enlightened moderation needed a review after 15 months of its birth.

Unfortunately, the general was caught on the wrong foot in defending his domestic record and made an incredibly distasteful statement which maligned the sexually-assaulted women of his country and virtually portrayed rape victims as prostitutes. The human rights leader Asma Jahangir was charitable enough to say that this could be excusable if it came from an SHO but was unacceptable from a president with pretensions of being enlightened.

If this is the “Islamic renaissance” which General Musharraf had promised in his enlightened moderation statement, then most Pakistani women would prefer to remain in medieaval times. For it would be an inordinately courageous victim of rape now who would go to register an FIR, fearing not only that the whole police station would give her the same bestial treatment, but that she would also have to prove that she did not “get herself raped in order to get a Canadian visa or become a millionaire”. The bar for courage has been raised so high that unless the president clarifies his remarks and dispels this fear, rape will become a legalized crime in Pakistan.

Regardless of whether the actual words of his interview were faithfully reported or have his personal endorsement (it took nearly a week for the general to retract them), the spirit and tone of his interview and his subsequent accusations of NGOs and their hidden agendas (which he has yet to spell out), the hypocrisy beneath his commitment to women’s emancipation has clearly been brought into question. It is indeed the height of insensitivity to blame the rape victims and the NGOs espousing their cause for maligning the country.

One fails to see how the demands for apprehending the perpetrators of these crimes can be interpreted as lowering the image of the country. What these well-meaning groups of Pakistanis, both at home and abroad, are doing is to highlight the serious social and economic constraints, including government apathy, police collusion, the lethargy of the judicial system and, above all, a feudal power structure that confronts the victims of rape in Pakistan.

In all the three recent cases that have captured public imagination, (Mukhtaran Mai, Shazia Khalid and Sonia Naz) one or more of these elements have been prominent. But what has enraged most Pakistani women, as well as public opinion is governmental and judicial apathy and the attempt by people at the highest level to hush up these cases. When such attempts are exposed, the government’s first reaction is to pretend to be puzzled, then to deny its involvement and claim it has been misquoted or misinterpreted, and finally to denounce the critics as unpatriotic and having ‘agendas’.

The government pays only lip service to women’s causes and is unable to disengage itself from the forces which are opposed to genuine social and economic change in the country. If the regime had any credibility it would have used the potential of these women and the NGOs to bring about real social change. Instead, General Musharraf has compounded his problems by calling his opponents the opponents of Pakistan.

His performance at the Roosevelt Hotel before a gathering of Pakistani women was even more disastrous than his interview with the Washington Post. Had it not been for the intervention of ambassador Jahangir Karamat, the meeting would have been a total fiasco. His edginess in the meeting clearly showed that he was uncomfortable facing the audience about his regime’s track record on the rape issue. The prime minister has also tried to downplay the incidents of rape in Pakistan as “sporadic” and undeserving of serious notice. It is remarks like these, from the highest echelons of the government that bring the country into disrepute.

Notwithstanding the frantic efforts of his regime to build a better image for itself by spending millions of dollars on wasteful and unimaginative public relations exercises, General Musharraf and his regime have a serious credibility problem, both at home and abroad. In the same Washington Post interview, the General claimed that Pakistan has not only outperformed all developing countries, but that its performance was better than of many developed countries. To quote the Washington Post: “Leave the developing world aside; I think we are better than all of them,” Gen Musharraf declared. “Bring the developed world and let us compare Pakistan’s record, under me, a uniformed man, with many of the developed countries. I challenge that we will be better off.”

This kind of talk may be a good tactic to cheer the troops in a besieged battlefield, but is unlikely to lead to rescue a lagging economy. The general should take a look at the recently released UNDP Human Development Report which ranks Pakistan below all but two Asian least developed countries, viz. Nepal and Bangladesh, Bhutan, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and the Maldives all fare better than us. Pakistan’s performance in achieving the MDG (the millennium development goals) is also quite dismal, contrary to the government claims.

Although the Washington Post interview has over shadowed the visit, other activities have hardly redeemed Pakistan’s image. The hype over the general’s meeting with the Indian prime minister proved to be unjustified as he failed to get the assurance about troops withdrawal in Kashmir, while the Indian side continued to insist that cross-border infiltration from Pakistan had not stopped. The Indo-Pakistan dialogue appears as if it is held together by geopolitical imperatives dictated by the United States and pressure from the people of the two countries to keep up its momentum, even if no agreement is reached on the larger issues. The governments of both countries are aware that scuttling the dialogue process in midstream will produce a severe backlash.

Although Pakistan’s role as a leading member of the US-led coalition in the war against terror continues to be lauded by President Bush and other US officials, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction about Pakistan’s inability to rein in or eradicate the sources of terrorism, including the madressahs, and its intelligence agencies since 1980. As long as the military remains in power, it will be difficult to clean up the Augean stables created since the US support to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The military regime is unwilling to accept any responsibility for the past and finds it convenient to put all the blame on the civilian regimes, even for the purely military adventures for which it was solely responsible.

Regarding General Musharraf’s address to the American Jewish Congress, the motivation for this will continue to be analyzed and its wisdom will become apparent in years to come. The main argument against such a move at the present time is that it constitutes an unnecessary distraction from the many pressing development goals facing the nation and will result in further divisiveness in the country, without helping the Palestinian cause. Although it is being presented as a bold and new step in Pakistans foreign policy, its main motivation stems from the hackneyed approach of check-mating India and neutralizing its influence both over Israel and the United States. This approach has never yielded any positive dividends in the past.

On the whole, General Musharraf’s current visit to the United States has been disappointing and has not helped promote his enlightened moderation project. Neither has it helped — in fact it may have considerably damaged — the regimes image-building project which is costing the country millions of dollars. In any event, image-building, in the absence of substantive achievements is an exercise in futility.

E-mail: sm_naseem@hotmail.com