WHAT are formation commanders? The image conjured up by these words is of men commanding fighting formations divisions and corps. If so, what is to be made of the television pictures of the recent formation commanders' conference at GHQ? So many generals were in attendance that it looked more like a public meeting than a select gathering of a knightly order.

When General Musharraf talks of restructuring national politics, a laudable aim, he and his fellow commanders might consider the question of starting charity from home. Does he need to be told that the military has become too top-heavy too many generals, admirals and air marshals? Time was when senior staff officers at GHQ used to be brigadiers. MI and ISI were headed by brigadiers. A major general was a rarity and being one a mark of distinction. Lieutenant generals were one with the gods, somewhere on the upper reaches of Olympus.

What was once an aristocracy has become a democracy and the resulting epidemic can be seen at its clearest when it is closing time in GHQ: a never-ending stream of black staff cars conveying two and three star generals to their grim destinations in and around a cheerless city. Rawalpindi used to be a quiet, beautiful place. Where has all its charm fled? If the army cannot clean up Rawalpindi Saddar, which is at the heart of its domain, shouldn't it be a bit more modest about cleaning up the rest of the country?

But modesty was never a Pakistani virtue. Admitting to mistakes is not part of our tradition. A hallmark of authority is the claim to infallibility. A change of government only means replacing one form of infallibility with another. The kind we saw earlier was dressed in shalwar-kameez. The kind now is resplendent in uniform.

But what on earth do they do when the sun is down? To what opera or theatres do the black staff car head when the lights are on and the night anywhere else would be rich with possibility? Sure, too much of what passes for culture was never a strong point of the general staff. Or indeed of the higher reaches of the mandarinate. But in days gone by there was at least the 'Pindi Club where the spirit of conviviality reigned. Senior officers now are more pious and their greatest cultural pastime is to attend the marriages of each other's offspring.

Can anything in the world match the bored and listless expressions at upper-class Pakistani weddings? Yet because there is nothing else to do, and because Pakistanis in authority have yet to be converted to the idea that marriages and funerals are best left as private affairs, this excruciating form of self-torture is routinely suffered.

On the subject of rank though, there was the news a few days ago that two more air force officers had been promoted as air marshals. How many of these exalted beings do we actually have? At one time a single air marshal Asghar Khan or Nur Khan was good enough to run the air force. And run it he did impressively. But at some infernal point in air force history it was decided that a simple air marshal was not enough and to command the air force we had to have an air chief marshal. Now there is no running away from this nuisance. The earlier air force chiefs stick in the public mind because they had large qualities and not because they carried a ton of brass on their chests. Obviously we live in different times. If present trends continue we'll soon have more air marshals than squadrons in the air force.

As I write these lines an Urdu newspaper informs me that 22 brigadiers have bean approved for promotion to the rank of major general. Good Lord, how many fighting divisions in all do we have? Where will all these major generals be accommodated? Remember, kindly, that a major general does not come cheap. He has to be housed and fed and looked after in the way to which Pakistani generals have become accustomed. It is not a question of burdening the exchequer. Our exchequer is used to such things. The question rather is of appropriate placing.

Was it MacArthur who said soldiers don't die, they fade away? He did not know what he was talking about. In Pakistan they refuse to fade away. On retiring they do not take to gardening or bird watching but expect to be reincarnated in another form of service. Hence the spectacle, for it is nothing less than that, of former navy and air force chiefs riding out as ambassadors, generals hankering for foreign office jobs, senior military figures heading corporations and now entering every nook and cranny of the administrative services. Where will it all end? Reincarnation is a Hindu concept. We have given it a new meaning.

Restructure politics by all means. Anything that keeps Benazir in Dubai and the Sharifs, the whole lot of them, in the Holy Land can only be for the national good. If General Musharraf thinks that the nazims and naib nazims being elected are the answer to Pakistan's problems, so be it. It is useless to quarrel with such fantasies. Resignation is the best attitude. Or as Euripides counsels, "Do thou endure as men must, chafing not."

In any event, what availeth chafing against the sublime certitudes of the Musharraf era? If its lights say prosperity is around the corner, will meek protestations to the contrary turn them from their path? A National Reconstruction Bureau is thus appropriate to the spirit of the times. But even while riding the crest of this optimism, might not a thought be spared for some of the other reconstructions the nation direly stands in need of?

From the mountains do we extract any brass of our own? If not, the brass needed to fill out higher shoulders will burden our import bill. What about red cloth, the kind needed to make the tabs so beloved of senior officers? Fauji Foundation may soon have to set up a factory devoted exclusively to the production of this single commodity.

And what about agricultural land, and plots and houses? Military retirees need to be looked after. Every man needs a house. But between genuine need and flaunting excess the gulf is wide. There was General Gul Hassan who spent his last days in a room in the 'Pindi Club, now an army mess. And there are the role models of today between whom and real estate brokers there would be little difference.

The properties in Pakistan of Admiral Mansur-ul-Haq are no laughing matter. They make for sad reading. What mechanism for the welfare of senior officers is there which enables them to accumulate so much property? Why the automatic grant of agricultural land (in poor Bahawalpur of all places) to every single, senior military grandee? Soon there will not be any land left to go around.

No one in England grudged Marlborough, Churchill's great ancestor, his Blenheim Palace after his victories against France, even though there were rumours over how he had got his money. After his victories against Denmark, Austria and France, the commander of Prussia's armies, the legendary von Moltke, received an estate (or was it money?) from a grateful nation. From a grateful emperor Bismarck received a gift of two huge estates. But the one was von Moltke, the other Bismarck. What Roman victories can we cite for the grant of minor estates in Bahawalpur?

Churchill supported himself throughout his life by his writing. Although the grandson of a duke, he had little if any independent income. Attlee took to newspaper writing when he stepped down as prime minister because the little money he had was inadequate to his needs. Wilson even when ill attended the House of Lords because his parliamentary daily allowance was a crucial source of income.

When we parrot the phrase 'colonial legacy', what do we know of its meaning? The colonial legacy was not only about dinner jackets, the hauteur of the civil service and gravelly voices shouting for whisky in clipped accents. More than these things it was about rectitude, integrity and service. The husk of the concept we have slavishly worshipped and its content discarded.

Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah were products of India's colonial experience. Without the stimulus of British rule and the inestimable gift of western education they would not have been the men they were. Lee Kuan Yew is a product of his country's colonial legacy. So is Mahathir Mohammad of his. The colonial legacy does not mean aping foreign manners, something at which we excel. Paradoxically, its essence lies in learning to be truly independent in thought and manner.

If we had really been touched by our colonial experience, our notions of morality and public rectitude would not have been the fuzzy things that they have become.