Like Oprah, Benazir and Dr Qadeer were God’s chosen. They possessed the populist oomph to turn things around had they cared, but didn’t
Now here’s a woman the world loves. How so? She gives freely and generously of her wealth to others in need. Oprah Winfrey has earned millions as the ‘Queen of Talk Shows’, sharing her bounties to empower those trapped in the margins. For decades now, hundreds, nay thousands, have been touched by this ‘angel’.
Rising like a phoenix from the debris of childhood deprivation and sexual abuse, flinty-eyed Oprah burst into the theatre of power, acknowledged as an oracle by the mighty and the meek alike.
From her Olympian heights, the princess of serendipity presides over the fates of lesser beings — giving of her glory and fame. Anyone we know back in Pakistan who is the verisimilitude of Oprah? The unbreakable type, and not the cheap variety we tout. A woman or a man we can assuredly enshrine and smash into smithereens? Never!
Her birthday bash — she turned 50 — clashed with another hero’s crash. Remember James Bond pursuing the villainous Dr No at his secret installations? Well, Abdul Qadeer Khan is “the real-life Dr No, only more terrifying,” America says.
If AQK’s winter of infamy has arrived, can the spring of his garden be far behind? Each year, as a rite of spring, his Dutch wife would transplant their environs with her national flower — the tulip. Dozens of them, fluttering and dancing in the breeze, like Wordsworth’s daffodils, to ease the eye of a passerby, a nonentity. Linger long one dare not, to steal a gaze at the house and garden of the holy cow for fear of retribution from the trigger-ready commandos with pointed automatics in your face. Scary business, but the tulips were so enticing as well as the mystique of the man who lived in two villas, side by side, sleeping in one for the night, to keep his would-be assassins guessing where he bedded.
His self-regarding bibulousness put him above the law. Who dared tell him that he had encroached public land around his E-7 Islamabad home, planting concrete cabins as bathrooms for his security personnel right on the pavement, even a largish cabbage patch, if you please? Who dared tell him that his brick-faced mansion on the shores of Rawal Lake in Bani Gala was unauthorized? The guy was the greatest scofflaw in the land, but he was our hero too, as Musharraf lamely says.
Enough of him. Benazir Bhutto is no better. As an expiation for her evil deeds, she’s ratcheted up the ‘gotcha’ refrain against Musharraf and hunkered her imperial self in Washington DC. As a nightly fixture on Fox News or anyone else who cares to invite our erstwhile prime minister, there she is, gratuitously congratulating the Americans for nailing Khan and bringing shame on Pakistan.
Hello? Was it not during her two infamous terms that the cocky scientist was conducting back-room business? Perhaps bartering his nuke secrets in lieu of dollars that we were desperate for to prevent a cash-hungry Pakistan from defaulting. All because Benazir and spouse Asif Zardari, along with their honchos, were too busy raking in money.
And of course, AQK, like all other cheapskates that Pakistan has had the misfortune to suffer, quietly snitched some of the lolly for himself, as Musharraf would explain to the world: “They were doing it for money, they had a lust for wealth.”
Oh, by the way, Benazir Bhutto, those who have not seen her lately, is unrecognizable. She has morphed back into her old beauteous self — gone are the brown age spots, those telltale lines, a sagging visage with a double chin. Has she been under the surgeon’s knife lately, or has she frequented the Botox parties, where women meet and get injections to get an instant mini-facelift, swiping years of damage off the face? Whatever, BB looks smashing.
Like Oprah, BB and AQK were God’s chosen — they possessed the populist oomph to turn things around had they cared; to touch the hearts and souls of millions of compatriots awaiting a better beginning; to singe corruption; to mend our pathetic institutions; reform education, healthcare, economy, women’s development ....
The wish list is endless; not impossible.
But they didn’t. And neither did Nawaz Sharif, who with his demagoguery did nothing but lead all down a dark dusty road paved with despair. While he, along with his talented bro, Shahbaz Sharif and Abbaji, built their dreams in beloved Raiwind outside Lahore.
Copycatting Benazir, Shahbaz, with his political hide, is in Manchester, England, to make innocuous press statements pillorying Musharraf. But despair not, Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayyed — the man Musharraf imprisoned after his coup in 1999 for being a close Sharif aide — is back spinning his conspiracy theories, this time to serve Musharraf. After all, lest we forget, he went to drink tea with the scientist bunkered under heavy surveillance some decades ago. And along came the Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar “just for the ride” declared Mushahid, who got fired as editor of the Muslim when the brouhaha broke.
The tea party had mined a mini-fortune for Nayar, who dutifully, the next day, hollered the news to a shocked world that Pakistan had gone ballistic as claimed by the father of the atom bomb himself while sipping tea. The claptrap has come a full circle today, amid secrecy and spin, gulling the silent majority yet once again. Where will Pakistan end up on a scale of zero to ten as Bush kicks off his campaign trail? Your guess is as good as mine. The American media here, led by the New York Times, is in an unforgiving mood. Things can get real ugly for us ....
Long before pious Zia’s greed proliferated, for which he paid with his life, the first general and president to take Pakistan down the tube was Ayub Khan. Starting off as an honest do-gooder, soon the dictator got quite comfortable with corruption, letting the kith and kin run things as they pleased. His own son, Captain Gohar Ayub, an officer and a gentleman, provided grist to the gossip mills when he suddenly came upon a palace on a hill in Karachi’s Defence Housing Society.
Why did he do that? Why did he harm his father’s name?
The same can be asked of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan and his clones ‘adorning’ Pakistan’s hall of shame.
Greed is kaleidoscopic and its sting universal. Why else would a widow want to wash her slain husband’s former newspaper’s dirty linen in public? Obviously, Mariane Pearl is hurting.
“Two years after my husband, Danny Pearl, was kidnapped and murdered, his employers at the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) seem all too willing to forget,” she writes for Salon.com. The paper has broken a sacred promise, a widow’s trust. It swore to fight Danny’s case to the end, but she “ended up paying a Pakistani lawyer a very large sum to represent Danny, and the Journal eventually reimbursed me for a small fraction of the total amount.”
Shame on the Wall Street Journal that sits on moral judgment over the rest of the world. “The Journal’s interest has seemed to wane. It remained remarkably dedicated until we found out for sure, nearly a month after his kidnapping, that Danny had died. The Journal set up a financial trust for Adam and me, to which hundreds of people have contributed thousands of dollars.”
Where have the dollars gone? How are the powerhouses at WSJ different than, say, AQK?
A lawyer for Dow Jones (the parent company of the Wall Street Journal) “levelled” with Mariane when she protested at their indifference. “It is your case, not ours,” the lawyer retaliated. “The moment that followed, when I looked at myself — too pregnant to go to Pakistan and represent Danny on my own — was one of the loneliest I’ve ever had.”
Since then, “From the Journal, all I’ve heard is the sound I’ve learned to dread the most: silence.”
Like Oprah, Benazir and Dr Qadeer were God’s chosen. They possessed the populist oomph to turn things around had they cared, but didn’t 
