MR Asif Zardari’s quest for conciliation, or the urge to carry everybody along as his lyrical refrain goes, also carries with it a cost which in the course of time might outweigh the semblance of unity that he has been able to project.

Factional and personal interests will dog every step of the hodgepodge government at the centre and in the provinces.

The first and obvious, though not the biggest, cost would be in the employment of many more ministers, deputy ministers, advisers, etc than the work requires. The numbers being talked about point towards a political establishment much larger than it was during the last Musharraf-backed government.

The number of ministers in each government is now heading towards half a century. Compare that in historical perspective with five ministers in Sindh and seven at the centre in the midst of the chaos that followed Partition. Such was the vigil of the founding fathers and their concern for propriety and public money. The worry now, however, should be less about the financial cost of the large establishments and more about the distraction, even nuisance, which the idle ministers and those in their tow must cause.

It is a matter of common knowledge that new vehicles purchased and manpower recruited for crime control over the past 10 years were all deployed to escort ministers and officials and to guard their homes. One provincial minister was said to be content with no less than three new vehicles in his escort. Hardly a vehicle went to the police stations for which they were all meant. Small wonder crime is increasing in tandem with the expense of controlling it.

Since every minister and senior official now feels his life threatened (police chiefs most of all), the expense can be cut only by reducing their number. Fifteen ministers at the centre and 10 in the province should suffice. Surely it would mean not just financial saving but also greater efficiency and less corruption. But the conciliatory effort is driven by the desire to exercise power, or even to share the spoils, and not the urge to serve the people.

There being no material difference in the foreign, domestic or economic policies of the contending parties the fuss is all about the place of Musharraf, if any at all, in the future set-up. That is not reason enough for making the governments at the centre and in the provinces unwieldy and inefficient at the same time.

It would raise the stock of party leaders in the eyes of the public if they were to wind up the secretariats of the prime minister and chief ministers. They do not need one of their own when the secretariats of the governments are all theirs. That is how it always was till men suffering from a superiority complex without being superior came to occupy those high offices. Cast out of the mainstream of the government, they now sit in isolated splendour surrounded by sycophants and intriguers who alternately assure the ‘Chaudhry sahabs’ and ‘Mian sahabs’ that they are masters of all they survey. The laws, rules and propriety are for lesser mortals.

The incoming prime minister and chief ministers would be better informed, more effective and accessible to the public if they were to sit in the secretariat of the government and close all their other offices except those in the assemblies. The palace-like structures built in Islamabad and Lahore can be profitably disposed of.

The Foreign Office can shift to the prime minister’s secretariat. The vast compound that the foreign ministry now occupies would fetch billions if sold to embassies or hoteliers. The prime minister should live in the presidency which has a large cabinet block attached to it. In fact it was all designed for the chief executive. It became the presidency because then Ayub Khan was the chief executive and there was no prime minister. Musharraf, or his successor, who would be just a constitutional head in the scheme now in the making, should befittingly live in the prime minister’s house on the hill to enjoy the splendour of the Margalla at his abundant leisure.

To recover a billion or more surreptitiously invested by Chaudhry Parvaiz Elahi in his personal secretariat which militates against both the law and good taste may not be easy. But the building with its Italian granite and Burma teak is not the right place for Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s brainchild of a technical institute either. If it were not for the enormous amount spent it should have been pulled down. Now that it is there it could find customers among the consulates and the corporations.

In any case, Mr Shahbaz Sharif should not feel compelled to occupy it just because it is there. He appeared amenable to a suggestion that the chief minister should sit where his government is and where every chief executive sat in the colonial era and later. The other day Syed Babar Ali of LUMS, a Lahori for four generations, nostalgically recalled how every ‘Latsab’ and no less than the Nawab of Kalabagh drove to the civil secretariat with a single motorcycle pilot. Now the Punjab chief minister has four offices but none where it should be. And, according to one account, the last incumbent of the post had 400 employees and 100 vehicles – all at his command.

From where and how the prime minister and the chief ministers should work seems like jumping the gun when the governments are not working at all. Ten weeks after the elections the cabinets have yet to assemble and the senior officials are queuing up to affirm or switch loyalties before the party chiefs. The activity centres only on conciliation (call it horse-trading if you will), in placating or outwitting the judges and lawyers or in anticipating what Musharraf is up to.

This writer had occasion to tell the comeback kid brother (who is more sensitive to public agony and restiveness than his elders and ideologues) that he has but three more months to hang all blame on Musharraf’s peg. He readily agreed. The rest of the lot appears to luxuriate in the thought of five years of pomp and power ahead. That was the privilege alone of the politicians under Gen Musharraf’s umbrella. The count now appropriately should be in days. It was complacency and arrogance that swept Musharraf and his cohorts away within weeks. With the wave of discontent sweeping across the country the timeframe for his successors wouldn’t be any different.

THE question of investigating Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has been a big challenge for the government and a painful dilemma for our people. Everyone wants to know who killed Benazir Bhutto and why, and only an independent and credible enquiry will determine the truth.

The PPP has been calling for a UN probe similar to the one involving the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who was killed in a car bombing in Beirut on Feb 14, 2005. President Musharraf, however, ruled out any UN involvement in investigating what he described as a ‘simple’ murder and which he insisted could be handled internally with the help of Scotland Yard.

Whatever the reality, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination cannot be treated like a simple murder. It was a national tragedy and a seismic event with far-reaching ripple effects on the national as well as the global scene. No one has any faith or confidence in the ability of our government agencies to conduct a fair and transparent investigation that would credibly determine the facts.

The national and provincial assemblies have now unanimously adopted PPP-sponsored resolutions asking for a UN probe through an international independent investigation commission to be called Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Commission to identify the “culprits, perpetrators, organisers and financers” of the heinous crime and to bring them to justice.

Given the prevailing scepticism over the prospects of a fair and impartial investigation under government auspices, the PPP demand and its rationale for a UN probe would have made sense only if the PPP was not in power in Islamabad. By asking the UN to probe its leader’s assassination, the PPP is not only over-estimating the UN’s capability to conduct an impartial enquiry into its leader’s assassination but also giving itself a clear vote of no-confidence.

Yes, there is a striking similarity between the Bhutto assassination and the Hariri killing and the currency of a serious political crisis in both Pakistan and Lebanon at the time of the tragic incidents. Both were former prime ministers of their respective countries. In both countries, the incumbent presidents were seeking to prolong their terms with external support and through draconian measures.

In Lebanon, Rafik Hariri’s killing was a sequel to the power struggle in his country with the Syrian-backed President Emile Lahoud seeking to prolong his term in office which was being opposed by the US and others. In the case of Pakistan, US-backed Musharraf was using unconstitutional powers as army chief to assault the judiciary and bypass the constitutional and legal hurdles to his re-election.

Syria’s alleged complicity in Lebanon was the external dimension of the Hariri case that led to the UN Security Council’s involvement in its investigation. Apparently, there is no such external dimension to the Bhutto case unless the PPP suspects a US hand in their leader’s killing. In that case, the question of a UN probe will not go beyond informal consultations in the ante-chambers of the Security Council.

Against this complex backdrop, no miracles or free and fair verdicts can be expected from any UN-sponsored probe. Irrespective of striking but circumstantial similarities in the assassinations of our former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, there is a qualitative difference between the two situations.

As prime minister, Hariri had been at odds with the Syrian government and was fiercely resisting the continuing Damascus influence in Lebanon. He also opposed Syria’s efforts to have President Lahoud’s term extended beyond his normal tenure. He subsequently resigned, and was killed in a terrorist attack that triggered mass protests in Beirut and sparked anti-Syrian sentiment in Lebanon.

What makes the Hariri case totally different from the Bhutto case is the technical and legal basis on which the US and its partners in the UN Security Council were able to proceed under Chapter VII with a politically-motivated agenda against Syria. The Lebanese political crisis revolving around an externally-fanned internal power struggle was already on the formal agenda of the UN Security Council entitled the ‘Situation in the Middle East’.

In September 2004, the Council had adopted Resolution 1559 concerning the situation in the Middle East, calling for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon. This resolution provided an instant legal and political basis for the Security Council to take cognisance of Hariri’s murder case and to adopt Resolution 1595 on April 7, 2005, establishing an international independent commission to assist the Lebanese authorities in their investigations of this terrorist act, and to identify its perpetrators.

Subsequently, despite objections from within Lebanon, the Security Council pressed ahead with the establishment of a controversial special tribunal through Resolution 1757 of May 30, 2007. Interestingly, this is the third international tribunal established by the UN, the other two being those on ‘genocides and humanitarian laws’ violations’ in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

For Washington, there could not have been a better opportunity to settle old scores with Syria. It used the UN Security Council to bring unprecedented pressure on Damascus for its withdrawal from Lebanon and also to neutralise its role in the context of the Middle East. It was also an opportunity for restraining Syria from its alleged complicity in the movement of arms and fighters across the eastern border into US-occupied Iraq. Syria withdrew its troops from Lebanon in April 2005 but did not fully cooperate with the UN investigation panel.

It was clearly a politically-motivated move in which the US was targeting Syria and Syrian-backed president in Lebanon, Emile Lahoud. In Bhutto’s case, the US may be sympathetic to the slain leader but in effect it is on the other side. It cannot afford allowing ‘Pakistan’s Lahoud’ being targeted in the Council. From the historical, political and legal perspectives, one can’t therefore draw a straight parallel between the two cases.

We need to ponder seriously over the consequences of involving the UN Security Council in our country’s affairs. We must keep in mind that we do not have many well-wishers in the Security Council. Once the Council gets seized of our internal affairs, there would be no end to it. Those who want to destabilise us will find a convenient multilateral tool not only to further their multiple agendas against Pakistan but also to legitimise them.

The only dignified way for our PPP-led government is to own its responsibility and not pass the buck to the UN which like our country suffers no less serious credibility problems.

If our country has any semblance of independence and sovereignty left, it must hold the enquiry itself through a high-level independent commission headed by the Supreme Court’s re-instated chief justice, comprising eminent persons of a non-partisan stature, and assisted by foreign investigative and forensic experts.

We need another Hamoodur Rahman Commission to bare the truth.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

IN June, Justin Lin Yifu, a Beijing professor, will take up the post of chief economist at the World Bank. Nothing could be a clearer sign of the times. This is the number two job in one of the two major international economic institutions, the other being the International Monetary Fund.

Earlier, incumbents have included the Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and the UK’s Nicholas Stern. Previously the top jobs in these two outfits have always been shared between Americans and Europeans. Lin’s appointment thus marks a major break with political tradition. Hitherto there have been hardly any appointments of Chinese to senior positions in the major international organisations.

In the past the World Bank, like the IMF, has been the tame captive of US and European governments, never straying from the prescribed western free-market orthodoxy. The very public disagreement at the time of the Asian financial crisis between Stiglitz and his counterpart at the IMF, Stanley Fischer – with the World Bank man strongly critical of the IMF’s disastrous policy towards the crisis, and supportive of Malaysia’s temporary imposition of capital controls – was highly unusual. But the appointment of a Chinese chief economist takes us into an entirely new realm.

At the centre of Chinese policy remains a highly interventionist state and state-owned firms. Lin himself has written that the government is the most important institution, determining whether development is successful, and argues that privatisation is neither necessary nor sufficient for making Chinese state-owned enterprises more efficient. Imagine such sentiments being expressed by the Bush or Clinton administrations, or Gordon Brown for that matter.

Nonetheless, Lin’s appointment is a clear indication that China can no longer be ignored, notwithstanding the fact that it espouses policies at variance with western free-market orthodoxy.

China, by virtue of its growing economic power, is in the process of barging its way into the citadels of global economic governance. Western governments are faced with a difficult dilemma: either they can choose to hold China at arm’s length until it can no longer be ignored, or alternatively they can usher China into the corridors of power before that decision becomes, in effect, a question of force majeure. Lin’s appointment suggests that in this case a more far-sighted approach is being pursued.

The entry of the Chinese into the highest echelons of the World Bank parallels the extraordinary turn of events at the back end of last year when major Wall Street investment banks were forced to turn to Chinese banks and the China Investment Corporation, among others.

The financial pillars of Wall Street, as a consequence, are now significantly underpinned by Chinese money. Like the appointment of Lin, these events herald the arrival of China not only at the centre of the global economy, but in the very heartlands of American financial power. It would be naive to think that Lin’s appointment will result in a major shift in the policies of the World Bank.

The latter will still be a creature of Washington. But nor will it be possible for Lin’s voice to be ignored. And if that is true now, it will become increasingly the case in the future.

The western countries that dominate them, along with Japan, account for a declining share of global economic activity, and, with the rise of countries like China and India, that proportion is destined to fall rapidly over the next two decades.

However, in the longer run it is not at all clear what will become of the World Bank or the IMF – as opposed to the G8, which could easily change by at some point ditching those who have little case to be there (for example, Italy and Canada), and adding China and India (and, in due course, Brazil and South Africa). A key question, however, is how China will perceive the World Bank and the IMF in the longer term.

Over the past decade, China has shown great eagerness to be seen as a fully fledged member of multilateral bodies, but what will happen when China, because of its immense economic power, comes to dwarf these bodies? Will it seek to transform them in its own image, or bypass them while still making a contribution? n

— The Guardian, London

The writer is a visiting research fellow at the Asia research centre, London School of Economics.