Natural calamities and man-made disasters Pakistan will survive. But I doubt if the same assurance can be extended to the onslaught of the plastic shopping bag which is choking every last drain in the republic and disfiguring its landscape.
There are pests which cannot go into the sea or cross the Himalayas. No such handicap of climate or geography deters the plastic shopper whose ubiquitous presence is more deadly than that of the sectarian outfits which murder in the name of Islam.
When the final cataclysm takes place, of whose occurrence all the Books assure us, and the mountains roll into the seas and the waters pour over the land, everything will be flattened but the shopper will still be there, floating above the waters, clinging to the trees and giving the angels a hard time.
Granted General Musharraf and his corps commanders are still trying to get their bearings right. Granted they need at least another ten years to implement their agenda. But what ingenuity or magical intuition is required to wake up to the menace of small things? Or is it that another Task Force must be set up to mull over the threat of the plastic shopper before the Chief Executive and his cohorts can be moved to action?
The mutilation of the Constitution will be of concern to any right-thinking citizen. As will be the freezer in which the carcass of democracy has been placed for safe keeping. But the country's ability to master bigger problems would be far more credible if it could first get around to solving smaller ones. What's the problem in getting rid of the plastic shoppper? What biblical injunction prevents its destruction?
Our love of all things plastic almost suggests as if we and not the Germans were the first to manufacture it. Plastic chairs, crockery, containers, buckets - the infernal thing has spread faster than any plague. There is a brand of vegetable ghee which now sells in plastic buckets encouraging village housewives, who think they are onto a good thing, to collect them for other uses. The mineral water scourge is another source for the spread of plastic as is the curse of the American soft drink whose invasion of the globe predates the insidious spread of the shopper.
A country like Pakistan should have no place for disposable plastic bottles or anything plastic that can be thrown away including - the storm troopers of the women's movement may note - disposable plastic nappies. The All-powerful, being merciful, will forgive us our other transgressions, not this one. Did He create the earth for us to litter it with non-degradable junk?
Even the pristine fastness of our highest mountains are not secure from the plastic invasion. Mountaineering teams deserve our respect when they test the limits of human endurance. But they become a problem when they throw their litter around. Heroism is no excuse for despoiling our mountains.
Or take the eucalyptus tree. Do we need another Revelation to tell us that this tree, a fiendish import from Australia, is injurious to the kind of land we have in the subcontinent? You don't have to be a forestry specialist to know this. Enormous quantities of water are required for its fast-rising growth. Even for waterlogged areas its use has to be watched for what it sucks up is fresh (and therefore drinkable) water, leaving saline water behind.
But no, being the monkeys that we are, we fell for the World Bank command that this was a miracle tree. Now it can be seen even on rain-fed lands where there is a scarcity of sub-soil water. From British days onwards we planted longer-growing tree varieties along our highways. Now the fashion is to plant the eucalyptus. Not only does it injure the soil, it also does not fit into the tone and texture of our traditional vegetation.
One thing always beats me: why can't we leave the few open spaces that we have alone? In this context, what about the expected desecration of the Ayub National Park? Couldn't the army have left it alone? Must some half-tutored retired army officer - a breed, come to think of it, as pestilential as the plastic shopper - be given the run of it to turn it into a heritage museum?
In the Rawalpindi area there are more retired and serving generals, brigadiers and colonels per square yard of built-up area than perhaps anywhere else on the planet. These people are always lecturing us about the higher imperatives of national security (which often boils down to saying, don't touch our pension nests). Have they no concern for their environment? Can they not deliver a petition to GHQ to leave the Ayub Park, the one piece of woodland near the city, alone? What a city 'Pindi once used to be. What a traffic and building slum it has now become.
In much of the industrialized North, civic order and the rule of law arrived much earlier than the trappings of democracy. Even in the age of absolutism European monarchies were governed by some system of laws. Even Henry the Eighth had to seek a dispensation from the Church before marrying his several wives and beheading two of them. What a contrast with us where right till the coming of the British the will and whim of emperor, king or local satrap ruled supreme, unfettered by even a passing reference to any structure of laws.
At times it seems as if the past has not left us and the intervening years of British rule touched merely the surface of our existence. In order to better appreciate our failure to master the problems of governance, no study is more worthwhile than that of the history of Punjab, and what is now the Frontier province, from the decline of the Mughal empire to the formation of the Sikh kingdom under Ranjit Singh. A tale of intrigue, murder, rapine and pillage so fantastic, and so full of colour, that it would look strange even in a work of fiction. Given some effort, a few books on that period can be found but in our collective memory those years of mayhem and anarchy are a blank and we know less about them than, say, the Thirty Years' War in Europe or the French Revolution. It is for native historians to cover this lapse.
The British established their empire to fulfil their imperial ambitions. Any light spread was not by design but through historic inevitability. There should be no illusions on this score. When one culture comes into contact with another, something is bound to rub off on both sides. So it is that through that interaction we got certain things about which we knew nothing: the rule of law, scientific education and, in time, the seedlings of representative government.
Civilization of course we had before but with the decline of the Mughals it fell into decay and for a hundred and fifty years thereafter India was prey to turbulence, a state of affairs ending only with the consolidation of British rule. A false sense of national pride should not lead us to deny these things or to submerge them under the rhetoric of a misleading nationalism.
Colonial legacy: how easily we parrot the phrase without understanding its import. Of course there was evil in colonialism, as there would be in any form of foreign rule. But we have had over half a century to get rid of the evil and preserve the good. We have done just the reverse. While dismantling the institutions which constituted the brighter side of colonialism, we have burdened the country with fresh problems: Kalashnikov Islam, intolerance and an approach to culture of whose multiple symbols one of the most widespread is the plastic shopper.
For the foreseeable future our economic situation will remain grim and tight. There is no easy way out of our debt problem. Nor, even with the best of intentions, can we scale down defence expenditure in a hurry. With scarce resources, therefore, we will have to live for quite some time. All the more reason then to till our garden in such a manner as to substitute diligence and imagination for money.
Does it cost money to get rid of the shopper, cut down the eucalyptus tree or preserve the Ayub National Park? It does not require foreign money to make taxis and rickshaws run on meters or to ensure that there is no overcrowding in passenger buses or wagons. The rule of law is an attitude of behaviour and of mind and has little to do directly with money. Indonesia and Nigeria had no shortage of oil money. That has not made them into better-run countries. We had no shortage of money in the eighties. We too blew it and spent it on consumption.
The challenge therefore is to run the country on better lines, to get to know how to tackle the smaller problems first, before moving on to the bigger ones.