“(I) have lived most of my life in these eternally restless times of fear and hope, and I have hoped that some time these fears and hopes might cease. But now I must see that they will go on for ever; indeed in moments of depression, I think they will grow worse”

— Hegel in a letter, 1819

HEGEL wrote about his fears and hopes against a background of years of turmoil in Europe as the French revolution passed through its various stages and other European nations struggled to contain its momentous impact. Greeted initially as the final emancipation of the human spirit, the revolution had delivered seismic shocks to the established order with its reign of terror and its militaristic export of revolutionary ideas.

Seldom before had Europe seen such intense battles of competing ideas; it produced an extraordinary concentration of European statesmanship committed to reconciling antagonisms of mind and soul that over two decades had caused rivers of blood to flow. Hegel, the philosopher that Prussia trusted most, never allowed his moments of depression to interfere with his optimistic quest for a new synthesis.

So deep has been the influence of that Hegelian search for synthesis that even events like the Karachi carnage of May 12 raise hopes that the arbiters of Pakistan’s destiny today would henceforth be shocked into adopting a path of national reconciliation.

After all, Karachi was a tragic dramatisation of the consequences of clinging to an outmoded concept of absolute power, a refusal to accept that time transforms human situations and that the business of government rests on adjusting to change. Pakistan had changed even before its Chief Justice refused to crumble before pressure; his refusal was only a catalytic agent of a movement that made that change explicit.

During the last eight years of direct or indirect military rule Pakistan’s network of civil society activists has grown larger and more articulate. In some cases, the military rule itself has encouraged this process as, in its judgement, it helps it to project a human face in a world which has since long ceased to admire saviour soldiers.

Civil society, the Pakistani regime had hoped, could become a substitute for democratic power-sharing. Indeed, President Musharraf has claimed on more than one occasion, that his rule was more democratic because people were free to express dissident opinions.

The heart rending tragedy of Karachi happened partly because the insensitive coterie that takes decisions in murky conclaves did not know that Pakistan had simply outgrown the era of civil or military dictatorships. It had simply not grasped the fact that its instrumental use of an explosion of information technology in the country was also creating a culture of scepticism and disbelief.

Primarily, this misreading comes from the echo chamber syndrome in which dictatorial regimes only hear their own voice and see only their own image. In the present case, it bears repetition that President Musharraf has been particularly unlucky in his civilian propagandists, formal and informal, who continue to reassure him that the steel frame of control is getting only temporarily “unhinged” because of some “administrative” mishandling.

Worse still are the apologists who try to shift the focus from President Musharraf’s plans for extending absolute rule in disregard of the spirit of the national Constitution as the underlying cause of political unrest; they continue to argue that the present situation has arisen only because some political parties are tagging on to the lawyers’ movement for an honourable reinstatement of the Chief Justice.The fact of the matter is that most political parties know that an overwhelming majority instinctively fears anarchy and throws its weight behind them because they are organised on a national basis. This majority understands the need for change and renewal and feels frustrated that President Musharraf has not played a positive role in steering that change voluntarily.

It is a measure of their disillusionment that the people of Pakistan have so strongly supported a Chief Justice who in popular imagination was removed as a possible obstacle to the implementation of yet another project of disenfranchising them.

Black Saturday has shaken the nation to its core not only because close to 50 lives were lost in Karachi but also because the people saw in it a deliberate resurrection of the ghosts of past social tensions. Rightly or wrongly, from one end of the country to the other, there was a widely shared perception that the government was trying to cling to arbitrary power by creating conditions of civil war.

The same perception has also sullied President Musharraf’s international image. Commentaries all over the world stress the point that a perfectly manageable problem related to a speech in Karachi by the Chief Justice was deliberately transformed into a full blown crisis in the hope of terrorising the people into an another uneasy acquiescence in a pre-determined outcome of forthcoming elections.

The leading question that gets echoed in international commentaries is as to how and why General Pervez Musharraf, who leads a large army and well-equipped paramilitary forces, permitted events to take the form they did.

Invariably this question is posed to provide the answer as well: Musharraf has become hugely unpopular and cannot risk separation of the office of the president from that of the army chief — a contingency that the civilised world cannot countenance at all — and that a free election will produce assemblies at the federal and provincial level that would just refuse to elect him as president while he continues as the army chief.

This has led to a new consensus of international opinion that Musharraf would lose whatever legitimacy he had accumulated during the last eight years and that this would mean chronic instability in a country that has a prime strategic location and that also happens to be a nuclear weapon power.

For the first time since 2001, opinion-makers in the West have lost faith in his indispensable role in the region and argued that it was no longer in the West’s interest to back him. The lone voice of support comes from the Bush administration and that too on the grounds that Musharraf would be backed only because he is fighting American wars in the region. Reference to the interest of the people of Pakistan is conspicuous by its absence from such ill-considered statements.

Pakistan has weathered greater crises in the past and its people have shown great resilience in coping with the consequences of sudden changes of government. The extreme anxiety witnessed at the moment comes from the feeling that a steady evolutionary political process towards participatory democracy is being ruptured by a government that was morally bound to take it to a logical conclusion, namely the full restoration of democratic institutions.

The nation is baffled that its president is threatening it with extra-constitutional measures to retain absolute power. There is a pervasive fear that a small coterie that is averse to the risk of a free election is simply succumbing to internal panic. Black Saturday is recognised within the country and abroad as evidence of that panic; it was beyond doubt one of the most retrogressive political moments in Pakistan’s political history. It has caused a serious disturbance of rhythm in national politics.

Musharraf was engaged in some serious negotiations with the People’s Party with a view to creating a new coalition of what are generally described as progressive and modernistic forces that would save Pakistan from the fog of religious obscurantism and extremism.

Benazir Bhutto had sustained the talks despite misgivings expressed by other opposition parties and shared by a fair number of her own followers. The carnage in Karachi has forced her to put limits on the political accommodation that she can offer. She does not seem inclined to support a general agitation even now as she is all too aware of its national and international implications. But the chances of working out a formula for a political bargain, if not reconciliation, have receded further.

What the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a party that was working overtime to shed its image as a violence-prone parochial organisation, has done to itself is simply incomprehensible. The headway it was making at the national level as a party of educated city dwellers has been greatly reversed by the judgment that this was only a thin veneer that came off as soon as it was given the opportunity to show its muscle.The danger is that as its leadership finds it more difficult to establish its credentials in the rest of the country, the MQM would run the risk of returning to fortress Karachi and its politics will regress into turf battles.

Given the demographic diversity of this mega city of 14 million people, nothing could be more reckless than to create ethnic and linguistic strife in it. At the end of the day, no government can live with this scenario and would have to arrest the drift into sheer lawlessness.

The international community professes to being concerned about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and its continued adherence to the broad objectives of nuclear non-proliferation. Pakistan can justifiably claim to have a highly reliable command and control arrangement for its nuclear power. But international confidence will come only when Pakistan is seen to be managing its political transitions peacefully and democratically.

Internal harmony will also elude Pakistan without effective democratic institutions. Arguably, President Musharraf can still opt for a place in history by recognising the imperative of change. In this column, I once posed the question if he can ever re-invent himself. He faces this challenge today with added intensity. Can Musharraf re-invent himself?

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

THE political situation in today’s Pakistan is not only highly fluid but also extremely hazardous for any civilian politician. This does not mean that it is a hopeless situation which is beyond redemption. The situation can be better put across as one that is alarming and demands political leadership of the highest order to be able to pull the country out of the current chaos that it finds itself in at present.

Indeed, it calls for a leadership that can inspire hope among the common people that all is not lost after all the years of rampant inflation and joblessness making life miserable. The dire need is to put in place a government that can perform the necessary role of political reconciliation and simultaneously deal with the worsening economic problems.

During the last seven years or so the military has been trying to run things their way and, despite the inflow of extra resources in the wake of the 9/11 happenings and a skillful banker being in charge of the economy, the aggregate economic picture is nowhere as rosy as is being painted by the votaries of the current dispensation.

Inflation is out of control and galloping at a double-digit rate. Poverty is rampant and growing rather than diminishing. The World Bank and IMF reports speak volumes about the mismanagement at very high levels, be it in pursuit of privatisation or in respect of implementation of any of the reform programmes initiated or implemented during the last seven and a half years.

There have been big claims of growth of the economy in terms of percentages points. But how can mere growth be a substitute for a net enhancement of the GDP of the country which is sadly missing from the balance sheet. Only a handful among the privileged classes have benefited. These are all very pertinent questions that deserve to be answered in public interest

The country has for almost a decade now been suffering from plundering on an unprecedented scale. Even the ongoing judicial crisis has had its roots in the judicial overturning of a number of high-profile privatization moves that were prima facie suspect. These were indeed privatisations that had been hastily done in a slipshod manner and in indecent haste.

Since most of these privatisations were carried out with little justification, they naturally came under judicial review and were consequently halted and scrutinised by an honest and fearless Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It may well be one of the reasons that the Chief Justice has been made ‘non-functional’ for refusing to toe the line of the executive wing of the government which is directly culpable for having conducted such a slipshod privatisation process over the last many years.

There is yet another category of cases taken up by the Supreme Court so as to act as a check on frequent invasion by the executive in areas of human rights as well as personal rights that are guaranteed under various statutes and by the Constitution. In many cases, the Supreme Court has intervened in exercise of its suo moto powers to prevent or reaction such excesses.

By natural inclination, the executive arm of the government has also been somewhat resentful of the judiciary exercising this jurisdiction. But in recent years the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and other judges have ably exercised their powers and advanced their jurisdictions in this area of laws to the benefit of the citizens of Pakistan.

The judicial crisis in Pakistan has indeed brought about a new reawakening in the country. One has hardly seen such a profound and deep change in mood unfolding in front of one’s eyes. It is indeed a moment to catch and the politicians particularly owe it to the country to chip in and make their contribution as the process begins to unfold.

If there is one politician one can think of who can understand the dynamics that are in play and convert them to the advantage of the country, it is Benazir Bhutto. She has the education and the social and political background to analyse things and has the skill to turn Pakistan around at this critical point of time in the nation’s life and emancipate it from the grips of despair, obscurantism and dehumanisation.

Even her worst detractors will agree that Benazir is made of leadership material and the fact that she has seen so many vicissitudes in her life and political career, she is certainly an asset to this country that should not be frittered away.

The country needs her. Her party, the PPP, desperately needs her. As against that, the comforts of a life lived abroad and thus eventually fading away into foreign obscurity is not what she really deserves. There is so much speculation about her future. Will she come or won’t she come? One really don’t know. But one can go on hoping that she will come sooner than later.

It is indeed a crucial factor in the politics of Pakistan whether Benazir Bhutto returns to her country or not in the next few months. It is indeed a tough decision for her to make. There are indeed all the negative factors relating to the mood of the current military-led dispensation that is in power and that may be quite averse to her returning to the country, particularly at this time when they have their backs to the wall with the judiciary and the legal community breathing down their necks. But the odds are that she may yet decide to return to the country. If that happens, it will surely be a major event.

IT has been the longest good-bye in modern politics, and there are still another four weeks to go before Tony Blair finally hands the prime ministership over to Gordon Brown on June 27. After he finally quits, most people in Britain assume, Blair will go off and make a living on the lecture circuit in the United States (where he is far more popular than he is at home). They won't miss him much.

It is strange that a prime minister who has presided over an unprecedented surge of prosperity in Britain should be so deeply unpopular, but the answer lies in a single word: Iraq. Support for that war in Britain is even lower than it is in the United States, and the popular conviction that the public was misled into invading Iraq by a leader who ruthlessly manipulated the "evidence" to get his way is even stronger. The argument is only about why he did it -- and the consensus answer is that it was religion.

In "post-Christian Britain" -- the phrase dates from the 1970s, but is even truer today -- Blair is what was once known as a "muscular Christian": a person who believes that his faith requires him to act, and justifies his actions.

Only a minority of British prime ministers in the past century have been Christian believers (Winston Churchill, for example, was a completely irreligious agnostic), and even the ones who were personally devout felt that religion should remain a private matter.

In terms of spin-control, this phenomenon extended even into Blair's government, as the prime minister was under strict instructions not to speak in public about his faith. "We don't do God," as spin-master Alastair Campbell once put it. But in fact, Blair did "do God." That was what led him into Iraq.

Columnist Geoffrey Wheatcroft got it exactly right in The Independent: "In some ways (Blair) is more innately American than British. Blair may not have prayed with the born-again George Bush, but their shared faith was certainly a bond, and (Blair's) wearing his faith on his sleeve would not have seemed too odd or embarrassing in the US, where more than half the population goes to church and where supposedly grown-up politicians can say they approach difficult problems by asking: 'What would Jesus do'?"

The problem was that it would seem odd and embarrassing in Britain, where only seven per cent of the population regularly attend church or its equivalent. The notion that British foreign policy was being driven by one man's faith would have inspired mass revolt if Blair's motives had been plain.

But they weren't: the spin machine did its job well.

From the time he took office in 1997, Blair talked about having a "moral" foreign policy, but it wasn't clear at the time that that meant he believed in doing good by force.

Then came a series of more or less legal military interventions abroad in which British troops did do some good: in stopping the genocide against Muslims in Kosovo in 1999, in ending the civil war in Sierra Leone in 2000, and in overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan after the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.

All those uses of military force succeeded at a relatively low cost -- the flare-up of guerilla warfare in Afghanistan today is due to neglect of the country after 2001 -- and it was flowers and champagne for Tony Blair each time. He was doing good by force, and he was doing very well by it politically, too.

But the lesson Blair learned was that this sort of thing is cheap and easy, and it was getting to be a habit.

Then along came the Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq.

It is clear in retrospect that Blair had agreed to commit British troops to the invasion by the spring of 2002. It is hard to believe that he was so ignorant and ill-advised as to believe the nonsense about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his alleged links to the al-Qaeda terrorists, but it is very easy to believe that he leapt at another chance to do good -- i.e., rid the world of a wicked dictator -- by force.

Did Blair understand that the Bush administration's real motives for putting Iraq at the top of its hit-list were quite traditional great-power concerns, and that the American public was just being fed those stories about Saddam's terrorist ties and his imaginary WMD because they went down more smoothly?

Probably he did, but he was willing to go along with all that so long as the wicked dictator was actually overthrown. For the true believer, the end often justifies the means.

Blair's perennial claim that "I have always done what I believe to be right" is no defence -- do the rest of us usually do what we believe to be wrong? -- but he firmly believes that good intentions absolve him of responsibility for the outcome.

The United Nations is a wreck, the reputations of the United States and the United Kingdom have never been lower, and Iraq is an almost measureless disaster, but no higher authority will ever officially hold Blair responsible for any of that, so in practical terms he is quite right.

Enjoy the lecture circuit, Tony. ––Copyright.

THE recommendation that a Russian national should be extradited to stand trial for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has led to fevered speculation about the state of UK-Russia relations. Few commentators, it seems, can resist the temptation to view the issue in cold war terms. Depending on who you choose to believe, there is either an icy chill or a deep freeze in relations.

For most Russians, not least those who have grown up enjoying the freedoms and opportunities of the post-communist years, these perceptions seem utterly at odds with the reality of modern Russia's experiences and ambitions.

Russia is a member of the G8 group of leading democracies, and a partner in addressing international issues as diverse as nuclear proliferation and climate change, and I certainly find it difficult to reconcile the media rhetoric with reality.

It is worth briefly revisiting what caused this furore: the death of Alexander Litvinenko. As the president has made clear in his unequivocal condemnation, this was a heinous crime. There can be no justification whatsoever for his murder; absolutely none. Both the British and Russian authorities have launched investigations into his death, and the Russian authorities have cooperated fully with Scotland Yard.

A few days ago the UK director of public prosecutions recommended the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy from Russia to face prosecution in Britain. As is the case in many countries, our constitution explicitly forbids the extradition of its nationals to face trial in overseas jurisdictions.

The Russian prosecutor general is awaiting formal details of the case against Lugovoy before making a decision on what action to take. There is no reason why evidence against him cannot be used in a Russian court of law.

Above all, as Russia's first deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, has clearly stated, this remains a strictly legal matter: "We have courts and prosecutors –– independent from the executive –– that will make an independent decision when they receive the case files."

It works both ways, of course. The Russian authorities have requested the extradition of both Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev from the UK. Berezovsky is wanted in connection with charges of misappropriation of funds and fraud in his home country, including the embezzlement of 214m roubles (£4.2m) from the national flagship air carrier, Aeroflot.

Zakayev is sought in connection with terrorism offences, notably the murder of 120 people in the Moscow theatre siege.

Frustrating as it is, we ultimately have to respect the decision of the British courts not to extradite these men, despite the severity of the alleged crimes. The Russian legal authorities remain convinced of the cases against them, and we will continue to work through the British legal system to bring them to justice. It does not, however, amount to a new cold war.

The Russia of today is, of course, very different to that which emerged from the turbulence of the post-Soviet transition a decade ago. With the fastest growth rate in the G8, the Russian economy is set to become the world's sixth largest within a few years.

It is Britain that remains one of the chief beneficiaries of Russia's economic success, topping the league of current international investors with $7bn invested in 2006 alone. Russian-British trade in the first 11 months of 2006 grew by 28.2 per cent on the same period in 2005.

Few countries, I believe, have undergone the scale of Russia's transformation in such a short time. It would be totally misguided, however, to view this as a resurgence of Russian power or any threat to regional stability. Energy resources are not a tool of Russian policy — we need consumers as much as they need suppliers. The president is correct to warn of the dangers of US unilateralism; we have a right to object to US missile deployment plans in breach of existing treaties.

It is understandable that there will be objections to the destruction of war memorials in neighbouring countries, given the sacrifices made in the second world war.

These issues, and the Russian responses to them, do not constitute renewed hostilities. They do, however, represent a defence of Russian interests within the currency of normal international relations.

There is, after all, a delicious irony to all this for those who remain uncomfortable with Russia's engagement in the world economy and successful adjustment to a multipolar world.

Russia owes its new-found place precisely to the fact that it is a fully democratic country, operating under the rule of law, with a thriving free-market economy. It explains why there is no fundamental threat to UK-Russia relations, and why there can be no return to the cold war. ––The Guardian, London

The writer is Russian ambassador to Britain.