SO FAR the most important among what has come our way, in return for our support to the US in its war on terror, is debt rescheduling and write-offs as these have long-term implications. Balance of payments support and cash transfers for services rendered. (These can be discontinued at a moment’s notice).

However, they have helped stabilize the exchange rate. Because of recessionary conditions in the West and the consequent reduction in interest rates, returns from investment in Pakistan look attractive, resulting in an increased inflow of funds, which had been held abroad.

This has further increased reserves and, as a matter of fact, there is some modest pressure on revaluation of the rupee, which has so far been resisted by our financial managers. Most of it has been windfall, but the managers are entitled to take credit for what has happened. What I would like to add is that developing countries cannot have too much reserves.

As far as foreign exchange reserves are concerned, India has recently boosted foreign exchange reserves by more than $ 20 billion. According to the (London) Economist “the rupee’s recent strength is only partly related to India’s prowess in software and the mushrooming of ‘business-process outsourcing’ in such projects as call centres. The chunky surplus on invisibles owes more to remittances from non-resident Indians, attracted to the stability of the rupee and its higher interest rates have been moving their offshore deposits back home.”

The main difference between India and Pakistan is that India has also earned some of the surplus, whilst ours has been almost entirely gifted. Nevertheless, it does show a certain amount of confidence in the future which goes to the credit of the present team of financial managers.

General Musharraf has correctly learned the mantra of poverty reduction and employment, but one suspects that he is at sea when it comes to deciding how this is to be achieved and his advisers have not been particularly forthcoming with the truth. Basically, poverty reduction and job creation comes through economic growth. The other factor directly related to improvement in per capita income is the rate of population growth. This in turn is influenced by improvement in education, particularly female education, provision of clean drinking water, improved sanitation and health facilities, and the resulting reduction in infant and maternal mortality. The improvement in health and female education make family planning more effective lending to further poverty reduction.

The failure in our economic policy is our inability to increase rates of growth through efficient investment in spite of a considerable lowering of interest rates.

Micro-credit is a good slogan. But it is very difficult to manage: it helps alleviate poverty in a modest sort of way but is no substitute for overall economic growth. If the government was serious it should have invited Dr Yunus from Bangladesh to help and advise on setting this up. Small and medium enterprises are a more promising area of investment, but it has not accomplished a great deal as yet. In all these endeavours finding the right people and the appropriate structure is the main problem.

One’s real concern is the PSDP (public sector development programme) which is overly loaded with dams and canals of rather dubious economic value. They appear to be low-return, long-gestation projects. No economic rates of return have been disclosed. As a matter of normal precaution such large projects should be open to public scrutiny, through the publication of their feasibility reports. One gets the impression that this has been unduly influenced by the super-strong general in charge of Wapda.

One of the standing complaints about the irrigation network is that nearly half the water is lost through seepage and evaporation before it gets to the field. If we are adding new dams to store another 5.2 million acre feet of water for irrigation, then out of this only less than three million acre feet will actually get to the fields. If we could reduce loss of water through seepage we should be able to save a lot from the existing sources of irrigation water.

In large areas of Sindh the ground water is saline. This water loss through seepage is wasted and merely adds to the problem of salinity. Obviously, in any attempt to solve or reduce seepage in a manner which is economically feasible, a start should be made with canals passing through areas where the underground water is brackish.

The bigger disappointment with Wapda is in the power sector. Claims have been made of saving so many billion dollars over long periods of time. These claims merely deceive the public which understandably gets angry when power rates actually keep going up all the time. When power is being purchased from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) on a cost-plus basis, including full coverage of debt servicing, etc., at 60 per cent of capacity, most, if not all, of the debt will be repaid in about ten years and the cost will continue to decline. If more than 60 per cent power is purchased, the cost of the additional purchase would also be much less. The cost of electricity from the IPPs has also been negotiated downward to some extent — by how much has not been disclosed by Wapda.

The Hub Power Company was more or less shoved down our throat by the World Bank at an unbelievable cost. I always found it rather ironic when Ms. Mieko, vice-president of the World Bank, in charge of Pakistan’s development destiny, used to publicly scold Pakistan for not keeping its international commitments. Of course, the World Bank could not quite anticipate the alleged avarice of the Benazir-Zardari duo. The bank must also be given credit for finally putting a stop to any more IPPs. But Wapda line losses plus unpaid bills are still around 40 per cent. The management of the general who runs it has not been a roaring success. By now Wapda under intelligent management would have been decentralized into a transmission, generation and several distribution companies. But the general has preferred to keep all power in his own hands.

The railway central had a much better PR (no pun intended) but he was, when ordering Chinese carriages, unable to calculate the appropriate size of a railway carriage which could be accommodated on our rail system. How much can we trust such a management?

As far as overall economic management is concerned, we have faithfully followed the dictates of the IMF and they, on their side, have overlooked our transgressions in breaking deficit-financing constraints. Opening up the economy according to orthodox economic theology is not going to improve Pakistan’s rate of growth at this stage of its development. Our PSDP does not appear to represent an optimal utilization of resources. We should review the construction of all those dams and instead develop our newly discovered gas resources as quickly as possible. It would provide a much better and quicker return on investment. The problem has become involved in the conflict between development and privatization. Development should be treated as a first priority while privatization can be done in its own good time.

We have a problem of over-investment in the sugar industry, particularly in Punjab, which has been politically inspired as many of the sugar mills belong to families with political connections. Punjab is not the best place for producing sugar; that distinction belongs to Sindh. Sugarcane is a relatively water-intensive crop and we don’t know what to do with the excess sugar produced. Last year’s surplus sugar is going to cost us six billion rupees as export subsidy and will probably continue to do so in the future. This is a long-term problem and government should seriously worry about how to deal with it.

The climate of Sindh enables recovery of 10-15 per cent more sugar from a unit of cane crushed as compared to Punjab. The price of cane fixed by the government in Sindh is very high in order to compensate Punjab for this difference in productivity. This is bad economic policy. Sugarcane prices should be left to the market.

Besides, the optimal opening date for mills in Sindh is December 1 as the yield starts rising rapidly from this point on until it starts tapering off in March. If the crushing season is restricted to around 130 - 140 days, 15 - 20 per cent more sugar would be produced from the same amount of cane. This is an easily verifiable figure from the information published by the Sugar Mills Association.

There has also been over-investment in cement but that will work itself out in time.

On the financial side it is now being generally realized that universal banking for various reasons has not turned out to be such a great idea. Although investment banking can be done by a commercial bank, it should generally not be merged with commercial banking activity but should be a separate area exclusively dealing with such matters. At present, except for PICIC we have no separate long-term lending institution left. Instead, funds are being utilized in promoting consumer banking.

What is the appropriate balance between consumption, saving and investment? For developing countries high rates of saving and investment are far more important compared to the encouragement of consumption. Nothing has been done by the government to encourage savings and investment. As a matter of fact, the new extra double taxation proposed on dividends will discourage equity investment in new ventures and generally have an adverse effect on the stock market.

Equally important is the fact that investment should be done efficiently. This is a specialized field full of pitfalls.

The other major deficiency is lack of diversification of exports. From time to time the cry goes up for export led growth. Recently the World Bank has also lent its sonorous voice to this demand. But so far this has eluded us.

WHEN Francis Fukuyama first proclaimed the ‘end of history’ in his lecture at the University of Chicago in 1989, the world was well on its way to reinventing history by standing the conventional wisdom on its head. By the close of the last century it had become obvious that most of the cherished ideals of the contemporary civilization, that had converged to create an illusion of end of history, had their flip side too. The triumphant ideology was clearly in the throes of a conceptual insurrection that just could not be quelled.

Prosperity, the ultimate objective of free-market economy, could wreck the institution of family and ravage the biosphere through a permissive consumerist culture that it tends to promote. Democracy, the foundation of free and liberal society, often creates a climate conducive to the mushrooming of ever new ethnic, linguistic and religious identities that cause tensions within and between nations, and destabilize states.

Globalization, expected to create a universal economic and technological brotherhood in prosperity, can offer, for the present and in the foreseeable future, only economic efficiency without social justice, and global competitiveness without global harmony. Freedom of thought, expression, association, travel, and of access to information works well not only for the open societies but also for its enemies.

It so happens that each of these aberrations of the contemporary civilization raises the same question: How much of freedom is too much? It was never easy to formulate a sensible answer to this question, nor was there ever any urgency to do that. But after September 11 this question has assumed a new significance, even urgency, and the focus, especially of the law enforcement agencies, has narrowed down to the civil liberties that are seen as an impediment to dealing with the terrorists.

If the war on terrorism is not over soon we could see the support for liberal values, across different cultures, put on hold. That would, indeed, be a reversal of the direction of the socio-political evolution just at the moment when the world had come to accept, after much ideological mayhem, freedom as the supreme value in any political dispensation. The West too is poised to take a step or two backwards, to barter away part of the freedom of its citizens in exchange for the promise of security of the homeland.

But is there, one may ask, a correlation between the degree of internal security in a country and the level of freedom its citizens have, and is the correlation such that the one could be enhanced by diminishing the other? Or, a simpler question: Do the citizens of the countries where freedom has been dispensed reluctantly and in small doses feel more secure? The experience, worldwide, is that freedom itself is the best security. Many nations in the last century did sacrifice individual freedom in the name of national security, but they very quickly became inmates of a vast prison house.

But these questions are not likely to be raised. Not just yet. For the present, terrorism, the most dramatic fallout of many religio-ethnic conflicts, holds our attention with such exclusivity and intensity that these questions have lost their immediate relevance. We are not that keen to look at the big picture as we were before September 11. But what, one may ask, constitutes the big picture? Well, the big picture is the state of human existence as reflected in the intricate relationships, such as the one between humans and the environment, between different societies, and between the individual and society. These and other relationships are now under stress and in the process of breakdown. We do not yet have a full comprehension of what is going on, but we do occasionally get a glimpse or two of the detritus thrown up by the on-going erosion of these relationships.

Consider four of the many global relationships, chosen chronologically, that are in the process of breakdown. First, the modern humans, who have flourished in the cocoon of the biosphere for thousands of years, now threaten its very existence through prolonged tampering with, and contamination of, its various elements from the ozone layer to sub-soil water. Second, Muslims have coexisted for more than 1,400 years with Christians and Jews, more often in peace and friendship than in conflict, and never under circumstances more violent than the Christians and Jews have experienced between themselves. Suddenly, the Muslims have become a cause of clash of civilizations that, according to some, is inevitable.

Third, the present civilization, a creation of modern science and technology, is now threatened by the power, proliferation and products of modern technology. The weapons of mass destruction in the existing arsenals are not the only problem. The continued acquisition of ever more lethal and exotic technology of mass destruction, whose global spread cannot be controlled, poses an even greater danger. The present relationship between the modern technology and the modern civilization, thus, presents the ultimate paradox: the two cannot exist without each other; and the two cannot exist together, not for long.

Fourth, the US which has been a defender of the free world and a promoter of international cooperation in war and in peace, throughout the last century, is now embarked on a course that is at once isolationist and intrusive. In its isolationist moves it is willing to walk out of international agreements at will; in its intrusive moves it is determined to launch ‘pre-emptive strikes’ on any target anywhere, even in the teeth of opposition by the rest of the world. This would place the US in an entirely new kind of relationship with the rest of the world. Surely, the world is not looking forward to that kind of new relationship.

Now, is it not rather intriguing that different elements of the global framework of relationships, put in place from the primeval to the present times, should begin to collapse at the same time? What could have happened during the recent past to unleash the forces of disruption? We are too close to the events to comprehend all the causes of this chaos, but we can identify at least three major ones.

First, the unprecedented increase in the production of global wealth and its concentration within a few nations and, within those nations, in the hands of a few individuals. The concentration of wealth is mind-boggling: the value of the assets of 84 richest persons in the world is greater than the GDP of 1.2 billion Chinese. The unrestrained increase in output has caused disruption of the relationship between humans and the environment; while the concentration of wealth in a few nations and few individuals is the cause of a growing imbalance that is beginning to disrupt the equilibrium between and within nations.

Second, the unprecedented production, accumulation, and lethality of the military arsenal. The worldwide military expenditure that had taken a dip after the end of the cold war has risen again to about three billion dollars per day, as it was in the 1980s. After the recent increase in the military budget of the US and of other nations it may go up to more than four billion dollars per day. Together with uncontrolled production of wealth, it gobbles up resources, including the nonrenewable resources, and widens the chasm between the rich and the poor. The rich become richer by selling weapons, the poor become poorer by buying them, and both, the rich and poor, make the world a much more dangerous place.

Third, the cause of so much of misery in the world, including terrorism, is political, economic and social injustice. It manifests itself in endless combinations, and could, in time, lead to an extremely dangerous situation where millions of people may come to believe that life is not worth living. Indeed, thousands, if not yet millions, of people in the world have already come to that conclusion.

These three mutually supportive evils — imbalance in national and individual wealths; huge investments in the weapons of mass destruction; unabated injustice in its many forms and manifestations — are, indeed, the axis of evil. In the crusade against this axis of evil, the world has to be led by a visionary dedicated to a Just World Order. And that visionary has to be an American.

E-mail: tvo@isb.comsats.net.pk

WATCHING American TV can be a surreal experience. Sandwiched between ads for instant weight loss products, predigested fast food, and incontinence panties, cable TV commentators bay like rabid dogs for war against Iraq, and subject nations daring to oppose President Bush’s crusade to venomous abuse or sneering disdain.

France, which speaks with the strongest, most logical voice of those opposing war, has become the special target of vituperation and hatred in America’s leading pro-Israel media — Fox TV, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post — and the Bush administration’s bete noire. Particularly so, now that France, Germany, and Russia vow to veto US attempts to ram a war-enabling resolution through the UN Security Council.

France, many Americans claim, should do whatever Washington orders out of gratitude for US ‘saving’ it in two world wars. US TV features angry veterans standing in American military cemeteries in Normandy, denouncing France for “stabbing America in the back” — as if invading Iraq to grab its oil and crushing Israel’s enemies had anything to do with World War II.

Few flag-waving pundits mention America sat out almost 40 per cent of WWII until attacked by Japan. In 1940, the German armed forces were the equivalent of the US armed forces today — a full military generation ahead of other nations. France’s entire army was destroyed in battle by the invincible Germans; had the US fought Germany in 1940, it too would have been routed. The Soviet Union, not the US, defeated Germany, destroying over 100 Nazi divisions.

So enough with all the bombast about Word War II. In the eyes of Europeans and most of the world, George Bush’s administration looks dangerously aggressive, dominated as it is by petrohawks and neo-conservative ideologues linked to Israel’s far right. These little Mussolinis have no time for diplomacy or multi-nationalism. No wonder a recent Pew Research poll found that formerly favourable ratings of the US have plummeted in 19 out of 27 nations surveyed.

It seems at times that President Bush is even more eager to bomb Paris than Baghdad. In fact, the administration has been treating France like an enemy, rather than America’s oldest ally and intimate friend. Neo-conservatives even accuse France of anti-Semitism, a disgusting slander.

Far from being an enemy, France has been doing what a true good friend should do: telling Washington its policy is wrong and dangerous, unlike the handkissing leaders of Britain, Spain and Italy, who crave Bush’s political support, or the East European coalition of the shilling, ex-communist politicians pandering to Washington for cash. Seventy per cent of British, and 90 per cent of Italians and Spaniards oppose Bush’s crusade.

France’s President Jacques Chirac speaks for an overwhelming majority of Europeans and, indeed, the world’s people, in urging the US to opt for diplomacy and UN inspections over a war that will not be worth the loss of a single American soldier, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqis and chaos across Mesopotamia. So, too, warns the great and wise Pope, John Paul II.

The contrast between France’s reasoned diplomatic response and Bush’s belligerent behaviour could not be more stark. As is the dignified, logical tone set by President Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin compared to the bullying, low-brow, locker-room talk issuing from the White House that has seriously damaged America’s reputation and image around the globe.

This week Turkey’s new parliament, chosen in the first truly democratic election in memory, followed Europe, courageously rejecting Washington’s bribes and demands US ground forces be allowed to attack Iraq from Turkish territory. Washington’s churlish response — withdrawing its bribes, threatening punishment — contrasted curiously to Bush’s claims his goal in Iraq is bringing democracy to the Mideast.

Democracy, its seems, is fine so long as it does US bidding. Inconveniently, Turkey’s people and democratic government voted a resounding no to war. Pakistan would do well to follow Turkey’s brave example, particularly in rejecting any UN vote on war. But how long the Turks can resist intense pressure from the US and its friends, Turkey’s hard right generals, remains to be seen.

Bush’s crusade against Iraq will go on with or without Turkey. The war will be akin to throwing a grenade into a huge hornet’s nest. France, which lives next to the Arab world and has five million Muslim citizens, warns an invasion and occupation of Iraq will roil the entire region, spark more terrorism, and hit Europe with a dangerous backblast. But Bush couldn’t care less, as he would say.

While Bush prepares war against demolished Iraq, he is ducking the surging nuclear confrontation with North Korea, which, unlike Iraq, truly threatens North America. His outrageous dereliction of duty over Korea, obsessive war-mongering against Iraq, crude, aggressive behaviour worthy of Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, threats against the UN, $400 billion deficit that will infect the world with inflation, and damage to America’s reputation — such are Bush’s ‘accomplishments’ to date. Who needs enemies with world-class blunderers like this in charge? America’s friends and neighbours, led by France, the mother of diplomacy, rightly warn the steroidal Bush administration to halt its rush to war. President Chirac and Foreign Minister de Villepin deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Americans owe France an apology, and a hearty ‘merci.’— Copyright Eric Margolis 2003

JUST over two thousand years ago, when the Roman republic turned itself into an empire and extended the ‘pax romana’ over most of the known world — western Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, plus the great reservoir of barbarian tribes in eastern Europe and central Asia — Rome exercised direct control over about half the total population, and was able to tax them and raise troops from them. So the Roman empire lasted over four hundred years.

Many people in Washington now talk openly of turning the American republic into an imperial power that enforces a ‘pax americana’ around the planet, but the United States has only four per cent of the planet’s population, and its people are equally averse to high taxes and US casualties. The demand for US troops and money will rapidly outrun the supply, so the American empire will last about twenty minutes — but it may be a hectic and painful twenty minutes.

The dream of American empire has attracted American neo-conservatives for decades, but it gained a much broader following after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The only apparent constraint on US power had been removed, and the idea that the world will be a safer place if it is governed by multilateral organisations under the rule of law began to give way to the fantasy that the United States can and should make the world a safer place (particularly for American interests) by the unilateral exercise of its own immense power.

Official Washington was starting to oppose any new international rules that might act as a brake on the free exercise of US power even in Bill Clinton’s administration. It was Clinton, not George W. Bush, who fought an international ban on land mines and tried to sabotage the new International Criminal Court. President Bush’s cancellation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the US veto on new provisions for intrusive inspections under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Washington’s more recent rejection of similar attempts to write some provisions for enforcement into the Biological Weapons Treaty simply follow in the same path.

As Boston University professor and retired US army officer Andrew Bacevich wrote in a recent edition of ‘The National Interest’, “In all of American public life, there is hardly a single prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time.” This is called hubris, and it is generally followed by nemesis. That will probably arrive during the next phase of the fantasy: the wildly ambitious project to make the conquest of Iraq the cornerstone for a wholesale restructuring of the Arab world along American lines.

“America has made and kept this kind of commitment before, in the peace that followed a world war,” said Mr. Bush late last month, comparing the project with the rebuilding of German and Japan after 1945. “We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary.” You don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but tears are probably more appropriate, for that is where this is all going to end.

Iraq is no more like Germany than Saddam Hussein is like Adolf Hitler. Germany and Japan in 1945 were industrial states with strong national identities, several generations’ experience of democracy, homogeneous populations, and fully professional bureaucracies. Iraq is an artificial state of competing ethnic identities with no democratic tradition and a deeply politicised, totally corrupt state apparatus dominated by a single ethno-religious minority.

Never mind running the world or spreading democracy throughout the Middle East; merely occupying Iraq is likely to prove too heavy a burden for the US public to tolerate for very long. The Kurds in the north will try to keep the de facto independence they have enjoyed for the past ten years, and the Turkish army will move in to ensure that they don’t set up an independent Kurdistan that would act as a beacon for Turkey’s own huge Kurdish minority.

The Iraqi Kurds will fight if the Turks invade, and America can either intervene in this no-win situation or leave the north of Iraq to another round of bloody fighting.

The Shia Arab majority of Iraq’s population, long excluded from power by the Sunni Arab minority, will also try to leave Iraq unless it gets the lion’s share of power in Baghdad.

—Copyright

THE opposition in the National Assembly has finally, and with considerable aplomb, rejected the country’s Constitution which had been peppered last year with amendments contained in the controversial Legal Framework Order (LFO). United in a steering committee, the opposition went one step further.

It refused to allow the 342 members of the lower house to function unless the LFO was tossed out of the window. The ruling party (PML-Q) and its allies don’t have the necessary majority in the parliament to have the LFO, ratified.

Opposition members, many of whom had not even read either the original 1973 Constitution or the amendments thereto, were already miffed because they were sitting on the wrong side of the fence. They instinctively reacted to what they were told was contained in the LFO. They created, what Walter Lippman described in his classic ‘Public Opinion’ as “counterfeits of reality in the world of their pseudo-environment. The problem is, of course, that they were living and thinking in the real world where hardly anything makes any sense.” And when copies of the Constitution were finally circulated, the tide which had continued to swell finally broke the dykes.

The major opposition parties had made it abundantly clear, when their members entered the National Assembly for the first time, that they were taking an oath under the Constitution as it existed before the October 1999 coup which ousted Nawaz Sharif, and that they did not recognize the amendments made by the military government as they had not yet been ratified by the parliament. Critics had expressed the hope that the government of Mir Zafarullah Jamali would make efforts to iron out differences, so that some sort of compromise could be worked out with some of the more vocal opposition MNAs like Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who had at one stage said that he was prepared to accept part of the LFO provided the president would stick his uniform back in the closet.

Recently, he has become more intransigent and uncompromising and has threatened to resign from the National Assembly if the LFO remains part of the Constitution. While members of the ruling PML-Q might secretly hope the Jamaat chief will carry out his threat, it doesn’t augur at all well for the system of government not in place.

In some ways this is a pity, because a few of the amendments contained in the LFO have a certain merit. For instance, the graduation clause. Then the substantial increase in the quota of women’s seats and the status given to the National Accountability Bureau are two other positive aspects of the LFO. The controversial issues, however, which stick out like a sore thumb, are the creation of the National Security Council, and having the same person as head of state and chief of the army. And it is unlikely that there will be any compromise on these two issues.

So far, there is no evidence to suggest that the prime minister is making any real overtures to the opposition. On the contrary, he has been chiding them for not accepting the LFO as part of the Constitution. He has even taunted them for opposing the LFO after contesting elections under it. He is widely perceived by both the opposition and the press as relying too heavily on the establishment and meeting the president rather too frequently, ostensibly for briefings on important issues. One wonders what would have been Mr Jamali’s reaction if the roles had been reversed, and the PML-Q MNAs had not been sitting on the treasury benches.

It is not clear just how the president is going to wriggle out of this one. He had a minor setback when the Supreme Court, in a recent judgment, allowed candidates who had been defeated in the election to the National Assembly to contest for the senate elections in disregard of a prohibition imposed by the then military regime.

However, whether the LFO stays, is altered, or turfed out of the Constitution altogether, is not the sort of issue over which the majority of the people of this country will lose any sleep. They have had bad experiences under both army and civilian rule.

Some of them might remember the classic lines from Richard Attenborough’s film on ‘Gandhi’ where in a scene Mahatma Gandhi said, “India is seven hundred thousand villages, not a handful of lawyers from Bombay and Delhi who make clever speeches for each other and for those liberal English magazines that might grant them a few lines. Unless we stand shoulder to shoulder with the masses in the broiling sun, India will never be free, nor will we be able to challenge the British as one nation.”

The lower middle class is worried about the little things that touch their lives, like finding a decent, inexpensive school for their kids, having to queue up outside a bank three times a month in the broiling sun to pay three separate utility bills, spending three and a half hours of a twelve-hour working day commuting to and from work, and trying to hang on to a job in an increasing spiral of uncertainty and insecurity.

“Would it make any difference”, a medical student who helped change a punctured tyre on my car, asked, “if the opposition does upset the apple cart? We have had 54 years of rotten apples and what have they done to improve the lot of the poor? We’ve still got the acid throwers who go about their business with impunity, especially if they are the scions of former governors, people who rape rural women on the instructions of a panchayat, and men who kill their wives, sisters and daughters in the name of honour, while the station house officer looks the other way. How different things would have been if we’d had a man like Joseph Stalin.

The more one thinks about the peculiar state of affairs in the country the more one gets depressed. I have this huge imaginary roulette wheel which I spin from time to time whenever I hear about the latest iniquities of the bureaucracy. The other day, the little white ball fell into the slot marked Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, that beautiful verdant isle that featured in the ‘Three Princes of Serendip’, the title of a Persian fairy tale in which the heroes were always making fortunate and unexpected discoveries.

I was always given to understand that, using Mr Bush’s quaint but simple classification, the Sri Lankans, for the government of Pakistan, were the good guys and the Indians were the bad guys. If that is the case, why is it mandatory for visitors from Sri Lanka to Pakistan to report regularly at the police station for verification? There they are harassed by demands for gratification.

The affable and urbane foreign minister, Mian Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, should look into this sordid way in which citizens of friendly countries are treated by the immigration authorities. He should also pay a visit to the communal trough where visitors are herded together. So far the Sri Lankans have not retaliated. But what is there to stop them from turning around and referring to all Pakistani visitors as supporters of Al Qaeda.?

This morning the roulette wheel turned once more and the little white ball fell into the slot marked power generation.

Email: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk