THIS national day I look at the mounting pile of foreign articles and reports criticising Pakistan for its sins of omission and commission, perhaps driven to it by curiosity, concern and perversity. Outside opinion matters for assurance and validation. It is a mirror that assists introspection.

No less importantly, it also reveals the agenda of powerful forces which itself may range from an honest preoccupation with human rights and democracy to a far less benign desire to exert pressure in pursuit of objectives that are entirely indifferent to our national interest.

There are familiar patterns reflecting a corresponding familiarity in the cyclic changes in Pakistan’s polity. This is particularly seen in the analysis of constitutional crises, military takeovers, movements for the restoration of democracy and periods of meta-military politics. There are, however, some new and fundamentally more portentous critiques that need great reflection.

It is in the last category that one notices arguments not found in the past. The usual context is Pakistan’s voluntary or coerced participation in the strategic projects of big powers. In it, the fortunes of the people of Pakistan are secondary, if present at all. The criterion is the usefulness of the Pakistani state — more precisely, the Pakistan army — to the pursuit of these projects. Support for Pakistan waxes and wanes according to the need for using it.

Occasions that readily come to mind are the early military pacts in which Ayub Khan had played a decisive role, the anti-Soviet crusade of the Zia era, and the present alliance in the war on terror. Initially, Ayub Khan was, in the eyes of the western commentators, a nation — builder, a moderniser; his authoritarian rule was justified by citing De Gaulle and Solon.

But when technology — the long range missile and the aircraft carrier — curtailed the value of the Dulles era alliances, the commentary underwent a complete change. Zia and his holy warriors sparked off a whole industry supportive of jihad against the infidel communists. He did not live too long after the Geneva accords. His legacy, however, continues to be demonised.

The present phase is beginning to turn out to be even more complex. It is nowhere close to an end but already the pundits have an unprecedented frame of discussion. It is largely defined by two dominant approaches.

First, there is Stephen Cohen’s Idea of Pakistan. I told him once that it was his best and most honest book on Pakistan. He is critical but never without a basic empathy. Pakistan needs a transformation, a view shared by a large number of Pakistanis themselves, and he proceeds painstakingly to flag what in his opinion are the areas where his country, the United States, and Pakistan can pool their transformative energy. But he acknowledges Pakistan’s continued salience.

On the other hand, there is a spate of studies questioning the idea of Pakistan itself. In its outer fringe, this approach advocates the breaking up of Pakistan and the redrawing of maps. More to the point are the essays written to challenge Stephen Cohen’s optimistic view.

They recommend, in a pseudo-scholarly manner, a tough approach on the assumption that the problems allegedly created by Pakistan are genetic and irremediable. In a world driven by the media they have a greater impact on public opinion than the more serious scholarly treatises.

A good example is an essay entitled “Containing Pakistan; Engaging the Raja-Mandala in South Central Asia” by Vanna Cappelli. There are many reasons to take note of it. It appears in the winter 2007 issue of Orbis, and not one of the rightwing popular magazines. The author is well known in Pakistan for his writings on Afghanistan. Many of us also know that he saved the life of a cat there and named it Queen Sorayya to mark the liberation of women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The pillar of his policy recommendations is “raja-mandala”, the key concept in Kautilya’s Arthashastra that Muslim strategic thinkers have quoted from even in the pre-independence era. Cappelli uses it to urge the United States to exploit tensions in the rival spheres, the “mandalas”, as Kautilya taught his prince.

It is significant that its belated discovery by a western analyst marks the mainstreaming of Indian scholars who now have a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. Cappelli also repeatedly tries to fortify his argument by citing Hussain Haqqani’s Pakistan: Between mosque and military. How fair the selection from him is better left to Haqqani himself but it is certainly an added reason for reading Cappelli.

What is Cappelli’s argument? Pakistan, he thinks, is the epicentre of terrorism for reasons much deeper than most people including Cohen think. Most people dig only up to Pakistan’s chronic militarism but Cappelli pretends to unearth a much deeper stratum. He calls it Pakistan’s multiple “alienations’, which spring from the assertion of Muslim identity in creating it as a separate state.

First and foremost, he regards Pakistan as an epicentre of global Islamic terror. Pakistan, in his diagnosis, “suffers from abiding structural pathologies” which he lists as follows: “its status as the first ideological Islamic state of modern times, its all dominating military, its influential extremist religious establishment, its powerful feudal oligarchy, its hatred of India, the perpetual resort to violence to answer political questions, the inadmissibility of dissent, and its long history of using Islamic radicals as instruments of state policy and of aggression in Afghanistan, Kashmir and beyond.”

After demolishing the thesis that Pakistan is an indispensable ally in the war on terror, Cappelli advises Washington to abandon its historic approach to Pakistan and base its future policy on “a clear assessment of its true nature and motivations”. Rawalpindi (read Pakistan army), he warns, “cannot be a US ally against terrorism because it is the root cause of the problem”. The answer, in his opinion, lies in a “tripartite American-Indian-Afghan alliance aimed at containing Pakistan”.

Amongst several measures proposed by him are cutting off all US military and economic aid to Pakistan, placing it on the list of state sponsors of terror and “providing covert economic and military support to any efforts that India and Afghanistan would make to counterbalance Pakistan’s support for insurgent groups within their countries

Arguably Vanni Cappelli , a frequent contributor to The Jewish News, could be dismissed as an instrument of the Zionist propaganda machine that can reach even The Orbis. But he is also the president of the Afghan Foreign Press Association.

More importantly, his highly tendentious reading of South Asian history is gaining currency because of the lack of a serious intellectual effort by us. The basic dogmas of this historiography that plays straight into the current global power politics are easily stated.

One, the territories comprising Pakistan were a strategic zone where the British did not care to inculcate values of democracy and economic polity encouraged in the rest of India. Two, Jinnah led an elitist movement which exploited Islamic sentiment and Jinnah “undercut any secular basis of his state”. Three, Pakistan has always been an emerging locus classicus of political Islam. Four, Kashmir should not be viewed as an unfinished agenda of partition and as a problem that was left unresolved in 1947; it is, for Pakistan, part of an aggressive Islamist regional and world mission.

Five, General Zia expanded the military infrastructure for this mission by cunningly manipulating the American opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Six, in total disregard of the Indo-Pakistan conflictual context for Pakistan’s quest for a nuclear balance of power, Bhutto is accused of adding an Islamic bomb to the mix. Seven, President Musharraf is simply hoodwinking the United States just as Zia did during the earlier Afghan crisis.

Much of this narrative will not stand the test of scrutiny. But historical research, like social sciences in general, is a desert in Pakistan. Military-dominated regimes have over decades regarded independent research as a danger. As if civilian surrogates had not strangulated free inquiry enough, the military has now directly taken over many universities and think-tanks. They are free only to elucidate government propaganda for which there are no takers in the international world.

It is common amongst us to hear from academics that they curb their instinctive quest for truth and their acquired research methodology to protect their jobs and career advancement. Mediocrity is thus the best guarantee of survival. Open-minded researchers all over the world complain of an acute scarcity of Pakistani source material. I have lost count of the times when foreign scholars told me that not a single credible history of Pakistan’s foreign policy exists.

Most of the time, Pakistanis asked for help in researching Kashmir can do no better than recommend Alistair Lamb and Victoria Schofield to study the predicament of the people of Kashmir. No wonder our viewpoint goes by default; we cannot stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

Rightly or wrongly, the Musharraf era has produced results that are the polar opposite of what is claimed to be the objective. Talk to any distinguished teacher at any of our universities and he will tell you that all the emphasis is on quantity.

In the priorities of the decision-makers and the distributors of funds, it is form and not substance that matters. There are individual professors who speak their mind but they are unable to institutionalise their concept of higher education.

Meanwhile hardly a week goes by without a pretentious essay challenging the basis of our state somewhere in the world. It is time we add value to our intellectual and academic life.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

THEY cheered Gordon Brown's budget to the rafters on Wednesday. But how many more bad opinion poll findings and election results does the Labour party need to see before it faces up to the seriousness of the predicament it is now in? This week's pre-budget Guardian-ICM poll showed Labour on 31 per cent for a third month. Labour now trails the Conservatives by 10 points.

For more than a year the trend has been for the gap to widen. In a general election based on this poll, David Cameron would have a Commons majority of 74. Nearly a third of Labour's MPs would lose their seats. Labour would be back at 1980s levels of support, when learned observers wrote serious books about whether the party could ever win an election again.

There are two obvious rejoinders. The first is that an opinion poll is only ever a snapshot and never a prediction, and that governments hit midterm troughs from which they can recover. In the summer of 1985, Margaret Thatcher's Tories, with a majority of 144, were regularly on 31 per cent; yet two years later they beat Labour by nearly 12 points and collected another landslide majority of 102.

The second counter-argument is that things will all change once Tony Blair goes. The manner in which Blair's long goodbye has evolved has increasingly paralysed Labour's vital functions. There is therefore a good case for saying that a new leader will be able to redefine, reshape and reinvigorate, making Labour politically dynamic and competitive once more.

Except that neither of these things is in any way certain. There is no iron law that guarantees that a government will recover from a midterm trough. Ask John Major. Nor is a new leader an automatic guarantee of a change in party fortunes. Yes, it worked famously for the Tories in November 1990, when Thatcher was toppled. But in 1990 the polls were telling Tory MPs that the dividend was clear - voters would return to the fold if Thatcher went. Michael Heseltine, her most apparent successor, had extremely positive ratings that contrasted with Thatcher's unpopularity. Major, who ultimately took over, was largely unknown outside Westminster.

The opposite is true today. Brown is neither unknown nor popular –- unless the budget, against most experience, has changed things at a stroke. This week's Guardian-ICM, like a clutch of other polls this year (and some from the more distant past too) suggests that electing the chancellor would harm Labour's electoral chances, not improve them. According to the poll, the current 10-point Tory lead over Labour would widen to 15 under Brown. All other current polls also show a four- or five-point difference of this kind.

Translated into seats, the Guardian-ICM Cameron v Brown poll would produce a Tory majority of 180 in the Commons. Feed the figures into the map on the Electoral Calculus website and grasp what it implies. A sea of English blue. Half of Labour's MPs would lose their seats, including five members of the current cabinet (John Hutton, Tessa Jowell, Ruth Kelly, Jacqui Smith and Jack Straw, since you ask). Michael Foot would no longer be Labour's most disastrous election leader of modern times.

Fortunately for Labour, there are reasons for doubting this outcome. Experience and instinct suggest the new leader will get a bounce of some sort. The public may flock to Labour once they see the back of Blair and all his political baggage. An opinion poll question about a hypothetical circumstance - which, unlike a general election, pushes respondents to think about leaders, not parties - is not a sure guide either. And Brown claims to have a quiver-full of dynamic ideas, of which he gave a hint in the budget, with which he hopes to transform the contest with Cameron.

Yet none of this is certain or knowable. There may be no bounce. The polls may be right about Brown's gloomy effect. Right now, the simple fact is that Labour and Brown are where they are, not where they would like to be.

Here's something else worth remembering. The opinion polls are consistently too generous to Labour. Everyone who is old enough remembers 1992, when the polls said Labour would win but Major beat Neil Kinnock with ease. Yet the polls overstated Labour's vote at each subsequent election too. In 2001, the final polls averaged a 16-point Labour lead, six more than the real margin. In 2005, they had Labour ahead by six points; in the end Labour won by only three.

In other words, this week's awful poll figures for Labour probably understate the scale of the Tory lead. The evidence, imperfect though it is, also suggests that Brown may not naturally possess what Labour needs to turn things around. The nagging evidence of the Dunfermline West byelection, which Labour lost very badly in the chancellor's Fife backyard, feels insistently relevant here.

It seems to be the settled will of the Labour party that Brown is to be its next leader. One is driven to go on asking the simple question: why? In personal terms, the answer is undeniably impressive: the record, the roots, the seriousness, the learning, the drive, the grasp, the brilliance, the long wait and the pre-eminence. No one has a greater personal claim to lead the party than he. The deeper difficulty is political. Does Labour want Brown because it wants more (and perhaps better) of what the government has done for the last decade? Or because it wants a bigger change? Brown himself seems extremely unclear. This ambivalence screams of risk, never mind Lord Turnbull and everything that his comments imply.

I understood when Tory MPs assassinated Thatcher and put Major in her place (though they should have chosen Heseltine). I do not understand why Labour MPs lack the same survival instinct and political seriousness today. But then I do not understand why people stay in abusive relationships or why squaddies on the Somme went over the top in such good heart. Yet these things happen too.

Perhaps, in spite of these doubts, Labour really does still connect with the public mood. Perhaps Brown has what it takes. But the truth may alternatively be that Labour is shot for a generation. Perhaps a combination of New Labour's own limitations, Iraq, and ultimately the cash-for-honours siege have simply destroyed the party's capacity to win. Perhaps at some level this party actually even wants to lose. If that's the case, then no new leader can turn it around.—Dawn/Guardian Service

THE military’s attempt to cut the chief justice to size has been a blessing in disguise. Pakistan might in fact be in the midst of a rejuvenation of people’s power. The battle lines have never been so clearly drawn since the military coup of October 1999. The fight is not between moderates and fanatics, or patriots and traitors. It is between those who have guns and those who don’t.

Sixty years after independence from British colonial rule, Pakistan enjoys the unenviable status of an autocracy where the military controls elected civilians even as democracy and civilian supremacy have become universal norms in the international community. Will the current crisis become a window of opportunity to settle the basic rules of the game? Prediction is no easy task as politics unfolds in contingent ways.

But a look at the history of democratisation in the most recent worldwide wave of democracy might be instructive. Militaries extricate themselves from politics mainly when a military government threatens the corporate interests of the military institution. In Latin America, southern Europe and Southeast Asia, ruling militaries retreated to the barracks when the costs of staying in power exceeded its benefits to the officer corps. And these transitions to democracy were typically preceded by the resurrection of civil society in favour of the rule of law. The demand for the rule of law is the Achilles heel of authoritarianism.

Lacking the overarching utopian ideologies characteristic of fascist and communist dictatorships, right-wing military authoritarian regimes have a hard time justifying their stay in power. They are the victims of their own schizophrenia, promising to stay in power only to facilitate a transition to a legitimate civilian political order.

General Musharraf and his apologists can blame it all on this or that conspiracy. But the good news is that all this dissimulation appears to be falling on deaf ears. Military rule appears to be on a slippery slope. The facade of controlled democracy, already crumbling, has collapsed in full public view.

Democracy is based on the uncertainty of outcomes. Politicians willfully subject themselves to the uncertainty of elections as they are in the game for the long haul. The belief that they too will get their chance in the next round, or the one after, often keeps the democratic process going.

In contrast, authoritarian regimes are based on the distinct dynamics of certitude. Above all, a military officer’s ability to reverse, violently if need be, the actual or potential outcomes of institutional processes forms the core of authoritarianism. Uncertainty erodes authoritarian stability, it shakes military confidence. There is always force and coercion. But that is costly to apply and runs the risk of alienating the people, leaving them no other way out but to withdraw their consent.

Authoritarian regimes can and often do survive without public support. But even if force works and certainty prevails, the changed dynamics of regime maintenance in the age of the 24 hour news cycle present further obstacles.

It matters little to electronic dictatorships like Musharraf’s what English language columnists write. Ironically enough, their musings in fact create the illusion of a free press so crucial to the authoritarian project in an integrated global environment. What matters more is success in the covert management of the airwaves. Real time images and representations travel across continents faster than lightning and have a sinister way of gripping the public imagination. No wonder the official reaction to the media’s coverage of state violence against the protesting lawyers was so nasty.

Let us not be under any illusion that all was well for the freedom of speech prior to this latest media crackdown. As any professional journalist will tell you, freedom of speech was plenty. But freedom after speech was an open question. Self-censorship induced by the fear of arbitrary violence operated as a self-reinforcing mechanism favouring authoritarian rule.

For all its faults, even flawed democracy affords one the institutional mechanisms of protection from the violence of the state. Under civilian rule in the 1990s, official excesses were at least technically subject to the check of rival centres of power. Where should one go now, when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is under trial?

How did we get to this dismal stage? We can blame the usual suspects: vicious landlords, corrupt politicians, weak political parties, deep ethnic factionalism, and so on. But culpability rests in large measure with the military, an institution that has always managed to escape accountability for its actions in excess of constitutional bounds.

No general has ever been held accountable for illegal acts against democratically elected governments. In fact, democracy in Pakistan is weak precisely because the military is always poised to intervene to disrupt constitutional authority with immunity.The durable foundations of this anti-democratic pattern of civil-military relations were laid in the formative years after independence. With US complicity, the military first manipulated and then banished democratic politics to choke any countervailing social and institutional forces with the capacity to assert civilian supremacy.

Over time, the military enlisted Islamist and other allies to narrow the space available to civilian governments to restructure civil-military relations. Elected civilians who tried to curtail military autonomy either ended up on the scaffold or in exile.No doubt, civilians have had their fair share of failures. But in comparative terms, the military’s tactical and strategic follies have been far more damaging to our political development. Besides, elected civilians can legitimately claim that their hands were tied by the military powers of censure. They had responsibility as it were but little authority to govern.

What is the military’s excuse for messing things up so royally? What does it have to show for its repeated political interventions? Even today, the military enjoys full authority over the affairs of the state. Yet it conveniently shirks responsibility for its actions. One day, we are told it is rogue police personnel who manhandled the chief justice. The next day, it is the dummy cabinet which advised the general to sack the chief justice.

Who are the generals fooling? The army as an institution is accountable for actions undertaken by its chief and vice versa. Responsibility for the sordid assault on the higher judiciary begins and ends with the General Headquarters. There are just no two ways about it.

Pakistani generals are not used to hearing civilian advice. But they would do well to understand that the military is supposed to defend not define the national interest. That is the job of the democratically elected representatives of the people of Pakistan. How many more national disasters would it take for them to realise that they have no moral, legal or even technical basis for claiming superiority over civilians?

In fact, as any other bureaucracy, the military is prone to deep organisational biases that render it unfit for politics. The military would do itself and the people of Pakistan a great service if it leaves them alone and focuses its energies on its primary mission of external defence. An army turned inwards is no army.

The writer is working on his Ph.D dissertation on comparative military politics at Columbia University.