June 17, 2006
North Waziristan (Federally Administered Tribal Areas)
A body, handcuffed and shot in the head from behind, is found in a Miranshah marketplace. It belongs to freelance journalist Hayatullah Khan. Six months prior, Khan had been abducted by five armed men after publishing a photo essay that implicated Americans in the death of senior Al-Qaeda official Abu Hamza Rabia. Whereas the Musharraf government asserted that Rabia blew himself up while experimenting with explosives, Khan’s essay revealed pieces of shrapnel bearing a CIA-controlled Predator drone’s designation “AGM-114,” the words “guided missile,” and the initials “U.S.” at the blast site.
May 30, 2011
Islamabad
A victim of torture, still wearing a suit, a tie, and shoes, lies mangled in the Upper Jhelum Canal. Saleem Shahzad had vanished two days earlier after disseminating a scathing criticism of alleged connections between Al-Qaeda and Pakistani naval officers. During a press conference two months later, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, states that Shahzad’s detention and murder were “sanctioned by the [Pakistani] government.”
April 19, 2014
Karachi
Members of the Karachi police force patrol the street in front of Aga Khan Hospital, ensuring that only government-sanctioned individuals can enter the city’s most exclusive health clinic. Wearing bulletproof vests and armed with automatic weapons, they remain vigilant for signs of suspicious activity. Inside, hundreds of bouquets decorate the lobby of the hospital’s private ward. The largest bouquet is from the police. A placard on it reads, “Get Well, Hamid Mir.”
Mir, Pakistan’s top-rated TV journalist and one of the most vocal critics of the nation’s intelligence agencies, recuperates upstairs. Hours earlier, he was shot six times—through the ribs, thigh, stomach and hand—in an attempt on his life. Pakistan’s largest news channel and Mir’s employer, Geo News, took an unprecedented move in solidifying the contention between the holders of power and those who critique the system. Just after the attack, the channel flashed a picture of the accused on screen: Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Zaheer ul-Islam.
The national broadcasting of this allegation prompted a three-page petition from the Ministry of Defense, accusing Geo of launching a “vicious campaign” against the ISI and demanding that its operating license be revoked. “The telecast in question was aimed at undermining the integrity and tarnishing the image of [a] state institution and its officers and falsely linking it with terrorist outfits.” Geo’s president, Imran Aslam, defended his channel’s stance on Mir’s attack in an interview with The Guardian. “There was a time that if [the government] didn’t like what you wrote they censored you. They cut out a word or a line. If they got really angry they got your editor fired. Now they just shoot you.”
Aslam’s observation of his government’s transition from censorship to the bullet as its preferred defense mechanism underscores a compromised freedom of the press that began during the rise of “Westernized” Pakistani reporting in the latter half of the 1980s.
“The Three Most Beautiful Words in the English Language”
Najam Sethi conceived the idea for Pakistan’s first independent newspaper while behind bars. Imprisoned in 1984 for writing From Jinnah to Zia, a scathing portrayal of General Zia-ul-Haq as a dictator, Sethi lamented the lack of protest from Pakistani publications regarding the trumped-up preventive law charges he faced. As a result, he sought to create a written medium free from socially induced fear of political retaliation. The first issue of The Friday Times was distributed in May 1989, and the newspaper soon emerged as an institutionalized platform for dissent for Pakistani activists who previously self-published.
Five months earlier, Pakistan, a nation founded on Islamic principles, experienced a threat to fundamentalism with the ascent of its first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. In her acceptance speech, Bhutto implicitly associated her platform with a Western mode of communication. “We gather together to celebrate freedom, to celebrate democracy, to celebrate the three most beautiful words in the English language: ‘We the People.’” A Harvard graduate and proponent of social-capitalist policies that strived for a “synthesis between adherence to the faith and adjustment to the modern age,” Bhutto distinguished herself as a politician committed to loosening theological constraints on the interpretation of law enforcement.
The Friday Times soon began publishing editorials that espoused Bhutto’s emphasis on deregulation of the financial sector, flexible labor markets, and more importantly, association with the West. Its editorials, revered by Pakistani intellectuals for their eloquent English prose and controversial stances, seemed to embody Bhutto’s reverence for “the three most beautiful words in the English language.” Consequently, even when Bhutto was dismissed by conservative Nawaz Sharif in 1990, her ideals were not.
Sharif’s government attempted to counter Bhutto’s Westernization campaign with one of Islamization. It authorized the Ministry of Religion to prepare reports on subversive activity and to establish the Nifaz-e-Shariat Committee (Sharia Establishment Committee). The Friday Times responded by launching an investigation into the government’s disposal of billions of rupees to the Ittefaq Group of Industries—Sharif’s personal steel mill. On May 8, 1999, hours before distributing a report on this corrupt allocation of money, Sethi was taken from his home by Punjab Police personnel. Charged with “Condemnation of the Creation of the State and Advocacy of Abolition of its Sovereignty,” Sethi was held in a detention center in Lahore for over a month and was released only upon the request of Amnesty International.
The Sharif administration’s targeting of Sethi signaled Pakistani journalists’ status as a dying breed. Since 1992, the year the Committee to Protect Journalists first began compiling data, 56 journalists have been killed in Pakistan. While this number underscores Pakistan’s broader transgressions of human rights statutes, it also catapults the issue of freedom of the press in Pakistan to the forefront of international politics. By silencing the journalists who attempt to expose the government’s hypocrisy, Pakistani politicians have given themselves unfettered autonomy to construct the image they desire of Pakistan, free from the challenge of dissenting voices. This is perhaps best expressed by a 1995 editorial in The Friday Times: “[Religious extremists] do not care about minority rights, they do not care about the disastrous consequences of the immoderate image Pakistan presents to the world outside.”
The dearth of Pakistani journalists able to safely report on their nation has shifted the duty of investigative reporting onto those across the ocean. Unobstructed by nationalistic restraints, American journalists are neither actors nor subjects in Pakistan’s political sphere. Rather, from their place in the periphery, they can craft and publish microcosmic observations on the Pakistani people, thereby shaping Pakistan’s macroscopic world image.
Newton’s Third Law: A Western Construction of an Eastern Narrative
Ethan Casey landed on Kashmiri soil under the impression that he would leave in a manner of weeks after covering the explosion of a local mosque for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. Instead, his 1995 visit to the disputed Pakistani valley became the first of three. Casey, an American born and raised in Wisconsin, began his career as a journalist by working in Bangkok.
“Reporting for newspapers with limited space and attention spans, I learned the discipline and value of explaining something irreducibly complex to uninformed readers far away, in chunks of digestible size,” he remarked to the HPR. Yet, his brief immersion in Kashmiri culture prompted the realization that “to understand [the world] is a more urgent task than to judge or change it.” Casey returned to Pakistan eight years later to gain this understanding. In 2003, he began teaching journalism at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Through a blog-based curriculum in which students wrote articles on Pakistani policy issues for his online discussion forum, Blue Ear, Casey hoped to connect Pakistani students to Western readers, debunking the stereotypes prevalent in both hemispheres. He recalled the catalyst for his interest in the intersection between journalism and Pakistani politics: a man from the Balochistan province who observed, “‘Politics is a dangerous field. There must be a response. Newton’s third law.’”
Casey’s equal and opposite reaction materialized in the form of Alive and Well in Pakistan, a memoir that purported to “humanize Pakistanis for a global audience and give Pakistanis worldwide an honest, sympathetic portrayal of their situation in the contemporary world.” In contrast to the explicit anti-government critiques circulated by The Friday Times, Casey’s memoir offered an alternative, more innocuous subversion of Pakistan’s political hegemony. In disclosing to us student Zunera Khalid’s views of the Islamic principle of feminine modesty and acquaintance Ahmed Rashid’s concerns about the Taliban’s influence on Peshawar, the narrative offered an intimate portrayal of the Pakistani populous itself. The exhaustive account of dialogues with locals concerning issues such as local cricket matches and the Monica Lewinsky scandal undermined the perception of the Pakistani government as a direct representation of its constituents. U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) praised Alive and Well in Pakistan for its reminder that “whatever the political situation or the state of relations between governments [American and Pakistani], most Pakistanis … live and suffer on the front lines of terrorism.”
By integrating the life experiences of various Pakistanis into a coherent story that places himself, a Westerner, as an agent, Casey formed his version of a Pakistani national identity, independent of the government and accessible to Western audiences. The Western construction of an Eastern people’s narrative, while not a replacement for the exposés conducted by the likes of The Friday Times, can achieve a commendable end: demonstrating the antithesis between big P and little p politics while propelling the creation of a nuanced national identity.
A Form by Any Other Name
Casey’s memoir, drafted from the subjective, self-proclaimed role as the Pakistanis’ “friend,” is one form of Western journalistic construction. Another exists in the detached analysis generated by publications such as Foreign Affairs. A vehicle for debates over the direction of U.S. international policy among members of the American establishment, the journal embodies the politics of reporting on Pakistani politics. Take, for example, Stephen D. Krasner’s assertion of an “obvious conclusion: Pakistan should be treated as a hostile power.” The statement, which appeared in the January/February 2012 issue, delineates a clear foreign relations paradigm. Given its publication at the beginning of an election year in which President Obama was seeking reelection—and given Krasner’s status as a senior fellow at the Republican-associated Hoover Institute and former director of policy planning at the State Department under the Bush administration—the statement may be more reflective of American politics than it is of Pakistan.
The article, “Talking Tough to Pakistan,” urges antagonistic treatment to induce Islamabad to comply with American demands. By observing that, “for decades, the United States has sought to buy Pakistani cooperation with aid: $20 billion worth since 9/11 alone,” Krasner commoditizes the two countries’ relationship, concocting a transactional evaluation of Pakistan as an entity rather than a composite of individuals. Proposing a “combination of credible threats and future promises,” including the provision of military assistance programs and “political arrangements in Kabul that would reduce Islamabad’s fear of India’s influence,” Krasner engages in a cost-benefit reductionism of Pakistani politics. While the article’s disappointment with governmental inefficiency parallels the sentiments expressed in The Friday Times and Casey’s memoir, it is also distinctly different. It leaves no room for Pakistani voices.
Krasner’s piece offers a pertinent, if unintended, view of the American government’s self-interest. Yet it also further reiterates the danger in leaving the void in independent Pakistani journalism unfilled. Constricted freedom of the Pakistani press has forcibly relegated Pakistani journalists to the periphery of politics. Ironically, the Pakistani government’s targeting of Westernized Pakistani publications has prompted American journalists to fill the void themselves. Ultimately, Pakistan’s national impression, whether through the individual narrative or social scientific examination, has become an increasingly Western-molded narrative.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons /Atifsati