THE phrase "perception is deadlier than reality" is frequently used by Pakistani politicians and opinion makers to explain why the country just cannot shake off its negative image and attract the foreign investments it needs.

For the most part true, a delegation of Malaysian journalists on a recent visit to the country discovered that "perception" is sometimes based on "reality".

In a rare visit to the historic Red Mosque in Islamabad, the delegation was not accompanied by rifle-toting policemen, who usually trail them on their forays into the streets of Karachi and Lahore.

At one point, a reporter was approached by a local man and asked:

"You are foreigners? Are you not afraid of being kidnapped?"
In her usually confident manner, the reporter said no, she did not feel unsafe.

What actually stunned the writer and her colleagues was the fact that one of the locals was more worried about her safety than she was.

The incident would be recounted again and again to all the Pakistani officials that the group met, as it pointed to a niggling question that would concern any foreign businessman or visitor to the country -- is it really safe in Pakistan?

After all, it is one thing to claim that suicide bombings and militant-related killings in Pakistan are grossly exaggerated by the Western media.

But it's a different thing altogether to find a local indirectly saying that it is really not safe here.

Militant violence aside, a policeman also claimed that the crime rate in Karachi, Pakistan's commercial nerve centre, was "very high".

In Lahore, an English daily called The News carried a frontpage story on Oct 7 entitled "Lucky Thursday", about how there was not a single murder incident being reported the day before.

The response to these issues was that Malaysian reporters should not take one incident like the Red Mosque meeting and use it to generalise the whole of Pakistan.

"I went to New York several years ago and before I went, I was afraid because I had the impression that it was crazy in the city with gang fights and shootings everywhere," said an Islamabad-based think-tank head, Dr Pervez Iqbal Cheema.

"But when I arrived, it was not like that.

"So you see how difficult it is to deal with perception?" said Pervez Iqbal, who is chairman of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute.

And what about the daily kidnappings and shootings?

"You give me the figures of how many foreigners have been kidnapped in the city," responded Pervez Iqbal.

The violence, he said, was between militants, local tribesmen and the military in areas where the army is trying to weed out the militants.

"In any developing country, it's difficult to generalise, but the government is doing its very best to provide security up to a certain extent," Pervez Iqbal continued.

This assessment is perhaps the case with militant activities of those associated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, such as sending out suicide bombers like the one which detonated outside the five-star Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 60 people.

According to a top Pakistani military spokesman, Brigadier Muhammad Tariq Jilani, the scale of suicide bombings in major cities has sharply decreased this year compared with last year.

Tariq did not provide the figures but an Oct 10 report quoting data from the Pakistani military said that suicide attacks had killed nearly 1,200 people since July last year, most of them civilians.

Tariq, the director of Inter-Services Public Relations, attributed the decrease in suicide bombings to the army's success in clearing out militants from their enclaves in the tribal belt, which borders Afghanistan.

"The tribes have woken up to the fact that it is not within their interests to shelter the militants, and the militants are being pushed against a wall.

"We have gone into Waziristan, which two years ago was a support base for the militants, and driven them out.

"Now, it's quieter there and we are continuing with other tribal areas such as the Swat Valley," Tariq said

He added that the operations had hobbled the militants' ability to mount attacks in other parts of Pakistan .

When it comes to crime, it is a bit more complicated to draw an accurate picture or arrive at a simple conclusion.

Privatisation and Investment Minister Wakar Ahmed Khan has plans to provide a way for foreign investors to be protected with round-the-clock security.

Officials have also pointed out that no investor has had her venture destroyed by violence.

But what about the average visitor to Pakistan?

To answer this, it would be helpful to apply the "perception vs reality" test to the rash of knife crimes in Britain.

A Nov 17 Guardian Online news blog posting said that statistics from the British Crime Survey showed that there were up to 130,000 violent knife-crime incidents from 2007 to 2008.

The same report also said that almost 14,000 people were treated in hospitals for stab wounds last year, an increase of 20 per cent in five years.

Another report on the same site quoted London deputy mayor Kit Malthouse as saying that the knife-crime problem is "our number one priority and it haunts us pretty much every day we are at City Hall".

And yet this scourge has not deterred thousands of Malaysians from going to study, work and play in Britain.