All the great Muslim rulers of our past whom we look upon as our heroes were either Turks or Afghans, from Mahmud Ghaznavi to the last of the Mughals — Caucasians all of them, who, in successive waves of invasion and conquest from the colder climates of the north, made themselves masters of Hindustan.

For 800 years — from 1192 AD. when Muhammad Ghori defeated Prithviraj Chauhan in the second battle of Tarain (in present-day Haryana) to the establishment of British rule in Bengal in the 18th century — every ruler of Hindustan of any note or merit was of Caucasian origin. In all this vast expanse of history, the lands which now constitute Pakistan could produce only one ruler of indigenous origin who could lay claim to any ability: Ranjit Singh, Maharajah of Punjab.

We, the inhabitants of Pakistan, may claim in moments of (misplaced) exaltation that we are descended from those early warriors. But this is a false claim. We are now more sub-continental than Central Asian. Just as empires and nations rise and fall, races too do not remain the same over time. The Mughals were a hardy people when they marched into India under Babar. After 200 years of unbroken rule their dynasty — descended from the great Taimur — had become degenerate and soft.

We may name our missiles Ghori and Abdali — although Abdali is somewhat inappropriate, considering that Ahmed Shah Abdali in his repeated invasions brought much suffering to Punjab — but this is a throwback to a past far removed from our present. Comfortable thought or not, Ranjit Singh’s kingdom of Punjab is more relevant to our present-day conditions than those distant days of glory and conquest.

The challenge thus posed is a daunting one. For 800 years we have produced no ruler of native ability. But if Pakistan is to come into its own, if it is to throw off the mantle of failure of the past 60 years and forge a new future for itself, then its native sons and daughters have to create something new: capacity and ability where none have existed before — except in the solitary example of the one-eyed king of Lahore, Maharajah Ranjit Singh.

We are going to get no infusion of fresh blood from beyond the high mountains. No Ghaznavi or Ghori is coming to rescue us or establish a new kingdom. We are on our own. It is for us to make something of Pakistan or disfigure it. The kingdom of heaven is here; redemption is here; salvation is here.

The very enormity of this challenge should teach us some tolerance. We expect miracles from our rulers — the Ayub Khans, the Yahya Khans, the Ishaq Khans, the Zardaris, the Gilanis and no doubt the Sharifs — without pausing to reflect that what we expect from them is nothing less than a reversal of history. We expect them to be the heralds of a miracle: the creation and expression of native talent and ability.

Not that it can’t be done or will never happen. But at least we should be aware of the extent of the challenge. We have to create something wholly new, something which in Punjab, the Frontier, Balochistan, Sindh, has not existed except in the dim annals of pre-history. There may have been native rulers of ability in times past but we know little of them and even if they did exist they did so before the advent of Muslim rule in India.

And even if we pride ourselves on our Muslim past, let us not forget that by the time the British arrived in India and set about establishing their empire, the Muslims of the sub-continent had declined to an inferior position. They were no longer a master race. So much so, that they were reduced to demanding from the British special safeguards, such as separate electorates, to protect their status and position.

Consider the irony of this. Once the Muslims, a tiny minority, had ruled India. Now they were afraid — or their leading lights were afraid — that they would be swamped by the Hindu majority, fearful that in a united India what they considered to be their just rights would be denied them, that they would not be able to hold their heads above the water.

This philosophy of fear — and there is no point in denying that it was that — was dictated by circumstances. After Ottoman defeat in the First World War, Turkish nationalism found expression in the idea of a Turkish republic confined to the Turkish heartland: the Anatolian plateau. The idea of empire was no longer feasible. Mustafa Kemal realised this, his vision clearer and sharper than most of his countrymen. In India, Muslim nationalism found expression in the idea of Pakistan. Jinnah’s greatness lay in helping achieve this idea.

But there was one vital difference between Turkey and Pakistan. The Anatolian plateau was the solid centre of the Ottoman Empire, what the Turks called their true home. The centre of the Muslim empire throughout the 800 years of Muslim dominance in India was central India, around Delhi. But Indian partition and the birth of Pakistan meant retreating from this centre and creating a new nexus of existence on the western and eastern marches of the sub-continent. Pakistan thus arose on what used to be not the centre but the peripheries of Muslim power in India.

This was a new challenge: of creating a new locus of existence where none had existed before. Muslim kingdoms had existed in South India. They had of course existed in North India. But there had never been an independent Muslim kingdom in the areas now constituting Pakistan. And, to repeat the point made earlier, there was in Pakistan no tradition of outstanding native ability: no native ruler of Multan or Lahore, Peshawar or Bannu, Hyderabad or Thatta, Quetta or Kalat, who could be cited as some kind of a role model.

We had roads and bridges, canals and waterworks, a judicial and an administrative system, the trappings of democracy, the concept of elections and political parties, but, apart from the one example of Ranjit Singh, no tradition of native ability. The idea of being Turkish had always existed in the Turkish mind. The Muslim faith was part of this idea but it wasn’t the whole of it. Pakistan was a wholly new invention and it was a reflection of the difficulties besetting the idea of Pakistan that our leading figures declared, very early on, that Islam was the basis of our nationhood.

Indeed, we made religion a fallback position, seeking refuge in its dialectics when more attention should have been paid to temporal problems. The discontent arising in East Pakistan was proof that temporal problems needed a temporal solution. Today it is the same in Balochistan whose grievances are crying out for something more than the usual palliatives.

The fight against the Taliban may yet prove our salvation. It is putting us through a formative experience. We were not willing to take on this fight, using all the mental resources at our disposal to avoid it. But this struggle has been forced on us by circumstances. The Taliban had become a domestic headache. To this was added external pressure from the American presence in Afghanistan, forcing the Pakistan army to shed indecision and adopt a decisive course of action.

What does the idea of Talibanism tell us? That it is a foreign importation and as such alien to our soil and condition. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar just don’t fit into the idea of Pakistan. But thanks to our own misunderstandings and follies we had allowed this alien concept to take root in our soil.

Hopefully things are changing. Pakistan has to be an autonomous concept, sufficient unto itself and free of alien viruses. The struggle is not over. The idea of Pakistan is yet in the making but it will come into its own, never to falter or indeed wither, when we realise that the historic task before us is to turn the mediocrity of our ruling class, including the confusion that often besets the military mind, into a vision springing from the needs of our own society.

How many doom-and-gloom stories can any reasonable person endure? More than a nation at war we are a nation in perpetual crisis, vaguely discontented if there is no real crisis at hand.

In no other country of the world would a Brigadier Imtiaz Billa, a spook who put up his gloves years ago, be taken seriously. Yet in recent days the media almost succeeded in turning him into a TV celebrity, an outcome which must have taken him by surprise most of all.

This is just by way of example to underline something obvious about Pakistan: there is too much politics in this country. Why is this so? Why is politics the staple of everyday conversation? Because — and here’s the paradox — there is too much religion in this country. By which, Heaven forbid, I do not mean the genuine article but religious cant and hypocrisy. The way we go on about religion an alien could be forgiven for thinking that the very concept of religion began in Pakistan.

This is General Ziaul Haq’s revenge from the grave. Revile him as much as we may, there is no escaping the fact that a good deal of the fake piety on display in the official life of the Islamic Republic is a continuation of the legacy whose baleful seeds —dragon’s teeth?—he scattered.

In art the counterweight to too much restraint, or too much order and discipline, is romanticism, a natural urge to reach for the opposite: freedom and perhaps even decadence. This also works the other way round. If there is too much freedom, too much artistic chaos, the desire arises to return to the comforts of order and discipline. This is how Hegel and Marx explained the universe: the combination, or clash, of opposites creating a synthesis or unity.

But with us what is the Hegelian counterweight to too much false piety? Alas, nothing more creative than an obsession with politics. In any other climate excessive piety would have led to a loosening of restraint, something like the atmosphere of the Sixties in Britain and elsewhere, when the Beatles were all the rage and permissiveness became a common word. I was in school then and used to scratch my head trying to figure out what permissive behaviour and promiscuity meant.

If we had experienced something like the Sixties it might have done us a world of good, perhaps saving us from such of our travails as the march to war with India in 1965 and, only six years later, war and defeat in East Pakistan.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s period at the helm was only a brief interlude. He could have reinvented the idea of Pakistan and secured the country’s future by making it safe for democracy. He had the opportunity but perhaps the times were hard or our good angels not sufficiently kind because events took a turn for the worse when Pakistan, not for the first time in its short existence, once more found itself under a military dictatorship. What is more, this one came with a sinister difference: it was steeped to its eyeballs in religious cant and hypocrisy.

As a result, it was not just physical repression which Pakistan suffered under Zia but moral and social repression. Instead of marching into the future, we travelled back in time. Talibanism in the form now familiar to us was a later phenomenon, but the attitudes giving rise to it were forged in the crucible of those dark years.

The army’s thinking became more conservative, fertile soil for the ‘jihadism’ that was to shape its outlook first in Afghanistan and then Kashmir, something from which it has yet to fully recover. The richest irony of that period of course is that our American mentors, now so bent on culturally reconditioning the Pakistani mind, were at that time the loudest cheerleaders of what passed for the spirit of ‘jihad’.

In the 1980s Americans in Islamabad (and I say this with a sense of wonderment) were amongst the most bigoted souls on the planet. About every subject under the sun they could endure scepticism, even cynicism, but the one thing beyond any criticism was the Afghan ‘jihad’. That was an article of faith, faith raised to the power of dogma. The demons they are now trying to exorcise in Afghanistan were born of that attitude.

Anyway, if any country was ripe for a social revolution — its Sixties and Beatle moment — it was Pakistan after Zia’s death. But instead of making a clean break with the past Pakistan slipped into a neo-Zia era, with the Establishment — as personified by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Army Chief Gen Aslam Beg — serving to put the brakes on any cultural revolution. No hundred flowers bloomed; no hundred schools of thought contended. The old dragons kept their vice-like grip on power. Pakistan remained imprisoned in the old strategic parameters — Afghan depth, holding down the Indian army in Kashmir, the space for adventure provided by our nuke capability, etc.

The Americans, ecstatic at the end of the Soviet empire, had walked on from Afghanistan, forgetting all about it (something which they now rue). But we did not march with the times. We kept holding on to the old certitudes. It was only a matter of time before the Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban and the Taliban provided a congenial setting for Al Qaeda to grow and prosper.

We only have a two years’ window. The Americans are not going to stay in Afghanistan forever. Support for the Afghan war is beginning to drop in the US. By the time Congressional elections come round next year, what is now a trickle could turn into something bigger. And by the time Obama’s first term is about to end, and he is up for re-election, America’s continued involvement in Afghanistan is likely to be one of the hottest topics of debate. We should be ready for that eventuality.

Our army has done a superb job of cleaning up Swat. Fazlullah’s Taliban are on the run. The FATA Taliban are also under pressure, the noose tightening around Waziristan and the army mounting operations at selected points. But for Pakistan to be fully cured of the mindset which drove it into the battlefields of ‘jihad’, the turning of the military tide is not enough. It must be matched by a lasting change of mind. We need a social revolution so that we jettison some of the spiritual baggage which has served to cloud our thinking.

Pakistan will never be fully free in its mind unless the fake piety introduced by Gen Zia into our law books is completely erased. We have to go back not to where the nation stood on Oct 12, 1999, when Musharraf took over, but where it was on July 5, 1977, when Zia and his generals seized power.

The aim should not be to hound anyone but to clear our spiritual decks. All the laws Zia introduced at the altar of a fake piety, including the Hadood Ordinance, need to be expunged. The historic task before this National Assembly, elected with such high hopes in Feb 2008, is this.

Hopefully, as a consequence, our nation will learn to lighten up a bit and discover a higher combination of opposites than religion and politics. There is too much gloom in Pakistan, too much darkness. We are too moralistic, too judgmental, often too self-righteous. That is why we endlessly preach and endlessly worry about the future while not being able to live in the present and make the most of what it has to offer.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Pakistanis at times give the impression of being forever on the cross. We have our problems but since when has the human race, from the dawn of history until today, been free of problems? When they walk the streets of their towns and cities, Pakistanis — both men and women — don’t act as if they are wholly free. In a social sense — and here I have to use my words carefully — they act in a constrained manner, as if a strict censor is watching their backs. Is it any wonder if they have cultivated the habit of doing so many things by stealth? This is no prescription for a free people.

The army and air force have taken on the Taliban and loosened the grip of the Taliban on our collective psyche. The threat of terrorism may not have vanished but it has definitely receded. But who will take on the great baronies of industry, commerce and banking against whose clubs, or cartels, the government in all its power and glory is helpless?

The sugar crisis represents only one aspect of the power of this multi-layered mafia. What the people of Pakistan are paying for sugar is a price determined not by the market but by the manipulation of this powerful lobby. When the government, employing some foresight — admittedly, a hard commodity to come by in our climate — should have imported some sugar to stabilize domestic prices, it did nothing of the kind. Whose pressure was it which forestalled this move?

In General Ziaul Haq’s heyday, a sign of power was to own a sugar mill. So anyone who was anyone sought a licence to set up the same. Today sugar-mill ownership cuts across the political spectrum, the who’s who of the sugar industry reading like a who’s who of politics. When in the veins of the country’s power structure runs not blood or national sentiment but sugar, is it conceivable that this power structure will turn against its kind and devour its own children?

Parliamentary sovereignty is one of the great myths democracies cherish and, in their wilder moments, even promote. But think for a moment: can parliament tinker with the price of cement? The cement cartel is one of the most powerful clubs in the country. Between themselves cement producers — some of the biggest names on the country’s industrial roster — set the price of cement and there is nothing than anyone can do about it.

The original sin — and I hate to say this — was committed in the early 1990s (I will not say who was then in power) when the State Cement Corporation was denationalised. From that fateful moment on the price of cement went up and up. Yes, yes, I know the refrain: it is no business of the government to own and run industry. But denationalisation should not mean complete deregulation, a total absence of check and control, which is what has happened with the cement industry, whose unchecked profits have come at the expense of the Pakistani people.

There is no better museum displaying the power of the cement industry than my district of Chakwal. When DG Khan Cement and a company owned by one of Queen Elizabeth’s knights — I joke not — wanted to set up cement plants in Tehsil Choa Saidan Shah of District Chakwal, they were backed by the whole might of the Musharraf regime — from Musharraf himself to Shaukat Aziz, to Punjab chief minister Pervaiz Elahi, down to the district administration.

DG Khan Cement played ducks and drakes while acquiring the land for its project but not as much as the company owned by the Queen’s knight which, with the help of the powers that be, misused the Punjab Land Acquisition Act — one of the most iniquitous pieces of legislation on our statute books — to forcibly acquire land around Village Tatral, next to the Hindu monuments of Katas Raj.

Because of the unholy incentives given to the cement industry Pakistan now produces more cement than it needs. Which means we are exporting cement at the cost of our natural environment, cement production being one of the biggest degraders of the soil and the environment known to man.

There has been a hue and cry about the damage done to the Margalla Hills by limestone quarrying and by a cement plant with a 1300-acre lease over a part of the Margalla range (this a gift from General Zia). But the devastation to the fauna, flora, soil, landscape and air of Choa Saidan Shah (or, more specifically, the Kahoon Valley over whose creation, so beautiful it is, the Almighty must have paused when He was creating Heaven and Earth) is on a scale much greater than anything happening to the Margallas.

Khalid Mirza, Chairman of the Competition Commission of Pakistan, is to be commended for the hefty fine he has recently levied on the barons of the cement industry. More power to his efforts and may there be more like him in the arid wastes of the Islamic Republic.

Banking is another cartel playing snakes-and-ladders with the country’s plight, its gaming skills again totally unchecked. Its patron saint during the Musharraf era was a smart banker himself, Shaukat Aziz (why does his name occur again and again in the roll call of our economic misfortunes?). What this sector received from his hands was not velvet but platinum treatment. While banking profits soared, the people — as usual — found themselves ripped off.

This sleight of hand was achieved through a simple mechanism. I’ve just called my bank to get my facts straight. The rate of return on deposits is five per cent while the interest rate on loans is almost 19 percent. During the Musharraf years the return on deposits went as low as two per cent. This is less sleight of hand than daylight robbery.

The high and mighty of course follow a well-trod route around this conundrum. Whatever the interest rate on loans, they are scarcely bothered because, if sufficiently high and mighty, they manage to avoid the entire inconvenience of having to return their loans.

The loans written off every year by our leading banks would be a scandal anywhere else. Here it is normal practice which doesn’t even elicit much comment any more. In Musharraf’s early days, after I had once commented on the business skills of Chaudhry Shujat Hussain and Pervaiz Elahi, I was invited to lunch by them so that they could explain their side of the story. With a solemn face Chaudhry Shujat assured me that all their affairs with banks were properly regularised. I said that I did not doubt that for a moment. All their loan write-offs — and those were massive — were done by the book.

These two chaudhrys have always been famed for their hospitality. I had written that if I had only a hundredth of the loans they took and never had to pay back, my table would spread from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea.

The benign practice of doing things by the book remains alive and well. Prime Minister Gilani’s respected wife, Madam Fouzia Gilani (widely admired for her grace and charm), along with some business partners of hers took two loans from the Agricultural Bank –71 million and 100 million — way back in the 1980s. As, quite correctly and entirely in keeping with the prevailing norm, they paid back not a penny of those loans; they had cases for recovery filed against them. Now, Allah be praised, we stand informed that matters have been settled between Madam Gilani and the Agri Bank and the cases have been withdrawn.

Prime Minister Gilani is all for transparent government. Things can hardly get more transparent than this.

The only high-flying banker friend I have is Ali Raza of the National Bank whose smartness and banking prowess can be judged from the fact that so far the only thing I have received from him are compliments, nothing that looks like a loan I would not have to return, the only true status symbol in Pakistan.

Leona Helmsley, the New York billionaire and hotel investor — later convicted of income tax evasion — famously said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes …” In Pakistan, as the example of First Lady Gilani freshly illustrates, only the little people return their loans.

Politicians in Pakistan live under a great illusion. They think they run the country when actually they do nothing of the kind. More than even the red-stripe wearers in General Headquarters, it is the captains of industry, commerce, banking and real estate who run things from behind the scenes and wield real power. Politicians represent the face of things. The string-pullers are different.

Malik Riaz of Bahria Town has been in with every government. Retired military high-rankers are on his payroll. He was thick with Musharraf, thick with the Chaudhrys (the ones famous for their hospitality), and now very thick with President Zardari. And he is only one instance of a phenomenon much greater than him.

Please read today’s Column of Ayaz Amir.

Army General Headquarters, Rawalpindi, is not the enemy — or, let us say, the main enemy — of Pakistani democracy. The Pakistani political class is its own worst enemy. Its incompetence, its inability to learn anything from the past and its unconquerable zest for intrigue are some of the factors paving the way for military takeovers. And, if the present political landscape is any guide, the political class is simply unable to overcome past habits and step into the future by creating a new political culture.

Military ambition of course is also a factor. So powerful is the position of army chief in Pakistan that anyone occupying it can be forgiven for being afflicted with the saviour syndrome which has been the bane of our history: the feeling, often encouraged by self-seeking journalists and politicians, that he has heaven’s mandate to save the nation. Four attempts at saving the nation, from Ayub to Musharraf, have been our greatest disasters.

But, let us be clear on this point, military ambition alone is not the prime culprit. Politicians are the guinea pigs. Politicians are the testers who prepare the ground for the real action, stamping at the bit in GHQ.

But Pakistan’s political ponies never seem to learn. Through unchecked folly — folly unmitigated by any reference to the past — they go about heating up the political atmosphere. When democracy’s funeral is finally taken out on the shoulders of GHQ, even as a fresh stallion is ensconced in the stables of power, democracy’s professed votaries begin a long period of mourning which doesn’t end until the next fitful rendezvous with democracy. Which in turn leads to fresh intrigues, and so the cycle goes on.

The transition from Musharraf to the Feb 2008 elections wasn’t easy. The lawyers’ movement weakened Musharraf but it was not the lawyers’ movement which got Musharraf to take off his uniform. That was accomplished by outside pressure and murmurings of discontent within the army high command. And it was outside mediation which paved the way for Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan, an event which further undermined Musharraf’s grip on power.

One thing led to another. Benazir Bhutto’s return opened the way for Nawaz Sharif’s return to Pakistan. The same Musharraf who had so easily thwarted Nawaz Sharif’s comeback on Sep 10, 2007, was helpless when the Saudis, after Benazir Bhutto’s return, insisted that there was no reason left to hold back Nawaz Sharif.

Musharraf’s days were numbered as the very fates began to conspire against him. Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was the last nail in his political coffin. The tide of public anger let loose by that tragedy was so strong that there was no way Musharraf’s anointed party, the Q League, could hold its own in the subsequent elections. Who was behind Benazir Bhutto’s death? We don’t know and, as with other tragedies of this kind in our history, perhaps never will know. But in the inchoate way in which the public mind works and arrives at its conclusions, people at large held Musharraf responsible for her death and made him pay for it when the opportunity arose on Feb 18, 2008.

But we seem to be a nation of ingrates. Or perhaps it is our political class suffering from this malady because it seems to be satisfied with nothing. It pined under Musharraf’s dictatorship but far from being happy with the return of democracy, it is busy nurturing fresh sources of discontent.

Pakistan’s real problems are real enough — from the state of the economy to the state of governance — but the political class, not content with these challenges, has honed an extraordinary talent for manufacturing spurious problems.

There is nothing real or meaningful about the storm caused by the media outbursts of a spent cartridge like Brig (r) Imtiaz Ahmed. How he has emerged at this juncture from the woodwork of things long lost and forgotten is not easy to say. But on the principle that once a spook always a spook, it is not past conjecturing that his resurrection is the work of the same elements who have been muddying the national waters by their talk of a minus-one formula and the like.

The sudden refocus on Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s petition pending in the Supreme Court for the last 14 years regarding the money doled out by the ISI to a list of anti-PPP politicians in 1990, is another attempt to wake up dead horses and use them as part of the campaign against the present democratic order.

The first target of this campaign is President Asif Zardari. The secondary target is Nawaz Sharif. The ISI list is meant to defame him. But the real target — as it takes not much genius to infer — is democracy itself. Elements thriving under authoritarianism, and therefore beholden to it, find the whole idea of democracy irksome and distasteful. That is why, as we have seen since 1988, no sooner is a democratic government in place — and it doesn’t matter whether it is the PPP in power or the PML-N — a whispering campaign starts against it.

For the army and intelligence agencies to conspire against democracy is easy to understand, their aim being to reclaim lost glory. Somewhat harder to fathom is why democratic elements choose to become willing players in the games whose aim is to run down politicians and discredit democracy. Why are they so ready to stand in the lists as their own worst enemies?

If all it takes to muddy the waters is the ranting of a Brig Imtiaz, or renewed talk of the ISI’s shenanigans way back in 1990, then not much can be said of the maturity or good sense of the political class of 2009. And if all it takes to upset the political applecart are a few verbal broadsides, then questions are bound to arise as to how secure and stable the present democratic order is.

And this has happened in the space of just the last fortnight, beginning with the quite needless scrap that we saw between the PML-N and the MQM in the National Assembly — a display of anger and vitriol on both sides that was wholly uncalled for — followed by the unleashing, from some hidden corner, of Brig Imtiaz about whose existence or non-existence most people would have been unaware of until all this happened.

Brig Imtiaz’s TV appearances — after years of deserved oblivion he is relishing the spotlight — and the renewed focus on the ISI’s 1990 payments have completely distracted attention from other things. Musharraf’s trial under Article 6 of the constitution and the question of repealing the 17th Amendment have receded into the background. If there is a department of dirty tricks behind the spectacle the nation is being treated to, its leading lights would be laughing up their sleeves, because the extent of the distraction must surpass all expectations.

This is not to deny that Pakistani democracy is facing a threat. But it comes not so much from GHQ or the mysterious underworld of the ISI and Military Intelligence as from (1) a spirited band of senior journalists and columnists, among whom I count some dear friends, who are doing all in their considerable power to spread uncertainty and confusion; and (2) trigger-happy politicians, from either side of the divide, congenitally unable to resist the temptation of shooting from their hips, especially when there is no earthly reason to indulge this passion.

Is this a perfect democracy? Only a fool will say it is. Are angels dressed up as politicians? Question scornfully dismissed. But this much should be plain: whatever we have, with all its glaring shortcomings and imperfections, is a vast improvement on the discontent the nation suffered during the Musharraf years.

So is it too much to ask the media cowboys and the trigger-happy political sages to kindly take it easy? We have enough real problems to deal with and can do without having to wrestle with invented ones.

But if, in a continued rebellion against common sense, the political leadership and media pundits insist on charging at windmills, they should not be surprised if they are hoisted aloft on the arms of those same windmills.

Please read today’s Column of Ayaz Amir.

“What do you consider to be the greatest blessing you have reaped from your wealth?

“…the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men.”

– Plato: The Republic

Common experience, at least in our times, would suggest quite the opposite. The very rich, far from being content with their riches, seem caught in a perpetual frenzy to acquire more. The discontent of the very rich in our society would seem to stem from this cause. They are always on the look-out for more.

Among other evils, this has distorted the spirit of enterprise in our society. Honest investment, productive labour and the spirit of hard work are not looked upon as virtues worth aspiring to. The smart young man is considered to be the one who can make a fast buck, through shady deals or by exploiting connections in the power structure.

But this is a digression. In the passage from The Republic quoted above, it is Socrates asking Cephalus whether his wealth is acquired or inherited. And Cephalus says that the basis of his wealth is inheritance. Socrates goes on to ask the next question (noted above), to which Cephalus gives the above answer.

In Cephalus’s view, therefore, inherited wealth is a great advantage for it enables you to avoid fraud and other related evils. And by putting you in a position where you owe no man anything, it helps bring you peace of mind.

There was a time, and not too long ago either, when the leading lights of the political class in our country regularly used to sell off bits of their patrimony to stay in politics. How different from today when politics has become an avenue for making money, not losing it. The laidback style of the decade after Partition has given way to a more ruthless approach in which the amassing of wealth, through fair means or foul (but mainly foul), is considered an essential, nay inescapable, part of politics.

Where money is spent to get into politics and then any position attained is used as a lever to make more money, it is scarcely surprising if standards of public conduct take a nose dive and practices once frowned upon become the norm.

Nor is this state of affairs confined to the political class. The culture of acquisition cuts across administrative compartments, some of our biggest money-grubbers being mandarins and imposing figures in uniform.

Which is not to say that our people don’t give. They do indeed, as generosity towards the less favoured, and hospitality in general, is part of our psyche and culture. But this is probably true of society at large, not of the elite in positions of authority and privilege. Those least in a position to give, give wholeheartedly. Those favoured by fortune are either self-centred or past masters at deceit and fraud. As a result, the concept of public service on the part of our privileged classes is virtually non-existent.

This is a morbid line of thought and is prompted by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy. He came from a rich family (Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the clan, having made his fortune through whisky smuggling during the US’s short-lived rendezvous with prohibition) which became famous and powerful when John F. Kennedy was elected as president. Compared to John and Robert (both tragically assassinated), Edward seemed not particularly gifted. But once elected to the Senate, he made his mark there. So much so that at his death he is being hailed as one of the most influential, even seminal, senators of the last century.

Along the way he had to cope with personal tragedy: the 1969 drowning of a girlfriend who was with him after a party at Chappaquiddick — Mary Jo Kopechne — an event which sank any hope he may have had of running for president. The memory of this incident clung to him always but as he made a career for himself in the Senate, championing liberal causes and speaking out for the less favoured, that memory receded.

Incidentally, he was among the minority in the Senate which opposed the Iraq war. The best speech against the rush to war in Iraq was perhaps delivered by Senator Robert Byrd (while writing these lines I have watched portions of it on YouTube…it is a remarkably prescient speech well worth watching, and pondering over). But Ted Kennedy also stood unequivocally against that march of folly whose consequences the US is likely to live with for some time. To no one’s surprise, he was an early supporter of Barack Obama.

Perhaps as a mark of his Irish heritage, Ted Kennedy was a heavy drinker. In the tragedies befalling his family he had much to forget and much to grieve over. He could have drowned himself in drink (as his wife nearly did). He could have made a career for himself as a playboy. There was a strong playboy streak in the Kennedy clan — John F. Kennedy’s serial affairs of a kind to make Bill Clinton’s adventures in the same league look like Sunday school escapades. But he devoted himself to public service and rose above his afflictions. A famous name is an advantage but it can also be a heavy cross to bear.

This doesn’t mean that privilege automatically leads to public service in the US. The Bushes are as privileged as the Kennedys and look what a disaster for the US and the world the younger Bush has been. All the same, there is a tradition of altruism and public service amongst America’s rich and famous which is well worth emulating. Of course, there has been no shortage of ‘robber barons’ in America’s past and corporate America remains as rapacious as ever. But greatness of empire does not come from rapacity alone. There is more to the American kaleidoscope than that.

The other event which has touched this reference to Plato is Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah and Partition. I haven’t read it but shall when I get my hands on it. But what I find striking, even more than the furore it has caused in India, is the fact that Jaswant Singh, an active politician, holding a senior position in the BJP (from which, to the party’s loss, he has been expelled) should have found the time, among his other activities, to research his book and then write it.

This is how it should be: politicians being not just politicians but also men of letters. What infuses politics with life and gives it a broad sweep — or the thing we call vision –comes from poetry (in the broadest sense of the word) and literature. If politicians are to rise above the level of common scum, they must live to higher ideals.

At the same time, citizens could do well to remember that politics should not be left to a tiny elite. It should be everyone’s business. As Pericles said of Athens (Thucydides quoting him as saying this), “…we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business: we say that he has no business here at all.”

Alexander, as Plutarch informs us, always with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, Caesar writing his Commentaries even when campaigning in Gaul, Marcus Aurelius penning his meditations even when fighting what Rome called the Barbarians, Napoleon speed-reading and throwing the books he would read out of his carriage window as he sped across Europe (especially when in the throes of his infatuation with Marie Walewska…this beguiling image provided by Emil Ludwig in his less biography and more hagiography of Napoleon), Stalin, one of history’s great autodidacts, reading books at night even as he fought Hitler’s armies: this is the ideal for the man of affairs to aspire to, in war or peace.

This is why Jaswant Singh’s book is so welcome because quite apart from what it says, it is a reminder of the politician’s obligation, if he is to be true to his calling, to cultivate the arts and the muses.

If we see the political class floundering and taking false steps, if we see political gurus who have been in politics for a long time — and who perhaps for that reason are unable to free themselves from the clutches of the past — fighting yesterday’s battles, we should neither be surprised nor dismayed. Old mindsets are hard to conquer. The past is comfortable territory. Stepping into the future needs a new kind of mental equipment.

We are not the only country in the world with a history of military coups. Authoritarianism has had strong roots and a more pervasive presence in societies more sophisticated than ours. Spain had Franco ruling for decades. Salazar in Portugal ruled even longer than Franco. Greece in the 1960s was under a brutal military dictatorship. In all three countries democracy has established itself in such a way that it takes an effort of the imagination to remember their past.

The journey from national darkness to light is never easy. To succeed it needs farsighted leaders: pilots who can negotiate narrow straits and treacherous shores. Spain, Portugal and Greece had such leaders. We are in a similar transition and, as is only natural, having a rough passage as we transit from dictatorship to democracy. But whatever our difficulties, we should remember that voyages such as ours, on rolling seas, are never smooth.

We shouldn’t be such simpletons as to think that powerful quarters with a vested interest in authoritarianism would reconcile themselves to democracy so soon. Such elements will always conspire against democracy, always insidiously whisper that the Pakistani political class is irredeemably corrupt and incompetent. And there will always be sections of the media, and a section of the political class, willing to play into the hands of such elements.

There is nothing new about corruption in Pakistan. Pakistan’s dominant classes — political, military and bureaucratic — are all bathed in the same waters, drinking from the same stream, supping at the same table. About military and bureaucratic corruption what we usually encounter is the silence of the lambs. But let politicians come to power — Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, Asif Zardari or Yusuf Raza Gilani — and we hear the roar of the lions.

Which is not to say that our politicians couldn’t do better. In a milieu such as ours they are, like Caesar’s wife, under a double obligation to be above suspicion and not give cause to slanderous tongues to wag. Spain, Portugal and Greece had a better cast of democratic leaders than we can lay claim to. Even so, some balance has to be kept if we wish to preserve the large scheme of things.

By all means excoriate the corrupt and inept politician. Hold him to a higher level of conduct. But do so in good faith, without falling into the trap of elements whose goal is not the good of the nation but their own good: individual interest overriding the collective interest, in the name of the smoothest promises.

And it is not only the political class or its leaders who are stuck in the past, fighting yesterday’s battles, flailing mightily at dead horses. Much of the national commentariat — pundits, analysts, and TV stars — are afflicted with the same syndrome, more at ease with familiar categories than with the agenda of the future. Why are some of our TV channels so mesmerized with such certified political comics as Shaikh Rashid Ahmad? Politics should rise above the level of buffoonery, even if the buffoonery is carried on with a serious face.

Why has a section of the commentariat honed such an expertise for kicking dead horses? Why do they go on and on about dead issues? They are not to blame. Walking old trails is easier than charting new territory.

Musharraf was swept aside by circumstances. History overtook him somewhere in 2006-2007 and then left him far behind. His exit was long drawn out but it was foretold. He is yesterday’s man. Why is a section of the political class so bent on keeping his memory alive?

Other countries have gone through worse dictatorships. South Africa’s past was more brutal and repressive than ours. But when white rule ended and the ANC came to power, South Africa, under Nelson Mandela’s inspiring leadership, drew a line under the past and moved swiftly beyond it. The country has huge problems, social and economic, but it is trying to grapple with them as best as it can, instead of shouting endlessly about the evils of white rule which, in the circumstances, would be little better than escapism.

The history of military coups in Pakistan will not end with political gimmickry or rhetoric. It will only end when politicians can prove by their competence and understanding of things that they are superior to any alternative. But if they are caught in petty squabbles, if the quality of their discourse is not uplifting, and if, on the other hand, the military remains a powerful and disciplined institution, no Article Six of the Constitution can be a sufficient safeguard of democracy.

The question of Musharraf’s trial has proved a nine-days’ wonder, PM Gilani neatly stepping out of this complication by declaring that as he was a consensus prime minister he would only go for a trial if there was a consensus of the entire National Assembly behind the move. With the National Assembly divided on this issue it is now as good as dead, which is some embarrassment for those crying, so to speak, for Musharraf’s blood. Gilani’s further admonition that we should do only that which is doable amounts to rubbing salt into this discomfiture.

Gilani is proving a more adept politician than most people gave him credit for when he became prime minister. He is cool and unflappable and measures his words carefully. As a self-proclaimed consensus prime minister he is proving true to the description by tending to the legitimate concerns of everyone — repeat, everyone — in the National Assembly. For this reason it is scarcely surprising that he enjoys enormous goodwill across the house, regardless of party affiliations, which is a feat unrivalled in the parliamentary history of this country.

Reports of his differences with President Asif Zardari are exaggerated. Insofar as he is more his own man than when he was picked as prime minister, some friction between his office and the presidency is inevitable. Chairmen of the board and chief executive officers always have their differences: two swords in one scabbard, etc. But this doesn’t amount to a revolt or anything like it. Gilani’s only political home and base is the PPP, without which he would be out in the wilderness. And he knows it, or should.

For reasons we are all familiar with, Zardari is a divisive figure. While inspiring loyalty among his close friends he doesn’t have much of a reputation (except for things he would gladly forget) as far as the public is concerned. The unifying figure is Gilani and when the succession in the PPP finally takes place, the torch passing from Zardari to Bilawal, Gilani will have played a role in this process. Gilani as keeper of the PPP flame: whoever could have thought it possible a year and a half ago?

The minus-one formula is less formula than fantasy, the wish to see Zardari put on a flying suit and disappear from the presidency. It is not going to happen. Indeed, there is no way to make this happen short of an intervention by Triple One Brigade. And if those trucks ever roll we can all go to the mountains and seek nirvana there. So whether anyone likes it or not, if we want to preserve democracy the first requirement is to abide Zardari. Admittedly a tough choice but then who said life was easy?

The times are critical. We are slowly stepping out of the wreckage of the Musharraf era. Amongst other things, the Taliban are on the run, for which we owe our soldiers our deepest thanks. They have performed splendidly, redeeming the army’s reputation tarnished by Musharraf’s many follies and blunders. At this of all junctures we can afford no disruption in our national life.

The people of Pakistan paid no heed to the gloom pundits on Aug 14. It was a joy to see them celebrate. We should take heed from the people and leave the pundits to their devices.

To whom this nation has given the most, it is usually from among this hallowed lot that arise its most virulent and merciless critics. This is a mild word, denunciators is more like it. More than ingratitude it is an attitude so benighted that it needs the services of a shrink to fully comprehend it.

Ordinary people at the lower rungs of the social order may complain about their lot in life, but they refrain from magnifying their discontent into a wholesale assault on Pakistan. Dysfunctional and meltdown are words alien to their frame of mind. When they see their cricket team in action, especially when (for a change) it is doing well, their our overjoyed. When it plays badly they are downcast. If this is not a sign of nationhood — and active nationhood at that — what else is?

Ordinary folk have no great respect for their leaders and much less for politicians, which is as it should be. A nation in love with its politicians would need to have its head examined. Punjabis have a droll sense of humour, much of it directed against the bombast and self-righteousness of the good and the great.

But ordinary Pakistanis, without going through any elaborate intellectual exercise, usually make a distinction between humbugs in power and their country. Go to any bazaar of any town, large or small, in Pakistan and it will be bustling with life and humour and anger. But what passes for our intelligentsia is mentally constipated. All it can see around it are portents of imminent collapse. Ordinary people never ask why this country was created. The same cannot be said of the intelligentsia.

Part of the problem lies in idleness and underemployment. Many of us in the newspaper or talk-show business have nothing else to do. Many self-appointed pundits are retirees, pensioners or property owners who don’t have anything to do for a living. Is it surprising if they excel at half-baked theories about what afflicts the nation?

If this nation did not have to endure — much against its will and temperament — the rigours of prohibition, if for the embittered of heart or the disappointed in love (or the thwarted of passion) there were places to go to in the evenings and there in some half-lit corner in moderate measure to drown their sorrows, if there were more theatres, even if of the Nargis and Deedar kind, in our towns, we would all be better off, and there would be more employment opportunities for that small but vital class which makes its living from song and dance and, as one is informed, from pastimes related to these activities.

But since, as penance for our many political sins, such enlightened alternatives are denied to us in what we insist on calling our sacred republic, what we are left with is politics. We talk politics morning and evening. We have nothing else to talk about: nothing about the arts or literature or the better aspects of life. Politics and gossip related to politics are the staple of our national conversation.

Since God knows when, and I have been in this business for a long time, we have been saying that this country cannot co-exist with the shenanigans or alleged corruption of this or that political figure — we said this of Benazir, then Nawaz Sharif, now Asif Zardari. But Pakistan has survived the worst predictions and is still there. It will survive the real or alleged misdeeds of the present dispensation.

One thing we can’t seem to get into our heads: Pakistan is bigger and more enduring than the sum of its military or political leaders. It is bigger than its dictators, bigger than its political failures. Our political and military scumbags will come and go but the Himalayas will always be there as will the Arabian Sea and all the land in between.

Bad things have happened to Pakistan and there is no denying this but why do we so resolutely close our eyes to the good things that have also happened?

This was a land which in 1947 fed 35 million souls. Now it sustains a population close to 170 million. Nor can it be said that standards of living have fallen. They haven’t. Pakistanis as a whole — and I am speaking in relative terms — eat better and live longer than they did at the time of Partition. If I speak of my own Chakwal, how dramatically it has changed. It was a backwater all those years ago. Now there are roads connecting most villages and most villages, although sadly not all, are electrified. The great popular demand nowadays is piped gas in every home, a luxury which many parts of Pakistan enjoy but which our cousins in India do not have.

Yes, there is poverty, and there is bureaucracy and the cruelty for many of life’s evil circumstances. But, like it or not, these are aspects of the human condition. You have only to read Dickens to get an idea of the rampant poverty of the lower classes in Victorian England; and only to read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to get an idea of the social dislocation and suffering caused by the Great Depression in the United States.

We have our problems, and may they grow less with the passage of time and the best of our efforts, but if we look around us — whether in the sub–continent, where mass poverty is greater than ours, or at Afghanistan which has been devastated by 30 years of uninterrupted upheaval and warfare, or even further away at the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia — we should count ourselves lucky that while our tribulations, constantly magnified by our ever-expanding tribe of cynics and pundits, have been great, they could have been much worse.

The rentier class — living off its rents and pensions — should be ashamed of itself: living off the fat of this land, yet going on and on about the destruction and perdition lurking around the next corner. I could cite examples, of metaphor piled upon metaphor and no attempt at an argument, but that would get personal, something best avoided.

About closing one’s eyes to something good that may have happened, why, on the part of the pundit class, is there such a deafening silence about the success of our military arms in Swat and Malakand, and the return of the displaced to their homes? Things aren’t wrapped up completely and much remains to be done, and there is still curfew at night in most parts of Swat, but can’t we appreciate what already has been done?

Only in April which is not too long ago, the best of us were saying that the country was in mortal danger from the Taliban. After gaining control of Swat, the Taliban were extending their tentacles into Buner and Dir. In those circumstances the army, left with no other choice and goaded to the limit, started an operation against Fazlullah’s armed followers. From the massed ranks of punditry arose the cry that preparations were inadequate and the displacement of the local population had not been fully catered for.

Yet in a mere matter of three months the tide has turned against the Taliban. While they have not been eliminated from Swat they are on the run, and the displaced have begun to return to their homes. In Waziristan the army, very sensibly, is relying on an indirect approach, launching not a full-fledged assault as in Swat, but throwing a noose around the Taliban and tightening it gradually. Whether Baitullah Mehsud is dead or not, the Taliban for the first time are on the defensive. The army both in Swat and Waziristan has taken heavy hits but it has persevered. Why are we being so squeamish in rendering it our praise and thanks?

We criticise the army, very rightly, for its coups and shall do so again if, God forbid, it repeats its past follies in that direction. But when our soldiers do a good job they deserve to hear of it, without qualification, from our lips. After the 1948 Kashmir war (which gave us what we have of Kashmir) this is the only necessary and useful war the army is fighting and, thanks to the heavens above and its own efforts, it is winning.

So here’s to the army, and air force, and here to the source of all our delights and sorrows on this its 62nd birthday. Ah, what’s this? The clink of ice in a crystal glass. On this of all days there should be no sound more welcome than this.

Please read today’s Column of Ayaz Amir.

Please read today’s Column of Ayaz Amir.