In Pakistan today what weighs heavier, positive or negative? Is it dark all around, as in sombre or gloomy mood we sometimes tend to believe, or is there a silver lining to the clouds?

A fixation with the superficial in politics tends to narrow one's vision, encouraging the seeing of things in black and white. Everything looks rosy or painted in black and headed for ruin.

There won't be much disagreement with the view that the gloomy perception of things predominates in Pakistan today. The militarization of politics and our other failures on the political front have turned us into a nation of first class cynics.

The Cynics were a school of philosophical thought in ancient Greece. If they could have seen Pakistan, it would have added to their body of knowledge. Still, the gloom is a bit overplayed, because we tend to ignore the positive.

Which, I hasten to add, has nothing to do with foreign exchange reserves or relatively high economic growth. These statistics have neither produced jobs nor reduced poverty.

As the Indian political class discovered during the recent elections, statistics are not enough to amuse the electorate, especially when they portray an economy where the benefits of economic growth are unevenly spread.

The good news relates to the political rather than anything else. The military may be dominating politics, and there may be no escaping the fact that one man straddles the divide between GHQ and presidency but, despite this, Pakistan today is more of an open society than ten, fifteen years ago.

Explain this paradox how you will, but this openness is something to see and feel. The press complains of oversight and pressure and no doubt like governments elsewhere, even in democratic countries, the government tries to bend the press to its purposes.

Yet the fact remains that both military democracy and the army are freely criticized. Jamali's resignation, Shujaat's elevation, Humayun Akhtar's discomfiture and the absurd situation of a prime minister-to-be in the form of Shaukat Aziz have provided riveting drama.

Yet hasn't the press had a great day lampooning the drama and all the actors, including the president? Talk of columnists not having anything to write about. There's been so much to write about that everyone is slightly breathless.

Let's not forget the clichi that everything is relative. The present should be judged by the past, the only way to acquire perspective. The kind of free comment which is now routine in Pakistan would have sent the entire press to the cleaners in General Zia's time. Forget about military dictators.

Our political leaders also have been remarkably thin-skinned. Could the great Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (the adjective 'great' not being wholly sarcastic) stand any kind of criticism? Did the PML-N's own Nawaz Sharif take kindly to adverse comment? As for television, who could have imagined this kind of relative glasnost?

Admittedly, this glasnost is not perfect or complete. There are worms in the apple and iron in the soul. Let us by all means see where we have gone wrong, down which wrong path we have strayed. But let's also bear in mind the distance we have travelled.

The openness of these past few years has at least had the startling effect of stripping the army of its holy-cow status. Whether the army takes a wrong step in Wana or its commander-in-chief adds further patches to the Constitution, unlike the past it is no longer immune to criticism.

Compare this to the ISI-induced fear and paranoia of the past and by God this is a great, if largely fortuitous, achievement. The oft-heard line that freedom has no frontiers in the global village is so much hogwash.

Our Arab brothers find no problem in keeping the media bound and gagged. In physical terms it's not so much of a problem doing the same here. If politics is so easily controllable in Pakistan, what gives the Pakistani media the idea that it is somehow beyond control? So let's be grateful for small mercies.

Indeed, the press is at fault for not making the most of its present freedoms. Pakistan today suffers from a glut of commentating. Anyone with access to newspaper space is a pundit.

There is little or no interest in investigative reporting (for the obvious reason that it entails work) and even standards of ordinary reporting are quite abysmal. Which has something to do with what we've done to our educational system but that's another story.

It is easy enough to say we should outlive the past but the past, in some form or the other, always clings to us. Just as a child of partition (a dying species) can never get the chill and horror of those events out of his (her) bones, those of us who grew up in the Ayub era, experienced the Bhutto years and then lived through the bleakness and hypocrisy of Gen Zia's helmsmanship cannot help seeing today in the light of those epochs.

Authoritarianism has been our bitterest and most enduring legacy. But compared to what we've experienced before, these are open times. There are no restrictions on political activity.

Politicians are free to talk, issue statements, address rallies, organize their parties, hold as many drawing room meetings as they please without any Mukhabarat or secret police knocking at their doors and whisking them away in the middle of the night.

Agreed, the application of freedom can be a bit selective. Javed Hashmi is in prison and I am sure there is no shortage of other things to add to the list of human rights violations. Bad enough as these events are, they pale before the restrictions and violations of the past.

The army and its agencies are constantly manipulating the political scene. They helped put the Q League together and continue to prop up the present system. But no one - not the ISI, not Military Intelligence - is preventing the political parties from organizing themselves or from doing their homework.

Gen Musharraf wants to stay in power for as long as he can. He wants to insure his position. All this is obvious. But, being mortal, can he be around forever? Elections will be held because, and thank God for this, elections, free or manipulated, are part of this country's political topography.

Local elections and then national elections: prepare for these and put together an effective alliance to give the military establishment and its cat's paw, the Q League, a tough time. The prospect is there. It is for the PPP and the PML-N to make the most of it.

A handful of oppositionists sat in Ayub Khan's 1965 National Assembly, a handful in Bhutto's assembly. Compared to that, Musharraf faces a large and noisy opposition with unrestricted access to the media.

So while there may be great disorder under the heavens, magnified of course by our zest for cynicism, the situation is not all that hopeless. Compared to most Muslim countries, Pakistan is a red-hot democracy which is not a bad foundation to build on.

To achieve a stable political order what do we need? A more mature political class and a military less prone to interventionism. Considering the road we've travelled, and the de-mystification of the army occurring during the last four years, these are not impossible goals to achieve.

What about the military's latest choice, Shaukat Aziz? The jibes against him that he's an American import, etc, are cheap and not much to the point. The Chaudris are district-level political material, elevated to national status, thanks to the vagaries of military rule.

But, for all its faults, Pakistan deserves better than what the Chaudris can provide. How many intellectual lightweights can any country afford? Everyone may not agree with Aziz's economic theories but it shouldn't hurt to have an intelligent man around.

Some commentators are dismissing him as a political lightweight. It's hard to tell the future but if Turkey's example is any guide (Turgut Ozal, Tansu Ciller), never under-estimate a technocrat with military backing.