I have just graduated from the kind of university that guarantees a good rishta but armed with a degree that my parents warned me about. It is time to go back home and become a difference-maker since my student visa only allows me to work for three months in the US. Enough time has been spent in the college library to enable me to bluff my way through an interview by name-checking Paul Collier and William Russell Easterly. Sure, the international development organisation that hired me isn’t too much like my sophomore-year coop but even if I am not changing the world, at least, I am not harming it, right? And I will totally be the rebel in the office by going to work in flip-flops every day.

The first year is a slog. No one told me that learning a foreign language would be a job requirement. Sure, the rhythm and cadences of this language are similar to English but I never realised any written or spoken dialect could have so many adverbs. There is enhancement everywhere. I spend a lot of my time on enhancing my facilitation skills. I write a report on livelihood-enhancement programmes and my awareness is enhanced through workshops and training sessions.

My goals in life are slowly changing. I am no longer the Yogi Bear who will take a dump in the Bretton Woods I. Instead, I am now writing reports that will instruct people more important than me, or as I like to call it, promoting knowledge-enhancement. These reports will eventually trickle their way down and make Pakistan an MIC, or a middle-income country. I am doing my bit by buying MIC products — those that are made in China.

All my kind work and good deeds pay off and I am offered a lucrative post at an international lending institute. My 18-year-old version would have called me a sell-out but that’s okay because Bob Dylan once appeared in a Gap advertisement. I am going to the belly of the beast as an insurgent, not as an embed. My first proposal is an instant chart-topper on the Hot 100 USAID countdown. I want $25 million to be spent on an extension of the Gomal Zam Dam in South Waziristan. The extra electricity this will generate should be enough to ensure that there are no power outages during the Champions League final. It may even irrigate the pot plant I am growing in my cupboard. Some busybody newspaper editorialist wonders how many people this project will displace and how many rivers in the area will dry up. I tell him I do not have the exact figures at hand but it does not matter since everyone there is a part of the Taliban and the rivers will be refilled with the tears of those bearded fanatics’ kids.

Despite my paradigm-shifting work in sustainability, I still feel the occasional pang of existential regret. Now well into my 40s, I take a leap of faith and quit my job after hearing an inspirational TED talk by Jacqueline Novogratz. I am now my own man, a free agent beholden to nobody. I am an independent development consultant, being paid $400 an hour to suggest drones will be far more effective if their delivery systems launch bombs and action figures of Captain America.

I ease myself to sleep in the company of a cocktail mixed with flavoured vodka from the US embassy supplies. Yet another day has gone by, where I have stuck it to ‘The Man’. And to think mommy told me I would never enhance myself if I majored in sociology.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 10^th, 2012.

In 1936, a man named Mirza Ali Khan launched what may have been the most successful armed anti-colonial rebellion in British India. Khan, better known as the Faqir of Ipi, had a reputation for saintliness but that was soon overshadowed by his exploits as an insurgent. That year, a 15-year-old Hindu girl married a considerably older Pakhtun man in a tempestuous love affair. Since the girl, who had the moniker Islam Bibi bestowed on her was a minor, her wishes bore little truck with the British and she was returned to her family. Khan, who was from Waziristan, took this as an incitement against the Pakhtun tribes and launched a revolt that was able to withstand British military expeditions thanks to unorthodox guerrilla tactics.

At the time, Khan was a legend for his military exploits; now he barely exists in the general consciousness. This may be because, unlike the radical Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar, Khan is a figure less attuned to modern sensibilities. Sure, he was an anti-colonial figure on a par with any other, but his movement was spurred by a marriage that would now be seen as illegitimate. He preached a version of Islam that would be disdained as distinctly Taliban-ian and had no compunctions in allying with the Afghan government or the Axis powers during the Second World War. Khan never reconciled himself to the idea of Pakistan and even declared himself president of the territory he inhabited after Partition. Simply put, being right on the central question of his time — the presence of the colonial British in the subcontinent — was not enough to make him an undisputed hero.

This brings us to the various militant factions fighting under the Taliban rubric. Stipulating from the start that the inhuman tactics of the Taliban are not to be condoned, it is instructive to compare it with the Faqir of Ipi for the way it fuses anti-imperial ideology with its depiction of itself as a religious vanguard.

Our need to instantly label the Taliban as a uniquely reactionary force that has no roots in history is undercut by the existence of past Pakhtun movements, like that of Mirza Ali Khan. Just as the Taliban use suicide bombings as a weapon, Khan’s men were accused of castrating those they fought; both saw themselves as the last, best hope of saving Islam; and the British colonisers have been replaced by the imperialistic Americans and their predator drones.

We need to acknowledge the strain of religious nationalism that exists in both and realise that while we may look upon that of Khan’s with detached understanding, we would never extend the same courtesy to the Taliban.

But to do so is important — remembering once again that this in no way implies support for the Taliban’s tactics — to dispel the ahistorical impression that the Taliban are an unprecedented evil. The natural human tendency to egotistically believe that what is happening right now is so very unique as to render history as a mere prologue leads to support measures, like military operations and US drone strikes that we would not consider otherwise.

As for the Faqir of Ipi, after Partition, he gradually faded into irrelevance although not before the Pakistan Army fought his men in Razmak (in one of those ironies history loves so much, the army brigade was led by one Ayub Khan). His pose as the saviour of Islam lost its sheen once Pakistan actually came into existence. Such is history. When a group — no matter how menacing it seems — loses its reason for existence, it tends to slowly disappear.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 19^th, 2012.

Think back to a more innocent time in Pakistan, say around 2007 or so. Terrorism may have been at its peak then, but all the right-thinking people knew who the enemy was: the Taliban and its enablers in the media, who spun wild theories to explain how everything was the fault of the Americans. The US –– the conspiracy theorists somehow expected us to believe –– was using robot flying saucers to attack us. Ludicrous as it sounded, these deranged people claimed that hordes of beefy Blackwater mercenaries were roaming the country. Clearly, no serious and sane person was going to fall for any of this jihadist propaganda.

One by one, we got confirmation that drone attacks were real, that the US did indeed have a lot of private security contractors working in the shadows and, in the effort to catch Osama bin Laden, even ran a fake vaccination programme. Welcome to Pakistan, where even the most feverish anti-US conspiracy theories turn out to be, well, true.

Those who took the pragmatic position that in a fight between the Taliban and the US, it would be wise to pick the latter’s side, should have had to reexamine all their core beliefs –– if not when drone attacks became a matter of public knowledge, then at least when Raymond Davis was revealed to be a spook. But we’re in a war, dammit, and picking a side is vital, no matter how much we mocked Dubya when he insisted on the same formulation. Thus, you have Pakistan’s liberals still denouncing the conspiracy theorists but having nary a negative word for those who are so adept at proving that the conspiracies actually exist.

Always beware of the person who is more willing to change his or her arguments than admit to a change of mind. So drones have now become the most effective way to kill militants, legality and scores of civilian deaths be damned. What’s wrong with a fake vaccination or two if it leads to the capture of Osama? And as for Raymond Davis, let’s just never talk about him again.

Many of those who seem more interested in being apologists for destructive US policies, mean well by concentrating on defeating the Taliban through strongly-penned columns and ignoring American transgressions. But what they are indulging in is propaganda, which by its very nature is designed to obfuscate, not illuminate.

The propagandists include among their ranks, obviously, the Zaid Hamids and Ali Azmats of the world. What grates is that some of their most ferocious critics seem to be stuck in the same mindset. Justifying desired policy outcomes becomes the goal, and facts are little more than an inconvenient hindrance that can easily be brushed away. Thus, you get someone like Farhat Taj arguing –– with a complete lack of verifiable evidence –– that citizens of Fata actually support being attacked by US drones and that the drones kill far more militants (or suspected militants) than civilians.

Here’s a simple rule that propagandists on both sides may want to follow: it’s possible to be both anti-US and anti-Taliban at the same time. Even better, sloganeering in support of a cause may not be the most effective form of argument. If it is absolutely essential to make a case in favour of one side, inconvenient facts should not be brushed away. We desperately need an honest debate. That we don’t have one is equally the fault of both sides.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2012.

Nearly 10 years ago, thanks to an extraordinary pile of rejection letters, I had to decide between the two universities that were willing to tolerate my presence. The choice should have been an easy one; the University of Chicago had a greater reputation for academic rigour and outranked Northwestern University by any conceivable metric. Yet, for some ineffable reason, I opted for the latter. At the time it seemed like the most important decision I would ever have to make. Now, the place from which I received my undergraduate education barely merits a single line on my resume.

As the brouhaha over the Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) rankings of Pakistani universities continues, it may be worthwhile to keep in mind that the university one attends plays only a small part in his or her future. But, since rankings are now in vogue, at least they should be done right and that is where the HEC falters.

The biggest problem with the HEC’s rankings is that they seem less like an attempt to rank the best colleges in the country and more of a post-facto rationalisation of the commission’s misguided policies. For some reason, during the Musharraf era, the HEC decided that what the country desperately needed was lots of people getting doctorates — no matter how they were obtained — and a glut of research papers, no matter what their quality was. As with everything else during Musharraf’s era, this was a policy that seemed smart until you actually looked closely at it. The results were predictable. A rash of research papers that no one has ever read and that no one will ever cite were published in journals of disrepute. Fake PhDs and plagiarism proliferated. Now, the HEC has given a full 40 per cent of its ranking points to research, thereby giving a higher rating to those universities which played the HEC’s game during the 2000s.

If the HEC had not given such inordinate attention to research, its rankings would be severely limited. Upon studying the HEC’s rankings system more closely, there are many important factors that are missing. We do not learn, for instance, anything about the students at these universities, but rather, only about those who teach them. Knowing what percentage of students graduate from a university and how many of those graduates get employment should also be a part of the basic minimum criterion for university rankings. Equally useful would be information on how many students are enrolled at the university on a scholarship, since one of the prime functions of a university should be to facilitate social mobility. In the HEC’s defence, it is possible that such data is not collected by universities, but in that case, it should have held off publishing rankings that are at best misleading and at worst completely useless.

It was also disheartening to note that the chairperson of the HEC, Dr Javaid Laghari, in a column published in this paper titled “Ranking universities” (March 1), defended the HEC rankings, rubbishing the ‘pop culture’ — whatever that is — on campuses saying that, “organising musical evenings, marketing shows, career placements fairs, workshops, guest lectures, model UN, etc does not aid in the global ranking of a university.” A university, it should go without saying, is not just a graduate mill and the non-academic facilities it provides need to be a part of its reputation.

The truth is that there is no one set of rankings that would satisfy everyone. Rankings are inherently gimmicky and designed to spur argument rather than illumination. Why the regulator of higher education in the country would decide to enter the debate and that, too, in such a lacklustre manner, is a question that is about as inexplicable as the rankings themselves.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2012.

When I was a kid, I loved the proudly racist British TV show “Mind Your Language”, and not only because stereotype-based humour is so uproarious to a six-year-old. What truly made it an instant classic was that it featured a Pakistani, who always wore a Jinnah cap and mined canned laughter by mispronouncing English words. Back then, any mention of Pakistan anywhere in the West was a cause of celebration, no matter how humiliating the reference may be. The snake charmers and yogis of yesteryear have been replaced by computer nerds and gas station attendants, but that’s Hollywood for you: always reducing foreign-looking people to the most reductive character possible. The real problem comes when Pakistanis buy into the same game, actively striving to gain Western recognition or, for those who follow a more mercenary mantra, Western money.

It is not surprising, then, that Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is the first Pakistani film-maker to receive the kind of international attention an Oscar win guarantees. Her documentaries all perform the kabuki dance that brings forth international funding, distribution and publicity. From the repression of Afghan women to the radicalisation caused by the Taliban right up to Saving Face, which ties in well with Western efforts to highlight the oppression of women in Pakistan, Sharmeen’s documentaries fuel the narrative that has been set by the West for Pakistan. Unless you believe that the US government funds work only out of a pure love of culture, the fact that she has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the US (although not for Saving Face) only shows how useful they consider these kinds of documentaries.

But this is not meant to be a personal attack on Sharmeen. The topics she chooses to concentrate on are all worthy of attention and have not been dreamed up by the West to justify military aggression. It is the consequences of the power enjoyed by western money and approval that needs to be critiqued.

The western influence means that only certain types of injustices will receive the international attention that has been bestowed on Children of the Taliban and Saving Face. Produce anything on militancy and at the very worst, you will get a pat on the back. Try and produce a documentary on, say, the victims of drone attacks or labour abuses and make sure you stock up on battery-powered torches and imperishable food items as you wait in the dark for NGO cheques and gold statuettes.

The pernicious influence of the West on Pakistan extends far beyond cinema. Anyone who has worked at a local NGO, after Pakistan suddenly became relevant again, will tell you how the gold spigots were turned on — but only if funding proposals hit all the right notes. Keywords like ‘Taliban’, ‘deradicalisation’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ have a Pavlovian effect on the likes of USAID. Once again, this is not meant to imply that such causes aren’t worthy of funding; simply that they crowd out other issues that should be as much of a priority for Pakistan, even if they are of no use to Western donors.

We also seem to have decided that our image, as projected in the West, is one of the most pressing matters currently facing the country. That we are in the news for an Oscar win is a matter for rejoicing, partly because now we’ll get a momentary break from stories about the latest outbreak of violence. And such feel-good stories will also ensure further foreign funding, more bouts of self-congratulation and more awards. Thus the vicious cycle remains unbroken.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2012.

Here’s a metric for judging the effectiveness of the Supreme Court: count how many enclaves it has breached. The more areas it uses its suo motu jurisdiction, the better a job it’s doing. In just one day last week week, the Supreme Court managed to enrage the perpetual martyrs of the PPP by the creation of a possibility whereby Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani could be convicted on contempt charges and hence lose his office. It then followed that up by forcing the intelligence agencies to produce prisoners, already found not guilty in a court of law, that were under illegal detention. Previous incarnations of the Supreme Court either knew they had to provide back-up to those in power, whether civilian or military, or learned to do so soon enough. For the Iftikhar Chaudhry-led Supreme Court, taking on the de-facto and de-jure rulers of the country is simply called Monday.

Those who have a vested interest in a less active Supreme Court need to continually reboot their arguments to explain why the judiciary needs to be checked. Argument 1.0: the Court is simply doing the military’s dirty work for it and hounding the PPP government. Now that the Court is going after the intelligence agencies with a considerable amount of zeal and has even dusted the mothballs of Asghar Khan’s petition from the 1990s accusing the ISI of funding political parties, that particular line of criticism lacks the vital quality of having any truth to it.

So it’s time to trot out Argument 2.0, where enough nit-picking can hopefully obscure how the anti-Supreme Court/pro-PPP forces are essentially picking at straws. This mode of attack, still in the beta mode, holds that the Supreme Court humiliated a duly-elected prime minister by hauling him up before the court but would never do the same to the chief of army staff or the director-general of the ISI. First, instead of celebrating the fact that we finally have a court that can force a sitting prime minister to obey its judgments, we are instead told that it must show greater deference to the prime minister’s office. This also ignores the fact that Gilani has been ignoring the Supreme Court for many months and only now has he been forced to explain himself.

What the PPP has to decide is what’s more important: continuing to enjoy the trappings of power unencumbered by trivial matters like the constitution or chipping away at the military’s power. The party has abdicated huge swathes of governance to the military as the price of continuing to keep its government intact. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is doing the dangerous work of trying to actually make the military accountable to the law too.

Only a willful or ignorant misunderstanding of what democracy means could lead one to conclude that the Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds by taking on the prime minister. The Supreme Court is meant to be the final arbiter of interpreting the Constitution. If parliament doesn’t like a Supreme Court interpretation of the constitution, it doesn’t have the power to ignore it. But it can, as it did by passing the 20th Amendment, follow the process of changing the Constitution.

As welcome as this course correction in the balance of power between competing forces has been, we still have to wait and see if it will survive. Much of the court’s power is derived from the moral authority Iftikhar Chaudhry gained from taking on Musharraf. It is only after he retires in 2013 that we will found out if this shift is permanent.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2012.

Mansoor Ijaz isn’t coming, Husain Haqqani has already gone and the army is staying put. It is not too hard to spin this as a victory for the civilian set-up; for months they have warded off every army and judicial offensive and now, we are back to where we were before Mansoor Ijaz inserted himself into our dreams, Inception-style with his Financial Times op-ed. For now, at least, we can forget that we ever thought it was a good idea to affix the ubiquitous and tiresome suffix ‘gate’ to Ijaz’s infamous memo. All Yousaf Raza Gilani has to do is wait for a favourable Supreme Court verdict or write a letter to the Swiss and the PPP is sitting comfortably for the rest of the year.

A victory for civilians, democracy, the Constitution and whatever else we are supposed to hold dear in this country? Sure, to the extent that drawing the final Test match, in a series in which you are already 4-0 down, is a triumph. The PPP will now get to strut and preen and claim they held the army at bay. It’s great fodder for campaign rallies but don’t mistake it for forward progress.

It would be a bit unfair to claim that in the four years preceding Mansoor Ijaz’s centrality to the future of democracy, the PPP abdicated most of their powers to the military. But they certainly didn’t make any efforts to grab them back. Foreign policy was left as the military’s baby; the army leadership merely had to smash a piñata and extensions came pouring out. So inherent was this assumption that policy on the war on terror couldn’t be made without the top brass of the military. So-much-so, that it was left to the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, to insist that a meeting could be held without the generals present, when she visited Islamabad last year.

The military should have had the good sense to realise it had received the best of all possible outcomes. It had control of policy areas it always considered its fiefdom and its massive, untraceable budgets were approved with a civilian imprimatur, that too by a political party which has always enjoyed playing the martyr card to shore up public sympathy even as it does precious little to challenge the military.

One of the worst analogies I have heard after this civil-military stand-off was that of the army being compared to Napoleon and that it had finally met its Waterloo in Gilani. This comparison assumes that the army has actually had to give up powers other than its ability to launch a coup in the next 72 hours. Gilani and the PPP are more like the army that surrenders and then throws a couple of spitballs in the direction of the victors. It might be emotionally satisfying but it doesn’t change the outcome.

If going on the offensive rather than merely struggling to stay in power was a priority for the PPP, it would not have been so tame after May 2. This was an opportunity to fire someone of relative authority in the military and have the US behind them publicly. Rather, the ambassador to the US chose to get a middleman to make suggestions that would have been completely kosher had they been made publicly. The PPP leadership denies having anything to do with the memo and one wishes this is true since behind-the-scenes scheming with the US is morally and strategically unwise. The true tragedy is that the PPP didn’t give two dozen speeches, making the same points as the memo, and gaining an upper hand in the war that they have now decisively lost.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 3^rd, 2012.

There are few reactions more human than to have a fixed impression of someone and then be blind to anything which would seem to poke holes in that initial judgment. When having to confront the complexities of human behaviour and motivations, we prefer to retreat to that which we are most comfortable with. This is particularly true in politics, where ideology can be an overriding factor that negates logic and good sense.

Take, for example, how Mansoor Ijaz’s column in The Financial Times was instantly dismissed as the delusional ramblings of a notorious self-promoter whose desire for self-aggrandisement topped any honesty he may have possessed. Knowing what he knew about the man and his tendency to place himself squarely at the centre of historic events, it seemed rational to discount what he had to say. We may not know yet exactly how true his claims were, but given that most had rubbished even his account of having talked to Husain Haqqani about a possible coup, it turned out that this was a man who deserved a second hearing.

And yet, so strong is the urge to cling to our first thoughts about a person, that even now his critics use every little bit of information about Ijaz that emerges to try and further discredit him. He appeared in a music video surrounded by half-naked women wrestlers? Well, that doesn’t mean he’s a liar; simply that his blood is as red as any other man’s.

Why is Ijaz hated with so much vitriol? The answer lies partly in the fact that he has hardly been the most sympathetic figure around but it has even more to do with ideology. Here was a man seen as such a potent threat to the future of democracy in the country that he had to be discredited, even though none of us actually know what transpired between him and Haqqani. Suddenly one saw the strange sight of journalists, whose very job is to uncover information that is not in the public domain, criticising Ijaz for opening his trap in the first place. Mocking him for his delusions of grandeur is similarly refusing to take subsequent facts into account as we now know that he had access to relatively high-level officials from both the Pakistan and US government.

On the flip side, Aitzaz Ahsan, thanks to his heroics during the lawyers’ movement, can do no wrong anymore. If he says the prime minister correctly refused to ask the Swiss authorities to reopen the case that had been closed thanks to the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), well, then that must be the gospel truth. Aitzaz has a duty to use the best possible defence for his client, but that doesn’t mean we should accept its legitimacy uncritically. The fact is that the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the president’s immunity and reopening the Swiss case doesn’t necessarily mean stepping on the president’s constitutional protections. Now that the NRO has been declared illegal, the Supreme Court has every right to demand the case be reopened and defendants without immunity face the music.

None of this is to suggest that Ijaz is truthful in everything he says or that Aitzaz is purposely employing a dishonest defence. Rather we should try not to be so strident in our views or so fixed in our impression of people that it blinds us to alternative possibilities.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2012. 

1.    They’re no longer called barber shops. Apparently just calling yourself a salon allows you to add a 30% margin to your prices.

2.    The back-of-the-head mirror glance. After the haircut, the barber always flashes a mirror and asks me if I’m happy with the way he has cut parts of my hair that I otherwise would never be able to see. The first person who tells them, “No, I’m not satisfied” deserves a ticket straight to heaven, which is probably where he’ll be headed after the barber goes all Edward Scissorhands on him for the rebuke.

3.    The magazine selection. Why, in a men’s barber shop, would you keep only men’s fitness magazines? What’s a guy gotta do to get an FHM or Playboy?

4.    The disapproving sniff. Yes, my hair is a mess. That’s why I’m here.

5.    “How would you like your hair cut?” Well, I’d like it cut really short so I don’t have to see you again for six months.

6.    Becoming a captive audience. I’m stuck in that chair until the barber tells me it’s time to go home. Until then, I have to listen to every inane thing he says and I’m afraid if I don’t give a sufficiently interesting reply he’ll nick me.

7.    The “blade or machine” question. It can be really hard to decide if I want to risk getting AIDS or have my neck tickled by a buzzing machine.

8.    The massage. I know how dirty my hair is and now I have the barber who has been handling my hair for the last 30 minutes ask if I’d like a neck message. Not with those hands, buddy.

9.    The risk of murder. Here’s an enclosed space filled with sharp scissors and there isn’t a security guard in sight.

10.  The guys with the photographs. Dude, just because you’re showing an underpaid man a picture of Brad Pitt doesn’t mean he can make you look like him.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 22^nd, 2012.

The PPP and its supporters have pulled off a nifty trick. Somehow they managed, with a straight face, to equate themselves to the system of democracy. Removing the PPP government from power, or just holding it accountable, even if it is done in a constitutional manner, is being portrayed as a crime against the democratic system.

The latest outrage against Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is that he is in danger of being held in contempt by the Supreme Court. What is supposedly scandalous about this, in the minds of the government’s defenders, is that the court is purposely targeting the PPP at the behest of the army. Dangerous though it may be to try and read the minds of the justices, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this criticism is true.

The obvious reply to this would be, “So what?” It is not the intentions of the justices that should be subjected to scrutiny so much as the soundness of their opinions, conveniently provided to us in written form. And there the Supreme Court clearly has the upper hand since, in refusing to comply with the Court’s orders in the National Reconciliation Order (NRO) case, Gilani can clearly be charged with contempt.

The Contempt of Court Ordinance of 1998 is quite clear on the matter. With regards to jurisdiction it states: “Every superior court shall have the power to punish a contempt committed in relation to it,” and a person can be deemed to have been guilty of contempt if he is diverting the course of justice. Unlike the president, Gilani doesn’t even have the constitutional protection of immunity to fall back on.

Legally, the Supreme Court has a solid case against the prime minister. Though this may be anathema to all the PPP defenders who have latched on to the democratic bandwagon like leeches, sucking out of it all the blood it needs to function, the contempt proceedings should be welcomed by all those who genuinely want our democratic experiment to succeed.

The Supreme Court may be the only constitutional check on the voracious appetite of those who have been voted into power. One of the few roadblocks placed on the government is the court’s role as the final and sole arbiter of the Constitution. The last time a sitting prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, was held in contempt by the Supreme Court, he simply set his goons loose and got himself a new court. That the balance of power has shifted in favour of the Court since then should be welcomed, no matter how positive a view we have of the current prime minister or how much we loath the current judges and their alleged allegiances.

There is also some moral satisfaction, or at least a bout of gloating, to be gained from the PPP being hoisted on the NRO petard. Political memories in Pakistan tend to be short, so it is worth remembering that the NRO was designed only to allow the PPP to share power with an army dictator, at the expense of the PML-N. The NRO was bashed by the very same people who now don’t want the PPP to suffer the consequences of its illegality.

To support the constitutionality of the Supreme Court’s actions does not mean, to preempt a likely criticism, that I support the army’s campaign against the PPP. It is possible to be against the illegality of a military coup while finding nothing to object to in a Supreme Court finally asserting itself. Their aims might be the same but by staying within the confines of the law, the Supreme Court may end up strengthening the system in the long run.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2012.