Within NFC constraints

IT IS always interesting to read reviews of provincial budgets. The analysis is conducted as if provincial governments in Pakistan have a large degree of freedom to formulate their budgets based on their own priorities. Unfortunately, the reality is just the opposite. Provincial budgets are essentially made in Islamabad, such is the reality of provincial autonomy in the federation of Pakistan, as I proceed to argue below.

Pakistan has a highly centralized tax structure, especially after the introduction of a 15 per cent sales tax in VAT mode under instructions from the IMF. Resultantly, in excess of 80 per cent, and in the case of two provinces close to 90 per cent, of provincial incomes come through statutory transfers from the divisible pool under the NFC Award or in the form of royalties on oil and gas. The centralized tax structure and the limits placed by the Constitution on the taxation powers of lower levels of governments, combined with the demands of debt servicing and the central role in our polity of the military which consumes a significant chunk of internal resources, means that the share of the provinces is limited to 37.5 per cent.

Whereas, in principle, the provinces are the partners of the federal government in the sharing of the divisible pool, and hence have a direct stake in any changes made in the size of this pool, they are never consulted in decisions pertaining to additions to, or reductions in, its volume, despite their heavy dependence on transfers from it for financing their activities.

Although both the multilaterals and the federal government lecture provincial governments ad nauseam on the need to enhance their own revenues through the exploitation and widening of their revenue base, the federal government has simply refused to extend the GST on services to cover professionals like lawyers, accountants, engineers, tax practitioners, etc., although GST on services is a provincial subject under the Constitution. The federal government is reluctant to extend the net to a highly charged and politically vocal community since it would have to face the political flak of taxing them while the revenue benefits would flow to the provinces, as Islamabad would only be entitled to a two per cent collection charge from such a source.

The federal government also controls, pre-empts and exploits the revenue base of the provinces. For instance, it has levied a withholding tax on motor vehicles, which is a potentially important revenue base/instrument for the provinces. The provinces have limited leeway even in determining expenditure priorities. They are forced to implement national priorities set by Islamabad based on commitments made to donors. There is perfunctory, if any, participation of the provinces in establishing these priorities. Take the recent example of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) designed in consultation with the IMF. The provincial governments were hardly involved, even in determining the outcomes and indicators that are being used to judge the country’s performance.

Some decisions of the federal government have huge expenditure implications for provincial governments. For instance, the 15 per cent increase in salaries and pensions of civil servants announced in the budget for 2003-04 will unduly burden the budgets of provincial governments. The ripple effect of this decision taken without consulting the provincial and district governments will be devastating for their budgets.

Almost the entire additional revenue transfers to the provinces in 2003-04 will be absorbed by the implementation of this decision. The federal government cannot argue that the provincial and local governments may not give concomitant increases to its employees, if they cannot afford it. It would be politically impossible for provincial and district governments not to enhance the salaries of their own employees as well.

After devolution and the transfer of the operational aspects of delivery of services like education, health and drinking water supply to local governments, the roles and responsibilities of all levels of government, be it federal, provincial, or district, have been fundamentally altered. Resultantly, the historical mandates of the federal and provincial agencies require a shift away from the operational aspects of service provision. Islamabad, however, having introduced a supposedly more effective decentralized framework for delivery of basic social services, continues to function as if business is as usual. It has simply refused to let go by downloading its functions, mandates and responsibilities. How else can one explain federally run health programmes and a Rs. 100 billion education sector reform programme?

It is because of the unfair and highly inequitable distribution arrangement under the 1997 NFC Award that we have the ridiculous situation of Islamabad executing education and health-related programmes, both essentially provincial subjects under the Constitution. Similarly, in complete disregard of local priorities, the federal government is constructing and rehabilitating irrigation channels and intra-provincial roads. A typical example of this anomaly is that when district governments in Sindh requested Wapda that instead of spending money on the rehabilitation of the Rehri canal, funds should be diverted to other projects of greater local priority, they were flatly told by Wapda that the only choice they had was to either accept this project or nothing at all.

We have seen above how the federal government restricts the freedom of provincial governments to mobilize resources either by raising revenues or by reducing expenditures. Another instrument for augmenting resources in the short term is access to credit. Even here the degree of freedom of provincial governments is highly circumscribed.

The provinces cannot raise debt, even in rupees from domestic financial markets, without the prior permission of the federal government, which the latter promptly denies. While expenditure and borrowing-related restrictions are first placed on the provincial governments so that the deficit ceilings prescribed by the IMF are not breached, there is little control over the latter’s borrowings other than those covered indirectly by the budget deficit targets laid down by the IMF.

Contrary to Islamabad’s claims of good financial management, the reality is that the bulk of the cost of the structural adjustment programme has been borne by the provinces. This has resulted in outcomes like the decline in net enrolment rates at the primary level, as allocations for social services and essential development expenditure suffered under the IMF programme. Even the benefits of the recent debt relief have not been shared with the provinces. Whereas the federal government was able to get substantial debt relief enabling it to significantly reduce its outflows in the form of debt servicing, the provinces have got nothing of this benefit.

In view of the above facts, it will not be possible for the provinces to effect any increase in pro-poor expenditures to implement the PRSP until the highly iniquitous NFC Award is revised, whereby the provinces are compensated for the loss of almost Rs. 550 billion that they will have suffered by the end of the financial year 2004 from the revision in the sharing of the divisible pool compared with what they would have received under the 1990 NFC Award.

Any reviews of provincial budgets that do not take these limitations and constraints into account are inherently flawed; they tend unjustly to castigate governments that are essentially rubber-stamping what has been handed down to them by the federal government.

The writer is former finance minister of Punjab.

Poverty is not simply a line

YOU either have to be very rich or very poor to be able to live in Pakistan. The rich can afford to because they can insulate themselves from reality; the poor have to because they have no option — they cannot escape their reality. Somewhere between these two layers lies a middle class that cannot rise above its condition and desperately wishes to fall below it.

The preparation of the national budget follows a pattern that has now become a metronomic tradition. Seminars are held, usually in five-star hotels, to elicit the views of a spectrum of commercial, industrial, professional, financial and agricultural interests. Opinions are heard, but not necessarily listened to. The golden gurus in the ministry of finance and the Planning Commission, satisfied that they have consulted the country, then develop a document that will meet the constitutional nicety of having something bulky tabled before the National Assembly and the Senate for and adoption.

In India, for the past few years, the national budget has been passed almost without discussion. The former Indian finance minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, (now its foreign minister) was once heard complaining that he was embarrassed by such automatic approvals to his budgets; he would have preferred some sort of scrutiny, for at least that would have showed that someone in parliament had actually read his budget.

The reason for such swift endorsement in India was that the Indian budget was perceived as the current segment of a longer economic road map, the direction and basic parameters of which have been agreed upon and accepted earlier.

In Pakistan, when national or provincial budgets are passed without debate, it is either because no parliamentarian wants to approve them, or worse still, when members refuse to read them even if it is only to disagree with them. This year’s budget, presented to a recalcitrant National Assembly, has already been relegated to become a part of our Jurassic-age national archives. The part of it that remains, like the thrashing severed tail of a lizard, is the Economic Survey for 2002-3. For the layman, this residual document provides better insights into government attitudes, perceptions and performance than the budget document itself. It merits dissection.

From it one learns that our population - the only thing that should matter in a country like ours but one that seems to matter the least — has since 1947 quadrupled in size. During the past 20 years, it has jumped from 90 million to almost 150 million, making us the seventh most populous country in the world. By 2020, it will increase to 217 million. We are too libidinous for our own good.

The 1998 Population Census revealed this age-wise composition:

Infants: 2.3 per cent

Below 5: 14.8 per cent

From 5-14: 26.3 per cent

From 15-65: 53.1 per cent

Above 65: 3.5 per cent

Translated, these figures mean that 79 per cent of our people in 1998 will have by this year hit the job or employment market. And from where can they expect to obtain a livelihood? The section in the survey covering the employment situation shows a grimmer picture. It states that the labour force has increased from 31.8 million in 1995 to 39.4 million in 2003. A marginal improvement, some might argue, but in reality a sinister one considering the tidal wave of prospective labour that is accumulating.

Disturbing too is the definition of ‘employed labour force’. The survey tells us that it covers “all persons of ten years of age and more who worked at least one hour during a reference period and were either “paid employees” or “self-employed”’. (Almost half of them are ‘employed’ in the agricultural sector.) This statistic is as deceptive as the one that determines literacy, which is the ability to sign one’s name. Applying that yardstick, not surprisingly, 51.6 per cent of Pakistan’s population is now classified as literate. It is difficult to reconcile this figure with the visible decline in reading, the closure of bookshops, and the deplorable educational standards.

An achievement the government has every reason to crow about is the accumulation of over 10 billion dollars in foreign currency reserves. This is the byproduct of a number of factors — insecurity amongst Pakistanis living in the post-9/11 United States, better fiscal husbandry, and if one was blunt, by keeping these reserves beyond the reach of the two light-fingered leaders who at present sit in exile counting their own millions abroad.

When will the present government begin to release these reserves and allow them to irrigate the national economy is anybody’s guess. Development expenditure does not seem a priority, which is a shame, for a government not keen on investing in the future of its own country can hardly blame local or foreign investors for fighting shy. The unprecedented euphoria in the Karachi Stock Market should not be interpreted as a measure of investor confidence.

Without any fresh equity flotations in the market (there was only one in the current year, and only four each in the two preceding years), a jump in the volume of the turnover of shares (Rs 36 billion shares in 2002-3, over Rs 29 billion the year before) follows the same principle as the recipe for making an egg-white souffle.

The trick is to beat in as much air to increase its volume without allowing it to collapse. Should a collapse occur (and one assumes that the laws of gravity apply also to the Karachi stock market), the fallout could be disastrous. The rich may become poorer but banking institutions that have fuelled this speculative boom would find themselves holding heavily over-priced, unmarketable shares.

An admission that no government should be allowed to make without the attachment of its own resignation is contained on page 177 of the Economic Survey report. It states that “almost one-third of Pakistanis are living below the poverty line.” This, under a government that boasts foreign currency reserves of over 10 billion dollars. Are we to believe the contention of the finance ministry that it is perfectly equitable to have public wealth hand in pocket with private poverty? What satisfaction can any jobless youth have or any harried householder who cannot feed his family have by knowing that the country has enough foreign exchange to cover more than ten months’ worth of fuel oil imports?

To anyone who has been out of a job at any time during the morning, afternoon or evening of his productive life, or who has had to look into the eyes of his children when he returns from a sterile day spent on the street trying to earn a wage, poverty is as vacuous a statistic as the gnawing emptiness in his stomach.

Like Pakistan itself, the Economic Survey is too congested, to over-populated with facts and statistics. It contains so much information that often there is a danger of missing a critical figure. One particular paragraph, though, deserves to be reproduced: “In preparation for the PRSP [Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper], the government of Pakistan has deliberated on the poverty-related data and concurs with the IPRSP regarding the broad trends in the incidence of poverty. The Planning Division, during the period, has adopted an official poverty line based on a calorific norm of 2,350 calories per adult equivalent per day.”

Someone in the Planning Commission has obviously not done his history homework. Had they done so, they would have learned that following the 1971 war, the Pakistani POWs held by the Indians were entitled under the provisions of Geneva Convention to receive a daily ration equivalent to 3,491 calories per day. Compare this to the 2,350 calories determined by the Planning Commission as the deserving norm for a Pakistani citizen subsisting below the poverty line, and one sees what a cruel, unconscionable irony there is in yesterday’s prisoners of war being better fed than today’s prisoners of poverty.

The minorities in our midst

A NEWS report quotes the decision of a minorities’ organisation of Rawalpindi to launch a campaign to oppose the adoption of the Shariat in the Frontier and its likely follow-up elsewhere in the country. I must say it is brave of them to do so in face of an overwhelming and rather intolerant majority.

While in a truly Islamic state, which Pakistan is not (nor is it likely to be with so much hypocrisy around) the ummah is supposed to be the protector of non-Muslims, one is heartened by the courage shown by the Christian minority. I warn them that this is not going to be taken lightly by the ultra-religious elements among the Muslims and might involve a recoil.

As for the other significant minority, the Ahmedis, they don’t count. They are not even second class citizens but something much lower, yet to be properly categorised. Quite apart from the blasphemy law which covers everyone, Christians in Pakistan do not appreciate how much we love them. For example, if a Christian pins the Muslim kalima on his breast, we’ll make much of him and exhibit him as “an honorary Muslim.” But if a Qadiani has the temerity to do that, we trot him off to jail for a year or two.

Similarly all Christians use the salutation Assalam-o-alaikum even among themselves, but if a Qadiani does so it is a crime in the eyes of General Zia’s law and duly punishable. He can say Namaste or Sat Siri Akal but never the Salam which only means “Peace be upon you,” and is hardly a religious expression. That is why I say that our Christians don’t count their blessings which they are exhorted to do by their faith. Qadianis have been prosecuted for writing Bismillah on a wedding card.

And that is why, when talking to foreigners, the Pakistan government always swears by the Constitution that there is no discrimination against the minorities. A study of press statements of government leaders reveals that Pakistan and its Muslim population have given unprecedented concessions and allowances to the minorities. Though if you ask those leaders to enumerate even one of these concessions they are at a loss to do so. As for our religious gentry, they think it is more than a generosity to let the minorities live in peace in the Muslim homeland. So what more do they want?

The whole atmosphere in the country as regards the attitude towards non-Muslims, as also the attitude of the adherents of one sect towards the followers of other sects, is so vitiated with intolerance that one now really marvels at what the Quaid-i- Azam did on Sunday, 17th August 1947. Readers may recall Ardeshir Cowasjee’s column describing how on that day the Quaid and Miss Fatima Jinnah attended a special service in Karachi’s Saint Patrick’s Church.

After the religious service, which was dedicated to the strength and welfare of the new state, Mr Jinnah reiterated his resolve that there would be absolutely no discrimination between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan. Elderly Christians and Parsis of Karachi recall his words fondly and remember how he assured them that Pakistan was as much their country as a new homeland for Muslims. Today they must be wondering which Pakistan the Quaid was talking about.

Can you imagine a prime minister of Pakistan attending a Christian religious service in a church today? Even General Pervez Musharraf with all his bravado wouldn’t dare. The maulvis would tear such leaders to shreds, and they would have to spend the rest of their life in Makkah and Madina trying to prove that they were genuine Muslims.

The masses are exhorted by these leaders on every occasion to follow in the footsteps of the Quaid? Are there different sets of footsteps, one for the people and one for the leaders? Why don’t they emulate his example and attend a special service in a church to instil confidence among the Christians? It would do more to assure them of the government’s good faith and the state’s impartiality than empty rhetoric and hollow slogans.

In the present state of affairs which, without doubt, has been brought about over the years by our own political and religious leaders, the most important requirement is that the minorities should feel safe, protected and even privileged. Of course there is no defence against stray cases of fanaticism, but the government and the nation as a whole should never allow themselves to fall below a certain level of civilized behaviour. Unfortunately the steps taken to reinforce society through Islamic principles have tended towards making fanatics of the entire Muslim population.

Six years ago there was Shantinagar, the Christian village in southern Punjab, which was raided by Muslim zealots fed on false rumours set afloat by certain fanatics. They behaved like the Huns and laid the village waste. I have kept a tab on the matter and can say without fear of contradiction that nothing was done by Mian Nawaz Sharif’s government to either restore the confidence of the victims or bring the culprits to book. What price civilised behaviour inspired by the tenets of Islam and our much-vaunted tolerance of other faiths?

That apart, the abduction of Hindu girls in Sindh is going on all the time. When a hue and cry is raised the girl is made to state in a court of law that she went away of her own accord, that she married a Muslim of her own accord and that she embraced Islam of her own accord. Then, a few years ago, there was the kidnapping of about a hundred Hindu haris, men, women and children, in a part of the province. If minority leaders, and a few good Muslims, had not raised the alarm, nothing would have been heard of the affair. On the strength of these events it can be safely averred that today the most privileged individual in Pakistan whom no one can touch is the Sindhi wadera. I refuse to believe that he is afraid of God.

I sometimes wonder if our minorities truly consider themselves 100 per cent Pakistanis, though I have never been gauche enough to ask this from the dearest of my non-Muslim friends. In fact the question should be, “Do we, the Muslims, make them feel by our attitude that they are Pakistanis?” The question is not irrelevant. The atmosphere pervading the entire country is so completely Muslim in its spirit and impact that a non-Muslim appears to be something alien and out of place.

Two years ago I had quoted from a letter written by a Christian woman to an Urdu newspaper columnist. I shall not recount her complaints against Muslim bias but I do want to repeat just one sentence from it. She had said, “Brother, let me share a private thought with you. I honestly feel that it is the prayers of us Christians that are sustaining Pakistan, otherwise you people would have finished it long ago by killing one another and anyone else who disagrees with you.” Ominous words, I must say.

The Iraqi resistance

AT the beginning of last month, US commanders in Iraq concluded that the war that a month earlier had been declared over really wasn’t. Loose networks of Iraqi militants, many with ties to Saddam Hussein’s deposed dictatorship, were trying to launch a guerilla campaign, hoping to drive US troops from Iraq and eventually restore the old regime.

The American response was relatively strong: Thousands of Army troops scheduled to leave Iraq were instead deployed to what became known as the “Sunni triangle” northwest of Baghdad, and systematic sweeps were begun to root out the lingering resistance.

Yet, as the month ended, the problem appears to be getting worse rather than better. By last week the number of incidents had risen to two dozen a day, and Iraqi ambushes were growing in effectiveness and range. At least six soldiers have been killed since Wednesday. The enemy also managed to cut off power and water in Baghdad with sabotage attacks and killed several Iraqi civilians working to restore electricity.

So far the resistance doesn’t appear to have weakened the Bush administration’s resolve or congressional support for staying the course in Iraq. It shouldn’t. But it ought to prompt a thorough review of whether the United States has sufficient troops, sufficient resources and sufficient allied help to overcome the challenge.

Reports from the ground strongly suggest it does not. US troops in the Sunni towns where support for Saddam Hussein was strongest say they are exhausted after months of fighting. In other parts of the country, where there is little or no resistance, American soldiers are nevertheless struggling to maintain order and restart normal economic activity, because they lack training, expertise or civilian help. The Pentagon says it is recruiting additional allied forces from countries such as India, Pakistan and Turkey, but political and logistical obstacles may postpone their arrival.

The administration’s best course would be to reverse the error it made after the war, when it insisted on monopolizing control over postwar Iraq and minimizing the role of allies and the United Nations. U.N. agencies and European governments are well stocked with experts on such matters as infrastructure repair, agriculture, policing and judicial reform who could be recruited to help the thinly stretched American forces in the provinces.

Provided the United States is willing to stop monopolizing reconstruction contracts for US firms, more financial support could be obtained from rich nations, such as Germany, and the European Union.—The Washington Post

Uncle Sam’s warm embrace

IT WOULD be petty to begrudge General Pervez Musharraf his right to be pleased as Punch. There is, after all, no shortage of heads of state or government who would gladly give an arm and a leg for a golf-cart ride and a tete-a-tete at Camp David with the president of the United States of America. Throw in a pat on the back and the prospect of a multi-billion-dollar handout, and they’d be over the moon.

The Bush-Mush encounter is the latter-day equivalent of, say, Caesar offering the privilege of a private audience to a vassal perceived as particularly loyal and valiant. The meeting may not have lingered for very long in Caesar’s memory, but on the vassal’s side it would have become the stuff of family lore, proudly passed down the generations as a historical highlight.

So it’s perfectly natural for Musharraf to be thrilled to bits, as well as profoundly grateful to George W. Bush for the invitation. There’s a minor irony in the fact, though, that, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election, Bush was deemed to have flunked the foreign policy test when he drew a blank on being asked to name Pakistan’s new military ruler.

Since September 11, 2001, the two of them have had plenty of opportunity to become better acquainted. Unequal relationships rarely lead to friendship, but they do have at least one important career trait: they’re both unelected presidents. That no longer seems to be much of a problem for Bush, thanks primarily to Al Qaeda. Musharraf, on the other hand, continues to be confronted with a significant dilemma on that account.

Before turning to Musharraf’s somewhat disingenuous responses to questions raised in the US about democracy in Pakistan, there are two other observations worth making.

First of all, it is significant, although hardly surprising, that the US is once more willing openly to embrace autocrats. The tendency was never completely abandoned, but for a decade or so it diminished markedly. Now the crass hypocrisy of old is back in vogue. Rhetorical advocacy of democracy hardly interferes with support for dictators, provided they are firmly in Washington’s camp. And, as Musharraf ought to be aware, once you’re in that camp, there’s no easy way out, as Noriega and Saddam discovered the hard way.

Secondly, in Pakistan’s case, military rulers have generally been able to establish a more productive rapport with Washington than civilian leaders. General Ayub Khan was on friendly terms with significant segments of the American power structure well before he decided to depose Iskander Mirza. Pakistan was by then firmly in the western camp in terms of the cold war divide, given that Liaquat Ali Khan’s government had spurned rather too hastily the option of non-alignment. There were no potential Mossadeghs among Liaquat’s successors, and during Mirza’s helmsmanship there was even an attempt to revive the tradition of reinforcing ties between ruling elites through marital bonds, when the president’s son successfully wooed the US ambassador’s daughter.

Washington, thus, had little to fear from any of Ayub’s predecessors. except their profusion. Pakistan was in competition during the 1950s with nations such as France and Italy, where governments changed hands almost every year. A serving general could be more or less guaranteed to offer considerably more stability — a concept that Washington continues to cherish, regardless of its consequences for stabilized populations.

Pakistan’s geographical proximity to the Soviet Union made it an ideal take-off point for American spy flights (Gary Powers, the US pilot whose U2 was shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1960, had flown from Badaber, near Peshawar — a base that reverted to American use in the wake of 9/11) and Ayub was prepared to go to great lengths to justify his reputation as a bulwark against communism. His efforts earned him the sobriquet of Asia’s de Gaulle from the Johnson administration, and nary a word of criticism was directed at his dogged refusal to make way for democracy.

Ayub’s successor helped inaugurate a new phase in the cold war by facilitating Henry Kissinger’s crucial visit to Beijing in 1971. Yahya Khan was no longer in power by the time Richard Nixon cosied up to Mao Zedong the following year, but his services as a faithful retainer were rewarded with the Nixon administration’s infamous “tilt” towards Pakistan during Bangladesh’s war of liberation and the consequent confrontation with India.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on the other hand, was far from an ideal choice in American eyes. It’s not that he was particularly anti-American, but he was disinclined to unquestioningly accede to Washington’s hegemony. ‘Islamic socialism’ may have been little more than a rhetorical device, but it was the sort of phrase that grates on American ears. US suspicions must have been confirmed when Bhutto visited Moscow twice during his first three years at the helm, sought to assume the mantle of Third World leadership and, following India’s first nuclear test in 1974, vowed to lead Pakistan down the same path.

Kissinger threatened to make ‘a horrible example’ of him; relations between the two countries were fraught by the time the Carter administration took office, and there can be little question that US agencies played a significant role in the destabilization that facilitated General Ziaul Haq’s coup 26 years ago this week. Civilized pretences necessitated that Zia be ostracized, particularly after he killed Bhutto. But that phase didn’t last very long. The disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan enabled him to publicly solicit American favour — possibly in ignorance of the fact that, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has lately been willing to acknowledge, US strategy had squarely been directed at instigating military intervention by Moscow.

The Reagan administration had no qualms about embracing Zia, ignoring the illegitimacy of his rule and the repression required to sustain it. Nor did his inclination towards Islamic fundamentalism pose a problem, given that the Reaganites were, in their eagerness to humiliate the USSR, exploiting precisely the same tendency.

Musharraf couldn’t be unaware of the irony: Zia was hailed as an unparalleled asset for the forces of liberty and prosperity for encouraging Islamist terrorists, while he is piling up accolades for combating precisely the same forces. And the powers-that-be in the US feign ignorance of any strategic contradiction. Dubya’s administration perceives itself, with considerable validity, as a continuation of the Reagan-Bush era in the 1980s. No concession is offered to the logical argument that if the forces of radical Islam epitomize evil today, they may have been unworthy of pecuniary and military largesse 20 years ago.

But, then, Musharraf is comparably ambivalent about the past: he loses no opportunity to vent his contempt for the civilian administrations that preceded his cockpit coup, but has precious little to say about Pakistan’s darkest years — the 11-year period from 1977 to 1988, whose legacy the nation has yet to recover from.

When questioned about democracy by American journalists last week, Musharraf was quick to condemn politicians for making a mess of Pakistan over 55 years, but failed to mention that for half that period there has been a man in khaki at the helm (although he may attire himself differently to spare his patrons the embarrassment of being seen to smile on a uniformed protege). Couldn’t military rule have more to do with Pakistan’s predicament than the civilian interregnums?

Musharraf is particularly vociferous in his condemnation of the Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif years, which may seem fair enough — but it is pertinent, surely, to point out that during the post-1988 period the armed forces were active participants in the power game. Let’s not forget, for example, that the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad that propelled Nawaz Sharif to stardom was an ISI creation.

Musharraf’s reluctance to come to terms with the past echoes the predilection of the Bush administration — which may help to explain why they have hit it off so well. The past offers a pointer to why Washington has found it so easy to embrace the latest general to claim the throne in Islamabad. It also helps explain why Musharraf is attracted to Washington. The question is: does he know where to draw the line?

Combating Al Qaeda and its offshoots is defensible, but offering two brigades to bolster American imperialism in Iraq may be going too far. The three billion dollars that Musharraf has managed to extract from the tight-fisted Bush has been described as “peanuts” by his detractors, echoing the term employed by Zia to denigrate a $400 million offer from the Carter administration.

In return, Musharraf is evidently prepared to guarantee that he’ll be at the helm for another five or six years (with or without an acceptable popular mandate), refusing to have anything to do with North Korea (a “closed chapter”), continuing the hunt for Al Qaeda with FBI/CIA cooperation, and advancing the democratization of Pakistan.

The last bit is tricky. It can only be achieved convincingly by excusing himself from the scene, or at least deciding once and for all whether khaki or mufti suits him sartorially. Musharraf isn’t prepared to do that. Nor does it strike Washington as a particularly good idea.

What does that imply? Is Pakistan back in the 1950s, clinging to western verities, unable to distinguish between itself and Washington’s preferred image of it? Maybe. Take a guess.

E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com