Will Shaukat Aziz continue with his rupee-a-month salary as he did when he was the finance minister?
“IMAGINATION makes possible all our thinking about what is, what has been, and perhaps most importantly, what might be.”
Readers, if novelist Tom Clancy can imagine a 9/11 scenario years before the terrorists tore down the towers or the chess champion Gary Kasparov can try to checkmate the world’s flash points with enough creativity and intuition for the State Department to woo the two as gurus of imagination, then our very own Shaukat Aziz, the banker, too fits the Foggy Bottom’s bill.
Institutionalizing imagination is Washington’s latest poster boy. The 9/11 Commission in its 585-page report has flashed it with a whole new brain, having unequivocally concluded: “The most important failure was one of imagination.”
Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies, laments the report. It is therefore “crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination.”
Having interviewed 2,000 people in government agencies plumbing the causes for the Sept 2001 attacks, Thomas Kean, the commission’s chair, urges officials to “analyze and think”, suggesting to include “unconventional thinkers” and use the “red team concept”, composed of team A and B to “create competition of analysis and ideas”, that he says governments with their “narrow visions” don’t do. “We need policy options; we need people who’ll push you towards them.”
Enter Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan’s new Prime Minister. His elevation is remarkably timed with the release of the report that makes Gen Musharraf appear to have found the holy grail to flush out terrorists from the face of the earth. Musharraf’s name sits comfortably on the lips of most congressmen at the Capitol hearings. Still some have serious concerns and reservations at the lack of democracy — the cliche Americans have worn-out fully — and the ISI running the political process currently in Pakistan. But drowning out the voices of these Doubting Thomas’s are those who only see Gen Musharraf, the army, and now Shaukat Aziz, as their best bet.
“Acknowledging these problems and Gen Musharraf’s own part in the story, we believe that his government represents the best hope for stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” says the report that lauds the role Pakistan has played in catching some “500 Al Qaeda operatives” on its soil.
Noting that the Pakistan government has in the past “tried to walk the fence”, helping against Al Qaeda while “seeking to avoid a larger confrontation with Taliban remnants and other Islamic extremists,” but what finally convinced Gen Musharraf (apart from all the millions that suddenly began pouring into Pakistan), was “when Al Qaeda and its Pakistani allies repeatedly tried to assassinate Musharraf, almost succeeding.”
Even his syndicated essay “Enlightened moderation” carried by the Washington Post and others, has won the commission’s praise as “extraordinary” and has been quoted as a model of moral certitude.
“If Musharraf stands for enlightened moderation in a fight for his life and for the life of his country, the United States should be willing to make hard choices too, and make the difficult long-term commitment to the future of Pakistan. Sustaining the current scale of aid to Pakistan, the United States should support Pakistan’s government in its struggle against extremists with a comprehensive effort that extends from military aid to support for better education, so long as Pakistan’s leaders remain willing to make difficult choices of their own.”
THE EPILOGUE: a deluge of green backs has opened up the floodgates for money changers back home who have their fingers itching handling so much cash, especially, the American variety. Real estate, I am told, in Islamabad has assumed a life larger than we all can imagine, and the half-baked, highly unethical and hugely avaricious real estate agents are stomping all over the capital like godzillas.
But the gravy train stops right at this point. Here’s the caveat: the Americans this time are wise old geysers. They have gotten Musharraf to appoint their very own comptroller, the former Citibank financier, Shaukat Aziz, who is being put in charge as a glorified receivable and payable clerk, handling the millions that Uncle Sam is providing once more with feeling ... that sweet life — la dolce vita — lived by a military dictator Ziaul Haq and his brass during the Afghan Jihad against the then Soviet Union.
Why then should Pakistan fret if unremarkable foreign investment stalks its wasteland? Why then should it turn green with envy as India steals the jobs here in America of millions, embracing outsourcing with garlands of marigolds?
Listen, instead of outsourcing — a word that sends out red flags in Pakistan — we have outreaching. The Americans, not wanting to appear unfair are promising to indulge generously in outreaching ideas across to Pakistan. That’s our share of their largess.
“We have given Pakistan $100 million to counter the madressah education — we know it’s peanuts, but it’s a start,” concedes one congressman, while another censures Islamabad for not doing enough to kill madressahs that preach anti-American doctrines.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is considered clean, something that appeals to the Americans, in addition, as the New York Times has pointed out, “he speaks English impeccably and dresses immaculately in Hermes ties and Canali suits. In short, he appears to be a perfect spokesman for Pakistan in the United States and Europe.”
Okay, I can name thousands of Pakistanis who speak English “impeccably” and perhaps are better turned out than the silver-haired, mid-fifties man with a panache for expensive cuff links. Does that mean he can really be another Lee Kwan Yu of Singapore and convert Pakistan into an “Asian Tiger” as he promises us? Have we not heard his predecessors take Pakistanis down this primrose path a thousand-fold, only to drag them into the nether world of poverty? Nawaz Sharif used to mouth this word (bet you he didn’t even know its significance) as did Madame Bhutto. Didn’t both these elected prime ministers say something similar to what Shaukat Aziz is claiming: “Pakistan, which used to be in pretty precarious health, has turned a corner. Everything is heading in the right direction.”
However, economists credit him with stirring the stagnant economy under his watch and registering an annual growth of 6.4 per cent. Will Aziz entertain curiosity among his cabinet, even if it is anti-conventional? Will he institutionalize imagination, as the 9/11 Commission recommends so strongly?
And will the prime minister continue with rupee-a-month salary as he did when he was the finance minister? hmm ...Will he be retaining the “beat-up Toyota” in which he drove to work from the “small town house in a government enclave in Islamabad?” And will he continue the “13-hour workday six days a week, no million-dollar salary or zooming stock options” as he did when he gave an interview to Asia Inc last year whose wide-eyed reporter makes Aziz an ascetic, living in the remote mountains of Margallas?
“Some Pakistani newspapers and magazines have talked about him as a future prime minister. ‘Oh no, please, no,’ he pleads. ‘I have no political ambitions whatsoever. I came here to do voluntary national service for a few years. Nothing less, nothing more.’ When he finally does give up that beat-up car for a limo, Pakistan’s loss will probably be some global bank’s gain,” blithely continues the reporter, whose preoccupation with the beat-up Toyota prevented him from imagining that Shaukat Aziz’s political trajectory was already in place courtesy the State Department, contrary to his protestations.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Will Shaukat Aziz continue with his rupee-a-month salary as he did when he was the finance minister?
