The military order's greatest contribution to the national condition lies in a double murder: the killing of expectation and the death of outrage.
Except for closet Musharrafites who still cling to the increasingly precarious notion that great things have been achieved under their general, few other Pakistanis are now given to soaring daydreams about Pakistan emerging from its lassitude and becoming some sort of a leaping tiger.
At the same time, Pakistanis (except over their cups when they can be quite passionate) seem to have lost, or rather surrendered, the power of outrage. They are capable of feeling angry but their anger is of the helpless kind which turns inward to become a quiet, wasting disease. It has nothing of the furious quality which is a spur to action.
Whether it is a question of the United States using Pakistan badly - leading to loud moans about wounded sovereignty - or the military government conducting constitutional manoeuvres against its own people, the most conspicuous feature of the Pakistani landscape today is the sense of resignation that appears to sit heavily upon it. Thinking (thinking?) and newspaper-reading Pakistanis have been reduced to enduring what they can't do anything about.
Enduring, moreover, without any traces of protest. This is what military rule followed by military democracy have done to the Pakistani spirit.
Not that, I hasten to add, even in the best of times there was much to report about the Pakistani spirit. After all, the self-inflicted and self-imposed disasters with which our history is replete it's hard to say much in its favour. Even so, a certain emotionalism, or call it naivete, distinguished the Pakistani mob spirit and found expression in the odd turn of rioting, brick-throwing and tyre-burning. While achieving nothing (else why would we be in this mess?) such activity at least showed there was still some life left in the Pakistani people.
Alas, no more. Today whatever passes for the liberal intelligentsia in a country as intellectually-shriven as this, has surrendered its arms, piling them up in a corner and renouncing their use for all time. If there is any sign of life it is among the clerical armies which, thanks to the follies of militarism, have found strength in the two Afghanistan-bordering provinces of the Frontier and Balochistan. Clericalism as the keeper of the national flame: Jinnah would be turning in his grave but that's another story.
The military regime and its financial wizards insist poverty has fallen in Pakistan. They are entitled to say what they like because giving rein to fancy is a national pastime. But if anyone takes the trouble of getting out of Pakistan's cloistered towers - in the fancier spaces of its bigger cities - he or she will soon see signs of a mass of humanity just struggling to survive. If this is poverty falling, what must poverty rising look like?
The result of this struggle is weariness. The people of Pakistan are too tired of shouting about anything. In any case, for the last twentythree hundred years - that is, since the time of Alexander's invasion - they have not defied any kind of soldiery: Greek, Hindu, Muslim, post-Mughal, Sikh, or British. They are not about to set fresh precedents now.
Nor do they have any pressing reason to reinvent history. Gen Musharraf has been moderate in his political ambitions. The three choicest things he has gifted the nation are the referendum, the Legal Framework Order and the October elections. And, not to forget two other essentials, the Chaudhry cousins from Gujrat and the genial nobody, Jamali, prime minister of our proud republic. But even if Gen Musharraf had been guilty of more, even if, say, he had declared himself president for ten years without the fig-leaf of his glorious referendum, take a sinner's word for it, he would have got away.
At the trial of Warren Hastings, in his defence it was said that given his opportunities as governor-general of Bengal, his moderation was astounding. The same is true of Gen Musharraf. Given the power of his divisions, we should be grateful he took his ambition only thus far and no further.
But in all fairness, the problem lies not with him alone. Or even with his institution, the army, from which he derives his Mughal powers. The problem lies in the way all our bonzes have exercised power, be they politicians or saviours in uniform. The rot started early and so from the start each one of our great tribunes exercised power in royal fashion, treating the state not as an abstract entity governed by laws but as his or, in Benazir's case, her personal estate. Much in the way of the great kings of India whom we idealize as our forerunners.
Akbar the Great was a good, nay a great, 'estate' manager. Muhammad Shah Rangila was a particularly bad one. But the point is that neither the one nor the other allowed himself to be governed by anything higher than his own will and ability or his personal sense of right and wrong.
Akbar's excuse of course is that he lived at a time when the divine right of kings was the norm everywhere under the sun. What excuse for Pakistan's tinpot rulers to treat the law and things such as the Constitution as irritants not even to be tolerated, let alone respected, but to be subverted and knocked about to suit their needs and convenience?
In this respect Musharraf is no worse than any of his predecessors. Leaving aside military saviours - who by definition lie outside the pale of both the law and democracy - what respect for the law did Bhutto show? Or Benazir or Nawaz Sharif?
The problem then is not with Islam, ideology or the predilections of the military. It has to do with the culture of power. In which respect, sadly, we are no better off than our forefathers. ........ This despite the interregnum of the Raj which apart from any evil or wickedness it may have gifted the people of India also taught them the rudiments, if no more, of such abstractions as the rule of law and constitutionalism.
The difference between civilian authority and the military is that just as an elephant tramples more grass than a dormouse, the army's capacity to wreak mischief, when it goes off at a tangent, is far greater than any political government's. The army has started wars it couldn't finish. It has presided over the country's dismemberment and fathered such follies as our involvement in Afghanistan from whose consequences we still suffer.
Politicians have been great at corruption and mismanagement but their ineptitude hasn't extended to the kind of full-scale disasters which fall to the army's account. This is the ultimate argument for Pakistani democracy: that while full of holes it is less harmful than its alternative.
That is why Pakistan's foremost problem at the moment is one man putting on too many hats at the same time. What's the solution? None other than this that the National Assembly, rising to the seriousness of the issue, should unanimously vote to make Musharraf a field marshal. So that when he puts on his field marshal's cap, someone else can become army chief and our half-dead democracy can begin to look like the real thing. Otherwise, we are stuck in this time capsule for at least the next five years.