ISLAMABAD, Jan 16: Former Air chief, Air Marshal (Rtd) Nur Khan has called upon President Gen Pervez Musharraf to induct what he termed as ‘doers and achievers’ in his administration if he wanted to rebuild Pakistan as envisioned by Quaid-i-Azam.

Nur Khan welcomed the outright rejection of Jihadi culture by the President in his address to the nations on Saturday but said articulation of a desire alone would not make any difference, what was needed, in his opinion, was action in the right direction and that too without loss of any time.

He said there was nothing new in the national ideals set by the President in his address to the nation. “These were there all the time and every successive government in this country had promised to achieve these ideals in its own language. But they did nothing concrete in this regard because their governance was poor and they had lacked administrative skills.”

Mr Khan, who led the Pakistan Air Force with his own personal example in the 1965 War, was all praises for the communication skills of the President as, according to him, he was highly convincing both when he spoke why he was abandoning his Taliban policy on September 17, 2001 and then when he articulated on January 12, 2002 why he was rejecting the Jihadi culture.

Nur Khan felt, particularly, sad about the prevailing education system in the country and said until and unless a national education system was evolved for all classes of citizens and for every nook and cranny of the country, it would be impossible to develop an identifiable national culture fully responsive to modern challenges.

The former PAF chief said the present system had created two classes of citizens — the English medium rulers and the Urdu medium masses — which also included a good number of Madaris graduates having a totally distorted idea of Islam.

These two classes of citizens, the ruling English medium and the ruled Urdu medium, who did not understand each others’ language, have remained in a perpetual and mutually self- destructive confrontation all these years causing immense losses to the country in terms of economy, politics and international prestige, added Mr Khan, who as the chief of the PIA in early 1960s and 1970s had turned the national carrier into the fastest growing and highly prestigious enterprize.

He said the President alone could not do what he had taken upon himself to do and he would, therefore, need a team of competent implementers having the capacity to deliver on every promise he had made and in the shortest possible time.

Mr Khan also advised the President to hold at the earliest fair and free elections under a truly independent and powerful election commission which would allow every political party to participate in it so that a truly national leadership, enjoying the full confidence of the people, could emerge.

He said the political parties before embarking on their election activities should declare publicly what each of them understands by Quaid-i-Azam’s Pakistan.

This, he said, would bound these parties from digressing from the path after having been elected.