THE tremors produced by the reference against the Chief Justice of Pakistan have been felt in virtually every field of our national life. It has outraged the legal fraternity, and the associations of lawyers, who have tried to act as the vanguard of all movements in Pakistan’s chequered constitutional history for the rule of law, have offered a tough challenge to the process initiated by the reference.

Political parties opposed to the government were struggling to overcome disarray in their ranks with uncertain plans to hold an All Parties Conference. The government campaign to sow the seeds of distrust by leaking news of progress in making a clandestine deal with the People’s Party had made people despair of the political parties acting as an instrument of change. The judicial crisis has provided them with an unexpected opportunity to energise their cadres.

The greatly expanded print and electronic media is passing through an intensely competitive phase; it can survive only by providing credible coverage of matters which arouse popular concern. This is where the government has made its worst miscalculation.

There are several precedents of a similar miscalculation in the contemporary world. From Pinochet to Milosevic, authoritarian regimes have relied heavily on communication technology especially the power of television to overwhelm public opinion. After initial gains, such projects have often backfired. Prominent amongst the reasons of this failure is the irrepressible quest for truth in human beings.

In a long and memorable essay, “The Power of the Powerless”, written in October 1978, Vaclav Havel, the dissident intellectual who became Czechoslovakia’s president after the collapse of communism some 12 years later, wrote that in every one there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. He defined the inevitable clash with authoritarian systems with stark simplicity. Life, he argued, “moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, in short, toward the fulfilment of its own freedom”.

Totalitarian systems, on the other hand, demand “conformity, uniformity, and discipline”. Havel described his struggle and that of fellow intellectuals who were at that time trying to come together as the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted as a struggle against a regime that was, in Havel’s own words, captive to its own lies, falsified the future, falsified statistics, pretended not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus, pretended to respect human rights, and pretended to persecute no one.

It is this dichotomy of aims that often gives the media a sense of vocation. This is why at some point of time the project to use it as an instrument of unchallenged power backfires.

Paradoxically, in Pakistan the subjugation of the other forums including parliaments, national civil and military bureaucracies, and business associations to absolute authority has placed a particularly heavy burden on the media.

There has all along been a special self-awareness in the media of being the only effective torch bearer of truth. From the early years when larger-than-life personalities, like the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, took up journalism to assume this responsibility to the present day, there has been a continuous tradition of trying to live up to this high calling.

The struggle to do so has been long and lonely. In more recent years, as the age of information inexorably burst upon us, technology has become an important new factor. Just as power elites try to harness it for their purposes, it also provides an unprecedented counterweight. As airwaves and cyberspace increasingly belong to the market place, the state’s apparatus designed primarily to capture photo-ops and disseminate the authorised word faces a far more robust counterattack.

Then there is the increasing intrusion into the scene of the internet which forces the more formal media outlets to maintain credibility. Access to international websites has added special pages to our newspapers which reproduce news and views that make it extremely difficult for press information departments to hide truth or put a self-serving spin on it.

One of the many surprises brought about by the rapid expansion of private television in Pakistan is the interest in broadcast discussion of national and international issues. It cuts across the social strata and underscores the universal hunger for information and participation. It has been a virtual revelation that even the disadvantaged segments of our population evince as much interest in these debates as the elite. In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand.

Education continues to be a privilege and not a right; it still deepens social polarisation and class cleavages. At least 62 per cent of our adults are illiterate; this figure rises to 77 per cent for adult women. This dismal situation leaves even the best of our newspapers with modest circulation figures and our book publishing industry with pathetically small print orders. But information technology reaches the educated and uneducated alike and helps organise and define their inchoate feelings, thoughts and responses.

Even in our under-developed infrastructure, sound broadcasting reaches 95 per cent of the population and anybody in the trade will testify to the growing interest in news and analysis. Electronic outlets have already given a cutting edge to mass perceptions. The media would increasingly be expected to disseminate information, identify problems and possible solutions, generate new ideas, measure progress, and above all, hold old and new bureaucratic agencies to account.

Empowerment comes to it from a critical outlook and not from compliance with the line given by official spokesmen. Even as the media shapes the attitudes of the people, the people shape the media. The noticeable failure of the publicity organs of the state including its radio and television channels to understand this responsive nexus is cutting into their ratings.

The chaotic scenes projected to a global audience from Islamabad on March 16 showed how inadequately the authorities have understood the present status of the fourth estate. The day marked a distressing stage in the deterioration of relations between the government and the media. As the elected parliament became less and less capable of acting as the custodian of peoples’ rights and the judiciary faced more constraints than before in safeguarding its independence, the media’s watchdog role got heightened. Its expansion attracted a large number of young men and women whose idealism has not yet been jaded.

This is where the official media managers started getting more frustrated: the new information technology was beginning to strike back. At the same time, structural changes in the economy had started reducing dependence on government advertising blunting the weapon that governments have traditionally used against the privately owned media.

The reference about the Chief Justice has demonstrated the unimaginative and uncreative nature of media management in Pakistan. It has underestimated the attention attracted by the seminal events arising out of the reference. For weeks the air was thick with reports and rumours about plans by which the regime would prolong itself. Some judicial decisions had also focused the media on some hitherto unexplored avenues of corruption and abuse of power.

The reference about the Chief Justice was at once dramatic and difficult to interpret. The media met the demand by offering equitable time and space to contending viewpoints and it was not its fault if the government spokesmen had made the disastrous decision to anchor themselves in total denial. What they said was immediately belied by the candid camera available alike to the conventional reporter and the more intrusive TV investigator. Sensing the stakes, the media presented a balanced picture. But obviously the official target was no picture at all if the government alone was not going to determine which picture was to be presented to the people.

Incidents multiplied by the day as major TV channels and newspapers followed similar policies of free reporting and analysis. On March 16, someone’s patience ran out and a particular establishment – the building housing the Jang-News group of newspapers and their flagship TV station in Islamabad – got singled out for punishment. The shockwaves went around the world in real time forcing the president of Pakistan to apologise on line.

This apology by itself is not much of a guarantee that the current drift into fascism would be arrested and reversed. That would need a revolutionary change in the culture of governance. The media has shown an inherent ability to balance freedom and responsibility; it is the insecure and utterly undemocratic ruling elite which does not give up efforts to turn it into a weapon against those who disagree with it.

The people express solidarity with the media when it comes under attack simply because other channels of redress have already been blocked. A reappraisal of the situation should begin by recognising that a vast majority of people want to live in truth when it comes to the collective life of a nation.

Secondly, as seen in different parts of the world, the technique of lies, more lies and still more lies has simply outlived its times. Technology has acquired an iconoclastic edge that cannot be ignored. It has re-opened the old question of the use and abuse of language.

What we have seen in the last few days was that the more glib and audacious the official spokesmen, the greater the public revulsion and media resistance. It is time for all of us to reflect and learn. What is really at stake is whether we can stop the present descent into barbarism.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

FOR a man who likes to warn of impending financial meltdown because of global warming, Sir Nicholas Stern has a gigantic carbon footprint.

The soon-to-be former head of the UK Government Economic Service has criss-crossed the globe in recent months, to share the bad news –- climate change could bring a worldwide economic downturn comparable to the great depression or the two world wars.

After trips to Brussels, Washington DC, Japan, China, India and South Africa, next week he is scheduled to leave on the final leg of his end-of-world tour, taking in Indonesia, Australia and California.

Sir Nicholas has been given much of the credit for the fact that global warming now tops the public and political agendas. His review last October was hailed by Tony Blair as the most important document to land on his desk, and no discussion of climate change is complete without a reference to Sir Nicholas's headline conclusion - that it is cheaper to tackle the issue than to wait and deal with the consequences.

But there has also been criticism. William Nordhaus, the esteemed Yale University professor of economics, said Sir Nicholas's unambiguous conclusions brought to mind the one-handed economist demanded by former US president Harry Truman, who complained that they would always say on the one hand this and the other hand that.

There has been gossip about the reasons Sir Nicholas will leave the Treasury at the end of this month to return to academic life at the London School of Economics. And the review's support for action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, just as the government is pushing for domestic and international measures to do just that, has even been labelled as another dodgy dossier.

For either a green prophet of doom or a shady conspirator, Sir Nicholas seems relaxed. He admits that he flies too much and has yet to replace all the light bulbs in his house with low energy versions. If all the attention has gone to his head, he does not show it.

He is reluctant to take credit for the current focus on environmental matters. "Others have made their contribution and I hope we made ours," he says. That contribution, running to almost 700 pages, said the expected increase in extreme weather, with the associated –- and expensive –- problems of agricultural failure, water scarcity, disease and mass migration, means global warming could swallow up to 20 per cent of the world's GDP. The cost of addressing the problem, it said, could be limited to about one per cent of GDP, provided it starts on a serious scale within 10 to 20 years.

The simplicity of this headline finding cut through the complications and caveats (the report itself warns the figures should not be taken too literally) and shifted the debate into new territory, at least in the UK. Although the report was written mainly for an international audience, it remains to be seen whether it, and Sir Nicholas's globetrotting, will kick start the stalled negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

He says: "Everywhere we went, people have been engaged in the discussion, which is very healthy. Now everybody has to find their own way to what they conclude from that."

The review has its roots in the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles. Sir Nicholas says: "There were two subjects, Africa and climate change. The previous year I'd written a report for the Commission for Africa. We got quite a long way on Africa and Gordon [Brown] felt this was very much on the basis of serious, careful analysis." The chancellor asked Sir Nicholas to perform a similar analysis to push forward the international effort on global warming. "Not to look for consensus, but to establish some of the basic issues and conclusions."

Chief among those is that a failure to cut emissions will be devastating. Critics such as Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin complain that the report's conclusions are "alarmist and incompetent" and argue that it should be seen as a political document, not an impartial assessment of existing knowledge.

Sir Nicholas says: "It's about providing an analytical basis for policy, whilst at the same time trying to be specific about policy. It's not a political document in the sense of making a narrow party case or a narrow case for a particular position. It's false to suggest there was any view on the way this should come out at the beginning."

Critics have focused on the way the report treats future generations, which will be most affected by decisions we make today because it takes time for the heat trapped by our carbon emissions to build up. Much of what is going to happen over the next 30 or 40 years is already determined.

So the policy decisions we take now in terms of reducing emissions will have implications in 50, 100 or 150 years. Sir Nicholas believes the damage future generations will suffer at our hands is greater than generally perceived. Other economists, including Professor Nordhaus, disagreed and an academic bun fight ensued.

Sir Nicholas says: "Many other economists have taken [our] position so we're not peculiar in this at all." Some climate change sceptics tried to portray these disagreements as undermining the case for action. In fact, even the most strident of his academic tormentors also stressed the need to reduce emissions.

Sir Nicholas says his team also took a different approach in the way they treated the scientific evidence. Rather than just working with the most likely scenarios, they took into account the smaller chances of far more severe events unfolding. And those events tend to be the most expensive. "You take into account the different probabilities and what kind of damages could follow," he says. "And at each stage where you've got a 'could', you've got a probability distribution. So you have to build that into the story. We're starting to be able to do that."

One example is something called climate sensitivity –- a measure of how much the atmosphere will warm. Most climate scientists assume that, if the concentration of carbon dioxide reaches double what it was before the industrial revolution, we would see an average rise of 3C. But some have claimed the climate is much more sensitive, and temperatures under those circumstances could increase by 6C, perhaps more. It's a small chance, but Sir Nicholas has considered it.

He has also considered studies that warn of positive feedbacks in the climate system, where increasing temperatures force more greenhouse gases from natural sources such as the oceans and soils into the atmosphere. These processes are poorly understood but could accelerate global warming beyond what scientists have predicted.

He calls this approach the economics of risk which, he says, "puts greater weight on downsides than upsides, because people are averse to risks." One such person, it seems fair to say, is Mr Brown, who brought Sir Nicholas back to London from his post as chief economist at the World Bank in 2003.

When Sir Nicholas announced his resignation in December, friends were quoted as saying it was because the already uneasy relationship between the two men soured after the report's release. Mr Brown, they said, wanted to focus on the international picture, and the clamour for strong domestic action in Sir Nicholas's report created jarred with his more modest proposals.

Sir Nicholas says: "The idea that I was pushed out or that there was some distancing is just complete rubbish. It's stupid nonsense." He praises the government's reaction to his report as "strong" and says he has received "full support" from the prime minister and the chancellor. Only once, when he refers baldly to "Blair and Brown" do his words suggest any kind of distance.— Dawn/Guardian Service

DURING a recent visit to the US, I had the occasion to revive the contacts built up during my five years tenure as political counsellor in our embassy in Washington in the 1980s. Most now occupy senior and influential positions in the administration and on Capitol Hill. What struck me was an all-pervasive feeling of unease about Pakistan being a “nursery” and “sanctuary” for terrorists and a sense of apprehension about “nuclear” Pakistan’s uncertain and dark future.

By contrast India was hailed as a reliable and responsible friend, a factor of stability in the region and an emerging superpower worthy of Washington’s friendship and strategic cooperation. That may explain the background of the recent coercive moves in Congress to compel Pakistan to toe the line.

The resolution by the US Congress providing for linkage between US military assistance to Pakistan and “demonstrable progress” by Pakistan in “achieving certain objectives related to counter-terrorism and democratic reforms” and application of restrictions on US assistance in the event of Pakistan’s failure to meet these goals has caused deep disappointment in Islamabad.

The sequence of events, however, suggests that such a shift in policy was in the making. Pakistan’s designation as a strategic partner was primarily a marriage of convenience. The military leader in Islamabad wanted support from the US and the West. The US objective was to find a pliant leader to do its bidding in the aftermath of 9/11. They both needed each other. For both, the motivation was to tide over a critical period.

Strain was inherent in their relationship as the agenda and policies of the two did not have much in common. The effusive expressions of “long, durable and enduring friendship” and the “robust” quality of bilateral relations were based on a single factor and hence the tension and crisis.

While the US administration and Bush have publicly appreciated Musharraf’s efforts in the war on terror in the face of heavy odds, the US media, think-tanks and Congress have serious reservations about Pakistan’s capacity and sincerity to deliver and have raised questions about Musharraf’s commitment to eliminate the sources of terror.

The editorial comments of influential papers like The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have frequently expressed exasperation with Musharraf. The New York Times has accused him of being a “frustratingly selective” and “intermittent collaborator in the fight against international terrorism rather than a fully committed ally.” The LA Times in a recent comment urged Musharraf to make sure that “Pakistan is known for exports other than terrorism”. In another comment, it said: “The US may well be destined for a long marriage of convenience with Pakistan. But its spouse need not necessarily be named Musharraf.”

These comments reflect a trust deficit and hence the demands for Pakistan to “do more”. John Negroponte, now deputy secretary of state, laid it out bluntly in his annual report submitted to Congress in January. According to him, “the Taliban and Al Qaeda maintain(ed) critical sanctuaries” and while Pakistan was America’s partner in the war against terror, it was “also a major source of Islamic extremism.”

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, have also echoed these apprehensions and accused the Taliban and Al Qaeda of using “wild areas” on the Pakistani side of the border as “havens”. Earlier General Karl Eikenberry, former US commander in Afghanistan, echoed similar feelings, saying that Al Qaeda and Taliban had “training camps and recruiting grounds in Pakistan’s tribal areas” and that these were used for launching attacks in Afghanistan. He called for “steady and direct” attacks on Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.

A resolution by Congress provides for blocking military assistance to Pakistan, if it does not succeed in halting the resurgence of the Taliban inside its territory. This is the natural culmination of the trust deficit and unease at Pakistan’s insufficient efforts in its war against terror. This is part of the implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations to address post 9/11 challenges. “Critical issues that need immediate action” include the curbing of the proliferation of nuclear technology, combating poverty and corruption, building effective institutions, promoting democracy and the rule of law.

Of late, there have been several reports citing unnamed intelligence sources about an alarming increase in Taliban activities that is expected to lead to a “spring offensive” launched by 20,000 Taliban inside Afghanistan. The statements by President Karzai regarding Pakistan’s involvement in and encouraging of the insurgency in Afghanistan have made the US media and intelligence reports focus on the “resurgent” Taliban in Quetta and Chaman, where they allegedly have training camps.

Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has endorsed the allegations and urged Pakistan to crack down on militants crossing its border into southern Afghanistan. It is clear, he said, that “Pakistan has to do a lot to prevent further incursions across the border.” The Conservative Heritage Foundation in a recent report has asked that “Washington should make the issue of denying terrorist safe haven in border areas a focal point of its partnership with Islamabad.” The think-tank also accused Musharraf of taking “little concrete action to make the country inhospitable for individuals and groups seeking to destabilise Afghanistan or India and plotting international acts of terrorism.”

Noted South Asian scholar Selig Harrison known for his pro-Indian tilt in a scathing attack on Musharraf discredited the premise that he is “a bulwark against the Islamic radicals. The Islamic parties are flourishing under the protective umbrella of military intelligence agencies,” he maintained.

Harrison has also questioned the wisdom of US largesse to Pakistan and urged that Pentagon subsidies be included in a ban on military assistance. According to Harrison, “since 9/11 the cost of Musharraf’s cooperation has reached a staggering $27.5 billion. Economic and military aid has totalled $4.5 billion. In addition, the US is providing five billion dollars in credit for the purchase of 62 F-16 fighters planes and has orchestrated the postponement of debt repayment of donor countries totalling another $13.5 billion. The subsidies to the armed forces amount to $4.5 billion and are set to reach $7.5 billion in 2008.”

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama told the Armed Services Committee that if international law allowed the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the same can be invoked for action against Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries inside Pakistan. Evan Bayh, Democrat Senator from Indiana, said that Pakistan leaders needs “to contemplate which is harder for them – acting to do something about this or us (America) acting to do something about this.” Most senators hold the view that the ISI continues to collaborate with the Taliban and other insurgent groups operating out of its border regions.

It is being said that the resolution only conveys the sense of the House and is not binding. However, the postponement of the second round of the Pak-US strategic dialogue, the failure to conclude an investment treaty promised during Bush’s visit and the delay in the supply of F-16 reveals a certain degree of coolness in bilateral relations. A Democratic administration could build up on the current congressional moves to Pakistan’s detriment.

Difficult days lie ahead. Our diplomacy and statesmanship will be put to a critical test. The bottom line is that there is no safety in yielding and no partnership between unequals. Based on its experience of the past six years, the US has continually changed the goal post, with the confidence that Pakistan would yield.

A couple of years ago, this writer had concluded that “a strategy of reliance on indigenous resources both material and human alone would enable us to offset any adverse fallout of a sudden change in US policy which as our experience shows has been unrealistic, even unfriendly at a most critical juncture in our national life. Prudence demands that we reshape our foreign policy with greater realism and refrain from taking US support as a constant factor in our future planning.”

After almost two years, I find this conclusion still valid and perhaps more relevant than before.

The writer is a former ambassador.