Consider these headlines: ‘Asif Zardari cleared in last corruption case’ (the ‘last’ here could be misleading, if you get the drift), ‘Sharifs allowed to contest bye-poll’,  then, ‘Nawaz barred from contesting bye-poll’ only days later, ‘Shoaib Akhtar banned for five years’, ‘I don’t want to be a useless vegetable: Musharraf’ and ‘Mohammad Asif detained for possession of banned substance’.
What kind of image do these headlines convey to the world, never mind how accustomed to them are we in Pakistan? And to think that one has not even touched gruesome stories of rape, gang-rape, dacoity, murder, karo-kari/vani/swara that are a daily diet in Pakistan.
The headlines mentioned above are related to events that took less than three months to transpire. A collage of embarrassment, these only go on to show how poor we are in terms of leadership.
Asif Zardari is the most powerful man in Pakistan today and that includes the army, which is considered the real arbiter of power.
It is a measure of how weakened the army has become thanks to its forced compliance in the war-on-terror under the unbridled reign of General Musharraf that, it now finds itself forced to listen to someone it would not ordinarily have time for given the choice.
For Zardari, the fruits of National Reconciliation Order may be a personal triumph, nay a revenge of sorts on the very elements he believes were responsible for his long incarceration until his release four years ago, but it does Pakistan’s image no good when his alleged corruption cases are quashed under a patently farcical deal and those people around the world who are not fully tuned into who Pakistan’s new ruler is get to know that he carries unenviable baggage.
Although the case of the Sharifs is different — they having borne the brunt of forced exile — once again it did Pakistan’s image no credit that it began and ended with the express involvement of a third country, Saudi Arabia.
What kind of “soft image” was promoted when General Musharraf overthrew an elected prime minister, then “pardoned” him against tall claims of bringing him to book after propagating endlessly that he had looted the exchequer, before illegally banishing him and his family against their will into exile?
Similarly, what face did Pakistan present to the world when its military ruler forced a PM he deposed into exile again (this time, in gross violation of the order of the country’s highest court) before stooping to such depths in trying to show that the exile term was part of a deal — all in the public glare?
Finally, when the Sharifs made it home last November after eight years, it was once again thanks to the involvement of Saudi Arabia, which was preceded by the embarrassing spectacle of a country’s president (Musharraf) going to a third country (Saudi Arabia) and begging its ruler (King Abdullah) not to allow his own compatriot (Nawaz Sharif) to return home!
If this was embarrassing enough, one will be hard-pressed to find words to describe how Benazir and Musharraf were conducting a secret dialogue — again in a third country (this time UAE) — under the aegis of another alien power (the United States) with some help from its terror-war cohort (Britain).
But as we soon found out, this was just a precursor to the drama enacted by Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, who chased each other at home from Lahore to Islamabad to Murree before yo-yoing to Dubai and London to discuss some of the most pressing domestic issues.
In London, they allowed themselves to be browbeaten by the likes of US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and British Foreign Minister David Miliband.
All of this, needless to say, reduced the rejuvenated ‘Democratic’ Republic of Pakistan to a laughing stock before the world.
However, it is Musharraf, the reinvented father of ‘enlightened moderation’ (whatever that means), who takes the cake in smearing the good name of his country — in spite of his scripted and well choreographed slogans of ‘Pakistan First’.
Easily the most despised man in Pakistan today for his spectacular betrayals — from promising to doff the uniform to stepping down the minute he learns Pakistan no longer wanted him — he emerged from political hibernation recently, only to mock the nation and all political players straining for his ouster.
For a man, who trampled the constitution of this country as many times as his insecurity allowed him to, the irony lay in his constant refrain of being a “constitutional” head, who “respected” the “parliament’s supremacy”, which he agreed was “empowered” to impeach him.
Pray, why would anyone agree to impeachment if he or she was up to scratch constitutionally, and had done no wrong deserving of such humiliation?
Musharraf and his beleaguered presidency personifies the bad name Pakistan has been getting globally for a long time now — imagine trying to explain to a foreigner what he stands for, what he has done and how he is holding this country to a ransom.
The country’s image has been ground to the dust by even non-political actors.
Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif had the potential to be as successful and dominating as their predecessors, the two Ws, Wasim and Waqar.
But they chose to act like ruffians, besmirching the name of their country and hurting millions of their compatriots, who elevated them to the level and standing associated with heroes. Worse still, they refused to learn lessons after inflicting the coup de grace on themselves.
As if the shenanigans and misdeeds of the political leadership was not enough, as if the daily diet of social evils was scarce, as if the imagined or real links to terrorism were too few, as if the frequent breakdown of law and order was not a problem, as if nuclear blackmail and troublesome neighbours were not enough of a nightmare, these cricketers have driven the a penetrating nail in the coffin of Pakistan’s image.
In a moment of solitude, you can’t but escape the fact that the state of Pakistan increasingly, appears to seam like a fiction. No spelling mistake there!