Patterson keeps the Pakistani press away from her as does her press section in Islamabad.

Many moons ago, American Ambassador Thomas Simons said in an interview that the first thing he was asked by his Pakistani guests when they came to his home in Islamabad was to get them and their families an American visa.

It became the bane of his and wife Peggy’s life. This was the time when Pakistan had not yet exploded its nuclear bomb. Nawaz Sharif was at the helm and apart from the corruption, nepotism and favouritism stories emanating from the Prime Minister’s House, life was normal and America was kept at bay.

Still, families of the affluent and the educated wanted to go West. They had no faith in the civilian government which had frozen their foreign exchange accounts in the stealth of the night in 1998. The retired general in charge of FIA told me on record and named bigwigs in the ruling party who had a night earlier transferred huge caches of money out of the country. He was sacked when he tried stopping the flight of capital.

Come September 11, 2001 Pakistan became America’s agent in fighting its war on terror. The two billion dollar yearly ‘aid’ package given to Musharraf was too juicy to refuse. While he and his khakis revamped their arms and their cantonments, making Musharraf the poster boy abroad, ordinary Pakistani-Americans in the US became the target of unjust racial profiling and downright discrimination. Anyone called ‘Mohammad’ was toast and kept at arm’s length by neighbors and office colleagues. If you put the word ‘Pakistani’ in your resume, you never got called for a job interview.

Eight years down the road the Americans have arrogated the governance of Pakistan to themselves. And they make no secret of it. Had fate not intervened, Benazir Bhutto was all set to becoming the prime minister. She had spent the better part of last summer in Washington DC planning her return to Pakistan in October on American coattails.

After her death, America continued its agenda to control the political, financial, social and judicial affairs of Pakistan with her husband Asif Zardari. It’s no secret that American Ambassador Anne Patterson met AZ almost every ten days or so. The photos in the press that we saw showed both smiling and looking very happy. Patterson keeps the Pakistani press away from her as does her press section in Islamabad. They don’t like being ‘bothered’ by the local media and prefer not to deal with them. Well, one can’t blame them. Why would they waste their time talking to the ‘hacks’ here when they can get the ear of Musharraf, Gilani and Asif Zardari at their choosing?

One can imagine Ambassador Haqqani trying to rein in the ‘wild’ hacks accompanying Prime Minister Gilani to the land of the free. Also the land of plenty and I leave it to your imagination to colour up any picture you can conjure. Information Minister Sherry Rehman had specially been requested by former ‘hack’ Hussain Haqqani not to cart along any press wallahs as they are nothing but trouble. Ms Rehman put her foot down and collected a clutch to cover the PM’s “historic” visit to America . Six of them unfortunately got bumped off at the check-in at Rawalpindi International airport as the Americans didn’t want them coming over and had told our immigrations to offload them.

Stories of the press accompanying the president and the prime minister in the past take on a life of their own. They provide the badly needed sidebars, colour and goofy stuff that the readers lap up instead of the stiff, gobbledygook statements put out after high-powered meetings and forgotten the next day. Prime Minister Gilani’s latest yatra to America was jinxed from the time he took off. Bumped about by turbulence in midair when the PM’s party hit an ISI thunder cloud, the landing and takeoff in London was equally rocky. But for our High Commissioner Wajid Shamsul Hassan’s entreaties to the Brits, our PM would have missed the red carpet treatment awaiting him at the Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

You know how the Americans are? They hate to be kept waiting, never mind if a thunderstorm or a big ugly bird hit your aircraft. Pakistan has put them in the driver’s seat since 9/11 and taken their flak because they continue to promise more aid to Islamabad. Well, it turned out that our PM was slightly off schedule. The red carpet had been rolled off and the limo driver who was to take the prime minister to the waiting shed probably told to go home as he could not be paid overtime.

According to reports filed by the accompanying press people, the prime minister and the first lady were “perturbed” when a red carpet treatment was not accorded to them. They had to foot it for “two-three minutes” to reach the spot where Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher (a familiar face in Pakistan) waited to greet the couple. The rest of the entourage was not allowed out of the plane on the pretext that a thunderstorm was approaching and it was “safer” for the Pakistanis to remain inside the plane. Many wondered if that was the case, then why was PM Gilani exposed to the vagaries of the weather and told to walk across to where Boucher stood? Surely, the safety of the first couple was more important than those left in the plane.

The accompanying the press party was not invited to dinner in honour of the PM by Ambassador Haqqani. He had already had enough of the press who being the ‘press’ will always ask niggling questions which the government factotums of the day hate answering.

The bottom line is: until our prime ministers and presidents continue going to America with a beggar’s bowl and asking for American aid, Pakistani leaders will receive the treatment meted out to the client state. The only change I notice since the time Benazir Bhutto visited the US as the prime minister in 1989, the Americans attitude towards Pakistan and its people is that of arrogance and hauteur.

What became of President George W. Bush’s public affairs department set up in Washington and headed by a cabinet minister meant to woo the hearts and minds of people like us? We need answers.