BY AYAZ AMIR

“Good government is not to be had for the asking. It took Europe centuries to get it, so why should Africa (or us for that matter… my words) do so in mere decades…?”

Landes: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Pakistan’s foremost challenges are two: riding out the Afghan storm and seeing to it that we don’t get hit by it too much when the Americans begin their painful exit from that bitter, unpromising theater of war a year from now; and ensuring a democratic transition at home when the time of the present assemblies is up (two and a half years from now).

We meet these two challenges and Pakistan will be able to step boldly into the future. The Cassandras (with which this land is full) and the doubters (also a huge blip on the population screen) will be proved wrong. We fail and we go back to the starting line, doomsday prophets — alas, a flourishing tribe — back in business like never before.

These challenges are complex but not insuperable, provided only that we show a little patience and steadiness of purpose. When a fierce storm rages the prime virtue is to shield one’s eyes from the blinding dust and preserve one’s footing. We are beset by two storms: the one whirling in Afghanistan and the other at home involving the shortcomings of our political, judicial and military structures.

No domestic structure or institution is immune from the charge of being dysfunctional, or at least poor in performance. The shortcomings of the political class are well inscribed. No need to go over well-trodden ground, especially when every professional and amateur critic in the land readily ascribes every sin, carnal or spiritual, however farfetched or implausible, to the political class and gets away with it.

The self-righteousness of the retired bureaucratic class — bonzes who held high official office in their time but now put out to pasture because of the cruelty of time and age — is especially remarkable. To hear these worthies talk, or mostly fulminate, it seems they never committed a wrong in their lives and if only their tall prescriptions were accepted milk and honey would flow across the arid wastes of the Republic.

But to the fair, politicians can also be their own worst enemies. Look at the furore over fake degrees, which amounts to the manufacturing of a wholly unnecessary crisis, as if there weren’t enough real problems meriting our attention.

Fake degrees was an issue which should have been addressed at the time of Musharraf’s assemblies. He allowed an entire army of maulvis to contest the 2002 elections knowing that the academic-cum-religious degrees with which they were armed were little better than the paper they were written on. Even otherwise a cottage industry sprang up to cater to the needs of budding legislators in need of false degrees.

This issue was brought before the higher courts but they sat on it and passed no judgment. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry became CJ (at Musharraf’s hands, let us not forget) way back in 2006. Shouldn’t he have woken up to this mischief then? One reason why the holy fathers of the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal stayed in line for much of Musharraf’s tenure was because of this particular skeleton rattling in their cupboards.

Action on fake degrees would have mattered then. It would even have been counted as a badge of courage. Now it is no better than beating a dead horse. Balochistan Chief Minister Aslam Raisani’s dictum that a degree is a degree whether fake or genuine could almost be a line from Shakespeare. One can picture Sir John Falstaff uttering it or Captain Pistol. There’s a poet hidden somewhere in his bosom.

Time and tide, however, spare no one. The superior judiciary was raised to the top of the mountains by a nation in search of heroes. Now its giants, raised to the status of giants by our over-eager enthusiasm, are being shown as having feet of clay. What explains the statement of the Lahore High Court chief justice, Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, that if the PPP was unhappy with Rana Maqbool (ex-police supremo) as head prosecutor Punjab it should quit the Punjab government? Coming from any judicial luminary such a politically-charged statement would be remarkable.

This has been ever the story of the human condition. Few tales of heroism last forever. By their frequent utterances, some of them (sadly) quite out of season, their lordships are making themselves familiar. And we know what familiarity breeds0sm can subsist on any soil but it shrivels on the soil of indifference.

Two of General de Gaulle’s observations are relevant in this context. “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.” And, “There can be no prestige without mystery…” Woe to the pope, the magistrate, the judge, the general or the leader, or even the mafia don, who strips himself of the aura of mystery.

Lest the army plume itself on its exploits and performance, it could do worse than peruse its own record of the last two and a half years, there being no point in going back any further. The army has been in charge of security matters, army chief Gen Kayani being the principal interlocutor with a range of American brass from Admiral Mullen to Gen Petraeus to Gen McChrystal (who has just fallen on his sword).

Since we are doing the donkey’s work and have suffered the kind of casualties in our FATA wars which if they had happened with the American army would have caused riots in the US, we could have cut a better deal with the Americans. If, instead, we have settled for pitiable wages, isn’t the army command also to blame for this niggardly state of affairs?

It is all right to cite civilian incompetence. But what about military obtuseness? Why from the first Afghan war back in the 1980s down to the present one, do our military chiefs settle for the cheapest possible arrangements? Is it because, the officer class apart, this remains a peasant army in which life is not of much account?

The US is spending 5 billion dollars a month — repeat, a month — in Afghanistan and they balk at, and make such a song and dance about, the 2 or 3 billion that they give Pakistan a year. Each American soldier in Afghanistan costs the US a million dollars a year. Thirty thousand more troops mean 30 billion dollars added to the US defence budget for Afghanistan.

This maths is not all that difficult but it doesn’t really get to our military minds. Hot meals are flown in to the Bagram airbase from Dubai and other places every day, repeat every day. And the Americans start counting cents, and raising audit objections, when they come talking to Pakistan, even as our army mounts operations in the killing fields of FATA and our soldiers die almost every day.

For the Americans this is a fine bargain, and they would be fools not to grasp it. But what about our supreme guardians of the national interest? Don’t they see the calculus of loss and gain? Or do they just lack the imagination to think in a big way? There is something complicated at work here, related more to the dark depths of psychology than anything else. Even so, when senior military officers go about berating civilian incompetence, they should not ignore the state of play on their side of the hill.

The purpose is not to indulge in a blame game but to indicate that all of us could do with a measure of modesty and humility. If we agree, and we do, that in the Turkish bath of Pakistani governance no one is fully clothed, we should put our poisoned daggers aside and seek to understand the nature of things and how certain events keep recurring.

We have to remain on course, without being swerved from our path, and without getting into any unnecessary adventures, over the next two years. If then elections are held and for the first time in our turbulent history the baton passes from one democratic government to another, we will come out of the woods and be marching in a surer direction.