ANYONE expecting an improvement in Pakistan needs to be patient. At its present pace of progress or regress (it depends upon whether you see things as half-full or half-empty), Pakistan can confidently look forward to becoming a developed country in another 300 years.

This statement should not cause Pakistanis to lapse into a slough of despondency. It took China 3,000 years to reach the level they are at today, Europe almost 1,000. South America and India are within sight, if not within reach of their goals. African countries have yet to emerge from the chrysalis of their potential.

Despair is a daily exercise for most Pakistanis. Their mornings begin with it. It is akin to the slow motion T’ai Chi routine practised at the start of each day by millions of health fiends across the world. The only difference is that here, the need for self-defence is not simulated; it is all too real.

Danger, disaster, and death have become daily companions — unwelcome, unavoidable, and dangerously sinister.

This triad is indiscriminate in its choice of victims: a young Shia teenage boy on his way to school in Hangu; a senior police officer who hunted terrorists until finally he became their quarry; a busload of passengers exterminated because they happen to be Shias; the sons of political leaders slain because their parents choose to sit in the opposition; military officers caught in the firing line of duty. The list is longer than the memory of an increasingly demoralised public.

It would be tempting to lay the burden of these crises at the threshold of the present government. If only it was that easy. A party that has gone into the opposition may have shed the mantle of governance; it cannot escape the hair-shirt of responsibility.

Our politics has become what the American call a whipsaw, in which there is a man at each end of the saw, each pulling alternately in his direction. Many cynics have come to the conclusion that the main political parties — the PPP and the PML-N — have agreed upon an arrangement by which one will be allowed to pull and the other to push for five years, after which it will be the turn of the other. The supine log in-between is the long-suffering public.

It is less than eight years since the Pakistani spring of May 2006 when the leaders of these two parties — the late Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif — pledged themselves to implement a Charter of Democracy. Re-reading its text, one’s attention is caught by Article 26: “Terrorism and militancy are by-products of military dictatorship, negation of democracy, are strongly condemned, and will be vigorously confronted.” The charter was careful not to go into details. Confronted how? And by whom? Alone, or together?

Every government — whether colonial or national — has learned that tackling terrorism and even insurrection is never an easy task. The British could not eradicate Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau in Kenya, Gen Grivas’ EOKA in Cyprus gave them as much of a headache, the Americans conceded defeat to Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Cong and finally lost South Asia, and Mandela’s African National Congress — the tortoise with a shell tempered by adversity — eventually won the race.

A war on terrorism does not come cheap. It is estimated that in the decade between 1965 and 1975, the US squandered over $100 billion in its ultimately fruitless conflict in South Asia.

Pakistan does not have that kind of loose change. By comparison, our resources are petty, and sadly, our issues in the global context are equally petty.

Ten years ago, Gen Musharraf was in the chair, confident of his power, convinced of his legitimacy. Today, he is in the dock, like Hosni Mubarak, reminded every day of his vulnerability to the whims of fortune and vagaries of our legal system, while those whom he hounded have the upper hand.

Will it always be like this? Will one man’s meat always become the same man’s poison?

One hopes not. Politics demands a spirit of accommodation, an acknowledgement that the political pendulum, like the whipsaw, swings both ways.

Judging by the behaviour of Musharraf’s opponents, they are all too keen on making him grovel before granting him any sort of amnesty. To foreign friends of Pakistan like the Saudis and the Chinese, such public spectacles are best avoided. The Saudis are too secretive to hold such showcase trials, and the Chinese have realised (after the self-damaging indictment of the Gang of Four in 1981) that they have held one too many.

It might help all our leaders — regardless of their party affiliation — to pause for a moment and to think, not of themselves, but of future generations of Pakistanis. They deserve more mature behaviour.

The writer is an author and art historian.

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