As I watched on Wednesday morning the BBC coverage of the American presidential elections, I found myself caught between easy suavity on one side and plodding gloom on the other.
On the TV screen was the BBC anchor, David Dimbleby, smooth, suave and very competent (I quite envied him). By my side were that morning's newspapers with President Rafiq Tarar solemnly warning the nation to be prepared for more bomb attacks and saying that the recent wave of bomb blasts was linked to the forthcoming defence exhibition in Karachi. A day before, the interior minister, Lt Gen Moinuddin Haider - surely Pakistan's answer to Saatchi and Saatchi - had said the same thing.
The defence exhibition in Karachi? It requires imagination and audacity for such a brainwave. Is the defence exhibition being read as a mortal threat by anyone? Is India scared of its regional impact and therefore bent upon sabotaging it? Is anyone even bothered by it? Of all the likely explanations for the sporadic bomb blasts taking place in the country this has to be the most bizarre.
Yet nothing really should be surprising in Pakistan any more, certainly not with the kind of helmsmanship we have had since the October Revolution. Pakistan was always known for some element of confusion and avoidable errors in its higher politics.
But the kind of confusion we have had these past twelve months is unequalled even by our turbulent standards. Everything has been stood on its head. Needless fronts opened in every direction and then as suddenly closed and forgotten. The already battered economy pushed into a deeper recession. Investor confidence, never very high, demolished completely. (Even the State Bank governor has come round to admitting this.) All for what?
True, the military inherited a bad situation. (Haven't we had enough of this cliche?) But then it should have improved it instead of making it worse by bad management. The test Clinton applies to his presidency is to ask the question: is the US better off today than it was eight years ago? What if we apply the same test here. Is Pakistan better off today than it was a year ago?
Forgetting everything else, take tax collecting about which the military government waxes so eloquent. Close to October 31, the last date for submitting individual income tax returns, the Central Board of Revenue was still revising the format of the tax forms. The last date has since been extended twice, yet such is the prevailing uncertainty that the urgency which used to accompany this yearly ritual has gone, to the detriment of tax collection. So much for military homework.
In a nation where paying taxes is considered a form of dishonour, the worst offenders are traders and shopkeepers. For long they have had their way. Zia did not touch them, considering them to be part of his constituency.
The PPP was afraid of their street power. The PML, part of the same spiritual brotherhood, openly pampered them. The last sanction against the greed of this class was the fear of the army. Now even this is gone because of the ill-conceived way in which the army was thrown into tax documentation. The traders have come into contact with what they feared and are no longer impressed. And Mr Shaukat Aziz is hoping to expand the tax net.
This government, in any case, seems to have a touching faith in documentation. It seems to think that anything put into a computer turns out fine at the other end, free of warts and errors. This is the reasoning behind the computerization of voting lists and the creation of a database organisation with the strange acronym, NADRA, and headed - you've guessed it - by a serving major general.
Who says the old voting lists were fraudulent? I have had first-hand experience of elections, local and national, since 1979 and can say with some authority that, by and large, there was nothing wrong with them.
As for bogus voting, the best defence against it was the presence of opposing polling agents at polling stations. If a candidate did not have a polling agent at a particular station, or if he had an ineffective one, the imbalance thus accruing naturally went in his opponent's favour. But where candidates were evenly matched, only over someone's dead body could bogus voting be carried out.
But who is to educate the nation's saviours? If they say the old voting lists were packed who is to gainsay them? Thus in a country already burdened with too many white elephants, we have another one, NADRA, which is taking the old voting lists and putting them on hard disk. But since this exercise is unaccompanied by any field survey, the old errors, wherever they existed, are being faithfully reproduced. What is more, fresh errors are creeping into the new lists because of the haste with which this task is being accomplished.
Such examples of military achievement can be multiplied. But no need to go through a familiar list. In any event, how many marks does General Musharraf give to his government's performance? Five out of ten, he says with becoming modesty.
In his annual confidential report an army officer is put in one of four grades: below average, average, above average and outstanding. Although an unbiased observer would probably give the Generalissimo's government less than five marks, even if his own marking is accepted, five out of ten is just average, not good enough for staff appointments or promotion to senior ranks.
In my three or four years in the army I got very bad reports from my commanding officers (a dismal lot, if you ask me), the only passably good report I earned being for the '71 war. Seeing that I was not cut out for the army, or because I did not have it in me to make a splash in it, I opted out and joined the foreign service (thanks to my father, an MNA in Mr Bhutto's government). It turned out that I was no good as a diplomat either, getting exceedingly bad reports from the late Mr S. K. Dehlavi. So I thought it best to opt out again. Admittedly, quitting in the face of adversity is no virtue. But I was quitting for different reasons: because I did not want to be a burden on myself and others.
Is the military government likely to do any better in the future than it has done uptil now? The signs are not promising. It has already exhausted its initial momentum. The popular acclaim with which its advent was greeted has long since evaporated. Accountability has forfeited public trust. For all of these reasons the national mood is depressive, the atmosphere heavy with theories of doom.
Even in defeat a nation's mood can be upbeat and defiant. Conversely, even when at peace, a nation which is prey to morbidity can have its inner strength sapped by feelings of despair. Such is Pakistan's situation today. The prevailing national mood is linked to no defeat or disaster. It stems from an abdication of faith in the nation's leadership. And this mood is made worse by a feeling of helplessness: that it lies not in the hands of the people of Pakistan to effect a change.
Zia was about the worst ruler Pakistan could have had: mendacious, hypocritical and living in the middle ages. But even during his long stay at the helm, the hope remained alive that when the darkness he symbolized came to an end, a new dawn would arise. (What the Daughter of the East made of that dawn is of course another story.) Benazir's and Nawaz Sharif's shenanigans were rooted in a democratic order and even if that order rested on shaky foundations it presupposed the existence of alternatives. If Benazir was bad, she could be replaced by someone else; if Nawaz Sharif persisted with his follies, he would lose his Heavy Mandate. What do you do with a dispensation whose power rests on the strength of its bayonet and which therefore is answerable only to itself?
The military should have got out a fortnight (no later) after seizing power. A year is already an eternity. How to bring this eternity to a close? This is the foremost test facing Pakistan today.
Just consider, as a parting thought, the absurdity of what we are going through. The military seized power because Nawaz Sharif tried to deal with the army command in a cavalier manner. General Musharraf himself is on record as saying that if the then prime minister had not tried to remove him, he (that is, Nawaz Sharif) would still be in office. A candid admission and therefore to be welcomed but one which casts more lurid light on our predicament. The military's action should have suited (and remained confined to) the provocation offered. As the last twelve months show, the events flowing from that fateful evening, and what the nation has had to endure as a result, far exceed any sin that may have been committed by the Wonder of Raiwind.