Pakistan: Big Nation, Small Leaders

Pakistan: Big Nation, Small Leaders

Standing next to Pakistan’s rising geopolitical challenges, most Pakistani politicians appear pygmies. The federal sports minister boycotts the Olympic torch relay in Islamabad because he hates Musharraf. The new prime minister chooses the same ceremony to lecture on democracy. The Pakistani military is condemned for executing coups.  But no one is bothered when ambitious judges want the judiciary to do the same. Anyone who believes this is an epical battle for good-versus-evil needs to take a good hard look at doomsday video games, the last bastion for such epics.

By AHMED QURAISHI

Tuesday, 22 April 2008.

WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Standing next to Pakistan’s rising geopolitical challenges, most Pakistani politicians appear pygmies. Take the federal minister for sports, for example. China overrides opposition in international circles to letting the Olympic torch pass through our country. Yet the honorable minister refuses to receive the torch because he hates the president.

Now, our president, Mr. Musharraf, plays a deft hand in the Great Game by inviting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [read: China and Russia] into Afghanistan to break NATO’s monopoly.  Yet our honorable Prime Minister picks the torch relay ceremony –China’s most important news event of the day— as a venue to remind ‘everyone’ [read: Musharraf] that the new ‘democratic’ government will have the upper hand even in sports.  One Chinese translator appeared confused at how to make this relevant to the officials who came down from Beijing. Hopefully the translators did not consider this equivalent to rubbing salt. They’ve already heard enough ‘democratic’ sermons from the Americans.

It is admirable that Mr. Shahbaz Sharif personally visited the family of the poor man in Lahore killed earlier in police custody.  But how to explain the absence of rationality in the first action of Punjab’s stopgap new chief minister who announced he was turning his own secretariat building, built by his predecessor, into a university?   The building housed offices previously scattered all over the expanding metropolis.  Isn’t this blind political revenge?  Punjab’s new administration would have scored some badly needed points for civilized politics in this country had it said something nice about at least one good thing that Punjab’s former chief minister did, like launching Rescue 1122.

But the biggest failures of reason, civility and common sense continue to be reserved for the ‘judicial issue’.  Anyone who believes this is some kind of an epical battle for good-versus-evil needs to take a good hard look at doomsday video games, the last bastion for such epics.

Mr. Aitzaz Ahsan hijacked the genuine activism of the legal community …

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