Moborate

Much can be said - and is being said - about the latest Wikileaks saga. Around the world, the two biggest issues being grappled with are the future of diplomacy - would interlocutors be open and frank with each other if they fear that what they say in private is going to find its way to the web - and the repercussions on sensitive regions such as the Middle East of some of the explosive confirmations of what people sort of suspected anyway about their leaders and American designs on the world. Unfortunately, most of what is being said in Pakistan is terribly uninformed, and swings from one extreme of 'it's all a big CIA conspiracy to undermine the Muslim world' on the one hand to 'how can you argue with this gospel truth?' on the the other. The former position does not understand the phenomenon of Wikileaks in the first place and conveniently ignores the fact that, so far, only some 500 of the more than 250,000 confidential cables have been released in the media....

Hmmmm. Does the Guardian know something we don't? A screen-grab off the Guardian 's Wikileaks database... Thanks to Missing Romance for sending it on to us: Ayatollah Ali Zardari?!? First it was the New York Times and BBC Urdu Service leading the world (and the gullible Pakistani media) to believe Saudi King Abdullah said Asif Zardari was "the biggest obstacle to Pakistan's progress", when he actually only said that Zardari was "the primary obstacle to the government's ability to move unequivocally to end terrorist safe havens" in Pakistan (okay, so the actual phrasing is far more baffling than the misquote). Now we have the Guardian trying to imply stronger links with Iran than anyone knew. Just doesn't pay to be Zardari does it? Oh wait, that came out all wrong...

Isn't is quite remarkable that almost none of the major newspapers in Pakistan thought that the 'leader of the Muslim Ummah' King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia , and the 'brotherly Muslim countries' of UAE and Qatar egging on the United States to bomb their supposed sibling in faith, the Islamic Republic of Iran - as revealed by Wikileaks - was worthy of any major headline? Without fail, all of them buried that bit in the secondary 'catch-lines', if at all, with possibly only the Express Tribune  and Nawai Waqt attaching it some real significance. Most focused on Abdullah's views on Asif Ali Zardari , while Dawn  and the Urdu Express decided that the American plan to take enriched uranium fuel out of Pakistan was the most newsworthy. Here's how some of the main newspapers' front pages looked today: Dawn : Jang: The News: The Nation: Nawai Waqt: Express: Express Tribune: Pakistan Today: (Apologies for not having The Daily Times up here but t...