Pakistan made seedbed of terrorism: Benazir

From today's DAWN

Difficult questions by BB....

 

 

Pakistan made seedbed of terrorism: Benazir

LONDON, Aug 23: The West's support for General Pervez Musharraf had made Pakistan a "seedbed" of terrorism, writes former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in The Guardian issue of Wednesday.

She asks: "Why is it that the terrorist trail always seems to lead back to Pakistan?"

"Why are second-generation Pakistani émigrés far more attracted by this pattern of terrorism than other disillusioned Muslims in the West?"

"What is it about Islamabad that puts it at the centre of terrorist plots?"

Benazir writes that General Musharraf "played the West like a fiddle" by offering support in the so-called "war on terror" to keep the United States and Britain "off his back as he proceeded to arrest and exile opposition leaders, decimate political parties, pressure the press and set back human and women's rights by a generation."

"The Musharraf dictatorship doles out ostensible support in the war on terror to keep it in the good graces of Washington, while it presides over a society that fuels and empowers militants at the expense of moderates," she says.

Ban on wedding meals and other bad laws

From the Daily Times, Pakistan - Thursday, August 24, 2006

EDITORIAL: Ban on wedding meals and other bad laws One bad law — ban on wedding meals — the citizens of Pakistan have tacitly resisted since its enforcement in 1997 has been amended by parliament with near unanimity. It was a bad law, as described in legal parlance, because it was steadily violated by the society on which it was imposed in the name of religion. Even the clerics in the National Assembly on Tuesday gave up applying the religious veto against "wasteful expenditure" (israaf) and thus accepted that a bad law, even when based on religious emotion, cannot stay on the statute book. The permission to serve a gravy, rice/bread, a sweet dish plus hot and cold drinks, neatly puts paid to the Ordinance that will now wither on the bough. The post-amendment news is that there will be an immediate investment of half a billion rupees in the poultry industry and a cascade of jobs for the poor. But it has cost Pakistan. It has taken nearly a decade for the public representatives to debate and decide an issue that needed immediate attention. After 1997 the catering industry reeled under the blow of the prohibition and collapsed along with its ancillary industries. The wedding halls that brought in crucial investment in all cities and gave employment to millions of people had to shut down. The police swooped down on them to see that only soft drinks or soup was served, as allowed by the law. Big money changed hands and what was healthy and economically dynamic became an underground activity. The real calamity befell the poultry industry. It lost billions of rupees of investment based mainly on the demand from the wedding halls. The rich went private and held their extravagant wedding functions in their residences. The middle class and the poor, who were supposed to be protected by the ban, had to spend even more to hold their 'valima' functions in the hotels where the police didn't interfere out of fear or for graft. In Karachi the police earned their illegal incomes mainly through bribes received from wedding halls. Rank hypocrisy pervaded the pious TV reports showing how the poor gorged themselves in the wedding halls. No one said clearly that a bad law was responsible for what was happening, not the people. In 2004, recognising the shameful situation created by the Marriage Functions (prohibition of ostentatious displays and wasteful expenses) Ordinance, the Punjab government sought to allow one dish at wedding functions, but the Supreme Court stepped in to say that since the federal law was still in force the province could not "amend" it on its own. The bad law continued thereafter amid much spilling of pious ink by writers who pretended to speak for the middle classes, who were supposed to be crushed by their aping of the israaf of the rich. Why did a bad law stay on the books for so long? When all the realistic criteria and economic indicators were against it, why was Pakistan unable to repeal it? The world agrees that Muslims are least able to scrap bad laws even after they are shown to be bad in practice. The basis of this Muslim trait is in the tenet that Revelation cannot be modified in the light of social condition; instead, it is society whose habits have to be suited to Divine Law. On the other hand, the tenet about bad laws is that any legislation that ignores the current mores is bound to fail. Muslims continue to defy the principle of intellectual mediation between revelation and society as posited by Pakistan's founding philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal in his famous Lectures. He wished to revert to the re-interpretive period of early Islam when the Rightly Guided Caliphs changed laws in the light of social conditions. Because of our intellectual prostration and clerical dominance, we have an entire hamper of bad laws riding our statute books, providing opportunities of crime to the retrograde and bribery to state functionaries. The most glaring bad law in force pertains to Zakat and Ushr. The ordinance, carelessly imposed to earn fake religious praise, ignited sectarianism till the Shia community was exempted from it. Later, the Supreme Court saved the country from mass conversions to Shiaism by finally exempting the Sunnis as well! The law is still there, withering on the bough, as usual. One can add aspects of the Diyat law, the misused Hudood laws, the cutting-of-hand and stoning-to-death laws, which are bad but which we may be fated to bequeath to our coming generations. *

Pakistan PM and money laundering??

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

BB saved Aziz from money laundering case: Babar NEW YORK: Major General (r) Naseerullah Babar has claimed that when he was interior minister he had issued orders to arrest Shaukat Aziz in a money laundering case, but then prime minister Benazir Bhutto stopped him. "When Shaukat Aziz was working with Citibank, he was involved in a money laundering case. After investigation I issued directives to arrest him but Benazir stopped it saying that Mr Aziz is an American citizen and his arrest will create problems," Gen Babar said at the launch ceremony of Sohail Warriach's book, 'Ghaddar Kon' (Who is the traitor?) here on Monday. He said politicians had always been targets of accountability, and it was now time for military generals to be held accountable. "President General Pervez Musharraf will come to know about the people's problems when he leaves the presidency. The president has bought a plot worth five crore rupees (Rs 50 million) in the capital. How has a general got such a huge amount?" he questioned. He said the public would have lynched generals in the street had the Hamood-ur-Rahman Commission report into the Fall of Dhaka been published. "(Zulfikar Ali) Bhutto saved them," he said. Gen Babar said that all political parties were agreed on the 'Charter of Democracy'. sana

Fazl replaces Jinnah’s picture with Mufti’s

Daily Times, August 21, 2006
Fazl replaces Jinnah's picture with Mufti's

ISLAMABAD: Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, has replaced the portrait of Quaid-e-Azam in his parliament chamber with a photograph of his father, the late Mufti Mehmood. Traditionally, a portrait of the Quaid is displayed at every government office. A senior MMA leader refused to comment on the issue. He said that only Rehman could explain why he had removed Mr Jinnah's portrait from his chamber. Rehman was not available for comment. It was not known when Rehman replaced the Quaid's portrait with the Mufti's.

Hoodbhoy on "enlightened Moderation" and Extremism

Great stuff on this blog  WATANDOST: Inside News About Pakistan

Post: Hoodbhoy on "enlightened Moderation" and Extremism
Link: http://watandost.blogspot.com/2006/08/hoodbhoy-on-enlightened-moderation-and.html

 

The judiciary under stress

  DAWN Editorial: August 20, 2006 The judiciary under stress


By Kunwar Idris

IT is not an occasion to rejoice when the chief justice of Pakistan has to assure his own people that the Supreme Court in its judgments is guided by law and conscience, and no other consideration. The mere fact that he was persuaded to extend this assurance shows consciousness on his part that the people entertain doubts to the contrary. Indeed they do, especially when the man in power is a party to the proceedings.

President Musharraf also claims that he has never asked the judiciary to do what he would like it to do. Reservations over this claim would be numerous.

The chief justice can prove his point only through the judgments of the court over which he presides and not by statements at formal dinners. The president can be believed when he says that he does not interfere in the courts but his responsibility extends much beyond that. The judges must feel assured that even if their judgments displease the executive authority they will not earn its ire in the way of being transferred to the Shariat court or, when the time comes, find their elevation to a higher bench jeopardised.

This apprehension is not hypothetical. Just one instance: Mr Ajmal Mian, chief justice of the Sindh High Court in the 1980s was sent to the Shariat court cutting short his tenure. A thought that often arises in conversation with judges and lawyers is whether the Shariat court is created to dispense Islamic justice or only to serve as a transit centre for the recalcitrant judges. Why should not each high court form a shariat bench of its own whenever the need arises? Mr Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim, a former attorney-general and Supreme Court judge, wholeheartedly endorses this view and argues for its abolition of the Shariat Court to the relief of the judges and the exchequer.

That the judges are not compelled to rule in individual cases as the executive authority wants is not enough to make the judiciary independent. They should also feel assured at all times that neither their peace of mind nor their career will be disturbed if their decisions hurt the government or its favoured party or cause.

It would be futile to deny that the judges are not under political pressure. Threat to the independence and integrity of the judiciary arises more from its own ranks than the attempts of the political leaders or officials to harass or win over the judges. Judges who need to keep their jobs for personal reasons are obviously more vulnerable than others.

Their number is on the increase for three chief reasons: one, the posts of judges have vastly increased but the standards of law education have fallen steeply; two, personal and political connections influence the selection because the practising lawyers and their associations are thoroughly politicised; and, three, the ICS/CSP and PCS cadres which constituted a vast pool of talent from which judges were drawn has all but dried up.

It may not be common knowledge that some distinguished judges came from the civil services. Among them were AR Cornelius, Shahabuddin, S.A. Rehman, Anwarul Haq, M.R. Kiyani, Shafiur Rehman, Saad Saud Jan, Habibur Rehman, K.M.A. Samdani, M.S.H.Qureshi, Masud Ahmad, Nurul Islam, Zafarullah (not to be confused with Sir Zafrulla Khan), M.A. Rashid, Hedayt Hussain and another Shahabuddin who later became chief justice of Bangladesh. At present, there is none.

The state of the judiciary is a lesson for so-called reformers that a cadre cannot flourish in isolation. It must draw on a large reservoir of people of diverse qualifications and backgrounds. Most ICS/CSP officers who became judges including Mr Cornelius and Mr Kiyani were not even law graduates but greatly enriched the case law.

The superior court judges now all come from the bar which is dominated by party politics or from the subordinate judiciary where the standards, as in all other public services, have plummeted.

To make up for the shrinking talent pool, the selection of judges needs to be entrusted to a larger judicial forum (rather than be left to the president, or the prime minister) in consultation with the chief justice. The heads of state and government both are now so deeply immersed in partisan politics that selection by them cannot but be politically tinged. Three most senior judges of the Supreme Court and chief justices of the four high courts would assure a more objective selection provided the eligibility criteria are clearly laid down.

Last week's international judicial conference in Islamabad may not have attracted many judges or jurists but it has thrown up two important questions which governments the world over may find difficult to answer. One is how to contain the terrorists (that includes sectarian killers in Pakistan's context) without infringing on their fundamental right to a fair trial and not to be detained indefinitely without being charged? The other is what is the alternative to the "doctrine of necessity" in the event of a successful military coup. US Justice Clifford Wallace posed these challenges to the conference but left them unanswered.

Truthfully, the answers to these questions have to be found not by the judges but by the leaders of public opinion in the values they cherish and the systems they shape. It is they who by their policies and actions nourish terror and pave the way for military coups or totalitarianism and only they can reverse these trends, not the judges or administrators.

Pakistan's brand of terrorism has its origin in religious bigotry. If the state and civil society both concede that liberty of conscience is the most indispensable of all human rights and that conscience is a sanctuary where God alone may enter as judge, bigotry and, with it, terror will die out.

Military coups will not succeed if the governments elected by the majority through fair and frequent elections were to administer justly respecting the rights of all citizens without any discrimination. Left to the military and judiciary, the alternative to the doctrine of necessity can only be anarchy or dictatorship.

The declaration issued at the end of the judicial conference suggests that internationally recognised human rights should be incorporated in domestic laws. Indeed, they should be and, further, made justiciable internationally. The countries who have signed the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights should have no qualms in making it a part of their legal codes. Terror and tyranny cut across national frontiers. So should the legal fight against them.

The president and the prime minister both talked of judicial reforms at the conference. Still contending with the chaos created by administrative and police reforms, the people deserve a respite from their reformatory zeal. After the reforms, both the district administration and the police, have gone under political control. The judiciary should be spared that fate.

Democracy and Terrorism

Two poignant editorials from the Daily Times, Pakistan

Sunday, August 20, 2006

EDITORIAL: Will 'democracy' end terrorism? The leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), Benazir Bhutto, has stated in an article contributed to the press that "a democratic Pakistan free from the yoke of military dictatorship would cease to be the petri-dish of the pandemic of international terrorism". She considers the connection made by the world between global terrorism and Pakistan as relevant, which she thinks is a "direct consequence of the West allowing Pakistani military regimes to suppress the democratic aspirations of the people of Pakistan". Ms Bhutto rightly blames General Zia ul Haq and his "Afghan jihad" enterprise in response to the US strategy to defeat the Soviet Union in the 1980s for being central to our problems today. It also meant the spread of the 'Kalashnikov culture' in the country and the appearance of elements like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, converting the country into an arena for a "political and religious extremist movement". She goes on say that, two decades after General Zia, another general has overthrown the civilian order and is "playing the West like a fiddle", offering token disingenuous support to the agenda against terrorism while exiling Pakistan's opposition leaders. Ms Bhutto, as leader of the country's largest political party, asks the following questions which Pakistan must lend its ear to: "Why is it that the terrorist trail always leads back to Pakistan? Why is it that second-generation Pakistani émigrés all over the world are far more attracted to this pattern of terrorism than other disillusioned Muslims in the West?" Her own answer is that extremism is the child of years of military dictatorship that inculcates the lesson of might rather than right. She thinks that the military dictatorship today "presides over a society that simultaneously fuels and empowers militants at the expense of moderates" and only a return to democracy will "produce citizens that understand the importance of law, diversity and tolerance". Most analysts trace Pakistan's current predicament to General Zia's Islamisation financed by the money extracted from the West for his Afghan jihad. His outward face was that of cooperation with the forces arrayed against Communism, his inward policy was that of social transformation under Islam, much of it clearly fashioned to negate the return to power of the PPP and its liberal-democratic message. But his decade of radicalisation of state ideology with much Saudi help was "internalised" by the Pakistani population far beyond anyone's calculation. Thus it was a different Pakistan to which Ms Bhutto returned from exile in 1986. The Muslim League in power then was less a political party and more a legacy of General Zia. While one may generally agree with Ms Bhutto's diagnosis, one has to see the years after the death of General Zia not as democracy but as governance dominated by army chiefs and the GHQ; also, importantly, as a political arena in which the political parties at times forced the GHQ to be the political judge on the yardstick of Islam and jihad. Ms Bhutto must remember that her 1988 government was made possible only after she accepted a number of COAS General Aslam Beg's "conditionalities". She also had to decorate him with a "democracy medal". In fact, when her government was fired in 1990, one of the charges against her was her "failure to Islamise" and her party endured the "Midnight Jackals" operation mounted by two army-men who were later "absorbed" by the Muslim League. The years of 'democracy' in Pakistan after General Zia were in fact years of military dominance under Article 58-2(b). They were also the period of Pakistan's first blowback from jihad in Afghanistan. (The second, more frightening, blowback is now.) The madrassas opened with Saudi money by Zia now threatened the democratic process with their Kalashnikovs. The attempt made on Ms Bhutto's life (by Ramzi Yusuf) happened in this period. Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996 when 'democracy' was in place in Pakistan just as the high tide of Pakistan-inspired jihad in Kashmir was during the years of 'democracy' in the 1990s. Therefore let us be clear: 'democracy' was not allowed to come into its own during the decade of the 1990s and the politicians were very much a part of the 'democracy' charade, in which the military and its intelligence agencies really called all the shots. That is why some answers may not relate to 'democracy' at all but to the flaws of the state. Ms Bhutto as a liberal-democrat must have felt this often when she ruled. What is needed is not more or less 'democracy' of the sort that we have had in the past with the civilians in front and the military pulling levers behind the scenes, but a paradigm shift from the "mission statement" of the militarised state. It is the ideology of munkiraat (that which is prohibited) that de-legitimises the modern state in general and democracy in particular. So if it is Musharraf and his military predecessors who refused to make a paradigm shift in the past, it is the 'democratic' politicians who today oppose the repeal of the Hudood Ordinance in Pakistan. And if one must look to the West as an arbiter — as Ms Bhutto does — how can our politicians hope to be favoured by it after this? No. The reform must begin at home. * SECOND EDITORIAL: Shame on the politicians! Politicians, both in power and opposition, conspired to keep the Hudood bill out of the National Assembly on Friday. The joint opposition blocked the government's move to table the Criminal Law Amendment (Protection of Women) Bill, by protesting lack of quorum. The bill seeks certain amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and the Code of Criminal Procedures (CrPC), as prescribed in the Hudood Ordinance. The original draft was changed to appease the rightwing ruling PML. The government avoided repealing the Ordinance altogether as recommended by the inquiry commissions and the Council for Islamic Ideology (CII), but still wanted to take rape out of the category of adultery and place it in the Penal Code. According to reports, the opposition claimed that several treasury members had opposed the bill and deliberately absented themselves from the session together with the ARD-MMA members. Those who favour democracy in Pakistan should take a close look at the cleavage between the politicians and the people. A national media debate has favoured repeal-or-amendment of the Ordinance to remove its anti-women bias. But the politicians are clearly interested in keeping the dreaded law on the statute books. How can these politicians then expect us to show any sympathy for them? *

Violence at the Quaid’s mazaar

This is perhaps a best metaphor of Pakistan today....
From the daily DAWN's editorial on August 18, 2006

Violence at the Quaid’s mazaar

THAT today’s society holds nothing sacred can be gauged from the violence that erupted at the Quaid’s mausoleum on August 14 in which a seemingly manageable incident led to no-holds-barred brawl, damaging whatever came its way. A group of female visitors at the packed mazaar on Independence Day are said to have complained of being harassed which resulted in people taking sides and resorting to violence. Consider the extent of the fight by the damage caused to the property: several doors were broken, as were lights, 40 marble dustbins, 58 flower boxes, over 700 feet of marble lattice and 40 garden benches, to name a few things. The damage has been estimated at one crore rupees. But all this was inconsequential to those who had to prove that they were on the side of right. That not one sensible voice could be heard calling on the unruly crowd to stop is tragic but understandable given how frightening it can be to confront a violent mob. However, one cannot understand the virtual absence of the security personnel, especially on a day that attracts more visitors than usual to the mazaar. This is particularly strange since 600 policemen had been earlier deployed at the premises in deference to the annual VIP pilgrimage to the mausoleum.

Repair work needs to be immediately carried out so that the mausoleum can re-open. But how does one offer a remedy or a way out of the kind of madness that erupted? What can one say about an increasing number of people going into rage at the slightest provocation? People need strong and wise leadership that can steer them in the right direction — one that will teach them to respect and tolerate each other under all circumstances and adhere to norms of responsible public conduct.

Defining Civil Society

An insightful piece on the Pakistani civil society -shows how the military regime and the articulate civil society are consenting bedfellows.

From the daily DAWN published on August 18, 2006

Defining civil society

By S. Akbar Zaidi
THE term ‘civil society’ is a complicated term which means different things to different people and is used in different contexts. Even in the more settled western societies, it has a changing meaning: late-20th century events have made the category more fluid, with civil society actors and constituents, moving in and out of the realm of civil society over a period of time.
In the countries of the East and the South, the location of the term ‘civil society’ and its meaning becomes even more complex. While there are different notions and contexts about what civil society is and is not, there is at least some broad agreement about what it must necessarily be. Civil society is supposed to be outside, and perhaps preferably in opposition to, or in contradiction with, the state.
In order to define civil society, it is a requirement that the organisations and actors of civil society not be controlled by the institutions or actors of the state. This ‘autonomous’ requirement is a necessary condition to distinguish civil society from the state.
For some more radical thinkers, the stricter requirement is that civil society must stand against both state and market, and particularly against economic liberalism. For them the “state, market and civil society are rival channels for the exercise of power’. For other theorists, civil society must necessarily be a democratising force. Howsoever one defines civil society and its constituents, the Pakistani case offers interesting (and contradictory) insights about the nature and form, and location, of civil society. It also shows the large number of contradictions which constitute the political settlement that is Pakistan.
Despite the fact that General Musharraf in October 1999 overthrew an elected prime minister, albeit an incompetent one, the largest and most public support for him came from the socially and culturally liberal and westernised sections of Pakistan’s elite, who embraced Musharraf as one of their own, which he very much was. Activists in the NGO movement in Pakistan were also vociferous in their support for Musharraf, precisely because he was seen as a liberal and westernised man.
Some prominent members of the NGO movement who had struggled for a democratic order in Pakistan when it was under General Ziaul Haq, actually joined Musharraf’s cabinet. Employers associations, trade bodies, women’s groups, and other such groupings which are all part of some acceptable notion of civil society, also welcomed the coup because General Musharraf was seen as a modernising man. Some intellectuals and peace and anti-nuclear activists also celebrated the arrival of a liberal head of state.
Clearly, for the westernised sections of civil society in Pakistan, the military general who had overthrown a democratically elected prime minister, was Pakistan’s latest saviour. Musharraf’s earliest critics and opponents included, what for lack of a more appropriate term one can call, the Islamic civil society, which did not like his liberalism and westernisation. Classical and western literature on civil society suggests that by being “against the state” in some ways, and especially by being against the autocratic undemocratic state, civil society is necessarily on the side of some form of a democratic dispensation. Not so in Pakistan.
For civil society in Pakistan, whether of the westernising, modernising kind, or of the more fundamentalist Islamic kind, the question has not been one of democracy versus non-democratic norms, but of liberalism against perceived and variously interpreted Islamic symbols and values. Unlike the traditional notion of civil society, the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. Not only is this a fundamental difference, but so too is the necessary distinction of autonomy from the state, so integral to the meaning of civil society.
If sections of civil society are expected to challenge the state, in Pakistan, there are many who are the state’s partners. For instance, development groups which have emerged as a result of government failure in Pakistan and have become contractors in the form of NGOs in their own right, are often coopted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s ‘advisers,’ winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.
Human rights activists and advocacy groups, too, become partners with other stakeholders, particularly government, and try to redress problems created by the very institutions of the state that they are now partnering. The essence of Pakistan’s politics — very broadly defined — is one of compromise not confrontation, and of cooptation. Civil society in Pakistan is very much part of that political tradition.
Linked to this relationship with politics, and perhaps determining it, is the relationship of civil society and of NGOs with money, particularly donor funding. If, for example, the most prominent and potentially radical civil society organisations in Pakistan receive funding from donors who have specific interests or agendas, the ‘politicalness’ of these organisations gets muted. With the British and American governments amongst the biggest donors of civil society in Pakistan, one does not see much protest against them for their role in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. After all, these governments are imposing their liberal social agenda on the two countries, an agenda which the westernised sections of Pakistani civil society endorse.
Moreover, the requirement that civil society be autonomous of the state is also undone since many of these NGOs, are highly dependent on foreign donor state. It is the broader westernised, ‘liberal’, modern (but in the case of Pakistan, non-democratic) vision, which western governments share with the elite and the westernised sections of those who constitute civil society in Pakistan — not with the Islamic elements or sections of civil society.
The greatest opposition to the foreign presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Israel has come from the political and non-political sections of the ‘Islamic’ civil society. Unlike their westernised Pakistani cousins, this is an anti-imperialist political grouping, which is also against the agenda of the World Bank, the IMF, and economic liberalism, something that westernised civil society supports very enthusiastically. For both, however, democracy is less important.
Most definitions of civil society do not stretch themselves to include film societies, debating clubs or puppet and theatre festivals. Yet, because these entities have a political and radical cultural presence in the context of an Islamicised (and violently so) society like Pakistan, they can be included in a non-western context as belonging to civil society.
Even such benign civil society organisations seek patronage from the chief of the army staff, who is also the president of Pakistan, to further their cause: General Musharraf was the chief guest at the inaugural and closing ceremony of a puppet festival and a film festival, respectively, some months ago. While these cultural preferences may be the redeeming feature of Pakistan’s military coup maker, one should not forget that Beethoven and Goethe were claimed as the cultural ancestors of a certain group of Germans not six decades ago.
One is not stating that Pakistan’s experience is in any way unique, but one will argue that perhaps civil society ought to be defined by the conditions in which it exists so that one can understand its functioning and politics better. While Pakistan’s civil society is an outcome of its particular history and the way its institutions and politics have evolved, it is, nevertheless, essential to apply some minimum acceptable norms of civil society behaviour, to be able to evaluate its role and performance.
In the context of Pakistan, one is likely to find that civil society (its western wing), aspires to only a few of the necessary requisites. For it, a westernised, socially and culturally liberal agenda, is far more important and preferable than the messy indigenous politics essential for democracy. In fact, one of the main consequences of this ideology has been the depoliticisation of public life in Pakistan. Under such circumstances, where the main representatives of the uncivil society are perceived to be westernised and socially and culturally liberal, where civil society actors work for the emancipation of women and for human rights, and military generals support the same agenda, both civil society and “uncivil society” make consenting bedfellows.

On Pakistan's Independence Day

I have discovered blogging; and this amazing piece of writing from http://baithak.blogspot.com/. This is a post titled Yeh Daagh Daagh Ujala: A Sequel to under the minaret and I post it as a tribute to the author.

Midwifed by Louis Battenberg (you would know him as Lord Mountbatten) on Lailat ul Qad'r, the holiest night of the holy month of Ramadaan (midnight of Aug 14-15, 1947) the non-identical twins' tenuous umbilical cord was finally cut by the untiring efforts of the elite Pakistani usurpers aided by nudges from Indira Gandhi in 1971.
The present Pakistan is entering her sixth decade today: from a tethering fledgling to an ostensible front line state is a mixed anomaly in the best of times.

These aren't.

It is the sixth most populated country with 164 million people, 340,000 square miles, spread over the deserts of Baluchistan and Sind, the mangroves of Rann of Kutch in the south to the plains of truncated Punjab in the center and the peaks of three ranges in the north - the Himalayas, the Karakorams and the Hindu Kush in the north, Pakistan has all that nature can bestow. And more.
The five main nationalities are the Punjabis, the Baloch, the Pathans, the Sindhis and the Muhajirs. Used to be six, as I alluded to earlier.
It is a thriving country. I use thriving with caution.

The natural exuberance and enterprise of its people is thwarted at every step by the bureaucracy aided and abetted by the occupying army. It has sharpened and fine tuned the colonizing Raj's policies of divide and rule to enhance and perpetuate its stranglehold.

This has had unintended results in unleashing forces that the Army has a tough time controlling. Out of Pandora's box, Zina (rape) ul Haq let out Altaf Hussain's Muttahida Quomi Movement (akin to Shiv Sena) to counter Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's hold over Sind. Today this secular, semi-fascist party is President Musharraf's coalition partner in Sind and in the Centre.

Zina's successors created MMA Mad Mullah's Association who want to push the baby back into the womb by wanting to recreate the era of 760 AD in 2006 AD. To understand how successful they are witness the occupying army's impotency in Baluchistan, Waziristan and Northern Areas where MMA and is allies are a law unto themselves.

***

The thorny (and bogey) issue of Kashmir and its attendant anti India card was always opportunistically used by the Army to divert the public's attention and scrutiny away from its mismanagement of the country. A political problem that laments for a political solution has been frequently used by Pakistani elites and to a lesser extent by India's rulers in this game - much to the delight of arms suppliers.

The Army succumbed to intense U.S. pressure to restore normalcy with her neighbours and was brow beaten into not increasing its share of the national budget. Another realization that dawned on the generals is that there is only so much it can optimally siphon off the budget. Today the Army is running out of tricks. But never underestimate its Machiavellian resourcefulness.

In addition to dividing and ruling the Army is always on the lookout to enrich itself at the expense of disenfranchised Pakistanis. After grabbing the maximum it can of the national budget pie - (depending on whom you believe - that share ranges from 38 to 65% of the budget that cannot be audited or questioned in the National Assembly) - it found a new outlet to enrich itself.

Land grab.

If you are familiar with the word cantonment, you know that they are a creation of the Raj to control the entry of the natives so the Mem Sahib can live in relative safety away from the natives' glare. (Yes I am oversimplifying some: email me if you don't get the point.)

They have enlarged and created more cantonment areas in Pakistan long after the Raj is over. Part of this land is in urban areas that fetches a tidy sum for Army's officers. They are awarded this land or they purchase it at paltry prices and sell off at prevailing market rates.

I am hard pressed to think of single redeeming feature for this occupying army save this: it has managed to keep intact the surviving country. But even this cloud has lines! They know that without the country their power base would dry up.

Why are you so harsh on the Pakistan Army I am frequently asked. A simple answer would be that in collusion with big landlords, bureaucracy and industrial magnates they have hampered the development of democratic institutions that are the bane of nation building.

Look at India.

The two countries received independence from the Raj at the same time. India under Nehru adopted the democratic path. They veered, stumbled, and learned along the way to becoming the largest functioning democracy.
The main culprit for denying and subverting the democratic ambitions of the Pakistanis is this occupying army. After 59 years, the Pakistanis are still essentially disenfranchised. For the gullible who believe that democracy is alive and well in Pakistan I have Santa Claus' cell number. And Pamela Anderson's too.

***

Whatever headway Pakistan has made is in spite of the Army occupation.
The Pakistani businessmen and industrialists can compete with the best given a level playing field. That they have managed to survive and on a smaller scale and thrive is a tribute to their ingenuity and entrepreneurial skills.

What can Pakistanis be proud on this independence day?

Two things! They survived. And they have Abdul Sattar Edhi?