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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”

The devastating terrorist attack in Norway by a demented Christian fanatic on the 23rd of July this year sent a wave of shock and surprise across the western world.

That’s understandable, because after all, nations and governments, both western and otherwise, had been nervously looking out for modern terrorism’s best friends of the past decade, the Islamic extremists.

Thus, a shocking act of carnage in Norway undertaken by an extremist from some other creed stunned a number of people.

But should one really be all that surprised by what happened in Norway? What makes people slaughter men, women and children in the name of God?

Of course, one expects the usual answers: Economic frustrations, social misplacement, the supposedly insulting deeds of the modern secular ways towards the believers, the cultural, political and economic hegemony of powerful military states, et al.

All these at once are understood to be the main reasons behind making certain sensitive souls go bonkers. The question however arises, why now?

Violence by vengeful religious groups and individuals on the scale we are witnessing today is quite clearly a recent phenomenon. The above-mentioned reasons that are said to give birth to such violence were there thirty years ago as well. Why weren’t they producing religious nut-jobs that go on blind killing sprees in markets, mosques, schools and streets?

Till even the early 1970s, politicians, psychologists, philosophers and the press weren’t psychoanalysing such nuts the way they started to do once the whole hogwash notion of ‘post-modernism’ began to kick in from the late 1970s onwards.

Post-modernism began as a philosophical trend in Europe that rejected the attitude of conventional science, ideology, politics and economics, replacing it with a sympathetic look at what conventional modernism would denounce as irrational.

As post-modernism began placing a new-found respect to trendy ‘New Age’ lifestyles (pseudo-sciences, ‘alternative medicine,’ ‘eastern spiritualism,’ kitsch pop cultural trash, etc.), its ‘alternative’ mantra soon entered the ways of modern economics, sociology and politics as well.

Since the whole concept of irony was so vital to the post-modernist literati, it was indeed ironic (unwittingly, though) to see this trend eventually facilitating the death of old-school social democracy and the left (attacked for being anti-individualistic and based on outdated meta-narratives).

It perpetrated the rise of a new kind of individualism, the sort best represented by transcendental corporate yuppies of the 1980s, rich New Age gurus and an almost spiritual belief in the power of greed and laissez faire economics – all upheld by the ‘anything goes’ conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The trend didn’t quite fold with their departure. Despite the obvious economic gaps emerging from post-modernist capitalism, that spiritual aura around corporate capitalism and individual greed continued well into the 1990s.

One look or a visit to any corporate ‘team building session’ may be enough to fully absorb the herd-like nonsense (in the name of individualism) and the clichéd self-improvement silliness that pours out from the mouths of corporate gurus at such events.

But what has all this got to do with violent religious crazies? A lot. Because one should remember post-modernist economics and politics were convinced that limitless capitalism signified by spiritually attuned yuppies, shopping malls, hackneyed ‘self-help’ books and an unhinged desire to get rich quick will produce a hard-working, tolerant and conflict-free trading society. A society where no-one would judge the other person’s motives because they’ll all have the same motive: To get rich and at the same time keep in touch with their spiritual ‘inner self.’

However, anyone going against this tide of thinking was judged and pronounced as a sour loser. Before those who have sympathies for violent religious nut-jobs get all too excited, they must know that such faith-driven idiots too are a part and parcel of the post-modernist whiplash.

It’s nonsense to believe that religious fundamentalists who go bonkers are symbols of defiance against the kind of economic, political and cultural hegemony post-modernist thought generated from the 1980s onwards.

They are very much part of it simply because their madness is/was not judged to be a mental condition (that would have been ‘politically incorrect,’ in the post-modernist lingo).

Their madness was sympathised with and given convoluted reasons. ‘Western imperialism,’ ‘the rational coldness of secularism,’ ‘Orientalism,’ ‘death of spiritualism,’ and, in Pakistan’s context, all this plus, of course, the drone attacks.

You see, it is politically incorrect to call faith-driven violence despicable without first cursing the awful things that makes a nut a nut. It is ironic that most of these awful things may as well be exactly the things that a politically correct person is also indulging in.

For example, in Pakistan, on the eve of a terrorist attack by a Muslim fanatic, the politically-correct, progressive and conscientious person is obliged to first blame western imperialism, then the drone attacks. Then he goes to have a Big Mac. Of course, by then he usually forgets to also issue at least a token condemnation of the death and destruction caused by the religious nuts.

The bottom-line is there are now more religious fanatics willing to go on murderous killing sprees in the world because they are more tolerated in the society than ever.

Nations are just too busy navel gazing about airy-fairy abstract concepts about spirituality and political-correctness that have nothing to do with the twisted images that pollute a religious fanatic’s head. Such spineless post-modernist behaviour actually ends up (indirectly) justifying a fanatic’s mad existence.

It is an odd thing to feel relief when 76 people have died. But then, being Pakistani has become an odd thing to be. When the news coverage of the grotesque terrorism in Oslo began, the world watched it unfold with a sense of sadness. In Pakistan, we watched it with gritted teeth and clenched expectations. We had but one prayer, selfish but understandable: Please don’t let it be a Muslim. Specifically, please don’t let it be a Muslim who had received training on our soil. The eventual revelation that a blonde man with a distinctly ethnic Norwegian genetic skin tone had been arrested gave us a moment’s respite before we then started worrying about his being a convert. We are always told that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. Unfortunately, no one details which Islam. The one practiced by the people around me who have a deep and unshakeable belief in the Almighty and his Messenger and find it a source of peace and comfort? Or the Islam that is subscribed to by the people running amok through the lives of those just described who have somehow found the message of submission to be one that requires mass murder and destruction. Fortunately, for the first time in recent memory, the attack was perpetuated by neither of these adherents. Instead, it was a lone lunatic who felt that the best way to protect his nation from dark forces he perceived was to slaughter the young. And so we all let out a sigh of collective relief, a sound that was effectively drowned out by the frantic back-scrabbling of ‘expert’ commentators on every single foreign news channel.

From the moment the first gunshot echoed through Utoya Island, and that last pane of glass shattered in central Oslo, every single person who had ever attended a class on foreign affairs or had passed within pinching distance of a Muslim was loudly proclaiming the clear guilt of al Qaeda. They did it with such solemn sagacity that one feels they are actually disappointed now that it has been proven to not be a Muslim at fault. The discovery that extremists can belong to any belief system and maybe it is something inherent in the person himself and not in the religion he subscribes to, that paradigm shift is causing them all sorts of motion sickness. All the nations who put a comforting arm around Norway in the initial moments of the attack, promising unity against this Muslim terror, are now backing away as if Norway vomited over it’s own furniture, telling it that it’s on its own in the clean-up.

The irony in all this, if you can manage to consider such a tragic event with cold scrutiny, is that the killer feared the “Pakistanisation of Europe”. His understanding of that phrase was that Europe would be full of small Muslim countries with extremist views. But his actions, instead, created another form of “Pakistanisation”, in the way that we Pakistanis understand it. Norway is truly like us now in that it, too, understands that the actions of a random extremist with a head full of bad wiring is not representative of the majority. That it takes a single day planned with fanatical focus to completely redefine a nation’s sense of security and identity. And that it will require the patience and understanding of a multitude to cope with the changed world that they now exist in. It is a reality we Pakistanis struggle against every day.

The primary description of the attacker in the media is that he is a ‘lunatic’. Let us hope that the next time an act of terror on such a scale occurs anywhere in the world, the same description is applied to the culprits, regardless of religion.

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.

Ever since my column of July 13th (‘The greatest dilemma of the general’) I have been swamped with friendly and not-so friendly phone calls, emails and run-ins, with everyone asking me to “explain” the ominous sounding quote of a multi-starred khaki.

The quote was: “The army works in a different manner. A point comes where if the chief does not, or cannot, run the army then the army runs the chief.” So, was I talking about a coup against COAS Kayani by his own handpicked lot of corps commanders? Storming of the generals by angry colonels? And if neither, then how would the army run its own chief? I have been asked.

Allow me to explain. A generals coup is not even a remote possibility in an army structured like a pyramid, with the chief sitting at the pinnacle. The Pakistan army has a peculiar professional culture and anyone having the slightest insight into our khaki psyche and countenance would tell you that an inside coup is a ludicrous thought. Similarly, the chances of the mid-ranking officers going for their generals is as much a possibility as Osama bin Laden’s son becoming the next president of the US.

So how does the army then run its chief? The answer is deceptively simple as explained by my wise khaki friend. As matters stand today, all the corps commanders have been posted by COAS Gen kayani himself. The GOC’s too did not land in their coveted perches without his approval. The head honchos of the ISI and the MI serve at his pleasure. In fact, a large number of the freshly made major and lieutenant generals owe their elevation to Gen Kayani. And where he may not have as direct an involvement, all key posts have been filled by likeminded officers in turn appointed by his own trusted likeminded top guns.

All said, he today heads the circle of military elders handpicked by him, and hence the obvious deduction that their viewpoint and thinking had to be in line with his own. It would not be unreasonable either to assume that with none of this lot being a vestige of Gen Musharraf, the incumbent COAS can rest assured that his top generals are thinking their own thoughts and not being influenced by some third covert interest. His is today one happy family of trusted lieutenants.

And here comes the twist. What does the chief do, if he senses a slow but gradual divergence of views between the majority of his top generals and himself? He knows they want the best for him, the institution, and possibly the country as well, but while he agrees with the set of identified problems, his remedy may not entirely be in consonance with their desired solution. What happens when the bulk of his top officers, whom he chose with excruciating patience during the last three years, are not as patient as him in waiting for things to improve or for the present ruling dispensation to mend its ways. Add to that the burden of the three-year tenure extension and the perpetual struggle to reassure all of his loyalty being with the institution and the country and not to any one individual. He is then left with three choices: first, he either questions the judgment of his generals, or his own.

Secondly, he either leans their way or convinces, or forces, them into seeing things through his prism. Or he makes one last assessment of where the coin is likely to fall and then synthesise the views of the best, and the rest to come up with a compromise solution.

All scenarios however have one thing in common: the chief is being softly steered into taking hard decisions (which ultimately would be of his choice though) and the combined pressure of external events and internal opinion is forcing a timetable of sorts upon him. It’s not as if it is a deliberate ploy by a band of scheming generals but simply the compounded effect of “respected peer opinion” pressure. The army controls the chief by simply nudging him into speeding up his decision-making process.

And the fast deteriorating situation in the country is not helping in easing the pressures either. As the cliched slogan goes: democracy is not about how votes are cast but how they are made to count. What we are witnessing here is anything but democracy. What we have here is a mandated autocracy rather than a people’s democracy. The elected no longer appear answerable for their acts of omission and commission (pun intended).

The ruling political junta is openly defying the Supreme Court and ridiculing the chief justice-led benches. The country is in the midst of an economic meltdown and the government’s only response has been to print billions by the day and spend even more by nightfall. There has been no mentionable direct foreign investment in the last three years and even existing multinationals have started pulling out. The governor State Bank and the nation’s chief economist resigned within days of one another citing serious political manipulation of national finances, but nobody cares. The FBR has just been caught with its pants down while lying about its tax receipts. That in turn, amongst siring other problems, has also jeopardised badly needed foreign loans. The energy crisis is forcing the closure of industry and causing losses of billions of rupees on a daily basis, but where is a serious government policy response? A hundred people die in Karachi within 72 hours, thanks to power games between PPP, MQM and ANP, and the interior minister blames jilted lovers and vengeful wives (sic). There is a serious state security crisis.

Lawlessness is the new law both in Fata and the settled areas of the country. The army is stretched beyond its capacity to fight internally, while exposing the country to external aggression.

On the external front too the army has its hands full with the US, and others. Admiral Mullen, the once trusted friend of Kayani, openly states that military-to-military relations are in very difficult times and need “recalibration.” Admiral James Winnefeld dubbed Pakistan a very difficult partner who “did not always share the same worldview or the same opinions or the same national interest.” Add to that the very strong belief in Rawalpindi that if left to its own, the US would ensure that the organisational and operational structure of the Pakistan army is changed max within the next year or two. In other words, just like the country itself, the institution too is faced with an existentialist threat.

The only democratic resolution to all our national ills lies in a political alternative to the existing ruling setup. Unfortunately, utter confusion prevails on this count. Nawaz Sharif does not want to go the agitation route out of his fear of any khaki exploitation of the situation and would like to wait till the next general elections in 2013, or even 2012 as President Zardari is said to be toying with the idea of calling snap polls after the Senate elections in March next year. The question is, can the country survive that long if it continues to be (mis)managed in this manner? Will anyone be able to revive the badly stalling economy at that stage? Or whether there will even be anything left at all to salvage by then. Everyone is thinking about all these things including the generals, and voicing their opinion, including the generals. This is how collective thinking influences and ‘runs’ an individual perspective my friends.

Nothing seems to be going right in Pakistan-US relations. Just when we were wondering what Pakistan needed to do to restore some semblance of normalcy to its ties with the US, the latter decided to arrest Ghulam Nabi Fai, long a voice against violence and an advocate for peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue. Are the two agencies playing games with each other?

Next, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to serve another ‘demand note’ on Pakistan and that too while in India, which made it needlessly provocative. Her other remarks at the end of the US-India strategic dialogue were not helpful either, particularly her support for India’s quest for transit rights across South and Central Asia. It was, however, in the southern port city of Chennai that Clinton became India’s unabashed cheerleader, stressing that India-US ties would be the defining partnership of the 21st century, while nudging India to play a more assertive role across the Asia-Pacific region, arguing that it “is an ambitious agenda, but we can afford to be ambitious.” Her assertions must have fallen on receptive ears, as Indian Foreign Minister Krishna confirmed that “we discussed our shared interest in peaceful and stable Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean region architecture in the region”. As if to demonstrate how much the two are in sync, it was announced that the Indian president would be undertaking official visits to South Korea and Mongolia, two countries of special interest to China, while the joint statement revealed that “India, the US and Japan plan to commence a trilateral dialogue at the senior official level.”

Increasingly, Clinton has been sounding as if she has joined those in the US who are convinced of the need to galvanise South East Asian nations to confront China now, rather than in the future, when it may no longer be feasible. A year ago, at the annual Asean Regional Forum (ARF) meeting in Hanoi, Clinton had waded into the choppy waters of the South China Sea, where China and its South Asian neighbours are embroiled in a contentious dispute, declaring America’s support for the right to freedom of navigation. Suspecting it as America’s effort to fish in troubled waters, China was constrained to warn the US and other major powers to stay out of disputes in the region. At last week’s ARF annual meeting, Clinton renewed her efforts to encourage South East Asian nations to be more assertive in their claims to the strategically located and potentially lucrative waters of the South China Sea.

Clinton’s remarks in Chennai appear to flesh out the bare bones of the US-India strategic partnership envisaged by Bush and the neocons. Its scale is huge and ambition unlimited, as Clinton herself admitted. Though an Indian Ocean power, the US is committing itself to making India a Pacific Ocean power as well, and for this purpose encouraging her to work with Japan on security issues relating to the region. The East Asia Summit would be turned into the premier regional forum for dealing with security issues and India invited as an observer, for the first time, in the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Nothing could be more provocative to China.

Do Clinton’s exhortations in Chennai represent the Obama doctrine for ‘containment’ of China? Getting India into this arrangement may sound like a stroke of genius, but could turn out to be a huge folly as well. Coming as it does at a time when the American economy shows no sign of recovery and its debt to China exceeds $1 trillion, Clinton and company are engaging in an audacious gamble and one that is likely to add greatly to regional tension and turmoil.

Given Pakistan’s strategic relations to China and continuing tensions with India, the Obama administration’s encouragement of India to become more assertive and ambitious in both South and South East Asia demonstrate the limitations of US-Pakistan relations, while creating huge challenges for Pakistan.

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’.

The situation in which Pakistan finds itself today, as it with the United States, is very different from the one that led to a tight embrace between the two countries more than half a century ago. Then, both needed each other. Pakistan was seeking a partner that would help build up its defences against India. The first generation of Pakistani leadership did not fully trust their neighbour’s intentions towards the new state they were hard at work to establish. Pakistan also needed finance to quicken the pace of economic development. The United States needed a partner in South Asia, which could be a part of the virtual wall it was erecting against the spread of communism.

Now more than 50 years later, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Washington needs Islamabad more than Pakistan needs the United States. Even after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Americans remain apprehensive about the harm Islamic extremists could do to its economic and political interests around the globe. Terrorism experts believe that Pakistan is now the epicenter of international terrorism inspired by Islamic fundamentalists. But Pakistan is not alone; there are other even more unsettled places around the world — Afghanistan, Somalia to name three but perhaps also Libya, Iraq, and Syria if the current unrest in these countries cannot be brought under control  — that could become exporters of terrorist activities. America and Europe are keen on throwing a fence around this troubled area and both believe that Pakistan could be a critical partner in such an enterprise. Pakistan, however, would like to partner but on its own terms.

There are at least three items in Pakistan’s term sheet for cooperation with the West. The first is that the announced pull out from Afghanistan by the United States should not leave a regime in Kabul that would be openly hostile to Pakistan. There was such a regime in place for 30 years, from 1947 (the year of Pakistan’s founding) and 1978 (the year the Soviet Union moved into Afghanistan). Then Kabul campaigned actively for the creation of an autonomous Pakhtun state that would extend to the western bank of the Indus River. It would also not want an Afghan government that was very closely aligned with India. That said, the change in thinking on security issues in Islamabad does not preclude a tripartite arrangement involving Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, in which all three countries work together to collectively promote their economic interests. Building of cross-country pipelines would be an important part of such an arrangement. Sustainable economic growth at reasonable rates will not be possible in mainland South Asia, unless a way is found to resolve critical shortages of energy. One way of doing this is to import natural gas through pipelines that would connect the area with energy-surplus Central Asia and the Middle East.

The second item on the Pakistani term-sheet, is to ensure a steady flow of foreign capital to augment its very low levels of domestic savings. Even if the country embarks on a structural adjustment program that would bring about increases in the rate of domestic savings and tax-to-GDP ratio, foreign flows would still be required for many years into the future. In that context the United States has been an unreliable partner.

The third item is Pakistan’s requirements that the United States desists from those acts that add to the state of fragility in the country. Some of the US sponsored activities in recent months fall into this category. For instance, CIA agents are operating freely in Pakistan — as The Economist wrote in a recent issue there were “CIA agents who roamed across cities without the oversight of local intelligence agencies.” One of them — a man by the name of Raymond Davis — murdered two individuals in broad daylight on a busy Lahore street. He was let go after spending several weeks in a Pakistani jail. The same issue of the magazine expressed surprise at the gathering in the compound of the American embassy in Islamabad of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. It wrote: “Even at the best of time it would have been unusual for America’s embassy in Islamabad to organise (such a meet). Given the grim state of bilateral relations, the meeting looked downright provocative. Some in Pakistan’s religiously conservative society accused America of conspiring to attack them by spreading outrageously liberal sexual views. One Islamic political party called it ‘cultural terrorism’”.

Most in Pakistan, including the country’s civilian leadership and the military establishment, believe that an alternative is available to which Islamabad could now turn more openly. In recent months, a number of senior people from Pakistan have gone to Beijing hoping to cultivate a relationship that will be more durable and less demanding. This year Pakistan will be celebrating the fiftieth year of the establishment of a formal relationship with China. This will be done with great fanfare and will no doubt bring in more indications of Chinese economic help and military support. To distinguish its relations with Beijing, Pakistan has begun to call it an ‘all-weather friendship’. Three weeks after the death of Osama bin Laden, Ahmad Mukhtar, Pakistan’s defence minister announced that China would take over the management of Gwadar, a deep-water Pakistani port on the Arabian Sea. The port is currently managed by a company from Singapore. But there was some confusion about what had transpired. According to one western newspaper, “the government in Beijing said the Gwadar takeover had come as news to China”. Even if the claims Pakistan was making about China’s interest in their country are somewhat exaggerated, it is clear that a tilt has occurred. There cannot be any doubt that Islamabad was moving away from the United States and was leaning towards China. Such a move will have profound implications not only for South Asia but for the evolving world political order as well.

Wasif 21, graduated from a college in Karachi. He is a budding musician, has a band, a recently acquired day job (at an advertising agency) and dreams of travelling abroad to get a master’s degree.
In what, I asked him?
“Islamic Studies,” said he.
I was obviously taken aback.

Wasif was a bit surprised at my reaction: “Did you know Farhat Hashmi did her PhD in Islamic Studies from University of Glasgow in Scotland?”

Her name rolling out so profoundly from a 21-year-old young man made me realise how different his generation is. Especially compared to the one I belonged to. The one which danced in the streets of Karachi and Lahore at the demise of the Zia dictatorship and looked euphorically towards a more democratic Pakistan.

Wasif is very much like Aman from Islamabad and Javad from Lahore. Both are about to get themselves enrolled in a high profile university in Lahore. From there they want to get their degrees and then join a bank. They are quite hip about latest western trends, watch Hollywood and Bollywood movies with great interest, but will suddenly swing to the far sides of conservatism whenever the talk of Islam, US, Imran Khan or Osama props up.

After talking to these young men, I figured that the whole concept of contradiction (let alone hypocrisy), seems quite conveniently alien to this lot.
Another interesting thing that I discovered about them was that almost all of them had at least one relative or friend associated with an evangelical Islamic organisation. Such organisations, even up until the early 90s, were usually believed to be only associated with the petty-bourgeois.

But some believe that in the wake of liberal democracy in Pakistan in 1988, various intelligence agencies got involved in a “strategic” and “cultural” programme designed to safeguard Zia’s so-called “Islamisation process”, and that perhaps these organisations are a result of this clandestine resolve. According to Tariq Qadir, a former member of the Arrahman Arrahim organisation, the sole aim of new organisations such as the one he became a part of is to take care of the anxiety pangs of people among the educated classes who’d been attracted by the more puritanical sides of Islam in the 1980s and were now feeling uncomfortable with their modern lifestyles clashing with their new-found beliefs.

He said these classes were searching for “scholars” who’d tell them what they all wanted to hear: that it is okay to enjoy the amoral fruits of modernisation and still be a moralistic Muslim. Tariq says that this in a way justifies hypocrisy and that this notion is usually the “bait” with which these organisations pull the more moderate, middle and upper-middle class people into their ranks.

“As the mullahs were encouraging a more brutal form of hypocrisy among the poor, these organisations are justifying a more sophisticated level of hypocrisy amongst the privileged classes,” Tariq adds, smiling. Islamic evangelical organisations got a boost (both financial and social), due to a sudden surge in their ranks of people belonging to the moneyed classes.

Also, in the late 90s, a string of celebrities in the form of pop musicians, actors and cricketers started to join such groups. It almost became a trend among affluent young men and women to frequent lectures organised by such organisations. “Well, that’s what these organisations are here for,” Tariq says. “Becoming a part of them means getting an Islamic label while continuing to do things that have nothing to do with saadgi (austerity), or modesty!”

I asked Tariq, now 31, what made him leave Arrahman Arrahim and then the Tableeghi Jamaat? “Commonsense,” he said, grinning. Iffat, a passionate activist of Women’s Action Forum (WAF) in the 1980s and now a mother of two teenage sons, summed up the situation with an air of resignation: “What is happening to today’s young generation regarding religion is an outcome of what happened during the Zia regime. The process of institutionalising hypocrisy that Zia started has now been strengthened by everyone from jihadi organisations to mullahs to even organisations which are catering to the more well-to-do segments of society.”

I asked her how working mothers like herself see the current generation’s topsy-turvy tendency to fall in with amoral modern lifestyle and then fall out to go to the other extreme by joining reactionary jihadi outfits or conservative evangelical groups. “It scares me,” said Iffat. “But what can a young, educated person do today to express him or herself politically and creatively?”

She added: “When we were growing up in the 1970s, we had ample opportunities to express ourselves and never found the need to wear our religion, or for that matter, our wealth on our sleeves. But in the last three decades, we have seen the whole concept of Pakistan espoused by our founders collapse. It’s a question of identity. Young people in the last many years have no idea what Pakistan stands for anymore. The progressive forces seem to have been vanquished.”

Maybe the progressive forces have been diluted and depoliticised and the liberal youth are left only to undertake trivial creative and social pursuits in the name of liberalism. “That’s it!” said Iffat, excitedly. “When it comes to doing something worthwhile you can identify with, it seems these days a young man or a woman just has these religious organisations. It’s an identity thing.”

I asked her what her reaction would be if her sons ended up joining an Islamic evangelical organisation. “Well, I’ll pray to God that they keep their newfound beliefs to themselves and not impose them on their unwilling friends, wives or children.”

“But wouldn’t they be compelled to spread their newfound enlightenment?” I asked her. “Unfortunately, yes,” said Iffat. “But that’s that, I guess.”

Notice women billionaires are rare. The world’s gilded have mostly been men. Some lucky dogs are born billionaires; others become billionaires through robbing the state; while some others earn the prize by sheer genius and sweat. You and I know well how the Third World leaders, dead or alive, own Swiss accounts that legends are made of. Guys like the late Indonesian President Suharto, late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Pakistan’s Zardari and Sharifs, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Libya’s Gaddafi, and Yemen’s Abdullah Saleh, to name a few. The World Bank estimates that these corrupt regimes steal $20–$40 billion from the national kitty each year; only $5 billion has been returned over the past 15 years.

But the men who stole to become billionaires are being put to shame just by one woman who has joined the billionaire’s club and is fast moving to the first position. J.K. Rowling, a single-mom is today cashing in six billion dollars with her Harry Potter movies alone. Just by using one tool — her pen, the cash-strapped mother who began by writing in public toilets because they were heated while her baby Jessica slept in the stroller, has left all other novelists behind. In 1990, while travelling on a train from Manchester to London, the story of Harry Potter hit her. It arrived “fully formed” into her mind. “I really don’t know where the idea came from. It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head.”

What is so unique about Harry Potter series? It’s the story of good versus evil. Harry Potter’s final battle between his mortal enemy Lord Voldermort is currently being screened in the theatres in America. It is a box-office hit just like the previous ones. So how did an ordinary woman with no fancy college degree in creative writing (these days it’s virtually mandatory for fiction writers to attend intensive creative writing workshops) beat everyone to it? Rowling may not have studied at Harvard, but she was invited to give the commencement address in 2008. She told the fresh Harvard graduates how she considered herself “the biggest failure” seven years after she graduated. Her life was a mess – a failed marriage, no job, and a kid to take care of. “Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential,” she told her hushed audience. “I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised…I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Jill Abramson is the first woman to replace a man as the editor of the world’s most influential newspaper, the New York Times. Bill Keller, the present editor will move to a full time writing job at the Times Sunday Magazine which is already giving a new look of vibrancy and sauciness with cover stories like ‘Infidelity keeps us together.’ Keller’s column appears at the beginning of the magazine every week. His recent column on Sarah Palin as a lightheaded female with no chances of ever becoming the US president earned him four-letter-word abuse from Palin’s admirers. Writes one reader: “As a man, replaced by a woman, you (Bill Keller) might think you were bitter.” Says another: “I would recommend any journalist, before looking at diversity outside our borders and in our cities, look at the diversity at their own people. Take a year off… become immersed in conservative culture, and you just might find your ivory tower is a rather lonely place to live.”

Martin Fee of Florida asks the Times editor whether “liberal pseudo-elite” journalists (like Keller) are that stupid or has he just deluded himself into thinking the American people are the stupid ones?

Keller is a brave man who has the guts to stick out his neck and give his measured opinion in his columns knowing that he’ll invite backlash from certain quarters. He also has the courage to print even the most negative criticism against him in his paper. How many editors of newspapers and journals, do you know of, back in Pakistan, who put themselves in the forefront of readers’ attacks? I can’t think of any. It is not the custom for our editors to express their personal opinions; they merely oversee the newspaper and its day-to-day publication. But the 160-year-old New York Times is unique. Not only does it have a public editor who scrutinises and censures the Times’ content, often with critical comments, holding the writer, reporter and the editor responsible for the errors and lapses, but openly endorses political contestants starting from the president of the USA. It declared its support for Obama against McCain quite early in the last presidential race.

But not all of Times readers are impressed by its “elitist, pseudo-intellectuals” as the editors including Keller are accused of. “You or your ilk,” writes another very angry reader, spew “pointless, nonproductive words” which has no worth ochzero, nada, nothing.” The opinion of the New York Times does not create jobs, it solves none of the problems of humanity, the reader continues. “You’re a propagandist. You write fiction designed to dupe imbeciles. I find you to be a mindless Liberal robot and a bit of a joke. Have a nice day.”
Jill Abramson, 57, slotted to take over from Keller on September 6 will indeed make history.

She’ll replace a man!

A serial predator at the IMF finally shuffles off to fight charges of rape/sexual assault on a hotel maid in New York, leaving the chief’s chair to be filled by a woman who is a good five inches taller than her predecessor Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK)! The former French finance minister Christine Lagarde is a divorced mother of two who did not “clamber into the cabinet room of the Elysee Palace via the narrow, winding, stairs of the ‘grande ecoles’ or tribal, party allegiance. She did it her own way, albeit with a touch of Gallic flair. She values her femininity as much as she does the brain that has helped her outcompete so many men.”
One more upset for a male whose sister has won by popular vote in Thailand to become the next prime minister! “She’s my clone,” said the exiled Thaksin in a disparaging tone, hoping to return after she led his party to victory. But Yingluck has been elected by her people. They want her instead of the brother. A triumphant Yingluck said: “people are giving me a chance and I will work to my best ability for the people.” Only two months ago, she was unknown to the Thais. The politically inexperienced businesswoman upstaged the ruling elite and military-backed Prime Minister Abhisit.

So here’s the story of four women, world’s most influential in their own spheres — cinema, newspaper, finance and politics. They have recently replaced men. How come? Here’s the new IMF president’s response: “Based on my own experience, women will tend to be inclusive, to reach out more, to care a little more.”
The column has enough meat for our male chauvinists in Pakistan to chew on. Here’s hoping they’ll reform or else get replaced by women!