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Or is it just plain stupidity? The front pages of at least two national newspapers of Monday, Aug 2 tell the story. In one, the prime minister, attired in his usual flamboyant and over-the-top style is shown sitting on a dais, on an ornate chair, alongside Punjab senior minister Raja Riaz and some others.

In the other, Mr Gilani is seen addressing a public meeting in connection with a coming by-election. This in the midst of possibly the worst floods this country has suffered in its existence in which billions of rupees worth of property, crops, animals and stored grains have been destroyed and more than 1,000 poor people killed. In which, indeed, infrastructure worth billions of rupees too has been ruined.

Our roads are mostly built of water-soluble materials anyway can one even begin to imagine what should have happened to them in a violent flood? And to our schools and dispensaries and hospitals in the mofussil? Is this then, the time to be addressing election rallies for God's sake? Is this the time for holding meetings in air-conditioned and luxurious surroundings amidst flower bouquets and perfume? Or is this the time to be out and about among the poor people, seeing first-hand the losses they have suffered and being with them in their hour of need?

Neither is this all; every newspaper is full of the most untimely foreign tour of the president to France and the United Kingdom at this fraught time. Please note that I have not alluded to the British prime minister's quite gratuitous remarks about Pakistan whilst on a tour of India as a possible reason for the postponement. That we will come to presently, but if there was a very big reason for postponing the presidential visit it was the devastating floods, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the damage is incalculable with whole bridges swept away. My German friend Wolfgang Stoeber has been on the telephone asking about the damage and sending his sympathies and asking where he can send contributions of cash, and the leaders of the largest political party in the country behave in this wanton way.

However, credit must be given where it is due, and immediately to Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif who have been visiting the flood-affected people, sitting among them and sharing their pain. Indeed to Gen Kayani, who too has visited the flood-hit in Swat and Nowshera and has offered any and all help that the army can give in alleviating the people's misery.

To David Cameron now, and to the silly remarks he has made at a most inopportune time when he was on a sales trip to India and had just garnered orders worth near a billion pounds. I should have thought that if we were a country with confidence in itself we should have ignored the remarks of the rookie prime minister with the contempt they deserved.

Instead of going about with anger writ large on our faces and in our statements we should have merely reminded the world that Cameron, his pockets full of luscious 'new' cash, did not seem to remember, say, the plight of the people of Kashmir and the most dangerous stage at which their freedom struggle stands — with barefoot boys as young as eight flinging stones at Indian security forces.

Instead of making calls for cancelling this visit or that; and making one statement after another, the last one contradicting the one before it, we should have made light of Cameron's naiveté and political immaturity. Who does not know that the Pakistani security establishment is well on the way to trying to hammer out a deal between Karzai and certain Taliban (something that I for one, completely oppose, let me add right here and now) leaders to the exclusion of certain other ethnic groups? Who doesn't know that these (good) Taliban (a premise that I completely oppose too) are friends with the security establishment — oh, alright, the ISI — for aforementioned reasons?

So what was the great secret that young Mr Cameron let out please, that we got our knickers into such a twist? Does Cameron know something we don't? Is our handling of the situation so completely at variance with what the Americans want to see that they asked their junior partner to set the proverbial cat among the pigeons by saying what the British prime minister said? If none of this is true then there was no need to demand that Asif Zardari's visit to the UK be cancelled because of what Cameron said.

I have often held that what used to be known as kutti (in days gone by, if a child fell out with his playmates he/she would walk off in a huff clicking his/her thumbnail under the front teeth and saying “kutti” meaning that he/she was not talking to anyone anymore and therefore not playing anymore either!) does not work in relations between countries. Of course if the slight is considered serious enough there are various ways in which to protest, even breaking off diplomatic relations. But could we, for example, just refuse aid from the offending country?

If the answer is a no, as it surely is, we must engage with the world and disabuse it of its impression about our country. Indeed, the visit by the ISI delegation should have gone ahead too with our people complaining to their interlocutors about Cameron's unhelpful remarks. We must come clean too, and admit that there was a time when we had our fingers in a very dirty pie indeed. A pie, please note, World, that was not only of our making. Many of you will sit up and say, “But we have said this a zillion times” and you will be right. But, and we have to admit it, filthy criminals Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) aka Tariq Raja, and Jose Padilla (the alleged 'dirty bomber') aka Abdullah al Muhajir walked in and out of this country aided and abetted by their handlers. Just who were the handlers? We and the world must know.

Endpiece My profound respects to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain's courage and fortitude and sense of duty. Just three days after losing his beloved son to terrorists, and enduring a suicide attack on his home the very next day, there he was, among the people who need him. God grant you a long life, Mian Sahib. Pakistan needs more sterling men like you.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk

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