With the opposition and the ruling coalition refusing to budge on the LFO, the country is sliding menacingly into a political and constitutional limbo. Virtually all legislative business has taken a back seat to opposition protests and official prevarication.

General Musharraf’s ominous warning of the dangers opposition to the LFO poses to the entire democratic edifice has understandably generated fears that he might use his self-assumed presidential powers to dissolve parliament.

Musharraf’s decision to throw in the gauntlet shows he must be deeply perturbed over the “uncivilized” behaviour of the parliament he himself helped elect. Little did the general know that once out of the bottle, the democratic genie has the notorious habit of assuming a life of its own.

But he is not the only one upset. The unending ruckus in both houses of the parliament has understandably unsettled many Pakistanis here at home and abroad. After all, the millions of rupees spent on keeping the parliamentary machinery well oiled are not meant merely to subsidize desk thumping. Elected politicians who have received the public mandate to legislate should be worried more about the burning issues that demand their urgent attention — unemployment, poverty and lawlessness, to name but a few. The unrelenting pandemonium in session after session hardly helps shore up public confidence in the political class.

These are all legitimate critiques in normal circumstances. But in an extraordinary situation where the future of democracy and the sanctity of the Constitution are at stake, resolving the LFO controversy first is equally, if not less, important. Besides, protest politics is the genuine democratic right of the opposition everywhere in the world. Parliamentary deadlocks are part and parcel of the democratic process. Politician-bashing may have become somewhat of a national pastime in Pakistan, but we should also give credit where it is due.

The unparalleled resolve with which opposition parties have decided to challenge the military’s constitutional engineering is indeed a welcome new development in an otherwise decrepit political culture. How much longer will it take us to decide who is in charge of governing this country: the people of Pakistan or their appointed minders of national defence? If an individual is allowed to mutilate the Constitution at will, where will it all lead to?

Already, General Musharraf’s constitutional and political distortions have placed our fragile multi-ethnic polity under immense strain. Ethnic tensions in the three smaller provinces over the gross centralization of powers by what is widely perceived as a Punjabi dominated military are already rising. Concentration of power in the anomalous twin office of the COAS-president and the subservience of an elected parliament to the military top brass via the National Security Council, (NSC), the two most contentious features of the LFO, constitute clear and present threats to the long-term stability of Pakistan — not to mention the damage caused to the professional integrity and public image of the military because of its prolonged involvement in civil and political affairs.

The most recent revelation by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain about the former army chief General Aslam Beg’s involvement in bribing politicians, while nothing new, says as much about the corruption of individual politicians as it does about the much touted integrity of the armed forces.

No matter where one stands in the political divide on the LFO, there are no two ways about the need for a full-time COAS. Moreover, General Musharraf’s “if you want to keep the army out, bring it in” defence does not stand the scrutiny of empirical or historical evidence. Experience with “guided” notions of democracy in Latin America and elsewhere shows that a political system in which an autonomous military holds sway over key areas of national policy is inherently unstable.

While the opposition is right in showing some flexibility on the LFO, those who are hoping for a half-way house between democracy and dictatorship a la 58 (2) B should re-examine our depressing political history since 1985. In the transitional pact struck between General Zia and the Majlis-e-Shoora, the soldiers were able to retain the initiative to redraw the rules of the political game, whenever they so wished.

That fateful compromise ushered in a decade marred by political instability. Instead of directly intervening, the military merely used the services of civilian presidents for dismissing elected governments whenever they crossed their prescribed limits. It was hardly surprising that democratically elected governments of both the PPP and the PML-N largely remained preoccupied with averting potential coups. Indeed, the continued decision-making power of the military and the perpetual threat of losing power made these governments prone to such temptations as centralization, deinstitutionalization, and whatever else it took to ensure survival.

Unless civil-military relations are comprehensively restructured, democratic institutions in Pakistan will continue to falter. Herein lies the paradox. Democratization and its consolidation require that the opposition deny General Musharraf the constitutional legitimacy he so desperately needs to institutionalize the military’s tutelage of national political life. But the lack of a stable party system and a persistent legacy of authoritarianism make the current political regime vulnerable to dissolution by the military. Will General Musharraf dissolve the democratic facade he has so painstakingly created to prolong his own stay in power? If previous episodes of military rule are any guide, any such move on his part also carries the danger of practically terminating his own political career.

Sensing the dangers inherent in the on-going impasse, the ruling coalition has resorted to a dual strategy of trying to test the opposition’s patience by refusing to discuss the LFO in parliament and carrying on legislative business as usual, on the one hand, while extending an olive branch, to the opposition, on the other.

Reports also suggest that the senior PML-Q leadership (with a helping hand from General Musharraf’s close civil and military aides) is doing all it can to wean the MMA away from the opposition camp. In doing so, the government hopes to exploit the MMA’s traditionally close links to the establishment, its stake in the NWFP and Balochistan governments as well as the deep frictions within the religious right.

Whether these or any other official machinations work only time will tell. If anything, the federal government’s delay and dilute tactics have hardened the joint opposition’s stance, prompting it to consider a no-trust motion against the chairman of the Senate as well as the speaker of the National Assembly.

In any case, the opposition parties have little to lose. In fact, if they are able to sustain the anti-LFO campaign in and outside parliament, they can help stabilize and consolidate the constitutional foundations of civil democracy by forcing a compromise in which the military’s extra-constitutional authority is at least partially watered down. The alternatives are worse. Tempting as it may be, striking yet another power - sharing deal with the generals in which the military retains its veto powers over the elected parliament will take us back to square one.

All this rumpus for a few crumbs of power? That will be such a shame.

IN a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on March 19, the day the war was launched against Iraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, asked “What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?”

No one bothered to answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the American people, their love of freedom, and their deep-seated values, these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption, of democracy that we are living through.

Let’s examine first what US Middle East policy has wrought since George W. Bush came to power almost three years ago in an election decided finally by the Supreme Court, not by the popular vote. Even before the atrocities of September 11, Bush’s team had given Ariel Sharon’s government a free hand to colonize the West Bank and Gaza, to kill, detain and expel people at will, to demolish their homes, expropriate their land, imprison them by curfew and hundreds of military blockades, make life for them impossible; after 9/11, Sharon simply hitched his wagon to “the war on terrorism” and intensified his unilateral depredations against a defenceless civilian population, now under occupation for 36 years, despite literally tens of UN Security Council resolutions enjoining Israel to withdraw and otherwise desist from its war crimes and human rights abuses.

Bush called Sharon ‘a man of peace’ last June, and kept the five billion dollar subsidy coming without even the vaguest hint that it was at risk because of Israel’s lawless brutality.

On October 7, 2001, Bush launched the invasion of Afghanistan, which opened with concentrated high-altitude bombing and by December had installed in that devastated country a client regime with no effective power beyond a few streets in Kabul. There has been no significant US effort at reconstruction, and it would seem the country has returned to its former abjection, albeit with a noticeable return of elements of the Taliban, as well as a thriving drug-based economy.

Since the summer of 2002, the Bush administration has conducted an all-front campaign against the despotic government of Iraq and, having unsuccessfully tried to push the Security Council into compliance, began its war along with the United Kingdom against the country. I would say that from about last November on, dissent disappeared from a mainstream media swollen with a surfeit of ex-generals and ex-intelligence agents sprinkled with recent terrorism and security experts drawn from the Washington right-wing think tanks. Anyone who spoke up and actually managed to appear was labelled anti-American by failed academics who mounted websites to list “enemy” scholars who did not toe the line. E-mails of the few visible public figures who struggled to say something were swamped, their lives threatened, their ideas trashed and mocked by media news readers who had just become the self-appointed, all-too-embedded sentinels of America’s war.

An overwhelming torrent of crude as well as sophisticated material appeared everywhere equating the tyranny of Saddam Hussein not only with evil, but with every known crime: much of this in part was factually correct but it eliminated from mention the extraordinarily important role played by the US and Europe in fostering the man’s rise, fuelling his ruinous wars, and maintaining his power. No less a personage than the egregious Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in the early 1980s as a way of assuring him of US approval for his war against Iran. The various US corporations which supplied Iraq with nuclear, chemical and biological material for the weapons that we supposedly went to war for were simply erased from the public record.

But all this and more was deliberately obscured by both government and media in manufacturing the case for the further destruction of Iraq which has been taking place for the past month. The demonization of the country and its strutting leader turned it into a simulacrum of a formidable quasi-metaphysical threat whereas its demoralized and basically useless armed forces were a threat to no one at all.

What was formidable about Iraq was its rich culture, its complex society, its long-suffering people: these were all made invisible, the better to smash the country as if it were only a den of thieves and murderers.

Either without proof or with fraudulent information Saddam was accused of harbouring weapons of mass destruction that were a direct threat to the US 7,000 miles away. He was identical with the whole of Iraq, a desert place “out there” (to this day most Americans have no idea where Iraq is) destined for the exercise of US power unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahab-like quest for re-shaping reality and imparting democracy to everyone.

At home the Patriot and Terrorist Acts have given the government an unseemly grip over civil life. A quiescent population for the most part accepts the bilge, passed off as fact, about imminent security threats, with the result that preventive detention, illegal eavesdropping and a menacing sense of a heavily policed public space have made even the university a cold, hard place to be for anyone who tries to think and speak independently.

The appalling consequences of the US and British intervention in Iraq are only just beginning to unfold, first with the calculated destruction of its modern infrastructure, then with the looting and burning of one of the world’s richest civilizations, and finally the totally cynical American attempt to engage a band of motley “exiles” plus various large corporations in the supposed re-building of the country and the appropriation not only of its oil but also its modern destiny.

In response to the dreadful scenes of looting and burning which in the end are the occupying power’s responsibility, Rumsfeld managed to put himself in a class beyond even Hulagu. “Freedom is untidy,” he said on one occasion, and “stuff happens” on another. Remorse or sorrow were nowhere in evidence.

General Jay Garner, handpicked for the job, seems like a person straight out of the TV-serial “Dallas.” The Pentagon’s favourite exile, Ahmad Chalabi, for example, has intimated openly that he plans to sign a peace treaty with Israel, hardly an Iraqi idea. Bechtel has already been awarded a huge contract. This too in the name of the American people. The whole business smacks of nothing so much as Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

This is an almost total failure in democracy, ours as Americans’, not Iraq’s. Seventy per cent of the American people are supposed to be for all this, but nothing is more manipulative and fraudulent than polls of random numbers of Americans who are asked whether they “support our president and troops in time of war.” As Senator Byrd said in his speech, “there is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered... A pall has fallen over the Senate chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.”

Who is going to ask questions now that that Middle Western farm boy General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly with his staff around one of Saddam’s tables in a Baghdad palace?

I am convinced that in nearly every way, this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular war. The deeply reactionary Washington “research” institutions that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith and the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence, the doctrine of military pre-emption, which was never voted on either by the people of this country or by their half-asleep representatives. How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed?

And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what in effect is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based pressure groups such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders like Franklin Graham who have been unleashed with their Bibles on destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC, (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), along with its associated think tanks and research centres.

What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like “democracy” and “freedom” have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillage, muscling in on territory, and the settling of scores. The American programme for the Arab world is the same as Israel’s. Along with Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long-term military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to ‘liberate and democratize’ a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to preserve public law and order?

The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam’s cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compassion either from the US or from the other Arab states, who have stood by idly quarrelling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you assume that “natives” will welcome your presence after you have bombed and quarantined them for 13 years. The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media coverage.

In a story about a 70-year old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural centre from her house — wrecked in the US raids — and is now beside herself with rage, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for having had “a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein,” and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, “and this from a graduate of London University.”

Adding to the fraudulence of the weapons that were not there, the Stalingrads that didn’t occur, the formidable artillery defences that never happened, I would not be surprised if Saddam disappeared suddenly because a deal was made in Moscow to let him out with his family and money in return for the country. The war had gone badly for the US in the south, and Bush could not risk more of the same in Baghdad. On April 6, a Russian convoy left Baghdad. US National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice appeared in Russia on April 7. Two days later, Baghdad fell on April 9. Draw your own conclusions, but isn’t it possible that as a result of discussions with the Republican Guard mentioned by Rumsfeld, Saddam bought himself out in return for abandoning the whole thing to the Americans and their British allies, who could then proclaim a brilliant victory.

Americans have been cheated, Iraqis have suffered impossibly, and Bush looks like the moral equivalent of a cowboy sheriff who has just led his righteous posse to a victorious showdown against an evil enemy. On matters of the gravest importance to millions of people constitutional principles have been violated and the electorate lied to unconscionably. We are the ones who must have our democracy back. Enough of smoke and mirrors and smooth talking hustlers.

— Copyright 2003, Edward W. Said

A CALIFORNIA superior court judge sent me the following quotation, which is well worth pondering. “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

This declaration was made by US Supreme Court Justice Samuel L. Jackson, America’s senior representative at the 1945 Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the tribunal’s chief prosecutor.

Those now exulting at America’s conquest of Iraq should ponder Judge Jackson’s majestic words, particularly now that the Anglo-American justifications for invading Iraq are being revealed as lies or distortions.

Every nook and cranny of Iraq are yet to be searched, but so far nothing incriminating has been discovered to validate lurid claims made by George Bush and Tony Blair. Let’s review the big ones:

* President Bush: “The Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Iraq, Bush warned, was intent on attacking the US. Fact: “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq” - Mohamed El-Baradei, chief of the UN nuclear weapons inspection agency (IAEA), March 2003. The same for gas and germs.

* Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claims made before the UN, backed up by a dossier from British Intelligence, that Washington and London had a long list of sites in Iraq containing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). When inspected by the UN, and, later, by US troops, none contained any WMDs. Part of London’s damning dossier on Iraq was revealed to have been plagiarized from a ten-year old graduate thesis.

* “Iraq is trying to procure uranium,” thundered Colin Powell at the UN. “Iraq building nuclear weapons” trumpeted US media. Washington and London claimed Iraq imported yellowcake uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. In March, 2003, UN experts concluded the documents purportedly confirming the uranium sales were ‘not authentic’ and, in fact, ‘crude fabrications.’ One veteran intelligence agent told me the documents were “laughable” and a plant by those seeking war against Iraq.

* The notorious aluminium tubes. Bush: “Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.” The uranium to be enriched was, of course, the same fictitious uranium from Niger. Fact: UN inspectors found the tubes were for short-ranged, 81mm artillery rockets.

* Iraq was an ally of Al Qaeda. No terrorist links have so far been found. Just a retired Palestinian thug, Abu Abbas. The notorious Ansar Al-Islam ‘terror and poison camp’ turned out to be mud huts occupied by motley Islamists who regularly denounced Osama bin Laden.

* The mobile germ warfare trucks -aka ‘Winnebagoes of Death’ - Powell warned about turned out to be mobile food inspection labs. Iraq’s “drones of death’ that Bush actually claimed with a straight face might fly off ships to attack the US with pestilence were, on inspection, two rickety model aeroplanes, only one of which was able to fly a few kilometres.

* The Bush administration concealed from Americans that in 1995 Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, had told UNSCOM (then UN arms inspection agency for Iraq) and CIA that he had personally supervised destruction of all of Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons (mostly supplied by the US and Britain in the 1980s). Gen. Kamel was head of Iraq’s strategic weapons programme. Glen Rangwala, of Cambridge University, who exposed London’s plagiarized Iraq dossier, obtained the transcript of the Kamel interview.

* Saddam’s brutal rule justified invasion. But why was it acceptable when Saddam was a US ally in the 1980s, but not today? What about all the other nasty dictatorships Washington supports?

And so it went. A torrent of lies and propaganda deceiving Americans into believing Iraq was armed to the teeth with WMDs, somehow responsible for 9/11, and intending, as Bush repeatedly claimed, to attack the US. UN inspectors found no WMDs. So far, neither have US occupation forces.

No nukes. No poison gas and dispersing systems. No Scud missiles. No Al-Qaeda camps. Just lots of palaces filled with hideous Mesopotamian baroque furniture and a ruined, destitute nation. The US has refused to re-admit UN inspectors to Iraq. Two teams of US intelligence specialists are sifting through the wreckage of Iraq.

Cynics suspect the US will shortly ‘discover’ a smoking gun to justify the invasion, even if one must be created. Otherwise, why would the US refuse to allow UN inspectors to join the hunt? Doing so would authenticate any future US claims.

No one, least of all this writer who spent much harrowing time in Iraq under Saddam’s brutal, sinister, megalodespotism, mourns him. But in its lust to invade Iraq, the Bush administration, and Tony Blair, deeply discredited their own nation’s moral standing, credibility, and democratic ideals by outrageously misleading their own people and whipping them into mass hysteria to justify an imperial war. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2003

IT HAS always been the tradition in Third World countries, whenever a change of government takes place, to eulogize the incumbents and to rubbish the folks who have been thrown out of power. Pakistan is no exception. The difference is that in this country the puppeteers who pull the strings that make the marionettes dance, use considerably more guile and finesse than in places like Nigeria and Indonesia.

How else can one explain the fact that three years ago, when Pakistan Television was asked to introduce to an incredulous public General Parvez Musharraf, the new saviour of the country, who was going to rescue the nation from the clutches of that arch evil Nawaz Sharif, the only anchor man they could find in a country of 140 million souls. He was the very fellow who, during the rule of the Muslim League government, was shown on national television as leading the mob that attacked the Supreme Court building. Tariq Aziz need not worry. All is forgiven. Life goes on.

Currently, the entire energies of the combined opposition in the National Assembly and the Senate are being expended in trying to expunge the provisions of the Legal Framework Order. No business is taking place. The government is at a standstill, and the people of Karachi who braved the heat on that blistering October day and cast their vote are wondering if this whole episode was not just one big wasteful exercise.

It reminds the writer of Bacon’s Apophthegms in which Mr Popham was the speaker in the English parliament in 1581. The lower house had sat long and done nothing. Coming one day to Queen Elizabeth I, she said to him, “Now, Mr Speaker, what hath passed in the Lower House?” And Mr Popham answered, “If it please Your Majesty, seven weeks.” It does look like the elected graduates in Islamabad might improve on this record.

One knows the constitutional lawyers are concerned as are some of the politicians. But is it really all that important for the mass of the people if the LFO stays or goes ? It isn’t as if the people are biting their nails and waiting with bated breath for this controversial document to be thrown out. Would it really make any difference to the people who are basically interested in two square meals a day, and protection from a corrupt police, if General Musharraf kept both his uniform and his presidency? Or if Makhdoom Amin F

Or if Makhdoom Fahim and Qazi Hussain Ahmed eventually celebrate by repeating the triumph that Nawaz Sharif had achieved a few years ago when he threw out the odious clause 58(2)B? The fact is, the people have no illusions about either the army or the politicians. Both have piled on the agony. And the graduate clause hasn’t really helped.

The president has taken a principled stand on the LFO, and by the look of things is not willing to budge. Why can’t he also take a principled stand on an issue that really matters, like ‘honour killing’, which is not only a criminal offence, but something which continues to tarnish the image of this country abroad? A friend, Rafat Usmani, pointed out in an e-mail that the equally reprehensible custom of ‘Sati’ was also eliminated in this part of the world many, many years ago. But, he hastened to add, it was the British, a colonial power, that succeeded in doing so.

The conclusion one draws from this is that it is apparently much more difficult to accomplish anything worthwhile when a country achieves independence and claims to be free. The politicians and the president will continue to vent their spleen and cry for the rights of the people of Kashmir, Chechnya and Palestine, while rapists and killers of village women in Pakistan go about their business in the comfortable knowledge that nobody will touch them.

It was much the same with some of the key players who preceded Mr Jamali. They too were concerned about all the issues except the ones that had to do with human dignity. But some of their admirers still speak of them fondly.

Of Benazir Bhutto, for instance. One does not hear much about her these days. One misses her perky insouciance and her flair for adding new dimensions to the commonplace. From her self-exile, she fires the occasional anti-Musharraf missiles on her lecture tours of British and American universities. She tries to convey the impression that she is enjoying a brief political hibernation and continues to hold out the hope to her dwindling supporters that she will return one day in the not too distant a future, triumphant and ready to lead her flock once again on the road to prosperity. Regrettably, she wasn’t a great achiever. And she didn’t do anything to eliminate the menace of ‘karo kari.’

The more intelligent among her supporters know hers is more or less a lost case, what with the list of NAB references against her and her spouse and the hostility of the military brass. But the parliamentary party is still intact, the breakaway Patriots notwithstanding, and the hard core has not allowed fringe-elements to assume a para-political role.

One also does not hear much about Nawaz Sharif these days. News occasionally trickles in about how well he has been doing in Saudi Arabia where he is supposed to own a chain of stores and that he has decided to weigh anchor and settle in the United Kingdom — at least for the time being. He still has a clutch of supporters in this country who have displayed a degree of loyalty that has surprised even members of military intelligence who, as a rule, would not trust some politicians with last week’s laundry list.

Nawaz Sharif, with his obsession for constructing highways, his preference for employing unlikely people in crucial positions and for displaying the heartiness of the big businessman when dealing with the Koreans, was never known for his brilliance.

And one feels that Beaverbrook’s famous assessment of Asquith could also fit Pakistan’s man of steel: ‘uninformed indolence and gentle indifference.’ He did leave behind something that motorists in Punjab grudgingly acknowledge — a modern motorway.But he too did nothing about the menace of ‘honour killings’.

But Shahbaz Sharif, his younger brother, and a former chief minister of Punjab who is also in exile, was an altogether different kind of person. Shrewd, intelligent and practical, he was very much an action man, and like his brother, had come to the notice of General Ziaul Haq who recognized his many talents. He will be chiefly remembered for his contribution to Punjab and particularly to its capital.

Lahore, the pride of the Mughals, with its gardens and fountains, its tombs and mosques, its quaint streets and bazaars with the smell of musk and sandalwood , and an old quarter drenched with history, has always been the most beautiful city in Pakistan. It is the sort of place to which foreign and local tourists gravitate in November where the lamps in Mayo Gardens lit early in the dusk.

The problem was, that many of the facilities in the metropolis did not function. Officials in government departments had a lackadaisical attitude towards work. Flippancy was used as a cover for professionalism. Shahbaz Sharif did his best to change the mindset of the inhabitants and made them proud of their city. He built broad boulevards, laid out gardens and parks, encouraged consumerism and even tried to introduce a mass transit monorail system to relieve some of the congestion on an overworked mall, something that Karachi still has not been able to do. Utilities started to function and there was a general aura of well-being..

One must not forget the last of the great players, Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, the feudal democrat, and an irredeemably marginal figure to whom other feudal democrats turn whenever there is a stirring in the political wind. He belongs to a part of the country where some of the worst rapes and murders have taken place.

But on the issue of honour killing he has not said a word. Last week he had another grating fling at goading the opposition to chuck out the LFO and to restore the pristine freshness of the 1973 Constitution. Could it be that the president and the politicians in this country have very different definitions of democracy? It is certainly beginning to look like it.