Look at the Iraqi people, their bravery in the face of American repression, their passion for freedom, their courageous resistance. And look at us, totally subservient to American interests. No one is saying we should confront America. There is no wisdom in that.
But why must Pakistan under its military leadership swing to the other extreme and be seen as behaving like an American satellite? There is no freedom, much less honour, in an unequal relationship. The senior partner calls the tune and the junior partner perforce must dance to it, exactly what Pakistan is doing.
But what about the people of Pakistan? What explains their lack of spirit? Infected perhaps by their government's example, they have been desensitized to the point where they feel no outrage or have simply forgotten how to express it.
Sobering thought: western cities are more alive to the sound of indignation against the Iraq war than our own cities. Why? Perhaps because of prolonged political bankruptcy, too much ordering about by Platos in uniform. Authoritarianism kills the human spirit. It certainly hasn't done any good to ours.
As if to prove we've learned nothing, four and a half years into untrammelled power, Gen Musharraf remains obsessed with the notion of waving a military swagger stick over national politics. A bill to create a National Security Council (NSC) has just been pushed through the National Assembly.
The theology behind this move is disarmingly simple. Politicians are incompetent at best, at worst outright crooks. The people of this country are immature, easily swayed by demagogic slogans. Democracy thus cannot be left to its devices and to survive and prosper must be guided by the superior wisdom of the military, the military being the only institution capable of running national affairs.
The NSC is this idea made flesh. Its twin objectives: (1) entrenching military hegemony over national politics, as if any more entrenching was required; and (2) ensuring that the political class doesn't step out of line, a redundant aim considering that the political class has never been guilty of this error.
The NSC - with the president's trusted aide, Tariq Aziz, as its secretary - will make the service chiefs permanent fixtures (ghosts?) at the high table of national policy. What was always a de facto arrangement will thus acquire de jure recognition.
The army has always been the prime arbiter of national politics and, by virtue of this commanding role, the prime begetter of the misfortunes dogging Pakistan's footsteps. After the passage of this bill, constitutional cover will be provided to its meddling role.
Or so at least it is hoped. For what military theoreticians propose is not always what the mills of God deliver. Self-appointed Field Marshal Ayub Khan's Basic Democracy model of politics did not survive his fall.
General Yayha Khan did not survive the loss of East Pakistan. General Ziaul Haq's commitment to a spurious Islamization has not saved him from being the most derided and denounced figure in Pakistan's history.
Disregarding these lessons, does General Musharraf believe he will succeed where all his predecessors in uniform failed?. You don't have to be a soothsayer to make some safe predictions. When the curtains come down on this dispensation, as they must on all mortal things, a few things will happen at once.
The district nazim system will fall like a house of cards. Mr Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan's answer to John Maynard Keynes, will return to New York quicker than he came. The Q League will melt faster than Ayub Khan's Convention League. The NSC will disappear without a trace.
Who says history is a great teacher? Not in Pakistan at least. If it were a teacher we would realize it is the army which requires supervision and the political system which requires freedom from constant interference.
Unwanted and ill-conceived wars, the breakup of Pakistan, the fooling around in Afghanistan, Pakistan's jihadi image, the long rope given to Dr A. Q. Khan to become a public relations disaster, a walking bible of self-advertisement: who has been responsible for these disasters? Successive army chiefs, not political bumblers.
That politicians have been bumblers is a proven fact. Pakistan has been ill-served by its political leadership. But on any scale of disaster political leaders are outstripped any time by their military counterparts. Politicians and civilian leaders have been the petty contractors of disaster. The real big tenders have been floated by the military command.
Pakistan's problem then: who'll guard the guardians? Not, who'll guard the civilians?
Elections, regular and honest, are the corrective to civilian excess or ineptitude. If one party blows it, an alternative is in the wings. Democracy doesn't create perfection. It is not meant to. But if practised with some skill and maturity, it helps reduce the margin of imperfection.
What's the corrective to military excess or failure? None has been discovered in Pakistan so far. The NSC will be another rope round the neck of the half-donkey, half-horse democracy Gen Musharraf has thought fit to tolerate. It won't check military ambition. It won't educate army chiefs to respect the Constitution and stick to their professional duties. So what will the nation get out of it?
Three service chiefs plus the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee breathing down the necks of the civilian leadership. If this after 56 years is our idea of democracy it doesn't say much for our learning abilities.
The worst crime is a useless crime, driven by neither passion nor necessity. The NSC falls in this category, something done or set up for no rhyme or reason. It won't give Musharraf any powers he doesn't already have. Nor give the military a pre-eminence it doesn't already enjoy. So why the frenzy behind this move?
Seek the answer to this question in the insecurity of the Bonapartist mind. Ayub gave up command of the army only when he made himself field marshal. Yahya until the end, even after Pakistan had been broken in two, clung to his uniform. Zia was in uniform when he was blown out of the sky. Musharraf still wears his uniform and promised to give it up only under pressure.
Uniform or no uniform, he'll still be a powerful president, with the power to dismiss the National Assembly and government and appoint the service chiefs. But as that Urdu saying goes, for superstition even the great Hakim Luqman had no cure. What if these powers are not enough? The NSC is a talisman, a piece of psychological armour, meant to allay this fear.
It has nothing to do with protecting democracy, the argument advanced for justifying its creation. Everything to do with giving another layer of protection to the present dispensation.
That it won't work and in fact will be another drag on the political structure is beside the point. It has to do with the irrational where its justification must be sought.
No wonder people close to the president are still unwilling to take any chances. Connoisseurs of advanced flunkeyism will have noted the statement of the First Patriot, Defence Minister Sikander Iqbal, vowing to persuade the president, in the national interest of course, not to give up his uniform. The more things change...
On this key issue will the defence minister's invocation of the national interest remain a lone voice or are these the opening sounds in what promises to become a swelling chorus? It should be fascinating to see how this theme develops.