Not to be outdone, Foreign Policy, last month, ran the “Idiot’s Guide to Pakistan”, an allegedly humorous “Georgetown cocktail party” primer on—as it turns out—the Taliban, the Pakistan Army, the tribals, and other assorted bogeymen. Published in the same month as the protests, it fails to mention the democracy movement even once. Its sole success is being unintentionally honest about its name as it lurches through a fool’s errand, reducing the entire country to six pages of chaos, crisis, and crazies.

The ‘tick-tock boom’ has been around since as early as 1964, says University of Chicago historian and blogger Manan Ahmed, with the publication of Lawrence Ziring’s The Failure of Democracy in Pakistan. By the 1970s, Pakistan had been tagged a troubled state based on development indicators established at Harvard’s Institute for International Development, as well as its Center for Development Studies.

“That narrative slowly percolates from the social sciences into the humanities and politics and State Department folks and outside of academia,” says Ahmed. “They’ve been saying this stuff for forty to fifty years, and there’s been no attempt to rethink or reformulate that narrative.” For Washington, the story has provided rationalizations for supporting dictators, encouraging repressive tendencies in successive Pakistani governments, and, lately, killing Pakistanis with drones. ‘Pakistan is chaos,’ the strange logic goes, ‘and the US will contain that chaos through dictatorships and bombing.’

Reporters, too, have their own ends. The “Idiot’s Guide” is—again, perhaps unwittingly—truthful about this, advising, “Tick off the name of a Taliban leader or two and make a reference to North Waziristan, and you might be on your way to a lucrative lecture tour.” Indeed. Journalism is a business, and the story sells.

Another issue has to do with what counts for ‘expertise’ on Pakistan, and who counts as an “expert.” Media discussions about the country routinely favor current or former government employees, security experts, think-tank political scientists and—in a circular fashion—journalists who’ve spent time filtering their reporting on Pakistan through these other groups. See the Foreign Affairs roundtable and this New York Times commentary for two examples. It’s a nexus of experts that’s close to Washington. The resulting expertise then, has much to do with security talk and U.S. concerns, and little to do with the complicated realities on the ground.

So whether the day’s news is about extremists or civil society activists, the story consistently remains one that’s about chaos, existential threats, and failure. Just take a look at early April’s New York Times Magazine cover word art for ‘Pakistan’: Perilous, anArchic, broKe, vIolent, Splintering, corrupT, Armed, goverNable? This serves as the title graphic to a story that’s actually about the protests.

Chaos is ultimately a story line that’s easier to recount with insurgencies than mass democratic politics. Hence, articles about the democracy protests regularly re-frame the story to focus on the insurgency. For example, a New York Times analysis dismisses the uprising of civil society as an interruption to the real task of counterinsurgency. “The way ahead is likely to be messy for everyone, including the United States, and could turn out to be a major distraction from efforts to counter the insurgency, which is spreading closer to the main population areas.” Pakistanis, in other words, are a nuisance to their own history.

The article explains that this is Washington’s view, too, as it tries to “convince Pakistan that the insurgency, not internal politics, was the most important challenge.” Everything else is just the distracted meanderings of a civil society with a massive attention-deficit.

Official opinion turned news turned judgment: A New York Times editorial on the protests begins by observing that it took “huge street protests and the threat of chaos” to compel a resolution. Chaos. Check.

The editorial continues, sidelining the protests to shift the story towards insurgency. “Mr. Zardari will have to do a lot more to calm the political turmoil and confront the extremists who threaten Pakistan’s survival.” Existential threat. Check.

Next, it discusses police officers’ reluctance to enforce the house arrest of Nawaz Sharif, who was to help lead the final stage of the Long March. Had the police complied with the house arrest, it was likely that protesters would clash with them as they had been doing throughout the march. The Times had this to say:

“Yet the process was flawed. It was unsettling to watch police officers in Lahore, Mr. Sharif’s power base, allow Mr. Sharif to escape house arrest. Pakistan’s coup-prone Army did not try to seize power. Instead, the chief of staff prodded Mr. Zardari and Mr. Sharif to compromise. That is certainly an improvement over the past. But it is also a reminder of the weakness of Pakistan’s democratic institutions.”

Granted, the Times editors have been drinking their own Kool-Aid, but it takes special people to be unsettled by police officers refusing to shed the blood of civilians demanding the rule of law. Sharif is a crook and a corrupt politician, but insofar as he stood in support of the lawyers’ issue, it’s very possible that demonstrators would have confronted the police and demanded his release.

Second, is the army’s unwillingness to seize power part of the “flawed process”—since that’s what the paragraph purports to discuss—or an “improvement” or a “reminder of the weakness of Pakistan’s democratic institutions,” or all three? The declaration of an all-out war on logic is ultimately necessary to pummel the story of the democracy movement into an account of crisis and failure.

Pakistanis are now debating their movement. Some, like Dr. Alvi, are chagrined about the closed-door deal making in the final hours of the protests. Others say it’s just the beginning. “This mobilization and consciousness should now translate into other constructive avenues,” says Siddique, currently pursuing a PhD at Harvard.