THE past is littered across Kabul airport. Most of the planes are broken neatly, snapped like twigs by a giant. Only a few look as if they have been subjected to a searing torture that had defeated their forms and mangled their innards.

On one decisive night in October, a giant, the United States, took each machine in the service of the Taliban regime, civilian or transport, apart with the laser precision that modern bombs can deploy against squatting ducks. The wreckage across the field has a surreal, museum quality to it, a memory of war, anger and deadly revenge. Salvage would not do justice to such wreckage. For some unknown reason a line from Macbeth echoes in a recess of the mind: How much blood was there in the old man! How many planes were there in the old regime!

The only military plane I saw, a MiG, was intact, and parked like a stuffed trophy on a banner outside the airport, on the fork of a road turning towards the city. To which war did this MiG belong, to which jihad? It had not been bombed, even by mistake. It was a dead survivor. They exist in countries like Afghanistan.

The live survivors, American helicopters and gunships, sit in obedient rows amid the art deco of what is surely the world’s only aeroplane graveyard. The present lives, if uneasily, between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s wars.

Our craft ovalled twice in the air, following the route of a racetrack, before landing on a patch in a valley 4,000 feet above the sea, ringed by mountains. From the air, Kabul looks flat and flattened. Brown is the colour of this world, of mountain, earth, habitat and man. Even rock seems to be made of mud, like the homes that cling to their sides. Nothing rises higher than the second floor, except for nature. Occasional flashes of green in the fields seem like lipstick and nailpolish, pretty but marginal.

A Turkish crescent barely stirs above the control tower of the airport. Turkish troops are in charge; the security of a renewed nation has been handed over to brother Muslims from the edge of Europe after Britain slipped away and America decided to concentrate on the search for an enemy, the Taliban and Al Qaeda, that is probably sitting elsewhere. The door opens and we see a swarm of people who have come to welcome the external affairs minister of India, Mr Yashwant Sinha. Paradoxically, warmth rather than discipline creates the straight lines out of a dispersed welcome.

Mr Yashwant Sinha has arrived on a magic carpet; in the first of the three Airbus-300s that India has gifted to the Afghan national airline, Ariana. Cake is served with cold drinks. Speeches are made against the backdrop of most glorious flowers. The Afghans are emotional. The external affairs minister is elegant. A gift has been given with grace and received with hope.

What do you call a traffic jam that does not have too much traffic? A traffic butter? This was more of a traffic jalebi, a squiggle that turned upon itself ignoring the wide space around its internal snarl. We wormed our way through curiosity, with authority; we shot past the American embassy, a fortress crowned by a forest of technology.

The Radio Afghanistan building looked distraught; the Afghanistan Films office forlorn. Shops began to appear, from Khayate Abdullah, mardana (or men’s) tailor, to Popolana, offering Italian food in a dhaba; to Milad Computer Service, Shafaq English and Computer Agency, D. Butcher’s Market and Sharif Market Japani. (You can take Japan out of a market but how can you take a market out of Japan?)

The star of the growing show is Sikander the Barber, now proudly displaying his profession without fear or favour. Just a year ago he would have been whipped for daring to snip the beard of a believer by the barbaric Taliban. The clean faces of Kabul suddenly strike you. A year ago the Taliban thought the police would drive men to mosques and punish anyone who dared to shorten a beard. Liberty has had a close shave in Afghanistan.

Is wizened an Afghan word? It should be. Name one country with more wizened faces. The most wizened of them all was the face of my driver, whose beam became broader with each helpless gesture. Sample: morning, and the clean, dry sun is already 30 degrees hot. We ask him to put the airconditioner of the car on. He swivels the button of the AC switch twice to show how useless it is, then winds the windows down with a broad smile to offer us air conditioned by God.

The one moment I did not immediately recognize him was when, most solemnly, he sat beside me at the general banquet for the two delegations at the Palace where President Hamid Karzai works and King Zahir Shah, the Baba-i-Qaum (or father of the community) lives. There was complete lack of social distinction at this formal lunch. Everyone involved in the two delegations took a seat at the table, including the police outrider and the driver of hired vehicles. Everyone was an equal at the table. The one difference was that my driver beamed even more after roast meat, pilao, bread, brinjal, beans, salad and melon.

While Mr Yashwant Sinha served the nation with exemplary zeal, I took my wizened driver towards Baagh-e-Babar, the last garden and final resting place of Babar. My driver had some difficulty finding out where Mr Hamid Karzai lived, but he had no problem taking me to where Babar lay dead.

The beauty of this garden ascends on you. The rise is deceptive. War and the ignorance of the Taliban have left it desolate, but there were lush grass lawns, beds of hovering flowers and a straight line of playing fountains once. Some of the flowers have returned and foreign restorers have brought their instruments of alignment to begin rejuvenation, but this beauty‘s scars will take time to heal.

The pavilion is a shock. Bullets and mortar have ripped it apart. The mosque above has not been spared either, its tiled roof tumbling out of control. The grave is small and simple; the obituary elegant and factual. From the high point of the grave, the meaning of war becomes terribly clear, both in the immediate and in the extended view. Below us lies a devastated area of Kabul, hectares of homes and roads that have been smashed by shell and wrecked by the fire of the fiercest battles. This is the famous road to Kabul University, the dividing line between forces of the Taliban and those of Ahmed Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance.

Destiny was cruel to Masood. It gave him his hour after September 11; but it took him away a minute before the hour struck. Masood was assassinated by two suicide bombers who fooled him into giving an interview by posing as European journalists.

They are building a statue of Masood on the Great Masood Road, which is what the principal artery of Kabul is now called. The honour will dominate Kabul; at least until the next war.

‘Well Come,‘ says the sign at the gate of the Kabul Intercontinental. English can go to the devil in these circumstances; I feel welcome. Even the Turkish soldiers who check me out do it with a smile. We drive through the gate and past a hall that says what it was rather than what it is: Ballroom.

The hotel reopened after the defeat of the Taliban; the carpets are as frayed as the uniforms; there is one local soap in the bathroom and it makes more sense to wait till the evening brings the temperature down than complain about airconditioning. But I feel at home. From the Drug Store Cum Antiqu (sic) Shop in the foyer, owned by Yak E. Bood and Yak E. Naboo, come the strains of ‘Aa jao tarapte hain armaan, ab raat guzarne wali hai,‘ which is soon followed by ‘Ghar aaya mera pardesi, pyas bujhi mere ankhiyon kee.‘ Across the hall from the shop is the Powder Room. I blink. I have not seen a Powder Room being called a Powder Room ever! Ballroom. Powder Room. Queen Victoria is alive and in Kabul.

The portrait of Ahmed Shah Masood looks down upon us. But he doesn’t mind, really. Where else would a Hindi song meet Queen Victoria except at an Intercontinental in Kabul?

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

ONCE, many years ago, I asked Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, then as now, president of the Pakistan Democratic Party, whether his party had assets beyond his own political experience, sagacity, and negotiating skills. He smiled and said his party placed a higher value on quality than on numbers, which are probably very small indeed.

PDP has no support base to speak of anywhere in the country except one or two districts in southern Punjab. It has never won more than a couple of seats in any legislature. The Nawabzada himself has not sat in the National Assembly in recent times.

Asghar Khan, once head of the Pakistan Air Force, founded Tehrik-i-Istaqlal some thirty years ago for reasons that remain obscure. TI has no known support base outside of Hazara and its neighbourhood. Only once has it won a legislative seat. A few months ago the party was said to have merged with some other groups and the late Omar Asghar Khan became the new organization’s president. But apparently TI is still around and a gentleman of the name of Rehmat Khan Vardag is now its president.

Mr Imran Khan founded Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf a few years ago and became its president. It is too young to have acquired a history. The only elections (1997) it has contested so far was without any success. Imran Khan is a renowned sportsman (cricketer); tall and handsome; presumably a decent “guy”; husband of a fabulously wealthy woman; and a philanthropist. But he has never been a professional politician. Some of his lieutenants are saying that PTI will emerge from the next elections as the largest party in the country, but that is unlikely.

Also deserving the title of minor parties are the factional groupings that have broken away, at one time or another, from the two major national parties — for instance: PPP (SB), PML (Chattha), PML (Qasim), and PML (Pagara), among others. The Pagara group may graduate to a higher status if it merges with some of the party’s other factions; until then it stays in the ranks of minor parties. None of these groups has much of a following outside the areas where their respective presidents live.

There are parties whose electoral successes in the country as a whole may have been modest, but their impact on public order and tranquillity — of late mostly negative — has been very substantial, and for that reason they cannot be regarded as minor. Included in this group are three of the more prominent Islamic parties — Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), Jamiat-ul-Ulama-i-Islam (JUI), and Jamiat-Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP).

Also noteworthy in this connection are the regional or provincial parties, such as the Awami National Party (ANP), the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and numerous Sindhi and Balochi organizations. Neither the ANP nor the MQM has a nationwide constituency, but each has done well in provincial elections and, in coalition with other parties, formed the provincial government. The regional parties are important because, depending on how the tide goes, they can act as preservers but also as wreckers of national unity and integrity. They too are therefore not to be counted as minor parties.

I have named only four minor parties; there are surely many others, but the observations below should apply to all of them. Let us first ask why these parties came into being and what their founders had in mind. Politics is generally regarded as a quest for power on the part of those who engage in it. None of the founders of the parties under reference has ever attained and exercised ruling authority and power. What went wrong?

In most professions an entrant begins at a lower rung of the ladder and then works his way up, usually one rung at a time. Many such persons will not expect ever to reach the top and happily retire from a mid-level or a slightly higher slot. This is the way it goes in politics also. Not all local councillors will become, or aspire to become, members of a provincial legislature or the National Assembly. Only a few of those who enter the assemblies will become ministers. One problem with the men we are considering is that, with the exception of the Nawabzada, they wanted to begin their political careers sitting at the top, and not from a lower position. Yet, they did not invest the requisite amount of effort in their enterprise. They should have pondered a page or two in the book of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The late Mr. Bhutto had had extensive experience of government and some exposure to politics, when he parted company with Ayub Khan in the summer of 1966. He coveted the seat at the top and knew that he would have to reach it through the political process. He initiated and carried on a mass contact campaign and rubbed shoulders with ordinary people in cities, towns, and villages. He was out campaigning virtually every day of the week for four and a half years in a row. None of the founders of the parties we are discussing here has made this kind of investment.

Why not? They may not have had the needed energy or skills. Perhaps they were not men of the people, the “hail fellow, well met,” back slapping, and hugging type. With the exception of the Nawabzada, none of them is a fluent, forceful or exciting public speaker. It is possible also that they were not ambitious enough, that their will to power was not dominant enough to push them towards high posts in our system of governance.

In any political system the person at the top — president or prime minister — is not the only one who exercises authority and power. Ministers do the same to a considerable degree. If power is what he wanted, any of these party makers — Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, Asghar Khan, Pir Pagara, Imran Khan — could have joined one of the ruling parties (PML or PPP) and received ministerial office merely for the asking. It appears that, even if they did not expect ever to reach the top, they did not want to accept a position in which they would be subordinate to someone else. They would rather be the big fish in a little pond than a medium-sized fish in a river.

A quick look at the background of these men may help us unwrap this puzzle. The Nawabzada comes from a family of great landed aristocrats. He has never worked for a living. Once an activist in the Majlis-i-Ahrar, he is a veteran politician and negotiator. He has made significant contributions to our national politics as a leader in the struggles against authoritarianism and dictatorship — Pakistan National Alliance (PNA), Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), and the current Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD).

He has excellent command of Urdu and knows Farsi, but he is not fluent in English, which may be one of the reasons why he has never seriously entertained the prospect of becoming the head of government. He has recognition and influence enough to sustain his ego, and while no longer wealthy, he does not need the salary that would come with the post of a minister.

Pir Pagara is one of our great feudal lords, and he is also the spiritual leader of the Hurs in Sindh, who invest him with an element of divinity. In his case the question of working under the supervision or direction of someone else simply does not arise. He is known more for his enigmatic statements about politics than for any political action that he has ever taken. He wants to be above the rough and tumble of practical politics. He is a drawing room politician of the old school, known well enough to have the ear of newsmen and some attention from the powers that be. He is content with being taken as the head of a party even if it makes no waves.

Asghar Khan was a competent head of the PAF. That experience may have led him to believe that he must always be the head of whatever enterprise he undertakes. It is a saddening aspect of his situation that while his chosen occupation, following his retirement from government service, has been politics, he is not much of a politician. A perfect gentleman, he has undoubtedly done countless good deeds in his life. But the only political act for which history will remember him is the obstructionist role he played in the PNA’s negotiations with Prime Minister Bhutto in the summer of 1977, and (if the late Maulana Kausar Niazi’s account is to be believed) for his letter to the generals urging them to overthrow the government of the day.

The case of Imran Khan is the strangest of all. He may be a good man, and famous, and wealthy. but to date he has not done anything very newsworthy that is of a distinctly political nature. The reasons for his founding a purportedly political party and becoming its head are entirely unclear. The move may have been intended to find a dramatic enough venture on which to spend his money, and to give his own family and friends the good feeling that they have a future prime minister or president of Pakistan in their midst.

One other explanation of why these men are in politics at all may be considered. If a person wants to feel he is important, and desires public recognition, a political role is more likely than most others to put him on the front pages of newspapers. Observations of persons in other professions will not make headlines.

While many of the minor parties are superfluous, there is no need to exclude them formally from the political scene or electoral contests. They do no harm to our political system inasmuch as most people do not take them seriously. Their presence may make more work for the Election Commission, but that is no hardship, for the Commission has plenty of rest and relaxation during the intervals between elections.

A MONTH to the polling day and a strange kind of torpor has descended on the country. It is the feeling one has on a long summer afternoon drawing to a close. The evening brings change but no cheer. At the other end of the spectrum is the hysterical fanaticism or political animosity. Missing is the hopefulness that should mark the promised return to democracy or, as Gen Musharraf insists, on the inauguration of a ‘real’ democracy.

Looking back, it seems in the noise of reform, reconstruction, devolution and accountability, the common place things that matter to the weak and the poor — jobs and justice — were neglected all the way.

The mechanism of the state at the grassroots have remained as oppressive and ineffectual as ever. May be it has become worse.

General Musharraf tiresomely repeats that honest and clean people will rule the country after the elections. He should identify them. The people see no change, not one jot or an iota. It is the same old leaders, and their henchmen, wallowing in the same old political pond. If things shape as is intended, the new head honcho could be Mian Azhar or Chaudhry Shujaat or Ejazul Haq.

But if this is all that was to happen after three years, it could have been made to happen before nightfall on October 12, 1999.

The ageing generals and whiz-kids who went about inventing a new political culture and structures failed to realize that they had to confine their ideas and exertions within the bounds of the parliamentary form of democracy.

They were well aware of this limitation imposed by the Supreme Court in a legitimacy verdict otherwise conferring unlimited authority on the military government.

The authors of the news system should also have known that the parliamentary government is a product of tradition and conventions more than any other form, and its central and inescapable feature is party organizations. Two mainstream parties with programmes not too radically different (as the Conservatives and Labour are in Britain) and evenly balanced in popular vote make for stability and continuity of national policies. A third and smaller party (Liberal Democrats in Britain) waits in the wings for either to falter.

Further, the political parties embrace all the elective institutions at all levels. Some elected individuals might opt to stay out of them and yet serve their electorates but the influence of the political parties remains overwhelming.

The inventors of the new system, thus, were badly mistaken in assuming that the local councils, especially the district and city governments, elected without the props of the political parties, would throw up a new leadership and, at the same time, subdue the cantankerous provincial governments which only squander resources and foster prejudices. What has actually happened is wholly contrary to that naive assumption. the stranglehold of the parties and their old leadership which ended at the provincial level, now extends to the districts and villages.

The control of the parties at the district level will no longer be restricted to the civic affairs. The party bosses will now run the whole administration. The life-long dream of the local potentates to order the thanedar and the tapedar about would by now have come true. The advice at the relevant time to keep the law and order and civic management apart was construed as an attempt to sabotage the plan for devolution of power to the grassroots.

The practitioners of power at the grassroots, it should now be obvious, are of the same ilk which had to be expelled for their corruption and shenanigans at the apex level. Their reach now would be longer and wider.

The dividing line between politics and administration getting hazier by the day now would vanish altogether.

In a parliamentary system new leadership is thrown up only by the parties. In Pakistan, where the parliamentary tradition is weak and conventions not at all respected, the parties are inevitably dominated by rich families or charismatic individuals. Attempts to change that pattern artificially and instantly has prompted Ejazul Haq in Punjab, Aftab Sherpao in the Frontier and Imtiaz Sheikh in Sindh to show up as new aspirants for power befitting the requirements of the regime. There could be no greater travesty.

The political forces, as they are poised now, do not hold promise of throwing up a stable and sensible government despite the disqualification imposed on some and preference shown for others. The PPP, the Q, N, Z (add more alphabets) Muslim Leagues, MQM, the religious combine of MMA and the hotchpotch of ARD and GDA all seem to look at the people as chattels in the bazaar of politics.

That is the tragic denouement of the three years of Musharraf’s strivings to institute a democracy for the people and not for the professional politicians and priests. Musharraf’s laws and reforms have not helped bring forth one new face to inspire hope or faith.

For a while it seemed the general tried to bring forth youth like Omar Asghar Khan and Imran Khan but then some past masters lay in ambush for them. Omar died in despair or was killed, and now Imran has been pronounced unfit for a public role because of his past antics and marrying a Jewish woman. His glory of cricket and philanthropy in the form of the cancer hospital have become irrelevant in the deeply prejudiced minds and perceptions of bigots and political opportunists.

But the politicians think only in political terms, especially when it comes to assassinating the character of those who pose a threat to their ambitions or hereditary interests.

In any case, now no choice is left to the people but to brace for another round of old-style politics with the old politicians without their leaders. What Musharraf still can do is to encourage the best among them to come together after the elections to form a durable government. Whatever his own constitutional term, it would be folly for the general to assume that he would outlast a prime minister or parliament of his own creation.