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HK Burki, who never said what he did not mean and always meant what he said, had no stomach for retired bureaucrats or their uniformed version who discovered one day after retirement that they were writers. Every time a general or a secretary, recently sent home with a pension and a membership of the golf club, took new birth as a commentator, international affairs being the runaway favourite, Burki would say, “Stop that man for if he continues, it will bring the wolf one step closer to the door of yet another poorly-paid journalist.” Of course, nobody paid any attention to him, including the newspapers that printed the stuff.

Of all the generals and upper bracket bureaucrats who have retired, how many have really performed any genuine public service or come out in support of a good cause? Count and you may find that the fingers on your two hands can more than suffice. And this brings me to two retired American generals who have done something worth while with their post-army lives. The first is General Wesley Clark who is running for president and seeks the Democratic Party nomination which seems unlikely to come his way, Howard Dean being well ahead of the pack. But what matters is that here is a retired general who is making a bid to enter public service.

The other general who deserves to be saluted is one we in Pakistan know well: Anthony C Zinni of the Marine Corps who headed the US Central Command or CENTCOM, a job that brought him to Pakistan many times. He is to be saluted because he has taken a position on the unjust and wasteful Iraq war that shows courage and conviction.

General Zinni maintains that President Bush’s Iraq policy is drifting towards disaster. He says, “Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy. The longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and not altering our approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut out of the fire.” Did even one Pakistani general express any reservation about the politically and militarily disastrous Kargil war? No, not then, not now.

As early as 1998, Zinni said, “I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn’t done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now. I don’t think these questions have been thought or answered.”

General Zinni does not share the thrill expressed by the administration and those who support its policies of aggression based on the immoral doctrine of pre-emption. He says Saddam’s capture is not likely to make much of a difference. He argues that since to date America has failed to capitalise the opportunities that existed, it is not going to do so now. “I believe the only way it will work now is for the Iraqis to somehow take charge and turn things around. Our policy, strategy, tactics et cetera are still screwed up.”

At a ceremony in August last year honouring his 35 years of service, he was taken aback by Vice President Dick Cheney’s declaration that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Zinni knew it wasn’t true, or he would have known of it as CENTCOM commander. It was then that he realised that the decision to invade had already been taken. “These guys don’t understand what they are getting into,” he said at the time.

In 2000 General Zinni voted for Bush and when someone reminded him of that, he replied, “I’m not going to do anything political again — ever. I made that mistake one time.” He has also said, “I don’t know where the neocons came from — that wasn’t the platform they ran on. Somehow the neocons captured the President. They captured the vice president.”

Do we have someone like Zinni back home who is prepared to stand up and speak without being afraid of losing his pension or his plots of land?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

It has been said of George Orwell that he was the conscience of his generation. If there is one person from amongst us of whom we can say this, that person will have to be HK Burki, who died quite unexpectedly earlier this year in Islamabad. Lala Afzal used to say that Islamabad was no place for the living, but not a bad one to die in.

Before Burki died, some of his friends had been able to persuade him to put together in a collection what he had published in newspapers in the last thirty years or so. I say “persuade” because he wouldn’t hear of it, as he believed that newspaper writing was a highly perishable commodity. Only work of more enduring value should be considered for print in book form, he maintained. However, in the end he agreed and being the hard judge he was when it came to his own writing, he made a small selection. Sadly, he did not live to see the book in print, nor is it in print as I write this, though, hopefully, it may be sometime in the new year.

I devoted part of the long Thanksgiving weekend to reading through the manuscript, and found it electrifying. Nobody could write with Burki’s bite and few could match his caustic wit and his distaste for sycophants, go-getters, careerists, dishonest journalists and, last but not least, “fat and flabby generals” (the memorable phrase with which he described Gen Yahya Khan and his cronies).

The name Burki chose for the book was apt. He called it Tales of a sorry dominion: Pakistan 1947-2003. Writing about “swagger sticks in politics”, Burki said: “In order to keep the chaps in the army happy, President Ayub fattened their pay packets. At the same time, the martial law apparatus had exposed the serving officers to all kinds of temptations. For despite all their swagger, the army officers are much like their brothers out of uniform, only a lack of opportunity and strict application of army regulations had kept them out of mischief. The net result of all this was that much of the officer class not only picked up all the venal habits of the civil servants but also their arrogance, their claims to encyclopaedic expertise and, above all, infallibility.”

Of the Ayub regime he wrote, “With a combination of bull, bluster and political jargon, the junta strutted about as saviours and defenders of the faith. And our rotten ‘respectable society’ provided plenty of harlots to crown the king, serve as his courtiers and hachetmen, sing his praises and sermonise on his behalf.” When Burki’s approach and opinions were questioned in parliament by none other than Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan, Burki wrote, “As far as this writer is concerned, he will continue to discharge his duties with a clear conscience, paying due heed to the genuine rights and privileges of all politicians, but keeping above everything else, the interests and well-being of the sovereign people of Pakistan, This duty shall be performed despite all the threats and slanders by pettifogging feudals and upstart editor proprietors of the gutter press.”

Recalling the early days of The Pakistan Times which he joined in 1947 when it was housed in the same Mall building – since demolished in favour of a dark, ugly “plaza” – as the Civil and Military Gazette, he wrote, “The newsroom had no windows. It was more like a largish, airless dungeon that we entered through a small, narrow tunnel-like passage, to roast there in Lahore’s terrible summer and freeze in winter. But nobody minded. We were young and wonderfully serious about beating the hell out of the C&M Gazette.” It was Kingsley Martin, the legendary editor of The New Statesman who told Faiz Ahmed Faiz that The Pakistan Times was the best written newspaper in the subcontinent. Burki stayed with it till he was thrown out, along with Khwaja M Asaf and many others, by Gen Zia-ul-Haq in 1978.

Burki recalls his first sighting of Gen Yahya Khan on the lawns of the Pakistan Military Academy mess in Kakul where the general was “snogging one of Salman Rushdie’s aunts in full view of a large crowd of guests invited to the passing-out parade.” Whenever Burki saw the General in the years following, at home or abroad, he found that his “two hairy cheeks were the colour of a ripe tomato” and even as early as 11 in the morning, “he was well on his way.”

Burki also points out – and it is important that we all remember this – that “at his very first press conference as information minister in 1969, (Gen) Sher Ali launched a phrase which continues to poison to this day the politics of the country. Suddenly, out of the blue, this fellow traveller of Jamaat-i-Islami talked of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’. ‘General, what is this ideology?’ I asked him. ‘Will you please define it?’ ‘Look at this man! He doesn’t know the ideology of Pakistan even after 20 years,’ Sher Ali replied.”

Writing about the Simla Pact, Burki observes with sadness, “The Simla Pact was signed just after midnight of July 2-3, 1972. Five years later, almost to the day, the colonels and generals whose honour Mr Bhutto had safeguarded so resolutely, committed treason and ousted the elected prime minister. Then they organised his judicial murder with the connivance of Maulvi Mushtaq’s kangaroo court at Lahore and Anwar-ul-Haq, the chief justice of the supreme court, and his three Punjabi colleagues, including that Tarzan of integrity, Nasim Hasan Shah.”

Burki did not take orders, even from his close friend ZAB. When Benazir was elected treasurer of the Oxford Union, the principal information officer phoned to ask that Benazir’s picture and story appear on page one of The Pakistan Times. Burki asked where the request had come from. He was told “from high up”. “How high?” Burki asked. “Very high,” was the reply. Burki’s answer was typical of him. “Well then, you please tell that person that if he wants to have the pleasure of editing The Pakistan Times, he should come and sit in the editor’s chair so that he also receives the kicks in the shin.” The next day his was the only newspaper not to have Benazir on the front page.

Burki called Zia-ul-Haq (he remained out of work through Zia’s years of rule), “a smooth religious hypocrite who was in cahoots with authoritative ignorants of the extreme right.” He described Jamilur Rehman (the late information official) as “a guttersnipe from Jullandur”. Burki was not optimistic about the future. He wrote in 1994: “Now after the locust swarm has ravaged the land for a dozen years, any kind of optimism would seem the height of wishful thinking. For the plague has so blighted civil society that even the basic sense of purpose has been falsified.”

Burki liked Gen Pervez Musharraf, calling him “the best of the lot”. He was disillusioned by Benazir and never thought much of Nawaz Sharif, whom he called Zia’s truly begotten. In a column not too long before his death, he wrote “Large elements of the elite, listless in the wilderness, are pining away for yet another chance to make a killing. Their ambitions thrive in a cocoon of self-deception, and the world is passing them by. There are better ways of spending the time than wallowing in wishful thinking. An honest day’s work, for instance.”

This time of the year is what in the trade is known as slow — and often no — news time, but 2003 is different. It is not going out with a whimper but a bang, in fact several of them. First there was the unearthing and capture of Saddam Hussein who should have had the decency to put that gun he was playing with to his temple and press the trigger. Then there was the shocking attempt to blow up President Pervez Musharraf’s motorcade practically next to where the 10th Corps headquarters stands. And here in Washington, the celebrations over Saddam’s capture were somewhat marred by the surprise announcement that Secretary of State Colin Powell had undergone prostrate cancer surgery.

As if all that was not news enough, we learnt as the week was drawing to a close that President George Bush may be up but he is not running because of a bad knee. ‘Welcome to the club’, a friend who has been a member in good standing of the Bad Knee Club for several years said. Running is bad for your knees, something everyone with good or bad knees knows.

The president who used to run three to five days a week on a treadmill or the south lawn of the White House ‘ain’t runnin’ no more’ and, in fact, has had an MRI scan at the Walter Reed hospital. Are his running days over? If so, what is going to happen to what had come to be known as the 100 Degree Club?

The president used to jog in 100 degree heat at his Crawford ranch with aides and secret service agents running along to keep him company. Anyone who completed the run without suffering a heat stroke was rewarded with a T-shirt that confirmed that he was a member of the most exclusive brotherhood of the Bush administration. Since the 100 Degree Club is now dead in its tracks, you can be sure that those who were running with the president either as part of their duty or in order to curry favour (the same way federal secretaries used to offer five prayers a day to stay on the right side, not so much of God, but General Ziaul Haq) are looking skywards, their hands cupped in prayer and saying, “Thank you Lord, protector of bad knees.”

If I were the president, I would worry less about that wobbly right knee and more about Miss Paris Hilton, the slinky socialite who clobbered the Chief on Tuesday night when her television show got higher ratings than his exclusive ABC interview with Diane Sawyer. More Americans watched Fox TV’s ‘The Simple Life’ which depicts the 22-year-old hotel heiress working on an Arkansas farm, than saw Bush.

According to the Washington Post, the Hilton show “may have been helped by the public saga of a video, making the rounds of the Internet, showing the granddaughter of hotel chain founder Conrad Hilton engaged in various sex acts with ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon.” Well, obviously you can’t beat that sort of thing even if you are the president of the United States and have just netted bad boy Saddam. Score? President: 11 million viewers, Miss Hilton: 11.8 million.

Not everyone is taken with Miss Hilton or her copycat younger sister Nickey Hilton. The heiresses to the Hilton Hotels fortune, according to one gossip column “haven’t done anything to merit being in the spotlight besides having a powerful last name attached to their otherwise crazy antics. While Paris, the older, more daring sister tries to grab headlines as often as possible, her sister Nicky follows in her shadow, attempting to mimic her sister’s over-the-top actions. Not only do they show up at every party in the free world, but they also make spectacles of themselves to ensure that they get a media mention in virtually every paper.”

Well, if all that was not enough, Michael Jackson ‘Jacko’ whom the current GOP spokesman, Farzand-e-Rawalpindi Sheikh Rashid Ahmed once vowed to bring to Pakistan to hold concerts has been charged with seven counts of child molestation, which sets the scene for an epic courtroom drama, his high-profile lawyer Mark Geragos says, promising that Jacko’s legal team would ‘take no quarter’ in its defence.

Don’t we live in exciting times!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

While few would question that Gen Pervez Musharraf is a man with liberal – if not Kemalist views – most would agree that his liberalism, despite its early promise, has made little difference. Every retrogressive and discriminatory law remains in use and no one believes any longer that the general will move to strike the Ziaist body of legislation from the books. I call it the dog test. The day Musharraf appears in public holding his two dogs, each under one arm, I would know that his liberalism is for real. Some time back in Lahore, an old friend of his was telling me how liberal the general was and what a no-nonsense approach he had to all things in life. My response was that those were private virtues but there was little evidence or hope of their being translated into public policy. In other words, the dogs needed to be seen again, and in the company of their master.

There is a great deal of talk in Pakistan and abroad of modernising education and bringing it in line with contemporary needs, especially in the thousands of madressahs spread across the country. Gen. Musharraf has promised it; his education minister, the personable Zubaida Jalal has promised it, and several others representing government have made similar noises. Since this government has been in office for four years, it is only fair that a good look be taken at what it has actually done, as opposed to what it has said. A commendable study of the textbooks taught in our schools, a hangover of the “Islamisation” effort has been done by Dr AH Nayyar of the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. His findings should make everyone sit up.

He begins by pointing out that Muslim “majorityism” has always existed in Pakistan and is thus reflected in the educational process. However, the effort to mould the minds of the young through textbooks began in the early 1980s thanks to Gen Zia-ul-Haq and his reactionary thinking. The curricula were redesigned and textbooks rewritten to create “a monolithic image of Pakistan as an Islamic state and Pakistani citizens as Muslim only”, in the process excluding non-Muslim students from the national identity. They were thus turned into second-rate citizens and a question mark put on their patriotism. No non-Muslim has since reached higher rank in any of the services. The basic Mawdudite principle enshrined in this philosophy of education is that nothing should be taught that is outside the context of “revealed knowledge”, which is another way of “Islamising” every subject.

Dr Nayyar found that the basic themes of the current curricula are that Pakistan is for Muslims alone; that Islamiyat is to be taught to all, regardless of their religion; that the “ideology of Pakistan” is to be internalised as faith and hatred created against Hindus and India; and finally, students are urged to take the path of jihad and shahadat or martyrdom. So you can now stop wondering where all the jihadis are coming from. One of the guidelines for class IV and V students calls for creating in them the feeling that they belong to a Muslim nation and they have to become life-sacrificing warriors (janbaz mujahideen). “The curriculum thus shows itself to be grossly insensitive to the existence and needs of non-Muslims among the students”, Dr Nayyar observes.

When she took office Zubaida Jalal initiated a process of consultations aimed at educational reform, culminating in a revision of curricula. However, writes Dr Nayyar, though that exercise was spread over two years, going by the most recent curriculum documents and textbooks, “things have remained absolutely unchanged”. Textbooks are written, he says, among others by teachers who also set examination papers. Ill-educated and badly-trained for the most part, they sow seeds of disaster in the entire educational system. Curriculum documents given to those assigned with its development specify objectives as well as the contents of the textbooks to be written by the provincial textbook boards. The ministry of education has a curriculum wing which is supposed to scrutinise the finished product but hardly does any such thing. In practice, textbook writers “play safe” and reproduce what has gone before. In fact, they tend to be “more loyal than the king”. There is also reason to believe that a textbook mafia has monopolised the entire system.

I do not know what is taught in Indian schools, but Dr Nayyar’s findings as to what is being taught in ours are horrifying. The existence of Pakistan is defined only in relation to Hindus, who are painted as evil. Before Zia-ul-Haq, school textbooks did not contain such material. Early history books, for instance, had chapters devoted to the pre-Islamic civilisations and ruling dynasties of India. Though there was bias when approaching contemporary history, the creation of Pakistan was explained in a rational manner and not a result of “Hindu machinations”. Some books also mentioned that the most prominent Islamic leaders were opposed to Pakistan. All that has now been edited out. Pakistan’s enemies and detractors and those who called the Quaid a “kafir” have been painted as heroes.

Curriculum documents studied by Dr Nayyar lay down that the child should understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the need for Pakistan. India’s evil designs should be brought home as it has launched three wars against Pakistan. The textbooks consequently stress that the Hindu has always been the enemy of Islam and the Hindu religion teaches bad things and has no respect for women. Hindus, these books say, worship idols in temples which are narrow and dark places where only one worshipper can go at a time, while Muslims say their prayers together in open mosques. The children are also told about Hindu the child marriage and the custom of suttee. They are taught that a higher-caste Hindu can kill a lower-caste one without fear of punishment. They are also told that Muslim children in India wear shalwar kameez while Hindu children wear the dhoti or the loincloth. The Hindus are said to have done better because they were opportunists who cooperated with the British, unlike the proud Muslims. The break up of Pakistan in 1971 is entirely laid at the doorstep of Hindu India, not attributed to the refusal of the army junta to transfer power.

The depressing thing is that the poisonous crop that Zia-ul-Haq sowed is flourishing fifteen years after his death. This will lead Pakistan to disaster. If there is one truth in the world today it is this: the exterminating Islamic warrior is unacceptable. Radicalism in the name of religion is a phenomenon with which the entire world is at war. It is time Gen Musharraf really got down to reforming the system; and the only place to start is with education. All textbooks now being taught in our schools should be burnt and objective scholars with a well-rounded worldview assigned to rewrite and recast the entire educational curriculum in both schools and colleges.

It has been said that Israeli Jews would find it easier to make peace with Palestinians than their vociferous supporters in the United States. While there are more and more voices being raised in Israel itself to bring the terrible, bloody fratricidal conflict in the Middle East to an end by coming to an arrangement with which both Palestinians and Israelis can live, few if any such voices of sanity and moderation are ever heard from the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States. Zionism seems to be in stronger evidence here on mainland America than in the land of its birth. And that is a shame.

George Bush has been described, and rightly so, as the most pro-Israeli President in US history. The American Muslim community that by and large voted for Bush in 2000 on the mistaken assumption that he would be more even-handed on the Middle East than Democrat Al Gore, has come to regret the decision and it is certain that in 2004, American Muslims would be voting differently. That of course is no guarantee that the next man in the White House will be any less supportive of Israel.

The first time I came to America in 1969, I almost caused my liberal American friends a heart attack when I told them that the liberal position elsewhere in the world was not blind support for Israel, right or wrong, but concern for the Palestinians and the vindication of their political and human rights. The guilt and responsibility for the holocaust is that of the Europeans, not the Americans. It was the Germans who decimated millions of Jews and it was the Europeans, including the Catholic Church, that looked the other way while it was happening. However, it is the Americans who have taken it upon themselves to carry the state of Israel all these years on their shoulders.

Since Bush’s ascent to power, ultra-conservative Christian evangelists have emerged as the most enthusiastic supporters of Israel, though for their own muddleheaded reasons. They believe that Christ’s second coming would be in Jerusalem and therefore the city and all else there must be preserved under firm Israeli control. A report this week in the Washington Post says Israel has cultivated a new breed of American tourist: the born-again American evangelist. These groups march through Jerusalem, offer support and money to illegal Israeli settlements and return happy in the belief that they have done God’s work. What can you do with people like that!

The latest financial package passed by Congress for Israel is part of legislation that includes language codifying President Bush’s June 24, 2002 ‘vision’, requiring an end to Palestinian violence, the free election of new leaders ‘not compromised by terror’, and extensive reforms and increased transparency within the Palestinian Authority. As one writer has pointed out, “The pro-Israel lobby, whose principal Jewish component is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), became a significant force in shaping public opinion and US Middle East policy after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Its power was simultaneously enabled and enhanced by Israel’s emergence as a regional surrogate for US military power in the Middle East in the terms outlined by the 1969 Nixon Doctrine. In the 1970s and 1980s, the lobby was able to unseat representatives and senators who could not be counted on to support Israel without qualification.”

In 1997, Fortune magazine ranked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as the second most powerful interest group in Washington, describing it as ‘calculatedly quiet’, which had for years been successful in encouraging members of Congress and the administration to support US foreign aid to Israel and other issues related to the US-Israel relationship. What is amazing is that a lobby, based on only two percent of the American population has been able to take over the US Middle East policy completely and has also developed a strong and sometimes decisive influence on US foreign policy in the rest of the world.

This is something our blinkered decision-makers in Islamabad and Washington should think about next time they approve or recommend millions more of the poor Pakistani taxpayer’s money to pay lobbyists whose only achievement is their success in getting Pakistan vilified without let, hindrance or respite, year after year after year.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

I often wonder who among those who practise the art of writing the light column in Urdu can claim to have been touched by the spirit of that all-time great maestro of this art (unless it turns out to be a science), the late Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat. The mantle would have sat well on Ibne Insha, but he is gone. And Majid Lahori who chose the ultimate name for Pakistan’s industrialist millionaires, Seth Tyre Ji Tube Ji, is dead too. So whom has Hasrat’s ebullient spirit touched? On a good day, I would say, it speaks through Abbas Athar and on some days through Munno Bhai. Abdul Qadir Hasan, my friend of many years, only writes about heavy, soul-scorching matters now; and Ambassador AU Qasimi, if he were he to stop reproducing both Sikh and sick jokes, might find the old maulana smile on him once in a while. Nazir Naji once had the touch but he appears to spend most of his time these days brushing his conscience clean of all that the years have dumped on it.

On current showing, therefore, it is Abbas Athar. His column on the holy crocs of Manghu Pir who refused to touch meat bought with tainted money is a classic. I found it so funny that I translated it into English for the English medium types. Abbas Athar, news editor of that short-lived firecracker, the Daily Azad, it was and not Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as universally believed, who authored “ Idhar hum, udhar tum”. This was the caption, the surkhi, Abass Athar slapped on Bhutto’s Nishtar Park speech in 1971.

The other day, I came across an exceedingly funny Abbas Athar column in a New York newspaper, and one that deserves to be shared with the angrezi bolnay wala crowd. It is called “Requirements of love”. So take it from here Abbas Athar.

“There is one good thing about Jamali sahib: he always speaks the truth. In Karachi at an iftar dinner the other day he once again said that he found nothing at all the matter with his having called Musharraf his boss. ‘I’ll continue to call him my boss,’ he added. He said some politicians were known to have adopted fathers; all he had done was adopted a boss.

“So why has the Muslim League leader Siddique-ul-Farooq taken this entirely truthful statement to heart? According to him, by calling somebody your father, you are actually paying tribute to his age and the respect his years have brought him. But to call someone your boss betrays a sense of inferiority and is an admission that you are an underling.

“I am astonished that Siddique-ul-Farooq should have taken such a negative view of Jamali’s declaration. Jamali is a truly humble man and admits to being Musharraf’s underling. Now what is wrong with that? Is he not working under Musharraf? He is a man of such utter humility that one wouldn’t put it past him to call himself an underling of Musharraf’s underlings, if not the dust under their feet. Obviously, Siddique-ul-Farooq is unaware of the reality on the ground. Does he not know who conferred the title of prime minister on Jamali? It was Gen Musharraf who did that out of the goodness of his heart. If Jamali has no powers, what difference does it make? After all, did the British not confer titles and gifts of land on Jamali’s ancestors? He is only carrying forward the tradition. Siddique-ul-Farooq should thus have praised this particular one among Jamali’s virtues. Is it not creditable that Jamali did not turn his back on family tradition? In this day and age, there are only a few who respect tradition.

“I am also unhappy with this absurd and dissonant melody the opposition has been singing about helping Jamali acquire real power. Somebody should ask these gents what is biting them when Jamali is quite content with his state. Only yesterday, fifteen new ministers were added to the Punjab cabinet, which has raised the number of ministers, advisers and others to a hundred and fifty. Some ministers do not even know what department they have been assigned. One minister said it all when he remarked that it was enough he had a flag on his car and a stick in his hand. What possible use could he have for a department! That is what is called being grateful to the Almighty for whatever He sends your way.

“Jamali sahib has also been given a flag, though the stick stays with Musharraf. That seems to be in order. The opposition would be well advised to stop chanting its loony tune. It is said that if man and wife are happy, there is no room for interveners. The opposition also appears to be greatly troubled by Jamali’s offer to India. During his address to the nation, Jamali sahib offered a ceasefire on the Line of Control to India, unilaterally and without conditions. He also said that he was ready for a bus service between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar, as long as it ran under the watchful eye of UN observers.

“Later, while addressing the nation, Jamali sahib exhibited admirable large-heartedness by withdrawing the UN bit. What is not clear so far is why he addressed India. It is possible that his for Indian-ears-only speech was by mistake broadcast to the whole nation. The opposition has accused Jamali sahib of having prostrated himself before India by sacrificing the stand Pakistan has maintained on Kashmir for fifty years. This criticism is not only illogical but irrelevant. Assuming that Jamali sahib has laid himself prostrate before a neighbour, does the opposition not know that there are certain obligations when it comes to the neighbour next door.

“After all, have we not laid ourselves prostrate, and with total self-effacement, before those who dwell seven seas away? Why is the opposition continuing to wail about a national stand that is fifty years old? This is the way the world turns. What is old is chucked out. We live in the New Age, in a New Democracy and we have new National Interests. It is these new national interests which require that we not even attempt to strike a bargain. Our relationship with our neighbours and those who live seven seas away is one of pure love. And when it comes to love, one doesn’t bargain. Love means total, unconditional surrender. Jamali sahib has fulfilled the requirements of love by hitting the ground. It is therefore time the opposition stopped whining because despite all the rumpus it is creating, the Kashmir problem is fated to be resolved on Jamali’s watch, to boot in a just manner. It will be settled on the basis of give some, take some. And that basis is: Kashmir theirs, Kashmiris ours. Let the opposition smoulder in its own fire. The Kashmir Medal is fated to dangle on Jamali’s chest.”

Game, set and match to Abbas Athar.

Washington is not a cricket-playing city and the number of people here who follow the game is limited. With the exception of former World Bank economist Zia Kalim, whose knowledge of the game is phenomenal and whose recall of matches he watched in Lahore as a boy so detailed that he can describe them over by over, I can think of few others who have an interest in the game. I am of course limiting my count to Pakistanis or Pakistani-Americans or whatever they wish to be called.

Ah yes, another cricket whiz who has now departed the city for the year-old baby government of Punjab was Mowahid Hussain Shah, brother of Mushahid Hussain (who alone of the three brothers is not into cricket but into how the world should be run, which is what a life-long interest in international relations ends up in.) I am not sure if Mowahid Shah’s onerous responsibilities as star special assistant to the chief minister of the province leave him any time for what many consider an idle man’s occupation.

I bring up cricket because the gods who oversee the game finally raised their index finger when yet another appeal was made to them demanding Gen. Tauqir Zia’s dismissal. Few batsmen have been as lucky at the crease as the General. Not only did every catch that he offered, several of them in the dolly category, get dropped but appeal after appeal for leg before was refused by the umpire who has been standing at both ends since October 1999. After the World Cup debacle, I suggested in a letter printed in this newspaper that the least the PCB chairman should do was to modify his first name with the addition of ‘Bey’, a public-spirited suggestion that, like the leg before appeals, was ignored.

And this brings me to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Whenever he has come visiting these shores, he has made it a point to find an hour or so on the last day for a meeting with correspondents working for the Pakistani media. His last visit to Washington was no different. He answered all sorts of questions and the way it was going I would not have been the least surprised had someone risen to ask what he was doing to ensure that the earth stayed on its axis.

Unlike some of my distinguished colleagues and friends, both here and in Pakistan, I try to ask a question instead of making a speech, strong though the temptation is. So when I raised my hand, Information Secretary Syed Anwar Mahmood who was coyly standing behind the General, though as Argus-eyed as Argus himself, indicated that I may now speak. What lay on my mind was not Camp David or those pie-in-the-sky F-16s or even Sharifuddin Pirzada’s gift to the nation, the Legal Framework Order. What lay on my mind was cricket.

After assuring the General that I was well aware of his deep interest in sports and his pursuit of golf and tennis, I asked why Gen. Tauqir Zia had not been given his marching orders so far. Little had I suspected the reaction this question was going to trigger. The President said I appeared to be unaware of the great good Gen. TZ had done to cricket. He then cited some of what he had done. He also asked me to come to Pakistan and meet. Gen. Zia (fortunately the living one) as well as Ramiz Raja. Crestfallen and with a lot of egg on my face, I sat down.

As soon as the news conference ended, Sarmad Bashir of The Nation shook my hand and congratulated me on just having ensured that we will have Gen. Tauqir Zia running cricket forever. A couple of weeks later, I received a solemn letter from the Embassy (that was before my current blacklisting by His Excellency the Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the State of Pakistan to the United States) informing me that with reference to my exchange with the President, I should advise the Embassy when I was travelling to Pakistan so that my meetings with Gen. Tauqir Zia and Mr Raja could be arranged.

A thorough search of the envelope revealed that there was no club class air ticket in there (so much for lifafa journalism). Had Gen. Musharraf given Gen. Tauqir Zia his marching orders on that day, we might have been spared much unhappiness including the Test capping of Junaid Zia.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

If the three remarkable Batalvi brothers who are the subject of ‘Khad au Khal,’ a memoir just published by Sang-e-Meel, Lahore, I have had the good fortune of knowing two intimately and one from a distance, so to speak. The book with a two-part preface by another remarkable man, Daud Rehbar, is made up of the reminiscences of one of the three brothers, Agha Babar who died in 1998 in Terry Town, New York state, a place aeons away from the cities of his youth, Batala and Lahore.

Ijaz Hussain Batalvi I first met in Lahore around 1964. Like several of his friends and admirers, his advocacy of the prosecution case against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977-78 drew a curtain across our relationship. In London, a year or two after Bhutto’s execution, I ran into him on South Brampton Road. We shook hands and he sensed my iciness because he asked, “Tell me what was it about Bhutto that you liked?” “His impishness,” I replied. I asked him what had made him accept the state’s brief. His reply that he was a lawyer and it was a case, no more no less, did not satisfy me, as no doubt he knew it wouldn’t.

To this day, I cannot quite understand what led him into the camp of Bhutto’s executioners. Ijaz’s life changed after that seminal event. For a while, he withdrew from the public eye. Once a regular at literary gatherings, his appearances became rare, if not non-existent. However, as the old cliché goes, a good deal of water has flown since under a lot of bridges and the Bhutto thing is behind him. When I went to see him on my recent Lahore visit, he said – and it was vintage Ijaz Batalvi – “You have come to see me because I am unwell. Had I been well, you wouldn’t be here.” I would have had to hire a better lawyer than him to refute the point, but where in Lahore would I find a better lawyer than Ijaz Hussain Batalvi?

Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi I came to know in London in the late 1970s and as long as I worked with Altaf Gauhar’s Third World “qumar khana-e-ishq”, those meetings continued because he would come every second or third day to hand over to AG – that was what we called him, but not to his face – copies of papers and documents he had unearthed at the India Office Library, a place he knew like the back of his hand. At the time, AG was planning to write a book on the origins and ethos of the civil service, although in the end the book did not get written. At any given time, AG had more than one thing on the anvil; some materialised, others remained no more substantial han a sheaf of papers in a file. Dr Batalvi could unearth anything India-related from the British archives and he knew where it all was. He often used to say that the British had never thrown away a single scrap of paper through the years they were in India, while we did not even have the single sheet from which the Sher-e-Bangla had read out the Lahore Resolution at Minto Park in 1940. It was said, he told me, that Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan had folded the paper and slipped it in the pocket of his sherwani. He also used to say – those were Zia-ul-Haq’s dark times – that the Mullahs had had their revenge of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Agha Babar I never really got to know though I was in Rawalpindi when he ran the Arts Council and his wife Sikandra Babar was to be found at the head of every good cause going. A word about Daud Rehbar. Cousin to the one and only Zia Mohyeddin, and son of Dr Mohammad Iqbal, professor of Persian at the Oriental College, now lives in Florida and is writing a biography of his father which will be a study in comparative religious sensibility. He writes in his preface that his relationship with Agha Babar spanned fifty years. When he first set eyes on him, he said to himself, “What a dashing, restless man this is whose body dances even as he sits!” Named Babar Hussain by his parents, he dropped Hussain and replaced it with the prefix Agha. Always attracted to the arts and fond of acting, he first made a name for himself though his short stories. Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi also began with a collection of stories but moved to contemporary political history of the Punjab.

Their father, Ghulam Akbar Khan, was a legendary police officer and became the kotwal or city inspector of Lahore in the 1920s, a distinction that was later to fall to the lot of his eldest son Zulqadar Khan. Once, someone asked him who his favourite son was. He pointed to Babar. When asked why, he pointed to his young bride Sikandra and said, “Because he is putting up with her.” “And who’s your favourite among daughters-in-law?” He pointed to Sikandra and when asked why, replied, “Because she is putting up with him,” turning his eyes towards Babar.

The book, barring the Daud Rehbar foreword and a moving tribute to his brother by Ijaz Batalvi, is entirely Agha Babar’s. His memory and recall are astonishing. He recreates for us a world that has passed into history. It occurred to me while reading this fascinating memoir of times and people past that it would be almost impossible to translate Agha Babar’s prose into English. He flits over literary, cultural and religious references that simple cannot be rendered into English. I have done a few translations over the years and I can recognise the translator’s limitations when I see them.

Ijaz, ten years younger than Agha Babar, writes, “There is a tradition in America: instant friendship, instant forgetting. In the East, friendship takes time to form and once formed, it lasts. Bhai Babar was in the latter tradition, which was why in an uncaring city like New York, he kept the tree of friendship green, nurturing it through personal meetings, phone calls and letters. As part of that effort, he formed a literary circle he named ‘Nishast’.”

Somewhere in his memoir, Agha Babar writes about a meeting in London between Prof. A. S. Bokhari (who was called ‘Saihi Bokhari’ as opposed to his brother Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari) and Dr Ashiq Hussain Batalvi. “Where should we begin?” Bokhari asks. In answer, Dr Batalvi recites a couplet by Iqbal which moves Bokhari so much that tears well up in his eyes. Then he says, “Ashiq sahib, it has been a futile life. In the end, one is left empty-handed.” Bokhari was at the time UN assistant secretary general and head of its information services. He had also been principal of Government College, Lahore, and the first Indian director general of All India Radio. Will we ever see the like of such men again?

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