INFLATION may broadly be under control, the foreign currency reserves may be growing, corporate governance may be improving and the budget deficit may generally be contained. However, all this (other than the deceleration in the rate of inflation) does not amount to much for the population at large. The economic revival that was supposed to generate economic opportunities continues to elude us.

Exports, especially after the events of September 11, have been badly hit as we enter the third year of drought. Both farmers and industrialists view the future with scepticism and are reluctant to invest. Few perceive (more important than managing the economy is the management of the perceptions regarding the economy) that the industrial slump will work its way through quickly.

The government appears to be helpless about what to do and periodically assembles entrepreneurs in Islamabad to ask them the same question, coupled with exhortations to increase investment and enhance production. There are no clear answers, leaving large segments of civil society wondering whether the reforms imposed by the IMF and the donors have brought us to such a pass.

After reading newspaper articles and public statements of a whole range of opinion makers, representatives of a variety of interest groups one gets the impression that we seem to believe that there is either a magic wand, a wave of which will make our problems disappear, or that undertaking reforms is like fixing an electricity fuse or a leaking tap at home. Call an electrician or a plumber to fix the fault. Moreover, reform is viewed more as a change of rules and procedures, that the same individuals who either established, or had grown up in, the control-oriented and rent-extracting environment can be called upon to implement. Hence, our approach to reforms, energy sector reforms, labour reforms, education and health reforms, financial sector and capital market reforms, if carried out, will make Pakistan’s economy attractive for investment.

Unfortunately, however, most of us seem to fail to realize that the economy is like a machine and not a house. All things within it are interconnected. To be able to fix a leak in one place we have to see the economy as a whole. Moreover, the economic machine is highly complicated and moves slowly; the impact of measures taken today will become visible and felt much later. In a liberalized environment, and the IMF breathing down the government’s neck, there are hardly any significant policies and instruments to kick start industrial revival.

Such a conceptualization of reforms also raises the need to guard against the danger of expecting too much from the current set of reforms. To an extent donors are also to blame; since they are strapped for resources, they have a natural inclination to exaggerate the outcome of prescribed policies. Such expectations can result in inadequate and poorly sustained support that can abort programmes that are essentially on the right course. The transmission mechanism through which policies lead to expected outcomes is not that straightforward. There are several steps in the process, each of which is subject to uncertainty and delay. So, quite often it may be necessary to adopt supplementary policies later to achieve expected outcomes. Without them the final outcomes may fall far short of expectations.

Since the 1970s the failure of the economic system can be traced to a deficiency of governance at one level or another, the most crucial of which was the desire of the state machinery to regulate every activity — a task that it carried out through the creation of both visible and invisible roadblocks. A survey conducted by the World Bank highlights the huge costs of doing business in Pakistan. It reveals that 12% of the time of entrepreneurs is taken up in dealing with the bureaucracy (with 42% feeling that there were far too many regulators and regulations) compared to 5% in Latin American countries.

Similarly, close to 56% of the respondents complained about the rising costs of doing business because of the government’s tax policies, while 40% mentioned the contribution of corruption to the growth in costs. The theological principle to regulate economic activity based on a complete distrust of the market and a belief in the state’s omnipotence have determined not just the role of the state but also the space within which the private sector could operate.

Next, the decision to deregulate industrial investment before trade liberalization and withdrawal of import subsidies (e.g., the provision of subsidized cotton for the yarn manufacturing sector until the first half of the 1990s) was a case of wrong sequencing. The result was that a major portion of Pakistan industry continued to focus on the domestic market. This market had not changed, supported as it was by the state stepping in, whenever necessary, with protective measures or other assistance under what later came to be known as the ‘SRO culture’.

The economy, despite the smuggled goods and the goods brought in by Pakistani migrants under the baggage allowance schemes, continued to be a closed one, as parts of the industrial sector that could not compete internationally survived, if not flourished, through the protection provided by general, or less transparent, specific SROs. Resultantly, the growth of one domestic industry created the market for another, thus all such markets grew together with hardly any signs indicating which ones would continue to grow or shrink over time. Such is the weakness of closed economies. Growth is neither influenced by, nor predicated upon, international comparative advantage.

Therefore, all kinds of industries operating with varying degrees of efficiency or lack of it flourished. The crisis of the industrial structure today, especially the one plaguing the traditional sectors, is an outcome of this piecemeal opening up of the trading sector followed by too rapid an adjustment when this sector was eventually liberalized under IMF pressure, not giving industry adequate time to adjust to this change. Import duties were lowered at a pace more rapid than in the case of industry.

The latter was admittedly heavily protected till then, had time to adjust, and this was accompanied with a slower speed of rationalization of import tariffs (because the impact on revenues would have been dramatic and not acceptable to the Fund), i.e., duties on raw materials at significantly lower rates than on finished imported goods affecting the competitiveness of domestic industry.

In my view the worse is yet to come, as tariffs, under IMF tutelage, are lowered further. And unless the phasing of this lowering of protection is slowed down further, something which the Fund, or for that matter the WTO, will not permit, the fortunes of the industry will continue to be uncertain, in the near future.

The way-out is to improve the profitability of industry through closures, consolidation and mergers - rather than keeping them all alive, sick and unable to withstand competition without repeated doses of artificial stimulants in the shape of protection from competition, tax and utility tariff concessions (e.g. the fertilizer industry through the subsidized price of gas), debt rescheduling and subsidies in one form or another, which are not only distortionary but also unsustainable.

Much of the industrial boom in the late eighties and the first half of the nineties was financed by government-owned financial institutions — they played a major role in the development of what now constitutes industrial sickness, since the financial viability of a large part of the textile manufacturing sector had depended on government policies. When the demand for credit was soaring and credit was scarce banks naturally preferred to lend to the old, large and established enterprises or groups — a rational approach for large, risk-averse providers of finance.

What was also critical in this was the huge reliance on debt finance rather than on equity. Whereas total equity investment in the economy is substantial, most of it has been made in small and medium enterprises by their owners, who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to attract risk capital. The result was predictable.

These small entrepreneurs became rentiers, who built a large home for the joint family and lived on the income of the enterprise, spending a lot of effort and resources to avoid the taxman, unable to invest in technological development. The fear in the ability of the taxman to close down and ruin businesses is a numbing one for the entrepreneurs — a feeling difficult to explain. They bribe(d) him to avoid being included in the tax net. Thus, the link between the government’s chronic budget deficits and the intense dislike and fear of new or foreign investors in the minds of key actors, in particular, and of civil society in general, is on account of such a financial system.

So, where do we go from here? The discussion above has attempted to argue that the first and foremost reform needed is the dismantling of the overextended regulatory framework and huge regulatory apparatus that is controlling (as opposed to regulating) and strangulating private sector economic activity. To illustrate the point, there are 27 labour laws. However, incremental changes will not work and the best way to address the issue of over-regulation would be for the government to announce that all regulatory laws stand suspended and each law would become operative only after its continuation can be justified.

Next in importance would be the lowering and rationalization of the tariff structure pertaining to plant and machinery and the withdrawal of import duties on raw materials and intermediate goods. The latter step would not only make the duty drawback regime for exports redundant but also facilitate import-based production of exports, without seeking the permission of the most formidable enemy of exports, the tax structure and the related systems and procedures.

Next, there is a need to broaden the equity market — an objective that cannot be achieved through the market sanitization being pursued by SECP. The SECP proposed reforms to address the needs of large, respectable enterprises with a credible track record. But such entities cannot bring about the industrial turnaround needed. What is required is external or internal equity for young entrepreneurs and small companies though venture capitalists.

Then, there is the high cost of transportation that affects cost competitiveness, which results in the cost of shipping wheat (including port handling costs in Pakistan) from Australia to Karachi being lower than transporting it by train from Lahore to Karachi.

Finally, the high cost of energy produced through Wapda and KESC will continue to accentuate the difficulties of industry in its efforts to compete internationally, especially the energy-intensive ones. The sooner we dismantle and privatize them the better not just for the competitiveness of agriculture and industry but also for the government budget through savings that will come from stopping the monthly haemorrhaging (leakages) caused by their losses. To begin with, the law should be changed to allow free entry into the distribution of power. Competition would spur reform by bringing down the risk of investing in generation (even after the HUBCO fiasco), since power producers would no longer be obliged to sell their power exclusively to the bankrupt Wapda and KESC.

ABDULLA Malik may have turned 81, but to this day, were he to hear a crowd of protesters chanting slogans and waving red flags on the street that runs in front of his house in Lahore’s Model Town, he would drop whatever he was doing, run out and join them. What is more, he would not be among the stragglers, but out in front, ready for the steel-tipped lathi, the noxious fumes of tear gas and even the trigger-happy Punjab policeman.

He has little respect for the established order which in his long career as an agitator and revolutionary he has always found to be indistinguishable from the mills of injustice that grind the poor and the defenceless of our land without respite. A passage in his just-published autobiography covering the first 27 years of his life — 1920 to 1947 - says, “The 27 years that this story covers were like a turbulent, shoreless sea which carried thousands of rising and falling tides inside its vast bosom. I lived those 27 years to the hilt. I felt reverentially drawn to the great religious scholars of the day. Then I fell under the spell of the firebrand leaders of the Majlis-i-Ahrar.

“I also clearly recall the impact of the worldwide economic downturn of 1930-31 and its impact on these men and their lives. When I joined Government College, the air was thick with the socialist slogans of Jawaharlal Nehru and how the world was to be changed into a better place for the downtrodden. I am a witness to the emergence of Communism among the students of my day. I joined the Party and volunteered to become a full-time worker for the cause. It is all here in these pages, as are the great writers and journalists of those days whom I came to know.”

Only Abdulla Malik, who is as Red today as the day he joined the Party, can look back on his eventful life and say, “I am 81 years old and I can declare with pride that the commitment that I first made to socialism I still wear on my chest as a medal. I dream of a democratic, socialist Pakistan. This is my only manifesto because it negates no religion or way of life. Neither is it a revolt against God. It is a message of love for all men, a love that goes beyond religion, creed, system of belief. There is no greater love than love for your fellow men.”

Born in the old city of Lahore in 1920, Abdulla Malik, who is gifted with a phenomenal memory, still remembers what came to be known as the Mughalpura Agitation which was aimed at the ouster of the British principal of the Engineering College on the charge that he had insulted the Holy Prophet, on whom be peace. What a familiar ring that charge has because to this day, and since Zia-ul-Haq’s time especially, it is regularly flung at someone or the other. Abdulla Malik writes that it later turned out that the principal had done no such thing. His guilt lay in his refusal to admit certain Muslim students because they did not qualify. Abdulla Malik also remembers that a wrestling pit in Chowk Rang Mahal was inaugurated by Maulana Shaukat Ali himself because it was meant to physically prepare Muslim youth against a new wave of Hindu militancy.

Ghazi Ilm Din who killed the blaspheming Hindu author of a book about the Holy Prophet, and was hanged, also came from Abdulla Malik’s neighbourhood. When Nehru came to Lahore once, he was taken in procession through city streets on a white charger. The Sikhs, in order to be one up on the Hindus, made their leader Baba Kharak Singh, who arrived a day later, ride an elephant. One can only wonder what they would have done had Nehru been put on an elephant.

When Abdulla Malik joined the Communist Party as a full-timer in June 1942, he entered a new world. “We all worked together, people from different religions. There were no distinctions among us on the basis of faith. Everyone worked for the Party. We were all Communists,” he recalls. Most Muslims, however, believed that Communism was a godless creed, but Abdulla Malik found it no more than political propaganda. Earlier, he had worked as the Party’s secret messenger. He also sold the Party’s three newspapers on the streets of Lahore. Since the Communist Party favoured self-determination for the Muslims, Abdulla Malik found it doubly acceptable. He campaigned for the Muslim League during the Pakistan movement as a good, card-carrying Communist - and a Muslim.

When Abdulla Malik was asked by the Party to move to Bombay he did so. He also lived where he worked, the Party office, sleeping on the floor. The rented flat belonged to Shakir Ali, the painter. Abdulla Malik shared the room with Sibte Hasan and Ali Sardar Jaffrey. They all slept on the floor. Saadat Hasan Manto, who knew Malik from Lahore, was in Bombay also. One day he dropped in and urged Abdulla Malik to move in with him. “Here you will only starve,” he said. But the loyal Party member preferred to starve and sleep on the floor rather than move to the relative comfort of Manto’s flat where he would have enjoyed Safia’s home cooking.

Abdulla Malik was among the first to join the Progressive Papers Ltd. in 1947. He remained with Imroze until he was let go during the final shake-up. Not long after the newspaper group was annexed by Ayub, it was decided to remove Abdulla Malik and Syed Amjad Hussain from Imroze and the Pakistan Times respectively. However, Altaf Gauhar, who was now information secretary, saw to it that the two “dangerous communists” (Syed Amjad Hussain, chief reporter of the Pakistan Times, was never one) were sent not to Kalat or Quetta but London and Colombo. Abdulla Malik spent a number of eventful years in London, forming a lifelong friendship with the late Athar Ali of BBC. I used to write letters to Abdulla Malik, though I barely knew him at the time. I came close to him — and have remained so — when after getting myself out of government service, I joined the Pakistan Times in 1967.

The only man in Lahore, few will now remember, who protested against army action in 1971 in East Pakistan was Abdulla Malik. In a speech at the Engineering University, he declared, “Hum Bangladesh ke mazloom awam ke saath hain.” (We are with the oppressed people of Bangladesh).

He was arrested and tried under martial law. I remember the day the judgment was announced. The hearing was brief, the judge a young and very jumpy major. The “court” was adjourned after an hour or so, the major earlier having ruled that he simply did not have the time to have all the defence witnesses testify. We were shown out of the room and we all sat under a shady pipal tree, Abdulla Malik in his handcuffs.

We were then pushed into the “court” room where the major announced that he had considered all the evidence and come to a decision. Then he produced a sheaf of neatly-typed papers and began to read his “judgment” which had obviously been written for him long before the case was “heard”. Abdulla Malik was sentenced to a jail term of several months with hard labour and a heavy fine. The major said the “mulzim” was not to be lashed because of his age. Abdulla Malik, then 51, said to us, “This I resent more than the jail term.”

Whenever, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to Lahore, he would take Abdulla Malik aside and ask, “Abdulla, now tell me what is going on in Lahore.” And if there was one man in the city who could tell him what was going on, it indeed was none other than Abdulla Malik. Had ZAB kept listening to the Abdulla Maliks of Pakistan and not the Masood Mahmoods, the Saeed Ahmed Khans and the Muhammad Hayat Tammans, he would have become Pakistan’s longest-serving prime minister.

Tragically, like many others before him, he ended up only listening to things he wished to listen to and not to things he should have listened to. And thereby hang several tales that, no doubt, we will read in the second volume of Abdulla Malik’s memoirs.

GEORGE BUSH in his State of the Union message to the Congress on January 29 gave an ultimatum to what the US administration calls the rogue nations — Iran, Iraq and North Korea — since they were supposed to be engaged in the acquisition of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.

He, therefore, threatened to take pre-emptive action against them. This was the unfinished agenda of the US-led war on terror whose first round was more or less won despite the inability of the coalition forces to capture their prime target, the elusive yet ubiquitous Osama bin Laden.

The Bush administration suspects that the Al Qaeda fugitives from the victor’s justice had escaped through Afghanistan’s southern border into Iran. And since George Bush has vowed to pursue the terrorists to their supposed sanctuaries in about a dozen countries, these countries would have to bear the brunt of the American blitz unless they come clean and join the US-led campaign against terrorism.

George Bush waxed bellicose on purpose, perhaps to deflect the public attention from the Enron bankruptcy scandal in which his administration is deeply involved. The giant energy corporation of Texas had ties with the Republican administration and financed the presidential election campaign of George Bush. The countrywide furore over the loss of millions of hard-earned pension money of the employees on the one hand and the enrichment of senior company officials on the other was drowned in the drumbeat of the Afghan war that may be extended to the so-called rogue states, in particular, Iran which has become vulnerable because of the presence of American forces in Afghanistan and its bases in Pakistan’s Balochistan. Small wonder the conservatives and moderates in Iran have come together in the face of the common peril.

The US envoy in Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin accused Iran of manufacturing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and planning to destabilize the region while the American defence secretary alleged that Iran had been supplying arms to an Afghan faction. The American ambassador’s utterances against a country with whom Pakistan has friendly ties, besides constituting a breach of diplomatic privilege, were indiscreet, more so because of the presence of American forces in Pakistan. Iran understandably feels endangered by the presence of US troops in the region. However, larger interests to dissociate itself from the US policy to extend the war to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

There was a worldwide alarm over the American president’s threat to carry the war to a dozen countries, provoking a near-censure from the NATO secretary-general, Lord Robertson, who refused to support the US in its war against Iran, Iraq and North Korea unless there was conclusive evidence of their complicity in the September 11 incident. Britain’s foreign office minister, Peter Hain, in his address to the Fabian Society, warned that those who had participated in the war against Al Qaeda would not join the US if it chose to widen the war.

He believed that Britain would not go along with US in its unilateral action while the European Union External Relations Commissioner, Chris Patten, expressed concern over the unilateralist policy that the Bush administration had adopted after September 11, regarding it as dangerous for the international community.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine lambasted the Bush doctrine as simplistic and unilateralist. The United States acted, he said, “unilaterally, without consulting others, taking decisions based on its own view of the world and its own interests”. Earlier, the French defence minister, Richard Alain, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, warned that any US invasion to topple President Saddam Hussein of Iraq would provoke a “broad backlash” among its allies, meaning they would oppose Washington on that score.

This is significant since until lately France had been joining the US and Britain in bombing northern Iraq in the enforcement of the so-called no-fly zone prohibition. Now it is Britain and the US which have been routinely bombing civilian and military targets in Iraq. It seems that Britain may quit the bombing spree in Iraq now that the Bush administration is likely to escalate the war to enable the opposition Iraqi National Congress to oust Saddam Hussein.

George Bush’s provocative rhetoric has weakened the US-led coalition on the one hand and prompted a rapprochement between Tehran and Baghdad in the face of the looming threat on the other. Saudi Arabia, smarting from the orchestrated hate campaign unleashed by the West which is sore with Ryadh because fifteen of the nineteen suicide bombers who carried out the Sept 11 attacks in the US were its nationals, has refused to allow the use of its Sultan air base for the invasion of Iraq. Most probably Turkey also would not permit the use of Incerlik base for any air raid on northern Iraq. Saudi Arabia has openly opposed any action against Iraq. Therefore, strictly from the military point of view, any large-scale invasion of Iraq by US forces does not seem to be a practical proposition. Nevertheless, Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that the US would go ahead with its plan to topple Saddam Hussein even without the help of its allies.

Iran’s situation is somewhat precarious, given the US military presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan from whose forward bases the US bombers can effectively hit targets inside Iran. However, this time the action replay of Taliban-bashing by the US may not work. Aside from the fact that none of the US allies would go along with that kind of misadventure, there will be strong opposition from Russia, China, India and most certainly from Pakistan. As an ally of America in the war against terrorism, Pakistan should use its influence with the Bush administration to make it abandon any idea of an attack either on Iran or on Iraq which would touch off outbursts, anger and violent protests throughout the Muslim world.

George Bush’s argument that Iran, Iraq and Korea are producing weapons of mass destruction is and his concern on this score seem hypocritical in the face of vast stockpiles of these weapons in the US and Israeli arsenals while the presence of American troops in the Gulf region and in South Korea and Japan poses a threat to the security of the so-called “axis of evil”. It is strange that George Bush did not censure the state terrorism of Israel, nor did he condemn the arch terrorist, Ariel Sharon, and instead, chose to declare war on the national resistance forces, Al Hamas and Hezbollah, fighting against foreign occupation. This may be a crusade but it is not a just war.

WHERE is Osama bin Laden? President Pervez Musharraf thinks he is dead. Maybe he just hopes he is dead. Nothing would be more inconvenient for President George Bush’s newest friend than an Osama discovered, possibly clean-shaven, in a nondescript safe house in Pakistan.

Would Pakistan’s president be able to hand over Osama bin Laden to America’s president? Intentions are not in question: he would certainly like to. He could later go on his favourite medium, television, and explain that since Osama was not a Pakistani citizen he did not feel duty-bound to save him for a local trial. Nor have the Americans come halfway around the world to watch Osama bin Laden being tried by a Sharia court.

But the reaction would be another story. The street would probably not erupt immediately, but it would smoulder. The Muslim street has been subdued by the crackle of events since September. But it is foolish to underestimate a volcano merely because it has not overflown in front of today’s television coverage.

As Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes pointed out so often, there cannot be a death without a body. Osama bin Laden may not these days be presumed innocent until convicted, but he must be presumed alive till buried.

The question is larger, and more intriguing, than the fate of only Osama bin Laden. He was a political recluse, for obvious reasons, but not a hermit. He had wives and children, some living with him in Afghanistan.

During the war a videotape was circulated in which two young sons of Osama were also shown with him in Afghanistan. Where is this family? They could not have disappeared into thin air, could they? The air is not so thin over Afghanistan, or Pakistan, as to enable a large family and entourage to vanish without a trace.

Where, similarly, is Mulla Omar? Where are his wives and his children? Where are those who occupied his palatial residence in Kandahar? Lurid stories are occasionally put out that Mulla Omar was last seen on a motorcycle, riding off into the sunset, with his second or third wife in pillion.

I do not buy such junk. Neither history nor its saucy cousin, journalism, are kind to losers. Where, indeed, is the top leadership of the Taliban cabinet? Afghanistan had a functioning government, replete with cabinet ministers — where are they now? So many questions, so few answers.

A good person to ask would be Hamid Karzai, although you might have to phrase the question a bit differently. Where was he, and where were many of the members of his government when Mulla Omar and Osama bin Laden were in power? They were not always in exile, or on the run, or in a sanctuary provided by a neighbouring power. The Northern Alliance was at permanent war. The answer is evident.

The whole of Afghanistan has almost never been under the complete control of any single government. There has always been space, even if they are no more than the nooks and crannies of a large country, out of the reach of even the most powerful government. But this brings us to an uncomfortable fact.

Such a large group of people, numbering thousands, can live outside the range of a government, but they cannot live without the support of some people who provide the essentials of survival: security, food and shelter.

The current dispensation in Afghanistan is much too loose and impromptu to command the allegiance of the whole country. Mr Hamid Karzai barely has the resources to exercise his personal authority in Kabul. For other regions he must depend on the goodwill of those who, in the bad old days, were called warlords but whose designations have changed since they ended up on the winning side.

The point to note is that each one of them survived not only the Taliban but also the decade during which the Russians occupied Kabul. The Soviets might not have the technological eyesight of the present American arsenal, but they were not a Third World force.

There is of course a vital difference in that the Pakistan government offered a safe haven that is not on offer now. But the relevant point is elsewhere. Afghanistan is deeper than its surface.

These worries must be nagging an officially exuberant Washington. This columnist learns that present American assessments envisage the presence of its troops in Pakistan and Afghanistan at least till the spring of 2003.

One presumes that the will to stay will not be undermined by the success of any sporadic sabotage mission: Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton both withdrew their troops, one from Beirut and the other from Somalia, after casualties.

In Beirut a truck bomb killed more than two hundred soldiers, and in Somalia those familiar “warlords” sent back too many of those dreaded bodybags. In the old days the British handled the problem of Afghanistan with more elan. They simply declared victory and got the hell out.

The British conducted their first Afghan war in 1839 in order, they said, to keep the Russians out. They were premature in their assumptions by about 140 years, but that is another matter. Their war aim was to remove the widely admired Dost Mohammad Khan, of whom it was said: “Is Dost Mohammad dead that there is no justice?”

They raised the much-vaunted army of the Indus in order to place their protege Shah Shuja, who had been living in their care in Ludhiana, on the throne. It had to be the army of the Indus because the sharp-eyed Ranjit Singh (he had only one eye, but it was sharp) refused, despite his alliance with them, to let the British cross his territories on their way to Kabul.

Kabul fell without a fuss. It always does. The British “coronated” Shah Shuja (at Kandahar, as it so happened) and settled down to enjoy two years of polo, champagne and hock, hermetically sealed salmon and, when they could find them, dark-eyed local beauties.

Dost Mohammad took shelter with the Emir of Bukhara and handed over leadership of the jihad to his favourite son Akbar Khan. He also, in an astute move, handed himself over to the British, confident that they always kept space for an alternative in their policy.

The British were wise; they kept Dost Mohammad this time in India. In 1842 Akbar Khan surprised the complacent British garrison in Kabul. By the time it found “safety” in Jalalabad, some 20,000 British army lives had been lost and, famously, only one man survived: Dr William Brydon (he was a great survivor; he also survived the siege of Lucknow).

The army of retribution succeeded where the army of the Indus had failed. The redcoats returned to Kabul, hanged a few people and, in a triumph of diplomacy, reinstalled Dost Mohammad. It was the ultimate victory. Both sides won.

That is the way they prefer it in Afghanistan. History, denying Marx his aphorism, repeated itself in the second Afghan war fought by the British forty years later.

President Bush once said that he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive. Having conquered a country in search of one man, one can appreciate that President Bush cannot really declare victory until he has brought that one man to the in-camera military tribunals that have been created, at great cost to the spirit of American justice, only for him. But it is a moot point whether the Americans would actually want either Osama bin Laden or the reclusive Mulla Omar alive.

What are the odds that it would be difficult to indict Mulla Omar for anything other than abetment of terrorism in an American court?

A trial of Osama could be kept in camera, but could it really be kept out of the purview of a million journalists waiting at the door for anything that they could pick up? Could anyone really prevent Osama’s lawyers from talking, or him from grandstanding? Would any statement he made become the inspiration for the next round of attacks on America and the American presence worldwide? America is now militarily engaged in almost all the key areas of conflict in the world.

Going by President Bush’s State of the Union address, his appetite for war has increased: both Iraq and Iran are now within his target-range, with North Korea getting a nod as well to await its turn. Perhaps a few people in Washington and Islamabad are thinking through the consequences of adding an Osama trial into such a volatile scenario. Perhaps.

Is Osama bin Laden safer (for America) lost in some mystery never-never land? Protected by a pronouncement of death that has never been proved? What, to return to a parallel mystery, happens to the families? Are they also to be presumed dead-disappeared? Will those boys on videotape never grow up? So many questions. So few answers.—Dawn/Asian Age Service

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi