FROM his lair in Army House, Rawalpindi, arguably more heavily fortified than Hitler’s eastern headquarters during the Second World War, and arrayed of course in trademark uniform, General Musharraf says he is winning the war against terrorism (this in an interview to this newspaper).

There is some kind of trouble around Wana, South Waziristan, almost everyday — rocket attack, ambush, random firing. Balochistan is in the grip of unrest with a military operation reportedly underway around Turbat.

The president is confined to his armed bunker. The prime minister-to-be, Shaukat Aziz, who has just survived a suicide bombing and who could be forgiven for remembering with some nostalgia his unexciting but safe days in Citibank, New York, is conducting his election campaign from the safety of Islamabad.

If there was a time when it was unthinkable for someone in military uniform to be attacked, in Karachi today not even a corps commander is safe. And Gen Musharraf says he is winning the war against terrorism. If this is winning, what would losing look like?

An army exercising vigilance not against any external enemy but embroiled at home is an army in trouble. Time was when the main focus of the Pakistan Army was against India. Now the army-led government is mending fences with India, which is a good thing and should have happened long ago, but acquiring land to build huge cantonments in Balochistan. What on earth for? Is Balochistan a foreign province in urgent need of pacification? Is it our next East Pakistan?

When the Cold War ended, western countries reduced their armies and channelled the money saved into other sectors. Even as relations with India improve — alas, not as a result of our own good sense but under heavy American pressure, the one area where American tutelage has done us some good — there is no peace dividend for the people of Pakistan.

Al Qaeda’s war against the Pakistani establishment is not the main war Pakistan is engaged in. This is a sideshow, an example of Frankenstein turning against his creator, of the forces of jihad rebounding against their erstwhile masters.

Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies nurtured the forces of jihad for over 20 years. Their twin aims: turning Afghanistan into a client state and bleeding India in Kashmir. When the world turned on its axis after the September 11 attacks on the United States, these ambitions perforce had to be abandoned, U-turns considered as betrayal by the forces of jihad. If they now strike at the hands that once fed them, it is only to be expected.

When deGaulle said that Algeria would be free, French settlers rose in virtual revolt and launched a bitter terrorist campaign. But deGaulle rode out the storm and emerged as his country’s saviour, consigning the settlers’ organization, the OAS led by General Raoul Salan, to the trashcan of bad historical memories.

Al Qaeda can be countered. It’s only a matter of time. But Pakistan’s main war is not with Al Qaeda but with itself. How to prevent the repeated sabotaging of democracy at the hands of our self-appointed arbiters of national destiny? How to defeat the combination of incompetence and shortsightedness that prevents Pakistan from attaining any semblance of peace and stability? This is our real problem, not Al Qaeda which will pass when its moment is over.

Dictators took the country into foolish and unnecessary wars, dictators who sowed the seeds of Pakistan’s break-up, dictators and shortsighted intelligence chiefs who danced to America’s tune and turned Pakistan into a crossroads of international jihad. The Pakistani dream, if ever there was one, has been betrayed at the altar of this tradition.

Al Qaeda we can fight but can we fight our own demons, tame authoritarianism and give democracy a chance? If a civilian government was in place, no matter how inept or corrupt, it would have struck a better deal with the Americans. A civilian government would have said no to Pakistani troops to Iraq long ago, something Gen Musharraf still can’t bring himself to say. A civilian government, no matter how feeble its power and judgment, would not have made a mess of Wana or gone about creating large-scale unrest in Balochistan.

Our leaders talk of reform. If they were sincere about reform, we would have honest elections and some respect for the Constitution. However hard we wrestle with the English language, nothing in the present political scene fits the mantra of “enlightened moderation” so beloved of our present rulers.

As another independence day approaches the information ministry is trying to whip up patriotic fervour by launching a campaign under the slogan ‘Salaam Pakistan’, whatever this is supposed to mean (I suppose the subliminal inspiration for this brainwave coming from the Bollywood flick, ‘Salaam Bombay’). The cause of patriotism would be better served, and Pakistan’s founding much better commemorated, if the president were to announce on August 14 that he was about to take off his uniform and appoint a new army chief.

The president had a chance to connect with the nation and overcome his problem of legitimacy if, acting more decisively, he had been instrumental in saving the lives of the two Pakistanis (Azad Kashmiris, actually) murdered in Iraq. But having missed that chance it is foolish of anyone in his government to think that gimmicks such as the ‘Salaam Pakistan’ campaign can fill up the portfolio of patriotism.

Power flows out of the barrel of a gun. But so does institutionalized myopia. Taming blind and unchecked power is Pakistan’s biggest challenge. Other problems, including Al Qaeda, are of a subsidiary character.

A country in denial, yes, but also one subsisting at two different levels. There is the rest of the country with its problems and then there is Islamabad with its delusions of grandeur. As Balochistan seethes with discontent, Islamabad is seized of the problem of replacing dead date trees with new palm trees. Islamabad’s civic godfathers, unelected of course, spent a fortune planting these trees at the time of the Saarc summit earlier this year. Now they are about to spend another fortune on new palm ones.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s temporary prime minister, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, oblivious of any other problem facing the nation, is obsessed with a single-point agenda: pushing through a new defamation bill through parliament.

The Chaudhris, a generic name for Shujaat and his cousin, Pervez Ellahi, chief minister of Punjab, have been regularly accused of two things: (1) getting huge bank loans written off, the subject of a National Accountability Bureau inquiry when Gen Musharraf came to power; and (2) being responsible for the collapse of cooperative societies in 1990-1991 by getting huge loans from those societies, something which the law did not permit, resulting in losses to tens of thousands of small account holders. The new defamation law will make it difficult to repeat such allegations.

The temporary prime minister has also been to the Holy Land accompanied by a planeload of freeloaders. Curiosity on this score can be assuaged by reading an account penned by one of Ch. Shujaat’s known acolytes, Senator Syed Dilawar Abbas: “After taking oath as the head of government, Prime Minister of Pakistan Ch Shujaat Hussain had a call from within — an urge to bow his head at Khana Kaaba, the House of God, for seeking Almighty guidance (sic) and blessing to make a covenant to keep himself above the worldly desires (sic, sic), to stand by the promises he made and to strengthen the belief to do good unto others as His Naib (deputy) in that part of world (sic) which is called Pakistan.” The entire article is equally inspiring.

Abbas is a leading light of the ruling Q League. No one can say Pakistan lacks political talent.