THIS was supposed to be a blitzkrieg, carrying everything before it, smashing the pillars of corruption and turning the waters of the five rivers red with the blood of accountability. It is acquiring instead all the hallmarks of a classic battle of attrition reminiscent of the trench warfare of 1914-18.

Nothing so strikingly illustrates this as the first batch of names chosen for the National Security Council (NSC) and the cabinet. After 15 days of frenzied consultations, is this what the army has to show for its pains? It does not say much for the skill employed in the search or indeed for the abundance of talent available in the Islamic Republic.

Sharifuddin Pirzada as the principal adviser to the Chief Executive? The mind boggles. Pirzada has been adviser, legal counsel, eminence grise to every tinpot dictator since Field Marshal Ayub Khan. What are the generals hoping to get from him? If they want the status quo defended, he is their man. But if this takeover is about changing the nation's destiny, as the Chief Executive insists it is, what will be Pirzada's role who is already saying that his inclusion in the new set-up is not a full-time job? Interestingly, as in the deal he swung with General Zia whose legal adviser he also was, membership in the highest councils of government will not debar Pirzada from his private practice.

The finance commissar of the revolution unfolding before our eyes is Dr Yaqub who in his extended term as State Bank Governor may not have done much to turn the economy around but who has definitely set a record of survival which most politicians would envy. Although a clutch of scandals and scams have hit the banking sector during his stewardship of the State Bank - the Mehran Bank scandal, the travails of Bankers Equity Ltd, Nawaz Sharif's various yellow schemes, the Mera Ghar programme - the reputation for probity and financial brilliance of Pakistan's very own Alan Greenspan remains intact.

At Attiya Enayatullah's inclusion in the NSC the mind does not only boggle, it goes into a bewildered sleep. She is a charming lady and a great lobbyist of the causes she espouses (population control, her own career, and not necessarily in that order), but as far as having a measure of Pakistan's problems is concerned, she is simply out of her depth.

The fourth person to have been inducted into the NSC is Imtiaz Sahibzada. He is a nice person (every one seems to be a nice person around here) and a Gallian (alumnus of Lawrence College) to boot. But, pray, what in heaven's name is he expected to achieve?

Foreign minister is Abdus Sattar. As foreign secretary he was taken seriously. Ever since he takes himself seriously, a sense of humour seemingly alien to the man. To plumb his depths further read the longish dissertation on nuclear matters which he recently co-authored with Mr Agha Shahi and Air Chief Marshal Zulfiqar Ali Khan although I suspect most of it was written by him. That a single document should bristle with so many contradictions and half-baked generalizations is quite amazing.

Finance minister is a New York import (Citibank), Shaukat Aziz. Why this country must remain dependent upon such fly-by-night reformers will remain a mystery till the cows finally come home.

Fifteen days if not more of anguished cogitation, and 140 million people to choose from, and this is what we get. Obviously, there is no escaping the glitter of mediocrity in this country.

General Jahangir Karamat has a lot to answer for: for the weakness he showed at several turnings when a bit of firmness was demanded and for this idea of a national security council (the reason for his quarrel with Nawaz Sharif) which his successors have picked up from him. What good will it do? Apart from the other service chiefs who are in it as of right, its other members are creatures of the Chief Executive. Will they be able to advise him in the real sense of the word and check him should the need so arise? If not, and they simply sing to his tune, or pander to the shibboleths which become the received wisdom of the moment, what useful purpose will they serve?

As a check on a democratically-elected government, an NSC can make sense from the military's point of view (I repeat from the military's point of view). But in a military set-up it is not only a contradiction in terms but also an exercise in redundancy. There will be the corps commanders calling the shots from the wings. There will be the cabinet advising the Chief Executive and helping him implement policy (or whatever passes for policy in Pakistan). How many more layers of advice does the country need?

All this amounts to running on the same spot. What does it betoken? To most people it would look like confusion. If something looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, in all probability it is a duck. In the same way, something smelling so strongly of confusion is probably confusion.Most of this confusion stems from a lack of clarity about aim and objectives, a serious failing in any endeavour but absolutely fatal in a military undertaking where decisiveness of action is lost if the mission is not defined with clarity and precision.

Reviving the economy, carrying out accountability, strengthening national cohesion are objectives which have tested the collective wisdom of the Pakistani nation for the last 52 years. How much time does the Chief Executive want for fulfilling this agenda? In Saudi Arabia he said it could take anything from six months to three years or even longer.

A six months' limit we can safely discard for if it took 15 days to pick Sharifuddin Pirzada and his team, it gives us an idea of the speed at which this dispensation is likely to work. As it is, the economy is being revived since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's time. Accountability became a catchword under Zia, a good 22 years ago. Strengthening national cohesion is an open-ended exercise. Free elections will follow not precede the fulfilment of these aims. We are talking therefore of a flexible time-frame made finite or infinite depending upon the convenience of the time-keepers.

The trouble is that whenever the army has ridden into the political arena it has done so on the back of iron certainties, convinced that to every problem there is a black and white solution. It has usually not tended to understand (1) that life is a complex affair, often a messy one, with little of the beguiling simplicity of the parade ground; (2) that politics is not a search for perfection, because perfection we will find only in heaven, but an undertaking in which a choice all the time has to be made between lesser and greater evils; and (3) that given its make-up and ethos, its conservative background and the intellectual limitations of its higher echelons, the Pakistan army can never be a wholly satisfactory or ideal instrument of lasting reform.

It is not a question of individuals being good or bad. General Musharraf may be a very nice person but that is not the issue. The issue is that power, especially untrammelled power, encourages arbitrary and whimsical behaviour. This has been the sub-continental norm throughout history. This has been the Pakistani norm since 1947. Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza, Ayub Khan, Yahya, Bhutto, Zia, Benazir, Nawaz Sharif: all of them, regardless of whether they were elected or not, have exercised power in the manner of mediaeval despots, treating the state as their personal estate, the state's servants as their personal retainers. This is the Pakistani problem and from it flow the other symptoms which so agitate us and form part of our national discourse: corruption, misuse of authority, the looting of banks, the squandering of national resources, etc.

How can the army solve this problem when its first and last resource in the political arena is the untrammelled exercise of authority?

Wherein lies the answer then? At the risk of sounding anti-climactic, it lies in creating an ethos in which institutions are developed and laws respected. If this task requires time and hard work it begins with a crucial step: ensuring that in all seasons the state's functionaries are chosen for their merit and talent and not their political usefulness. If the army can provide just this, if it can leave in place constitutionally-protected checks which ensure, firstly, that in the judiciary and bureaucracy the best available people are appointed and, secondly, that the administration of justice and the maintenance of law and order are insulated from the influence of politics, sifarish and money, it will have done its job and earned the nation's gratitude. Addressing the other problems facing the country can then proceed in an institutional rather than an ad-hoc manner.

The army's own self-interest is tied to this approach. More than most countries in the same league, Pakistan needs a professionally competent and politically neutral military, qualities put at risk when generals, admirals and air marshals acquire a taste for power. The choice, accordingly, is simple: to be distracted by an open-ended agenda and sink, inevitably, deeper into the mire or concentrate on essentials and get out while the sun still shines?