The Canadian prime minister has delayed parliamentary proceedings for three months to by-pass expanding opposition criticism. The Japanese prime minister has lost popularity within a couple of months of winning a general election. The US president has not even completed a year in office but his approval ratings are down and the media is criticizing him for everything under the sun. The British prime minister has faced a major parliamentary corruption scandal and is at the lowest ebb of popularity.

Yet in none of these democracies is anyone predicting the end of the government or calling for “someone” to save the country from its elected leaders.Pakistan’s unique history of repeated extra-constitutional interventions has created a mindset that does not accept the notion of elected governments having a mandate to complete their terms, notwithstanding unpopular decisions or scandals and charges propagated by a hostile media. Ending corruption is a noble and popular cause that has, in the past, been used in Pakistan to undermine democracy.

If Pakistani democracy is to survive, our judiciary must uphold legal action against the allegedly corrupt and the media must learn to criticize the supposedly unpopular without undermining the democratic system or overturning the mandate given by the people in a general election.

The Supreme Court declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that came into effect on October 5, 2007 ultra vires on grounds that it was discriminatory. That should restore the pending proceedings in various courts. But these proceedings should not become an excuse to overturn the mandate given by the people of Pakistan in the general elections of February 18, 2008.

The people of Pakistan knew that they were voting for NRO beneficiaries and the mere fact of someone being an NRO beneficiary cannot be held as justification for demanding the ouster of anyone elected by the people or their representatives. Only conviction by a court of law for a specific criminal act or wrongdoing should result in the ouster or resignation of any official.

Elected governments and leaders make mistakes. Scandals emerge in the most advanced countries. Those elected amid cheering become the object of criticism or ridicule everywhere. But the desire to “correct the mistake of the electorate” through media noise and backroom maneuvers is not the way forward for a democratic system.

To avoid the pitfalls of the past, why not allow the law to take its course without rocking the boat of democracy this time? Let the courts deal with corruption while allowing the elected executive and the parliament handle their respective spheres in accordance with the constitution. One can understand the frustration of those implacably hostile to President Asif Zardari and the PPP but they, too, should understand that democracy requires patience and howsoever much you might hate the elected leaders it is important to wait for their mandate to expire.

We face a unique situation in Pakistan where we accuse people of corruption and we want to skin them even without charges being proven against them. This time round it would be useful if we look at how other democracies deal with corruption. None of them have purpose built politicized accountability bureaus and none use elimination of corruption as a slogan to eliminate political parties or leaders disliked by the urban middle class of a particular region.

Across our eastern border, in India, no government has been removed from office without an election whereas no elected government has ever completed its term in our country. Even when Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule and crossed the limits in the eyes of most Indians, her opponents and critics waited for the next election to oust her. There was media criticism but no campaign for removing her.

In May 2009, the speaker of the British Parliament resigned over his role in a scandal about the exaggerated expense claims of Members of Parliament. Michael Martin is the first speaker to step down under pressure since a previous incumbent was forced out for taking bribes in 1695. But throughout the MPs expense claim scandal no one called for the resignation of all those charged with wrongdoing.

Each case was treated individually and was required to be proven individually. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, highly unpopular and with approval ratings in opinion polls even less than those of President Asif Zardari, continues in office and the British are waiting for the next election.

Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao (1991-1996) faced a huge corruption scandal after leaving office. It was alleged that in July 1993 when Rao’s government was facing a no-confidence motion Rao, through a representative, offered money to Members of Parliament belonging to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). In 1996 a special court convicted Rao but he appealed to a higher court and remained on bail. In 2002 the decision of the special court was overturned by the Indian Supreme Court and both Rao and Buta Singh were cleared of the charges.

In another case Rao along with other fellow ministers was accused of forging documents to show that former Prime Minister VP Singh’s son, Ajeya Singh, had a bank account in St. Kitts. In 2003 Rao was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Despite these charges Narasimha Rao did not spend one day in jail. He was able to obtain bail on each occasion, allowed to appeal to the higher courts and when he died in 2004 the Congress-led government of his former finance minister and now Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave him a state funeral on grounds that he was never finally convicted. That, rather than the lynch-mob mentality advocated by some in our hyperactive media, represents the rule of law.

Another former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi faced a huge corruption scandal. Rajiv Gandhi and several of his close associates and friends were accused of receiving kickbacks from Swedish company Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India’s military with 155 mm field howitzer guns that eventually proved so effective against the Pakistani military during the Kargil war. The scale of the kickbacks was alleged to be of the tune of Indian Rs64 million. Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party lost the elections in 1989 to a combined opposition, which used Bofors as a slogan against the Congress administration. But the Indian courts waited for evidence and tried the case at a regular pace instead of joining the popular anti-corruption bandwagon.

Rajiv Gandhi died in 1991 and the Bofors case continued for years but none of his associates were ever arrested or put in jail. In February 2004 the Delhi High Court quashed the charges of bribery against Rajiv Gandhi. While he was alive, even though the charges of corruption remained, Rajiv was never arrested, never placed on the Exit Control List (ECL) and was accorded a full state funeral on his death.

After his death his wife and children continued to be accorded the privileges and security, which they were entitled to as the family of a former prime minister. What we are witnessing in Pakistan is the result of the anti-politician and anti-democracy mindset cultivated among Pakistan’s middle class by General Zia-ul-Haq and his successors. Zia’s use of corruption and immorality as the main planks with which to attack popular politicians and his constant reiteration that unless accountability (Ehtesab) takes place elections cannot take place are his major legacy to Pakistani politics.

Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and analyst based in Toronto, Canada. Email: sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

Ending corruption is a noble and popular cause that has, in the past, been used in Pakistan to undermine democracy. As Pakistan’s Supreme Court vigorously adopts this cause with the support of a zealous media it is important to remember that the job of courts is not to do what is popular but rather what is judicious. Legal action against the allegedly corrupt must be taken without undermining the democratic system or overturning the mandate given by the people in a general election.

The Supreme Court declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that came into effect on October 5, 2007 ultra vires on grounds that it was discriminatory. That should restore the pending proceedings in various courts. But these proceedings should not become an excuse to overturn the mandate given by the people of Pakistan in the general elections of February 18, 2008.

The people of Pakistan knew that they were voting for NRO beneficiaries and the mere fact of someone being an NRO beneficiary cannot be held as justification for demanding the ouster of anyone elected by the people or their representatives. Only conviction by a court of law for a specific criminal act or wrongdoing should result in the ouster or resignation of any official.

The NRO is not the only discriminatory act from the past that should be the Supreme Court’s concern. The court has already declared Musharraf’s imposition of emergency on November 3, 2007 as an act of treason. Now it must also acknowledge that the overthrow of the elected government in a coup d’etat in October 15, 1999 was also treasonous. The constitution has no provision for the army chief becoming chief executive and if the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) of 2007 was illegal and ultra vires so were earlier PCOs.

Similarly, the creation of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) through an ordinance after the coup should be undone on the basis of the legal maxim of “fruit of a poisonous tree is also poisoned.” There is no constitutional basis for a corruption watchdog agency staffed by serving and former intelligence officers and headed in its initial years by a serving general for selective persecution of a military regime’s political opponents.

The Supreme Court would enhance its prestige by admitting that past PCOs and judgments endorsing martial law were acts of corruption. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s judicial murder should also be identified for what it was and struck off the law books. Hearings must be opened in pending cases such as Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s 1995 petition against the covert funding of the IJI by the national security institutions. The discriminatory treatment against the MQM between 1992 and 1999 must also be reviewed.

While the judiciary’s stand against General Pervez Musharraf’s Emergency has raised hopes about it as an institution one must not forget that in the past even the higher judiciary’s record was chequered. If twelve year old corruption cases must be reopened to establish the principle of non-discrimination why not call upon all beneficiaries of past PCOs to step down as well?

The judiciary cannot forever ride a wave of popularity backed by a media-driven frenzy. If the party that won the most votes barely two years ago can be said to have lost popularity there is no guarantee that the judiciary’s populist decisions will not start coming into question in the court of public opinion.

General Zia-ul-Haq managed the media sufficiently well to keep a lid on sentiment opposing the elder Bhutto’s assassination. But eventually the judges who gave the verdict themselves recognized that theirs was a political, not a legal, decision. Some day there will be a critical mass of judicial opinion that will recognize that it is not the superior judiciary’s task to determine, for example, the price of sugar.

To avoid the pitfalls of the past, why not allow the law to take its course without rocking the boat of democracy this time? Let the courts deal with corruption while allowing the elected executive and the parliament handle their respective spheres in accordance with the constitution. One can understand the frustration of those implacably hostile to President Asif Zardari and the PPP but they, too, should understand that democracy requires patience and howsoever much you might hate the elected leaders it is important to wait for their mandate to expire.

We face a unique situation in Pakistan where we accuse people of corruption and we want to skin them even without charges being proven against them. This time round it would be useful if we look at how other democracies deal with corruption. None of them have purpose built politicized accountability bureaus and none use elimination of corruption as a slogan to eliminate political parties or leaders disliked by the urban middle class of a particular region.

Across our eastern border, in India, no government has been removed from office without an election whereas no elected government has ever completed its term in our country. Even when Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule and crossed the limits in the eyes of most Indians, her opponents and critics waited for the next election to oust her. There was media criticism but no campaign for removing her either through judicial activism or in connivance with some invisible establishment.

In May 2009 the speaker of the British parliament resigned over his role in a scandal about the exaggerated expense claims of Members of Parliament. Michael Martin is the first speaker to step down under pressure since a previous incumbent was forced out for taking bribes in 1695. But throughout the MPs expense claim scandal no one called for the resignation of all those charged with wrongdoing.

Each case was treated individually and was required to be proven individually. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, highly unpopular and with approval ratings in opinion polls even less than those of President Asif Zardari, continues in office and the British are waiting for the next election.

Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao (1991-1996) faced a huge corruption scandal after leaving office. It was alleged that in July 1993 when Rao’s government was facing a no-confidence motion Rao, through a representative, offered money to Members of Parliament belonging to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). One of those MPs, Shailendra Mahato, even turned approver in this case. In 1996 a special court convicted Rao and his colleague Buta Singh who was alleged to have escorted the MPs to the Prime Minister. However, Rao appealed to a higher court and remained on bail. In 2002 the decision of the special court was overturned – mainly because of the inconsistency of Mahato’s statements – and both Rao and Buta Singh were cleared of the charges.

In another case Rao along with other fellow ministers was accused of forging documents to show that former Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s son, Ajeya Singh, had a bank account in St. Kitts. Charged for this alleged 1989 incident in 1996 Rao was acquitted in 1997 for lack of evidence. Finally an England-based Indian businessman, Lakhubhai Pathak, alleged that he had bribed Rao along with his close associates, including Chandraswami, with $100,000 in order to be allowed to supply paper pulp in India. However, in 2003 Rao and Chandraswami were acquitted for lack of evidence.

Despite these charges Narasimha Rao did not spend one day in jail. He was able to obtain bail on each occasion, allowed to appeal to the higher courts and when he died in 2004 the Congress-led government of his former finance minister and now Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave him a state funeral on grounds that he was never finally convicted. That, rather than the lynch-mob mentality advocated by some in our hyperactive media, represents the rule of law.

Another former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi faced a huge corruption scandal. Rajiv Gandhi and several of his close associates and friends were accused of receiving kickbacks from Swedish company Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India’s military with 155 mm field howitzer guns that eventually proved so effective against the Pakistani military during the Kargil war. The scale of the kickbacks was alleged to be of the tune of Indian Rs. 64 million. Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress party lost the elections in 1989 to a combined opposition which used Bofors as a slogan against the Congress administration. But the Indian courts waited for evidence and tried the case at a regular pace instead of joining the popular anti-corruption bandwagon.

Rajiv Gandhi died in 1991 and the Bofors case continued for years but none of his associates were ever arrested or put in jail. In February 2004 the Delhi High Court quashed the charges of bribery against Rajiv Gandhi and others but the case continued as one of causing wrongful loss to the Government. While he was alive, even though the charges of corruption remained, Rajiv was never arrested, never placed on the Exit Control List (ECL) and was accorded a full state funeral on his death. After his death his wife and children continued to be accorded the privileges and security which they were entitled to as the family of a former prime minister.

U.S. Congressman, William Jennings Jefferson of Louisiana, was accused of bribery by the FBI in 2006 but was re-elected later that year. In June 2007, a federal grand jury indicted Jefferson on sixteen charges related to corruption. Jefferson lost his seat in the elections of 2008 but was never ordered by a court of law to resign before final judgement on his corruption case, re-establishing the principle that the court of public opinion matters in democracy. In August 2009 Jefferson was found guilty of 11 of the 16 corruption counts and in November 2009 Jefferson was sentenced to 13 years for bribery. However, throughout the entire process, Jefferson was treated as innocent until proven guilty. He was not imprisoned during trial, was not forced out of office except by an election and was only sentenced when his guilt was finally proven.

To bring an entire government down on charges of corruption is a uniquely Pakistani phenomenon. To place your defense minister on the Exit Control List (ECL) as though he was a common criminal who is a flight risk again only takes place in Pakistan. It is the result of the anti-politician and anti-democracy mindset cultivated among Pakistan’s middle class by General Zia-ul-Haq and his successors. Zia’s use of corruption and immorality as the main planks with which to attack popular politicians and his constant reiteration that unless accountability (ehtisab) takes place elections cannot take place are his major legacy to Pakistani politics.

In Pakistan charging someone with corruption means that person is by definition guilty and suddenly loses all of his or her natural rights even though the charges have not yet been proven. This undermines democracy and constitutionalism instead of reinforcing it. We must expose and pursue corruption without undermining democracy, the key principle of which is respecting the mandate of the people.

 Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and analyst based in Toronto, Canada. Email: sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

The most significant question about accountability was neither asked nor answered during the Supreme Court proceedings about the NRO: If President Zardari has assets of $1.5 billion (which means $1500 million) then why only $73 million in assets were frozen or subjected to litigation abroad? Furthermore, if the case against Zardari was as open and shut as Ehtesab officials and their supporters in the media have claimed then why was it never settled in Swiss courts after ten years of proceedings before the NRO? In most countries white collar cases with a clear paper trail are resolved within a couple of years.

The terms Ehtesab and accountability were introduced in the Pakistani political lexicon by General Zia-ul-Haq when he cancelled the 1977 election on the basis of the slogan “Pehlay Ehtesab, phir intikhab” (First accountability, then elections). Since then accountability has been a selective political exercise aimed at excluding those not liked by the right wing powers-that-be. The purpose of this particular type of accountability was never to deal with the problem of corruption but to create hype about it. Hence, phrases like “Looti hui daulat qaum ko wapis kee jaye” (Return the looted wealth to the nation) are bandied about without dealing with the substantive legal issues.

The reason why former Ehtesab supremo, the notorious Saif-ur-Rehman, came up with the figure $1.5 billion as the amount “stolen” by Zardari was that it sounded good in propaganda. Otherwise his Ehtesab Bureau never really identified properties or initiated substantive cases that amounted to that value. The Supreme Court must ask the Ehtesab Bureau’s successor NAB why, if its claim of $1500 million in assets is correct, cases in international courts led to freezing of only $73 million ($60 million in Swiss courts and $13 million in the case of the Surrey Mansion in England).

No one is arguing that it is okay to have corruption of 60-70 million dollars but not of 1500 million dollars. The point is that the legal situation as described by the Ehtesab Bureau and NAB has been based on deception with political propaganda being its primary aim.

The corruption cases against Philippines President Marcos were established and settled within 3 years. In case of Pakistani politicians it was either NAB’s incompetence or the possibility that it simply did not have sufficient evidence that the cases have languished for over a decade. NAB officials, like Mr Ghazni Khan, spent a lot of time quietly briefing journalists about corruption allegations so that they continue to have their jobs but the fact remains that their former boss Lt General Shahid Aziz has virtually admitted that the pace of proceedings in NAB cases was determined by political considerations.

Filing cases in Pakistan was easy, especially after the creation of special accountability court. But for real propaganda some independent action was required internationally. Saif-ur-Rehman’s Ehtesab Bureau discovered international laws against money laundering and filed cases in Switzerland and England to further the impression of “massive” corruption.

Few Pakistani media organizations could cover proceedings in Switzerland allowing the Ehtesab Bureau or NAB to explain the legal complexities whichever way they liked. The justified distaste for corruption in the country helped. If you create the perception of corruption, people will hate those painted as corrupt even if no court convicts them.

In case of the Swiss case, the deception in Pakistan has surrounded the notion that it is somehow an independent case. It is not. Money laundering presupposes a crime from which money was obtained to be laundered. It is like charging someone with selling stolen goods. To prove that someone was selling stolen goods the prosecution must first prove that the goods were stolen. In case of the Swiss case against Zardari, the government of Pakistan failed for ten years to get a Pakistani court to convict Zardari of the initial crime of obtaining the money through criminal means. Without such a conviction in Pakistan there could be no case of money laundering in Switzerland.

The Swiss judicial system is based on the French system and not the British one. Under the French system, a magistrate has to first hold court proceedings to determine whether a case should be tried. For ten years beginning in 1997 the case in Switzerland was before an investigating magistrate. One magistrate decided that a trial could proceed and also imposed a fine. In the Swiss system, paying that fine would have meant accepting guilt and avoiding trial. But Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari contested the case and the investigating magistrate’s finding was overturned by the Appeals Court, bringing the case back to a new investigation magistrate. Even if the case had not been folded as a result of the NRO it would still have depended on settling cases in Pakistan.

Instead of telling the nation the fine points of Swiss law, NAB and its propaganda machine kept on talking about “looti hui daulat” and keeping the nation in frenzy against corruption without NAB doing its actual job of prosecuting cases with vigour. Now the Swiss government has clarified that the case in Switzerland was secondary to the cases in Pakistan. If a Pakistani court recognizes evidence that someone broke laws and made money through corruption, the Swiss court can charge them with laundering the ill-gotten money. In other words, Switzerland cannot try someone for selling stolen good unless the fact of the goods being stolen in the first place has been established.

The Ehtesab Bureau under Saif-ur-Rehman tried to convict Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari in Pakistan with the help of a friendly judge, none other than Malik Abdul Qayyum, whose father also was on the bench that sentenced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to death. If that conviction had prevailed, the Swiss case could have moved on. But some readers might recall that the Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned Malik Qayyum’s conviction judgment after tapes were produced of his conversations with Saif-ur-Rehman that proved the collusion of the judge with the prosecution. In those taped conversations, Saif-ur-Rehman urged Malik Qayyum to quickly convict Mohtarma and her husband because Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was anxious to see them convicted. Quite clearly, the matter was not about rule of law but about politics.

The Supreme Court judgment on the NRO reflects a desire to re-establish the writ of law and has been widely welcomed. Hopefully it will also bring to an end the political deception and hype that has accompanied the accountability issue since the days of Zia-ul-Haq.

It was ironic that most of the key petitioners in the NRO case had a Zia-ul-Haq link. Mr Roedad Khan was the late dictator’s Interior Secretary before serving as incharge of accountability under President Ghulam Ishaq Khan from 1990-1993. He failed to bring any convictions against Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari, but has never relented in raising his voice selectively against corruption. Qazi Hussain Ahmed rose to fame as the organizer and founder of Jihad during the Zia-ul-Haq era.

With the end of the NRO, let us now let the courts settle all outstanding cases of alleged corruption under the able guidance of the chief justice. At the same time let us also understand the politics of the issue. Why are supporters of the Taliban so eager to keep the nation involved with the saga of “looti hui daulat?” Is it to keep the nation distracted from its great challenge of fighting and ending the terrorism that threatens Pakistan and is the lasting legacy of Zia-ul-Haq’s CIA-backed Jihadis’ ideology misadventure? As for the $1500 million dollars, NAB can’t get it back because it doesn’t exist or because NAB is so incompetent that it has not been able to find it in a decade.

Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and analyst based in Toronto,Canada.sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s official visit to the United States should have been the major story in Pakistan’s media. But our right-wing anchors and columnists and “get-Zardari” editors are far more focused on the domestic power struggles to realize that the nightmare of Pakistan’s strategic encirclement may already be on the brink of becoming reality.

The less attention Pakistanis pay to fighting terrorism and figuring out a way of dealing with the world, the more likely it is that India — the country with which Pakistan has fought four wars in 62 years — will continue to gain ground. India already has better relations with the governments of Afghanistan and Iran, our western neighbours. The more we demonstrate hatred towards the United States, the more we contribute to making the India-US relationship into an anti-Pakistan alliance, which need not be. We could complain and get angry with the US, as the Jamaatis and the Ghairat lobby advocate, or we could analyse the rising Indian influence and figure out ways of combating it.

It is interesting to note that in the ongoing Pakistani debate about US-Pakistan ties, India is seldom mentioned. Our jihad sympathizers relate their anti-Americanism to US actions against Muslims around the world, without realistically examining whether shouting slogans for our Arab brothers gains us any advantage in defending Pakistan against India. Pakistan has traditionally sought American help in order to stand up to India. If Pakistani anti-Americanism is not managed in a way that the Americans do not see Pakistanis as enemies, India’s strategic advantage will continue to increase.

The US would become a force-multiplier for India in our region instead of being a potential balancer that keeps India’s anti-Pakistan moves in check. We would be left holding anti-American demonstrations and publishing anti-American diatribes while India will be the beneficiary of US investment, defence deals and civil nuclear deal. Do we really want that to happen? Or is it already too late to stop the very strong ties, which have been built between India and the US? Let us take a look.

In the Bush administration 18 Indian-Americans served in various positions over the course of eight years compared with one Pakistani-American. In the Obama administration 22 Indian-Americans are already serving in senior positions (Assistant Secretary and above) and there is one Governor (out of fifty US states) of Indian descent. Almost 200 Indian-Americans serve as Congressional staffers compared with 12 Pakistani-American, three of whom work for the same Congresswoman. There are numerous State Department and Pentagon officials and at least one the US Ambassador of Indian origin.

More than 100,000 Indian students are enrolled in US universities compared with less than seven thousand Pakistanis. The number of professors of Indian origin in the US is at least one hundred times more than professors from Pakistan-totally disproportionate to the 1 to 7 population ratio.

The Indian Congressional caucus is three times as large as Pakistan’s and even the Chairwoman of the Pakistan caucus in the House of Representatives is simultaneously a member of the India caucus. There is hardly a US media organisation where Indian names are not prominent whereas Pakistani journalists only make their noisy presence felt in our own introverted media and that too only on domestic issues. Any Pakistani who manages to earn respect of the Americans is immediately denigrated as an American agent in Pakistan. The Indians, on the other hand, see their countrymen as spreading Indian influence in America.

Ironically, India was historically never an American ally and did not have the same level of aid (especially military assistance) from the United States, as did Pakistan. So how did India transform itself into a close partner after the cold war and Pakistan manage to become the unhappy semi-ally? The question is relevant today because of what we Pakistanis have become and what we have achieved over the years. Pakistan is America’s oldest ally in the region but Pakistan and the US are more estranged today than they were at any time in history. India was a Soviet ally till 1989 and yet India and the US have strong economic and strategic ties.

The Indians appear to have realised early on that even if they did not have security ties with the US building close ties at other levels was important for the long-term. Pakistan did the reverse. While we were recipients of large amounts of military aid, we did little to build a presence in US academia or media. Our community remains focused on getting attention in Pakistan and few Pakistani-Americans have earned the stature in mainstream American intellectual or political life that could translate into serious influence. Over time, US-based Indian organizations have helped build close cultural and educational ties between the two countries. Bollywood is now penetrating Hollywood while there is little comparable Pakistani ingress.

The India-US nuclear deal is considered a defining moment for the India-US relationship. Let us look at the reactions in India over the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Congress-led government was in favour of the nuclear deal but the Communist parties who were allied to the Congress government at that time did not ideologically support the deal. There was debate and discussion in the Parliament and in the Indian electronic and print media for nine months. In the end when the left parties and BJP decided to vote against the bill, the Congress obtained the support of other smaller parties.

The government secured 275 votes in the 541 member Lok Sabha for the India-US civil nuclear deal and their opponents secured 256 votes. The left parties targeted the government for changing the traditional policy of non-alignment and becoming too close to the United States but it was through discussion and debate, not street demonstrations, rubbishing America in the media or calling influential Indian-Americans as CIA agents.

Also, the political leaders faced fire, not the Indian ambassador in Washington and other officials who were following orders and doing their job. Also during the entire controversy the Indian military did not openly involve itself or say anything about the deal. And throughout the entire period the Indian-American community was very strongly behind the bill, they lobbied hard in the US for the passage of the bill and they lobbied hard back home for the passage of the bill in Parliament.

On the other side let us look at the Kerry-Lugar Bill controversy and the way it played out both in Pakistan and amongst the Pakistani-American community abroad. The strong anti-Americanism in Pakistan led the initially pro-Kerry-Lugar Pakistani American community to become silent. The debate in the Pakistani media was less a debate on Pakistani policy options and more a hate campaign against the US. Politicians attacked their own government; the army spoke out publicly against the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill’s contents; and once it became clear that the US Congress would not change its views, the whole thing subsided like foam at home even though offense had unnecessarily been caused to American Congressmen.

Why is it that despite 54 years of close ties with the US Pakistan has not been able to help build a relationship of influence in the US? Our problem is that unfortunately we don’t know how to influence others – we only know how to abuse them. The Quaid dreamt of Pakistan being a global power with influence all over the world. How does one build Pakistan’s global influence?

Pakistan’s ability to change minds of global powers will be a source of Pakistani influence; Not jihadis who will keep getting arrested and keep Pakistan under watchful eye of major powers. And yet over the decades every Pakistani who has tried to build close ties with the US, like Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, Najmuddin Sheikh, Jehangir Karamat, Mahmud Ali Durrani and Husain Haqqani, has been labeled as an American agent rather than being seen as Pakistanis who can better communicate with Americans in Pakistan’s interest.

If India is about to win huge contracts and get heaped with praise during the Manmohan Singh visit to Washington, Pakistanis need to review how we have played our cards wrong for decades. And then, let us work on a plan to change the relationship if for no other reason than to deny our adversary the advantage of being the world’s sole superpower’s sole South Asian partner.

 Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and analyst based in Toronto, Canada. E-mail: sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

Transparency International’s new Annual Corruption Perceptions Report and Pakistan’s position on its index is once again the topic of discussion on all TV channels and most newspaper columns, courtesy right wing anchors and columnists. Instead of focusing on the terrorist threat to the Pakistani way of life, the corruption issue is once again being used to create hatred for the political class and to dislodge or weaken an elected government.

One can sense a replay of the past, as those who know Pakistan’s history of the 1990s would testify. In Pakistan between 1988 and 1999 no elected civilian government was allowed to complete its term because of alleged corruption. The 1999 military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power was also justified on grounds that Pakistan’s generals were better suited to wage the war against corruption.

Transparency’s reports are highlighted only under civilian governments though Pakistan’s rating for corruption changes little on an annual basis and the global perception that Pakistan is rife with corruption is consistent under civil or military rule. Few commentators educate the public on how Transparency International, a small NGO with local affiliates who are not past political prejudice, draws up its index. The average man is led to believe that Transparency International is some kind of a United Nations, which it is not, and its reports are based on measuring corruption, which they are not either. The truth is that Transparency International is a Berlin-based organization that publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index based on surveys “from 13 independent institutions” based on “the opinions of business people and country analysts.” So all that Transparency’s reports tell us is what some businessmen perceive and tell the organisation’s surveyors.

The media can first create a perception of corruption, which is reflected in Transparency’s survey and then report on the survey selectively to argue that corruption has gone up or down in the country. What a manipulative process!

Corruption has often been described as the cause for most of the problems of third world countries. During the better part of the 1990s when democracies were being introduced in most of these countries in a post cold war era, corruption was used by the entrenched establishment in several countries to undermine the democratic processes. By the early 21st century however another serious debate emerged in the West when intellectuals started to question the wisdom of taking corruption as the single most important factor in the social, economic and democratic development of a society.

This thread of thought emerged as the researchers and academics realized that the so-called war on corruption, sometime pushed by the World Bank, had started to undermine democracy and often resulted into projecting choices for the people that did not lead to real development.

One such thinker Moises Naim, former Venezuelan Trade Minister and currently Editor of Foreign Policy magazine, wrote in a classic 2005 article that the “worst collateral damage” of a fixation with corruption, “is the political instability it can create. Electorates already have many reasons to be disappointed with their elected officials. The corruption curse feeds people’s unrealistic expectations about what it would take to improve their standard of living and set a country on a more prosperous path. Popular impatience, exacerbated by the belief that nearly all those at the top are lining their pockets, unreasonably shortens the time governments have to produce results.”

Naim also pointed out, “There is no doubt that corruption is a scourge. But there is also no doubt that many countries crippled by corruption are not sinking. Hungary, Italy and Poland are just a few examples of countries where prosperity has coexisted with significant levels of corruption. China, India and Thailand are only not sinking; they are prospering, despite widespread corruption.”

Of course, Naim’s purpose was not to condone corruption. He sought only to point out that the elites and intelligentsias of some countries can ignore more fundamental problems while obsessing about corruption.

In our case, the corruption debate has prevented Pakistanis from identifying terrorism as a threat. Bombs go off and we ignore them but columnists and anchors who consider the Taliban lashing a young woman in Swat as “consistent with Sharia” rant on about fiscal corruption as disastrous.

During the mid-1990s Pakistanis felt dishonored by the revelation that Transparency International had listed Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world. Apologists for Pakistan’s establishment used that factoid to run down Pakistan’s politicians and blamed them for bringing Pakistan to this point. Once the establishment had run the politicians down and used corruption as an excuse for increasing its power in a succession of palace coups, discussion over Pakistan’s rating for corruption by Transparency International seldom made news. In most of the Musharraf era, the media rarely gave any importance to the TI index, although Pakistan never performed very well on that benchmark.

Going back to the argument of Moises Naim that corruption does not necessarily mean that the country’s economy is sinking, one may notice that in the year 2004 Transparency International index, Finland was identified as the world’s least corrupt country and the most corrupt countries were Bangladesh and Haiti. Now if we look at Bangladesh’s economic growth in the first few years of the 21st century it is apparent that she has managed to maintain stable growth while Pakistan that had better rating in TI index during these periods had not been able to create a sustainable economic platform.

According to TI, “The index defines corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain, and measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among a country’s public officials and politicians.” The scores on TI’s index range from 10 (squeaky clean) to zero (highly corrupt). TI considers a score of 5.0 as “the borderline figure distinguishing countries that do and do not have a serious corruption problem.”

The methodology for determining the level of corruption in a country is such that the ranking is less important than the rating. A country can be the worst in a certain year, when fewer nations are surveyed, but move up or down in the rankings because of changes in the number of countries surveyed. Pakistan’s rating, on the other hand, has improved little over the years.

It has been pointed out that in Pakistan’s case, corruption is a constant factor, which is exaggerated or downplayed according to the political needs of the country’s bureaucracy and generals. In Pakistan this rating is often used as an excuse to boot out or denigrate the politicians while covering up the corruption and other ethical lapses of other important players of power.

There is no doubt that the honest Pakistanis must carry on their struggle against corruption but anti-corruption crusades must not be allowed to deprive the country of democratic governance and popular participation in government.

During the NRO debate in the country recently many facts were completely ignored by most of the media. While the 1990s were wasted in filing and pursuing corruption cases, no one came up with statistics about how many cases were actually proved in the courts of law? How many cases did not even reach the stage of prosecution and what about those in which the victims (accused) were found not guilty? And why should it not be debated that those who filed false cases on the basis of patently political considerations must be brought to book?

Exploring these angles requires thinking that is not contoured and driven by an agenda. The Transparency International index and allegations of corruption, however, can help some people play their games.

 Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and analyst based in Toronto, Canada. Email:sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

In repeated opinion poll surveys in Pakistan over the last one year, there has been one thing constant – the rising anti-Americanism in the country. According to the Pew Research Centre, only 16 per cent of Pakistanis surveyed have a favourable view of the United States and 13 per cent have confidence in President Barack Obama.

Though there are many reasons for this anti-Americanism, what we cannot deny is that it has a great deal with how the discourse has been shaped by the views and agendas of our political leaders, media personalities, journalists, academics and security establishment.

Pakistanis as a nation are riled up en masse over the supposed ‘loss of sovereignty’ over the fact that our ally of 55 years decided to give us unconditional economic aid – in addition to conditional military aid – for a change. At $1.5 billion per year the Enhanced Partnership for Pakistan Act 2009 would make Pakistan the single largest recipient of US government development aid in the world – greater than the Israel economic aid package. And while to many media commentators and so-called analysts $1.5 billion in aid does not seem like a large amount as it is 1 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP and for the government would be 10 per cent of its revenue. It would enable the government to increase spending on education and health by 33 per cent (I am grateful for this information to a California-based Pakistani, Mr Nayyer Ali).

Our very ‘honourable’ political leaders and media personalities lecture and harp on a daily basis how this bill is ‘anti-Pakistan’, failing to point out that this is one among the very few pro-Pakistan American legislations as it would help the people of Pakistan! But then for these ‘honourable’ personalities Pakistan means them – and not the people.

Pakistan’s Ghairat lobby responds to those who disagree by labelling them ‘bay-ghairat’, ‘traitor’, ‘American agent’, ‘kafir’, and a dozen more such epithets. It is interesting how supporting good relations with the US makes one an American agent but advocating a break in these relations does not result in any label whatsoever.

Secretary Clinton’s trip to Pakistan too was portrayed in a very particular way – to highlight this ‘anti-Americanism’ and Pakistani ‘anger’. More focus – and more camera time – was given to anti-American speeches, to students ranting and raving on ‘US policy’ and to how ‘this war’ was not Pakistan’s war. Very little attention was paid to the fact that the leading foreign diplomat of the still only superpower in the world spent three days in Pakistan, emphasised how deep the US-Pakistan relationship is and promised even more economic aid for the Pakistani people.

Again the only time attention was paid to Secretary Clinton’s speech was when she expressed ‘surprise’ at how ‘no one’ in the Pakistani establishment had any knowledge about al-Qaeda and other jihadis, elements at one time sponsored by elements of our state. Here too the focus was on how to show this as ‘American perfidy’ rather than what it really was – frank talk between two friends, especially in the light of Secretary Clinton’s earlier admission and apology about American conduct during and after the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s. Maybe our culture believes in hypocrisy and so we think if we refuse to admit something the world will stop asking those questions. But that doesn’t happen. The world will keep asking and keep stating things and if we don’t give answers they will find ways to find those answers themselves.

We also tend to see events as stand alone things that we can ignore because they will have no impact on long-term policy. That is where we are wrong. Events play in to process and process decides policy. Just as it is wrong to mistake the wood for the trees, similarly it is stupid to do the opposite. From 2008 onwards the Americans have tried to build a relationship with Pakistan that goes beyond the traditional security-based relationship and is more multi-dimensional in nature. However, this is their last and final attempt to try to ‘help Pakistan’ reverse what they perceive as a precarious course.

It is interesting that what Hilary Clinton said during her three-day visit to Pakistan in 2009 is not very different from what President Bill Clinton said when he stopped for only five hours in March 2000. Quite clearly the Americans have been as consistent in their view of Pakistan as Pakistanis have been of the Americans. If we are on collision course should we just increase the pitch of our screaming or actually think about how we can avoid that collision?

For decades we were America’s only ally in the region and we believed that ‘the Americans need us more than we need them’ and since they have no other ally in the region they have ‘no option’ but to stand by us through thick and thin. Even that theory was constantly disproved – in 1965, 1971 and 1989. Now, those days are gone. The US-India relationship, which was mainly economic in the 1990s, has now taken on a strong security and defence dimension. India plans on spending $100 billion to modernise and replace its old Soviet equipment and the Americans are there at the top of the line as suppliers. American companies will build two nuclear power reactors in India.

For the last five years on an annual basis the American and Indian armies have held war games called Yudh Abyas (War Exercise). This year’s exercise included 17 American Strykers – the largest deployment outside of Iraq and Afghanistan for the US Pacific Rim forces. Not only the army, but also the navies and air forces of both countries hold joint exercises on an annual basis. This year the Japanese naval forces joined the joint India-US exercise. Even China and India hold military exercises once every two years.

The US has always been open to the idea of help and assistance of regional powers in Afghanistan and Admiral Mullen has openly talked about Indian military assistance. This has never happened because of American reluctance to upset Pakistan. However, if our anti-Americanism continues the day might come when the Americans do not see the value of their Pakistani relationship. I, and anyone else who points this out, is not an American agent but a voice of sanity in an environment of anger and hate.

In a recent article in the influential Foreign Policy magazine titled ‘US-India military cooperation’ Robert Haddick argues that the rapid expansion in the defence relationship between the United States and India contrasts sharply with the troubled security relationships the US has with China and Pakistan. At the end of his article Haddick warns with little seeming to go right with Afghanistan, Pakistan, or China, US policymakers should be pleased with warming US-India defence ties. When pondering Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China, the US-India defence relationship is something both countries will take comfort in – and may someday need.

Many of you who read this piece will shrug your heads and say ‘so what’ and that is what I fear. This complacency about our relationship with the US is going to hurt Pakistan long-term. We are not Vietnam, Iran or China. Vietnam fought a nationalist insurgency, which so thoroughly consumed the country that it took them years just to reach to the level of a developing country. Iran has oil and ancient roots. And China has a 1.2 billion population, the largest military in the world, soon to be the largest economy and a very strong identity. Even then, each one of them is willing to engage with the US cautiously instead of basing their relationship on rhetoric. None of them is as dependent on US aid as Pakistan. It is time that we wake up as a nation, look around and see the reality of the world rather than living in a constructed reality.

On Monday, November 2, thirty-five innocent Pakistanis lost their lives to a terrorist attack. These were ordinary people, standing in line at a bank to receive their monthly salary. They must have gone there with plans of spending that money on their parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters. But for the Pakistani media, especially the TV anchors who have now become the arbiters of what is important and what is not, the death of these poor people was not important. With their usual cast of characters from —Jamaat-e-Islami to Imran Khan to the two Muslim Leagues— the electronic media that day was exclusively focused on the so-called NRO issue.

Although the PPP has defused the matter by withdrawing the ordinance from Parliament, there is something artificial about the manner in which the matter of the NRO was made the primary focus of national discussion. The NRO issue took over from debate over the Kerry Lugar Bill, which also died its natural death. Those in the media who considered the Kerry-Lugar Bill a matter of national sovereignty have not even asked the PML-N or PML-Q to bring their own resolutions in the National Assembly on the matter.

Now that Hillary Clinton has spoken, the two Muslims Leagues would not dare condemn the US through a resolution in Parliament. The purpose of the fuss over the bill, like the NRO non-debate, was to undermine the Zardari presidency. The Pakistani military is fighting the battle for the country’s survival in Waziristan.

For years at least some of our anchors have claimed that the Mehsud militants are backed by foreign enemies of Pakistan. But neither the war in Waziristan nor the terrorist attacks in Rawalpindi have received the kind of attention that befits them. For the overzealous TV anchors, the real issue is how to embarrass President Zardari. Some of them claim they have the establishments backing in doing so.

Those striving for a Constitutional knockout of President Zardari need to reconsider whether they will accomplish anything even if they succeed. The first consequence of such a knockout would be to give the PPP and the Bhutto-Zardari family the mantle of victimhood once again. After the initial grumbling is over, the People’s Party will most likely rally round the family that has given the greatest sacrifices for it. Even if Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani becomes part of the knockout plan, which is highly unlikely, he would be reduced to the same position as Farooq Leghari was within months of his action against Benazir Bhutto in 1996.

If the fingerprints of the establishment are found in President Zardari’s decapitation, as the anti-Zardari anchors and columnists claim, it would revive in all likelihood the anti-establishment polarization that the military sought to end by withdrawing from politics after the eclipse of General Pervez Musharraf. In any case, why should the establishment become part of an anti-Zardari game plan if all it would do is bring Mr Nawaz Sharif to power?

The issue of civil-military relations will certainly not be resolved to the establishments satisfaction because if Mr. Nawaz Sharif rises to power with the weakening of a Zardari-led PPP then he is unlikely to be more deferential to GHQ.

Since the unfortunate era of General Ziaul Haq the Pakistani establishment has had a pro-Jihad faction that operates politically through the media and various political actors. These people did not respect General Asif Nawaz, General Abdul Waheed, or General Jehangir Karamat. General Pervez Musharraf pleased them by championing adventurism in Kargil but lost their backing in the post-9/11 context. Now, too, it is not General Ashfaq Kayani who wants an army (or establishment) role in politics. It is the beneficiaries of Jihad Inc., including the many media figures beholden to the Jihadis, who want to shoot at a liberal government using the establishments shoulder.

If Pakistan will gain nothing from upsetting the applecart, why are some people so insistent on continuing to distract the nation from fighting terrorism and from sympathizing with terrorist victims? Why not allow the Parliament to decide matters even if it is with a single vote? Why don’t the TV anchors ask Imran Khan how he can judge the government’s actions and claim to speak for the people without being elected? Why is every initiative of PML-N a media initiative and never brought to the elected chambers? Is it not the purpose of democracy to find a way to get past issues instead of getting bogged down by them?

The media, especially its electronic manifestation, seems like a bunch of quacks (fake doctors) that keep generating campaign after campaign against someone they dislike (President Zardari). It is time the people fight back and say let there be some sanity in the country. Let priorities be priorities.

Like the title of the Hindi movie Lagay Raho Munna Bhai, we need to learn to ignore the TV anchors and say Lagay Raho media Bhai and pay attention to the lives of people instead of the artificial politics of talk shows. If the talk show crowd has evidence of corruption, let them take it to the independent judiciary, which they claim they got restored. If there is an issue that requires Parliamentary attention, let Parliament vote on it. It is time for real action, not media campaigns.

For twenty-four hours after a tragedy like the Rawalpindi terrorist attack, the nation should be allowed to grieve and sympathize with the victims. The media and the establishment some anchors so frequently quote should give the people a break.

Watching American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton interact with university students in Lahore was a sad spectacle. Sadder still was to see our most influential TV anchors and columnists betray their limited knowledge of facts while trying to impress their audience with their solid nationalist credentials.

In the aftermath of Hillary’s straight talk, Pakistanis must seriously examine how we discuss international relations on the basis of sentiment and without knowing or examining basic facts. The most glaring error of fact by a Pakistani came during Ms Clinton’s interview with Pakistani TV anchors. One gentleman tried to make the point that the US does not provide enough assistance to Pakistan and that Pakistan’s leaders sell the country cheap. He said that the US paid Kyrgyzstan $700 million in rent for just one airbase. Hillary tried to correct him and said the actual amount of rent was around $50 million. Our anchor-columnist was unfazed and insisted that must be the figure per month. But anyone with access to the internet can find out that as of June this year the US pays Kyrgyzstan $60 million per year as rent for the Manas air force base. Until June the rent was only $17 million.

Hillary was closer to the facts while the anchor-columnist was off by at least $640 million. His hostility towards the US, not facts, defined his question and none of his anchor colleagues were better acquainted with facts to help correct him.

At Government College Lahore, there appeared to be no diversity of views among the many students gathered to talk to the US Secretary of State. It was as if everyone was speaking from one single narrative -Pakistan’s victimhood (mazlumiat) and America’s mistakes. Nobody seemed to have read anything else. There was no mention of divergent or convergent national interests, of the internal threat Pakistan faces from terrorism, of Pakistan’s hostile neighborhood and what options we might have in staving off Indian hegemony.

Nobody seemed to know about basic facts that can be found in the thousands of books that are produced everyday around the world. It was a reflection of the sorry state of knowledge in Pakistan.

Student after student at GC stood up to ask questions that were rooted in the narrative of victimhood and conspiracy theories widely circulated around the country. To her credit, Hillary Clinton responded thoughtfully and without the screaming that characterizes discussion and debate in Pakistan. But nobody in her several audiences seemed to understand any of Pakistan’s problems that are not related to the United States. After all, we are the nation that failed to debate our failure in erstwhile East Pakistan for over two decades after the fall of Dhaka. We blame others. We do not analyse or take responsibility.

Yes, the US walked away from Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1989 and almost everyone including Americans agrees that was a mistake. But should Pakistan have continued to nurture Jihadis who are now launching terrorist attacks around Pakistan in the subsequent 20 years and can the US be blamed for that?

The US had nothing to do with the sectarian Jihadis of Southern Punjab and surely Pakistan’s people and our establishment have some responsibility for what has been happening in the country since the Americans terminated their Afghanistan operations in 1989?

It appears that none of Pakistan’s young people brain-washed into an anti-American fury by a one sided media and the Jihadi mind-set, have ever thought about that. Only 58% of children between the age of 5 and 15 in Pakistan go to school compared with 92% for India and 96% for Bangladesh. Can Pakistanis blame this on the US as well? None of Pakistan’s colleges or universities is included among the world’s top 500 universities listed recently by the University of Shanghai in China.

Is America at fault? Pakistan ranks 141 among 182 countries in human development indicators. Can we blame the US for our national choices, especially after we have been so abusive about the Kerry-Lugar aid package that would enable the revenue-deficient government to increase expenditure on health and education several fold?

Pakistan’s range of exports is very limited. Pakistan has remained primarily a textile exporter and an exporter of agricultural products. Pakistan’s business community and Pakistan’s agriculturists do not pay much tax. Is the US responsible for all of that too?

Pakistan has fought three full-scale wars with India and at least one mini war after having tested nuclear weapons in 1998 (the Kargil episode). How can we Pakistanis blame these military blunders on the United States?

Perhaps it is time for Pakistanis to start learning about a worldview other than the one in which America is demonized and none of Pakistan’s internal weaknesses and flaws are ever discussed. America is not perfect but neither is Pakistan. It is time for some of the TV anchors and columnists to start wondering why is it that Pakistan’s establishment is entitled to give opinions on political matters when that is not the constitutional position.

Only recently, some people have been writing about how the establishment is fed up of President Zardari. Even if it is, why should that be the basis for President Zardari’s ouster or diminishing of his powers? Shouldn’t “the establishment” deal with whatever is its constitutional responsibility and stay away from other matters?

Pakistan’s political discussion or reporting is not based on facts. It is dominated by opinions and allegations. So overwhelming is the culture of intimidation that anyone who tries to draw attention to inconvenient facts or introduce another set of opinions is immediately called a foreign agent. The Aslam Beg-Hamid Gul mindset that has dominated Pakistan since the death of General Ziaul Haq has not contributed to real openness.

Hillary Clinton has raised some pertinent questions and I hope that we will keep asking some questions ourselves. Why should we not listen to those Pakistanis who have an opinion different than this overwhelming majority brainwashed into a certain worldview? Why should I get hateful emails each time I express an opinion different to that of the pro-Taliban and the pro-Jihad mob in Pakistan?

Why any of Pakistan’s officials should be denigrated as unpatriotic or described as foreign agents just for saying that in their opinion there is another point of view than what our anchors and the students at Government College Lahore reeled off during the Hillary Clinton visit?

It is time for a genuine debate in Pakistan on all issues. Get out the facts, discuss them and then reach any conclusion or opinion you like. But if we are to resent the United States on the wrong assumption that it is paying Kyrgyzstan $700 million for one air base while we are being given less then that resentment is just plain wrong. Can we have a discussion based on facts and not on labels, abuse and outright propaganda?

Pakistan Army is fighting a tough adversary in South Waziristan, who may have been propped up to pose a mortal threat to our country by our traditional enemy. But some politicians, right-wing TV anchors and columnists are doing little to mobilise public support for our troops in the middle of a war. Instead, they remain focused on attacking the elected government, fomenting civil military disagreements, exacerbating anti-Americanism and raising issues that divide the nation instead of uniting it.

The events of the last few days are similar to the circumstances created between 1988 and 1990 when Ziaul Haq era Generals Aslam Beg and Hamid Gul plotted what they considered to be a new strategy for an Islamist ideological Pakistani nationalism. During that period, Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) was born with covert funds meant for national security; Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto was called a national security risk and accused of being pro-American; Interior Minister Aitzaz Ahsan was alleged to have given the names of Sikh separatists in India to the Indian government; Foreign Minister Sahibzada Yaqub Khan was described by General Beg as lacking spine to stand up to America; the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States was charged with protecting American rather than Pakistani interests.

If someone wants to understand the similarity of today’s mood with that of the 1988-1990 period, here is an extract from an article by Hendrik Hertzberg, the editor of The New Republic who was one of the international observers of the 1990 election, in the magazine issue dated November 19, 1990.

“I observed a rally. This was two nights before the election in Rawalpindi, a small city near Islamabad, Pakistan’s hideous, sterile capital. It was put on by the Islamic Democratic Alliance, known as the IJI from its Urdu initials, a coalition of rightist and religious parties united by antagonism toward Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party.”

According to Hertzberg, the speakers at the rally said the PPP of old once had great leaders, now it is led by an incompetent woman, who takes instructions from Washington and Moscow! Those who have sold out to India are traitors! (The crowd chanted in response: Traitors! Traitors!) Startlingly, the speaker pronounced names that needed no translation: Salman Rushdie, Mark Siegel, Stephen Solarz. They are friends of Israel, they are friends of India, but are they friends of Pakistan?”

Then, in what has startling echoes of the utterances of the ghairat lobby today, one IJI speaker was quoted as saying, American senators, you can keep your aid! You can keep Benazir Bhutto! You are conspiring against Islam! An Islamic resurgence is sweeping through Central Asia it may not be good for British shopkeepers or American businessmen hungry for the Russian market, but it is good for Muslims!

Of course, twenty years later that Islamic resurgence in Central Asia that was to make that region Pakistan’s backyard has yet to materialise. But that does not prevent our politicians, TV anchors and columnists from continuing in the tone of the IJI and its Strategic Defiance midwives. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) in its report on the 1990 elections also commented on the extreme nationalist jingoism that had been unleashed on Pakistan by the IJI. According to the report, members of the IJI criticised not only Bhutto’s abilities but also her right as a woman to rule a Muslim state. The most contentious element of the election campaign, and perhaps the most successful from the IJI perspective, was the IJI’s strategy of tying Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto to the United States and the so-called Indo-Zionist lobby in the US. The lobby was portrayed as having close ties to India and Israel and opposing Pakistan’s development of a nuclear capability.

The report further pointed out the lies that were fed to the Pakistani public. It said the Bhuttos were accused of selling-out Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The IJI ran a nationalistic campaign and repeatedly accused Bhutto of being unpatriotic. The former prime minister was called the conduit for American influence into Pakistan and her efforts to influence Congress on her behalf were criticised. Articles were also published in the government-controlled papers alleging her links to India and other reportedly anti-Pakistan groups. One of these articles was based on what was evidently a forged letter from Bhutto to a staff member of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

As similar language about the Kerry-Lugar legislation amounting to surrender of national interests is currently being used and patriotic Pakistanis are being called traitors for supporting closer ties between Pakistan and the US in Pakistan’s interest, it is important to recall the painful tragedy of the 1988 to 1990 period. Like now, in the 1988-1990 period too rumours and whispers found their way into news stories and were amplified by journalists claiming to speak for the establishment. What did Pakistan get out of the Beg-Gul philosophy of strategic defiance and exaggerated anti-Americanism? Ten years of very weak civilian rule with governments changing frequently and often amid allegations of corruption or strategic failure; a disastrous civil war in Afghanistan that resulted in a Taliban victory, which in turn resulted in American military intervention after 9/11; the unmitigated military disaster of the Kargil episode; and finally nine years of General Musharraf’s rule.

The claims of not wanting American aid in 1990 were based on the miscalculation that America needed Pakistan more and would, therefore, overturn its decisions after a few demonstrations, speeches and statements in Pakistan. That did not happen. From 1990 to 2001, Pakistan remained under US aid sanctions. We survived and managed to conduct nuclear tests in 1998 but we did not attain the high economic growth rate that would have been possible if our relations with US had remained steady. And our military’s conventional capability remains severely handicapped because of lack of consistent US inputs. Most importantly, Pakistan is on the periphery of globalization while its rival, India, has gained most over the last 20 years in becoming a key international player. In the current round also, the civilian government and especially President Asif Ali Zardari is being attacked for not taking a harder line against the US. What if after some initial engagement, the US walks away from Afghanistan again and we get left with no Kerry-Lugar and just the slogans given to us by our assorted politicians, TV anchors and columnists? Pakistanis must think long and hard and remember their own recent history before falling into the trap of repeating that sad history.

Sadiq Saleem is a businessman and part-time analyst based in Toronto, Canada. sadiqsaleemca@gmail.com

Now that the orchestrated furore over the KLB aid package for Pakistan is diminishing, it is important to analyze how the country was driven into a frenzy and US-Pakistan relations put at risk by Pakistan’s “Ghairat lobby” and those whose hatred for President Zardari and the current government exceeds their love for Pakistan.

The real mystery of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill is not its conditions or who may originally have proposed or recommended them. The conditions that have been the cause of much shouting and screaming were included in the House of Representatives’ version of the bill that was passed on June 11, 2009. That bill was widely reported in the domestic and international media. If the reporting requirements in the bill were insulting, or if they infringed upon Pakistan’s national sovereignty, why did not the assorted columnists, politicians and right-wing TV anchor persons make the same noise about these conditions in June that they have been making of late?

Indeed, appropriate reaction in June might have caused those in Congress who want to improve relations with Pakistan but also do not trust Pakistanis to revisit their attitude. The latest furore brought us an explanatory statement, which the Supreme Court of the United States says, has the force of law. Some timely “hungama” in June might have resulted in some actual amendments.

There is something very suspicious about coincidences that link otherwise unconnected people. For example, the day President Obama announced before the Friends of Democratic Pakistan summit in New York sitting next to President Zardari that the US Senate had passed the Kerry Lugar consolidated bill, some of the TV anchors, who 48 hours later turned against the bill, described it as a major achievement for Pakistan. For those who like me believe in checking facts, I would suggest a search for the TV shows of September 24.

The first suggestion that there might be something wrong with the bill came in the form of an article on September 27 by a writer who has been claiming since President Zardari’s election that the establishment hates him and that his days as president are numbered. It was this article that got everyone in the country emotionally charged and became the basis for distortions on TV talk shows. Until then, there was no one who had found a challenge in this bill to Pakistan’s sovereignty or our ubiquitous Ghairat. It seems that the internet connections of the Ghairat lobby were dead between June and the first week of October; otherwise, the original Berman bill with its offensive language would have been read and criticized much earlier. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill was approved in its final form by the US House of Representatives on October 1.

Moreover, most of the conditions in the bill had been included in the Annual US aid Bills since 2001. It turned out that among the many things that were insulting for Pakistan in these preceding bills was a reference to Azad Kashmir as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and a virtual acknowledgement that Kashmir was a settled matter because the US government was required to tell Congress that infiltration across the Line of Control into India had stopped.

The question arises why any of the initiators of the recent debate, including columnists, TV anchors and some MNAs from the martial belt, never found out about these past conditionalities and failed to describe them as a surrender of sovereignty or national disaster? Why didn’t the echo chamber of these views on the TV talk shows ever discuss US aid conditionality in preceding years? That there was an echo chamber in the past few weeks is obvious: The man who writes the story or column comes on TV to push his view, the MNA who is also a columnist is the first one to be contacted by the TV anchor who has been railing against the bill, the parliamentarians are quoting the columnist and the anchor, and so on.

Quite clearly, the powers that be were content with receiving aid between 2002 and 2008 without worrying too much about words that did not have teeth. Non-binding findings of the US Congress certainly do not compromise national sovereignty any more than Nawaz Sharif travelling to Washington on July 4, 1999, to get President Clinton’s help in securing a climb-down from Kargil. Indeed, as Major (R) Kamran Shafi has rightly pointed out in an article, since the days of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, there was a willingness to be accommodating of US condescension especially while men in uniform ran Pakistan.

Throughout the orchestrated controversy none of the fuss creators explained to the people that the Kerry-Lugar Bill is not a treaty between Pakistan and the US where all words and phrases have to be agreed upon by Pakistani stake-holders. It is an American law. The Pakistani Foreign Office has already pointed out in a much less publicized news story in this very newspaper that the Pakistani Embassy in Washington had sent as many as 35 telegrams that got circulated to all stakeholders, describing every stage of the Congressional process relating to the Kerry-Lugar aid package.

Why, then, did none of the columnists, anchors and parliamentarians attacking the bill make any effort to write a summary of US Congressional procedures, seek interviews with American constitutional experts or conduct studies of conditionalities in the bills, relating to other US allies (including that very special American ally Israel) to see if this bill was particularly insulting or just represented business as usual for the American Congress?

The Mystery for someone like me, sitting at a distance but with my heart in Pakistan, is how push button words such as sovereignty and honour, coupled with absolute disinformation made their way into identical articles, similar news stories, comparable talk show ranting and emotional statements by some political players.

Another mystery is how leaders of the PML-N and PML-Q both discovered American intrusiveness objectionable almost simultaneously. The two Muslim Leagues followed the Jamaat-e-Islami’s lead as if on cue.

The PML-Q had little leg to stand on, having been in power throughout the period when much more insulting language and intrusive conditions had been inserted into aid packages that went through Congress on an annual basis between 2002 and 2008. The PML-N also had shown no interest in turning down American aid when the offer for this aid was made by Senator Biden and when the House version of the bill was first passed on June 11, 2009. What changed during this period?

Even more mysterious is the manner in which the entire Ghairat lobby in the media, the Zardari haters, select parliamentarians of the two PML factions and the Jamaat-e-Islami strangely discovered extracts from the book by Pakistans Ambassador to the United States that was written and acclaimed 4-5 years ago in a different civil-military environment. Now, what are the chances of Munawar Hasan, Faisal Saleh Hayat, Tariq Azim, Chaudhry Nisar Ali, Khwaja Asif and the right wing TV anchors and Marvi Memon deciding to read the same 5-year old book at the same time? How many books these people read regularly any way and how often do they read the same books?

The first story suggesting a link between Kerry-Lugar conditions and Husain Haqqani’s book ‘Pakistan between Mosque and Military’ was simultaneously run by three totally unconnected reporters–one based in Washington DC, one in New Jersey and one in New York–all on the same day. The next morning, even before bookshops could have opened in Islamabad, copies of the book were floating around the National Assembly and among talk show anchors. Who briefed them all or drew their attention to the book? Why didn’t any journalist care to research what opinions were expressed by reviewers of the book that included one of the current condemners and the foreign policy adviser of the PML-N, who all heaped praise when the book was first published.

So how did so many unconnected people suddenly discover the flaws in the Kerry Lugar Berman Bill, managed to tie it up with a book written five years ago and successfully spread rumours about how the Pakistan Government rather than the US Congress wrote the bill? In the middle of all the noise came the dangerous story about the existence of tapes that confirmed senior Pakistani officials urging Americans to put in anti-military conditions in the bill. Where are these tapes and why hasn’t the reporter who claims to know about them put them on his TV show? Now that is a mystery that needs to be solved. What then was the objective behind the entire ruckus? Was it aimed at undermining civil-military relations or putting US-Pakistan ties under strain or both? Conspiracy theories anyone?