IT is not as if there is anything wrong with Pakistan. Perish the thought. It is just that the national mathematics do not add up. That we are living beyond our means and earn not enough even for everyday needs is a clich become hoary with over-use.

The stage has arrived where our IOUs are being called and we do not know what to do except plead before the IMF for another round of aspirin. Six hundred million dollars - a sum Bill Gates could eat for breakfast - is what the Islamic Ummah's only nuclear power is begging for. And ready to do anything to get it.

National agenda? Say that again. Since the October coup (all right, counter-coup) the only agenda in town has been fulfilling the IMF's conditions - GST, documentation, tax survey, the free-fall of the rupee - no matter if the economy slips further into recession and people howl louder about the impact of high prices and blame the army for all their troubles.

Who knows what is really going on? Not the Jabbars and Haiders or the civil society gurus running around like headless chickens. Not, I wager, the corps commanders who with set jaw go about their municipal and provincial duties: transfers and postings, road inspections, desultory talks with traders when the sputtering tax survey runs up against another brick wall. Unless he is dumber than we think, the person in the know should be the de facto prime minister, Shaukat Aziz. Isn't he orchestrating the national tap-dance before the IMF? But no matter. When the obituary of these times is written (the history of Pakistan being more a matter of writing obituaries than anything else) he will be safely out of the way, supping with the ghosts of finance ministers past, even as the Republic, unbreakable begging bowl in hand, sinks further into bankruptcy.

Stop, I can hear the cry from afar. We know all this. What point in driving the obvious home? Tell us your remedies. Well, here goes. The present course is unsustainable. We simply do not have the export or manufacturing capacity to get the economy moving so as to be in a position to pay off our burgeoning debt. Living from one rescheduling to another: this is all we are doing, in the process getting more indebted and seeing a greater flight of human and other capital abroad. This has to stop. We must turn our backs on the past and undertake a search for new solutions.

But at this point a caveat looms. The army is a great and glorious institution, perhaps the last line of defence against creeping disorder and anarchy. But let us get one thing into our mutts: it is also a conservative institution, as armies all over the world are, no more capable of dreaming up radical solutions to Pakistan's economic woes than the Rotary Club or the English-Speaking Union. When swept by self-righteousness it declares it is going to turn the ship of state around, it is guilty of fooling itself and of trying to fool the nation. These are games for which there is scope in normal times but not when the direction of the country (or indeed its future) is at stake.

I have no idea of what or who can replace the army at this juncture. The list of all our would-be saviours makes for depressing reading. But along with a good many of my countrymen I know one thing for sure that the army should not wait around too long in power. It must return to its own duties and leave the nation's affairs to a civilian set-up, call it a national government, made up of the best this country has to offer (although, Heaven knows, even the best that we have can be pretty depressing). Let the superior wisdom that the army claims to have be put at the service of such a government.

Now back to the what-is-to-be-done tale. The time may have come to look seriously at the benefits of a default. Between now and January 2001 lines of communication with the IMF should be frozen. While talking politely to it nothing should be accepted. And then, summoning up our last reserves of courage, it should be told we have no need for a bailout package - 600 million dollars or even more. Will anyone, please, tell me in plain English what we will lose? In what way will our position be worse than it is today? That the dollar will hit the roof? It is pretty near the ceiling already. That our exports will dry up? Big deal. What exports are we talking about? That we will be able to import nothing? In the words of Eliza Doolittle, wouldn't that be lovely? That our manufacturing industry will come to a standstill. What in our manufacturing industry is worth saving?

Business as usual will drive us further into the pits. The Republic needs a wake-up call which it will only get when something drastic, like a default, happens. And a default, by the way, without the chest-thumping rhetoric at which we so excel.

But...and this is an all-important but... we will be in no position to carry off this gambit as long as we remain over-extended as a nation. We are carrying too much delusional baggage around: meddling in Afghanistan when we cannot manage our own affairs, liberating Kashmir by force when we have lost half the country at the altar of our unmitigated stupidity, setting off our nuclear fire-crackers when any dim-wit could have told us we would be far better off leaving them in the closet, and making an asinine issue of the CTBT as if signing it would mean the loss of national virginity. We have to draw our fingers in, call back our armies home and take a hard look at what is possible and what is not before being able to part-defy the international community regarding our foreign debt.

In other words, we have to perform a double-act: engage the international community by giving up on our Soviet ambitions (there being everything Soviet about our overstretched external lines) and show a hard face to our international creditors. We cannot be tough (and stupid) on both counts: spurn our creditors and be Talibanish at the same time. That won't work. Recklessness at one end must be balanced by responsibility at the other.

Our present posture is just the reverse. Proud Bolsheviks on Afghanistan, Kashmir and the CTBT; abject slaves before the IMF. The day this equation is reversed will mean the fruition of the Pakistani revolution. And, no, I don't mean we give up on our stand, principled or whatever, on Kashmir. We just learn to be a bit more sensible. Japan has not given up on its demand for the return of the four Northern Islands taken by Russia in the last days of the Second World War. But neither has it set up training camps on the mainland to recapture them. While pressing for their return it carries on normal dealings with Russia. This should not be such a hard act for us to follow.

But who will reset our national order of priorities? I wish I knew the answer to this one.