THE government continues to be accused of corruption in both the houses of parliament by the desperate opposition leaders. The ruling party members on their part accuse the leaders of the PPP and the PML-N of practising massive corruption while they were in office until 1999 when general Musharraf seized power.

The rulers on their part assert there is no corruption now at the top — a claim vehemently denied by the opposition. But it is the duty of the ministers not only not to practise or promote corruption, but also to prevent corruption at all levels of the government. The government says that is too tough and a prolonged task.

The opposition accused the military-led government of using the National Accountability Bureau in an utterly partisan manner and sparing the serving ministers and officials while focusing on the opposition leaders for lapses committed while in office. And same kind of follies or lapses by the ruling party leaders are ignored.

Worst still is condoning the practices of the opposition leaders while they were in office if they joined the leading coalition. Their large defaulted loans from government banks are also written off or condoned.

If such follies of the leaders while in opposition are not condoned or forgiven, their cases are put in cold storage. The annual audit reports of the Auditor-General of Pakistan furnish ample instances of such malpractices and even of the serving officials.

The more glaring instances of such irregularities are picked up by the Public Accounts Committee of the National Assembly whose hearings provide ample proof of the misdeeds of the ministers and senior officials in the past.

Such impugned officials try to make the hearings of the PAC in camera, but the chairman did not agree with that demand, hence we know more and more now about what happened in the past including 2004-05 period the audited accounts of which have been furnished by the auditor-general.

Eventually it all boils down to whether an offending minister or official is in office or out. If he is in office he is pretty safe from the clutches of the NAB which needs the government’s approval to proceed with such cases.

An Accountability court in Quetta has now sentenced three officials of the PTCL to long term imprisonment and heavy fines for causing a total loss of Rs35 million to the government through bogus billing. If all the guilty officials including the ministers had been punished in a similar fashion the people would have been pleased and would have had better faith in the government and we there would have been a better, cleaner and more efficient administration. That is too much to ask for or hope for in the present context.

And if the accused or exempted officials were not holding powerful posts including key ministries, the people would have accepted the official decisions with fewer reservations.

The basic question is whether these officials regard themselves as public servants and the ministers as persons holding office of public trust and a vehicle for service to the public or regard themselves as holding imperious offices which is symbolic of the flag that they fly. In a tribal-cum feudal order, the top men regard themselves as all powerful and above the law.

We are now familiar with the top persons in authority claiming there is no corruption at the top in the government. That claim was advanced when Nawaz Sharif was the prime minister as well. In fact such claims began at his time. It was said that many of the leaders and ministers are so rich that they need not take to corruption. But the fact is that excess of wealth has not prevented its holders from adding to it. If they hesitated or were too slow in adding to their wealth while in office, their children or other family and friends did that gladly.

The fact is that in this land of 160 million people a small number of people deal directly with senior officials and ministers. The bulk of the people in their daily life deal with policemen, revenue officers, government doctors and public school teachers and other very junior officials. Corruption at that level hurts the people.

Corruption is of several kinds such as stealing of official funds, depriving the government of its revenues, wasting public funds on useless schemes, obtaining bribes to do favours to people at the cost of others or the government getting government lands and other properties allotted to them and obtaining large loans from government banks and then writing them off are among other crimes.

Several of the key ministers in the present government are loan defaulters and they have saved their skin by changing their parties and joining the ruling coalition and becoming ministers.

The opposition members protest against the discriminatory treatment meted out to the former PPP speaker of the National Assembly for giving appointments to a large number of people in the NA secretariat. Wasim Sajjad, a former chairman of the Senate, who approved 200 such appointments in the senate secretariat is leader of the house in the senate enjoying a variety of perquisites.

Gilani has been in jail for too long refusing to change his party loyalty. Wasim Sajjad says he made all the appointments in accordance with the rules. Yusaf Raza Gilani says he too made all the appointments under the rules, but he remains in jail.

When it comes to the people and the police, the former are usually more afraid of the latter than the criminals and they do not report crimes to the police to avoid any harassment from them. For that matter, getting a First Information Report entered in a police station is a vexatious exercise. When the complainant is a woman or a young girl she faces greater hardships in getting an FIR filed. Big money comes in to play and prevails.

In the rural areas the police are under the influence of the landlord and his word is law, unless orders come from the top to do justice to the gravely wronged and the media exposes the cover-up. Very few of the wrongs done to the poor and the weak are exposed and punished. The police are taking to major crimes including murders not only in the rural areas but also in the cities.

In the latest instance, the Supreme Court has ordered the return from London of the Town Police officer of Lyari Omer Shahid on a charge of a murder of a labourer Rasool Buksh Brohi in place of a proclaimed offender. He was allowed to go abroad to do a course at the London School of Economics despite the fact that his name was in the Exit Control List. The Sindh home minister Rauf Siddiqui had also announced a reward of Rs10 million for the police team which killed the innocent labourer in an encounter.

The minister also announced a one step promotion to all the members of the police team. This is a good example of how the police system works in Pakistan and how the police get rewarded instead of being punished for its crime. This is truly an eye opener. Police reforms have been introduced in the country after a considerable debate. But the reforms are partial and ineffective, the old high handed machinery goes its own way punishing the innocents and rewarding the wrong men.

The chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhary has asserted that no one will be allowed to violate the constitution. He has received large support from the legal community and the people at large. But the constitution will be upheld when the laws are upheld and enforced rigidly and when the police become the guardian of the law instead of its violators.

The chief justice has been vigilant and has rightly initiated legal action against some of the blatant crimes including those instances where the helpless women are victims.

Corruption permeates the public sector to a large extent. If enough number of guilty are punished, more of them will not take to crime and new comers may give up their nefarious practices.

Some of the petty corruption can be eliminated or reduced if the need for personal contact between the officials concerned and the people is reduced in the manner done by the CBR for taxation purposes. And citizens should be able to get simple things done through the government through a letter to the official concerned. It should not be necessary for a citizen to approach a government officer time and again to get simple things done.

In the area of land transfers, one has to make several efforts to the government offices or hand over a large bribe initially. Land administration needs urgent reform to reduce the prevailing corruption.

If corruption is to be eliminated, it has to be done in a non-partisan manner. Corruption practised by those in office or in opposition should be checked uniformly or punished and the fruits of corruption forfeited.

Now the corrupt officials enjoy the fruits of their evil practices openly and then their children take over as businessmen or industrialists. Almost everyone feels it is pretty safe to be corrupt and usually very rewarding.

If corruption cannot always be checked, it must at least be exposed, the corrupt punished and fruits of corruption forfeited. Hardly any of that kind is done in Pakistan. Instead, the corrupt are respected, envied, admired, imitated and much sought after by society. They are deemed as success stories to be followed by others. So more and more people yearn to become corrupt and enjoy a good life.

LAST WEEK I argued that Israel’s attack on Lebanon was premeditated: Hezbollah’s capture of two soldiers gave Israel’s government the excuse to launch an assault it had been planning since 2004. Both Bush and Blair knew that it would happen and gave it their approval.

I was, of course, denounced by supporters of Israel’s government as an anti-semite and an apologist for terror. But on Sunday this hypothesis was confirmed by an article Seymour Hersh published in the New Yorker. Israel, his sources told him, “had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah — and shared it with Bush administration officials — well before the July 12 kidnappings”. One US government consultant revealed that Israeli officials visited Washington earlier in the summer “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear”.

One obvious question then arises. Why? Given that the invasion has cost Israel far more in terms of both lives and international standing than the status quo could have done, why did Ehud Olmert’s government choose to attack?

The motives of the US administration are easy to understand. The neocons believe that, by attacking Hezbollah, Israel is helping them to confront Iran. Its bombing raids could even be a wet run for an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While a full-scale invasion of that country is impossible, fighting the guerrillas they regard as Iranian proxies is the next best thing. As Bush’s grip on reality weakens, he really does seem to believe that he is seeking a final showdown with the forces of evil, which will result in a triumph for “freedom and democracy” as definitive as the second coming of the Lord (in either case an apocalypse is involved). But why would Israel allow itself to be used as his battering ram?

The obvious answer is that it thought it would win. If so, this suggests a failure to learn even from recent history. In 1996 Hezbollah, the Shia force formed to fight the Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon, had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. Shimon Peres, hoping — like Olmert — to show the electorate that he was as tough as any of the generals, decided to clear the civilians out of southern Lebanon by means of heavy bombing and then destroy Hezbollah.

He received the support of the US and drove 400,000 people from their homes, but failed to defeat the enemy. The guerillas continued to send their rockets into Israel, swhile Israeli shells killed 102 civilians taking refuge in the village of Qana. The resulting outrage forced the US government to support a ceasefire. Ten years later the whole fiasco - including the killing of civilians in Qana - spools past like a repeated film.

I am not suggesting that Olmert’s administration believed it would lose. But it seems to me that to be quite so blind to the lessons of 1996 it must have had a powerful incentive to attack. Is it possible, as some have claimed, that Israel is pursuing a territorial claim?

The Israeli columnist Tanya Reinhart reminds us that David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, believed that its borders should be “natural”: the Jordan river in the east, the Suez canal and Sharm el-Sheikh in the south-west and south, and the Litani river (20 miles inside Lebanon) in the north.

In his book “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World”, the historian Avi Shlaim describes Ben-Gurion’s “fantastic plan” for annexing southern Lebanon and turning the rest of the country into a Maronite Christian state. In 1956 he explained this scheme to the British and French at the secret talks in Shvres that launched the Suez invasion. His chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, planned to sponsor a Lebanese officer who would “declare himself the saviour of the Maronite population”, then “enter Lebanon, occupy the necessary territory, and create a Christian regime that will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel, and everything will fall into place.”

There are plenty of articles on the internet — including Reinhart’s — suggesting that this ambition has been revived. I don’t believe it. The evidence I presented last week suggests that the soldiers planning this assault envisaged an operation lasting for three weeks. They would storm into Lebanon, eliminate Hezbollah and storm out again. Since the attack began, Israel has been pressing for someone else — the “multinational force” — to patrol southern Lebanon on its behalf.

Though the government is incapable of learning from 1996, it still seems to remember the lesson of May 2000, when the Israeli armed forces discovered that an occupation of southern Lebanon was impossible to sustain. I have not been able to find any evidence that Ben-Gurion’s successors contemplated annexation. Even Ariel Sharon, who engineered Menachem Begin’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, envisaged not a land-grab but the establishment of a puppet government and the destruction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in the hope that the West Bank - not southern Lebanon - could be incorporated into Israel. This is not an attempt to seize more territory.

But you cannot read any account of Israeli politics without being struck by the extraordinary domination of the generals. We are familiar with military dictatorships. But Israel is unique in being a military democracy. An electoral system much fairer than our own repeatedly places the country in the hands of warriors, and sometimes (I am thinking of Yitzhak Shamir and Sharon) war criminals. Even when civilians are elected, they are pushed around by the generals.

To sustain their position, the warrior chiefs seek to ensure that Israel is constantly on the verge of war. As Moshe Dayan observed, military retaliation is a “life drug”. Avi Shlaim summarises Dayan’s argument thus: “First, [retaliation] obliged the Arab governments to take drastic measures to protect their borders. Second, and this was the essence, it enabled the Israeli government to maintain a high degree of tension in the country and in the army.”

The warriors in Israel have almost always been empowered by armed action. (Even while planning the biggest political disaster in Israeli history - Suez - Ben-Gurion was able to depose his peace-seeking foreign minister, Moshe Sharett.) Their interests are best served by escalation, however inappropriate. After the latest attack on Lebanon began, the generals demanded to intensify it. At the cabinet meeting of July 27, when it had already become clear that the assault was turning into a strategic and political disaster, they insisted that they be allowed to mount a full-scale ground offensive.

Who loses from this war? The people of Lebanon and northern Israel, of course, and maybe - one day - the rest of us. The civilians in the Israeli government, perhaps including Ehud Olmert. But not Hezbollah, who are now proclaimed as heroes in Muslim nations across the Middle East. Not Bush or Blair, for whom every attack by terrorists - even those motivated by opposition to their policies — is a further vindication of their war on terror.

And not the Israel Defence Forces. Faced with emboldened enemies, they can demand more resources and greater powers. The generals did not intend to lose, but even this disaster has done them no harm. It has made the Israeli people less secure, and therefore more inclined to vote for those who promise to defend them. —Dawn/Guardian Service

ONE could almost feel sorry for them. A minister like Ruth Kelly is wrenched from her bucket-and spade holiday on a rainy British beach with the kids to launch yet another push to “engage” with Muslims and to step up efforts to “tackle” extremism. A ministerial tour of nine cities to meet Muslims is announced.

It’s all designed to sound energetic and purposeful. We pay fat cabinet salaries and we want our politicians to sound like they are earning them. But in truth, beneath the rhetoric — an odd verbal combination of rugby tackles and romantic engagement — is a profound confusion in government policy as to what to do about British-grown Islamist terrorism, apart from large amounts of surveillance and frequent use of detention. Beyond that, the hearts-and-minds strategy is running on empty.

I’ve seen government ministers do “engagement”: Paul Murphy, when he had the community-cohesion brief, listened carefully, answered questions patiently and got precisely nowhere. His young, angry Muslim audience heard him out but were profoundly cynical; their views didn’t change a jot.

Events of the last few days will have immeasurably increased that cynicism: Muslim MPs and peers have been roundly ticked off by a succession of government ministers as if they were imperial vassals who should know their place. Yet they were simply stating the obvious — that British foreign policy is incubating (we can argue whether it’s the root cause another time) Muslim extremism. Given that kind of opening salvo from her colleagues, perhaps Kelly should save herself the trouble and return to the beach for some more sandcastles and rock pools.

While she’s there, the best thing she can do is to get a bit of perspective on a worn-out policy. Even more importantly, she would do well to take stock of a pernicious media onslaught in danger of spiralling out of control. The ministerial tours, the meetings with selected Muslims — most of whom are as baffled by Islamic extremism as ministers — were the responses to last summer’s London bombings. The danger is that as the government’s “community cohesion” policy flounders, there is no shortage of media commentators pouring out a flood of venomous advice on exactly why no Muslim is worth talking to anyway.

If, reader, you’re short of time and need the summary, it runs thus: the government can’t talk to extremists because they endorse violence and/or are nutty and irrational, and can’t talk to “moderates” (warning: the word is on the point of becoming a term of abuse in the Muslim community) because they’re not representative. These methods of dismissal are so frequently used by journalists that the only possible conclusion is that there are many people in this country who have no interest in listening to any Muslim unless they can chorus their own loathing and suspicion of Islam — the former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the case par excellence.

Some of this armchair advice to government can be pretty briskly dismissed, such as the paranoid fantasies of the rightwing Daily Mail commentator Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan or those of the Conservative MP Michael Gove in his book Celsius 7/7. Both authors haven’t troubled themselves to get much beyond revived imperial delusions of violent Muslims (check out Britain’s history in India, Sudan or Egypt).

More insidious is the comprehensive attack on Whitehall’s policy towards the Muslim community over the last decade by the New Statesman’s political editor, Martin Bright. He argues that the government should have no truck with any Muslim organisation in the UK that has had any involvement with any person who has ever been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, the political Islamist organisation.

That rules out the Muslim Council of Britain, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies and other mainstays of the government’s “engagement” policy of the last 10 years.

It would even include intellectuals such as Professor Tariq Ramadan (grandson, no less, of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), who was a member of the government taskforce set up to tackle Islamist extremism last year, and a star turn on its travelling roadshow for young Muslims. We are talking sweeping here. In fact, implement Bright’s advice and you’ve got a pretty small tea party for your next round of engagement.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a global phenomenon that has taken many different guises in different places. It has been very successful at the ballot box in a host of countries, particularly Egypt. In some countries it has developed an armed wing, in many others it has not. Many of those in this country influenced by this strand of anti-colonial political Islamism have subsequently developed their thinking in entirely different directions. Almost every thoughtful, educated Muslim in this country has been exposed to — and to varying degrees influenced by — the Muslim Brotherhood, the 20th century’s most influential political Islamic movement. The obvious historical analogy to Bright is those US Cold War warriors in the 1950s who smeared anyone who had ever read Marx.

For a story to really work you have to have good guys as well as bad, so the critics conjure up another absurdity — the “silent Sufi majority” of British Muslims. These are the gentle, peace-loving Muslims at the grassroots who have been betrayed, so the argument runs, by those who claim to represent them, such as the Muslim Council of Britain.

One can argue for hours about how to define a Sufi in this country; and, leaving that aside, the characterisation of Sufism is wide of the mark: some of the most violent anti-colonial struggles have been led by Sufis, for example Chechnya and Algeria. Furthermore, some argue that Sufi-inclined traditions such as the Kashmiri Barelvi have failed to travel well to urban Britain and that it is precisely their youngsters who are most disorientated and likely to fail prey to extremism — as was the case of the July 7 bombers from Leeds.

The main target for Bright is the Muslim Council of Britain; he loathes it with a contempt that is hard to explain. Given that the MCB is in effect a small volunteer parish council scrabbling to represent a hugely diverse — both ethnically and theologically — community, it’s not surprising that it has scored own goals in its time. It’s a young, under-confident institution and falls short in many ways, but the fact remains that of all the Muslim organisations to emerge in recent decades it has proved the most successful in winning affiliates.

There is no comparable substitute waiting in the wings. The Sufi Muslim Council of Britain has been in existence all of a month; I wish it well, but unlike the MCB it cannot claim to represent anything like the 40 per cent of British mosques affiliated to the MCB.

Kelly has an urgent task ahead to assuage anxiety as the possibility looms of a second-class status for Muslims in this country — profiled, suspected, searched, endlessly quizzed and found wanting. As for the armchair warriors so keen to proffer advice, one has to question the motives of those intent on undermining the meagre organisational capacity the Muslim community has managed to weld together to combat just such a threat. — Dawn/Guardian Service