Many moons ago when I wore a younger man's clothes I spent three months in Pakistan. I didn't know it when I arrived at the airport to leave, but I didn't have permission to leave the country. After I had gone through customs, checked in with Air France (yes, Air France, and I'd fly them again in a heartbeat), I was stopped at the security check, my luggage removed from the plane, and I was told I couldn't leave the country without a travel permit. As an American, I hadn't a clue that a country would stop a traveller from leaving. A criminal, yes. Someone who had spent three months in country without incident, no. The next day I and several co-travellers went to the police station and in a scene from Dickens (imagine very old men in uniforms surrounded by massive amount of paperwork) we were issued Travel Papers and I was able to leave the country (on Air France, who did right by me).
Well.
I'm glad to see that someone else will be now be able to leave Pakistan - Mukhtar Mai, the woman whose gang rape was ordered by a tribal council to punish her family for her brother's alleged indescretion. For reasons best known to the Pakistani government, she wasn't allowed to leave the country until the prime minister of Pakistan himself took her name off the do not leave the country list yesterday.
But while her story ends there for now, my tale continues on.
I look at the AP version at the KC Star -- it reads like the woman's appeal moved the PM. Ditto for The Independent. I look at ABC News and it reads like international pressure moved the PM. The Indian Express notes that it was pressure from "key ally" United States that did the trick. Finally the WaPo version cites a single factor: "a stern protest by the Bush administration". Australia's News.com.au isn't content just to cite some amorphous pressure, they have the best detail on who said what stern protests. The NYT, God love them, can't bring itself to mention the word Bush in a positive light, so it has a "pressure from Washington" formulation. Could be the state, could be congress, could be George, who knows for sure. Reuters, Reuters makes it clear just who applied the pressure and how it was applied.
But the best coverage was at Voice of America, which supplied all the details, and even covered the NYT's prior coverage. In head to head coverage, the VOA is consistantly one of the best for news coverage.
Google News - it's how you can compare a bunch of different versions of a story in a hurry.
And I suppose that the fact the Pakistani government is worried about losing its popularity in an election year had nothing to with it. Or pressure from Pakistani legislators and the Pakistani press (see http://www.dawn.com/2005/06/15/top11.htm) No, the Pakistani government is always depicted as reacting to external forces.
In the words of Mark Twain, reports of Mukhtaran's arrest have been greatly exaggerated. She was lunching with top officials on the day she was supposedly arrested. (http://www.dawn.com/2005/06/14/nat4.htm)
I suspect that internal Pakistani politics gets left out of the story because the news editors don't think they understand it and feel it isn't of interest to people outside Pakistan. Personally, I'd like them to take a stab at those kinds of explanations, and they certainly have no trouble in including them in stories about the US.