Re: how to deal with our supreme court
****The Indians did it (or the CIA)](http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9709203)
Aug 28th 2007
From Economist.com
Our correspondent goes gossiping in Islamabad
I USED to hate Islamabad, where I lived for a few months in 2003. A concrete new city, after a stringent grid design, it was built in the 1960s to exclude anything unseemly, chaotic or poor—which is to say, most of Pakistan.
Islamabad is Abuja, but without the Nigerians, who can never bore. It is Brussels, but without the old buildings and beer. There is nothing much here but government and diplomacy. Islamabad may be the most boring capital in the world.
Yet at least it is easy to get around. And, living as I do now in smoggy, log-jammed Delhi, I appreciate this fact. Breezing in along the airport road—past a notorious fibre-glass model of the Chagai hills, where Pakistan tested its nuclear bombs in 1998—I do not mourn the absence of any rickshaw, bus or truck. The city is open and approachable, as indeed, for the most part, are the bureaucrats, politicians and diplomats that it contains.
Nonetheless, even several days of engaging conversation here can leave you little the wiser about what is going on. Very often, your interlocutors don’t know the truth either. Or else, as with American diplomats alarmingly often, they may think they know, but it turns out that they don’t. The generals and intelligence chiefs of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), who tend to rule Pakistan, as currently, do give interviews. But rarely do they give much away.
That leaves most of the country’s 160m people playing an extravagant guessing game about what is afoot. Ample rumour, mystery and smug allusion are a result of this. Here are a few Pakistani favourites:
Q: Why did the ambulance ferrying Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the country’s founding father) to hospital, as he was dying, break down?
A: The Indians/Americans/ISI fixed the engine.
Q: Why did a plane carrying Zia ul-Haq, a cruel army ruler of the 1970s and 80s, crash?
A: The Americans/Indians/ISI blew it up.
Q: Who destroyed the World Trade Centre in 2001?
A: The Israelis. Or the CIA. Or maybe India did this one too, though I have yet to be told as much.
Where conspiracy theorising is a national habit, a certain amount of damn foolish conversation is unavoidable. By and large, however, Pakistanis are first-rate company. In particular, they rarely exhibit the prickly nationalism of their Indian cousins, which can be a turn-off for foreign guests. In its place, I often find, is a rather beautiful kindred sense, transcending frontiers of race and nationality, of wondering what the hell is going on.
Such is the mood at a party thrown by a friend, let us call him Sohail, at which many Pakistani journalists are gathered. The soirée is held upstairs while Sohail’s brother, a successful arms dealer, gets his accountant drunk downstairs. The current political crisis, unsurprisingly, is hotly discussed. Plenty of wine and whisky ensures that, for about ten hours, this conversation never fades.
Naturally, there is no consensus on what is happening in Pakistan. But in Sohail’s house, and other hideouts of Pakistan’s chattering classes, this seems to be the most common view:
General Musharraf has had it, though his American friends don’t know it.
Benazir Bhutto, by appearing to cosy up to an unpopular military dictator, may have done herself and her party great harm.
Nawaz Sharif, a late runner in this election contest, has profited from her error. In exile, he has thunderously ruled out co-operating with General Musharraf. All of a sudden, he is looking good for the election. Always assuming—though no Pakistani does assume this—that an election is held.