WHETHER we like to believe it or not, there is no getting away from the fact that, at least in the West, the mysterious entity we refer to as the `system` has failed.

And that too — slightly exclusive pronouncements such as made by the IMF chief about a virtual `systemic meltdown` of the global financial system notwithstanding — as a whole.

The catastrophic implosion of the US economy is in effect a symptom of something far bigger. The recent reversal of the fortunes of the US suggests as much. And it takes no wizardry to predict that the $700bn bailout package finally passed by both houses will eventually prove a mere placebo rather than a lasting prophylaxis.

Even if this does not send us delving into our copies of Das Kapital, it should nevertheless give us pause. In an overpopulated world where there is simply not enough to go round — whether in terms of food or sources of energy — the American dream which is at best a rather crude dream of `plenty` is a mere absurdity. Like other dreams it does not reckon with the implausibility of its sheer excess. The defaults or deferments on credit extended, for instance, to house buyers in the US have to do with a capital market that, recklessly overextending itself, finds itself, at the end of the day, akin to a sort of beleaguered Tantalus.

Scores of analysts have written about the West`s obligatory recourse to `socialism`. So that particular perception would now seem gratuitous. However, there is a slightly more important object lesson to be drawn here. What should have been pointed out — but has not in so many words — is that what the world has just witnessed is an instance of a kind of avoidable force majeure.

For the fact is that, to some extent, the present situation is of the world`s — or the West`s — own making partly as a reaction to the perceived extravagances of historical socialism, in particular the slippage into poverty in the post-Second World War era of Eastern Europe. The result was, in the West and other countries that followed suit, a virtual deification of the `free` market and a consequent takeover by autonomous and ultimately unpredictable market forces.

Thatcher was among the presiding deities of the phenomenon, at least in the UK. `New` Labour, in the shape of Blair, unabashedly promoted that tradition. Dividends presented themselves but were to be selective and short-lived. Regardless of its proponents, the system was bound to pass `the many` by.

The `free for all` bonanza of the Bush regime has proven as flimsy in the context of Main Street in the US. Little wonder then that Obama has felt constrained to speak up in the least politically correct yet most historically convincing ways of the need for a `redistribution of wealth` in the US. If nothing else — and whether his resolve to break the status quo actually comes about in case he is elected next US president — he has at least had the moral courage to challenge it verbally.

Interestingly, the observation was societal more than, properly, economic and to that extent — given the entrenched nature of capitalist interests in the US — fairly improbably radical. Indeed, it would have rung truer of Pakistan which needs, for its enduring survival, to be looking beyond an initially short-term economic programme at long-term social change.

We cannot afford to be blinkered any longer. Much more than an immediate monetary bailout by the IMF or other international donors, followed by the customary illusionist slumber and safe haven of affluence masquerading as `continuity`, is called for.

Pakistan has been classified by the Foreign Policy magazine as among the ten `failed states` of the world. If it is to pull back from further decay, it must give up on economic and other forms of spin and, at the brink of default, reconsider its priorities. The collective instinct notwithstanding — and since, for the time being, its sheer subsistence is at stake — its erstwhile goals of power and pelf will, clearly, no longer do.

A more benign and in fact pastoral state will have to take the place of the ravenous bird of prey the country has been suffering since as far back at least as the Ayub era. The energy crisis is just one symptom, among many, of our overall moral and environmental degradation.

Those in power today must realise that democracy has no talismanic attributes per se. Nor do we have any ready icons that can help draw us together so as to allow us to contain our motley mafias and make democracy more wholesome, participatory and credible.

There are numerous issues that await resolution, not least of all the insurgencies in two of our provinces. In the wake of a protracted in-camera briefing, parliament has adopted a curiously convoluted resolution calling for an “urgent review of the national security strategy and revisiting the methodology in order to restore peace and stability through an independent foreign policy”. Where the state is as vulnerable as it is and the country is faced with an impossibly spiralling cost of living, what can such `independence` conceivably mean?

Past masters at doublespeak,

we surely know that the malaise of the pre-Zardari era still persists. Why? Some would have it that the rot is too deep-seated to stem. All the same, what, for argument`s sake, are the solutions at our disposal?

There has been talk at the very highest level of the necessity for something like a Green Revolution. At present — given our economic plight and in the absence of a viable work ethic or equitably distributed agrarian resources or indeed Grameen Bank-style micro-credit — that must necessarily remain a pipe dream.

The bid for peace by the government, both externally and domestically, as a possible means to a way forward, seems right now to make greater sense. It will be a start if only by default. However, much, of course, depends on the good faith and foresight underlying it.