The Economist on Pakistan, Part II

Too much for one man to do

Reuters

Pakistan needs more democracy to make it a less dangerous place, says James Astill

THINK about Pakistan, and you might get terrified. Few countries have so much potential to cause trouble, regionally and worldwide. One-third of its 165m people live in poverty, and only half of them are literate. The country's politics yo-yo between weak civilian governments and unrepresentative military ones—the sort currently on offer under Pervez Musharraf, the president and army chief, albeit with some democratic wallpapering. The state is weak. Islamabad and the better bits of Karachi and Lahore are orderly and, for the moment, booming. Most of the rest is a mess. In the western province of Baluchistan, which takes up almost half of Pakistan's land mass, an insurgency is simmering. In the never-tamed tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the army is waging war against Islamic fanatics.

Nor is that all. Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and until recently was selling their secrets to North Korea, Iran, Libya and maybe others. During its most recent big stand-off with India, in 2002, Pakistan gave warning that, if attacked, it might nuke its neighbour. Mostly, however, in Kashmir, Afghanistan and its own unruly cities, Pakistan has used, and perhaps still uses, Islamist militants to fight its wars—including the confused lot it is fighting, at America's request, in the tribal areas. Several thousand armed extremists are swilling around the country. Thousands more youths are being prepared for holy war at radical Islamic schools. Osama bin Laden is widely believed to be in Pakistan.

When General Musharraf launched his coup in 1999, it was not—or not principally—to clean up this mess. Instead, he wanted to save his career, having been sacked as army chief by Nawaz Sharif, then the prime minister. Mr Sharif had tried to subordinate the army—which in Pakistan is a parallel state, some say the only state—to civilian rule. But however unpromising his start, General Musharraf has generally proved much better at running the country than either Mr Sharif or Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan's other elected leader in recent times. He also remains more popular than either of them, though his support has recently been slipping.

General Musharraf's shopping list

General Musharraf inherited an economy in crisis. Shackled by sanctions and parched of capital, Pakistan had defaulted on foreign debts. He ensured that the country did what the IMF told it to do, and ended the crisis. Thanks partly to continued fiscal prudence and some sensible reforms, Pakistan has notched up average growth of 7% over the past three years, about the same as India.

It also helped that after the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, General Musharraf decided to stop supporting the Taliban government in next-door Afghanistan and grant America access to airbases from which to fight it. The benefits have not been confined to a surge of American aid dollars that boosted the growth figures. Having joined the “war on terror”, the general reined in Islamist militants fighting India in the disputed Kashmir region. He then surprised many by throwing himself into peacemaking with India. Peace on the subcontinent is still hard to imagine, but it may be more possible than at any time since British India's bloody partition.

This is encouraging. But a bigger concern for most Pakistanis is the state of their broken and predatory institutions, which have helped to make Pakistan unstable and prone to extremism. General Musharraf pledged to fix them, and to promote liberal values, or “enlightened moderation”. If he were to make serious progress towards either of those goals, history would smile on his coup.

But this survey will argue that General Musharraf is unlikely to deliver on these crucial promises. He has introduced many sensible reforms, such as making the lowest level of the judiciary independent. But they have almost all been implemented only partially and corruptly. Part of the problem is that General Musharraf does not rule Pakistan by fiat, though he often seems to think otherwise. He rules behind a façade of democracy. Thus, for example, he has rewritten the constitution in his favour, allowing him to sack the government and impose martial law; but he needed political allies to vote through those changes. Such alliances have led to paralysing compromise.

To sideline the mainstream parties, whose leaders he fears, General Musharraf has sought support from religious conservatives, so his liberal reforms have gone nowhere. With the same intent, he pandered to Taliban-friendly Islamic parties, helping them win unprecedented power. Moreover, General Musharraf has clung on to his job by the same undemocratic measures as his predecessors: by manipulating the institutions he had vowed to clean up. Only, unlike any civilian leader, he has the army behind him, which means he can do that much more damage. Whereas Mr Sharif and Ms Bhutto packed the supreme court with their supporters, General Musharraf sacked half its judges for refusing to swear allegiance to him.

Pakistan is too big, too fractious and too complicated to be ruled so overwhelmingly by one man. General Musharraf has been lucky to survive three assassination attempts, and his succession is unclear. He has, moreover, limited time at his disposal to get to grips with an unlimited number of problems. His period in office has been littered with initiatives—a diplomatic proposal to India here, a promise to reduce the army there—that never got off the ground or fizzled to nothing for want of the general's attention.

And even if he had unlimited time, he has limited understanding. In army fashion, he considers Pakistan's problems to be mostly practical. But they are invariably political. To deal with a mounting water crisis, for example, General Musharraf has decreed that three long-stalled dams will be built in Punjab and North-West Frontier Province. In Sindh province, the lower riparian, this has caused uproar. Sindhis say their water supply will be diminished by the dams; General Musharraf says it will not. He has no patience for the Sindhis' distrust of the Pakistani state. They complain, with good reason, that it is dominated by Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, where most of the army is raised. Sindhis make up about a quarter of Pakistan's population, but hold only a couple of the top 50 jobs in the water ministry. If General Musharraf wants the dams built, he should start by increasing that number.

Pakistan is torn by such grievances. Where people feel unprotected by their government, regional strife and Islamic militancy have bred. The longer they are allowed to fester, the more unstable Pakistan will become. Neither General Musharraf nor his obvious rivals for the leadership, Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif, could heal these rifts. But then Pakistan does not need a saviour to become stable and well. It needs a sustainable political system, representing the majority of its people. General Musharraf has had some successes. But by sabotaging Pakistan's fragile democracy, he may well have made the country even more dangerous.

The Economist on Pakistan, Part I

As the number of British soldiers killed in Helmand, Afghanistan, rises, the UK press has begun to turn the screws on the country they largely hold responsible for the chaos - Pakistan. In the June 6 edition of the Economist, the venerable news magazine has trenchantly criticised Musharraf's Pakistan. The inside pages also contain a must-read survey of the political landscape in Pakistan.

The Economist is a subscription only website, so over the next few days I will republish the articles here. Paraphrasing the articles would simply not do justice to the eloquence of the Economist.

The trouble with Pakistan

A country that everyone should worry about

TERRORISM has many sources and claimed justifications, but if it can be said to have a centre, it lies in the training camps, madrassas and battlefields of northern Pakistan and south-eastern Afghanistan. There the Taliban and their ally, al-Qaeda, were both formed. From there, in hellish diaspora, jihadis have fanned out across the globe. Add to that Afghanistan's lawlessness and ability to produce vast amounts of opium, not to mention Pakistan's wretched history of venal democrats and clumsy dictators, and its lamentable record on nuclear proliferation, and it is clear why what happens in those two places is of huge importance to the rest of the world. From neither place is there much good news.

The West has invested a huge amount in Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in October 1999. This newspaper was prepared to give him a chance on condition that he acted swiftly and firmly to rein in extremism and sort out the economy, and then returned to barracks. He failed to do any of that. After September 11th 2001, however, he was recast as a provider of relative stability in a dangerous neighbourhood, and an essential ally in the “war on terror”. Money was showered upon him; he was feted in Washington, DC, and London. Only gradually has it started to dawn on his admirers that, in the past five years, he has not done very much to make Pakistan a less dangerous place.

A destroyer of democracy

True, the economy has improved quite a bit since 2001—and not just because of all that donor money. But promises, made even before September 11th, to bring the country's most radical madrassas under control have not been kept. The training camps that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has long tolerated because of their usefulness against India and in Afghanistan still exist, though they have been told not to mount any operations for now. The most dangerous outfits, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba (the Army of the Pure), have been banned, only to reappear under new guises. Not until 2004 and under the most intense American pressure did Pakistan arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist who had cheerfully sold nuclear secrets to anyone prepared to pay.

But perhaps the most damning criticism of General Musharraf is that he continues to do grave damage to the long-term political health of Pakistan (see our survey). In his seven long years in office, he has insinuated the army into every nook and cranny of Pakistani public life, weakening institutions that were feeble already, emasculating its political parties and reducing parliament to a squabbling irrelevance. He has sacked judges when it suited him, created and dismembered parties at his own convenience, rigged a referendum on his presidency and used Pakistan's constitution to write his own job description. None of this bodes well for a post-Musharraf future—which could arrive at any moment given the enthusiasm of his enemies for trying to kill him.

Like a previous “caretaker” dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, who held power for 11 years before being killed, General Musharraf has been unable to resist the temptation to play politics with Islam, even if, unlike Zia, he has also had some success at purging fundamentalists from the top ranks of the army. He has forged a disparate group of Islamic political parties into a block that has helped him outmanoeuvre the democratic opposition; these Islamists are pushing hard for the extension of sharia law.

And then there's Afghanistan

It would not be fair to blame Pakistan for everything that is going wrong in Afghanistan. The government of Hamid Karzai is weak and corrupt; because of the West's continued failure to live up to its promises, much of the country, outside the big cities, is in the grip of bandits and warlords. But Pakistan's contribution to Afghanistan's chronic insecurity should not be underestimated. Both the Taliban and the remnants of al-Qaeda are able to take refuge on Pakistani soil, which makes the job of the soldiers from Western countries who have been struggling to eliminate them for the past five years much more difficult. The Taliban, after all, were in part a creation of Pakistan's ISI, which saw in them a way to establish a friendly state on their western flank, a vital strategic consideration for an organisation that sees itself as locked in perpetual conflict with India to its east.

General Musharraf, by contrast, contends he is doing all he can to root out Taliban fighters from their sanctuaries in the tribal areas, and Pakistan has lost more than 600 soldiers fighting there. Even so, say the critics, it could try much harder, especially given the size of its army. And as for al-Qaeda, none of General Musharraf's protestations can hide the fact that Osama bin Laden is generally reckoned to be holed up on Pakistani soil. Lesser terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the September 11th attacks, have been caught and handed over by the general, but Mr bin Laden goes on evading capture.

The danger is that Afghanistan may now, thanks to Pakistani meddling and Western neglect, gradually revert to what it was before September 2001: a state partly captured by the most dangerous Islamists. Belatedly waking up to this threat (see article), Britain is leading NATO into risky action in Afghanistan's southern provinces, a swathe of territory where the Kabul government's writ is ignored and where a record-breaking crop of poppies was recently harvested. With a remit that has been altered to war-fighting at short notice, inadequate numbers and an apparent lack of enough helicopters and armoured support, these soldiers are taking politically painful casualties. There is a risk that the will of the politicians back home to go on fighting will swiftly fade.

An unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan, intertwined with a chaotic and Taliban-dominated Afghanistan: it is not a settling prospect. It has all happened before, of course. The result was September 11th, swiftly followed by a terrorist outrage in Delhi that came close to provoking full-scale war between Pakistan and also-nuclear India. What will happen next time?

A positive, albeit small, step

They both were the chief of army staff, came to power by deposing an elected prime minister, held referendums to secure themselves as head of state, presided over manipulated elections and amended the constitution to give them ultimate control over parliament. But Zia and Musharraf part ways when it comes to the role of Islam in the state: Zia was an unabashed Islamist while Musharraf professed love for his dogs.

The problem was that Musharraf lacked the courage of his convictions and refused to annul the misogynistic and repressive laws of his predecessor. But with the promulgation of the Law Reforms Ordinance 2006, which will see the immediate release of 1,300 women prisoners, the majority held under the odious Hudood Ordinance, Musharraf may finally have taken a small step on the long road to making amends to the women of Pakistan. Yet, much remains to be done as this editorial in the News suggests: most imporantly the 2006 Ordinance does not affect the status of the odious Hudood Ordinance.

An improvement in the legal position of 1,300 women must be celebrated, as must the possibility of further changes. Yet, Pakistan is rarely blessed with undiluted good news and so is the case with Musharraf's ordinance. With an elected parliament in place the obvious path for any change in the law should be a parliamentary Act. Musharraf's choice reflects his lack of confidence in his handpicked government. A small victory for women is another nail in the coffin of democracy.

A blow to workers, but a silver lining for women?

When the government promised a 'people friendly' budget yet again this year, conventional wisdom held that, with an election on the horizon, the government would likely dole out some palliatives.

But the working class was in for a rude shock: during the budget session in the national assembly, the government brazenly altered the laws governing working hours. Iqbal Haider, Secretary General of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, summed up the changes made by the government:

"(B)y amending the Shops and Establishment Ordinance 1969, the government had increased daily working hours from eight to 12 hours.

"Similarly the compulsory closed weekly holiday has also been abolished, and through an amendment in Section 38 and 45 of the Factories Act has allowed the employers to make female workers work till 10pm in two shifts. Earlier, female workers were bared from working in factories before sunrise and after sunset. Besides, by changing the West Pakistan Standing Orders Ordinance 1968, the contract workers had been added to the categories of work without entitlement of overtime."

The effect of increasing the work day from 8 to 12 hours will be devastating for labourers. The reason is simple: already forced to work more than 8 hours, they will now be deprived of overtime pay unless they work more than an incredible 12 hours a day. If this is the government's idea of people friendly, one shudders to think what an unfriendly government would have cooked up.

However, in its zest to convert Pakistan's stores and factories into virtual prsions, the government may have unintentionally have empowered women. By allowing women to work beyond sunset and until 10 pm, the boost to businesses is what the government had in mind. Yet, the increased earning power of women will undoubtedly provide women with more leverage and leeway at home.

Researching the use of child labour in the carpet weaving industry several years ago, I was surprised to learn that families who put their young daughters to work at an early age actually ended up treating them better. The girls were married off later, allowed to watch TV and given a small measure of autonomy in their daily lives. Counterintuitive at first blush, the reason was that the increased economic value of girls meant that families would not be in a hurry to dispose of them through marriage, and the girls, knowing their increased worth, could afford to be more assertive at home.

Therefore, it's important not to be reactionaries and issue a sweeping denunciation of all the changes in the country's labour laws. Yes, it is important that adequate checks and balances be introduced to ensure women are not exploited. However, the emancipation of women is cause for celebration, not remonstration.

Dr. Johnson is the only one left smiling

Jaranwala tehsil is the largest of Punjab's tehsils (administrative divisions that are the rough equivalent of counties) in terms of the number of union councils and as such has a relatively typical law and order situation. I know this because Jaranwala was my stamping ground for several months in 2004 when I was part of a team of researchers seeking to measure the impact of Pakistan's latest experiment in devolution. The villagers and townsfolk were genial and accommodating and we only raised the hackles of the locals when a lazy afternoon of cards ended in a rout.

Yet, the federal government would have you believe that Jaranwala is a hotbed of human rights abuses. The Federal Human Rights Division, overseen by the Law Minister, Wasi Zafar, distributes a human rights fund amongst victims of rape, torture, extra-judicial killings, etc. and last year 305 of the 365 successful applicants nationwide were residents of Jaranwala tehsil.

That a staggering 85% of victims were from Jaranwala was evidence of serious foul play, though patently not of the human rights kind. The dubious distinction of Jaranwala being the country's human rights abuses capital is owed to the fact that it is also the constituency of the Law Minister who has been using the human rights fund to dole out patronage amongst his supporters.

This year Wasi Zafar was caught red handed with his hand in the cookie jar when a senior bureaucrat, Saira Karim, refused to release funds to a further 560 of Mr. Zafar's Jaranwala supporters. The story hit the national press when Mr. Zafar tried to intimidate Ms. Karim and punish her for the perceived insubordination.

The government, however, is sensitive of its image and in late June an investigation into the corruption was launched by the ISI apparently on orders from the very 'top' i.e. Musharraf or Shaukat Aziz. Political expediency has seen many a ministerial scandal hushed up in the past, but it was hoped that the investigation indicated a new willingness to back up the rhetoric of good governance and accountability.

That hope was dashed yesterday when Ms. Karim was transferred to another division, signalling the end of the issue as far as the government is concerned. According to The News,Musharraf and Aziz were unhappy that the issue had been picked up the international news media and felt it was damaging the country's reputation abroad. This was the same rationale for banning the heroic gang rape victim, Mukhtaran Mai, from travelling to the US at the invitation of a human rights organisation. It seems that the President and the Prime Minister have not learned a lesson from that debacle. To recapitulate: a country's international reputation is enhanced when it takes positive steps to address wrongdoing and harmed when the country is seen bundling its problems out of the public eye. And 231 years after Samuel Johnson first pronounced it, patriotism is still the last refuge of a scoundrel.

The good, the bad and the ugly

The revival of the Pakistani economy has triggered a bout of conspicuous consumption which, inevitably for a developing country, thus far hase been largely confined to imported indulgences. Yet, Pakistani entrepreneurs appear to have stumbled upon a way to reverse the flow of precious dollars: cosmetic tourism. Expatriate Pakistanis with cash to spare and looking to shed their flab, get a headful of hair or a curvier figure are heading to the homeland to have these surgical procedures performed at a fraction of the cost in the West.

Yet, exploitation in the medical sector is never far off. The vanity clinics have more sinister counterparts who prey on the desperation of the impoverished as they ply their trade in human organs. Clearly government regulation is required in both areas: the poor may viscerally attract more sympathy and face the more acute risk of medical malfeasance, but cosmetic surgery has its own book of horrors.

The two businesses also combine to make an elementary point on state regulation: whichever way you go on the economic ladder, the state must regulate the medical sector to protect public health. Obviously regulation is easier when you're climbing up the economic ladder rather than going downwards. However, as Pakistan climbs that ladder it is imperative that our government be reminded not to neglect the people languishing on the lower rungs.

Till death do us part

Political memoirs are meant to be saved for when one has been put out to pasture. Certainly you can't imagine any democratic leader writing his memoirs while in office: the electorate wouldn't take too kindly to a leader who takes time out from the business of govnerment for a vanity project. Of course things operate differently in Pakistan and now it seems Musharraf is set to publish an autobiography.

If one were to read between the lines, the autobiography-while-in-office is also an unmistakable signal that Musharraf doesn't intend to retire from office. If you decide to write a book but don't intend to relinquish office in your lifetime, you of course write one while in office. It may well be that we already know the most important of all the things that Musharraf has to tell us.

Prime Minister, do your job and let them do theirs

Much is made of Musharraf loosening the reins on the national press and allowing the news media a freer hand than they have enjoyed in decades. Yet, Musharraf was not motivated by altruism. In the first place, the mushrooming cable TV providers in the informal sector were difficult to regulate and foreign news and entertainment flowed unchecked into people's homes. In the second place, even a crackdown on the cable providers would not have stemmed the flow from foreign news channels because the cost of owning a satellite receiver had fallen to an almost insignificant level. Of course, Chinese style media controls were always out of the question, so Musharraf chose the politically savvy option: open the floodgates and bask in the praise that comes your way.

Yet, governments by their very nature dislike scrutiny. So it is that the federal government is seeking to ban the media from meetings of Parliamentary standing committees. The reason: the government has been embarrassed by a series of disclosures made by opposition members in the Public Accounts Committee. At one level the measure is almost farcical as the current Parliament must surely have set some kind of record for the amount of work it undertakes. But a more serious democratic principle will be eroded if the media is barred from sitting in on the meetings: the media is a watchdog that should be free to report on what the people's representatives are doing. This is all the more important when it comes to financial oversight which the PAC undertakes. The Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, never misses a chance to talk about good governance and transparency. Perhaps it's time to stop talking and start acting. Nip this in the bud, Prime Minister.

For more on the topic, read an editorial in the News here.

Ghoulish, not cartoonish

The tragedy of the 'honour killing' of a young Danish woman of Pakistani origin is also bitterly ironical given the virulent protests of the beards in Pakistan against the publication of cartoons in Denmark. Is there a connection between the murder of an innocent woman and rampaging beards? Yes. The beards' preoccupation, nay, obsession, with religious ritual and dogma creates the space for the morally bankrupt amongst us to continue to perpetrate their evil acts. Cartoons and the like are no more than red herrings, but so long as they are forced down the gullet of society there will be little appetite for change.

Name and shame

When members of the provincial assembly in Sindh recently turned to fisticuffs to defend the honour of a female counterpart who was being sexually harassed by an MPA from the ruling party, the high profile punch-up turned the spotlight on the routine harassment of women in all spheres of life. That women are harassed, brutalised and even murdered in Pakistan is not news nor is the fact that little is done by the government to curb the institutional and social repression of women.

Yet, every once in a while the juxtaposition of the abuse of women and the complicity of the state and society in that abuse is hard to ignore. Yesterday was one of those days in Peshawar. In the NWFP assembly a female member of the provincial government of the beards submitted an adjournment motion to suspend the regular proceedings of the house to discuss an important issue: renaming the province to give it an appropriately Islamic appellation. Meanwhile, in a lawyer's office yet another sorrowful tale of exploitation was being narrated. It has all the usual ingredients: an impoverished woman, a rich, licentious man, threats and intimidation, and elders willing to subordinate morality to a misogynistic culture.

That the unfortunate woman had to give an account of her suffering to a reporter while her democratic representative sought to adjourn the assembly's proceedings to discuss the 'urgent' matter of changing the province's name is an elegiac lament for a society that has lost its soul. More damningly, they are few mourners.

Neo-liberalism: clinging to the past

Over lunch with Wasim Sajjad this weekend I had the opportunity to question him about the government's neo-liberal economic policies. Even as the world is reassessing its commitment to liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, Pakistan has embraced neo-liberalism with a gusto that rivals anything seen at the height of the discredited theory's heydays in the 90s. The result of that commitment has been entirely predictable: increased inequality and a static, arguably worsening, level of poverty.

Wasim Sajjad acknowledged that the problems of inflation, unemployment and inequality needed to be addressed urgently, but he was less forthcoming on the specific policies necessary to tackle those problems. I asked him whether Shaukat Aziz was the right man to continue to set the country's economic compass given that he seemed incapable of thinking beyond stale and discredited policies and again he was reluctant to comment. Obviously as Chairman of the Senate, Wasim Sajjad must toe the party line - a party that is nominally headed by Shaukat Aziz.

However, the Supreme Court has finally shown some steel and cancelled the corrupt auction of the Pakistan Steel Mills to a consortium of Pakistani and foreign businesses. The Steel Mill's debacle highlighted a critical flaw in the government's neo-liberal policy: a fire sale of the country's assets will only harm the state rather than strengthen it. Disinvestment is only beneficial if it is carried out transparently and at market prices, but in the Steel Mill's case neither was achieved.

The other fundamental flaw in the government's strategy is that the necessary degree of market regulation and oversight has not been enforced. The crash of the Karach bourse can be attributed to a reluctance of the government to take on the powerful financiers; in the absence of the proper regulation it was only a matter of time before the market crashed.

Now that 7 years of neo-liberal policies are proving to be inadequate to address Pakistan's structural problems, the crucial question is whether there is any meaningful internal dissent that could mitigate the worst excesses of neo-liberalism. On the evidence before us so far, the answer is a resounding 'No'.

Gagged and bound - if you're lucky

The government has ballyhooed its commitment to a free press even as its tried to keep the skeletons in its closet firmly out of view. Topping the list of issues that are off-limits for reporters is coverage of the Americans' presence on Pakistani soil. Now, 3 months after they first disappeared, a reporter for Geo TV, Mukesh Ropeta, and a cameraman, Sanjay Kumar, have been charged with revealing state secrets for filming an air base in Jacobabad that was used by Americans to support the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The charges come in the same week that another reporter, Hayatullah Khan, abducted in Dec. 2005, was found dead with a bullet in his back. Mr. Khan disappeared soon after he photographed fragments of an American Hellfire missile that had killed an Al-Qaeda operative inside Pakistan. The Pakistani government had earlier claimed that the Al-Qaeda man had died from a blast caused by a bomb-making accident.

The Supreme Court has taken suo moto notice of Mr. Khan's death, but surely it must do so in the case of the Geo reporter and cameraman, too. As they are alive and capable of testifying, they can shed light on their 3 month long disappearance; were they indeed abducted and tortured by one of Pakistan's intelligence agencies as alleged?

As the Supreme Court celebrates its golden jubilee the court could regain some credibility amongst the public if it took on the ubiquitous intelligence agencies and stood up for the rule of law.

The wrath of the beards

The country's beards have fiercely guarded the misogynistic and antediluvian hudood ordinance ever since its introduction by the dictator Zia and now a new campaign is afoot to beat back any discussion of reform. The beards ire has been stoked by the tepid Zara Sochieye (Think) campaign of Geo TV and Islamabad is now being lobbied to rein in private media channels. Of course this lobbying effort is backed up by an implicit threat of mob violence.

One hopes that the government will for once do the right thing and stand up for its own declared agenda of 'enlightened moderation' and media freedom. But with an election year on the horizon and with the government's record of yielding to the beards, the country may need to brace itself for another lurch towards extremism.

Developing the army?

The PSDP isn't working and the utilisation of funds remains woefully inadequate, so the government has offered a way out of the quandry: give the money to the army.

Public Sector Development Program - the very words suggest that a project to shift 60 telephone exchanges of the army from the recently privatised PTCL could not possibly be financed by this account. The financing for the project comes on the back of the recent hike in the defence budget. The billion rupee project raises an obvious question: why not just add it to the defence budget? Surely in a year that the defence budget has been raised by 30 billion rupees, another billion would not have caused much of a stir. And using the PSDP just exposes the military led government to further critcism - the military is probably the single most developed institution in the country.

The likely answer is hubris. The same hubris that led to this exchange:

During the course of approval of the project, the Planning Division asked about the economic viability and financial analysis of the project, but its officials were told that shifting the armed forces’ network from the PTCL to NTC was a strategic decision to address security concerns and so the issue of economic viability did not arise.

The DNA of beards

Pakistan's role in the 'war on terror' has spawned at least one positive byproduct: the introduction of DNA testing in the country. The catalyst was the need to identify the remains of suspected terrorists, but the technology can also be used in other criminal contexts, such as rape, or even to settle civil disputes over paternity and child support.

As if on cue, the beards are queuing up to denounce this diabolical intrusion of science. Referring to the onerous requirement of four male witnesses, a beard had the following to say: "The condition to provide four eyewitnesses cannot be done away with. Technology or no technology, we have to stick to the divine dictates."

And on the issues of determining paternity: "Our religion prohibits us from publicizing others' sins. Publicly declaring someone illegitimate or of having fathered a child outside marriage is no service at all."

So there you have it - crimes against women and the neglect of one's biological children ought to be swept under the carpet to protect dogma and society's double-standards.

Fool's gold

The Supreme Court of Pakistan is celebrating 2006 as its golden jubilee year, but the court's history gives little reason to celebrate. Capitulating time and again before military interlopers and usurpers, the superior judiciary has little credibility amongst ordinary people. Restoring judicial independence is critical to the rule of law, but for obvious reasons this remains low on the government's list of priorities.

In a 2004 report on the judiciary in Pakistan, the International Crisis Group made the following recommendations for building judicial independence:

To the Government of Pakistan:

1. Establish, by proposing and urging adoption of a constitutional amendment, a transparent system of judicial appointments to the High Courts that expands accountability for such appointments beyond the executive and Chief Justices to include parliamentarians and bar councils and associations; prior to the adoption of such an amendment, involve the bar and parliamentarians in public discussions of candidates for posts on the High Courts.

2. End deviations from the seniority rule in the promotion of High Court judges to the posts of Chief Justice, establish by statute a seniority rule for promotions from the High Courts to the Supreme Court, and when filling vacancies on the High Courts and Supreme Court, promote female judges who are qualified candidates under the seniority rule.

3. End the practices of not confirming additional judges and of awarding government positions to retired judges; establish public audits of all members of the superior judiciary and close family members to ensure that only statutory benefits are awarded and corruption is avoided.

4. End the practice of selectively offering new oaths to judges, and renounce publicly the use of the judicial oath as a mechanism for purging the judiciary.

5. Institute new internal administrative mechanisms for the prevention of corruption and the removal of corrupt High Court judges, with oversight from a judicial commission that includes members of the bars and parliamentarians, and ensure that women and minorities are adequately represented in these mechanisms.

6. Institute administrative reforms that curtail Chief Justices' power over the assignment of cases and of judges, and establish professional, managerial divisions within the courts to fulfil this task.

7. Absorb the anti-terrorism and accountability courts into the ordinary judiciary, jettisoning procedural variations in bail, plea-bargaining, and the physical circumstances of trials that presently characterise those proceedings.

8. Institute courts within Pakistan's ordinary judicial hierarchy, with review in the Peshawar High Court and the Supreme Court, for the FATA, and conform courts' jurisdictions, judges' tenure and judges' privileges in the judiciary of the Northern Areas, including the new Court of Appeals, to practices in the ordinary courts.

9. Endeavour to ensure that judicial decisions at all levels respect international human rights, including the rights of women, and make efforts to eliminate traditional and religious practices imposed by tribal and village councils that are harmful to women.

The full report is a worthwhile read to understand the way in which the government bends the judiciary to its will. As the Supreme Court celebrates, Pakistanis only have reason to mourn.

Prisons of shame

The killing of the deputy superintendent of Karachi's central jail ought to lead to scrutiny of conditions inside Pakistan's jails. While no one has yet claimed responsibility for the murder of Amanullah Khan Niazi, the speculation has centred on enemies Niazi made inside the jail he helped run.

As the following excerpt from a PBS Frontline report indicates, Niazi had no shortage of enemies inside the prison:

I went to the Karachi Central Jail, in which more than 5,000 prisoners are incarcerated, including some of the most notorious terrorists. As I passed through to the inside, it struck me how primitive life has remained here. For example, there are no X-ray machines to monitor what guards or visitors might try to smuggle inside. The prison can't afford these machines.
When I met with the jail's superintendent, Amanullah Khan Niazi, he showed me his badly scarred arm. Last year, while Niazi was on a routine walk through the cellblocks, a militant threw boiling water mixed with sulphuric acid on him. Niazi was lucky to escape with only a burned arm. "These people are not scared at all," said Niazi. "They are capable of building bombs with sugar, fertilizer and some chemicals, and they are convinced that their ideology will lead them to heaven."
Reporter Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy visits Karachi Central Jail where some of Pakistan's most notorious terrorists are held.
Jail is meant to help reform people, but the militants in the Karachi Central Jail vow to return to their past activities as soon as they are free. "We have tried our best to convince them to change their ways," said Niazi, "but they tell us that they will fight until they die and that they will get new recruits in the process. These are very dangerous people."

In 1996 the UN's Special Rapporteur on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment published a scathing report on prison conditions in Pakistan, and it's safe to say that not much has changed in the past decade. While the Supreme Court has taken note of the unlawful use of fetters on child prisoners, a 2003 special report by The News on Sunday indicates the acuteness of the problems that still plague the country's jails.

Amanullah Khan Niazi, three other policemen and an innocent bystander lost their lives in Karachi today. Their killers should be brought to justice. But so should the perpetrators of crimes inside our jails.

Losing the plot

A pair of editiorials in the Daily Times highlighted the country's drift into the smothering embrace of intolerance and extermism. First, Jamaat-ul-Dawa, the same group involved in the trafficking of children and allowed to operate freely in earthquake zone, organised prayers for Zarqawi. Second, beards in the Punjab assembly demanded an end to the practice of allowing non-Muslims to legally purchase alcohol produced by local distilleries and single brewery.

The government's reaction? None. Jamaat-ul-Dawa, as the Daily Times editorial points out, could not operate so openly without the government's tacit approval. As for the beards, Musharraf has demonstrated time and again that he is willing to accommodate them if it suits his political needs. The government's view may well be that the ends justifies the means, but all too often the means can alter the ends.

Switched off

Karachites have been suffering more than ever this summer with frequent and prolonged power outages. The situation has already led to violent protests by frustrated and angry residents in a few neighbourhoods and may yet escalate as warnings of disruptions deep into August are being sounded.

A creaking distribution network is the usual culprit, but this particular crisis appears to have been caused by the shortage of 200 MW of electricity at peak hours. The two power authorities at the heart of the problem, KESC (Karachi Electric Suppply Corporation) and WAPDA (Water and Power Development Authority), have traded accusations over the reasons for the shortage, but suspicions keep growing that it has been contrived.

KESC was privatised last year as part of the government's ongoing privatisation process and this is the first summer that the new management has been in charge. It appears that officials at WAPDA, a government organisation, fearing that their organisation might be the next on the chopping list, are doing their part in undermining confidence in private sector management of electricity supplies. The unfortunate residents of Karachi are simply the pawns in this high stakes game.

Transparency International has labelled WAPDA as the second-most corrupt organisation in Pakistan, but there appears to be no political will to tackle the problem. Instead the government has decided to force traders and other businesses to close at dusk, thus compounding the misery of the city's shopkeepers and workers. The fact that the electricity shortages are most acute during the sweltering afternoons appears to have been overlooked by the government as has the fact that people are likely to shop on their way home from work.

The issue goes to the heart of the government's neo-liberal policies - all the privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation in the world can be scuppered by the lack of political will to effectively enforce the rules. And ultimately it's the consumers who will pay the price.

A forsaken father

Outside Pakistan there are few salutary images of the homeland. One that comes to mind is the Empire State Building lit in green and white on August 14. Another that could warm the cockles of any Pakistani's heart is the portrait of Jinnah that hangs at the entrance of the magnificent dining hall in Lincolns Inn. Accomplished individuals are legion at the Inns of Court and for Pakistan's greatest citizen to be honoured thus is significant.

Then there is Pakistan - where the sacred is regularly defiled. This time it's the turn of Jinnah's birthplace. Bureaucrats in charge of the renovation of the home have been accused of embezzling funds for the project. In a long history of pelf and corruption this particular mischief will likely be become a mere footnote; yet, the juxtaposition of Jinnah and corruption is full of pathos.

Over lunch at the aforementioned dining hall, I once explained to a judge the meaning of Jinnah's appellation, Quaid-e-Azam. "Well, as things have turned out, I'm not sure how happy he'd be with that association," was the wry response.

For a reminder of the values the Quaid hoped to impart to the custodians of his progeny, click here and listen to a sample of his speeches.