After the confusion which marked the early stages of his rule, Pakistan's soldier-president has finally discovered his forte: the extended press conference.
It is a sign of the confidence he has acquired, and the awkwardness he has shed, that he prefers his press conference live. And he prefers it long, cooking over a slow fire. If commando training emphasizes endurance, it takes little imagination to see from where comes this tendency.
Who would have thought he would be a natural with this? But he is: speaking easily and handling questions, even difficult ones, with aplomb. Nor is he a boring speaker. The tedium comes when he stops looking at his watch. In many things, as men and women of the world would acknowledge, length is a virtue, in others a heavy cross to carry.
Even so, in his chosen medium of the press conference, Musharraf is the best speaker Pakistan has had since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He is also a more down-to-earth speaker than the Pride of Asia (one of the many titles bestowed on Bhutto by a grateful populace) who was inclined to rely on generous amounts of fiction to embellish his public utterances.
Not that General Musharraf is a Quaker who speaks always on oath. He would be a poor ruler to do this. But he gives the fiction treatment only to a few chosen subjects, those the closest to his heart: his government's achievements and the wonderful things likely to accrue from devolution. Make-believe in such small doses is pardonable in a leader.
The larger question is altogether different. Backward countries like Pakistan face problems of development, not eloquence. When they get leaders who start liking the sound of their own voices, the danger is real of the medium becoming the message, of words filling in for action. The circus function of government then becomes more important than the prosaic and harder task of solving everyday problems.
Who in the post-colonial era have been the great exponents of Third World righteousness? To name a random few: Nkrumah, Sukarno, Nasser, Ben Bella, Nehru and, a bit later, our own Bhutto. All of them dashing and romantic figures abroad, failures at home. While each had his achievements, in the scales failure would perhaps outweigh success. Eloquent leaders who have also been men of action constitute a thinner list. Castro comes to mind and, at an altogether different level, Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Muhammad.
In what category to place General Musharraf? His foremost achievement so far is the consolidation of his rule - not too difficult a task given the army's backing and the opposition of such fearsome luminaries as the Sharifs, Benazir Bhutto and the unshaven monks of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy. Given these factors, Musharraf would have had to be spectacularly inept to get the business of consolidation wrong.
For the rest what has he to show for himself? Alas, very little. Army monitoring - of the country, the economy, the districts - may not have been a disaster but it's been a pretty limp affair. While being quick at taking up different initiatives like ending smuggling, recovering bad loans, documenting the economy, etc, the military government has been equally quick in abandoning them in the face of resistance or after realizing that things simple on paper were more complicated on the ground.
Regarding the economy, the statistics spun out by Shaukat Aziz may be music to the IMF's ears but they leave most Pakistanis cold. And who is to blame them when the cost of living is constantly on the rise, investment has all but dried up and no jobs are available?
Sure, a stagnant economy is not susceptible to instant or magical cures. But then army rule at a minimum should have meant an improvement in public services - better administration, less corruption, less police highhandedness. Can anyone honestly say this has happened?
What are we left with then? Merely the echo of the hackneyed phrase that General Musharraf has become increasingly "media-savvy" of late. Good for him that he has. But of what consolation to the people of Pakistan is his increasingly effective handling of the media? How does it affect their cost of living? How does it improve the functioning of the local police station?
Or take Agra. The General argued Pakistan's case on Kashmir effectively, perhaps better than most leaders before him. With the media he was a hit. Despite the lack of a declaration, Kashmir was placed firmly on the centre table, which is exactly what Pakistan wanted. However, statesmanship is not only about mounting the rooftops and beating one's drum. Ultimately, it is about realizable solutions.
After Agra, is Pakistan any nearer getting India to accept its stand on Kashmir? Can the hope be entertained that next time round India would be more amenable to its point of view? If not, what purpose is served by further steps along the road of reiteration? Rhetoric has its dangers as much as its uses. As an end in itself it becomes an exercise in self-deception.
Let us also remember that foreign policy is the last, and quite often the first, refuge of Third World despots, demagogues or military figures. When domestic problems - debt, crumbling infra-structure, corruption, mal-administration - are found to be intractable, the lure of playing international statesman proves irresistible. There is no shortage of monarchs and presidents in the Arab and Muslim world who play this role to the full, none more so than the most ineffectual of them all, Yasser Arafat, who, in Edward Said's words, flits from capital to capital on one pointless state visit after another to prove his supposed standing as Palestinian president.
Pakistani leaders have also been assiduous globe-trotters, the more keen on foreign travel the more ineffectual they have proved at home. Benazir Bhutto made a record number of trips abroad. So did Nawaz Sharif. In the short time he has been around General Musharraf has also done his fair share of foreign sight-seeing. But his India visit, under whose cover he made himself president, has been his most important and most fruitful. It was a visit during which the general was not patronized by his hosts nor read lectures by them in democracy or stability as was the case with some of his earlier forays on to the international stage.
He went to India as an equal and in pursuit of a worthwhile objective: getting Indo-Pak relations moving again. His reception in India, the way his visit became a media event and how he put across the Kashmir case has reinforced his standing as a leader. For providing him this opportunity he has reason to be thankful to Mr Vajpayee.
But what does General Musharraf's new-found confidence and "media-savviness" mean for Pakistan? It means the obvious: an extended presidential term and a new system whose foundations - in the form of local elections and election of army-approved nazims and naib nazims - are already being laid. These are not signs of an early exit. On the contrary, they hold the promise of a long haul.
Take your pick out of what is on offer. Musharraf is a liberal which, for those of the same persuasion or for those who think that Pakistan can do without more of mindlessness and bigotry, is the good thing about him. But as his record thus far proves, he is no radical reformer, his socio-political instincts being those of the institution which is the source of his power. Furthermore, the political system whose scaffolding he is erecting is a throwback, minus the suppression of the press, to the Ayubian model.
Pakistan could have done without this regression. The Ayub model did no good to Pakistan and in fact sowed the seeds of future disasters, including the secession of East Pakistan. There is no iron law which says that history repeats itself in all particulars but it is disquieting enough to realize that we are again treading a path we have travelled before.