Is there anyone left besides the 3 hardcore Mush Supporters here on this forum, that are stilled fooled by the lies of this dicatator?!? Here is yet another scathing review of Mush’s incompetance.. With a bit for Shaukat Aziz thrown in for good measure
Our stalking horses
By Shamshad Ahmad
AMAZING things have been happening with us. With our tradition of military dominance, praetorian culture and political bankruptcy, we have become a nation of double standards, double character, dual nationalities, dual loyalties and dual office-holders, losing touch with the very originality of our values and national character. There is certainly something fundamentally wrong with our patterns and standards of governance.
Our country is dismembered but we take no lessons. Our people remain disenfranchised and have no role in national decision-making. Our polity is in ruins. Our democratic ethos is comatose. Our Constitution is grossly subverted. Our judiciary is mousetrapped. Aversion to the rule of law is endemic. Crime and corruption are rampant. Our governance is abysmally poor. Terrorism is now our sole identity.
Our economy is in a shambles. With our continued domestic political instability and aggravating law and order situation, especially the precarious extremism-led violence, we remain unable to harness the unique asset of our geographical location for our economic growth.
Despite governmental claims, foreign capital is hesitant to come to Pakistan. There are no signs of our people benefiting in any measure from the dividends of the post-9/11 economic windfall.
The last eight years have been a painfully eventful period of our crisis-ridden history. We now figure prominently in the top global lists of most corrupt, most violent and most undemocratic countries. We have lost our sovereign independence and are waging a war against our own people. The Constitution and the law have become the property of one man who can do whatever he likes to do with them. He just needs a draftsman to mould the law as he pleases.
With an ingrained culture of political opportunism and ineptitude, our politicians have been losing out to dual-nationality technocrats of Pakistan origin who have, in recent decades, become a double-utility hit in our system.
Our ‘Double Shah’ culture is also gravitating overseas people of Pakistan origin with dual nationality as potential candidates for ‘double-purpose’ high-profile positions in Pakistan.
We borrowed a prime minister from the World Bank in the early ’90s and then another from Citibank, first as finance minister in the late ’90s and later upgraded to prime minister in 2004, both with known foreign allegiance and banking credentials. Both had no constituency of their own, yet political aridity at home produced no one to match their calibre and clairvoyance.
While the former was inducted only as a caretaker head of government, and had to do only with a borrowed Sherwani for the less than three months of his ‘caretaking’ stint, the latter has been more persistent in his adaptation to the local political culture. He is no more the prime minister but he has not taken off his Sherwani. He has had ‘good times’ here which he thinks will soon revisit him.
He came to Pakistan as finance minister in October 1999, and then never looked back. With an exemplary sense of involvement, he made himself the pivot of everything that went wrong in the country. This included the controversial privatisation process and the most ill-advised ‘presidential reference’ against the chief justice in March, sparking the worst-ever judicial crisis in our history that precipitated the beginning of Gen Musharraf’s irreversible political decline.
What now amazes the nation is that although he has been denied an election ticket by his own political outfit, he continues to use state-provided security and occupy two houses in the official ministerial enclave in Islamabad. This would be both unlawful and unethical in his adopted homeland where the Constitution and rule of law, unlike his native land, remain sacrosanct.
It now appears he has no intention of leaving our political scene and will remain a favourite ‘stalking horse’ in the current environment of uncertainty. Some people surmise that he might be keeping himself available, under orders from Washington, just in case the current crisis erupts into a serious political convulsion leading to the removal of its most favourite and trustworthy incumbent from the presidency.
In the absence of a consensus-wielding politician from amongst the country’s political parties, they might need him as the only consensus-provided successor to the office of the presidency of this benighted country.
No wonder President Gen (retd) Musharraf was reportedly piqued the other day when asked about the future of his former ‘technocrat’ prime minister. He replied smilingly that he was not running a career planning office.
Incidentally, we have no shortage of imported, smart technocrats avidly seeking to build careers in their country of origin to which they said goodbye long ago in search of far and fairy lands. Having spent their lifetime overseas making a few dimes and high-rise dens, they want to serve their native country where these rootless technocrats become the stalking horses of our system, easy to grasp, easy to install and always handy to control.
Another expatriate with identical banking antecedents and dual ambitions, having already served in high positions for five years and now presiding over a commission on our systemic reforms, is now hovering around the power pillars and presenting himself as another potential ‘compromise’ candidate for any job in the country.
The list of stalking horses with dual citizenship and imported credentials for top positions in the country also includes another American national, a doctor who already holds dual positions — head of the national commission for human development and overseer of the downswing in our cricketing fortunes.
Lately he has also been heading a mission to his homeland to do some image-building there but he and his two companions must have been shocked at the negative response they received wherever they tried to glorify the military regime and its extra-constitutional feats. But amazing things kept happening.
As a follow-up to their mission, most of our information and press officers based in major capitals of the world were recalled for not projecting the ‘true’ image of the country and its present regime.
What can the poor information and press officers project when there is no image or a face to be projected? Image is not something that you can show on videos. It is basically what you are and what the world thinks of you.
A country without a Constitution or rule of law and where there is no independent judiciary, no free media, and no fundamental freedoms and rights has no face to show the world. It has no place in the comity of civilised nations. We won’t have any image at home or outside unless we fix our fundamentals.
We must return to civilised democratic norms, rooted in the will of the people and based on constitutional supremacy, independence of the judiciary, rule of law and a civilianised body politic.
We must return to the pre-Nov 3 status quo ante by restoring the untempered Constitution, the illegally removed judges, media freedom and the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights of the people.
No election will be free, fair and credible unless we have a truly neutral and independent national consensus government as well as a reconstituted and genuinely empowered Election Commission
