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Everything anyone ever wanted to know about Osama bin Laden — and may have been afraid to ask for fear of being nabbed by the CIA or the FBI or the MI6, or even the ISI — can now be found in Peter Bergen’s just published book The Osama bin Laden I Know. Anyone who watches CNN — and who doesn’t, including Osama bin Laden — knows Peter Bergen because he is the news network’s terrorism expert. He is also an academic, being adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

Bergen is one of the few Western journalists — and the only British one — who have actually met Osama. Peter Arnett, one of the most distinguished journalists of his generation, is the other prominent Westerner to have met the Al Qaeda founder and perhaps the most hunted man in history. What Bergen has done is quite remarkable. He has interviewed most people who knew bin Laden, from his boyhood friends, family members to journalists like our own Hamid Mir (who met bin Laden three times, and became the only journalist to have interviewed him after 9/11) and Rahimullah Yusufzai. Those not interviewed by the author are represented in the book through excerpts of what they wrote or had recorded about the Saudi-born fugitive. In short, you do not need to “google” Osama: all you have to do is to buy or steal Bergen’s book, which has several pictures including a famous one that Bergen took when he and Arnett met bin Laden.

Bergen is modest. He writes, “Finally, what does bin Laden really want: the overthrow of the Saudi regime, or the restoration of the Caliphate across the Muslim world? I do not pretend that this book will definitively answer all those questions. After all the interior life of a person is something of a mystery.” He writes that while what bin Laden has done is unforgivable, we need to understand him. Bergen has written an oral and a document-based life of the Al Qaeda leader and almost everyone he quotes has met bin Laden. Bergen recalls that when he and Arnett met bin Laden, he came across to them as a soft-spoken cleric, rather than the fire-breathing leader of a global terrorist outfit. He was also well informed with an intense interest in world politics. Having said that, bin Laden, Bergen believes, acts on impulse, often overreaching and paying little attention to the consequences of his actions. It is unlikely that he could have imagined the far-reaching changes the 9/11 attacks would bring. Bergen says 9/11 “turned out to be something of a kamikaze mission”, as the American response decimated Al Qaeda and destroyed its Taliban partners.

One of the telling observations Bergen makes is that the global jihadist movement is not a monolith, because it is split by squabbles over personnel and strategy. Many Islamist militants hold that 9/11 damaged their cause. Bergen also questions the general belief that the CIA financed bin Laden during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA funnelled $3 billion to the Mujhideen but “there is no evidence that any of that money went to the Afghan Arabs”, nor can it be established that any CIA men met bin Laden or anyone in his circle. The CIA’s bin Laden unit was set up in 1996. Osama turned against the Saudi royal family because of its decision during the first Gulf War to rely on non-Muslims to defend Arabia. Bergen writes that bin Laden has always had something of a romantic attachment to Afghanistan, sometimes referring to it by its Muslim name of Khurasan. Bergen quotes Hamid Mir, who also interviewed Mullah Omar in December 1996. When Mir asked Mullah Omar if he was working for the Americans since Robin Raphel had expressed admiration for the Taliban in a speech at the UN, Mullah Omar asked, “Who is he?” He did not know who Robin Raphel — then assistant secretary of state for South Asia — was or even the fact that she was a woman, not a man.

About the 9/11 attacks, Bergen writes that while bin Laden did not involve himself in details, he was the overall commander. It was he who appointed the Egyptian Mohammad Atta as the lead hijacker. Bin Laden discussed the plot with a Saudi supporter, the tape of which was discovered in Jalalabad by US forces after the fall of the Taliban. When the first plane hit the World Trade Centre, bin Laden told those who were with him listening to the radio to be patient. When the second plane hit, bin Laden recalled, “the brothers who heard the news were overjoyed”.

Bergen is to be credited with having forecast a major Al Qaeda attack on the US, which turned out to be 9/11. After viewing a two-hour Al Qaeda videotape circulating on the Internet, he wrote to John Burns of the New York Times saying that he was “alarmed” by what he had seen as it seemed to presage a major Al Qaeda attack. Burns filed a story which was put on the New York Times website but not in the newspaper on September 9, 2001. Bergen writes, “In an Orwellian rewriting of history, the Times took Burns’s pre-9/11 story off its website” after the attacks two days later.

The ISI will like Bergen’s book because it gets only one mention in its 444 pages. I also found it refreshing that the author does not join the Osama hunt club, which should earn him another interview in case the Sheikh of Al Qaeda ever feels like chatting to a discreet and knowledgeable reporter.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Dr Amjad Hussain left Peshawar more than thirty years ago but as Manto said of Bombay after he bade it goodbye, “ Mein chalta phirta Bombaii hoon. ” So is the doctor a roving, wandering Peshawar. Some years ago, he reproduced from memory a map of the city as it used to be. He also wrote its history, in English and Urdu. Ahmed Faraz, another of Peshawar’s sons and lovers, and an incomparable wit, once said, “It is Amjad who left Peshawar, not Peshawar that left him, so the city bears no blame.”

Amjad lives in Toledo in the Midwestern state of Ohio, where a couple of years ago, I went to see him. It was like walking with him in the Qissa Khwani or sipping green tea at a stall in Dabgari. I had to remind myself now and then that I was actually in Toledo, thousands of miles from Peshawar. Nostalgia is perhaps the most powerful of human emotions. Amjad is nostalgia incarnate, the city of Peshawar’s separated but intensely loving son, who has missed no year when he has not gone to breathe its air and stand under its sky. But as Ahmed Faraz wrote, he goes only to leave again. Amjad has traversed the entire course of the great Indus river, from its source down to the Arabian Sea. Anyone who has anything the matter with his ticker will be in good hands were he to repair to Toledo because Dr Amjad Hussain is not a doctor like Dr Wazir Agha but a celebrated heart surgeon. He laid down his carving knives a couple of years ago but would cut anyone up for old times’ sake and with great dexterity too.

He may never have left Peshawar but for the fact that when he returned with an advanced medical degree after spending six years in America, he was first told that there was no suitable position and then given one that made no use of his surgical skills. After a time he was told that since his wife was a foreigner – he got hitched in America – he was in violation of government rules. Not taken into account was the fact that he had got married when he was not in the service of the government. In the end, he returned to America where he built a successful and rewarding professional career. But his heart did not leave with him; it stayed in Peshawar.

Amjad retired from full-time work as a surgeon a couple of years ago but still teaches and I am sure when his fingers get itchy, he fixes a game heart or two. He has just published an account of his life and the schools and colleges he went to. His recall of the past is amazing and he brings back the city of Peshawar and its way of life that no longer exists. His book – Dar-e-Maktib – is actually a book about his teachers, from the time he was four, to his professors in Peshawar and the hospitals of Ohio and Michigan.

The book is dedicated to his blind religion teacher Abdul Qadoon Hafizji at the Machhi Hatta primary school, Peshawar, who made him memorise, often with a slap across the wrists, passages from the Quran that he still remembers sixty-two years later. The Machhi Hatta school no longer exists, having made way for a market, but it lives in Amjad’s memory and in the pages of his book. Hafizji would come to the school every morning, being led by a niece. Before starting the lesson, he would test his pupils over the previous day’s lesson and anyone who faltered was asked to come up to him and receive a slap. Amjad writes in his dedication that whenever he stands up to pray, he remembers that it was Hafizji who taught him namaz . He also recalls Lal Shah Jigar Kazmi who taught Urdu to the first grade at Machhi Hata. To him, Amjad owes the neat calligraphic Urdu hand he writes, which distinguishes him from doctors who are known the world over for their illegible handwriting.

Muhammad Ali, one of the teachers he writes about, was known for his vile temper. So terrified were the boys of his fisticuffs that one day a group of them went to the mausoleum of Shah Noor Pir in the city to pray and promise that if Master Muhammad Ali died, they would return to make an offering. So confident were they that the saint would take immediate action that they were quite surprised when Muhammad Ali remained alive and kicking. Another teacher at the school was known as Abdul Ali ‘bone-breaker.’ In the classroom alcove, he kept a collection of canes for the ‘benefit’ of his students.

Amjad writes with particular affection about his English teacher at Islamia College, Peshawar, Prof Hubert M Close, who spent his entire life in Peshawar. He would dress like a Pathan, go around on a bicycle and spoke fluent Pushto. He came to India from Cambridge in 1937 to teach English at St Stephen’s College, New Delhi, joined the army when the war broke out and fought in North Africa, where he commanded a company of Pathan soldiers. After the war, though he returned to Delhi, he began to go to Peshawar every year to look up the men who had served under him. It was on his 1946 visit that Governor Sir Olaf Caroe offered him a post at Islamia College. He never left Peshawar till his last breath. After he retired from Islamia College, he began to teach English classes at the Peshawar University and Edwards College. He was given an OBE by the British and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz by Pakistan. When the medal was being pinned on him by Gen Zia-ul-Haq, he reminded him that he had been the professor’s student at St Stephen’s in 1946. The great Pakistani English poet, the late Daud Kamal, was one of Prof Close’s students.

Amjad graduated in medicine from the Khyber Medical College, worked at the Lady Reading Hospital and first left Peshawar in 1963, but in a way he never left it. His book ends on a wistful but eloquent note. “Time is like a river that keeps flowing. No one can block its flow. As I find myself walking along its running waters towards sunset, I turn around and see faint footprints that I recognise as mine. I also see faces that I know. Among them are my kind (and some not-so-kind) teachers, the schools and colleges through which I passed, places where I spent the days of my youth. All those faces, those institutions, those teachers are like pillars of light that showed me the way to my future, and whose light never abandoned me. In fact, my life has been nothing but a borrowing from those kindly men and places. My book is a small tribute to them.”

Dick Cheney has finally met his comeuppance, his just desserts, as it were. And everyone who hates him — and the number is legion, both here and elsewhere — is delighted. The man who is the Bush administration’s eminence grise and the true begetter of the Iraq war and other reckless adventures of this administration is being ridiculed and catcalled from one end of America to the other. Even his rich, fat friends in gold-plated corporate boardrooms and country clubs are refraining from springing to his defence.

And, frankly, with the best of intentions, who can come to the aid of a man who goes out shooting little innocent birds and pelts his friend Henry Whittington instead. Not only does it show that he is no hunter but that he doesn’t really give a damn what or who he brings down. I write this on Valentine’s Day and it is only, therefore, appropriate that there should be a poem addressed to Dick. For that I am indebted to radio broadcaster Tom Joyner who came up with this jewel:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Say something I don’t like
And I’ll shoot you.

Dick Cheney, whose name could well be that of a character in a Raymond Chandler novel about a private dick, is known for being secretive and clubby. He is also the darling of the rightwing lunatic fringe that believes America can only fulfil its destiny by bombing to kingdom come anyone who squeaks. After this administration leaves office — we pray without destroying the world — and it becomes easier to bring its record to public scrutiny, there is little doubt that Dick Cheney’s fell influence will be seen to have been at work in the enunciation and implementation of the reckless and dangerous policies the world has come to associate the Bush administration with.

But on a lighter note, the accidental shooting by the vice president of the 78-year old lawyer, who now lies in a Texas hospital in a “stable” condition, has been a gift for the irreverent hosts of late night TV shows, no less than for cartoonists. In the letters columns of newspapers, a majority of correspondents is critical of the VP who took his time letting the country know what had happened, and that too through an announcement made by his hostess, a lobbyist to boot.

David Letterman, the acerbic late night CBS TV host, said on Monday night, “Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It’s Dick Cheney.” And, “We can’t get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney,” followed by, “The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he’s fine. He took a little in the wallet.”

Jay Leno on NBC’s Tonight Show quipped, “Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, DC, Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear.” And then, “That’s the big story over the weekend… Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent.”

This was followed by, “I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, ‘Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?’” And this being Valentine’s Day, Leno said, “Dick Cheney is capitalising on this for Valentine’s Day. It’s the new Dick Cheney cologne. It’s called Duck!” “I guess the guy is going to be OK”, Leno said. “When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher… Cheney’s defence is that he was aiming at a quail when he shot the guy — which means that Cheney now has the worst aim of anyone in the White House since Bill Clinton.”

Jon Stewart on Comedy Central called the vice president “Dead-Eye Dick”. Craig Fergusan, who — like most people — has a thing about lawyers, said, “He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he’s a lawyer, he can use his other face. He’ll be all right.” He found it odd that Whittington wasn’t shot in the back, which is what politicians are known for.

In an editorial, New York Times found it unacceptable that it had taken the White House nearly 24 hours to inform the nation of the shooting accident. “The Vice President appears to have behaved like a teenager who thinks that if he keeps quiet about the wreck, no one will notice that the family car is missing its right door. The administration’s communications department has proved that its skills at actually communicating are so rusty it can’t get a minor police-blotter story straight. And the White House, in trying to cover up the cover-up, has once again demonstrated that it would rather look inept than open.”

One of the letters in the newspaper ran, “This is further testament to the dismal judgment of America’s second-in-command. Apparently he hunts as he does his ‘other’ job — with no regard for others.” Another correspondent wrote, “This is an administration, after all, that shoots first and looks around for hazards later — a dangerous policy not just for hunting partners but for the world.”

The foreign press found the shooting equally amusing, with the Herald, Scotland, running the story under the headline ‘Cheney bags a lawyer’, while the Sydney Morning Herald headlined its coverage with ‘Cheney hunts quail and everyone else ducks’. The blogosphere wasn’t far behind with headlines like ‘Dick Cheney finally takes a stand against trial lawyers’.

Coming as the accidental shooting has done after a huge snowstorm that swept across the northeast, it has lightened the atmosphere somewhat. Is it too much to hope that the lawyer, who was mistaken for a quail, will sue Cheney and, if not take him to the cleaners, at least relieve him of some of the millions that he holds in his bank account?

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

The first time I “saw” Pran Sabharwal was at the Baltimore Sun ’s headquarters back in 1970. On a wall hung the portraits of the newspaper’s foreign correspondents. I was struck by the presence among them of this dashing, handsome, smiling man with a jaunty moustache and wavy black hair. The man was Pran Sabharwal, the only non-American correspondent at the time of a major American newspaper. He filed for the paper on the region from New Delhi. I was greatly impressed.

It could not have occurred to me as I stood looking at Pran’s picture that I would not only get to meet him two years later, but form a friendship with him that would survive the ups and downs of life and the relentless march of time. It was in Simla that I met him in the summer of 1972. By then, fate and circumstance had placed me on the staff of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as his press secretary. When I saw Pran at the press centre the Indian government had set up, he was waving a copy of his dispatch like a man saying goodbye with a handkerchief on a railway platform. There were hundreds of journalists around, since the Simla Conference had become the centre of world attention, come as it had six months after the break-up of Pakistan, the surrender of 80,000 of our soldiers in what had been East Pakistan, and the emergence of Bangladesh, midwifed by India, the Soviet Union, but more than any single factor, the arrogance and lack of honesty of the blundering Yahya regime.

I recognised Pran from his picture, which I had somehow remembered. He was waving a couple of sheets that contained his dispatch and offering it to anyone who would want it because what is once filed is no longer the reporter’s problem or property, Pran said. Several people leapt up to snatch Pran’s crisply written copy. He was that kind of man, generous and cavalier. We met and I told him where I had first “seen” him. He told me two things. First, that he was from Serai Alamgir and, two, that he wanted to come to Pakistan and interview Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. That evening, there was a reception in honour of the journalists reporting the Simla Conference, arranged by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. It was there that I met two people with whom I have had a life-long friendship. One was SK Singh, then the head of external publicity at the Indian external affairs ministry. The other was a young reporter just starting out. His name was Saeed Naqvi.

Pran was at the reception and he was what he always would remain: the life and soul of the party. There was a crowd around him and he was regaling them with his predictions of how a conference that had hardly begun would end. Pran was great at spinning out theories, sometimes a bit fanciful but invariably intriguing. Like many of us, he was a conspiracy theorist, and why not. After all, we have all seen things happening in our region which can only be explained on that basis. On our short flight from Lahore to Chandigarh – from where we had been driven by car to Simla, ZAB and Benazir having been taken by helicopter – ZAB had told members of the press accompanying him to be polite and dignified. He had also said that if drink they must, they should not drink Indian booze. I noticed at the reception arranged by SK Singh that while a number of our pen-pushers were knocking them back, the hooch they were drinking was Indian-made. So I said to SK Singh, “If you must serve whisky, then serve Scotch, not this stuff.” To his credit, SK produced the right poison and everybody lived happily ever after.

Some time after our return to Pakistan, I managed to find time in ZAB’s 18 to 20-hour working day for an interview with Pran Sabharwal and sent him word to come. He arrived in Karachi and was thrilled to be in Pakistan. A day after he arrived, ZAB decided to fly to Larkana. “Why don’t you bring your Indian friend along and I will chat with him in Larkana,” he told me. Inside the country, ZAB often travelled in a PAF Fokker – the sky rickshaw – which we all hopped into. “Sir,” Pran said to ZAB soon after we were airborne and getting tossed around, “I should warn you that I am a Punjabi chauvinist.” “Pran,” ZAB replied, “you didn’t have to do that. All you had to say was that you are a Punjabi and I would have assumed that you are a chauvinist.” Pran said to me later: “Your man is sharp. I concede game, set and match on this one.”

I left ZAB, went abroad, working here, there and everywhere, which prompted my good friend, the one and only Qurratualain Hyder “Annie” to say once that every time I wrote to her, it was from a different continent. But wherever I was, working or out of work, happy or otherwise, my link and friendship with Pran remained strong and lasting. In 1983 I went to Delhi from Vienna to report a world energy conference for the Opec News Agency. I met Pran’s wonderful wife Ruby and his three children, Gautam, Gopa and Gauri. I wanted to go to Srinagar and Jammu, a nearly impossible thing on a Pakistani passport, but Pran, who knew everyone from the President of India down to the panwala in Khan Market, got me permission. It was like a dream come true. Srinagar was the place where I had been born and it was great to breathe its clean, crystal air and stand under its limpid skies. It pained me to see that even then, six years before the outbreak of the uprising, Srinagar was teeming with armed soldiers and pockmarked with ugly, fortified check-posts.

Pran threw a big party for me at his Pandara Park home, which was where I first met Riaz Khokhar, who was the No. 2 man at the Pakistan embassy at the time. There was nothing Pran could not fix and nobody he did not know. And for his friends, of which Delhi was full, he was always willing to walk a mile, which is what he did seven days a week. It was Pran who introduced me to such close friends of his as Chandershekhar, Shahabuddin and IK Gujral. I have a picture somewhere of the four of us – Gujral, Inder Malhotra, Pran and I – chatting in Pran’s living room, whose doors were always open, like his and Ruby’s heart, for their friends. What took me to Delhi always was the thought that I would spend time with Pran. Another great friend, with whom I associated Delhi, was the journalist Rajendra Sareen who passed away several years ago, but his sons carry on his work at the opinion and analysis service he set up. Before the days of the Internet, Sareen would have all Pakistani newspapers flown to Delhi and prepare a daily brief in English of important stories and articles that would be distributed to all the embassies in Delhi and various government departments and ministries. He was a great bridge builder and like Pran, a passionate believer in India and Pakistan learning to live like friends and settling their disputes any which way so that they could move on.

Pran Sabharwal passed away on the 6th of February in New Delhi, as Ruby put it, “after a long illness patiently borne.”

The death of Pakistani-American engineer Farooq Malik in a Lahore hospital where he had been practically dumped by the 5-star hospital where he had been first taken and given what turned out to be a lethal injection, has touched a lot of people, going by the number of messages I have received; having written about that tragedy in this space last Sunday.

One message from New York said, “Humanity has gone out of the new generation of Pakistani doctors. Contrast what Farooq Malik went through with what doctors used to do for their patients in the 1960s and 1970s. What has happened to our people? Will anybody take note of this moving story?” By anyone, I suppose, the correspondent meant “anyone in authority”, to which the answer to date is no.

Another, a doctor, wrote from Islamabad and said, “Doctors’ Hospital, Lahore (where Farooq was taken first) should have been able to deal with the problem. The rest is a story of post-operative mismanagement and greed.”

Another doctor, who lives in the United States, wrote, “I wish I could say it is hard to believe, but it is not hard to believe. Most of us have had bad experiences in Pakistani hospitals. I lost my brother and a sister-in-law due to lack of facilities at a Peshawar hospital. They died in my arms. When I talked to the medical superintendent a few days after the death of my brother, he said I was not sympathetic to their difficulties.”

Another doctor, also from the United States, wrote, “I think what happened to Farooq Malik was not the first such case and unfortunately it will not be the last such case. The level of training of most physicians in Pakistan is extremely deficient. The training of the ancillary staff such as nurses is practically non-existent. Malpractice and medical abuse cases happen daily and routinely. I would be surprised if there was any family in Pakistan that does not have some kind of malpractice case to report. However, the fact of the matter is that such medical malpractice in Pakistan can never come to an end until the people develop ethics. Government legislation and uproar in the media cannot fix this pervasive problem. Unethical behaviour is not limited to the medical profession in Pakistan only. Businesses in almost all facets of Pakistani society practice some type of fraud and underhand behaviour.

“Unless people develop the will to respect fellow human beings and a conscience that prevents them from causing hurt to others, there can be no end. It is a sad story and I hope that it does not happen again, but I fear that even as I type this email, some poor person in Pakistan is going through what Farooq Malik did.”

A lawyer from Pakistan wrote, “I have gone through this horror story and want to add something. When doctors make mistakes they bring mental torture and physical pain to the patients and their families. But when these mistakes are brushed aside, the distress deepens. Medical negligence is not something new, but it is not accountable in Pakistan. People accept pain and loss as something ordained, something that was bound to happen. Someone has to break the silence. At present, I am dealing with a number of medical negligence cases and interested to pursue Farooq’s case free of cost and expenses.”

A doctor from Lahore said he was saddened by what he had read but “unfortunately that is the reality of medical care in Pakistan. The first hospital where the patient was taken is also known as the ‘dakoo hospital’. As for the Punjab Institute of Cardiology, little can be said about it these days that is good. Recently when a radio station in Lahore started airing reports about all that was wrong at the Institute, the station was closed down and the owners arrested. The medical big shots in Pakistan are very well connected and do not care what people say about them.”

Another message addressed to Omer, Farooq’s son, said, “I have seen a lot of medical malpractice here in Pakistan. I wish things were different but I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. Make no mistake, most of the doctors in Pakistan’s hospitals are like butchers in killing fields, I know this correlation sounds absurd but it is true. I know your father can never come back, but the way you have lost him makes me sick. I wish there was some law which could deal with these doctors and put them behind the bars for the rest of their lives.”

A Pakistani living in Sharjah was shocked at the deplorable circumstances under which Farooq passed away in Lahore. He wrote, “Like many of my compatriots, I too have suffered much pain through witnessing the almost criminal behaviour of some Pakistani hospitals, especially when my youngest brother was shot three times in the chest just outside my house in Karachi by robbers. With Allah’s help he survived but has his left arm fitted with steel rods that were expensive but perhaps not necessary. At 27 years of age, he is walking around with two bullets lodged in his chest and abdomen that the hospital in Karachi could not remove. My brother is a PhD candidate in computer science and is currently working in North Carolina. My brothers and I have decided to do something about this problem.

“We are approaching this problem from a different angle though. We believe that quality healthcare is a right of every human being and the service need not charge any fees from the patients. We have established a free clinic in a poor suburb of Karachi as our pilot programme and will be offering telephone triage services to the community 24 hours, seven days a week within a year. Since this service will be rendered by qualified doctors without any incentives such as commissions and profits, we expect that such a service will be useful to our people, especially those who are frequently misguided by profit-oriented hospitals.

“We plan to provide the telephone triage service to charitable hospitals that do not have the financial strength to address in a timely manner the needs of all who knock at their doors. I believe, Inshallah, our service will also fill this gap without duplicating the efforts of NGO-run hospitals. We plan to have this service available nationwide by the third quarter of 2007.”

It is people like Arshad Syed from Sharjah, who sent me this note, not flint-hearted killer doctors motivated by greed, who are Pakistan’s hope. Men like Abdul Sattar Edhi, a living saint, have shown the way. Let others follow.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

A few days after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took over, he said to me that there were four directors-general in the Foreign Office whom he considered officers of great ability. They were the late Aftab Ahmed Khan, Abdul Sattar, “Hakim” Muhammad Yunus and Maqbool Ahmed Bhatti. He also told some of the officers that the good news was that he knew all of them; then he paused and added, “which is also the bad news.” Vintage ZAB.

I spent five years in the foreign service, having joined the much-maligned ranks of lateral entrants. Much-maligned by the ones who considered themselves career diplomats. One of them, a man of great charm and talent otherwise, once wrote in a letter to a newspaper, for which I was then writing, that I would know little of how diplomacy was conducted – or words to that effect – since I had never been a “core professional,” only a part of the “undergrowth of diplomacy.” I would have forgotten this insult, as I have forgotten countless others, except that my estranged friend Mickey keeps throwing it in every now and then.

One thing that I observed during those days was the near contempt in which the “core professionals” held all those working with them if they were not from “the service.” Even a stripling third secretary, barely out of his diapers, would thumb his nose at senior members of the mission who came from other backgrounds or services. This brahminism should have died with time but regrettably, lives on. Even in missions where the ambassador is not from “the service,” it is the “core professionals” who run the show, often riding roughshod over all others, a demonstration of which one witnessed for many years right in this city of Washington. That gentleman has now departed for home and he would be surprised if he were told that the sun still comes out from the east every morning in Washington and the embassy has not gone into the self-destruct mode. Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud “Blameworthy” may like to look into this next time he is in Pakistan.

And what about the foreign service wives? There was one at one of the stations I served at, who would always say the oddest thing at the most inappropriate occasion. And since every time she spoke, she dropped a brick, it occurred to me one day that the only word that could do justice to her gift was “brickmanship.” I do not know if there still exists a Pakistan Foreign Office Wives Association, but one did exist back in the 1970s. I have in my possession a copy of the Protocol Guide published by the Association in 1975. It is quite hilarious.

The introduction says that since it has been proved how effectively a wife can assist her husband, “not only in representational duties but also in his task of winning friends and influencing people,” it has been decided to reduce some of the “well-known rules” to writing as guidelines. An ambassador’s wife going on a foreign posting is advised to call on the Foreign Secretary’s wife “who may give useful advice.” Wives are advised to stay no more than half an hour when calling on another diplomat’s wife. They are also to arrive about two minutes ahead of time. They are further told: “It is not considered proper to address seniors in a familiar manner in public, even if you know them personally,” and “at any gatherings, when your ambassadress or senior ladies walk into the room, it is a mark of respect to stand up and greet them.” They are also cautioned – a rule observed more in the breach than in the observance – that “wives of junior officers are not under any obligation to shop, baby-sit, cook or do any other work for their ambassadors unless it is on a personal friendship basis.”

Under the section ‘Entertainment,’ wives are told that they “must circulate at a party and talk to foreigners (men and women) and not just stick to other Pakistanis” (which they invariably did and do). They are asked not to be critical of the country of their posting and if they “get stuck and cannot find anything to say, (they should) talk about the weather.” They are also not to leave any party unless their ambassador or the chief guest has done so. Exits are to be discreet. If the wife is the chief guest herself, she is not to overstay as others may be waiting for her to leave. It is a “good idea” for the ambassador and his wife to “host an Eid party for Pakistanis.” As for food, “when giving a party, serve at least one non-Pakistani dish with no chilli and no masala , say, boiled chicken with salt” (pass me the sick bag, Mickey). Another instruction goes: “When you pour tea or coffee, please let the guest put the milk and sugar according to her own taste.” The guest of honour is always to walk and sit to the right of the hostess. Wives are not to insist that their guests eat more.

Other “important points” include such gems as, “at public occasions, when walking, try not to be ahead of your seniors.” Wives are also advised not to discriminate against the foreign wives of Pakistani officers. Another bit of advice says: “If you have to reply yes or no to anything, please speak up and say ‘Yes, please’ or ‘No, thank you.’ Do not answer by nodding or shaking your head.” During state visits, wives are to remember that the VIP sits on the right and the accompanying wife must enter the car from the left “to avoid crossing over the VIP’s legs.”

The wives are also instructed not to shake hands with their gloves on or to wear dark glasses in company (obviously, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain has not read this manual).

Now for table manners. “Food should be eaten as quietly as possible.” “Knives, forks and spoons should be used noiselessly and should not be toyed with, waved or pointed during conversation.” “Spilling of food or drink on the tablecloth should be avoided” (as if one does that deliberately). “If in any doubt about what to do, observe other guests and follow their example.”

If there still exists a Pakistan Foreign Office Wives Association and it has published a Protocol Guide, I would accept a complimentary copy most gratefully, if only to confirm that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

My phone rings early one morning. I do not know the voice or the person. He says his name is Omar and he is calling me because he found my card in his father’s wallet and since that shows me to be a journalist working for a newspaper in Pakistan, he has decided to call me. He says his father, an American citizen like him, and a Pakistani, died in Lahore at the hands of the doctors and hospitals to which ill luck had him taken.

He wants people in Pakistan to know what happened to his father so that those who kill instead of curing patients and whose callousness is only exceeded by their greed are unmasked.

I ask him his father’s name and when he gives it to me, I realise with horror that I not only knew him but I had known him from my days at Murray College, Sialkot. Farooq Malik was several years junior to me but I knew him well and we would run into one another in Lahore in later years. He was a civil engineer and he had spent a good many years building roads and airports in the Middle East. He moved to the United States in 1987 and was working for the State of Virginia. It is quite shocking. What his son, a systems analyst, tells me is chilling and it needs to be shared.

Early November, the family flies to Lahore for the wedding of Farooq’s daughter. On November 14, six days before he is to return to Washington, Farooq feels dizzy and is driven to the CMH where he is found in good shape after tests. On the way home, the dizziness returns and someone suggests that they go to the “best hospital in the city”, the Doctors’ Hospital, which is run by a group of Pakistani-American doctors.

The doctor on duty in the emergency room says it is a case of dehydration and the patient needs an injection to “open up his clogged intestines”. A nurse arrives and begins to inject him. Farooq screams, says it is burning him and tries to pull his arm away but she doesn’t let go. Farooq clutches his heart and his eyes roll. His daughter, who is with him, shouts at the nurse, “Get away, you are killing my dad.” A doctor runs in and tries to revive Farooq who has fallen into a swoon. An ultra sound is done, plus some more tests. The children are then asked to pay Rs 30,000, which they do.

A doctor takes Omar aside and tells him that his father’s aorta is leaking and the Doctors’ Hospital is unable to perform surgery, so he should be taken to the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (PIC), which has been notified and where a doctor is waiting. Omar says, “I learn later that when private hospitals screw up, they send patients to a government hospital, where they are left to die.”

Farooq is taken to the PIC. It is 12.30 pm. There is no doctor waiting and for the next five hours, Farooq lies there unattended. At one point, he starts gasping for breath but receives no help. One of Farooq’s cousins, a doctor, comes in and manages to have him taken to the operation theatre. Half an hour later, the chief surgeon, Dr Abdul Waheed, tells Omar that his father is bleeding internally and there is a 50 percent chance that he would die if operated upon, and a hundred percent chance otherwise.

He then asks Omar to arrange for 25 bottles of AB+ blood. “Where are we going to get so much blood?” he asks. “That’s not my problem,” answers the doctor. Somehow, the family manages to arrange the required quantity of blood. The operation is carried out.

The next two weeks that Farooq is alive are a harrowing time, as one problem leads to another. He looks bloated but the family is told it is nothing serious. He is also put on morphine and heavy antibiotics. Of and on, he is placed on a respirator. It seems his kidneys are also shot. There is internal bleeding again. The family is asked to pray as Farooq is put on dialysis.

Omar says he kills cockroaches crawling around his father’s bed. An attendant laughs, “How many are you going to kill?” Meanwhile, the hospital keeps asking for money. The first night, it is Rs 150,000, then Rs 80,000, followed by Rs 60,000 every other day. Omar asks for a detailed bill because Farooq’s American insurance — Blue Cross Blue Shield — wants a breakdown so that it can make payment arrangements. Omar is given the run-around. He never gets a detailed bill, just demands for money.

The family is desperate to see someone in authority. That man is the PIC head, Dr Javed, but he is impossible to get hold of. When Omar is finally able to meet him, the doctor tells him that Farooq was taken in on a “humanitarian” basis and since his kidneys are failing now, the family can take him away if it wants to. Farooq dies the same day. Omar later learns that a night before he died, Farooq’s ventilator support was reduced, which is of course one way of killing the patient early.

Omar is now back in Virginia and says he knows his dad won’t come back, but there must be an investigation. He wants to know why his father was sent away by the Doctors’ Hospital. What was the injection that was given to him at that hospital that caused havoc to his internal organs? Why are families in distress forced to pay large sums of money and told that unless they do so, the patient won’t be treated? Why are the doctors and nurses so callous?

Omar says, “I am not vengeful, and I know doing this will not bring my father back. He was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die like this. I hope my going public with this will save another life and another family the anguish we went through.”

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent

Nargis and Madhubala are two stars who remain unforgotten, though they have been gone for many years now. Madhubala, who was easily the most beautiful of the many beautiful women who lit up movie theatre screens across the subcontinent, died young and broken-hearted. The one man she loved, Dilip Kumar, treated her brutally. Her father, Ataullah Khan, not only tyrannised over her but squandered all the money she had earned on several of his failed film ventures.

Nargis was in love with Raj Kapoor, but he was not worthy of her. He used her talent and her money and in the end, he rejected her. She found happiness in the many years of marriage she had with Sunil Dutt, who spared no effort to save her life after she was diagnosed with cancer. He even brought her to New York where she spent time at the Sloan-Kettering hospital, but she did not make it. She lives, now and forever, in her movies, the narcissus of undying bloom.

Sunil Dutt buried her, as she had willed, next to her mother Jaddan Bai in Bombay. Her grave bears the name she was given at birth: Kaniz Fatima. Her great friend in Bombay, Qurratulain Hyder, wrote to me after Nargis died: “Yes, Nargis has left us all immeasurably sad. She was a part of the time of our growing up, a time that is itself now mythological. Her old movies, when one watches them on television now, look quite amateurish, but how romantic they seemed then! She moved ahead in life with tremendous grace and dignity. And when she died, she died as a major national figure. She was a fascinating woman who had no hang-ups about her mother’s origins. In fact, the last time she met me, I recall her telling me that her mother was such an independent woman that once when the Nawab of Rampur, who was celebrating his birthday, asked her to dance on a takht-e-rawaan , a platform that moves with a ceremonial procession, she refused. She was a great admirer of her mother and it was her desire that she should lie next to her and among those who stood silently praying as she was being lowered to earth was Sunil Dutt.”

Sunil Dutt, who came from Jhelum, died last year.

Raj Kapoor first met Nargis when he was trying to make his first film Aag . He needed a studio where he could shoot his movie and someone suggested that he should go and see Jaddan Bai, who owned Famous Studio. When Raj knocked at her Marine Drive flat door, it was answered by Nargis, who had been working in the kitchen. There was dough on her hands, with one of which she tried to wipe her brow, leaving some behind. Years later, Raj filmed this first encounter in his film Bobby . Raj asked if Bibiji (as Jaddan Bai was called) was home. She wasn’t and though Nargis asked him to stay, he was so nervous that he left. Nargis played the lead in Aag which bombed. Raj next began what became one of the greatest hits of all times, Barsaat. The love affair between Raj and Nargis was doomed because Raj was already married and he had no intention of leaving his wife. One of Nargis’ friends, who now lives in Washington, told me that the RK Studio was built with Nargis’ money. Nargis also looked after her two brothers and their families. At one time, when she needed money for the treatment of the very sick wife of her brother Akhtar and asked Raj for some of what she was owed, he shot back: “What money? I owe you nothing.” Her friend told me that, “Nargis walked out of the RK Studio that day, never to go back. All she took when she left were a few crystal glasses.”

Raj, her friend told me, would often get drunk and abusive. He mistreated Nargis. “He wasn’t a very nice person,” she said, yet Nargis bore all that because she loved him. After she walked out of the RK Studio, she never saw him again. Her friend told me that when Nargis was shooting Mahboob’s Mother India , her life was actually saved by Sunil Dutt – who played her son – as a fire threatened to engulf her on the set. He did so at great risk to himself, a gesture that endeared Sunil to her. It was who proposed marriage, a decision she never regretted. Nargis, her friend said, did a lot of charity work, especially for spastics. She started a school for children struck by that dreaded disease.

I asked her if it was true that Nargis could outswear any man if angered. That was quite true, her friend replied. She recalled that once Nargis, the actress Shammi, who was Nargis’ great friend, and she were waiting in Nargis’ car for some food to be delivered, when one of the two men passing by said to his friend in Marathi: “Look, that is Sunil Dutt’s bai .” In Marathi, bai means both mother and wife. Nargis heard it and jumped out of the car, took off one of her shoes and screamed, “ Haramzaday, idhar aa, mein thjhay bataati hoon mein kiski maan hoon. Mein kya behri bhi ho-gayee !” (You bastard, come here and I will tell you whose mother I am. You think I have gone deaf!) Her chauffeur, who had been with the family for many years, kept urging her, “Baby, get back into the car, baby get back into the car.” She was every inch a lady but she could take care of herself when she needed to.

Saadat Hasan Manto, recalling his meeting with Nargis in 1946, writes: “There was something very playful and innocent about her. She would blow her nose every few minutes as if she suffered from a permanent cold. This was captured in Barsaat as one of her endearing traits.” He also writes about the two younger sisters of his wife Safia, who while on a visit to Bombay, befriended Nargis. One of the sisters is Zakia, the late Hamid Jalal’s wife and Shahid and Ayesha Jalal’s mother. I asked Zakia Jalal some years ago what she remembered of Nargis. This is what she wrote back: “You have asked me about our meetings with Nargis. I can only tell you that when we saw her first picture Taqdeer, my sister Rafia and I just fell in love with her. The public reaction was that she would not make it to the top because of her looks. People said that she had a long face. Anyway, we sisters were dying to talk to her. We dared not ask Bhai Saadat to get her telephone number for us. We asked Agha Khalish Kaashmiri for it and he got it for us. We called her and we just clicked. We told her that it was difficult for us to visit her, so it would be nice if she could come. She agreed and the very next day, she came to Safia Apa’s house with her mother Jaddan Bai. There was nothing more exciting for us, but that very day, Bhai Saadat decided to come home early. We were terrified but he was very nice to Jaddan Bai and they got along very well.

“We girls moved into the other room and honestly, it was just like young schoolgirls meeting each other. We enjoyed each other’s company and that was all. She told us that she was not keen on acting and wanted to continue her studies. She also told us that Surayya’s mother was talking against her, although Surayya was a top star at that time. Nargis tried to be friendly with Surayya but the mother did not approve of it. We naturally had our sympathies with Nargis and became members of her camp. . . She never told us that she had a crush on Raj Kapoor. I can only say that she was a fine human being and I miss her. We did not keep in touch with her after Partition.”

Well, that was Nargis, narcissus of undying bloom.

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