THE service chiefs, beginning with General Pervez Musharraf, have set a good example by disclosing details of the properties they and their immediate families hold. While this is a step in the right direction and one which should be followed by all fat cats - political, bureaucratic and commercial - it also goes some way to reveal one of the things wrong with the Pakistani elite: it is over-privileged and over-pampered.

The army chief has six plots, an under-construction house in Karachi and two squares agricultural land in Bahawalpur. This is besides a house owned by his parents in Islamabad and a house in the name of his daughter in Defence, Karachi. The naval chief has three sizeable plots, a flat in his wife's name in Islamabad and the obligatory two squares of land in Bahawalpur. This is what he must have acquired while in service. What he inherited were four acres (repeat four acres) of barani land in Rawalpindi and six acres in Multan. The air chief has six plots and the inevitable two squares in Bahawalpur. At this rate there will not be any land left in Bahawalpur.

While a grateful nation would not grudge the leading defenders of the motherland these privileges, a person in a shantytown would be forgiven for thinking that there was a plot too many in all these lists. As Tolstoy asks in his famous short story: how much land does a man require?

The ironic thing is that compared to (1)the higher bureaucracy, (2) the politicians of the last decade and (3)the entrepreneurs who have made a speciality of getting loans and then declaring their paper enterprises as 'sick units' to have those loans written off, the properties of the service chiefs are, if anything, on the austere side. Which just goes to show how much the acquisitive mentality has infected the Republic's vitals. Yet we wear our virtue on our shirt-sleeves and sermonize loudly from the house-tops. While the gap between rich and poor in this country is wide enough, more striking perhaps is the yawning chasm we have dug between rhetoric and reality.

Anyway, this was just a digression which like the lists of plots above has turned out to be longer than it should have. Of greater importance is to see how within this first month military rule has progressed and what bench-marks, if any, it has set for the future.

So far what the nation has heard is stern resolve and plenty of good intentions. It is a measure of how deeply unpopular the previous regime had become, and of how tired people generally are of the Benazir and Nawaz Shairf brands of democracy, that they have taken to the sound of General Musharraf's voice and are not only eager but desperate that he and his team should succeed.

It is also true, however, that so far the good intentions of the military government are not buttressed by too many specifics. Maybe it is too early to pass any judgment on this score. Even so, the team in the driving seat not only looks a bit unwieldy - corps commanders, principal staff officers at GHQ, the famous NSC, the patchwork cabinet, all making up quite a handful - but it also seems a bit vague about how it is to carry a broom through the Republic's stables.

A great deal will depend on how bank defaulters are tackled after November 16. This date has been built up so much, not least by newspaper ads which no one seems to realize are always an exercise in futility, that if the action against defaulters does not come up anywhere near the hype, no one should be surprised if disillusionment sets in early. Especially among the civic-minded sections of the middle class who are always more concerned about the country than anyone else and who, in this instance, are looking upon the military takeover and its threats of reform as signs of the final coming.

Vagueness is also visible in the monitoring mechanism which the army is setting up to ensure, as has been stated, good governance. This will function under the chief of the general staff, General Aziz, and go from the corps, which will keep an eye on the provinces, to progressively smaller units down to the district level. Even in theory this sounds like a half-baked idea. The CGS should run GHQ and keep an eye on the army. How can he monitor, much less understand, the functioning of government?

The matter wrong with Pakistan is institutional breakdown. Nothing, apart perhaps from the post office, works the way it should: not the provincial secretariats, not the district management group, the criminal justice system, the revenue departments or, indeed, the lynchpin of all, the criminal justice system. This breakdown will scarcely be helped by any 'monitoring'. It requires a serious effort at reform of which the military, at least for now, seems to have little clue. The army can jump-start the process of reform by banging heads together and cracking a few eggs. This is what it can be good at, provided of course it knows what it wants and where it wants to go.

Part of the problem of course is that this batch of reformers is learning on the job. There is nothing wrong with this except that if the pace shown thus far is anything to go by, we are in for a fairly extended apprenticeship. Who will defray the expenses of this exercise in learning? Obviously the nation which over the last 52 years has had more than its fill of seeing where good intentions lead when not backed by understanding and vision.

Part of the problem also is that the public's honeymoon with General Musharraf (and, let it be stated for the record, that of General Musharraf's with the public) is still going strong. As long as this mood lasts there are not many people willing to hear criticism of the army, especially when in defence of the army it can be said that it has not had time to prove itself. To disarm criticism further people looking enthusiastically at the military takeover are saying that this is the country's last chance and that if after the failure of democracy the army too fails we are done for and our future is sealed.

This is dangerous thinking. First, it places General Musharraf on a pedestal and invests him with the robes of messiahdom. For this role he himself may not be prepared if for no other reason than that it imposes a crushing burden of expectations on his shoulders. Second, to speak in such apocalyptic terms amounts to suppressing the spirit of scepticism in our midst which, apart from any other purpose it may serve, is a necessary corrective to the fatal tendency, to which all Pakistani rulers sooner or later succumb, of wielding power arbitrarily. While a necessary corrective in all seasons, its importance is heightened at a time when the Constitution and the assemblies lie suspended in no-man's land.

Who knows this experiment turns out differently from the ones before it. Who knows this is the dawn we have been waiting for. Maybe. Even so, we should not be victims of collective amnesia and forget that we have been here before. Military rule has been tried on several occasions in the past and found wanting. While the practice of democracy over the last decade and a half has been a joke, it does not follow that the baby should be thrown out with the bath water. If the army loses a war, a fact not unknown in our history, does it follow that the army should be disbanded? This is faulty reasoning.

Let us also not forget that the same people at the helm now, eager to change the nation's destiny, misjudged and misread, to put it no stronger than this, the objectives and the likely consequences of the Kargil operation. For the sake of the country let us pray that they are better at governing the country than they were in handling something that fell within their professional competence.