THERE was jubilation when Gen Musharraf arrived forcibly on the scene. There was jubilation again at his forced departure.

Hope for a better future lasted but for a few months after Oct 1999’s surprise military coup. The hope can now be seen fading away much faster — within days of the triumph of the political forces over the coup-maker.

Doubts were widely expressed whether the disparate coalition that was united only in its common hatred of Musharraf would be able to hold together once he was gone. The leaders of the two mainstream parties have beaten the most cynical of cynics by the speed at which their consensus is dissolving into a contest for power.

The irony of it all is that a nationalist descendant of the Red Shirts — Asfandyar Wali Khan — and an arch conservative cleric whose seminaries gave us the original crusading Taliban — Maulana Fazlur Rehman — have now together been exerting pressure to persuade the heirs to the politics of Jinnah and Bhutto — Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari — to evolve a consensus on the main contentious issues: first, who should be the president, second, when the judges can be reinstated and whether the chief justice should at all be reinstated and, third, whether Musharraf should be tried or allowed to while away his time in safety — playing bridge and golf here and abroad.

In whatever way the ongoing feud ends, the uncertainty, violence and inflation besetting the country will not go away and may even be prolonged and increase in intensity for their sole concern seems to centre on who will wield the real power. And it is of no concern to the terrorists who are in power. The myth that terrorism would subside when Musharraf goes has exploded tragically and doubly.

The Shia killings in Kurram and Dera Ismail Khan, home of the mediating maulana, underline the fact that the sectarianism being instigated by our own fanatics is more lethal than the insurgency being fuelled by foreign fighters in the borderlands. For sectarian mayhem and violence in other forms the ascendant politicians cannot, for once, blame the deposed Musharraf or his policies or America’s and our war on terror. The blame falls entirely on them.

No matter how the coalition settles its internal differences its leaders must take time out from their revelries to give the country an administration which is united in checking the spread of homegrown violence (as far as their ingenuity and resources permit) and also one that saves the economy from sinking deeper into recession (as far as the world economic forces permit).

Alas, every indication is to the contrary. The administration of public affairs, whether general, economic or legal is in total disarray, and deteriorating. In making appointments to public offices Musharraf would sometimes cast favouritism aside and go by merit. The new government in its five months hasn’t done that at all. It is sheer coincidence if a favourite also fits the bill of merit. Round pegs in square holes are far too many to be recounted and could lead to ill-will if they were to be, but I will still refer to one.

The Planning Commission is necessarily and traditionally headed by administrators with proven ability and experience in finance and economic planning. Among them in the recent past were Ghulam Ishaq Khan, M.M. Ahmad and A.G.N. Kazi. Able economists Mahbub ul Haq and Sartaj Aziz, just to name two, assisted them.

Recalled from exile and appointed to this post now is Salman Farooqui who hasn’t worked for a day in planning or finance nor has the academic background to do so. A dozen advisors and members will surround him. Knowing Salman as I do from our days in the Sindh government he would make a good minister of general description or of public relations but he is surely not the one who should be arguing Pakistan’s case for economic assistance in the World Bank, IMF or in the consortium of donors. It will be of interest to note that the Indian counterparts of our chief executive and planning chief — Manmohan Singh and Montik Singh — are economists of world renown.

Politicians are driven by their own considerations. But for once if they were to let national interest prevail over their fancies they should agree to choose a president who is respected nationally, can rise above party politics and whom the prime minister, cabinet and bureaucracy can also respect and seek counsel from. They should not fear a president fitting this description even if Article 58-2(b) were to stay in the constitution. He would not dissolve parliament even if he felt that it should be. Instead, he would advise the prime minister to call for fresh elections.

If Article 58-2(b) is repealed and other executive powers like the appointment of the service chiefs and chief justice revert to the prime minister, such a president would indeed become a symbol of unity and source of inspiration rather than a laughing stock as were Fazal Elahi Chaudhry and Rafiq Tarar (imagine, costing a million a day).

It would be good fortune for this floundering federation if a president answering the stated description were to come from restive Balochistan. However the names that keep coming up are, sadly, of party bosses or of their friends, close relatives and party loyalists. When a president is overawed by the prime minister (as were Fazal Elahi and Rafiq Tarar) the commanders are tempted to take over (as were Ziaul Haq and Musharraf).

Demanding higher priority than Article 58-2(b) or the fate of the chief justice is putting the state machinery in order. Parliament should not be content with ratifying ordinances alone. It should hold administration constantly accountable through its committees and question hours. One day in a week must be set aside for the prime minister to answer questions. He hasn’t done that even once in five months.

The subject needing foremost consideration is the structure and functions of the government at all three levels — federal, provincial and district. Musharraf’s devolution plan empowered the nazim but undermined the authority of the provincial governments. The provinces while they were expecting to be more autonomous were altogether sidelined. The centre, instead, acquired direct control even over those few subjects that belonged to them. The politicians have relished their victory long enough. They should get down to serious business before it all goes sour.

kunwaridris@hotmail.com

THE present government prefers to blame its predecessor for the ills afflicting the country instead of working to cure them. It may be that it has neither the requisite will nor the skills.

The PPP–PML-N entered into a coalition to form the government nearly five months ago. Since then it has been professing two overriding concerns, namely: (1) making democracy ‘real’ by eradicating dictatorship and (2) ensuring the judiciary’s independence by reinstating the deposed judges.

Gen Musharraf did indeed rule Pakistan openly as a dictator until October 2002, and then covertly during the PML-Q’s quasi civilian regime. But he cannot be deemed to have operated a dictatorship after the PPP–PML-N coalition had taken power. Under the circumstances while the president retained the authority to dissolve the National Assembly in the event of a constitutional breakdown and the authority to make certain appointments (neither of which he had the occasion to exercise), he could not do anything else except on the prime minister’s advice.

Where then was the dictatorship? If the president acted arbitrarily during these five months, it had to have happened because Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani asked him to do it, in which case the dictatorial acts were his, not those of the president.

Gen Musharraf has now left the presidency. Several prominent persons in the country want to put him on trial for his alleged crimes. This advocacy is both unwise and dysfunctional. Crime takes place when a law is violated. The law and the constitution are what, in the final analysis, the Supreme Court says they are. Gen Musharraf cannot be prosecuted for his coup in October 1999 or for his imposition of emergency rule, dismissal of numerous judges, and amendment of the constitution on Nov 3, 2007 because all of these acts of his were validated by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. They cannot be termed as crimes.

The general adopted policies and took actions which turned out to have been unwise and possibly detrimental to the national interest. Choice of bad policies is political folly but it is not a crime. From time to time governments in most countries do things which are later shown to have been unconstitutional or even unlawful. The courts strike them down.

In ousting the chief justice on March 9, 2007 the general may have thought he was within the bounds of his authority to make that move. The Supreme Court held: no, he was not. He accepted the court’s verdict and the chief justice went back to work. Musharraf doubtless committed an indiscretion, but it would be hard to establish that he had committed a crime for which he should now go to jail.

The proposal to put Musharraf on trial will accomplish nothing good for the people. It will merely keep them occupied with another drama and give Prime Minister Gilani and his guide, Asif Ali Zardari, still another excuse for ignoring the country’s actual troubles.

Mr Nawaz Sharif wants the deposed judges to be reinstated within the next few days by a National Assembly resolution followed by an executive order requiring their reinstatement. Mr Zardari says he needs more time to think over the ‘modalities’ involved. He may not have thought about politics and governance while Benazir Bhutto was still living. But surely it became his obligation to think about them after her assassination and his own appointment as the PPP’s co-chairman. Ms Bhutto had firmly declared that the judges must be restored. Thus, Mr Zardari has had almost eight months to think the matter over and figure out its modalities.

In fact there may not be any modalities to consider. Mr Sharif wants an assembly resolution and an executive order. Let these instruments be sent out, and if they prove to be insufficient, we can think of what else might be done.

In my reckoning Mr Zardari simply does not want the judges to be reinstated, and he will yield only if exigencies of the time leave him no other option.

Gen Musharraf is gone. Let the judges now be reinstated so that we are done and over with a tormenting crisis. It is time for the nation and its government to come out of the past, look ahead and move on. There are hard choices to be made and campaigns to be mounted. There is the task of putting together and applying adequate (not minimal) force to deal with the militants.

Then there is the lingering insurgency in Balochistan. It has been surfacing periodically since this country’s inception and it is no minor matter. It poses an extremely grave threat to this nation’s solidarity and territorial integrity. Mr Gilani’s government, like the ones before it, keeps telling us that it is going to alleviate the Baloch people’s sense of deprivation, particularly their sense of exclusion from the management of their resources and their affairs in general. But to date it has taken no steps to meet their concerns.

The Baloch leaders and the political elite in the other smaller provinces have been demanding provincial autonomy, invoking the assurance in this regard given in the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Successive governments in this country, including the present one, have reaffirmed the commitment to allow the provinces maximum autonomy, but none has done anything to implement it.

Provincial autonomy is an imperative of this country’s survival as a federation. And, it is wholly feasible. It should be conceded forthwith if unnecessary turmoil is to be avoided. In this connection it is to be noted that the highly centralised state has failed everywhere to preserve political unity among culturally diverse groups of people. Decentralisation is now the preferred mode.

Some of the problems confronting the country are not quite as intractable as others. They can be mitigated even if they cannot be eliminated. Life for many of our people can be made a bit easier if the production and purchasing of food and fuel are subsidised and their prices lowered. Money for this should come not from more borrowing but from savings in other areas. Considering that we have an inventory of nuclear weapons, and that a full-scale war with India is therefore most unlikely, defence spending can be reduced substantially.

One cannot say if Mr Gilani and his associates have the wisdom and will to provide what the people so desperately need. I hope they will overcome the inclination to let things slide, as they might, and let nature take its course.

The author is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts

anwarsyed@cox.net

LOOKING back through August 2008 eyes, many commentators now seem to treat the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia 40 years ago this week as a primarily geopolitical event.

The coincidence of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and the anniversary of the invasion of 1968 perhaps makes it understandable that some should colour their thinking about the crushing of the Prague Spring this way. In this elision, securing their near-abroad against their empire’s enemies is what tsars in Moscow always do, whether the threat is from American capitalists or Georgian nationalists. The common theme, in other words, is always Russian power politics.

Undeniably there are important and ominous connections here — and they are ominous not only to those who live in any country in that vast geographic Russian border arc that stretches south from Finland to the Black Sea and then east from the Caucasus towards Mongolia.

No other state in the contemporary world treats its neighbours’ sovereignty with as much cynicism as Russia.

Yet to concentrate on the geopolitics of enduring Russian insecurity is to downplay some of the other large historical lessons of what happened in August 1968. That is because the central question in the eight months between the appointment of Alexander Dubcek as first secretary of the Czechoslovak communist party at the start of January 1968 and the overnight arrival of 500,000 Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of that year was big and simple. Could the Soviet communist model of socialism be reformed or not?

Today we know the answer. But the world of 1968 could not be so sure. The question was at the heart of the Prague Spring. Dubcek’s reforms raised the possibility that there could be some kind of democratic socialist third way.

The reform question was not being asked only in Czechoslovakia itself. It was also being posed to some degree in all the Soviet client states of eastern Europe, though manifestly under less open circumstances, as well as in limited.

The invasion of August 1968 put an end to all that. Even so, it took a while for the full implications of the invasion to sink in. As Zdenek Mlynar, a leading Czech reform Communist, later put it (as told by Judt), when Red Army troops burst in on a meeting of Dubcek’s politburo and lined up behind each member, the future of socialism was not the uppermost thought in most people’s minds. “But at the same time,” Mlynar went on, “you know that it has a direct connection of some sort with the automatic weapon pointing at your back.”

August 21, 1968 was not the day that communism died. But it was the day that communism’s death sentence was confirmed. Christopher Hitchens had a neat way of encapsulating the whole thing during a debate at the Hay literary festival earlier this year. If you flip 68 upside down, he said, you get 89. In eastern Europe the protest generation of 1968 was the generation who then replaced the Soviet system 21 years later. Dubcek himself, however, re-emerging in 1989 from long years of obscurity, was not part of it. Even in 1989 he remained wedded to the possibility of communist reform, even as communism was dissolving around him.

Yet August 1968 was also the beginning of a more general crisis for socialists of all kinds. Many in the western left in 1968 believed that Dubcek’s reform programme, though noble, was doomed.

The Soviet invasion duly confirmed their view. Yet however firmly the western left dissociated itself from Soviet communism’s own crisis, many on the left remained wedded in various ways to the same ideological — and in some cases the violent and lawless — traditions of the French revolution, out of which the Soviet Union had itself also been forged.

Forty years on from the Russian tanks, the eclipse of socialism is now as general in the West as it is in the former Soviet lands further east — perhaps even more so. Most people who consider themselves to be on the left — whatever that really means in the post-1989 world — are aware at some level of this reality.

Very few parties of the left have been equal to this task. In Britain in the 1990s, New Labour began to ask such questions, but not in a sustained way. Too many key, but hard, issues were ruled off the agenda.

— The Guardian, London