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The cottage industry registering the fastest growth nowadays is the one dedicated to advising Pakistan’s generals to wake up and save the country before it is too late. Not a day goes by without this precious advice bubbling up in one form or the other.

The argument goes that waiting for the next elections will be too late, because by then everything will have gone down the drain and nothing will be left to save. This forecast is less than flattering to what we like to call the fortress of Islam. Are its foundations so weak? It is also the highest compliment that could be paid to President Zardari.

For it implies that, whereas Pakistan could survive the extended nights of its four saviour-generals, including their unwanted wars and the country’s break-up, it won’t survive another year-and-a-half of the Zardari dispensation. Which puts Zardari on a higher pedestal than all who came before him – mightier in the mischief he will have wrought than all the do-gooders and dimwits who preceded him.
In times past a tenth of this prodding would have impelled the General Staff to act. Mercifully, not now…not because of Facebook or Twitter, or the power of independent television, but because of the American presence in Afghanistan and the Taliban wars our army is having to fight as a consequence. The army’s hands are full and it is all it can do to keep its head above the raging waters.

Take a sinner’s word for it: the Indus can rise to the mountains, and the mountains can come down to the seas, but this country is not going under, certainly not by the end of 2012 when election bugles sound. So why don’t the self-appointed consultants to the General Staff take a rest and think of going to the masses if they are so keen on cleaning the national stables? Or is the nagging thought hitting them that unless judges and generals act in tandem, reading from the same page, Pakistan may have to endure five more years of Zardari and his artful handiwork?

Tough luck, then, especially if conspiracy and wishfulness are the only things Pakistan’s fastest-growing industry can produce. The answer to Pakistan’s woes, the answer to corruption and economic mismanagement, is political mobilisation – between now and the next elections. Make the masses hearken to your call. Cast a spell with your words and strike the notes which rouse their dormant senses. With the power of the ballot, storm the bastions of power. Sadly, there is no other alternative.

But if hearts are empty, and minds barren, and not a single fresh idea descends even if you pray to the gods for assistance, it is unfair to look to the General Staff for miracles.

Is this what we call the sum of our national discourse, the sum of the intellectual treasures at our command, that while we stick resolutely to our armchairs we expect General Kayani and his corps commanders to pull our chestnuts out of the fire?
Let them only try, and Pakistan will be in a greater mess than ever before. On our souls, then, let it be branded with iron that of all the recipes of disaster available in the market none is likely to prove more ruinous than the siren calls of army intervention, including that fairy tale (increasingly heard) of an honest interim government.

Consider these lines from Flecker’s great poem, “The Golden Journey to Samarkand”:
We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

Somewhere in the distance, perhaps over the horizon, lies this golden road that our most burning desires seek, but to discover it and then take it our hearts must be worthy of the enterprise. If the political landscape of Pakistan remains bereft of ideas and inspiration, no tree of paradise will grow from that arid soil.
But is there no escaping the collective death wish of the Pakistani governing class? In the Supreme Court is being played a masque we could do without. If the government has made an art of stonewalling, which it has, their eminences have presided over a state of affairs which has seen their once imposing authority erode to a point not far removed from raillery.

The Indian Supreme Court is also very active in public litigation issues, but its word is heard and respected. A far cry from our situation, where the government is making a mockery of the SC’s authority. Why this difference?

While great things were expected from the judiciary’s restoration, it has to be said with a heavy heart that their eminences have spread themselves too thin, taking up issues that angels, or indeed the furies, would have left alone – like trying to set the price of sugar and regulate petroleum prices. Their intervention into the sale of the Steel Mills has left the country with a big white elephant it doesn’t know how to tame. Should the SC have intervened in the liquefied natural gas issue? The list goes on and on. As for the notice famously taken of the two bottles of liquor recovered from Ms Atiqa Odho’s fetching possession, light lie the dust on the memory of that droll undertaking.

This hyper-activism contrasts with the neglect towards some other pending matters – like Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s petition about ISI funding to political parties in the 1990 elections, some cases affecting particular political parties, etc. This has given rise to charges of selective enthusiasm.

In response to this perceived selectivity, the ruling party has adopted a posture of defiance. It was not so in the beginning but it has become so now. There is a need for good sense to prevail, instead of conduct being guided by newspaper headlines.

The question that Stalin asked regarding the Pope applies also to the judiciary: how many divisions does the Pope have? The judiciary’s most powerful weapon is its moral authority, not anything else. When that, for whatever reason, is squandered, all is not well with the nation.

From the cottage industry devoted to the honorary service of the General Staff are coming too many loose references to Article 190 of the Constitution which asks all “executive and judicial authorities throughout Pakistan (to) act in aid of the Supreme Court.” This does not amount to a marching order to General Headquarters to rush to the aid of the SC, 111 Brigade in the lead. If the generals want to come to Islamabad, let all of us rest assured that they will not consult the Constitution before doing so. There will be other imperatives at work beyond the pages of the Constitution.

And let us bear in mind what happened in Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah’s time. He asked General Karamat to come to his assistance and, as was only proper, the general forwarded his letter to the defence ministry. It is not for the General Staff to act alone, and whenever it does so, it is in defiance of the Constitution. There should be no ambiguity on this score.

The establishment secretary, now put out to pasture, who issued the notification for the transfer of Hussain Asghar without the prime minister’s permission, clearly exceeded his authority. His stance before the SC should have been that the summary of the transfer had been sent to the PM’s office. If the SC was not satisfied with this reply, it could directly ask the PM to explain matters. There is a precedent, after all: Sajjad Ali Shah’s summoning of Nawaz Sharif when the latter was PM. If elephants must fight, so be it. We have had enough of covert warfare.

Things may look unpromising, but as Chairman Mao was fond of saying: there is great disorder under the heavens and the situation is excellent. From the present welter of our discontent some good may yet arise, but only if we remain committed to correct constitutional form and procedure – and the General Staff, mastering some of its deepest prejudices, refuses to take the bait being offered so desperately by armchair gladiators.