ENGLAND, UK: The author has done an outstanding job of cherry-picking various things Imran Khan has said, removing the qualifications and contexts and then criticising the result.
I will not attempt to counter the author’s ludicrous arguments point by point, though this can easily be done. I will merely point out that the argument of Imran being the ‘lesser evil’ — that the author has so haughtily dismissed — is in fact an outstanding one. I vividly recall Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn advising people to vote for the Democratic nominee in the last two presidential elections just because the alternative was so much worse. This had absolutely nothing to do with how good or bad Barack Obama was; it was simply a necessary choice. The author has missed the basic point that decisions about voting cannot be taken in a vacuum and must take into account the ground situation.
That said, the author is welcome to vote for any other political party and endure another five years of corruption, load shedding, runaway inflation and the complete lawlessness that prevails currently.
Keyser Soze
Published in The Express Tribune, March 13th, 2012.
