AS the government makes more and more laws to check corruption, improve the conduct of the officials and reform governance as a whole, the basic question arises: can we catch a thief by loading the statute book with more laws?

We have by now too many laws against every crime, too many rules for each administrative action and complex procedures for doing simple things in the hope they would give the best results. And yet the overall outcome has been too poor.

It used to be said “set a thief to catch a thief.” That might have been valid in the old world of simple thievery. But in the areas of administration instead of the monitoring officer checking his erring junior we may get two thieves as they find the sharing both easy and lucrative. That certainly has been our experience, and the strength of the administration has gone on, as a result, expanding. We find the total of state employees rise to four million — federal, provincial and local. The people in the employ of the state seem to exceed the number employed in a large scale industry.

The World Bank, which has been stepping up its aid to Pakistan and supporting the reform process, has been highlighting one weakness after another in the administrative field, beginning with corruption in excess, maladministration and misuse of public funds. Now it is focussing on excess of red tape which slows down the administration, hampers economic development and increases corruption.

It is often asked whether corruption is the result of red tape or the cause of it? The answer is both. Where there is corruption, disposal of files is delayed until the expected payment is made, and quickened if the payment is made in advance.

The late finance minister Mohammad Shoaib used to say that bribe is more like a tip — to insure promptness — which is essential in business as time is money there. But that is not as simple as that. The amount involved matters. Once the practice of “tipping” begins in government offices it grows like a giant weed and can eventually become a monster. Equally important is the penalty a businessman pays if he does not pay the ‘tip.’

Industrialists in Karachi have been protesting that they have to deal with 40 government departments or more — federal, provincial and local. In case a payment was involved and if a person fails to pay up he may have a lot of hardships or difficulties to put up with, which are bad for business. A World Bank report based on studies in 130 countries says “poor countries regulate the most, and regulation in poor countries is more cumbersome for all aspects of business activity.” As examples it gives a group of African and Latin American countries which regulate the most, including Bolivia, Chad, Costa Rica, Mali, Mozambique, the Philippines and Venezuela.

Compared to them a group of wealthy countries beginning with Australia and Canada regulate their business the least. And they include some Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong and Jamaica. It says that Pakistan is getting good results out of its deregulation.

The report says “the countries which regulate the most — poor countries — have the least enforcement capacity and few checks and balances in government to ensure that regulatory discretion is not used to abuse business and exact bribes.”

As a result, as in Pakistan, there is less enforcement and more stringent laws and greater corruption to evade them. The report says “a vibrant private sector — with firms making investments, creating jobs and improving productivity — promotes growth and expands opportunities for poor people. “And heavier regulation is generally associated with greater inefficiency in public institutions, longer delays and higher cost. That results in higher unemployment, increased corruption, less productivity and investment but not better quality of private or public goods.”

This kind of dissatisfaction with how the costly official machinery works has made many former western administrators and thinkers talk of re-inventing the government altogether in the US. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler have written a book, “Reinventing government”, and Osborne ultimately realized that bureaucracy itself has to be done away with, and came out with a book entitled “Banishing bureaucracy.” In Pakistan, a recent book titled “Governance, the South Asian perspectives” deals with the problems and is an instructive and comprehensive study.

We should have an in-depth discussion on the subject in Pakistan using such publications and other literature on the subject. We should not confine ourselves to the current discussion on the role of the politicians and the generals.

The World Bank report says that in Australia a business can be registered in two days; but in Haiti in takes 203 days. In Denmark it costs nothing to start a business, while in Cambodia it costs five times the nation’s per capita income.

Excessive regulation drives more and more of the business from the formal sector to the informal sector. In Bolivia, one of the most regulated economies, 82 per cent of the business is in the informal sector.

That also means that most of the revenues of the government vanishes or does not come into the government coffers ever. And while the government may be poor the senior officials are very rich and soon after retirement they become industrialists or politicians by buying a seat in the legislature.

The report says excessive regulation has a perverse effect on the very people it is meant to protect. The rich and connected may be able to avoid cumbersome rules or even be protected by them.” But it is the ordinary man, the man without connections or enough money to pay the right bribe, who suffers and ultimately the consumer who has to pay a heavy price for the products he buys and is often forced to prefer the cheaper smuggled goods.

The report observes that rigid employment laws are also associated with fewer job opportunities for women.

It is interesting to note that 40 Pakistani enterprises have been set up in the Hamriya Free Zone of Sharjah at a cost of one billion dollars. This is in addition to the investment Pakistanis had made earlier at Jebel Ali in Dubai, which could be even larger. Compare that to the fiasco with KEPZ. It has happened at a time when there has been little investment in Pakistan itself and the government has been appealing to our entrepreneurs to invest and provide employment to the vast mass of the unemployed.

If you ask these Pakistanis why do they invest in the Gulf, their answer will be that it is tax-free, including the import of machinery, unlike in Pakistan, and no questions are asked there and all help given once the permission to set up the enterprise is given. Here, they may find themselves defaulters or face questions from the CBR as tax defaulters. What is the government going to do about it as we need investment desperately to increase employment and expand the economy.

We have been talking about special industrial zones and now three textile cities as well. But progress in such sectors has been too slow. We cannot afford such foot-dragging or excess of red tape which delays all decision-making and negates efficient implementation. “Productive businesses thrive where government focuses on the definition and protection of property rights,” says the World Bank. “But where the government regulates every aspect of business activity heavily, business operates in the informal economy.

But businessmen in Pakistan are not a bunch of virtuous men. The endless infighting in the chambers of commerce and the malpractice in the stock exchanges of the country reflect their serious flaws or follies. They have to become a far better lot and be better at self-regulation.

They have to pay their taxes regularly instead of trying to avoid or evade them. If foreign companies in the country can pay full taxes and yet make large profits and declare them publicly, there is little reason why the major Pakistani entrepreneurs can’t do the same. There is a great deal of talk of public-private partnerships following the same debate in the West. To achieve that, the officials have to improve their ways and so have the businessmen instead of both infecting each other far more, and making such enterprises fail or make little progress.

Even after more and more public sector is privatized the officials would continue to be the regulators and monitors. They have to do that job honestly and efficiently as custodians of public welfare.

If we want a better administration and real good governance we need to re-invent the government using such guide books as “Banishing bureaucracy.” Making the local government more resourceful alone will not solve our administrative problems. How can we make the bureaucracy feel the impact of public opinion and respond to public needs and the nation’s welfare?

Should we not only sack the corrupt civil and military officials, but also dispossess them of their ill-gotten wealth so that they do not begin an industrial or a political career after retirement ? These are questions to which answers have to be found and applied so that the 140 million people of this poor country can have a better deal and not the chosen few who bind others in unending red tape, if not erect a stone wall to block them.

LIAQUAT Ali Khan had only three years (1948-51) to demonstrate his mettle, his abilities and competence for leadership, his capacity to face challenges and defuse crises, his skill for mass leadership, his penchant for selfless service and for sustaining tradition of Jinnah, the supreme leader.

Precisely for these reasons, Liaquat’s name has increasingly acquired an undying place in our national history. Indeed, over the decades his compelling personality has risen in stature, in popular esteem, and in the context of our national pantheon. No wonder, Liaquat heads the list of those few Pakistani political leaders who had carved for themselves a place in history.

Although Liaquat had several accomplishments to his credit since he entered public life in the middle 1920s to warrant notice, what really catapulted him to undying fame was his role in all-India Muslim politics and subsequently in Pakistani politics as the Quaid-i-Azam’s “right hand man” and heir apparent.

Jinnah was, of course, the supreme leader, but like Lenin, he was essentially a party man, with his personality being sustained by, and developed within, the party fold. Indeed, during the momentous decade of 1937-47, he came to be identified as the party. Yet even he needed a team of lieutenants to put his plans through. As Philip John Noel-Baker, secretary of state for commonwealth relations (1947-50), said on his death, “His power was great, yet his greatness was that he used his power to make a team of men, who could carry on the work when he was gone”. Liaquat headed that team.

Jinnah’s presence at the time of Pakistan’s emergence was, of course, critical — not only in formulating policies to steer the new-born nation out of the crisis of partition, but, more important, in energizing the people, in raising their morale, and in canalizing in constructive channels the profound feelings of patriotism that the coming of freedom had generated. But Liaquat was the man who supervized the implementation of those policies, filled in the gaps, and attended to the details.

However, the acid test came in the wake of Jinnah’s death on September 11, 1948. Some American circles speculated whether the desire for a separate existence among Muslims would survive the catastrophic event. Even Bernard Shaw wrote to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on September 18, 1948, “I am wondering whether the death of Jinnah will prevent you from coming to London. If he has no competent successor you will have to govern the whole peninsula.”

But during the next three years Liaquat proved to be more than a competent successor. Unassuming all the time, never seeking the limelight and content to work behind the scenes under Jinnah’s towering shadow, almost no one thought that he could measure up to the kind of leadership qualities which he did during Pakistan’s gravest crisis caused by the Quaid’s death.

The deft manner in which Liaquat tackled problems, both internal and external, and consolidated Pakistan surprised almost everyone and won him recognition both at home and abroad. “No one played more successfully the role of Cavour to his leader’s Mazzini”, remarked The Times of India. “He guided the fortunes of his country with a certainty which amounted to genius”, wrote The Statesman.

During the next three years, Pakistan was confronted with some new problems, besides the old ones. Liaquat’s first success as prime minister was to belie the assumption that Pakistan would collapse once it had to face the daunting partition problems without the guidance of the Quaid — an assumption that provoked Dawn to proclaim “Quaid-i-Azam is dead: Long live Pakistan.” Though by no means easy, Liaquat ably filled in the vacuum.

Second, Jinnah’s exit emboldened India to go on the offensive in a big way. Within twelve hours of Jinnah’s burial, it mounted an invasion of the Hyderabad state, and had it occupied within five days. In September 1949, India imposed a trade embargo, putting Pakistan to serious economic strains since India was the largest buyer of Pakistani jute, the country’s premier cash crop.

In early 1950, the Indian prime minister threatened to use “other methods” in East Bengal, and Indian troops were massed within the striking distance of West Pakistan in order to pressure Pakistan into accepting New Delhi’s diktat on the minorities question. Again, in July 1951, India massed its troops on West Pakistan’s borders. Each time Liaquat stood his ground, took bold measures to counter the Indian threats, showed courage, determination and statesmanship, and galvanized the nation as a solid phalanx.

Meanwhile, Liaquat consolidated what had been accomplished during Jinnah’s life-time, enlarged upon it and carried forward the process of building Pakistan. Thus, he accomplished a good deal in making Pakistan united, strong and stable. Internally, Pakistan was politically stable and confident, and, though lacking in resources, economically buoyant.

Simultaneously, Liaquat initiated policies designed to enable Pakistan to play its due role in the comity of nations and world forums. He strengthened Pakistan’s tentative links with several Muslim countries, extended support to liberation movements in Indonesia, Malay, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Nigeria, called the first International Islamic Economic Conference in early 1951, which was attended by, among others, the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Abdullah Usman of Somalia.

He used his diplomatic skills to secure support abroad for Pakistan’s disputes with India, especially on Kashmir. When the Commonwealth prime ministers were found lukewarm in discussing these disputes and suggesting solutions, he took a bold stand: he refused to attend the third Commonwealth conference in 1950 unless Kashmir was put on the agenda. Likewise, he was successful in selling Pakistan’s viewpoint during his official visit to the United States in May 1950.

This is evident from the New York Times’ editorial of May 5, 1950. Liaquat, it said, “spoke with fervour to our Congress yesterday when he declared that ‘no threat or persuasion, no material peril or ideological allurement’ could deflect his country from its chosen path of free democracy. These are strong words and they were spoken in an international atmosphere marked, as he noted, by ugly manifestations of greed, aggression and intolerance.”

Thus, internationally, Pakistan was able to carve out for itself a place in the comity of nations. It was courted by big powers, as indicated by Liaquat being invited by both Moscow and Washington for an official visit.

“Three years of Liaquat Ali Khan’s leadership”, said Sir Olaf Caroe, one-time governor of the NWFP, “carried Pakistan through difficulty and crisis to the achievement of a degree of political stability rare in any democratic country ... of economic prosperity beyond her rosiest dreams, and of an honoured place in the affairs of nations.”

However, one crucial role that has somehow remained ignored or has been missed concerns his contribution in thwarting the rise of theocracy in Pakistan. In perspective — that is, against the backdrop of developments in terms of the religious parties’ credo and aspirations, the proliferation of sectarianism and of the rise of sectarian violence, especially during the past twenty-six years — this contribution was both substantial and of far reaching implications.

This Liaquat did through the Objectives Resolution (1959). Therein he committed the nation to democracy, emphasizing that “in accordance with the spirit of Islam, the Preamble fully recognizes the truth that authority has been delegated to the people, and to none else, and that it is for the people to decide who exercise that authority.”

“For this reason it has been made clear in the Resolution that the state shall exercise all its powers and authority through the chosen representatives of the people. This is the very essence of democracy, because the people have been recognized as the recipients of all authority and it is in them that the power to wield it has been vested.”

About theocracy Liaquat was emphatic: “I cannot over-emphasize the fact that such an idea is absolutely foreign to Islam. Islam does not recognize either priesthood or any sacerdotal authority; and, therefore, the questions of a theocracy simply does not arise in Islam. If there are any who still use the word theocracy in the same breath as the polity of Pakistan, they are either labouring under a grave misapprehension, or indulging in mischievous propaganda.”

The writer was founder-director of the Quaid-i-Azam Academy.

THE Turks, it seems, will send troops into Iraq. When and how many is uncertain. But in a momentous decision, Turkey’s parliament voted decisively to aid the US military occupation of Iraq.

Washington is delighted. Having run out of troops itself, the US is arm-twisting and bribing all and sundry to send soldiers to Iraq. Not surprisingly, few nations are eager to risk their men in strife-torn Iraq. Pakistan and India both had the good sense to resist US pressure to send sepoys to Iraq. But Uncle Sam has a very powerful inducement: money and trade. Turkey shows just how loudly cash talks with near-bankrupt nations.

Turkey is an important military power. The Turkish army of 402,000 men is Nato’s second largest after the United States. Though Turkey’s armed forces suffer from outdated arms and wobbly logistics, its soldiers, like those of Pakistan, are renowned for courage and tenacity.

Great warriors, yes, but, as Ottoman history shows, hopeless when it comes to money. Much of the Empire’s commercial affairs were conducted by peoples who keenly understood money: Greeks, Jews, and Armenians.

Once the Ottoman Empire stopped expanding by conquest, it began a long, painful process of economic decline that led to its collapse after World War I.

Today, as usual, Turkey is in dire economic straits. Thanks to wild overspending and a defence budget too large for this nation of 67.6 million, Turkey’s economy is on the rocks. Inflation is 30 per cent, bank crises are endemic, corruption rampant, and a powerful military-industrial complex holds the economy in a stranglehold.

Worst of all, previous free-spending governments ran up a huge external debt of $118.3 billion that requires crushing interest payments and all too frequent, heart-stopping repayment of large chunks of maturing debt. Turkey’s unsustainable debt problem perfectly illustrates how nations with weak economies and large debt lose their independence and become beholden to foreign powers.

Turkey cannot repay its debts. But failure to do so would mean an Argentine-style collapse of the already shaky currency, bank failures, a stock market collapse, cut-offs of imports, notably oil (Turkey has none), and a host of other dire consequences. To keep its debt ball rolling, Turkey must keep borrowing from international lenders. Old loans are paid off by new loans.

Enter Uncle Sam. The US and the world financial agencies it controls, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, keep lending and re-lending to Turkey. The IMF has loaned Turkey $30 billion since 1999. Each time Turkey suffers a new financial crisis, Washington rushes in to prop up its finances and government.

Last spring, when Washington was preparing for war, it demanded Ankara to allow US troops to invade Iraq from eastern Turkey. PM Recep Erdogan’s new, Islamic-light government in Ankara — the first genuinely popular, freely elected government in memory — refused, in spite of intense pressure from the US and the Turkish army’s too-powerful, rightist generals, a virtual government unto themselves. The refusal was wildly popular among Turks, but Uncle Sam soon began cutting off the flow of money and threatening restrictions on Turkish cotton exports to the US market.

Eventually, this pressure and worsening finances forced Turkey’s government to accede to US demands over Iraq in spite of strong opposition by 80 per cent of the public.

Just weeks after Washington announced $8.5 billion in desperately-needed new loans to Ankara, Turkey agreed to send troops to Iraq. Erdogan and his AKP had stood up to Washington, at least long enough to save national honour. Now it was time to take the American loans to stave off bankruptcy.

Money was the dominant but not sole reason for Turkey’s decision to send troops to Iraq. After waging a 20-year war against Kurdish separatist PKK guerrillas, Ankara wishes to occupy Kurdish regions of northern Iraq to crush PKK activity there and monitor Iraq’s two, US-created Kurdish mini-states. Northern Iraq’s vast oilfields remain the object of passionate, if discreet, Turkish desire. Today’s Iraq was a part of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years until imperial Britain grabbed the resource-rich region after WWI.

Almost lost in the clamour over Turkey’s decision were angry chirpings from the US-installed ‘ruling council’ in Baghdad, which, for a figurehead regime, had the audacity to protest against the dispatch of Turkish troops to Iraq. Many Iraqis fear once Turkish troops come, they may never go.

The de facto partition of Iraq, long predicted by this writer, could be accelerating. Washington may decide to carve up the country into ‘Iraq utile,’ as France used to define Chad, and ‘Iraq inutile’, or useful and useless Iraq. Oil is in the north and south-east. Let the Turks and Kurds divide up the north; the US and Britain will control the bigger south-east fields; the Sunni triangle, where resistance to US occupation is fiercest, will be sealed off and left in isolation.

Most Turks bitterly oppose intervention in Iraq. But their politicians cannot face them and admit, ‘it’s either rent out our troops as mercenaries — oops, ‘peacekeepers’ — or watch the lights go out when we run out of imported fuel.’ Pakistan faces identical pressures and may yet cave in.

Either way, it’s a very hard choice for the proud Turks, and one that will certainly generate even more anti-Americanism in a nation that used to love America.— Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2003

IRAQ is a mess. The extent to which US hopes and aspirations of a post-Saddam, pro-US, stable Iraq have been crushed is now all too obvious. The weekend’s suicide bombing at a hotel used by American personnel and members of the Iraqi governing council was the latest evidence of that. Six people, all Iraqi, were killed and several more injured.

Headlines on the previous two days make for equally grim reading. Friday: ‘Spanish diplomat, 11 others killed in Iraq’. Saturday: ‘Two more US soldiers die’. And alongside Sunday’s suicide bombing headline: ‘Three US soldiers hit by roadside bomb’. Go through the headlines for the past several weeks, and the same stories crop up — sabotage, demonstrations, bomb blasts, suicide attacks, death. The US occupation of Iraq is facing sustained, violent and escalating opposition.

Iraq is a mess and the Bush administration is ready to call it a day. If not to its whole Iraq strategy (some neocons still believe they can realize their goals of regional control and oil wealth), then at least to the physical deployment of American troops. All it needs is someone to take their place. Hence the desperate hunt for replacements.

That hunt has taken the Bush administration back to the United Nations, the body it so brashly dismissed in the run-up to war. By not, at that time, supporting the US war against Iraq the UN had — according to President Bush — failed the test to ‘prove its relevance’. As American casualties in post-Saddam Iraq mount, however, it has suddenly become relevant again.

Washington is looking for a UN-mandated force to take on security duties in Iraq. The major obstacle for such a force is Washington’s persistent ‘have the cake and eat it too’ demand that the US — and not the UN or the Iraqis — control Iraq. France is leading the opposition in the world body to the deployment of international troops on these conditions. Kofi Annan, the usually mild, compliant secretary-general of the United Nations, has also been surprisingly vocal and determined in his opposition to the US resolution.

It is a measure of the Americans’ desperation that they are this week presenting a reworked resolution to the UN. Draft Two provides for the Iraqi governing council to decide by December 15 the timetable for transfer of power to the Iraqis. Russia is reported to be more willing to vote in favour of this revised draft, the French at best of not vetoing it. The UN route for relief remains, however, fraught with diplomatic hurdles and — even if it should be agreed — will take months to materialize on ground in Iraq.

So the hunt for non-UN mandated relief troops also continues apace. Last week Washington finally secured an agreement with Ankara for 10,000 Turkish troops to be deployed in Iraq. The reason the agreement took so long (the talks started even before the war) is the deep unpopularity of both the war and the Turkish participation in it, among the Turkish people. Watching the pictures of daily bombings and killings in Iraq, Turkish families have no wish to see their sons become the next victims.

Turkish deployment in Iraq has been criticized by other Muslim countries. The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), meeting in Malaysia, did not attack Ankara by name but everyone knew who its condemnation of foreign troops in Iraq was directed against. King Abdullah of Jordan went further by saying none of Iraq’s neighbours should be involved inside the country, as they could not be neutral.

The Turkish people don’t support Turkish deployment; the Muslim world is against it. But by far the biggest irony is that the Iraqi governing council (IGC), constituted by the Americans to provide some semblance of Iraqi power-sharing, is vehemently opposed to Turkish entry. The IGC is by far the most pro-US entity within Iraq at the moment. If it has condemned the decision, imagine how much more resentful the Iraqi people, and the armed groups causing America so many headaches, must feel. It does not take a genius to predict that the Turkish deployment will not lessen anti-occupation attacks.

This assessment applies to the deployment of other nationals also. Those optimistic that non-American, non-Turkish troops will come in for less flak than the current occupation force, would do well to study the pattern of attacks in Iraq in recent months. The targets include: the United Nations, whose headquarters have been attacked twice and whose envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed; the Jordanians, whose mission was hit by a suicide bomber; Aqila al-Hashimi, a female member of the IGC gunned down outside her home; and a Spanish diplomat, also gunned down outside his home. The lesson, for those willing to heed it, is that the allies of the US occupation will face as much difficulty and be as vulnerable as the Americans.

Washington is, of course, unconcerned about that. Its only desire is to get its troops out of harm’s way, stem the flow of body bags back home and — its real goal — stop the seepage of support for the president. As long as George Bush can get American deaths off the news stories being seen by tomorrow’s voters (his re-election campaign has already started), he will not be troubled by Turkish, Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi deaths. Pakistan is being asked to play its part in the war on terror by contributing two divisions to Iraq. The topic was first broached during President Musharraf’s visit to Camp David. Within hours he was announcing on American television that he had agreed in principle to Bush’s request.

Aside from what that announcement says about the state of democracy, the power of the ‘elected government’ of Prime Minister Jamali, and the consultation that precedes major policy decisions in Pakistan — in all three cases ‘not much’ — it speaks volumes about Musharraf’s desperation to please America.

Previous decisions to side with the war on terror (reversing long-standing policies towards the Taliban and Kashmiri separatist groups) cannot be characterized in the same way. They were policies that were proving counter-productive for Pakistan. As such they should have been reversed long ago. After 9/11, not changing them would have proved disastrous for Pakistan.

Sending Pakistani troops to Iraq is a completely different kettle of fish. Here the disaster lies in complying with American wishes. The wave of discontent that this would unleash at home is not such a big issue for the president, adept by now at jarring popular sensitivities and managing the consequences. But it would be a big issue in Iraq. As seen, neither religion nor nationality confer immunity to attack in Iraq. The same applies to any resolution that the Security Council passes tomorrow. Pakistani soldiers would be targeted and killed in precisely the same way and to the same extent as the American and British soldiers are today.

It has to be stressed here that Iraq is not an improving or even stabilizing situation — it is a deteriorating one. Things are getting worse there — both for the Iraqi people and for the occupying troops. So long as the US remains set on maintaining control in Iraq, this downward trend will persist. Even if tomorrow it agrees to hand over control to a neutral body like the UN, it will take months for this to translate into on-ground improvements and stability. Bottom line: Iraq is going to stay a mess for a very long time.

The argument that Pakistani deployment would yield gains in terms of American gratitude and largesse cuts little ice. If the remuneration is so large, why has there been only one applicant for security duties in Iraq? All the other candidates have seen what a mess Iraq is and concluded that any benefits of the US gratitude for sending their troops would be far outweighed by the human and political cost of doing so.

Turkey, the sole taker, is no example for Pakistan to follow. It is motivated by the desire to ingratiate itself with the US, and by what it sees as an opportunity to further its national interests with regard to its neighbour. Even with these pressing motives, it has no guarantee of success — indeed, it is likely to fail. Wait for the first Turkish body bags to reach home, and see how long the government survives.

As Washington searches for allies to relieve its dying troops in Iraq, prospective partners — especially Pakistan — should take a long, hard look at the mess in that country and consider whether it is really a place where they want to send their soldiers?