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A MOST respectable gentleman has written to me to clarify certain aspects of Dr Fai’s case, principally that the FBI (read the US government) was certainly not taken by surprise.

In his words: “I am also surprised that you couldn’t see the obvious context in which the FBI was ‘shocked to find’ (to quote the famous line from Casablanca) that KAC had connections with ‘the boys’. KAC has been operating under the very nose of all the intelligence agencies in the US for at least two decades.

It developed a close network of relations with the State Department, the White House (during the four administrations) and with both houses of Congress.

“Dr Fai and his KAC was facilitated by the US officials (and not by ‘the boys’) to present the Kashmir case before several UN-affiliated bodies both in New York and in Geneva for years. The ‘links’, therefore, were of several dimensions and, for years, part of the games that humourless people were playing with both Pakistan and India, and trying to develop independent access to the relevant actors in Kashmir, especially the Indian side, along the way.

“I was really surprised that a person of your analytical stature would so easily accept and endorse the FBI’s stated position.”

He also goes on to say that Dr Fai was jailed in India-administered Kashmir and that he escaped from jail and came to the US via Pakistan whereupon his Indian passport was cancelled in the early 1990s. And that he himself attended the 2006 Washington D.C. conference during which he can “vouch that Dr Fai showed the draft before the conclusion of the conference to the participants.

The draft did include the right of self-determination. However, all the American and Indian participants refused to sign the declaration if this phrase was there.

“A compromise phrase of ‘political rights’ was agreed on the suggestion of Mr Yousuf Buch and some prominent Indian
Kashmiri delegates who were eager to seek signatures from the American and Indian delegates. Dr Fai was not happy but he went along when the KAC board chairman agreed to the revised version.”

He also suggests that Khalid Hasan did not get on too well with Dr Fai, therefore his unfair remarks on the self-determination issue.

Which is all very well. But, respectfully, the point still remains that Dr Fai operated outside US law if the allegations made against him of getting undeclared funds from a foreign government aka ‘the boys’ is true. The point still is that the démarche made to the Americans on behalf of an American citizen was idiotic.

As for the matter of the US government looking away, if not exactly helping Fai along in the past, time and events have moved on. The fact is that Pakistan, prodded by the Ghairat Brigades, now has a testy relationship with the US.

The fact is that Pakistan, let’s face it, is a client state of the US upon which it depends for the weapons of war, upon which in turn its Deep State bases its intransigence; and plain good old cash. The fact is that this relationship is an unequal one.

The fact is that the junior partner in any relationship cannot strike attitudes and pretend it calls the shots. For if it does, the senior partner will hit back. Ergo, Dr Fai’s troubles. And more troubles to come, rest assured, friends.

For we have not yet seen the light. Just a few days ago, the American ambassador was stopped at Islamabad airport on his way to Karachi and asked to show the FO’s permission to travel to Karachi! I ask you! What if the Americans stopped our
ambassador from flying to, say, Chicago?

Do the movers and the shakers of the Deep State, for it is them surely, not understand the dictum tit for tat? Do they not understand that the wheel has come full circle, that there is a growing realisation in America that we Pakistanis are unreliable friends out to make a buck any which way; that we sucker our friends mercilessly, and that there is a certain resolve now to teach us a lesson?

Are the Rommels and the Guderians reading the signals emanating furiously (word chosen advisedly) from Washington D.C.

particularly from their former buddies the Republicans? Are they aware of the repeated references to the Kakul raid and the need to get more bad boys in the same manner soon? Unilaterally?

Is this then the time to strike attitudes, and strut about puffing out their puny chests or is it time to tell the Americans that the past is past and that in the future they will do the right thing and fight terror in the way and manner it should be fought: with sincerity and honesty of purpose because the fight is ours too.

Gentlemen, time is running out faster than you think. For the love of God spare our country more pain and sorrow which is sure to be ours if you continue to be bad boys. So stop whingeing, see reality and come down to earth immediately if not sooner.

In the meanwhile, there is a debate raging in the western world about whether Anders Behring Brevik is a Christian terrorist/extremist or not with most commentators, among them clergymen, saying that he is. But of course he is, as was Timothy McVeigh who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Terrorists are terrorists: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, whatever.

WITH increasing frequency, there fall into my email inbox messages from young people, students, some studying abroad, others not so lucky back home — but none as unfortunate as the doomed eight youths of Sialkot, desperate to get out and away, who were found dead in the latter half of July in a container bound for Greece.

So desperate were those young Pakistanis for half a chance to live a better life than can be lived here that they scraped together their meagre savings and were willing to take any route as long as it took them elsewhere. Such is the state of mind prevailing in this republic.

The young e-mailers have generally been schooled in Pakistan at our better private schools, but all they appear to have assimilated is disillusion with their homeland and a wish to leave it. They ask what they can do for their country — if anything.

The same question is asked by those studying abroad whose parents urge them to stay where they are when qualified, find a job and make a life for themselves. Their quandary is that they are unable to decide whether to follow that advice or return to the homeland and try to make a difference.

They are all, whether here or there, deeply distressed by what they see as Pakistan today, a country that has evolved into an ungoverned morass. All are aware of what ails the country.

They point out that there is no governance because those who have been put where they are with an aim to govern have neither the will nor the intent, that their prime motivation is the lining of their pockets and the fleeting joys that accompany power. They have read and heard why and how, from president downwards, the main powerbrokers carry on their broad shoulders heavy baggage from yesteryear.

They know that democracy, as practised in Pakistan as a weapon of revenge, is but a joke perpetrated upon a mainly ignorant populace. They know that the government is not manned by a cluster of men and women but that it is manipulated by one man who calls the shots and is the supreme ruler, having successfully hijacked both ruling party and the presidency. They know how he is renowned for all the wrong reasons.

(But as one youth remarked, credit must be given to him for being oblivious to all criticism, for his ability to not react in the slightest, for his not having victimised — to the best of anyone’s knowledge — any of his opponents. A plus point indeed.)

They know how a once viable country has been overtaken by religious extremism which, combined with the spirit of jihad as encouraged by the military that claims to be the ideological guardian of the nation, has spread a poison that has seeped into the national mindset. They realise the inherent dangers of the false pride that boasts of the possession of nuclear assets without giving one minuscule thought to the implications of such possession.

They know how violence has swept the land — coupled with gross intolerance — from its northern borders down to the seashore where Karachi has become a vast playground for a selection of political parties and their affiliated mafias which have spawned the new breed known as target killers.

They see the dirt involved in politics as played in their country, where defectors are rewarded, where appointments are made devoid of any consideration of merit, purely on personal whims and fancies. They are worried by the fact that corruption and degeneracy are considered as assets, that honesty and integrity are taken as crass stupidities.

They know that law and order have fled, long ago, and that the few laws that operate also kill. They have seen this year how a governor of a province and a federal minister were gunned down because a succession of governments have either not wished to or have not had the guts to take on and override the forces of darkness.

They know much more, in fact they seem to know it all. What they do not know is how they wish to use their lives. So what does one tell them when they ask how they can help, or should they simply go?

Well, without a solid government which can dispense governance, the country as a whole cannot progress in any manner. Yes, there are pockets of goodness provided by the generosity of the good of the private sector, but they are but drops in a sea of wickedness. So, the answer no longer lies in joining the army with the aim to one day be head of state and sole wielder of power — that has not worked. Therefore, we must turn to democracy and seek out competence, honesty, intent of purpose and the will to do right by this overpopulated nation.

New brooms sweep clean — and that is what is needed to get rid of the rot that has permeated all facets of life, even the national mindset. New brooms must come in and wipe away, firstly, the old guard of politicians who date back to the dismal 1980s and 1990s, to weed out the grime from the administration that props them up through dishonesty and fear. The election process has to be cleaned and revamped and disqualification rules and regulations strictly adhered to. Democracy is not static, it moves with the times and its purpose is to progress not regress.

And religion as preached and practised in the land has to be brought back to its proper place in the scheme of things — strictly a matter between a man and his God. The words of the maker of the country, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, must be respected and applied — religion is not the business of the state.

I AM going to say it again: not in my name, your shenanigans (for there is no better word for what you do), sirs; not in mine or in that of the other luckless Pakistanis who try to live honourable lives and endeavour to feed and clothe and educate their children as best they can.

Every week brings forth new and newer allegations which only hurt our country evermore as if it was not wounded enough already. The newest news is the arrest of Ghulam Nabi Fai the head of the Kashmir American Council, supposedly working for the cause of the Kashmiri people.

Before I go any further let me quote from an article by Khalid Hasan who was a Kashmiri in his heart and soul and who wrote so eloquently and wisely on Kashmir and its pain. Khalid lived in the Washington D.C. area for many years immediately preceding his untimely and sad death and was deeply involved in Kashmir-related activities across the world.

In August 2006, writing about Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan’s visit to Washington, Khalid Hasan says: “Asked what he thought of the recent Kashmir Conference held in Washington where the sponsor, the Kashmiri-American Council, refused to include any reference to self-determination in what it grandiloquently called ‘The Washington Declaration’, Sardar Qayyum, whose political acumen and skill even Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto acknowledged, replied, ‘If you take out the right of self-determination from the struggle of the Kashmiris, you are left with nothing. So how can you cast it aside?’

“When someone said that it was Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai who had seen to it that the final document issued by the Conference in controversial circumstances should carry no reference to self-determination, Sardar Qayyum smiled wanly and said, ‘What can I say? What Fai does is not on his own’. What he left unsaid is clear and it is time those who back operations that do a disservice to the Kashmir cause rather than advance it, were to re-examine their conduct and reassess their erroneous assumptions.”

He also wrote: “The links between the Council and certain sponsored Kashmir outfits in London, Toronto and Brussels are too well known for me [to make] a listing here. It is time this charade was brought to an end and the agencies (or more accurately The Agency) masterminding them were to begin to concentrate on the work for which it/they were originally set up. It is quite clear that unless the ‘Invisibles’ get out of the act, we will keep sinking deeper into the morass in which we find ourselves. The damage done, some feel, is already beyond repair, so let The Boys pick up their hats and their gadgets and leave by the nearest exit without saying goodbye.”

Now then, before the Ghairat Brigades get into an almighty lather in the matter of Fai’s arrest let them take two deep breaths and digest this:
— Dr Fai is an American national who holds dual nationality of India.

— He did not declare himself to be an agent of a foreign government (Pakistan) and therefore was outside the pale of the law when large payments were allegedly traced to him through emails and sworn testimony.

— The law’s spirit is: “The Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) of 1938 requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities.”

Dr Fai is in jail pending trial.

Now then, since he is a US citizen, what got into our Foreign Office to issue a démarche to the US embassy — taken so seriously by the Americans that a lowly political counsellor received it, thank you very much — in rather bombastic and convoluted (as is our wont) language. The Foreign Office’s statement:

“Dr Fai is a US citizen. A démarche was made to the US embassy in Islamabad today to register our concerns, in particular the slander campaign against Pakistan … upholding [the] fundamental rights of Kashmiris is the fundamental responsibility of the international community and all conscientious people who value human rights and values … campaigns to defame the just cause of the Kashmiri people will not affect its legitimacy.”

Several problems here. How is this a “slander campaign against Pakistan”? Were the payments made in a clandestine manner or were they not? If they were not, the FO should say so. How is Fai’s arrest for what surely is dubious funding too, a “campaign to defame the just cause…”? Did such funding not happen? If it did not, the FO should say so. This newest jewel will not affect the ‘legitimacy’ of the cause of Kashmir? Of course it will when the pointsman of the cause is arrested for violating the law of his own country.

Whilst one sympathises with the FO for perpetually having a pistol held to its head by the arbiters of foreign policy of the country one wishes that one, just one honourable FO babu will stand up one day and say to what Khalid Hasan called ‘The Boys’: ‘I will not do your stupid bidding because it will hurt our country.’

In the end, just this for The Boys to chew on while they plan their next brilliant move: just one-third of US supplies for Afghanistan now go through Pakistan, with the Americans working hard to develop other routes, as ‘relations with Pakistan continue to deteriorate’.

To quote one of the great political leaders of Pakistan, Mohammad Asghar Khan: “We have learnt nothing from history.”

The reason is painful but simple — ignoring lessons of history benefit the ruling class. Watching every ruthless power struggle among politicians and military generals grabbing power for the sake of power, or twisting laws and coercing institutions by the powerful ruling groups, we are reminded of this reference of our poor memory and very weak sense of history.

The present context in which the collapse of the legal and constitutional foundation of the government is taking place is its open and brazen defiance of the orders of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It may not require an erudite constitutional lawyer to establish what it would mean for a political order if those in power refuse compliance with judicial decisions, primarily to protect themselves and their supporting allies against independent investigations of their corruption. It amounts to pulling the judicial system down, and they don’t seem to be bothered about this at all.

The argument of the government is as follows; all institutions must function within the constitutional boundaries allotted to them; and it is the executive’s legal privilege to appoint and transfer civil servants, and it is not obliged to do so when ordered by the judicial authority. Don’t forget this government and all others before it have justified their misuse of executive authority under the defence that parliament is sovereign because it embodies the will of the people.

These arguments can be used to mislead people, which the ruling classes have done for a very long time. The mandate of the people is to form a government but exercise power within the limits of the law and the constitution.

In most of the developing world, notably in Pakistan, political executives formed by dynastic leaders and their proxies act as civilian dictators and have used executive power like in for personalised fiefdoms. In doing this, never have they faced effective resistance from the society or from other state institutions. Every student and practitioner of politics knows that power of the political executive is restrained by the constitution; democratic norms within parties through conscientious dissent; civil society; and finally the electorates. In parochial, traditional political cultures, these indeed have proven to be very weak brakes on the power of the executive.

It is a political falsehood that popular representation can give a free licence to a representative political executive to do whatever it wants or interpret the constitutionality of its own acts itself. No, this cannot be the case in any constitutional democracy. All acts, and the general exercise of power in any form and manifestation, must be within the legal and constitutional limits. Here is the rub; who will determine the legality and the constitutionality of the executive’s decisions or even the boundaries of the executive authority? Not the executive itself, and not even the parliament, but the superior courts.

Why then such defiance? It is to protect certain members of the ruling club against independent inquiry of their misdeeds and subversion of autonomous prosecution. The clan seems to have made a choice — it is better to go down by causing a collapse of the entire system than carry the legal stigma of conviction and its social and political consequences. We hope some good sense prevails in the corridors of power to save democracy from such ‘democrats’.

In June 2009, less than six months after being sworn in as America’s president, Barack Obama addressed the citizens of the Islamic world. He chose Cairo’s Al Azhar University, the oldest surviving centre of Islamic learning, as the site for his much anticipated address. This was to be one of the most important and remembered speeches the president gave in the early part of his tenure. In it, he promised a new beginning in America’s relations with the world of Islam.

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslim world, one based upon mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition,” he told his large audience. “Instead they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress; tolerance and dignity of all human beings. The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is a God’s vision. Now that must be our work on Earth.”

President Obama thought that defining a new relationship between Islam and America was expected of him. He was a different kind of American president. “I’m a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the azan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.”

That speech was given two years ago. The American president could not have imagined how much would change in the Muslim world since the Cairo address. He must have hoped that democracy, liberty, freedom of expression, respect for the rule of law and rights of all citizens — ideas on which America had built its own society and its own political and social orders — would be adopted by those in the Muslim world where authoritarianism governed. That began to happen in ways that could not have been imagined in June 2009. One single and tragic act of defiance by a frustrated young fruit vendor in a small Tunisian town ignited the Arab world. The Arab street erupted and brought down two long-enduring regimes and threatened several others. The West, including America, surprised by these rapid moving events, stood by and watched as the Arab youth turned out in the streets and in public squares, no longer afraid that they will be mercilessly assaulted by the security forces. They brought down the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt. It was only when the Libyan regime threatened to massacre its own people that the West intervened.

The West began a military operation against the regime of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya that has lasted longer than expected. The Assad family that represents a small non-Sunni minority in a Sunni majority country launched a viscous campaign of repression to beat back those who wanted a more open political system. The opposite happened in Bahrain, where the Sunni establishment and monarch were challenged by the country’s large Shia majority. In Yemen, a society that was still governed by tribalism and tribal loyalties was set on fire, and it rages on even as the country’s long-serving president has gone to Saudi Arabia to recover from the injuries suffered during an attack on his compound by those who had rebelled against his rule. The Arab political revolution is actually work in progress.

There were other developments in the Muslim world. A political party inspired by Islam won the plurality of the vote in a general election and prolonged the rule of the country’s prime minister, Teyyip Erdogan. The Turks demonstrated that Islam was not incompatible with democracy. America and its Nato allies, fearing that they may get stuck in Afghanistan, began the search for a way out of that country that had defied so many other foreign interventions. The Americans found and killed Osama bin Laden in a city deep inside Pakistan’s territory, by carrying out an operation that was deeply resented by many in Pakistan, who considered it an act of aggression committed against a sovereign nation. After relations with Pakistan rapidly deteriorated, Washington indicated that it was holding back part of the aid it had promised the country’s military. A resolution was moved in Congress demanding a cut back in economic aid as well.

The Muslim world’s relations with America, therefore, were moving in directions that were not expected by the country’s new president. To use a favourite Obama expression, it is necessary for Washington to press the reset button. In doing so, it needs to cognise a few things. First, the world of Islam is not homogenous. The people living in these countries belong to many different cultures and have had different histories. They are making economic, political and social progress at different speeds.

Second, the political systems that are evolving in these countries will be different. This is not surprising since the Christian nations in Europe and America don’t have the same political structures. Third, the strategic interests of countries in the Muslim world will not always be the same as that of America and its European allies. To force countries to follow Washington, Berlin, London and Paris is to generate resentment which is not good for any country inside or outside the Muslim world. Let us take three examples.

A more confident Istanbul has begun to carve out a role for itself in the Middle East, Central and South Asia that may not be in line with what the Americans consider to be their interests. An economically weakened and politically unsettled Islamabad is rightly nervous about what might emerge in its neighbourhood after the United States begins to pull out of Afghanistan. Tehran feels anxious because of the fact that it is the only major Shia country in the middle of a Sunni world. It may be inclined to give up its nuclear ambitions if it feels comfortable about its security situation.

In other words, in resetting the button, President Obama needs to move forward from rhetoric to real politics.

TO many, it is mind-boggling: why President Asif Ali Zardari and his political team continue to play Russian roulette with their government’s future. At another level, it is not hard to work out.

The PPP has had gamblers’ luck in the last three years. It has performed remarkable feats, not the least of which is staying in power despite a deluge of financial scandals and well-documented cases of individual corruption. President Zardari’s political manoeuvring has been brilliant: he has completely outplayed the PML-N and even got the better of the usually on-top-of-things MQM. A less lucky leadership would have found it hard to stay in the seat of political authority in the face a complete meltdown of law and order in Karachi, and a grim economic crisis.

Emboldened by his successes, President Zardari seems to have taken the decision to stay on the same path. He has played a deadly game of chance and won every round so far. This is also how he will conduct himself in the remaining years of this government’s tenure. He is secure in the knowledge that the PPP vote bank in Sindh, and the new element of political militancy that he has carefully nurtured in the party ranks is resilient. He is also confident that he can face off any reaction to the course of derring-do on which he has steered the government.

This is the context in which a usually supine Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has been showing defiance to a judiciary he previously never missed an opportunity to praise. Prime Minister Gilani, like other PPP’s stalwarts, is going by the script the president has penned with the able assistance of legal hawks such as Babar Awan.

But like all players of Russian roulette, President Zardari must have worked out some probability of success besides banking on pure luck. For instance, he knows that by keeping Prime Minister Gilani up against the judiciary, he is taking minimum personal risks.

If a sitting chief executive and his whole cabinet take on the judges and accuse them of manifest bias, then the ensuing pressure on the judiciary is sustained and effective. The president and his office can stay in the background. And if the judiciary does not relent and there is a head-on collision between the executive and the judicial arms of the state, the ensuing chaos might be to the PPP’s advantage since it can play the martyr and contest the next polls on the wave of voter sympathy.

The other calculation in taking on the judiciary seems to relate to the role of the armed forces. Since the embarrassing events of the last few months, the army leadership is too bogged down in fixing its deeply wounded image and lifting its sagging morale to be of any real threat to the present government.

The tense relations between the presidency and GHQ before the killing of Osama bin Laden have turned into a rather convenient arrangement: President Zardari does as he pleases in the political field in return for his party’s unconditional support to the armed forces in these times of plummeting prestige and mounting foreign pressure.

The assumption also centres on President Zardari’s reading of the complete absence of political alternatives available to the army. Even if Gen Kayani wanted to clip his wings, he could not because he has no political force to rely on. In any case, a chief of army staff on an extended tenure and battling an insurgency and an image problem is hardly in a position to contrive political moves against an elected government.

It is this formula of calculated risks combined with proven political luck that has gone into the toughening of the PPP’s stance against the judiciary and explains the ease with which its leadership is hurtling down the course of confrontation.Yet, there are a few issues that might crop up to spoil the thrill of the game. One is that luck runs out as frequently as it smiles. And when that happens, the smallest mistake can cause the biggest disaster. The most recent example is that of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s fall. Not even in his wildest dreams could he have imagined that sacking a seemingly pliant judge would cause him to trip so badly that the combined strength of the army, America and his political allies could not pull him up again.

In different eras Nawaz Sharif, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayub Khan — all men with god-complexes — went the same way: swiftly, unexpectedly, thrown off by events they thought they could control. Like his predecessors, President Zardari is spinning the chamber of the gun too frequently to escape unhurt.

Also, he is assuming too much. The assumption about the judiciary being stung by accusations of partisanship to the point of becoming controversial and losing national support is not sound. The PPP’s stance on the Haj and NICL cases is weak. The prime minister’s move in taking recourse to his authority to transfer bureaucrats was too transparent an attempt at covering up financial bungling to deserve even procedural support.

His government has treated the judiciary with slow, incremental but deliberate contempt. The matters on which this contempt has been doled out are not ordinary issues of postings and transfers: they include investigations into scams that have cost the national exchequer billions. The judges, by showing patience and perseverance, have adequately neutralised the accusation of being politically biased. If President Zardari decides to take on the judges, he might be surprised by the reaction in favour of the judiciary.

The most unexpected surprise might come from the military establishment which, though considerably weakened by recent botch-ups, might be forced to take a stand and choose sides between the chief justice and the president. That is a point President Zardari must avoid reaching, because there the odds of his government and his presidency surviving might be lower than he is able to calculate right now.

Many decades ago, whenever I saw Aminullah Chaudhry, I thought he looked a bit supercilious; now, after reading his book, I think he was not supercilious, simply superior. He was a CSP officer of the 1967 batch, together with my favourite Government College (GC) class-fellow, Tariq Sultan, and another dear GC friend, Ali Kazim.

Before he entered the CSP cadre, he held an honours degree in physics from Punjab University and an LLM in corporate law from the London School of Economics. I always wondered why he was universally disliked by his contemporaries. After reading his memoir Political Administrators: The Story of the Civil Service of Pakistan (OUP 2011) I can say that he may have been harmlessly ‘uppity’ but simply did not deserve to be despised the way he was.

The book substantiates the charge that the CSP was patronage-based and thoroughly political, and declined after 1947 when the service gradually began to succumb to being a collection of henchmen of military dictators and elected strongmen. Today, as we revert to the commissionerate system, Aminullah Chaudhry’s frank assessment of it might temper our reactive enthusiasm a bit.

Aminullah was director-general Civil Aviation Authority in Karachi — where he was perhaps mischievously sidelined by the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif — when Pervez Musharraf’s coup happened and he was accused of abetting the hijacking of Musharraf’s plane in October 1999. As he languished in jail, Aminullah thought of the service to which he had given his life. He meditates in the introduction: “CSP officers were confronted with a tricky choice. To move up the ladder they would need to become party loyalists; failure would mean pining away in sideline positions”.

The book is full of anecdotes like the one concerning then chairman of Punjab’s Planning Board, Muhammad Arif, who was being tripped up by Chief Minister Wyne’s ultra vires interventions. Wyne’s answer was: “When confronted with a difference of opinion between a civil servant and a politician, I would willingly support my party colleague irrespective of the merits of the case”.

Aminullah is positive about Shahbaz Sharif and that is saying a lot, given Aminullah’s strict yardstick of merit; but, in 2008, the way Shahbaz went hunting for ‘loyal’ officers set his teeth on edge. Conclusion: “The civil service is as politicised as the armed forces, big business, lawyers, doctors, and educationists, the feudal and trading classes”. If you have patrons you can duck normal discipline like foreign service officers Tariq Osman Hyder and Munir Akram — the latter was bottom of the list — and inspector-general police Haji Habibur Rehman (p.77) and Bandial, who were close to the generals (p.83).

As junior officer in Dipalpur (1969), “I was summoned by Shoaib Sultan Khan (CSP 1955), secretary services, to his residence in the Civil Service Academy: Without waiting for me to even sit down, he said that I had acquired the reputation of being an influence-peddler (p.161).

Roedad Khan, today the champion of democracy, behaved differently in 1971: Yahya Khan made his famous speech announcing a ban on all political activities and imposition of complete press censorship in East Pakistan. Roedad’s face beamed when the president denounced Mujib as a traitor and declared that the man would not go unpunished. Roedad reacted: “Yaar iman taza hogaya” (my faith stands revived) (p.167).

As commissioner Faisalabad, he witnessed handyman civil servants like Haji Akram and Chaudhry Sardar, the latter police officer sneaking on him when he tried to help Aitzaz Ahsan and his brother Ijaz Ahsan — both his maternal Warraich cousins — against threats of PML leader-cum-strongman Rohail Asghar. Nawaz Sharif was not pleased (p.228).

Some judgements are interesting and I daresay I can’t find myself disagreeing: Benazir’s choice of police officer Rao Rashid as her adviser on establishment was a serious error of judgement (p.230). Pervaiz Masud as chief secretary Punjab under Wyne was a good decision to maintain sanity in administration. Nawaz Sharif allowed GC principal Majeed Awan’s son to unfairly augment his marks to enter medical college (p.245).

When working in the Chief Minister’s Inspection Team in Lahore, he wondered together with Anwar Zahid (CSP 1957) at the hold Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had on Nawaz Sharif (most of us are still wondering). He thought AZK Sherdil was not competent but AZK held on to Nawaz Sharif despite some misadventures and emerged as his favourite to his dying day (p.298).

He is honest about his own encounters: “I had a particularly acrimonious meeting with the chief minister in which he accused me of creating misunderstandings between him and senior PPP minister Makhdoom Altaf (p.259). Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto lost her cool: She sharply rebuked me and accused me of having wrongly briefed my minister” (p.263).

After President Farooq Leghari got rid of Benazir’s government, he surrounded himself with his batchmates. (He was fourth in CSP 1964). Aminullah is acidic about Afzal Kahut and his costive behaviour. Another batchmate, Shahid Hamid, escapes the skewer because of competence. Another Nawaz Sharif man who gets by is Aminullah’s batchmate Saeed Mehdi whose relationship with Nawaz Sharif continues to be mysterious. Mehdi got kicked out to Sindh when one thought he would be in Islamabad after NS’s ‘heavy mandate’. So was Aminullah, understandably.

Observation: “A temperamental personality, Nawaz Sharif, like all other leaders of stature, was not averse to backbiting and this created a general sense of insecurity among senior bureaucrats” (p.303). And the coda: “The problem with loyalty as demanded by the Sharifs is that at the end of the day, it turns out to be as unreliable and fickle as a woman of easy virtue”