| President Bill Clinton’s televised address to the Pakistani nation on 25 March was no fireside chat in the style of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts to his listeners. Instead, Clinton conformed to local custom by using the same backdrop Pakistani leaders are wont to do when addressing our nation – the formal office desk, the frontal pose, the national flag in the background – and he used the same authoritarian style of address, looking directly and unsmilingly into the camera. Unlike Pope John Paul II’s trip to the Holy Land these days, President Clinton visit was not a gesture of conciliation. He had no intention of kissing the soil of his host country, Pakistan, upon arrival. He had other uses for his spittle. |
| The fact that he could commandeer the national television network, as his military hosts had done more forcibly in October for similar reasons, to make a direct appeal from the Islamabad studio to the public waiting silently across the country, was not an unusual occurrence. His audience has become inured over the years to such one-sided monologues, stressing as he also did the need for a return to democracy. That he should have chosen to do so in a tone both solemn and portentous imbued his speech with the finality of a requiem. |
| A requiem for half a century of U.S.-Pakistan relations? In a way, yes, for no-one watching President Clinton could misunderstand the purport of his message. American policy in the subcontinent had undergone a significant, irreversible change. Future U.S. interests and those of Pakistan, like the two national flags that flanked the President on either side during his television address, now stood poles apart.[EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 29 March 2000, and reprinted in THE BARK OF A PEN (2001). |
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