Opinion All the president’s missteps

Elected governments in Pakistan come with a default setting of self-destruct; this government is no exception. The longer the impasse between the executive and the judiciary on the one hand and between the executive and the military on the other continues,the harder it will become for the government to stay put in a state of suspension. By alienating opposition leader Nawaz Sharif,who was willing as late as May 2 (the day Osama bin Laden was hunted down by the US) to support the government in bringing the errant khakis to book for their intelligence and military failure,President Asif Zardari has worked hard to put himself in the dock. Zardari has only proved himself wrong by doling out service extensions to the army chief and his chief spy,hoping that doing so would ward off the threat to his government.

Mansoor Ijaz,the man behind the Memogate scandal,may be a hate figure in the ISI’s books but they love the allegations levelled by him that could help them pin down the elected government. It all goes back to Hussain Haqqani’s nomination by Gilani at the behest of Zardari as Pakistan’s envoy to Washington. The military top brass had opposed the appointment in 2008 tooth and nail. The intelligence spooks,since then,had been working on digging up dirt on the Zardari point man,and now they seem to have it. In Haqqani’s removal from ambassadorship,the army’s hubris has outdone Zardari’s politicking.

It is too late in the day now for PM Gilani to be taking powerplay after the pitch has been amply queered. The time to do so,with the backing of Sharif’s PML-N,which has little love lost for the army’s political manoeuvring,was back in May after bin Laden was taken out and a navy base was attacked by terrorists in Karachi. The army stood discredited in the public eye then,and had the government decided to roll a few heads it would not have had to live in fear of a coup today. But both Zardari and Gilani looked the other way; before that,the Raymond Davis episode,too,was entirely left to the military to handle and settle with the Americans.

The government for all practical purposes has been a lame duck. Now that the chips are down and the army is all set to go for the kill,the PM cuts a sorry figure going to parliament and challenging the khakis from the floor of the House. It elicits little sympathy from the public whose affairs have been grossly mismanaged and the exchequer robbed for personal pomp and ceremony in the name of governance. The Zardari-Gilani duo is arguably the most discredited entity in the public eye.

The State Bank of Pakistan’s annual report released this week paints a particularly scandalous picture of the economy: the severe and rising energy crisis has all but stalled the industrial sector; foreign investment in the economy is running dry; law-and-order is non-existent; Sindh’s agriculture lies in a shambles with millions still displaced by last monsoon’s floods; the national flag carrier and the railways have gone bankrupt; inflation runs in double digits; the rupee has plummeted,and there’s no plan to fix any of these crises.

Under the circumstances,there will be few tears shed for this democratic dispensation if it is rolled up,and that has been the tragedy of democracy in Pakistan. It has nearly always failed to address people’s needs. Worse still,there can be little hope pinned on what lies ahead; military interventions too have failed the people and thrown the country back several years every time a general has assumed power.

The writer is an editor at ‘Dawn’,Karachi,express@expressindia.com