FACED with a disaster like the one that has hit the Karachi coastline, Castro would have declared a national emergency and been there himself - shouting, directing, pulling officials by the neck, and there and then axing not a few of them.

He would have been in the forefront of the cleanup operations. He would have cried with the fish and pulled turtles with his own hand out of the sullied waters of the Arabian Sea. He would have worked the population of Karachi into such a frenzy that man, woman and child would have walked to the shoreline, shovel and bucket in hand, to help to clean up the mess.

But that would have been Castro who shouldn't really be compared with the tinpot variety of leader strewn across the Third World. But wait a moment. Don't our bonzes (our saviours) stake out a claim for their indispensability? Don't they say that but for them the nation would face ruin and perdition? Well, perhaps they are right but where have they been during this crisis? Or do they think the devastation of Karachi's shoreline not to be a huge enough subject for their endeavours?

We are told the Legal Framework Order is an irrelevant issue, of no concern to the common man. Fine. But what about this oil spill and the ecological catastrophe it portends? Are these not of concern to the nation or the common man? So where have they been all this time? Of course we have heard profound expressions of concern on television. Unfortunately, dead fish and dead turtles and sand soaked in oil are immune to treatment by television.

The Sindh government was helpless to cope with the after-effects of the rains. A day of rain and Karachi became an ungoverned city, all vestiges of government drowned in the rain puddles. How could this efficient administration deal with any bigger catastrophe, one as huge as that caused by the oil spill?

In any event, the Arabian Sea is not a provincial subject. Apart from the Himalayas and the river Indus, if there's any other truly federal subject it is the sea. And yet when a disaster hit Karachi's coastline, spewing poison and death into the waters of that sea, Pakistan's present set of Indispensables - all our leaders being always indispensable - sat like the gods on Olympus, watching the disaster unfolding from the heights.

Ah, but what about delegation of authority, you might say? Must the Big Chiefs be there for every emergency? No, they shouldn't or else they'll be caught up in small things forever. But this wasn't, isn't, a small thing. Since it's hard for anything to penetrate the military mind unless couched in the familiar idiom of strategy and tactics, let's put it this way: the Karachi oil spill is the biggest strategic disaster to hit Pakistan for a long, long time.

As soon as the oil tanker was grounded, and this was somewhere around July 27, an emergency should have been declared. The Chairman of the Karachi Port Trust and officers of the National Shipping Corporation should have been made (they wouldn't have done it on their own) to sleep on the beach devising plans to siphon the oil from the doomed tanker.

The navy, our famous navy, should have been around somewhere. The Karachi Corps Commander whose eloquence has left no one in any doubt about his being the moving spirit behind the plan to build luxury apartments along Karachi's seafront, now all washed in oil, should also have been there laying out - you've guessed it - strategy and tactics.

But from July 27 to August 14 not a squeak, or at least not a helpful one, was heard from any of these worthies. Instead Karachi and the nation as a whole was fed on a diet of vapid lies. There was nothing to worry about, we were told. And, as always, the situation was under control. The first signs of the sea bureaucracy coming to life, and springing to some semblance of action, became visible only when the oil had started to pour into the Arabian Sea.

Another thing. The army is into everything, into every aspect of national life. Why wasn't it into this ecological disaster in the making? A leadership lapse or a failure of imagination?

But have no fear, no heads will roll. We live by more civilized standards than that in the Islamic Republic. The worst can happen and no one is held to account. We lost half the country and General Niazi's pistol is kept for display in the Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun, yet that famous commander who is still alive and well lost neither his sleep nor his digestion.

One of his colleagues deserted his post and managed to flee to Burma on a helicopter meant to fly out female nurses. Far from being cashiered he rose to ever higher honours on his return. Our happy system of justice ordains trials and penalties for minor offences not major man-made calamities. There is no reason to suppose it will be any different this time.

Remember, we have just four precious natural resources in this country: the water system of the Indus Basin, the waters of the Arabian Sea, natural gas and energy from the sun. That's all, nothing more. National salvation or any notion of progress and development requires the harnessing of these resources.

We have not the means to utilize solar power so, for the moment, let that pass. Natural gas we are consuming in the hope that its supplies will last forever.

We are allowing the Indus Basin water system to deteriorate at a fast pace. We should have lined our canals to conserve water and prevent water-logging and salinity. We should have seen to it that enough water flowed down the Indus to preserve the Indus Delta and the variety of life and ecology it supports. But we have done nothing of the kind and to counter the emerging water crisis are thinking of building more mega dams on the Indus which while providing temporary relief will lead to more water shortages downstream. (Can a law be passed preventing Information Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmed from opening his mouth on the Kalabagh Dam?)

And there's the Arabian Sea whose marine resources are being plundered by foreign fishing boats. Our land frontiers are secure (barring of course the odd intrusion and the firing at our soldiers by our American friends from across the Afghan border). Our sea frontier is not. The Karachi coastline we have been polluting for years. Now comes this oil spill whose effects will take years to overcome.

We have so many advantages. We had so many at birth in 1947. Thanks to our British legacy of law, constitutionalism, judicial independence, roads, bridges, schools and an efficient administration we should have been way ahead of most Asian countries. Since democracy is the great talisman the world swears by today, it shouldn't hurt us to remember that in 1947 in the whole of Asia there were just two democracies: India and Pakistan (Ceylon becoming independent in 1948).

But Asian dictatorship - think of China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore and even Malaysia where Mahathir has kept alive a semi-authoritarian tradition - appears to have been a greater success story than Asian democracy.

In Pakistan of course we have tried both democracy and dictatorship. It says something about our luck or perhaps our talent for government that at both we have been singular failures. Inept dictators and bad democrats: this is the cycle defining our history.

Lest Indians, whose bragging on the subject of democracy is often a heavy cross to carry, think too much of their democracy, they could ponder over the fact that from secularism their democracy is moving towards a concept of nationhood defined by religion. (Read Sardar Khushwant Singh on the subject.) At least that is what the BJP thinks and the BJP is the ruling party.

General Musharraf said 'sham' democracy was responsible for all of Pakistan's ills. He promised to bring in 'real' democracy. The nation has been living with his brand of 'real' democracy since the referendum and the elections last year. Even a fiction writer would have a hard time making up this shambles.