Chakwal Diary: Creative anarchy: moving ahead Pakistani style

When we shed tears over our history - and let's not forget we remain among the world's most accomplished mourners - many of us forget how far we have come in many things. The openness of the press and even the gradual opening up of that ancient concubine, state television, is taken for granted nowadays. This too in a military government. But only a few years ago this would have been unthinkable.

True, General Musharraf stretches a point when he says he is a military man who rules democratically. Even so, it is hard not to admit that compared to what we've had in the past this has been a tolerant dispensation.

Perhaps the tolerance owes less to conscious design than to domestic exigency and international pressure. Perhaps this is globalisation at work, a world where the dissemination of information is harder to control. So what? In everyday life facts are more important than their underlying causes.

Forget the press, the political parties too over the last three years have been free to do as they please except hold rallies in the open. If they have sat lazily and not organised themselves properly who is to blame? The military government may have had dubious motives in making the political parties go through the farce of internal elections. But at least it made them do something they would never have done on their own.

Horace Walpole said he would love England if it were not for the people in it. Pakistani democracy can trigger much the same emotion. I am all for democracy but its practitioners put me off. Ten minutes in their company and I find myself turning into a rabid Jacobin.

General Musharraf's greatest service to Pakistan has been to demystify the military. The armed forces still sit on the bulk of national resources but their holy cow status which made immune from criticism has come to an end. Thanks to the army being pushed into doing things it had no business touching, the halo round its head has gone.

The intelligence agencies also stand demystified. During the Zia years the words ISI and MI were spoken in hushed tones. Not any more. ISI and MI continue to play their political games, a subject on which Mian Azhar and Chaudry Shujaat of the Q League are more qualified to speak. But the old dread of these agencies has disappeared. The iron curtain around them has fallen.

The young of today are scarcely aware of the repressive atmosphere of the Zia regime. For open dissent a harsh price had to be paid which many people, to their lasting honour, did. But it's a measure of the distance we have travelled that it all seems such a long time ago.

I think sufficient credit has not been given to Gen Musharraf or the army for this transformation. Which doesn't mean Gen Musharraf hasn't done silly or unnecessary things. Only that all said and done he has presided over an easy regime.

The argument often trotted out by politicos and journalists that the tolerance of the regime is dictated by international necessity is at best half true. In a country where ordinary thanedars can get away with the most blatant excesses, the army's secret agencies, whose reach and power should not be under-estimated, can get away with a great deal more. If they have desisted from doing so, it is another sign that our political culture is improving.

Which is not to say we should close our eyes to the follies or political excesses of the present order. On the frozen body of the 1973 constitution open-heart surgery is being performed. This is a fact. But the new openness in which criticising the military government is no longer considered an act of heresy is also a fact. While drawing up a balance sheet of the present both these facts should be kept in mind.

The live political discussion on TV is something no government, military or political, ever risked. It has become a regular feature these days which means another taboo has been broken. Democracy best evolves not merely through strictures or governmental commandments but through an accumulation of such small things, quite often unintended or inadvertent.

No Pakistani leader has risked being interviewed live on television. Granted that Musharraf's TV interviewers have always been carefully chosen for their patriotic credentials. And on one or two occasions, I suspect, for their looks which of course bespeaks an aesthetic approach to such things. But the fact remains that in a live interview, however carefully managed, anything can go wrong. If Musharraf has taken the risk he has set a precedent for others to follow.

It is another matter that the Generalissimo is often forgetful of Polonius's advice about brevity being the soul of wit. He has a great facility for the long answer, at times the excruciatingly long answer. Polonius was a bore but had some useful advice for his son. Perhaps a reading of his famous speech could be arranged in the Presidency.

Another thing to be celebrated is the demise of the CSP or DMG, surely not consciously willed by anyone in General Headquarters but an inadvertent consequence of General Naqvi's devolution plan. In its heyday the old civil service had its strengths and uses but by the time Naqvi's cruel axe fell on it, it was of no use to man or beast. The passing of the village chowkidar is still mourned among sections of the rural populace. The demise of the commissioner and deputy commissioner, and the meltdown of the once-vaunted steel-frame of the Empire, has gone unnoticed and unwept.

ISI and MI are justly blamed for installing and dislodging civilian prime ministers in the nineties. What is often forgotten is that as much to blame are the mandarins of the civil service surrounding those two princes of presidential ineptitude, Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Farooq Leghari. Their role was as dark and sinister as that of any interfering general. The mandarinate had tempted fate for a long time. Who could have foreseen that its nemesis would come stalking in the shape of Gen Naqvi?

Not that bureaucratic incompetence has been replaced by military efficiency. To the sum of national inefficiency the army is making its own distinctive contribution. What's more, by turning the district nazims into ready instruments of its ambition the government has already managed to give devolution a bad name. But this is how progress takes place: one set of incompetents being replaced by another until something more solid and good emerges from the resulting chaos.

British democracy was not created overnight. Its beginnings can be traced to the struggle between king and parliament - the latter representing not the people, as political myth would have it, but the aristocratic landowning class. From the balance thus created came civil liberties and the supremacy of parliament. This process took a couple of centuries. Not that we have the same luxury of time but it helps to keep things in perspective.

Consider two more things worth celebrating: the abandonment of the Taliban and the change of heart over Kashmir. The Taliban were a millstone round our neck, jihad in Kashmir a concept which had outlived its utility. On our own we wouldn't have had the sense to reverse these policies. It was the post-September 11 world which knocked the stuffing from our most cherished illusions. We were left with no choice except to quickl