SHOULD the Hamood Report be read as dirge or high drama? The army command living it up, General Yahya in thrall to various beauties, he and General Hamid conducting the nearest thing we have had to bacchanalian orgies, Lt-Gen Niazi (as given to sensual delights as his superiors but, coming from Mianwali, somewhat less polished) smuggling betel leaves and living it up in Dhaka: this is the stuff of Falstaffian comedy.

What is the Hamood Report? Essentially, wisdom after the event. When the events of 1970 and 1971 were unfolding most people in the know, and this included junior army officers such as myself, had a fair idea of how the senior command was disporting itself and spending its free time. Tales of copious drinking (Ghalib surely would have approved) and other delights abounded. As a captain posted in Lahore, where Lt-Gen Niazi was corps commander before being sent to liberate East Pakistan, I well remember how the more knowledgeable amongst us used to regale each other with stories of his escapades with the famous Mrs Saeeda Bokhari of some sector of Gulberg.

Someone even told me that while visiting his favourite lady the Corps Commander, Lahore, was given to wearing calf-length boots, as a mark, I would suppose, of his Mianwali machismo. Furthermore, that before climbing the stairs to her flat he would make a beeline for some nearby bushes and there relieve himself. Festive warlord indeed. High boots and relieving oneself in the bushes: try as I might I find it hard to work up a patriotic indignation over these telling details.

While the Higher Command was thus preparing itself for war, how was the political warlord of West Pakistan conducting himself? Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was threatening to break the legs of those of his MNAs who had the temerity to attend the scheduled National Assembly session in Dhaka - whose postponement triggered the chain of events which culminated in the surrender ceremony at Paltan Maidan, again in Dhaka.

When the drama of it all ended and Bhutto was ensconced in power in what remained of Pakistan the search began for scapegoats and the readiest to hand were booze and women, Pakistan's humiliation being blamed on these kindred vices. In this frenzied orgy of righteousness few people chose to consider that in 1971, even if Pakistan had been led by a college of cardinals, the same policies would have led to much the same disaster. Yahya's drink was first-rate and his black beauties (there being several in his stable) sublime. It is his policies which were to blame.

It is also sobering to remember that those policies were backed by the entire West Pakistani establishment, from the mandarinate of Islamabad to the great political warlord himself, Zulfikar Bhutto. Not only this but the Jamaat-i-Islami, which later became one of the most ardent purveyors of the booze-and-women theory of national humiliation, was amongst Yahya Khan's foremost supporters. So much so that its then chief, Mian Tufail Muhammad, famously said that the president was about to give the country an "Islamic" constitution. And this when the lights were already closing in on the Yahya era. From no single quarter have Pakistan's villains sprung. They have come from all sides of the national compass.

The army command's great fault in '71 was to mix up the issues of peace and war. If Yahya Khan and his generals had stuck to their peacetime vocation of exercising power, the sun would not have set so tragically on their wining and dining. But the Fates pushed them into the vortex of events they could neither comprehend nor control. Even if there had been no Mata Haris at their court they would still have been driven on the rocks.

It can be argued of course that booze and women robbed Yahya and his coterie of the power of lucid thinking. Maybe so although looking at some of the other highpoints of Pakistani history I find it hard to subscribe to this theory. How did we stumble into the '65 war? Ayub drank moderately and was certainly not given to late-night trysts with black and other beauties. How did we decide to carry out our nuclear tests in May 1998 or, a year later, rush into the Kargil adventure? Both decisions, each disastrous in its own way, were made in a flush of flaming sobriety.

Caesar was abstemious in food and drink (although less straight in the matter of choosing his bed partners). Napoleon hardly tasted alcohol. Hitler was a puritan in most matters, including sex. Ataturk drank to excess and liked amorous company. Churchill was a serious drinker. Stalin was given to all-night drinking orgies in the Kremlin. RAF and Luftwaffe pilots in the second world war seldom went short of good wine and champagne, none of which impaired their fighting ability. Either way the evidence is not conclusive. Sobriety is no automatic guarantee of statesmanship, drink not always the shortest route to hell. To be sure Yahya (lucky devil) was in the arms of his women when he should have been studying his war maps. But then Yahya's inclinations were well known much before Ayub picked him to be army c-in-c. In normal times he would have made a genial commander. It was just his luck to be presiding at the high table when adverse winds were driving Pakistan into stormy seas.

Maybe the praetorian tradition which is strong in Pakistan is to blame. Maybe if democracy had not been derailed civilian leaders would not have taken as readily to failed and expensive wars. But this is to second-guess history and is like saying that Germany would not have plunged into the first world war if the militaristic spirit had not been so strong in it. This precisely is the point. The baptism of Germany at the hands of Bismarck took place at the altar of militarism. How could Germany escape one of the defining influences of its birth?

The strength of the praetorian tradition in Pakistan is not because of the subverting of democracy. This is too simplistic an explanation. In what is now Pakistan the praetorian tradition has always been strong. In Ranjit Singh's kingdom, which encompassed Punjab and much of the Frontier (and which in these parts was the last settled political order before the arrival of the British), the most powerful element was the Khalsa army. Being the kingdom's mainstay everything else was subordinated to its interests. For their part when the British finally annexed Punjab some years after the death of Ranjit Singh they introduced a system of administration which was more military than civilian.

Henry Lawrence, the man at the epicentre of Punjab events (after whom is named Lawrence College in the hills), chose a group of brilliant young men as his political assistants: James Abbott (after whom we have Abbottabad), Herbert Edwardes (Edwardes College, Peshawer), Joe Lumsden (who raised the Guides Cavalry), Jack Nicholson (of Nicholson's Monument at the Margalla Pass near Taxila), Hodson (of Hodson's Horse) and several others. All of them were junior officers of the British Bengal army. They proved great administrators but were at heart soldiers. In the relief of Delhi during the Sepoy Uprising of 1857 some of these men, especially Nicholson, played an important part. What is of interest to us, the imprint of their administrative methods long survived them.

The district and police officers of Pakistan may not know much of the origin of their services. They may lack the spirit and competence of their forebears but to the extent that they have a collective unconscious it is haunted by the memory of those shadowy figures who imposed British order on the parts which now form the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Democracy and its trappings have merely scratched the surface of this more timeless reality.

From all of which I conclude that whatever Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan might say we are not going to be rid of the praetorian tradition in Pakistan any time soon. General Musharraf may choose to formally retire to the barracks tomorrow but this tradition will continue to cast its shadow on our polity. This, to my way of thinking, is the grim reality.Even so, if the praetorian tradition is to remain with us for some time more (and who knows how long this 'some time' may be) why should it not learn to tame the spirit of frivolous adventure? Yahya Khan was brought down not by his black beauties (to say as much is to do a grave injustice to those women of great zest and charm) but by not heeding the wisdom of Horace's words, " Brute force bereft of reason falls by its own weight..." For the generals of today brute force comes dressed in the garb of infallibility which leads them to believe that while everyone else in Pakistan is a fool or a scoundrel they alone of God's creation know best.

TAILPIECE: Apropos of the great Ranjit Singh, he drank to excess, took opium daily and had a stable of mistresses of both sexes. His durbar was the scene of greater licentiousness than Yahya Khan could ever have imagined. Yet he was a great ruler because he knew where to draw the line and for as long as he lived did not cross swords with the British except in peace.