Ours has never been a land famous for the birth of ideas. Mystics and poets we have had aplenty but original thinkers who could light the way for the rest of us, hardly any. Even so, whatever little potential we had in this regard was knocked out long ago by our political tribulations - our failure to evolve a stable polity.

Political confusion exacts an economic price. This is a truism with which we are all familiar. Less often realized is another consequence of the same malady: the stifling of ideas. Tinpot leadership, and we have had no other variety, is responsible for this legacy.

We are a nation rooted in the myths of the past, inimical to fresh ideas, challenged by originality of any kind. The only scientist of world renown we had was Dr Abdus Salam. Yet we did not accept him as one of our own because of his faith. There must be something seriously wrong with a society which can think along such lines.

The government says it will bring madrassah learning in line with modern education. Of course it will do no such thing because any such undertaking is beyond the capability of the Pakistani state. All the same, can the irony embedded in this resolve be lost on anyone? The Islamic madrassahs are not the principal founts of ignorance in this country. The pass we are in is not because of madrassah education. When has the mullah held power? When has he been close to the decision-making process? Not that we should invite the Taliban in. We don't deserve that. But at least let us get the perspective of things right.

Most of the baffling decisions which have marred the country's destiny owe their origin to the Sandhurst types (civilian and military) who have held the reins of power. Why did we go into the '65 war? Why couldn't we get the measure of Bengali aspirations? Why did Bhutto have to sully his government by his dictatorial methods? Why did Zia and his generals fight America's war in Afghanistan? What explains the corruption of Benazir Bhutto and the Sharifs? What drove us to test our nuclear devices? What teaching of Clausewitz encouraged the army high command to embark upon the Kargil adventure?

Whence springs this zest for the irrational, for the course of action that, if you weigh the costs and benefits, makes no sense at all? Partly from political confusion, partly from the cultivation of ignorance at the highest levels of government. If we have turned the country into an intellectual graveyard it is bound to rub off on the calibre of the governing class. Let me cite two examples.

The brightest minds then in government and the army conceived the steps which led to the '65 war. Had we consciously gone to war it would have been another matter. But Bhutto, Aziz Ahmed and Maj Gen Akhtar Malik, acting under the guidance of the subcontinent's only self-appointed field marshal, opted for a limited adventure in Kashmir and for their pains saw the country sucked into a full-fledged war with India. The folly of the exercise lay not so much in the clash of arms as in the miscalculation behind it.

The second example. Prior to our nuclear tests in 1998, every card-carrying intellectual on Islamabad's seminar circuit was in favour of testing, more nonsense having been spouted on the nuclear question than perhaps any other subject in Pakistan. Three years later the earlier jingoism is no longer much in evidence, a nation of nuclear hawks having gone suddenly quiet. After an all-night binge, the morning-after feeling. Even the demotion from his commanding perch of the country's Oppenheimer, Dr A. Q. Khan, has passed without flap or protest. Of all changes in fashion this one is the most surprising.

In the calculus of cause-and-effect wherein fits political failure? It determines much of our floundering as a nation because instability invites repetition. Every time we go off the rails, every time a fresh crop of generals comes riding into the arena, the country has to begin from the beginning, re-inventing the wheel, rediscovering the obvious, regurgitating the same rhetoric about politicians being villains and the country needing a strong hand on the tiller.

So it is this time. General Musharraf and his knights are not stepping into the future; they are marching back into the past, taking the nation with them. The polity being fashioned is a throwback to the past, the methods are the same, even the politicos being fashioned into frontmen by the military government resemble nothing so much as the Convention Leaguers of the sixties or the Muslim Leaguers of the Zia era.

Ayub Khan's political experiments had an air of novelty about them as they were being tried for the first time. Forty odd years later, and with many other experiments intervening, General Musharraf's political manoeuvres look about as fresh as the hills. Yet the nation is expected to perform a conjuring trick and see originality where there is none.

The sixties gave us our first dose of full-blown authoritarianism. The gift of the seventies was half-baked socialism, from whose nationalizing consequences the country has still to recover. The eighties saw the crowning of a false Islamism whose most conspicuous features were hypocrisy and social regression. Then followed a period of corrupt and inept democracy. Now we are back to recycling Bonapartism.

With the past having to be relived every now and then, it is hardly surprising if Pakistan gives an impression of a wheel forever turning at the same spot without moving forward. No wonder our political discourse, whether issuing from the lips of military paladins or out-of-work politicians, is so sterile. How are fresh ideas to be born in such a self-defeating climate?

Failing to get politics right, what have we managed to create? A top-heavy state structure which allows nothing to grow in its shadow. Granted that Benazir and Nawaz Sharif were a couple of short-sighted politicians interested primarily in lining their pockets. But given the interventionist zeal of the military-bureaucratic oligarchy, even figures better than them would have had a hard time making a success of democracy.

The pity of it is that even after so much devastation the oligarchs will not let go. Still determined to control the march of political events, they have learned no lessons from history. The only difference is that whereas previously the mandarinate made and unmade policy, it is now the corps commanders who are swept by the illusion of having all the answers.

In war the record of the general staff has been at best indifferent. Now it wants to refashion the peace and in so doing is intervening in every aspect of national life from cricket and hockey to the recasting of the Constitution. It is another aspect of the past being revisited that the air is again full of talk of Zia's constitutional amendments being re-enacted. Even in our failures we refuse to be inventive.

Anywhere else versatility would be considered a good thing. With us it has become a living curse. Earlier top mandarins went from job to job, leaving confusion and mayhem in their wake. Now it is generals trying their hands at different things.

Take the devolution plan which has led to more confusion across the land than anything since the dissolution of the Sikh kingdom after the death of the great Maharaja Ranjit Singh. If it was such a good thing why did the military government not implement it first in Islamabad before trying it on the rest of the country? For reasons unknown Islamabad has been spared while the experiment rages elsewhere. Knowing something of the authors of this plan I am not surprised. It is hard to make out which is more frightening, their naivete or their complacency?

Pakistan may not deserve much but it can do without these fresh experiments upon its tired and harassed body.