“US military chief Mike Mullen accuses Pakistan of backing terror group”! So announces the Guardian in its headline (September 22, 2011). The same evening, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviews the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Hina Rabbana Khar – the youngest ever person, and the only female to hold the position, as well as a graduate of U-Mass Amherst (with a Masters in Hospitality Management) – and she, no doubt owing to her great New England hospitality training, acts as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She is the master (mistress?) of the non-denial denial. Pakistan is on the frontline of terror, she says, and it is doing all it can to combat this scourge, and it pains her (and her nation) to have Americans making these public suggestions.
Can it possibly be that both sides are correct? Surely they must be contradicting each other – and so one must be in the wrong, or even outright lying. Who is in the right here? Well, it is clear that the American leadership is telling the truth, but it is also true that they are manipulating that truth in a way that is somewhat hypocritical.
No newsperson would tell you this, because journalists are rushing from story to story and so few of them (there are some truly notable exceptions) really have had the opportunity to stop and think about it – and indeed, even if they do stop and think about it, they don’t want to ask certain kinds of questions because they know that those questions would not be welcomed (by their management, their viewers, etc.).
But here is how the Wolf Blitzer interview might have gone:
Blitzer: “Madam Foreign Minister (or whatever the appropriate title is), the Americans are accusing you of harboring terrorists and making it possible for them to attack Americans in Afghanistan.”
Foreign Minister: Non-denial denial…i.e., we are working hard to thwart the terrorists and the Americans are aware that we are doing this. We are using all the available methods, and we are helping the Americans. While this is a theoretical issue for Americans, we have to live with this; many of our people die as a result of terrorism, and there are a whole lot of terrorists coming across the border from Afghanistan and attacking and killing our people.
Blitzer: Are you saying the Americans are lying?
Foreign Minister: I am just saying that we are working hard and the Americans know that we are doing so?
Blitzer: But, how can this be? Surely you must be lying or they must be lying?
Foreign Minister: Not at all, Wolf, you need to brush up on your understanding of the policing of terrorism and begin to understand how it is that Americans, just like ourselves, police terrorist groups. Then you wouldn’t ask such a stupid question?
Blitzer: What does that mean? You must be speaking in some devilish foreign tongue? Except you are American educated and I must remember to tell you that you need to avoid getting killed back home because you are a Pakistani woman, and I as an American man need to say that you should be careful, considering what happened to your former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto (continues for some time in this vein).
Foreign Minister: Stop being a condescending prig, and let me school you on what in fact is going on – even though you clearly don’t want to hear it. Here it is: the manner in which terror organizations are policed is by infiltration, in-fil-tra-tion, what I believe you call “human intelligence.” As such, it goes without saying that we are working with the organizations you claim that we are working with; just as you have been working with (i.e. endeavoring to infiltrate in order to destroy) all the organizations like al qaeda that you wish were not targeting you. But you know, as well as we do, that that is the approach that we all use in order to combat terrorism. So please, stop this nonsense. What it all comes down to is whether you believe that we have the same goals in mind – the destruction of the particular terror networks in question. If you do, then you will accept what we are doing with the Haqqanis; if you don’t, you will claim that we are using them as a group to carry out a proxy war against you – just as we might claim the same about you, or even you (or your democratic people) might claim the same about yourselves (as I hear many of your citizens are doing). But, I ask you, what reason do we have to want to carry out that proxy war? It makes no sense; such a war would only destabilize our own regime.
Blitzer: But that makes no sense. While our government believes wholeheartedly in human intelligence as the means to combat terrorism, and hires private companies to undertake this for them – since, after all, government no longer works in America (gosh, I didn’t mean to say that), we are certain that that human intelligence does not involve the kinds of things you are suggesting. It rather involves infiltrating the house next door to the terrorists, the country next door to the terrorist nation, but not the terrorists and the terrorist nations themselves; for that would be like baseball players taking steroids; it is truly offensive to imagine, so it just cannot be true.
Foreign Minister turns and walks away laughing…
