In The October elections in which I was a candidate for the National Assembly my opponents, rolling out their heaviest artillery, charged me with being a Qadiani.

On the strength of a column I had written about the exploitation of religion as a political tool by successive governments, in which I had also referred to legislation against the Qadianis, a local maulana, Qazi Mazhar Hussain, issued a fatwa to the effect that I was "pro-Qadiani".

Only too happy to get this incendiary ammunition in their hands, my opponents from the Q League - ah! the Q League - circulated the fatwa far and wide. From every platform my good friend General Majid Malik, in times past a worthy ornament to the general staff (and then novitiates wonder why the army has such a talent for making a mess of things), denounced me as a Qadiani. Adding for good measure, that I was also a drunkard incapable of writing a line without chucking a few down his throat. (I wish my liver was that strong.)

Nor was this all. A spirited young maulvi, Shakoor Naqshbandi by name, holding out the offending column in his hands after the Asar prayers declared to his small congregation - the Naqshbandi maulvis of Chakwal being into big money but small congregations - that after what I had written it was an Islamic duty to kill me (waji-ul-qatl). He then went to distribute the original fatwa in the bazaar.

Shakoori's maternal family are my neighbours and our relations have always been cordial. Why was he doing this? Because he had come to me a few days earlier saying that in view of his great popularity, his friends and supporters were urging him to stand for the provincial assembly on the MMA ticket. Since he was asking my advice, I told him that if he felt so strongly about it he should stand by all means but that it would also help if he was a bit more consistent in his actions.

In which connection I pointed out that whereas after September 11 he had helped burn tyres as a mark of protest against the United States' war on Afghanistan, during the referendum he had felt no qualms about mounting the stage when the Punjab governor, Khalid Maqbool, had arrived in Chakwal. Red in the face and a bit agitated, Shakoori walked out of my house. A few days later he was issuing invitations for my assassination. (For the record I might add that the offending column was written two months earlier, everyone concerned discovering it only during the elections.)

All is fair in politics, however - more so than in love and war - and candidates hoping to serve the people or save the country will stoop to any level to score a point or win an advantage. Since when have dirty tricks been outlawed in elections? The relevant point is altogether different. In the end none of the vilification really mattered. I still ended up getting 70,000 votes, just 1,300 or 1,400 behind the officially-sponsored Q League candidate. The ordinary voter didn't fall for the Qadiani propaganda.

After India's nuclear tests in May 1998, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif started meeting Punjab MPAs to get their views on Pakistan's response. I never tire of pointing out to friends that at the meeting of Rawalpindi division MPAs, out of the 22 MPAs attending, except for two or three, the rest spoke up against a tit-for-tat response. Anyone might have thought that from a division providing nearly 70 per cent of the army's soldiery a hawkish line would emerge. But none did.

A bit put off, for he clearly wasn't expecting this, Shahbaz Sharif said with some asperity that he was more interested in the views of the people. What did the people want? Having just campaigned in the Punjab local elections, I said that in all the meetings I had addressed I was asked about schools, roads, electricity and jobs, not once about India's nuclear tests or any mortal danger facing Pakistan.

But who's to stop our penchant for myth-making. That we had to test was a myth cooked up by the national security establishment with the ideology-of-Pakistan lobby cheering in the background. We would have been much better off keeping our bombs in the nuclear closet. No one was asking us to throw them away or spike our nuclear programme, only that we shouldn't test. When he telephoned Nawaz Sharif (four times as we keep reminding ourselves in our misplaced pride) Clinton wasn't asking for the moon, only for restraint and a small act of self-denial.

We would have gained the world's plaudits and some money into the bargain. Perhaps more than we have got for sentry duty in America's war on terrorism. But against the pressing demands of self-indulgence, for our tests amounted to little more than that, the calls for prudence meant nothing. So we fired off our nuclear-tipped firecrackers in the conviction that by doing so we were securing our defences and making them impregnable. For myth-making on this grand scale there is no known cure, in science or in medicine.

Exactly a year later Nawaz Sharif was in Washington desperately urging Clinton - the same Clinton who had cautioned restraint - to get Pakistan off the hook because of the army's adventure in Kargil. If the commanders entrusted with this adventure had their way, they would rewrite history and make everyone believe that but for Nawaz Sharif's dash to Washington our northern troops were on the verge of a huge victory.

The truth, as every staff officer knows, is that our beleaguered troops, cut off from supplies, were at the end of their tether. The dash to Washington, undertaken in consultation with the army command (let there be no doubts on this score), gave us a piece of paper which allowed us to pretend that our troops were withdrawing from the Kargil heights with national dignity preserved.

Nawaz Sharif lost his way later when he tried to remove Musharraf as army chief while he was still in the air. That was like showing a red rag to Musharraf's loyalists and, as anyone could have predicted, provoked them into action. But on Kargil, even though Clinton was in no great rush to see him (remember that Sharif was forcing himself on Clinton on July 4, US Independence Day) he deserved the high command's gratitude.

Just as Bhutto, for bringing home our prisoners of war without compromising national dignity deserved a slightly better fate than being strung up from the gallows.

So many debacles, a whole string of them: the '65 war, '71 and the country's break-up, the disastrous course pursued in Afghanistan, the costs of jihad in Kashmir. And even now, the refusal to learn, the preoccupation with more myths. Surely this matter calls for investigation because it points to something wrong not just with any particular institution - that would be too facile - but with the national mood, the national psyche.

The values of a governing elite, the spirit and temper of a race or nation, are products of history and culture. When we speak of the English or the French character, or the fighting prowess of Prussia (now mercifully shackled in German democracy), we are alluding to something created by centuries of history. National attitudes are not changed overnight. It took a revolution, and a bloody one at that, to change Chinese attitudes.

What do we have to fall back upon? A confused and not too accurate memory of the days of Islamic glory and a thin veneer of English polish yet to touch our core. The western outlook on life lies not in aping western manners or in speaking the English language but in imbibing the true spirit of western learning. (1) Faith in reason (not dogma), (2) a feeling for proportion, and (3) the ability to see both sides of a question (which is the foundation of democracy). These are Greek virtues forming the bedrock of western civilization.

Our governing classes lack these virtues. The colonial experience introduced these qualities in the subcontinent but we never fully imbibed them. It'll take a cultural revolution for this to change but whence such a storm comes it is hard to say because we seem quite happy to muddle along the way we are doing.