Military or publicity coup?

Military or publicity coup?

Nirupama Subramanian
The Hindu (India)
Tuesday, Sep 26, 2006

ISLAMABAD: There is an interesting line in President Pervez Musharraf's book In the Line of Fire, well before it begins.

The book was available in bookstores in Islamabad a few hours before the New York launch. Store owners reported brisk sales, with one saying he had sold 200 copies in under an hour.

On the title page, under the name of the publisher Simon & Schuster, it says A CBS Company.

CBS is the media giant that owns CBS TV, on which President Pervez Musharraf said that the then Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age".

Last week, with just days to go for the book launch, CBS TV put out excerpts from the interview on its programme, 60 Minutes, including the bomb-you-back-to-the-Stone Age line, arousing wide interest in the book.

The Pakistan President's refusal to say anything more on the subject at a joint press conference with U.S. President George Bush at the White House, on the plea that he was "honour-bound" to his publisher, heightened the interest.

Some were willing to believe the "straight-talking" President had unknowingly pre-empted his own book launch, and had been reined back by the publisher. Many smelt a marketing stunt.

Considering the publisher and broadcaster are owned by the same parent company, the question is bound to come up again: did the one not know what the other was up to, or were they both partners in a planned publicity coup?

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One that flew over the coup’s nest

The Hindustan Times (India)
September 25, 2006

As far as sales pitches go, Sunday’s rumours that a coup was in progress in Pakistan came at a perfect time — a day before the launch of Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography, In The Line of Fire. A power failure, of the electrical kind, throughout the country, along with the news that the President was undergoing an unscheduled medical check-up in Texas, had the grapevine buzzing.

But as the Punjabi wag currently visiting the US stated, the reports of a coup have been greatly exaggerated. The funnier line from Mr Musharraf was, however, that “these reports are absolute nonsense and thank God we are not a banana republic... we are a normal, stable country”. But surely, the General can forgive us, as well as his own countrymen, for thinking that the mice may well have been at play while the cat was away considering in October 1999, General Musharraf had to dash back from outside the country (Sri Lanka) to conduct his own coup. Then, as on Sunday, the first public sign of a coup was TV stations going off air. A power failure can be a surer sign that a transfer of power, of the political kind, is taking place.

Black-outs, of course, mean different things in different places. In Delhi, they normally mean business as usual. In New York, they could trigger red alerts before something apocalyptic. In certain parts of Pakistan, like in Quetta where crowds cheered on the streets, it can mean the removal of a government. But perish that thought. Pervez Musharraf, unlike Thaksin Shinawatra, has a book to sell. A putsch at this time just won’t do.