Update on Mukhtaran Bibi: free at last (sort of)

Those of you who have been paying attention to the story of Mukhtaran Bibi -- I previously wrote about it here -- and even those of you who haven't (but should) will be happy to hear that this incredibly courageous woman has finally been freed by Pakistani officials. Sort of. Nicholas Kristof follows up here:

President Pervez Musharraf's government is still lying about Ms. Mukhtaran, saying that she is now free to travel to the U.S. Well, it's true that government officials removed her name from the blacklist of those barred from leaving Pakistan, but at the same time they confiscated Ms. Mukhtaran's passport.

And, yes, President Musharraf -- one of our "allies" in the war on terror -- is himself to blame for this:

[W]hen Pakistani officials learned that Ms. Mukhtaran planned to visit the U.S. this month, they detained her and apparently tried to intimidate her by ordering the release of those convicted for her rape. This wasn't a mistake by low-level officials.

Mr. Musharraf admitted to reporters on Friday that he had ordered Ms. Mukhtaran placed on the blacklist. And although Pakistan had claimed that Ms. Mukhtaran had decided on her own not to go to the U.S. because her mother was sick (actually, she wasn't), the president in effect acknowledged that that was one more lie. "She was told not to go" to the U.S., Mr. Musharraf said, according to The Associated Press.

"I don't want to project a bad image of Pakistan." he explained.

A bad image? I wonder how anything could be worse than the image of Pakistan that Ms. Mukhtaran's story presents to a world that -- let's face it -- doesn't really know much at all about Pakistan. Kristof says that "Pakistan is one of the most hospitable countries [he's] ever visited" -- I hope to visit it myself one day -- but the image one gets from stories like this is that Pakistan is a place where innocent women are gang-raped and essentially left to die, and then persecuted and threatened when they dare refuse to remain silent and submissive.

Musharraf may or may not be nuts, but "he has now met his match -- a peasant woman with a heart of gold and a will of steel". An example for us all.