I have nothing against dictatorship. In fact in front of my bathroom mirror I am a bit of a dictator myself, trying to look like a Caesar about to address the Senate or walk into the Forum.

What gets my goat, and indeed would get the goat of anyone in his right senses, is the tinpot variety which has flourished in these parts for so long and which received a fresh lease of life when the tides of history swept us into the Musharraf era.

Every time a strutting Napoleon comes on the Pakistani stage there is no shortage of people who applaud him. Not only the usual flatterers who pay homage to power no matter what its colour but also decent people who are bamboozled into thinking that reform and redemption are finally at hand. In the fullness of time these patriots stand disillusioned but not before they have done their bit to confuse the national landscape.

So we need to get certain things straight and the first is that the army is a deeply conservative institution without the capacity or the vision to carry out any kind of political reform. It is not a question of this or that individual. Apart from the sly Zia, most of our military autocrats have been convivial figures fond of a tipple in the evenings. But what of that? It is their political wisdom and ability we are talking about. In this they were woefully deficient for their alma mater, the military, was never fertile soil for the nurturing of these qualities.

Nor was this any great loss because democracy and political liberalism were ideas we inherited from our colonial experience (let us never forget this debt). Our armies therefore were under no necessity to play the role of political and social reformers. Indeed the British saw to it that the army and bureaucracy stuck to their professional jobs and kept away from politics, a tradition largely preserved in India but knocked to bits in the great halls of the Islamic Republic.

But despite repeated political interventions the army remains a prisoner of its limitations. Whatever its pretensions, it is not equipped to clean the political stables. Each intervention has aggravated the country's problems. Each strongman has left a greater mess behind him. But strangely enough, instead of being chastened by this experience, the army's confidence in its ability to fix things it knows little about has grown in proportion to the extent of its failures.

Yes, the nineties were no golden period in the country's history. Yes, Benazir and Nawaz made a hash of things. But this is a justification for more democracy, for elections at regular intervals to turf out the crooked and the incompetent. This is no argument for military rule. In any case, Gen Musharraf came riding into the arena not to save the country. The reasons for his coup, as we all know, were altogether different.

Of course the argument can be made that whatever the original impulse behind the coup, Musharraf must be judged on his subsequent performance. True enough, but falsehood and flattery apart, to what miracles over the last two and a half years can his government lay claim? Do we have better schools and colleges, better hospitals? Does the national administration run more smoothly? Has our quality of life improved? Are we richer in pocket, with more to spend? Have our famous courts become founts of justice? Is the promised kingdom near at hand?

Yes, the country's foreign exchange reserves have grown. Tremendous news but can we move on to the next item please? The nation is going deaf with the drum-beating that is accompanying the referendum. But beneath the din what's the substance? What can this military government truly claim as its own?

The one radical thing it has done was the rapid switch to the American camp after September 11. We have proved America's most dutiful ally, providing airbases for attacks on Afghanistan, surrendering the surveillance sovereignty of our airports to prying American eyes, catching Afghans and Arabs and delivering them over to Guantanamo justice, and allowing the FBI a free run of the country. But strange that not much has been heard of these achievements in the referendum speeches. Is there then a shamefaced quality to these wages which makes us thus reluctant to trumpet them?

So the question is not about dictatorship but about a dictatorship which has precious little to show for itself. This is the greatest argument against militarism Pakistani style. It has never delivered in the past, bringing only ruin to the country. It cannot deliver anything now or in the future not because sincerity and good intentions will be lacking but because the military, even with all the goodwill in the world, can give us a Burmese or an Indonesian Pakistan. It cannot lay the foundations of national growth and renewal. The sooner we take this lesson to heart the better for our collective sanity.

Time was when during the Zia era the religious right sided with the army, considering it to be the key to national salvation. Having learnt their lesson the maulvis are singing a different tune. It is the turn of the liberati and the English-speaking chattering classes to be enamoured of the military solution as the means to rid Pakistan of its evils.

True, some of the more sensitive of the liberati have professed to be shocked by the referendum and the organisational excesses accompanying it. They feel the hero whom they had earlier extolled to the skies has somehow betrayed them. My friend Irfan Hussain of this very newspaper is a case in point. He has announced that he will not be voting for the President which I am sure is a serious blow to the Musharraf camp. But others of the same persuasion are still issuing certificates of approval--'he means well', being the most common--to the object of their undiminished admiration. Which leads one to conclude that it will be some time before the education of the liberati is complete and they too come round to where Pakistan's maulvis stand, licking their shattered illusions.

Musharraf has betrayed no one, least of all the liberati. He is hewn from the same rock as his predecessors. If the liberati chose to invest him with qualities that never existed, it is not the General who is to be blamed. It's his drum-beating admirers who got it wrong. Just as they are getting it wrong about the strange political theories now circulating in the country. Who ever heard of a balance between the powers of the president, the prime minister and the chief of army staff? What has the army chief to do in this tripod?

Far from showing Gen Musharraf in a favourable light, the layers of constitutional protection he is seeking make him look weak as if he walks in dread of the future. Macbeth was not so much in awe of Banquo's ghost as Gen Musharraf seems to be of the dwindled spectres of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif? What is he afraid of? What is he seeking to protect, his so-called 'reforms' or his impressive person in commando uniform?

The referendum has reopened settled wounds. The people of Pakistan were resigned to a Musharraf presidency. No one had consulted their wishes when Musharraf and his generals seized power. They wouldn't have considered it amiss if they were not consulted about the future. But far from being a consultation, the referendum is an act of double homage. Not only are the people of Pakistan being asked to acquiesce in a Musharraf presidency, which they have already done, but also to go a step further and applaud it. This amounts to insulting their intelligence, a risk that need not have been taken.